thousand pounds added, is what the _Formidable_ represents--£1,040,000
literally cast on the waters. Of that sum the guns by themselves
cost £74,500--more, in fact, than it cost to build and rig and fit
the _Victory_ for sea. And her upkeep in commission--interest on
first cost, wear and tear, crew, victualling, coal, stores, and
ordnance stores--costs £163,000 a year. In action every shot from the
_Formidable's_ big guns would cost £80--a sum equivalent to the annual
pay of two midshipmen _plus_ a naval cadet.
These features of the _Formidable_ are enough to show that in the
case of this particular modern battleship, at any rate, the name is
not misapplied, not unsuitable, nor without justification: that it
is something more than a 'futility,' something more than a 'merely
blustering adjective.' We may trust the honour of the flag to the
_Formidable's_ keeping, assured that should the hour of trial come
in her time she has the means of taking her own part with power and
advantage. Grant her, when that time comes, 'good sea-room and a
willing enemy,' as the war toast of the Old Navy used to go, and the
British Empire may rest assured that, as far as this particular ship is
concerned,
... in the battle's dance of death,
She'll dance the strongest down.
There is, though, another justification, and of the amplest kind, for
the presence on the roll of the British fleet of the name _Formidable_.
This 'merely blustering adjective' has a meaning there that is all its
own--a _raison d'être_ not only for the Royal Navy but for all the
world in that connection that is _sui generis_. The British fleet does
not owe the name to any whim or fancy of a modern Admiralty First Lord.
_Vixere fortes ante Agamemnon_--there have been famous _Formidables_
before the present ship. _Formidable_, indeed, is one of our best
'trophy names'--a name that came into the British service as spoil of
war, won from the enemy in very exceptional circumstances. It stands
in a special sense as a memento of one of the most brilliant exploits
in our annals--of that tremendous November afternoon battle of 1759,
fought in a wild Atlantic storm amid the reefs of Quiberon Bay, on that
historic occasion, so happily described in Mr. Henry Newbolt's stirring
verse,[13] 'when Hawke came swooping from the west.'
'Twas long past noon of a wild November day
When Hawke came swooping from the west;
He heard the breakers thundering in Quiberon Bay,
But he flew the flag for battle, line abreast.
Down upon the quicksands roaring out of sight
Fiercely beat the storm-wind, darkly fell the night,
But they took the foe for pilot and the cannon's glare for light
When Hawke came swooping from the west.
One result of Hawke's swoop was, of course, the stopping of all French
invasion schemes for the rest of the Seven Years' War. Henceforward
there was no need to watch the southward beacons night after night; no
need of more shore batteries at Brighton and elsewhere along the Sussex
coast; no further need to cover the South of England with standing
camps for Pitt's new militiamen to learn their drill in; no more need
to shock the good ladies of Hampshire with the sight of bare-legged
Highlanders marching to and fro.
The guns that should have conquered us, they rusted on the shore,
The men that would have mastered us, they drummed and marched no more;
For England was England, and a mighty brood she bore
When Hawke came swooping from the west.
The other result of Hawke's swoop was the _Formidable_--the French
flagship _Formidable_--the sole trophy that the stormy weather allowed
Hawke to bring off from the fight. The Royal Navy took over the fine
prize, a magnificent two-decker of eighty guns, enrolled her name as it
stood on the list of the British fleet, and in due course handed the
name on from one successor to another, until we come in the end to our
own fine steel-clad battleship, the _Formidable_ that to-day graces
The proud Armado of King Edward's ships,
in the words of poor Kit Marlowe's 'mighty'--and prophetic--line.[14]
Then we have another justification, the most notable of all. The
_Formidable's_ name has acquired a new significance since the days
of Hawke. To-day it has to the Royal Navy a more recent meaning. It
stands on the roll of the fleet as the special memorial of another
achievement, as a memento of another admiral's 'stricken field,' in
special honour of Rodney's most famous feat of arms, of the great
victory that has given Rodney his place in the history of the British
Empire. On that day a _Formidable_ was Rodney's flagship; the second
ship of the name, the immediate successor of Hawke's great prize, our
first British-built man-of-war _Formidable_.[15] 'If ever,' wrote
Froude, 'the naval exploits of this country are done into an epic
poem--and since the _Iliad_ there has been no subject better fitted
for such treatment or better deserving it--the West Indies will be the
scene of the most brilliant cantos.' In at least one of those cantos
Rodney's _Formidable_ would be a central figure.
