Edward Fraser

“ II
“KENT CLAIMS THE FIRST BLOW!”
“The Kentishe Menne in Front!”
“Kent claims for itself the first blow in battle against alien enemies.” The hand that penned these words has lain in the grave for over seven centuries; but old William Fitz-Stephen of Canterbury knew what he meant, and meant what he wrote. They are words that our fine “county cruiser” the Kent of to-day—to which the ladies of Kent have presented a silken battle flag and the Men of Kent a silver shield and other gifts, to incite the Kent’s bluejackets to shoot straight—might well adopt and make the ship’s motto. ”

“ It was not an impossible task for the Egyptian gunners on the ramparts to hit the Condor. That they failed utterly was the Condor's luck—the fortune of war, pure and simple. The Condor's crew through it all seemed to bear charmed lives. Shots fell thick in the water all round, as other ships observed, or cut the rigging overhead. One big shot tore the awning over the quarter-deck. A 10-inch shell struck the water close underneath the ship's bows, and the column of water sent up by the splash knocked an officer and two men off the forecastle. ”

“ To aid in deceiving the enemy as to what was happening, lighted ship’s lanterns were left behind, lashed to poles set up on the casks that had served as cable buoys, making it appear from a very short distance off as though the fleet were still there, riding at anchor in the roads.
The masterly ruse succeeded to the full. The watch on board the English fleet could see the lights of some of de Grasse’s ships away to seaward. They themselves, one and all, entirely unobserved, passed out in the darkness. ”

“ All that month of May the Téméraire and her consorts off Brest held themselves ready to clear for action at the shortest notice, daily expecting the sails of Admiral Villeneuve's fleet to appear on the horizon to the south-west. As if awaiting Villeneuve's arrival, also, the whole of the Brest fleet had come out of harbour and was riding at single anchor, twenty-one sail of the line completely equipped for sea, under the cliff batteries of Bertheaume Bay. The British fleet off Brest for the moment could only muster seventeen sail. ”

“ As the Spaniards seemed to be upon them the wind shifted, the English sails filled, ship by ship and all together, and then stretching out with bowsprits pointing seaward, the Revenge, Victory, Ark Royal, Dreadnought, and the others safely cleared the enemy, pouring in so fierce a fire as they passed that the Spanish ships had to sheer off. This was the first fight of the day. Later, when the wind, going round with the sun, shifted again and gave Drake and Howard the weather gage, came on the most desperate encounter with the Armada that our ships had yet seen. ”

“ Those who were to fall in the coming fight were to be [Pg 70] envied, rather, in their ending. It was better, surely, to go down there and then, to be dropped overboard in the clear, deep water alongside, eight hundred and fifty fathoms down, to sleep the last sleep beneath the lapping wavelets of the blue Caribbean, dead on the field of honour, than to survive for what was yet to come for France, to experience the fate that was to befall so many a gallant French officer who outlived the cannon thunders of Rodney's day. ”

“ If we go backward, we die;
Better go forward—and live!
The story of what happened once in Frigate Bay, St. Kitts, in the West Indies, recalls one of our “forgotten glories”; a feat of arms that nine out of ten people, one may be quite certain, have never heard of. Nor do our general histories say much of it, even of those whose pages make reference to it. Yet it is one of the very smartest, and neatest, and cleverest displays that, it may be, any British Admiral ever made, and it was managed, too, in the face of heroic odds. ”

“ Her topmasts had gone, her foreyard was gone, her foremast was tottering, all her rigging was torn and tangled, her sails hung down in rags. Her ensign, too, had been shot away, or at least was down owing to the fall of the gaff; very few men were to be seen alive on her upper deck; not a shot came from her guns on the broadside facing the Fougueux.
Captain Baudoin, the captain of the Fougueux, seemed at first uncertain whether he would lie off to leeward, and with the Neptune's help rake and cannonade the Téméraire into submission, or come to close quarters at once and board. ”

“ Keppel did so immediately, and settled the fate of the hapless Thesèe, a seventy-four, the same size as his own ship, which went to the bottom with awful suddenness as they were fighting yard-arm to yard-arm, struck by a fierce squall that burst on her and heeled her over just as she had opened her lower-deck ports to leeward in order to give the Torbay a broadside. Swamped by a tremendous sea, the luckless Thesèe filled and sank like a stone. Out of eight hundred men on board, not twenty in all were saved, picked up from floating wreckage. ”

“ Amid the clash and ring of hostile steel, in the heat of a hard-fought fight, with shells bursting round, and grape-shot hurtling through the powder smoke, with bullets flying thick, while men closed hand to hand with cutlass and bayonet and boarding pike, came the first idea of the name Undaunted, and the scene of its first appointment, of its first bestowal on a British man-of-war, was the quarter-deck of a British flagship, as the last echoes of battle were dying down. ”

