"What is the flag of England? Winds of the world, declare!
* * * * * * * * *
The lean white bear hath seen it in the long, long
Arctic night,
The musk-ox knows the standard that flouts the Northern light.
* * * * * * * * *
Never was isle so little, never was sea so lone,
But over the scud and the palm-trees an English flag
has flown.
I have wrenched it free from the halliard to hang
for a wisp on the Horn;
I have chased it north to the Lizard--ribboned and rolled
and torn;
I have spread its folds o'er the dying, adrift
in a hopeless sea;
I have hurled it swift on the slaver, and seen the slave
set free.
* * * * * * * * *
Never the lotos closes, never the wild-fowl wake,
But a soul goes out on the East Wind, that died
for England's sake--
Man or woman or suckling, mother or bride or maid--
Because on the bones of the English, the English flag
is stayed.
* * * * * * * * *
The dead dumb fog hath wrapped it--the frozen dews have kissed--
The naked stars have seen it, a fellow-star in the mist.
What is the flag of England? Ye have but my breath to dare;
Ye have but my waves to conquer. Go forth, for it is there!"
--KIPLING.
"The great Lord Hawke" is Burke's phrase, and is one of the best-earned
epithets in literature. Yet what does the average Englishman to-day
remember of the great sailor who, through the bitter November gales of
1759, kept dogged and tireless watch over the French fleet in Brest,
destroyed that fleet with heroic daring amongst the sands of Quiberon,
while the fury of a Bay of Biscay tempest almost drowned the roar of
his guns, and so crushed a threatened invasion of England?
Hawke has been thrown by all-devouring Time into his wallet as mere
"alms for oblivion"; yet amongst all the sea-dogs who ever sailed
beneath "the blood-red flag" no one ever less deserved that fate.
Campbell, in "Ye Mariners of England," groups "Blake and mighty Nelson"
together as the two great typical English sailors. Hawke stands midway
betwixt them, in point both of time and of achievements, though he had
more in him of Blake than of Nelson. He lacked, no doubt, the dazzling
electric strain that ran through the war-like genius of Nelson.
Hawke's fighting quality was of the grim, dour home-spun character; but
it was a true genius for battle, and as long as Great Britain is a
sea-power the memory of the great sailor who crushed Gentians off
Quiberon deserves to live.
Hawke, too, was a great man in the age of little men. The fame of the
English navy had sunk to the lowest point. Its ships were rotten; its
captains had lost the fighting tradition; its fleets were paralysed by
a childish system of tactics which made a decisive battle almost
impossible. Hawke describes the _Portland_, a ship of which he was in
command, as "iron-sick"; the wood was too rotten, that is, to hold the
iron bolts, so that "not a man in the ship had a dry place to sleep
in." His men were "tumbling down with scurvy"; his mainmast was so
pulverised by dry rot that a walking-stick could be thrust into it. Of
another ship, the _Ramilies_--his favourite ship, too--he says, "It
became water-logged whenever it blowed hard." The ships' bottoms grew
a rank crop of grass, slime, shells, barnacles, &c., till the sluggish
vessels needed almost a gale to move them. Marines were not yet
invented; the navy had no uniform. The French ships of that day were
better built, better armed, and sometimes better fought than British
ships. A British 70-gun ship in armament and weight of fire was only
equal to a French ship of 52 guns. Every considerable fight was
promptly followed by a crop of court-martials, in which captains were
tried for misconduct before the enemy, such as to-day is unthinkable.
Admiral Matthews was broken by court-martial for having, with an excess
of daring, pierced the French line off Toulon, and thus sacrificed
pedantic tactics to victory. But the list of court-martials held
during the second quarter of the eighteenth century on British captains
for beginning to fight too late, or for leaving off too soon, would, if
published, astonish this generation. After the fight off Toulon in
1744, two admirals and six post-captains were court-martialled.