We now come directly to the place, time, and circumstances of the
event, taking up the tale a little before the fighting actually opens.
[Illustration: RODNEY'S _FORMIDABLE_ ON THE DAY BEFORE HER LAUNCH
From a pencil sketch.
[Note, to the right of the ship, the canvas 'booths' or stands for
the Commissioner of Chatham Dockyard and officers and guests of
distinction. The launching flagstaffs on board were usually set up on
the day before a launch, to fly the Jack at the bows, the Admiralty
flag, Royal Standard, and Union flag where the three masts would be;
and the 'St. George's ensign' (White Ensign) on the ensign staff.]]
It begins, first of all, in Gros Islet Bay, St. Lucia, a locality that
one wants a fairly large map to find. The name is hardly a familiar
one, yet it has a place of its own, of special interest in our naval
annals. Gros Islet Bay was Rodney's headquarters in the West Indies
during March 1782 and the first week of April, at the time that the
_Formidable_ was Rodney's flagship. Rodney was in Gros Islet Bay with
his fleet of 36 sail of the line, and the French admiral De Grasse,
at the head of 34 of the line, was facing him in Fort Royal Bay,
Martinique, distant some thirty miles--about as far off as Boulogne is
from Folkestone. So the lists were set.
[Illustration: RODNEY'S SWORD]
Rodney had come out from England specially to save the British West
Indies from De Grasse. And even more than the fate of the 'sugar
islands' depended on his efforts. 'The fate of this Empire,' were the
last words of the First Lord of the Admiralty (Lord Sandwich) to Rodney
before he sailed, 'the fate of this Empire is in your hands!' He forced
his way across the ocean in mid-winter, battling through a series of
fierce storms that day after day threatened to tear the masts out of
his ship. 'Ushant,' wrote Rodney to his wife, 'we have weathered in a
storm but two leagues, the sea mountains high, which made a fair breach
over the _Formidable_ and the _Namur_, but it was necessary for the
public service that every risk should be run. Persist and conquer is a
maxim that I hold good in war, even against the elements, and it has
answered.' It did answer. Rodney arrived to find that there were still
four islands left to Great Britain. All our West Indian possessions had
fallen except Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, and St. Lucia. St. Kitts,
Nevis, Montserrat, and Demerara had been taken, actually, while Rodney
was on his way out. De Grasse when Rodney arrived was refitting for a
yet more audacious project at Fort Royal, Martinique, the Portsmouth of
the French navy in the West Indies; and to be on the spot to intercept
him and bring him to decisive battle at the first chance, Rodney
anchored his fleet in the nearest available harbour, within touch and
almost within sight of the French fleet, in the roadstead of Gros Islet
Bay, St. Lucia.
Both fleets during March and the first week of April were hard at work
refitting. Twelve of Rodney's ships had come out from England with him
and wanted little; the others of the thirty-six, however, belonged to
the fleet originally on the station, and after the trying time of it
they had had during the past six months, including two sharp fights
with the French, were badly in need of a refit. De Grasse's fleet
was in like case. The arrival of convoys from home, however, with war
stores and supplies of all kinds for both fleets, towards the end of
March, made it all but certain that the month of April would not go by
without a battle in the open sea.
Those days in Gros Islet Bay proved to Rodney of vital importance.
Secret intelligence came to hand which disclosed to him the enemy's
entire plan of campaign. A gigantic and startling project was on foot.
An elaborate and wide-reaching combination had been designed in which a
Franco-Spanish army and a Franco-Spanish fleet were both to take part,
the operations being projected on a scale far beyond anything hitherto
attempted in the war on either side. It aimed at nothing less than the
sweeping of the British flag out of the West Indies by one tremendous
and overmastering _coup_.
