In a flash the numbers burst,
As the signal bunting 'broke' and fluttered free;
But we cheer'd from ship to ship,
And we set the guns to strip,
For to fight 'em we could trust old Blue Billee!
Billy Blue, etc.
He was shavin', so they say,
When he heard the news that day,
And his skipper came his wishes for to larn;
But he only said, 'All right,
Let 'em bark, for we can bite,
For all they're like to try on us, I don't care a darn!'
Billy Blue, etc.
'No, I don't care a rap
For any Frenchy chap,
When they come they'll get the dressing they deserve;
I've the best four in the fleet,
That the Frenchmen well could meet,
With the "Fightin' _Billy Ruff'n_" in reserve.'[73]
Billy Blue, etc.
'As she broke the line with Howe,
So she's game to do it now,
And repeat her "First o' June" here in these seas;
With their name for dauntless pluck,
And the _Billy Ruff'n's_ luck,
I will fight as many Frenchmen as you please!'
Billy Blue, etc.
But it wasn't merely bluff,
For he saw the job was tough,
And the signal promptly flew to 'Go about':
With the slowest ship in front,
And his own to bear the brunt,--
So we headed back for England, guns run out.
Billy Blue, etc.
To the _Sov'ren's_ lads he told
Like some hero chief of old,
As he bade 'em from the quarter-deck 'Good luck';
'To no foe upon the sea.
You may take it, men, from me,
Is the ensign of the _Sov'ren_ to be struck!'
Billy Blue, etc.
'Let the odds be what they will,
We must go on fighting still,
For the honour of the _Sov'ren's_ old renown;
And when, men, all is done,
As we fire our last gun,
With our colours flying still, we'll go down!'[74]
Billy Blue, etc.
Soon we heard the _Branle-bas_
What cheers up the Frenchy tar,
And their 'Vives' for 'La Nation!' and 'La Patrie!'
'Tis the way, as you should know,
With the maritime Crappo,
When he's got to do his fightin' on the sea.
Billy Blue, etc.
Then they came on, looking slaughter,
Like to blow us from the water,
As they near'd to port and starboard and astarn;
But we put in double shot,
And we paid 'em back so hot,
That they looked at one another with consarn.
Billy Blue, etc.
'Just a broadside or two--_Certainement_,
For the honour of their flag--_cela s'entend_,
But it's more than very fine, seven ships to twenty-nine!--
Most decidedly 'no go,'
Not at all _comme il faut_,
And a bit of British insolence for punishment condign!'
Billy Blue, etc.
'Just a broadside, if they like,
Then forthwith their colours strike
Having rendered to their flag the homage due:
It's sheer madness to pretend,
They can fight us to the end--
There's no other course the _Rosbifs_ can pursue!'
Billy Blue, etc.
Next the _Triumph_ they attacked,
And the _Mars_ got badly whacked,
'Twas the _Sov'ren_ with her broadsides beat 'em back:
Her three tiers all aflame,
Sweeping round the flagship came,
Leaving death and Frenchmen's wreckage in her track.
Billy Blue, etc.
And they didn't let us rest,
For they did their level best,
Fighting on and off from eight till after five;
Till at length they seemed to see,
That it wasn't going to be,
That they shouldn't take us dead, nor yet alive.
Billy Blue, etc.
How it ended, is a story,
Not at all to France's glory,
Of a little game the _Phaeton's_ men did play;
Making Mossoo go in fear,
That the Channel Fleet was near,
And think perhaps he'd better run away.
Billy Blue, etc.
For Blue Billy sent the _Phaeton_,
When the pass looked like a strait one,
To cruise out in the offing,--just in sight:
'At a fitting time,' said he
'You will signal down to me,
That Lord Bridport will be with us before night.'
Billy Blue, etc.
'You will fire guns, you know,
And to'gallant sheets let go,
As the custom is, reporting fleets at sea;
With a signal that they're 'friends'--
Which I think will serve our ends,
To humbug those chaps astarn with Monsieur V.'[75]
Billy Blue, etc.
The Frenchmen cried 'Morblo!'
