Types of Naval Officers Part 4

It was suitable indeed that so strenuous and admirable an exhibition of professional ability,--of naval generals.h.i.+p,--alike in strategic combination, tactical disposition, and administrative superintendence, should terminate in a brilliant triumph, at once its fruit and its crown; wherein sedulous and unremittent readiness for instant action, comprehended by few, received a startling demonstration which none could fail to understand. As Nelson was pursued by ignorant sneers before the Nile, so Hawke was burned in effigy by the populace, at the very moment when laborious effort was about to issue in supreme achievement. The victory in either case is less than the antecedent labor, as the crown, after all, is less than the work, the symbol than the fact symbolized.

A brief account of preceding conditions, and of the dispositions maintained to meet them, is therefore necessary to due appreciation of the victory of Quiberon Bay. Although the diversions of 1758 had not very materially aided Frederic of Prussia, they had inflicted distinct humiliation and hara.s.sment upon France. This, added to defeat upon the Continent and in North America, had convinced the French Government, as it convinced Napoleon a half-century later, that a determined blow must be struck at England herself as the operative centre upon which rested, and from which proceeded, the most serious detriment to their cause and that of their allies. It was resolved, therefore, to attempt an invasion of England; to the threat of which the English people were always extremely sensitive.

From local conditions the French preparations had to be made in several separate places; it was the task of the British Navy to prevent the concentration of these different detachments in a joint effort. The troops must embark, of course, from some place near to England; their princ.i.p.al points of a.s.sembly were on the Channel, whence they were to cross in flat-boats, and in the Biscay ports, from Brest to the mouth of the Loire. The Bay of Quiberon, from which Hawke's action takes its name, lies between the two latter points. It is sheltered from the full force of the Atlantic gales by a peninsula of the same name, and by some shoals which prolong the barrier to the southward of the promontory.

To cross safely, it was necessary to provide naval protection. To this end squadrons were equipped in Toulon and in Brest. Combined at the latter point, and further strengthened by divisions expected to return from North America, they would const.i.tute a force of very serious consideration in point of numbers. Rochefort also was an element in the problem, though a minor one; for either the small force already there might join the concentration, or, if the port were unwatched, the American or other divisions might get in there, and be at least so much nearer to Brest, or to a neighboring point of a.s.sembly, as Quiberon Bay.

As the French Navy was essential to the French crossing, as its junction was essential to action, as the point of junction was at or near Brest--for there was the district near which the troops were a.s.sembling--and as by far the largest detachment was already in Brest, that port became the important centre upon blocking which depended primarily the thwarting of the invasion. If the French Navy succeeded in concentrating at Brest, the first move in the game would be lost. Hawke therefore had the double duty of not allowing the squadron there to get out without fighting, and of closing the entrance to reinforcements. The latter was far the more difficult, and could not be a.s.sured beyond the chance of failure, because an on-sh.o.r.e gale, which would carry his fleet into the Channel to avoid being driven on the French coast, would be fair for an outside enemy to run into the port, friendly to him. This actually occurred at a most critical moment, but it could only happen by a combination of circ.u.mstances; that is, by the hostile squadron chancing to arrive at a moment when the British had been blown off. If it approached under ordinary conditions of weather it would run into the midst of foes.

The great names of the British Navy were then all afloat in active command. Rodney was before Havre, which he bombarded in the course of the summer, doing a certain amount of damage, hara.s.sing the local preparations for invasion, and intercepting vessels carrying supplies to the Brest fleet and coastwise. Boscawen, second only to Hawke, was before Toulon, to hold there the dozen s.h.i.+ps-of-the-line under De la Clue, as Hawke was charged to stop the score under Conflans.

In broad conception, Hawke's method was simple and can be easily stated; the difficulty lay in carrying it out. The main body of his force had a rendezvous, so chosen that in violent weather from the westward it could at worst drift up Channel, but usually would have a fair wind for Torbay, a roadstead on the British coast about a hundred miles distant.