De Grasse's fleet was to be the chief factor in the situation, the
mainspring of the movement. The preliminary dispositions had already
been made. Thirteen Spanish ships of the line were at that moment
waiting off Cape Haitien in San Domingo, accompanied by transports with
24,000 troops on board. They were expecting to be joined by a force of
10,000 French soldiers from Brest, escorted by five or six men-of-war
which were already overdue. According to the grand plan, De Grasse with
his fleet, thirty-four of the line, with store-ships and the convoy
that had arrived in March, was to move out from Fort Royal, with some
five or six thousand more troops on board the men-of-war, and cross
over and join hands with the assemblage off San Domingo. The united
armada, making up some sixty ships of the line, against which Rodney's
thirty-six and the handful of ships at Port Royal could not hope to
stand, were then to swoop down on Jamaica and capture it out of hand.
There were only 3500 British regulars in Jamaica, and the planter
militia and armed negroes were of little account. Jamaica taken, said
the enemy, Barbados would fall at the first summons, and Antigua and
St. Lucia would follow, making an end of the British West Indies. So
confident were the enemy of success that, as it was reported, Don
Bernardo Galvez, the Spanish Commander-in-Chief, had already been
publicly addressed at Havana as 'Governor of Jamaica,' which island,
according to the secret arrangement between the allies (already
drafted), was to be Spain's share of the spoil.
Rodney's fleet--the _Formidable_ and her thirty-five consorts off St.
Lucia--were all that stood between the scheme and its fulfilment.
Realising to the utmost what depended on him, Rodney pressed on his
preparations for sea with intensified vigour, so as to be ready to fall
on De Grasse immediately he left Fort Royal.
[Illustration: _From Dupont's engraving of Gainsborough's portrait._]
[Illustration: [Facsimile of the signature to despatch announcing the
victory over De Grasse.]]
During March and the early part of April--except for ten days lost
in a futile attempt to cut off De Grasse's convoy from France on its
way to Fort Royal--Rodney was busy refitting: a task that taxed all
his energies owing to the state to which some of the ships had been
reduced, short of powder, shot, sea stores of all kinds, bread, even
anchors. All the fleet, too, had to be watered, which proved a slow and
difficult business owing to the bad weather. 'I think,' wrote Rodney
in March, 'the winter season has followed us: nothing but violent hard
gales, and such a sea that half the boats of the fleet have been stove
in watering, which has delayed us much in refitting.'
Incidentally the admiral had other matters to attend to. One--it will
be interesting to make a small point of it here--was to correspond
personally with his opponent. The subject was the interchange of
prisoners taken at St. Kitts and earlier in the campaign. The British
sloop-of-war _Alert_ was the intermediary, going and coming under a
flag of truce. Nothing could exceed the courteous tone of Rodney's
correspondence with the French admiral; and, on the other hand, De
Grasse was civility itself. He treated Captain Vashon of the _Alert_,
while that officer was at Fort Royal, with every consideration, made
him his guest for the time, and expressed in conversation with the
British captain the highest esteem and consideration for 'le Chevalier
Rodney.'
Rodney wrote to De Grasse, for instance, in one letter, after dealing
in the pleasantest way with the business in hand:--
It will make me happy if at any time this island produces anything
worthy your acceptance, or that may be the least useful to your table.
As the merchant ships which have lately arrived from Europe may have
brought different species of necessaries that may be agreeable to your
Excellency, it will make me happy, Sir, to obey your commands.
The bearing of the two admirals to one another in their personal
dealings affords a pleasing instance of the high-bred, chivalrous
courtesy that was so characteristic of the old-time fighting days.
It was the way with the men of the _ancien régime_ on both sides the
Channel when they met in war never to forget that, first and foremost,
they were gentlemen. In this spirit, almost at that very moment,
indeed, De Crillon at Gibraltar was exchanging similar compliments with
the 'old Cock of the Rock,' General Eliott--'Eliott the Brave': the
same spirit that at Fontenoy, as all the world knows, moved one side to
challenge the other to fire first. It was the same chivalrous spirit
that prompted the captains of the British fleet in the East Indies to
pay their unique compliment to the great De Suffren at the close of
this war. Hostilities were over, peace had been proclaimed, and the
rival fleets, so lately enemies, met, both on their way home, in Table
Bay. They had fought five fierce battles within sixteen months--each
one a drawn action, with honours divided. On finding the Bailli de
Suffren and his fleet in Table Bay when they arrived, the British
captains, brave old Commodore King, the senior officer, at their head,
proceeded in a body to call on the gallant leader of their quondam
foes, and pay the homage of brave men to the brilliant tactician
they had more than once been hard put to it to keep at bay. Their
generous tribute delighted the warm-hearted Provençal immensely, as he
described, by the spontaneity and peculiar graciousness of the act. The
intercourse between Rodney and De Grasse was in essentials of the same
kind: the outcome of two warriors' sense of _noblesse oblige_ the one
to the other; the obligation, as a point of honour, on both sides--
To set the cause above renown,
To love the game beyond the prize,
To honour while you strike him down
The foe that comes with fearless eyes.