And they shuffled to and fro,
Till they judg'd they'd haul their wind and go about;
To Belleisle back all the way,
At anchor there to stay,
Till they learnt the coast was clear to venture out.
Billy Blue, etc.
Yet no Channel Fleet was near,
To excuse the Frenchmen's fear,
For Lord Bridport was still cruising leagues afar,[76]
And a well-worn _ruse de guerre_
Was a hardy game to dare,
With French frigates--seventeen--the plot to mar.
Billy Blue, etc.
It so happened, for the rest,
Just to point the _Phaeton's_ jest,
By the merest chance--it wasn't meant at all--
Distant coasters passing by,
Chanced to fleck the evening sky,
And still faster to impel the flying Gaul.
Billy Blue, etc.
Here's to Stopford of the _Phaeton_,
And Flag-Captain Whitby bold,
To Fitzgerald of the _Brunswick_, tried and true,
Gallant Gower of the _Triumph_,
Gallant Cotton of the _Mars_,
Lord Cranstoun--_Billy Ruff'n_--here's to you!
Billy Blue, etc.
Aye, Blue Billy:--here's to him, with three times three,
To the honour of his name upon the sea!
'He upheld Old England's credit,' said the country in its pride:
'Cornwallis's Retreat,'
Greek Xenophon's great feat,
In its spirit we may claim to set beside.
Billy Blue, etc.
E'en our foes, the _Parley Voos_,
At this feat of Billy Blue's
Professed to be astounded--'_Etonnés_':--
'_Hors de ligne_' 'twas, so to speak,
'_Une affaire trop héroïque_,'
'_Le Déterminé_,' they call him to this day.
Billy Blue--
Here's to you, Billy Blue, here's to you!
For the magnificent display made by one and all on the occasion,
Admiral Cornwallis and the captains of his squadron were thanked by
both Houses of Parliament, while every ordinary seaman on board the
ships was specially rated 'A.B.'[77] Of his men, indeed, Cornwallis
himself said in his official despatch, 'Could common prudence have
allowed me to let loose their valour on the enemy, I hardly know what
might not have been accomplished by such men.' The last survivor of
Cornwallis's squadron, one of the midshipmen of the flagship _Royal
Sovereign_, died in the year 1869.
'Billy Blue'[78] himself lived to command the Channel Fleet in the
great war with Napoleon, and, in conjunction with Nelson at the head of
the Mediterranean Fleet, to save England from invasion in 1805, when
the Grand Army stood on the heights above Boulogne every day expecting
an opportunity to cross over, 'battling,' in the words of Captain
Mahan, 'the wild gales of the Bay of Biscay in that tremendous and
sustained vigilance concerning which Collingwood wrote that "Admirals
need be made of iron."' A man-of-war of 74 guns, a model of which
is one of the treasures of the Royal United Service Institution at
Whitehall, was in 1813 named the _Cornwallis_ in honour of Admiral
Cornwallis, and that ship's immediate successor is our fine modern
battleship the _Cornwallis_ of to-day.
[Illustration: THE 'FIGHTING' _TÉMÉRAIRE_ TUGGED TO HER LAST BERTH TO
BE BROKEN UP
From the engraving by J.T. Willmore, A.R.A., after the picture by
J.M.W. Turner, R.A., in the National Gallery.
[This print of Turner's _Téméraire_ differs from the painting. The sky
was engraved by R. Dickens principally in dry-point, and was toned
down by J.T. Willmore; the ship and tug were engraved in line by
Saddler. The rigging of the _Téméraire_ and the mast and funnel of the
tug do not correspond with the picture at the National Gallery, but
Turner permitted it as making a better engraving.]]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 67: _Evelyn's Diary_, July 16, 1641.]
[Footnote 68: The court-martial was held at Chatham on January 27,
1696, and comprised two admirals and seventeen captains. The minutes
of the evidence and the sentence are in the Public Record Office.
(_Admiralty (Secretary's Dept.) In-Letters_, 5256.)]
[Footnote 69: Public Record Office, _Admiralty Out-Letters_: Order of
October 29, 1697.]
[Footnote 70: Sir Cloudesley Shovel is the popular form of the name. It
is here given as the admiral himself spelled it.]