To the rendezvous the fleet was not tied under ordinary circ.u.mstances; it was merely a headquarters which admitted of cruising, but where despatches from home would always find the admiral in person, or news of his whereabouts. Near Brest itself was kept an insh.o.r.e squadron of three or four s.h.i.+ps, which under ordinary circ.u.mstances could see the enemy inside, noting his forwardness; for the cannon of the day could not molest a vessel more than a mile from the entrance, while the conditions within of spars and sails indicated to a seaman the readiness or intention to move, to a degree not ascertainable with s.h.i.+ps dependent on steam only.

With these dispositions, if a westerly gale came on, the fleet held its ground while it could, but when expedient to go put into Torbay. Owing to the nearness of the two places, the weather, when of a p.r.o.nounced character, was the same at both. While the wind held to the westward of south, or even at south-southeast, a s.h.i.+p-of-the-line could not beat out from Brest; much less a fleet. The instant the wind went east, fair for exit, the British left Torbay, with certainty of not being too late; for, though the enemy might get out before their return, the east wind would not suffer them to close with the French coast at another point soon enough to avoid a meeting. While in Torbay the time was improved by taking on board stores and provisions; nor was the night's rest at anchor a small consideration for seamen worn with continual cruising.

The practical merits displayed by Hawke in maintaining this simple but arduous service were, first and supremely, the recognition of its possibility, contrary to a tradition heretofore as commonly and as blindly accepted as those of the line-of-battle, and of the proper methods for fleet attack before described. It must be remembered also that in these wars, 1739-1763, for the first time the British Navy found the scene of action, in European waters, to be the Biscay coast of France. In the former great wars of the seventeenth century, French fleets entered the Channel, and pitched battles were fought there and in the North Sea. Thence the contest s.h.i.+fted to the Mediterranean, where the great fleets operated in the later days of William III., and the reign of Anne. Then, too, the heavy s.h.i.+ps, like land armies, went into winter quarters. It was by distinguished admirals considered professionally criminal to expose those huge yet c.u.mbrous engines of the nation's power to the buffetings of winter gales, which might unfit them next year to meet the enemy, snugly nursed and restored to vigor in home ports during the same time. The need of periodical refitting and cleaning the bottoms clinched the argument in favor of this seasonable withdrawal from the sea.

With this presumed necessity, attention had not been paid to developing a system of maintenance and refit adapted to the need of a fleet performing what Hawke undertook. In this, of course, there cannot be a.s.signed to him the individuality of merit that may belong to a conception, and does belong to the man who initiates and a.s.sumes, as he did, the responsibility for a novel and hazardous course of action. Many agents had to contribute to the forwarding of supplies and repairs; but, while singleness of credit cannot be a.s.sumed, priority is justly due to him upon whose shoulders fell not only all blame, in case his enterprise failed, but the fundamental difficulty of so timing the reliefs of the vessels under his command, so arranging the order of rotation in their going and coming as to keep each, as well as the whole body, in a constant condition of highest attainable efficiency--in numbers, in speed, and in health--for meeting the enemy, whose time of exit could not be foreknown. Naturally, too, the man on whom all this fell, and who to the nation would personify success or failure, as the event might be,--terms which to him would mean honor or ruin,--that man, when professionally so competent as Hawke, would be most fruitful in orders and in suggestions to attain the desired end. In this sense there can be no doubt that he was foremost, and his correspondence bears evidence of his preoccupation with the subject.

Into particulars it is scarcely necessary to go. Administrative details are interesting only to specialists. But one quality absolutely essential, and in which most men fail, he manifested in high degree. He feared no responsibility, either towards the enemy, or towards the home authorities. Superior and inferior alike heard plainly from him in case of defects; still more plainly in case of neglect. "It is a matter of indifference to me whether I fight the enemy, should they come out, with an equal number, one s.h.i.+p more, or one s.h.i.+p less." "I depend not on intelligence from the French ports; what I see I believe, and regulate my conduct accordingly;" a saying which recalls one of Farragut's,--"The officers say I don't believe anything. I certainly believe very little that comes in the shape of reports. They keep everybody stirred up. I mean to be whipped or to whip my enemy, and not to be scared to death."