To count the life of battle good,
And dear the land that gave you birth,
And dearer yet the brotherhood
That binds the brave of all the earth.[16]
It was, as it were, the swordsmen's obligatory recognition of each
other in 'the Salute' when they first come face to face, ere the
sword-blades cross and clash in fight; one of the courtesies of war
between destined opponents, wishing one another well until the striking
of the appointed hour--
Health and high fortune till we meet,
And then--what pleases Heaven!
'Always be polite,' said Bismarck once to Moritz Busch; 'be polite to
the foot of the scaffold, but hang your man nevertheless!' Nothing
could be nicer than Rodney's attentions, but he was in deadly
earnest all the same--he meant, at the proper time, 'to hang his man
nevertheless!'
[Illustration: THE PITONS OF ST. LUCIA]
Another incidental detail. It was while Rodney's fleet off Gros Islet
Bay was getting ready for sea that, according to local tradition, the
grim little real-life tragedy of the Pitons took place. The Pitons or
'Sugar Loaves,' as, from their general shape, they are to this day
commonly called by seafaring men, are two gigantic cones of rock, of
volcanic origin, that thrust themselves up out of the sea off the
south-westernmost end of St. Lucia, rising abruptly, almost sheer
from the water's edge. The larger of the two, the Grand Piton, towers
up to a height of some 2720 feet, or nearly seven times the height
of St. Paul's Cathedral; the smaller has an elevation some 300 feet
less. A number of sailors, the story goes, either stragglers from a
watering-party or, possibly, men from the _Russell_, a seventy-four,
then undergoing repairs in the _carénage_, managed to get on to the
Grand Piton, clambering up on to its lower slopes 'by means of lianes
and scrub.' Their intention was to try and scale the huge mass and
plant a Jack flag they had brought with them on the boulders at the
summit. The Grand Piton is covered almost to the top with dense bush,
but there are bare patches and open areas of rock surface and ledges
here and there. How many landed or started to climb is not stated, but,
according to the story told at St. Lucia to this day, lookers-on with
telescopes made out four men, including one man with the flag, more
than half-way up. Immediately afterwards one of the party was seen to
stagger and fall, and then roll down a little way and disappear. The
others went on until some two or three hundred feet higher up, when a
second man dropped. The two survivors went on steadily higher still,
and then suddenly one of the two was seen to go down. His companion
apparently took no notice. He pressed on with his flag, intent only
on getting to the top. He nearly succeeded. The last man seemed to
have almost reached the summit when he, like his messmates, was seen
to stop, stagger, throw up his arms, and drop. So the local people
tell visitors to St. Lucia to this day. What was it? What made the men
fall dead so suddenly? How they met their death no man ever knew. Few
human feet besides theirs, if indeed any, have ever tried to scale
the Pitons, and the bones of Rodney's sailors lie up there on the
windy height as they fell--what the weather and a hundred and twenty
years' exposure in the open has left of them. Was it sunstroke? Local
opinion attributes their fate to another cause. The Pitons, like the
whole island of St. Lucia itself, are known to swarm with venomous
serpents, the deadly _fer de lance_--'perhaps the deadliest snake in
the world' it has been called--an ugly monster, in average length from
3 to 5 feet, as thick as a boy's wrist, of a dull red or reddish-yellow
colour, fiercely aggressive in its ways, ever ready to strike at sight,
and its bite practically instant death. _Craspedocephalus_--the name in
itself is almost enough to kill--would account for everything. Whatever
the cause really was, at any rate the Grand Piton has ever since kept
its secret to itself.