Admiral Byng was shot on his own deck, not exactly as Voltaire's _mot_
describes it, _pour encourager les autres_, and not quite for
cowardice, for Byng was no coward. But he had no gleam of unselfish
patriotic fire, and nothing of the gallant fighting impulse we have
learned to believe is characteristic of the British sailor. He lost
Minorca, and disgraced the British flag because he was too dainty to
face the stern discomforts of a fight. The corrupt and ignoble temper
of English politics--the legacy of Walpole's evil régime--poisoned the
blood of the navy. No one can have forgotten Macaulay's picture of
Newcastle, at that moment Prime Minister of England; the sly, greedy,
fawning politician, as corrupt as Walpole, without his genius; without
honour, without truth, who loved office only less than he loved his own
neck. A Prime Minister like Newcastle made possible an admiral like
Byng. Horace Walpole tells the story of how, when the much-enduring
British public broke into one of its rare but terrible fits of passion
after the disgrace of Minorca, and Newcastle was trembling for his own
head, a deputation from the city of London waited upon him, demanding
that Byng should be put upon his trial. "Oh, indeed," replied
Newcastle, with fawning gestures, "he shall be tried immediately. He
shall be hanged directly!" It was an age of base men, and the
navy--neglected, starved, dishonoured--had lost the great traditions of
the past, and did not yet feel the thrill of the nobler spirit soon to
sweep over it.
But in 1759 the dazzling intellect and masterful will of the first Pitt
controlled the fortunes of England, and the spirit of the nation was
beginning to awake. Burns and Wilberforce and the younger Pitt were
born that year; Minden was fought; Wolfe saw with dying eyes the French
battalions broken on the plains of Abraham and Canada won. But the
great event of the year is Hawke's defeat of Conflans off Quiberon.
Hawke was the son of a barrister; he entered the navy at fourteen years
of age as a volunteer, obtained the rating of an able seaman at
nineteen years of age, was a third lieutenant at twenty-four, and
became captain at thirty. He knew the details of his profession as
well as any sea-dog of the forecastle, was quite modern in the keen and
humane interest he took in his men, had something of Wellington's
high-minded allegiance to duty, while his fighting had a stern but
sober thoroughness worthy of Cromwell's Ironsides. The British people
came to realise that he was a sailor with the strain of a bulldog in
him; an indomitable fighter, who, ordered to blockade a hostile port,
would hang on, in spite of storms and scurvy, while he had a man left
who could pull a rope or fire a gun; a fighter, too, of the type dear
to the British imagination, who took the shortest course to the enemy's
line, and would exchange broadsides at pistol-shot distance while his
ship floated.
In 1759 a great French army threatened the shores of England. At Havre
and Dunkirk huge flotillas of flat-bottomed boats lay at their
moorings; 18,000 French veterans were ready to embark. A great fleet
under the command of Conflans--one of the ablest seamen France has ever
produced--was gathered at Brest. A French squadron was to break out of
Toulon, join Conflans, sweep the narrow seas, and convoy the French
expedition to English shores. The strategy, if it had succeeded, might
have changed the fate of the world.
To Hawke was entrusted the task of blockading Conflans in Brest, and a
greater feat of seamanship is not to be found in British records. The
French fleet consisted of 25 ships, manned by 15,200 men, and carrying
1598 guns. The British fleet numbered 23 ships, with 13,295 men, and
carrying 1596 guns. The two fleets, that is, were nearly equal, the
advantage, on the whole, being on the side of the French. Hawke
therefore had to blockade a fleet equal to his own, the French ships
lying snugly in harbour, the English ships scourged by November gales
and rolling in the huge seas of the Bay of Biscay. Sir Cloudesley
Shovel, himself a seaman of the highest quality, said that "an admiral
would deserve to be broke who kept great ships out after the end of
September, and to be shot if after October." Hawke maintained his
blockade of Brest for six months. His captains broke down in health,
his men were dying from scurvy, the bottoms of his ships grew foul; it
was a stormy season in the stormiest of seas. Again and again the wild
north-west gales blew the British admiral off his cruising ground. But
he fought his way back, sent his ships, singly or in couples, to Torbay
or Plymouth for a moment's breathing space, but himself held on, with a
grim courage and an unslumbering vigilance which have never been
surpassed. On November 6, a tremendous westerly gale swept over the
English cruising-ground. Hawke battled with it for three days, and
then ran, storm-driven and half-dismantled, to Torbay for shelter on
the 10th. He put to sea again on the 12th. The gale had veered round
to the south-west, but blew as furiously as ever, and Hawke was once
more driven back on the 13th to Torbay. He struggled out again on the
14th, to find that the French had escaped! The gale that blew Hawke
from his post brought a French squadron down the Channel, which ran
into Brest and joined Conflans there; and on the 14th, when Hawke was
desperately fighting his way back to his post, Conflans put to sea,
and, with the gale behind him, ran on his course to Quiberon. There he
hoped to brush aside the squadron keeping guard over the French
transports, embark the powerful French force assembled there, and swoop
down on the English coast. The wild weather, Conflans reckoned, would
keep Hawke storm-bound in Torbay till this scheme was carried out.