Agitation, to a very considerable degree, was the condition of Hawke's superiors; to say the least, anxiety strained to the point of approaching panic. But Hawke could have adopted truly as his own Farragut's other words, "I have full confidence in myself and in my judgment,"--that is, of course, in professional matters; and he spoke rea.s.suringly out of the firmness of his self-reliance. "Their Lords.h.i.+ps will pardon me for observing that from the present disposition of the squadron I think there is little room for alarm while the weather continues tolerable." Again, a few days later, "Their Lords.h.i.+ps may rest a.s.sured there is little foundation for the present alarms. While the wind is fair for the enemy's coming out, it is also favorable for our keeping them in; and while we are obliged to keep off they cannot stir."

This was in October, when the weather was already wild and the days shortening.

With equally little hesitancy, though without breach of subordination, he overbears the Admiralty when they wish to pay what he considers exaggerated care to cleaning the bottoms, traceable, no doubt, to the prejudices of the Sea Lords. "If the s.h.i.+ps take up a month by cleaning, from the time they leave me to their return, it will be impossible for me to keep up the squadron. The only practicable way is to heel, etc., and confine them to ten days in port for the refreshment of their companies in case they should miss the spring tide." "Their Lords.h.i.+ps will give me leave to observe that the relief of the squadron depends more on the refreshment of the s.h.i.+ps' companies than on cleaning the s.h.i.+ps. By the hurry the latter must be performed in, unless the s.h.i.+p continues a month or five weeks in port, which the present exigency will by no means admit of, the men would be so hara.s.sed and fatigued that they would return to me in a worse condition than when they left me....

However, I shall endeavor to comply with all their Lords.h.i.+ps' directions in such manner as, _to the best of my judgment, will answer their intentions in employing me here_." The words italicized strike the true note of subordination duly tempered with discretion.

To the Navy Board, a civil adjunct to the Admiralty, but possessed of considerable independent power to annoy officers in active military service, he took a more peremptory tone. He had discharged on his own authority, and for reasons of emergency, a mutinous surgical officer.

For this he was taken to task, as Nelson a generation later was rebuked by the same body. "I have to acquaint you," he replied, "that there was no mistake in his being ordered by me to be discharged." He then gives his reasons, and continues, "For the real good of the service I ordered him to be discharged, and his crime noted on his list of pay, for your information. I shall not enter into any dispute with you about my authority as a Commanding Officer, neither do I ever think of inconveniences or prejudices to myself, as a party, according to your insinuations, where the good of the service is concerned." It must be added that to subordinates he was as liberal with praise as he was with censure, where either was merited; nor did he fail in kindly personal intervention upon due occasion for deserving or unfortunate men. More reserved, apparently, than Nelson, he seems to have been like him sympathetic; and hence it was that, as before observed, it was his spirit that he communicated to the navy rather than a system, admirable as was the strategic system embodied in his methods of blockade. It was by personal influence rather than by formulated precept that Hawke inspired his service, and earned a just claim to be reckoned the greatest force of his century in naval development.

The general conditions being as described, the fighting in the naval campaign of 1759 began in the Mediterranean. On June 8th Boscawen, having driven two French frigates into a fortified bay near Toulon, attacked them with three s.h.i.+ps-of-the-line. The attack failed, and the British s.h.i.+ps were badly injured; a timely lesson on the general inexpediency of attacking sh.o.r.e batteries with vessels, unless for special and adequate reasons of probable advantage. In July he returned to Gibraltar, to refit and for provisions. In the absence of details, positive criticism is unwarranted; but it is impossible not to note the difference between this step, during summer weather, and the Toulon blockades of Lord St. Vincent, who, when before Brest, modelled his course upon that of Hawke. The port being thus left open, De la Clue sailed on the 5th of August for Brest. On the 17th he was near the straits of Gibraltar, hugging the African coast, and falling night gave promise of pa.s.sing unseen, when a British lookout frigate caught sight of his squadron. She hauled in for Gibraltar at once, firing signal guns. Boscawen's s.h.i.+ps were in the midst of repairs, mostly dismantled; but, the emergency not being unforeseen, spars and sails were sent rapidly aloft, and within three hours they were underway in pursuit. The French division separated during the night. Five s.h.i.+ps put into Cadiz.

The British next morning caught sight of the remaining seven, among which was the admiral, and a sharp chase resulted in the destruction of five. From August 18th the Toulon fleet was eliminated from the campaign; though the vessels in Cadiz remained to the end a charge upon Hawke's watchfulness, similar to that caused by the enemy's divisions expected from America.