[Footnote 71: The Naval Medal was granted for Cornwallis's Retreat with
a clasp inscribed '17 June 1795.' The _Gazette_ notification records
the service that the medal was granted for thus: 'Brilliant repulse of
a fleet four times superior in force.']
[Footnote 72: Compare the curious definition of the term 'Retreat'
in Falconer's _Naval Dictionary_ (2nd edition, 1789). 'Retreat:--The
order or disposition in which a fleet of French men-of-war decline
engagement, or fly from a pursuing enemy. (Note) The reader who wishes
to be expert in this manoeuvre will find it copiously described
by several ingenious French writers ... who have given accurate
instructions deduced from experience for putting in practice when
occasion requires. As it is not properly a term of the British marine,
a more circumstantial account of it might be considered foreign to our
plan.']
[Footnote 73: 'The _Bellerophon_,' wrote Cornwallis to the Admiralty,
'I was glad to keep in some measure in reserve.... I considered that
ship as a treasure in store, having heard of her former achievements
and observing the spirit manifested by all on board.' Quite
unaccountably, as it so happened, the _Bellerophon_, the fastest 74 in
the service, sailed very badly that day. According to one of her men,
the reason was this: 'it warn't in the natur' of her to run from an
enemy.']
[Footnote 74: Admiral Cornwallis's actual words were, 'Remember, men,
the _Sovereign's_ flag and ensign are never to be struck to an enemy.
She goes down with them flying.']
[Footnote 75: 'Monsieur V.' was the familiar term for the French
admiral then in command of the Brest Fleet--Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse.
The words of the last line are the actual words Cornwallis used.]
[Footnote 76: Severe comment was made at the time on Lord Bridport for
so disposing his fleet as to leave Cornwallis's squadron isolated and
in such a situation of extreme peril.]
[Footnote 77: 'Landmen' or 'Landsmen,' 'Ordinary Seamen,' and 'Able
Seamen' or 'A.B.s' were the three classes or ratings into which men
before the mast were divided, usually according to ability and length
of service. 'A.B.' was the highest rating, entitling those of the rate
to increased pay, and affording opportunities for promotion.]
[Footnote 78: It should have been mentioned earlier that he was the
same officer who so ably commanded the _Canada_ in Rodney's fleet on
the 12th of April 1782, and took a leading part in bringing about the
surrender of De Grasse, as has been described.]
V
THE 'FIGHTING' _TÉMÉRAIRE_
WHERE, HOW, AND WHEN SHE MADE HER NAME
Heard ye the thunder of battle
Low in the south and afar?
Saw ye the flush of the death-cloud,
Crimson o'er Trafalgar?
Such another day never
England will look on again,
When the battle fought was the hottest,
And the hero of heroes was slain.
Francis Turner Palgrave.
In England's song for ever
She's the _Fighting Téméraire_.
Henry Newbolt.
Trafalgar was her day. It was at Trafalgar that the _Téméraire_ made
her mark and won undying fame.
First of all--
She came to Nelson's aid,
The battle's brunt to bear,
And nobly sought to lead the van,
The Brave Old _Téméraire_.
Then she was 'the _Victory's_ companion in her closing strife,' as Mr.
Ruskin has called the _Téméraire_, 'prevailing over the fatal vessel
that had given Nelson death.'[79] That is one of the reasons why people
remember the _Téméraire_. There is another--that all the world knows.
To learn it one has only to visit the National Gallery. Turner's
masterpiece has made the _Téméraire's_ name a household word all the
world over. But, all the same, had Turner never painted his picture at
all, even without the aid of Turner's magic brush, the _Téméraire_ must
surely, for the part she took in the greatest sea-fight of history,
have achieved for her name an immortal renown.
