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Rodney. David Hannay
Читать онлайн.Название Rodney
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isbn 4064066168841
Автор произведения David Hannay
Жанр Документальная литература
Издательство Bookwire
All this, however, was the life of his time and his service which he shared with other men. To him, who was born to be a great commander, the spectacle afforded by the fleet during his three years’ service must indeed have been especially instructive. It must have taught him what a squadron ought not to be, and how it ought not to be managed. The navy of that time was the navy of Hawser Trunnion, Esquire. Now one may have a real affection for Hawser Trunnion personally, and yet be compelled to acknowledge that the generation of officers of which he is the type fought less well than English naval men have done before or since. It was not that they were not brave, for they often were; nor yet that they were not seamen, for that also they were; but there was far too often something which they preferred to the discharge of their duty. It was often party politics, for they were very Whig and very Tory. Too many of them were members of Parliament, and owed their commands to their seats. In that case they carried on the party battle with one another in presence of the enemy. Perhaps they did not actually betray one another, but they believed one another to be capable of treason. The Tory officer saw the Whig in a mess with a certain complacency, and the Whig was pleased when baffling winds gave him an excuse for not coming to the help of the Tory. As an inevitable consequence their fighting was apt to be slack, and their recriminations furious. Personal quarrels were carried to a pitch of rancour not to be rivalled out of a cloister. Mathews was brutally insolent to Lestock, and Lestock hated Mathews with the concentrated fury of Mr. Browning’s Spanish Monk. When one turns over the pamphlets they wrote against one another, the picture of Commodore Trunnion as he listened to the report that Admiral Bower was to be made a British peer, rises at once. The mug, we remember, fell from his hand, and shivered into a thousand fragments; his eye glistened like that of a rattlesnake. Even so may Lestock have behaved when he heard that his enemy Mathews was coming to command him. His pamphlets were certainly written with the venom of a rattlesnake. Many years later, when Rodney was himself a peer, and at the head of the profession, he deliberately recorded on the margin of a copy of Clerk’s Tactics his belief that Lestock had betrayed his superior officer. The judgment was too harsh, but it shows what an impression the factions in the fleet had made on Rodney’s mind. When he was afterwards in command he showed a distinct readiness to believe that some of his subordinates were capable of the same conduct, and he resented their conduct fiercely. It is premature to discuss his justice on this occasion, but, no doubt, the memory of what he had seen in the Mediterranean was very present with him in those days, exasperating his suspicions and animating him to stamp the bad spirit out.
CHAPTER II
SERVICE AS CAPTAIN TILL 1752
On his arrival in England Rodney’s post-rank was confirmed, and he was appointed to the Sheerness. She was a much smaller ship than the Plymouth, but a post-ship none the less—that is, a vessel large enough to be commanded by a post-captain and not by a commander. Over this intermediate rank, which every officer must now pass through on his way from lieutenant to captain, Rodney appears to have skipped in the free and easy way the time allowed to those who had luck or interest. Interest Rodney certainly did not want. If his own words, written many years later, are to be understood in their literal sense, it was the best a man could then have—the interest of the Pelhams. In 1756 Rodney declared in a letter to the famous electioneering Duke of Newcastle, the “noodle” who would allow nobody to govern England without him, that he owed all his preferment in the navy to His Grace. This statement was, however, made in a private note, at a time when the writer was in lively expectation of future electoral favours, and need not be taken as rigidly accurate. It is at all events certain that Rodney did not want for friends at Court, for he was in command of sea-going ships, mostly on home stations, for the next ten years without a break. A man may use interest in two ways. He can either get comfortable billets on shore, or can avail himself of it to be put in the way of seeing service, and must be judged by the use he makes of a good thing.
On the whole the use Rodney made of it was honourable. It is true that he did not go to the East Indies, or to the Mediterranean, then the scene of mere dull cruising, and not the model station as it became in the Napoleonic wars. Neither did he go to the West Indies, which he was to make the “station for honour” in future years. He stayed steadily at home in the Channel doing such service as the nature of the war he was engaged in permitted. This, it must be acknowledged, was for the most part not brilliant. The war of Jenkins’ Ear, or of the Austrian Succession, was the dullest we ever fought. At sea it was first and foremost a privateer war. The navy was poorer in spirit than it ever had or has been. Failures and courts-martial were numerous, and the decisions of some of these last were so scandalous that Parliament was driven into passing the drastic act which left the officers who tried Byng no alternative but to condemn him to death for want of spirit. Part of our sins was the fault of our enemies. They were never strong or spirited enough to make us stretch ourselves. The Spaniard would never fight unless his back was against a wall, and then to be sure, as we found at Carthagena, he could make a desperate stand. Now and then a Spanish liner would bear a tremendous amount of hammering before she struck—witness the Glorioso, which kept a whole swarm of our warships and privateers at work for days before they got her. But their fleets were contemptible. Their courage and efficiency were of the passive kind. The French fleet was at its lowest in strength if not in courage. Cardinal Fleury had persistently neglected it, and France herself had hardly begun to recover from the terrible exhaustion caused by the wars of Louis the Fourteenth. Neither Spaniards nor Frenchmen could put our fleets on their mettle, and so the natural tendency of a dull time was unchecked.
From 1743 to 1747 Rodney was engaged on mainly routine duties in the successive ships which he commanded—the Sheerness of twenty guns, the Ludlow Castle of forty, the Centurion of fifty, and the Eagle of sixty. He patrolled the North Sea in search of privateers, he protected convoys, he took soldiers to and from the Low Countries. In the Ludlow Castle he took a large privateer from St. Malo. In the Centurion he helped to patrol the coast of Scotland during the Forty-Five on the look-out for adventurers who might bring help to the Jacobites. When bringing the Centurion back from this service he had the ill-luck to run on the Whiting Sand off Orfordness, and lose thirty feet of his false keel and his rudder. The pilot was held very properly, no doubt, to be responsible, and Rodney passed without loss of credit to the command of the Eagle. The four years were useful to Rodney, no doubt; they gave him experience in the handling of a ship, and they showed his patrons that he was worth patronising. More need not, and indeed cannot, be said about them.
In 1747 the lazy naval war flamed up for a moment—just before it was ended by the uneasy truce called the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. France made a resolute effort both to help its forces in the East Indies, and to protect the return of its convoys from the West. England pulled herself together, and decided to defeat this intention. Early in spring two squadrons were despatched—a strong one under