That one of the latter was already on its way home, under the command of Commodore Bompart, was notified to our admiral on September 21st by a despatch from England. He immediately sent a division of heavy s.h.i.+ps to reinforce the light squadron to the southward. "If the alarm is great now," he said, "it will be much greater if he get into Rochefort."

Further information from the West Indies contradicted the first report, and on October 10th Hawke recalled the s.h.i.+ps-of-the-line, apparently at the wish of the Admiralty; for he expresses his regret at doing so, and asks for more of the "many s.h.i.+ps" then in England, that Rochefort may be blocked as well as Brest. The incident has now little importance, except as indicating the general national nervousness, and the difficulty under which he labored through force inadequate to the numerous and exacting duties entailed by constant holding the sea in war. From this point of view it bears upon his conduct.

That Bompart was coming proved to be true. On November 10th Hawke anch.o.r.ed with the fleet in Torbay, after three days of struggle against a very heavy westerly storm. "Bompart, if near, may get in," he wrote the Admiralty, "but no s.h.i.+p can get out from any port in the Bay." The weather had then moderated, but was still too rough for boating, even in the sheltered roadstead; hence he could get no reports of the state of the s.h.i.+ps, which shows incidentally the then defective system of signalling. On the 12th he sailed, on the 13th was again forced into Torbay by a south-wester, but on the 14th got away finally. On the afternoon of the 16th the fleet was twenty-five miles from the Island of Ushant, near Brest, and there learned from transports, returning from the light division off Quiberon, that the French fleet had been seen the day before, seventy-five miles northwest of Belleisle; therefore some fifty or sixty miles southeast of the point where this news was received. Conflans had sailed the same day that the British last left Torbay, but before his departure Bompart had opportunely arrived, as Hawke had feared. His s.h.i.+ps were not able to go at once to sea on so important a mission, but their seasoned crews were a welcome reinforcement and were distributed through the main fleet, which numbered twenty-one s.h.i.+ps-of-the-line. Hawke had twenty-three.

Concluding that the enemy were bound for Quiberon, Hawke carried a press of sail for that place. He knew they must be within a hundred miles of him and aimed to cut them off from their port. During the 17th the wind, hanging to the south and east, was adverse to both fleets, but on the 18th and 19th it became more favorable. At half-past eight on the morning of the 20th, one of the lookout frigates ahead of the British made the signal for sighting a fleet. It was then blowing strong from the west-northwest, and Belleisle, which is ten miles west of Quiberon Bay, and south of which the fleets must pa.s.s, was by the English reckoning forty miles distant. A course of some fifty or sixty miles was therefore to be run before the enemy could close the land, and there remained about eight hours of sun.

Hawke's day had come. Towards ten o'clock he had the enemy sufficiently in view to see that they were intent upon securing their arrival, rather than fighting. He therefore made signal for the seven s.h.i.+ps nearest them "to chase and draw into a line-of-battle ahead of me, and endeavour to stop them till the rest of the squadron should come up, who also were _to form as they chased that no time might be lost_ in the pursuit." The French "kept going off under such sail as all their squadron could carry and _yet keep together_, while we crowded after him _with every sail our s.h.i.+ps could bear_." The words italicized sum up the whole philosophy of a general chase. The pursued are limited to the speed of the slowest, otherwise he who cannot but lag is separated and lost; the pursuer need slacken no whit, for his friends are ever coming up to his aid. Overtaking is inevitable, unless the distance is too short.

At half-past two firing began between the French rear and the leading British. Of the two foremost in the chase, who thus opened the fight, one was the same _Dorsets.h.i.+re_ which in Mathews's battle had played the laggard. Her captain, who thus rose to his opportunity, was one of the two to whom Hawke addressed the enthusiastic compliment that they had "behaved like angels." Hawke himself was at this moment south of Belleisle, with several s.h.i.+ps ahead of him; while the French admiral was leading his fleet, in order better to pilot them over dangerous ground, and by his own action show more surely than was possible by signal what he wished done from moment to moment. At the southern extreme of the shoals which act as a breakwater to Quiberon Bay are some formidable rocks, known as the Cardinals. Around these M. de Conflans pa.s.sed soon after the firing began, his rear being then in hot action.