“ It was Napoleon with all the resources of his Empire in its full vigour at his back, Napoleon at the zenith of his intellect and genius for war, Napoleon in the year before Austerlitz—baffled and held at arm's length by the British Navy. One has only to glance at the daily newspapers of 1804 to realise the superb self-confidence with which Great Britain braced herself to meet the threatening peril. ”

“ It is very sad, but this is war time, and the fleet must be manned.
All day long duty-boats keep going up and down. Now it is an admiral’s twelve-oared barge with the flag at the bows; now a captain’s gig, or a pinnace, pulling between ship and shore; now a midshipman’s boat scurrying off to answer the flagship’s signal. Ships’ long-boats with water-casks and pursers’ stores for various men-of-war in harbour, pass and repass, and beer hoys and yard craft of all kinds. ”

“ The body of the hull itself has a keel length of some eighty feet—from rudder post to fore-foot. Along the water-line the bends are all tarred over, with varnished side planking above, tough oak timber from the Crown lands of the Sussex Weald by Horsham. The topsides above are varnished to the bulwarks, where a touch of colour shows; ornamental carved and painted work in royal Tudor green and white, laid on in “colours of oil” and garnished with Her Majesty’s family badges in gold, and with here and there, on the balustrades of the quarter-rails and stern gallery, an additional touch of red. ”

“ Is worth an age without a name.
Scott.
There is no incident quite like it in all the annals of the Royal Navy. There is hardly a finer tale, all said and done, hardly a more stirring story, than that which tells how we came by our first Undaunted—why there is an Undaunted to-day on the roll of the British fleet. Better name for British fighting ship there could be none; none, assuredly, of happier omen. In a sense, indeed, it is, so to speak, a self-made name. No Admiralty Lord of high degree in the comfortable surroundings of a sanctum at Whitehall first made choice of or appointed it. ”

“ Towards nine o'clock, all of a sudden, a burst of roaring flame shot up from one of the French prizes, illuminating the sky and sea for many miles all round. De Vaudreuil and his fugitive fifteen, far away to northward by now, below the horizon, could see the reflection and guessed what it was. Bougainville, in the other direction, flying towards Curaçao, saw it too. The victim was the captured César. One of her own disorderly crew, it came out later, did the mischief. They had been as usual clapped under hatchways after the surrender, but had the hold to themselves. ”

“ She is the biggest and the heaviest and the fastest and the hardest-hitting vessel that any navy as yet has seen afloat. And more than that. The Dreadnought has been so built as to be practically unsinkable by mine or torpedo; while at the same time her tremendous battery of ten 12-in. guns—huge cannon, each forty-five feet long—makes her absolutely irresistible in battle against all comers ”

“ Each ship had been packed with troops for the Jamaica expedition. Every seventy-four that morning, including the hundred and fifty or two hundred soldiers on board, had carried not fewer than nine hundred men at least. Some ships had had still more on board. The Ville de Paris, for one, carried thirteen hundred. Awful indeed had been the slaughter as the English broadsides, aimed at the French port-holes at point-blank range, swept the decks and tore lanes through the closely-packed masses of men as they stood helplessly at quarters. It was the dreadful sequel that interested the sharks. ”

“ Royal Sovereign continued in close encounter, until the Santa Anna’s colours came down. It was just at that moment that Collingwood received, by an officer of the Victory, Captain Hardy’s first message that Lord Nelson had been “dangerously wounded.”
The stubborn stand that the Santa Anna made was a disappointment, it would appear, to the Sovereign’s men. Their terrible raking broadside at the outset had plainly “sickened” the Spaniards—as our men expressively put it—and many on board believed that the enemy must surrender forthwith. ”

“ Then fastening with a bulldog's grip on her big opponent, the Monmouth set to and blazed away fiercely into the French ship as fast as the guns could be loaded and run out.
Nothing could be more masterly than the way the British captain handled his ship. Captain Gardiner knew his business. He meant to settle his personal score with the Foudroyant once for all; but he had no idea of sacrificing needlessly the life of a single man. There was to be no reckless clapping of the little Monmouth side by side with the Foudroyant. Gardiner was well aware of the weight of his opponent's metal. ”

“ So terrible was the weather that on board some of the British ships men were flung down on deck or hurled helplessly about and seriously injured and maimed. In one or two men were washed overboard and never seen again. The guns were double-breeched; eight men were at the wheel in every ship. So on that awful November afternoon did Hawke swoop down to strike.
On the French side there were twenty-one ships—with Hawke, twenty-three; but the French ships were on the average bigger vessels than ours, and carried heavier guns. That for fighting purposes in such weather gave Conflans the advantage. ”