But Hawke with his whole fleet, fighting his way in the teeth of the
gale, reached Ushant on the very day Conflans broke out of Brest, and,
fast as the French fleet ran before the gale, the white sails of
Hawke's ships, showing over the stormy rim of the horizon, came on the
Frenchman's track. Hawke's frigates, outrunning those heavy
sea-waggons, his line-of-battle ships, hung on Conflans' rear. The
main body of the British fleet followed, staggering under their
pyramids of sails, with wet decks and the wild north-west gale on their
quarter. Hawke's best sailers gained steadily on the laggards of
Conflans' fleet. Had Hawke obeyed the puerile tactics of his day he
would have dressed his line and refused to attack at all unless he
could bring his entire fleet into action. But, as Hawke himself said
afterwards, he "had determined to attack them in the old way and make
downright work of them," and he signalled his leading ships to attack
the moment they brought an enemy's ship within fire. Conflans could
not abandon his slower ships, and he reluctantly swung round his van
and formed line to meet the attack.
As the main body of the English came up, the French admiral suddenly
adopted a strategy which might well have baffled a less daring
adversary than Hawke. He ran boldly in shore towards the mouth of the
Vilaine. It was a wild stretch of most dangerous coast; the granite
Breton hills above; splinters of rocky islets, on which the huge sea
rollers tore themselves into white foam, below; and more dangerous
still, and stretching far out to sea, wide reaches of shoal and
quicksand. From the north-west the gale blew more wildly than ever;
the sky was black with flying clouds; on the Breton hills the
spectators clustered in thousands. The roar of the furious breakers
and the shrill note of the gale filled the very air with tumult.
Conflans had pilots familiar with the coast, yet it was bold seamanship
on his part to run down to a lee shore on such a day of tempest. Hawke
had no pilots and no charts; but he saw before him, half hidden in mist
and spray, the great hulls of the ships over which he had kept watch so
long in Brest harbour, and he anticipated Nelson's strategy forty years
afterwards. "Where there is room for the enemy to swing," said Nelson,
"there is room for me to anchor." "Where there's a passage for the
enemy," argued Hawke, "there is a passage for me! Where a Frenchman
can sail, an Englishman can follow! Their pilots shall be ours. If
they go to pieces in the shoals, they will serve as beacons for us."
And so, on the wild November afternoon, with the great billows that the
Bay of Biscay hurls on that stretch of iron-bound coast riding
shoreward in league-long rollers, Hawke flung himself into the boiling
caldron of rocks and shoals and quicksands. No more daring deed was
ever done at sea. Measured by mere fighting courage, there were
thousands of men in the British fleet as brave as Hawke. But the iron
nerve that, without an instant's pause, in a scene so wild, on a shore
so perilous, and a sea sown so thick with unknown dangers, flung a
whole fleet into battle, was probably possessed by no other man than
Hawke amongst the 30,000 gallant sailors who fought at Quiberon.
The fight, taking all its incidents into account, is perhaps as
dramatic as anything known in the history of war. The British ships
came rolling on, grim and silent, throwing huge sheets of spray from
their bluff bows. An 80-gun French ship, _Le Formidable_, lay in their
track, and each huge British liner, as it swept past to attack the main
body of the French, vomited on the unfortunate _Le Formidable_ a
dreadful broadside. And upon each British ship, in turn, as it rolled
past in spray and flame, the gallant Frenchman flung an answering
broadside. Soon the thunder of the guns deepened as ship after ship
found its antagonist. The short November day was already darkening;
the thunder of surf and of tempest answered in yet wilder notes the
deep-throated guns; the wildly rolling fleets offered one of the
strangest sights the sea has ever witnessed.
Soon Hawke himself, in the _Royal George_, of 100 guns, came on, stern
and majestic, seeking some fitting antagonist. This was the great ship
that afterwards sank ignobly at its anchorage at Spithead, with "twice
four hundred men," a tale which, for every English boy, is made famous
in Cowper's immortal ballad. But what an image of terror and of battle
the _Royal George_ seemed as in the bitter November storm she bore down
on the French fleet! Hawke disdained meaner foes, and bade his pilot
lay him alongside Conflans' flagship, _Le Soleil Royal_. Shoals were
foaming on every side, and the pilot warned Hawke he could not carry
the _Royal George_ farther in without risking the ship. "You have done
your duty," said Hawke, "in pointing out the risk; and now lay me
alongside of _Le Soleil Royal_."