At Fort Royal, meanwhile, everybody, from the great French Admiral
De Grasse himself down to the smallest _mousse_, was in the highest
spirits and assured of victory. To one and all the hour was at hand
for the development of the grand scheme that was to lay all the West
Indies at the feet of France. Hardly a finer fleet, perhaps, had ever
assembled under a French admiral than that lying there at that moment
in attendance on the orders of De Grasse. There were thirty-four ships
of the line, the finest men-of-war in the French navy among them,
and their captains were some of the smartest and most dashing and
most highly trained officers that ever trod a French quarter-deck. A
specially interesting set they were, as it happened, in many ways.
[Illustration: THE COUNT DE GRASSE
(From the Portrait in Hennequin's _Biographie Maritime_)]
De Grasse himself was a man of reputation, a talented and highly
trained officer, able to map out the strategy of a campaign in advance
with any man of his time, as his admirably planned and executed
Chesapeake campaign had just proved to all the world. He was just
fifty-nine--five years younger than Rodney. Both men had followed the
sea for half-a-century, the young De Grasse taking service under the
Order of Malta, in which seven-and-twenty of his ancestors had been
enrolled before him, just about the time that the schoolboy Rodney
was leaving Harrow to enter the Royal Navy as the last of the 'King's
Letter Boys.' Since then De Grasse, as an officer of the French navy
in the regular line, had served all over the world, and done well
for his country and himself. He had fought against England in three
wars and been taken prisoner once. In the present war, indeed, he
had already taken part in six fleet actions, and in three of them as
_chef d'escadre_ and third in command had had opportunity of learning
something of Rodney's methods on the day of battle. Such was Joseph
Paul de Grasse-Briançon, Knight of Malta, Grand Cross of the Order of
St. Louis, Chevalier of the Order of Cincinnatus, Count de Grasse and
Marquis de Grasse-Tilly, thirty-fifth of his line, of the _noblesse_
of Provence, overlord of forty fiefs, the man in whose hands rested
the fate of the campaign now about to open. 'Fresh from the victorious
thunder of the American cannon' as he was, not a man under his orders
doubted his ability to achieve success in the grand project that had
been committed to his hands.
The Marquis de Vaudreuil was De Grasse's second in command. There was
no better gentleman, from all accounts--never a nobler specimen of a
French naval officer of the old school than Louis Philippe de Rigaud,
Marquis de Vaudreuil. He looks it in his portrait at Versailles--a
_beau sabreur_ of the sea, _rusé_, ready-witted in emergency, a
'first-class fighting man' in all respects. The son of a sailor, the
grandson of a sailor, the great-grandson of a sailor, he belonged to a
family that had sent its sons to serve 'on the ships of the King' ever
since France had had a navy. '_Il a de l'eau de mer autour du coeur_'
is an old Breton saying that applied in the case of the scions of the
Norman house of De Vaudreuil. He was a year younger than De Grasse,
and like his chief had once had to go through the bitter experience of
having to raise his hat on the quarter-deck of a foeman's ship as he
gave up his sword to a foreigner in token of surrender.[17] Like De
Grasse also, De Vaudreuil had taken part in six fleet battles since
the war began. He was there by his own choice. There was not a man
in the fleet who had not heard how, only a little time before, De
Vaudreuil had refused the King's personal offer of a lucrative colonial
governorship--De Vaudreuil was a poor man--rather than be absent from
what to him was the post of duty. 'I am a sailor, your Majesty,' was
the fine reply, 'and in war-time a sailor's place is on the sea.'[18]
No officer in the whole French navy was more personally popular than
was this courtly son of old-time France--'_noble de sang, d'armes, et
de nom_.'
The circumnavigator Bougainville, _chef d'escadre_, was third in
command, and about to add another experience to the many he had gone
through in his crowded life. Professor of mathematics, barrister,
author, major of militia, diplomatist, colonel of light dragoons,
A.D.C. at Quebec and on the Rhine, circumnavigator, flag-captain--there
were few things within his reach that Louis Antoine de Bougainville,
the clever son of a country lawyer, had not tried his hand at in his
time.[19]