Hawke himself was without a pilot, as were most of his captains. The sailing master of the flag-s.h.i.+p was charged with that duty for the fleet, but had of the ground before him no exact personal knowledge; nor could reliance be placed upon the imperfect surveys of a locality, which it was not the interest of an almost constant enemy to disclose. Enough, however, was known to leave no doubt of the greatness of the risks, and it was the master's part to represent them. The occasion, however, was not one of a mere diversion, of a secondary operation, but of one vital to the nation's cause; and Hawke's reply, stamped with the firmness of a great officer, showed how little professional timidity had to do with his laudable care of his fleet in Basque Roads two years before. "You have done your duty in warning me," he replied; "now lay us alongside the French Commander-in-chief." So amid the falling hours of the day the British fleet, under the unswerving impulse of its leader, moved steadfastly forward, to meet a combination of perils that embraced all most justly dreaded by seamen,--darkness, an intricate navigation, a lee sh.o.r.e fringed with outlying and imperfectly known reefs and shoals, towards which they were hurried by a fast-rising wind and sea, that forbade all hope of retracing their steps during the long hours of the night.

"Had we but two hours more daylight," wrote Hawke in his official report, "the whole had been totally destroyed or taken; for we were almost up with their van when night overtook us." His success would have been greater, though not more decisive of issues than the event proved it; but nothing could have added to the merit or brilliancy of his action, to which no element of grandeur was wanting. This was one of the most dramatic of sea fights. Forty-odd tall s.h.i.+ps, pursuers and pursued, under reefed canvas, in fierce career drove furiously on; now rus.h.i.+ng headlong down the forward slope of a great sea, now rising on its crest as it swept beyond them; now seen, now hidden; the helmsmen straining at the wheels, upon which the huge hulls, tossing their prows from side to side, tugged like a maddened horse, as though themselves feeling the wild "rapture of the strife" that animated their masters, rejoicing in their strength and defying the accustomed rein.

The French admiral had flattered himself that the enemy, ignorant of the ground, would not dare to follow him round the Cardinals. He was soon undeceived. Hawke's comment on the situation was that he was "for the old way of fighting, to make downright work with them." It was an old way, true; but he had more than once seen it lost to mind, and had himself done most to restore it to its place,--a new way as well as an old. The signals for the general chase and for battle were kept aloft, and no British s.h.i.+p slacked her way. Without ranged order, save that of speed, the leaders mingled with the French rear; the roar and flashes of the guns, the falling spars and drifting clouds of smoke, now adding their part to the wild magnificence of the scene. Though tactically perfect in the sole true sense of tactics, that the means adopted exactly suited the situation, this was a battle of incidents, often untold,--not one of manoeuvres. As the s.h.i.+ps, rolling heavily, buried their flanks deeply in the following seas, no captain dared to open his lower tier of ports, where the most powerful artillery was arrayed--none save one, the French _Thesee_, whose rashness was rebuked by the inpouring waters, which quickly engulfed both s.h.i.+p and crew. The _Superbe_ met a like fate, though not certainly from the same cause. She sank under the broadside of the _Royal George_, Hawke's flag-s.h.i.+p. "The _Royal George's_ people gave a cheer," wrote an eye witness, "but it was a faint one; the honest sailors were touched at the miserable state of so many hundreds of poor creatures." Americans and English can couple this story of long ago with Philip's e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n off Santiago de Cuba, but three years since: "Don't cheer, boys, those poor devils are dying."

By five o'clock two French s.h.i.+ps had struck, and two had been sunk.

"Night was now come," wrote Hawke, "and being on a part of the coast, among islands and shoals of which we were totally ignorant, without a pilot, as was the greatest part of the squadron, and blowing hard on a lee sh.o.r.e, I made the signal to anchor." The day's work was over, and doubtless looked to him incomplete, but it was effectually and finally done. The French Navy did not again lift up its head during the three years of war that remained. Balked in their expectation that the foe's fear of the beach would give them refuge, harried and worried by the chase, harnessed to no fixed plan of action, Conflans's fleet broke apart and fled. Seven went north, and ran ash.o.r.e at the mouth of the little river Vilaine which empties into Quiberon Bay. Eight stood south, and succeeded in reaching Rochefort. The fate of four has been told.