A French 70-gun ship, _La Superbe_, threw itself betwixt Hawke and
Conflans. Slowly the huge mass of the _Royal George_ bore up, so as to
bring its broadside to bear on _La Superbe_, and then the English guns
broke into a tempest of flame. Through spray and mist the masts of the
unfortunate Frenchman seemed to tumble; a tempest of cries was heard;
the British sailors ran back their guns to reload. A sudden gust
cleared the atmosphere, and _La Superbe_ had vanished. Her top-masts
gleamed wet, for a moment, through the green seas, but with her crew of
650 men she had sunk, as though crushed by a thunderbolt, beneath a
single broadside from the _Royal George_. Then from the nearer hills
the crowds of French spectators saw Hawke's blue flag and Conflans'
white pennon approach each other, and the two great ships, with
slanting decks and fluttering canvas, and rigging blown to leeward,
began their fierce duel. Other French ships crowded to their admiral's
aid, and at one time no less than seven French line-of-battle ships
were pouring their fire into the mighty and shot-torn bulk of the
_Royal George_.
Howe, in the _Magnanime_, was engaged in fierce conflict, meanwhile,
with the _Thesée_, when a sister English ship, the _Montague_, was
flung by a huge sea on the quarter of Howe's ship, and practically
disabled it. The _Torbay_, under Captain Keppel, took Howe's place
with the _Thesée_, and both ships had their lower-deck ports open, so
as to fight with their heaviest guns. The unfortunate Frenchman rolled
to a great sea; the wide-open ports dipped, the green water rushed
through, quenched the fire of the guns, and swept the sailors from
their quarters. The great ship shivered, rolled over still more
wildly, and then, with 700 men, went down like a stone. The British
ship, with better luck and better seamanship, got its ports closed and
was saved. Several French ships by this time had struck, but the sea
was too wild to allow them to be taken possession of. Night was
falling fast, the roar of the tempest still deepened, and no less than
seven huge French liners, throwing their guns overboard, ran for
shelter across the bar of the Vilaine, the pursuing English following
them almost within reach of the spray flung from the rocks. Hawke
then, by signals, brought his fleet to anchor for the night under the
lee of the island of Dumet.
It was a wild night, filled with the thunder of the surf and the shriek
of the gale, and all through it, as the English ships rode, madly
straining at their anchors, they could hear the sounds of distress
guns. One of the ships that perished that night was a fine English
seventy-four, the _Resolution_. The morning broke as wild as the
night. To leeward two great line-of-battle ships could be seen on the
rocks; but in the very middle of the English fleet, its masts gone, its
hull battered with shot, was the flagship of Conflans, _Le Soleil
Royal_. In the darkness and tempest of the night the unfortunate
Frenchman, all unwitting, had anchored in the very midst of his foes.
As soon as, through the grey and misty light of the November dawn, the
English ships were discovered, Conflans cut his cables and drifted
ashore. The _Essex_, 64 guns, was ordered to pursue her, and her
captain, an impetuous Irishman, obeyed his orders so literally that he
too ran ashore, and the _Essex_ became a total wreck.
"When I consider," Hawke wrote to the Admiralty, "the season of the
year, the hard gales on the day of action, a flying enemy, the
shortness of the day, and the coast they were on, I can boldly affirm
that all that could possibly be done has been done." History confirms
that judgment. There is no other record of a great sea-fight fought
under conditions so wild, and scarcely any other sea-battle has
achieved results more decisive. Trafalgar itself scarcely exceeds it
in the quality of effectiveness. Quiberon saved England from invasion.
It destroyed for the moment the naval power of France. Its political
results in France cannot be described here, but they were of the first
importance. The victory gave a new complexion to English naval
warfare. Rodney and Howe were Hawke's pupils, Nelson himself, who was
a post-captain when Hawke died, learned his tactics in Hawke's school.
No sailor ever served England better than Hawke. And yet, such is the
irony of human affairs, that on the very day when Hawke was adding the
thunder of his guns to the diapason of surf and tempest off Quiberon,
and crushing the fleet that threatened England with invasion, a London
mob was burning his effigy for having allowed the French to escape his
blockade.