How Turner came to paint his 'Fighting _Téméraire_' is a story in
itself. The famous picture came into being by the merest accident; as
the outcome of a happy chance, as the result of a casual meeting with
the old ship at a water-picnic on the Thames one autumn evening of the
year 1838.[80] Turner, with Clarkson Stanfield and some friends, was
boating off Greenwich marshes in Blackwall Reach when the old ship
passed them, coming up the river from Sheerness to meet her destined
end off Rotherhithe, where the shipbreaker Beatson's men were waiting
for her. She had been sold out of the service some days before for
£5530, barely the market value of the copper bolts that held her
timbers together--just a twelfth of the prime cost of the ship's hull
in labour and materials, or one-twentieth of the total value of the
ship, gunned and equipped for sea. Forlorn enough, and a thing for
pity, looked the grand old man-of-war as the Sheerness men had left
her, her sails stripped from the yards, her tiers of ports without
guns and closed down, her hull with its last coat of dockyard drab all
rusty-looking and weather-stained, cast off and discarded, as it were a
broken warrior being borne to a pauper's grave.
[Illustration:
Emery Walker, sc.
'Turner saw the tug and ship just before entering Greenwich Reach,
and when before rounding the Isle of Dogs she would be steering
about South-South-East up Blackwall Reach, with the summer setting
sun astern of her in the North-North-West.'--Mr. R.C. Leslie in the
_Athenæum_.]
Two tugs had the ship in tow, as contemporary accounts of the
_Téméraire's_ arrival in the river relate, not one, as Turner has
painted the memorable scene.[81] In Turner's picture the _Téméraire_ is
shown passing the water-party before she rounded the Isle of Dogs, when
heading south-south-east up Blackwall Reach, with the September sun
setting astern of the ship to the north-west. 'There's a fine picture,
Turner,' said Stanfield, pointing to the war-worn veteran of the sea as
she stemmed her way past them, and Turner went home full of the idea
to reproduce the scene on canvas, with touches of his own, to give the
world a picture 'of all pictures of subjects not involving human pain,'
says Mr. Ruskin, 'the most pathetic that ever was painted.'[82]
Now the sunset breezes shiver,
_Téméraire! Téméraire!_
And she's fading down the river,
_Téméraire! Téméraire!_
Now the sunset breezes shiver,
And she's fading down the river,
But in England's song for ever
She's the _Fighting Téméraire_.[83]
The Fighting _Téméraire_ tugged to her last berth to be broken up,'
was the title Turner gave his picture when he sent it in to the Royal
Academy Exhibition of 1839. He added these lines, composed apparently
by himself--
'The flag that braved the battle and the breeze
No longer owns her.'
The 'Fighting' _Téméraire_ was an Essex ship, built--nine-tenths of
her--of oak cut in Hainault forest and sent across to Chatham dockyard,
where the _Téméraire's_ keel was laid in July 1793.[84] Tuesday,
the 11th of September 1798, was the day of her launch, 'a squally
day with drenching rain.' She was a three-decker, a second-rate, 'a
ninety-eight,' in the Navy parlance of the time, a ship carrying
ninety-eight guns (32-pounders, 18's, and long 12's, with twelve
carronades as well), throwing a broadside weight of metal at each
discharge of 1336 lbs., very nearly twelve cwts.--three-fifths of a ton
of solid cast iron. 'She is one of the finest ships that we have seen,'
wrote an officer who inspected the _Téméraire_ on the stocks a little
while before she was launched.
An Essex man captained the _Téméraire_ at Trafalgar, Eliab Harvey, of
Rolls Park, Chigwell, Essex. He was a great-grandson of Eliab Harvey,
brother of Dr. William Harvey the discoverer of the circulation of the
blood, by whose side he now lies buried in the family vault under the
Harvey Chapel in Hempstead Church, near Saffron Walden. All Essex, we
are told, was represented at the funeral, or followed the coffin to its
last resting-place. Captain Harvey, during the time that he commanded
the _Téméraire_, had also a seat in Parliament for the county of Essex,
in accordance with a political usage of those days which enabled
officers on active service to represent constituencies at Westminster,
although Ministers apparently did not always find it satisfactory.
'I don't like your M.P. Navy Captains,' said Castlereagh once; 'they
are always off Cape Finisterre when they are wanted, and when they
are sent for they say they don't like being "whistled up merely to
give a vote."' Those who know their Marryat will remember the case of
the Hon. Captain Delmar, M.P., of H.M.S. _Paragon_, a frigate in the
Channel Squadron, 'which was never sea-going except in the Recess.' It
was better though than this with the _Téméraire_, which Captain Harvey
commissioned for the 'Western Squadron,' as in those days the Channel
Fleet was generally called, at Plymouth, in November 1803, six months
after the outbreak of the Great War with Napoleon.