Conflans's flag-s.h.i.+p anch.o.r.ed after night among the British, but at daybreak next morning cut her cables, ran ash.o.r.e, and was burned by the French. One other, wrecked on a shoal in the bay, makes up the tale of twenty-one. Six were wholly lost to their navy; the seven that got into Vilaine only escaped to Brest by twos, two years later, while the Rochefort division was effectually blocked by occupying Basque Roads, the islands of which and of Quiberon were cultivated as kitchen gardens for the refreshment of British crews.

Of the British, one s.h.i.+p went on a shoal during the action, and on the following day another coming to her a.s.sistance also grounded. Both were lost, but most of their people were saved. Beyond this Hawke's fleet suffered little. "As to the loss we have sustained," wrote he, "let it be placed to the account of the necessity I was under of running all risks to break this strong force of the enemy."

A contemporary witness a.s.signs to Hawke's own s.h.i.+p a large individual share in the fighting. Of this he does not himself speak, nor is it of much matter. That all was done with her that could be done, to aid in achieving success, is sufficiently a.s.sured by his previous record.

Hawke's transcendent merit in this affair was that of the general officer, not of the private captain. The utmost courage shown by the commander of a single s.h.i.+p before the enemy's fire cannot equal the heroism which a.s.sumes the immense responsibility of a doubtful issue, on which may hang a nation's fate; nor would the admiral's glory be shorn of a ray, if neither then nor at any other time had a hostile shot traversed his decks.

The night of the 20th pa.s.sed in anxieties inseparable from a situation dangerous at best, but still more trying to an admiral upon whom, after such a day, night had closed without enabling him to see in what case most of his s.h.i.+ps were. "In the night," he reports, "we heard many guns of distress fired, but, blowing hard, want of knowledge of the coast, and whether they were fired by a friend or an enemy, prevented all means of relief." In the morning he resumed his activity. Little, however, could be done. The continuing violence of the wind, and ignorance of the ground, prevented approach within gun-shot to the s.h.i.+ps at the mouth of the Vilaine, while they, by lightening and favor of the next flood tide, warped their way inside through the mud flats.

Hawke remained nearly two months longer, returning to England January 17, 1760. He had then been thirty-five weeks on board, without setting foot on sh.o.r.e. At the age of fifty-four, and amid such manifold cares, it is not to be wondered at that he should need relief. Rather must he be considered fortunate that his health, never robust in middle life, held firm till his great triumph was achieved. Boscawen succeeded him temporarily in the command.

He was received in England with acclamations and with honors; yet the most conspicuous mark of approval conferred on admirals before and after, the grant of the peerage, was not given to him, who had wrought one of the very greatest services ever done for the country. Recent precedent--that of Anson--demanded such recognition; and popular enthusiasm would have applauded, although the full military merit of the man could scarcely be appreciated by the standards of his generation.

That no such reward was bestowed is most probably attributable to Hawke's own indifference to self-advancement. If demanded by him, it could scarcely have been refused; but he never pushed his own interests.

His masculine independence in professional conduct, towards superiors and inferiors, found its root and its reflection in personal unconcern--as well antecedent as subsequent--about the results from his actions to his fortunes. To do his own part to the utmost, within the lines of the profession he knew, was his conception of duty. As he would not meddle with the land officers' decision as to what they should or should not do, so he left to the politicians, in whose hands the gifts lay, to decide what they would, or should, accord to a successful admiral. Pitt, the Great Commoner, left Hawke a commoner. Possibly he recognized that only by stretch of imagination could Hawke be reckoned one of the creations of a great Minister's genius.

Little remains to tell. On September 3, 1762, the admiral's flag was hauled down for the last time. He never went to sea again. In 1766, when Pitt came back to power as Lord Chatham, Hawke became First Lord of the Admiralty, and so remained till 1771. It was a time of unbroken peace, succeeding a period of continuous wars extending over a quarter of a century; consequently there was in naval and military matters the la.s.situde usual to such a period. Hawke is credited with formulating the principle that "the British fleet could only be termed considerable in the proportion it bore to that of the House of Bourbon;" that is, to the combined navies of France and Spain, over which that House then reigned.

The maxim proves that he had some claim to statesmans.h.i.+p in his view of affairs outside his service; and his manifested freedom from self-seeking is the warrant that no secondary political motives would divert his efforts from this aim. That he succeeded in the main, that he was not responsible for the fallen condition of the fleet when war again arose in 1778, is evidenced by a statement, uncontradicted, in the House of Lords in 1779, that when he left office the navy had 139 s.h.i.+ps-of-the-line, of which 81 were ready for sea.

In 1765 Hawke, who was then already a full admiral, wearing his flag at the mainmast head, was made Vice-Admiral of Great Britain; an honorary position, but the highest in point of naval distinction that the nation had to give. As one who held it three-quarters of a century later wrote, "It has ever been regarded as the most distinguished compliment belonging to our profession." The coincidence is significant that upon Hawke's death Rodney succeeded him in it; affirming, as it were, the consecutiveness of paramount influence exercised by the two on the development of the Navy. In 1776 the peerage was at last conferred; seventeen years after his great victory, and when, having pa.s.sed three score and ten, a man who had ever disdained to ask must have felt the honor barren to himself, though acceptable for his son.

His last recorded professional utterances are in private letters addressed in the summer of 1780 to the commander-in-chief of the Channel Fleet--Francis Geary--who had served with him in the Bay of Biscay, though he missed Quiberon. He recommends the maintenance of his old station off Brest, and says, "For G.o.d's sake, if you should be so lucky as to get sight of the enemy, get as close to them as possible. Do not let them shuffle with you by engaging at a distance, but get within musket shot if you can. This will be the means to make the action decisive." In these words we find an unbroken chain of tradition between Hawke and Nelson. One of Hawke's pupils was William Locker; and Locker in turn, just before Hawke's death, had Nelson for a lieutenant. To him Nelson in after years, in the height of his glory, wrote, "To you, my dear friend, I owe much of my success. It was you who taught me,--'Lay a Frenchman close and you will beat him.'"

Hawke died October 16, 1781. On his tomb appear these words, "Wherever he sailed, victory attended him." It is much to say, but it is not all.

Victory does not always follow desert. "It is not in mortals to command success,"--a favorite quotation with the successful admirals St. Vincent and Nelson. Hawke's great and distinctive glory is this,--that he, more than any one man, was the source and origin of the new life, the new spirit, of his service. There were many brave men before him, as there were after; but it fell to him in a time of great professional prostration not only to lift up and hand on a fallen torch, but in himself to embody an ideal and an inspiration from which others drew, thus rekindling a light which it is scarcely an exaggeration to say had been momentarily extinguished.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] For the account of Mathews's action, including Hawke's personal share in it, see _ante_, pp. 21-47.

[4] By express orders from the Ministry Councils of War had to be held.

[5] An application for four days' leave for private business had been refused.

RODNEY

1719-1792

Unlike Hawke, Rodney drew his descent from the landed gentry of England, and had relatives among the aristocracy. The name was originally Rodeney.

We are told by his son-in-law and biographer that the Duke of Chandos, a connection by marriage, obtained the command of the Royal yacht for the admiral's father, Henry Rodney. In one of the trips which George I.

frequently made between England and Hanover, he asked his captain if there were anything he could do for him. The reply was a request that he would stand sponsor for his son, who accordingly received the name of George; his second name Brydges coming from the family through which Chandos and the Rodneys were brought into relations.h.i.+p. The social position and surroundings resulting from such antecedents contributed of course to hasten the young officer's advancement, irrespective of the unquestionable professional merit shown by him, even in early years; but to them also, combined with narrow personal fortune, inadequate to the tastes thus engendered, was probably due the pecuniary embarra.s.sment which dogged him through life, and was perhaps the moving incentive to doubtful procedures that cast a cloud upon his personal and official reputation.

Rodney was born in February, 1719, and went to sea at the age of thirteen; serving for seven years in the Channel Fleet. Thence he was transferred to the Mediterranean, where he was made lieutenant in 1739.