Strange as it may seem to us, the _Téméraire's_ name at that moment had
for most people an unpleasant ring about it. The shadow of a terrible
tragedy rested just then over the name _Téméraire_. The public had not
yet got over the shock with which, barely two years before, the whole
country had learnt that the crew of one of the flagships of the Channel
Fleet, while lying in Bantry Bay, had mutinied, and offered violence to
their Admiral and officers, using ugly threats and proposing to point
guns loaded with grape-shot to sweep the quarter-deck. Nor had people
forgotten the grim sequel, the relentless severity of the retribution
that fell on the ringleaders; how eleven of the _Téméraire's_ men
had been hanged at the yard-arm, two flogged through the fleet at
Spithead, receiving two hundred lashes each, seven sent to the hulks
for life. The newspapers had been full of the terrible story, as
related day by day in the evidence at the two courts-martial that
sat at Portsmouth to try the mutineers. The trial lasted five days,
and the report of it in the _Times_ of the 13th of January 1802
took up the whole paper, all but two columns. Nor had the following
paragraph which appeared in the _Naval Chronicle_, done any good to the
_Téméraire's_ reputation:--'Plymouth, October 7th, 1802; The seamen of
the _Téméraire_ of 98-guns, Rear-Admiral Campbell, paid off, put on
crape hat-bands round their straw hats in memory of the mutineers in
that ship who were executed for the mutiny in Bantry Bay last year.'
That unhappy episode in the ship's story was, however, as far as the
_Téméraire_ herself was concerned, now past and done with. Now the
_Téméraire_ had a new ship's company throughout; captain, officers, and
men, with a future of their own before them.
Captain Harvey manned his ship to a large extent with Liverpool men,
sent round from the Mersey by tender, and sailed from Cawsand Bay on
the 11th of March 1804, to join Admiral Cornwallis off Brest.
It was perhaps the most critical period in our national history. On
the heights above Boulogne lay Napoleon's Grand Army, 160,000 men,
waiting for the French fleet to put to sea and secure its passage
across the Straits of Dover.[85] The fate of England depended on the
British Navy. There were twenty-one French line-of-battle ships in
Brest, six others at Rochefort, and five sheltering in the Spanish
port of Ferrol. At Brest, also, there were known to be upwards of
20,000 French soldiers; and another 20,000 under Augereau were under
canvas at Rochefort, 'supposed against Ireland,' according to Admiral
Cornwallis's instructions from the Admiralty. It was the business
of the Channel Fleet to hold the enemy in check at all points from
Ushant Island, off Brest, to Cape Finisterre, and prevent aid from
elsewhere arriving to enable them to put to sea. At the same time, as
his appointed part in the great strategic plan of campaign, Nelson off
Toulon kept his tireless watch over the French Mediterranean Fleet.
Thus the toils were set, the gambit was opened.
'They were dull, weary, eventless months,' says Captain Mahan in one of
his most telling passages,[86] 'those months of watching and waiting
of the big ships before the French arsenals. Purposeless they surely
seemed to many, but they saved England. The world has never seen a
more impressive demonstration of the influence of sea-power upon its
history. Those far-distant storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand
Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world.'
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. The nation
knew its strength and on what, under Providence, it relied; the nation
knew it and the Navy knew it--as we too, after forgetting it for a
time, have in these later years at length come again to recognise the
vital root-fact of Great Britain's existence--
No track of men, no footsteps to and fro
Lead to her gates. The path lies o'er the sea
Invincible.
Six months of pitching and rolling in the dreary Bay of Biscay was
the _Téméraire's_ lot at the outset, as one of Vice-Admiral Calder's
squadron watching Rochefort. The most disliked of all billets perhaps
was blockade duty off the Basque Roads, ever facing the dreary sand
dunes of Aix and Oléron, stretching wearily along the featureless
coast, there and back, between Sables d'Olonne and the mouth of the
Gironde, buffeted week in week out by persistent gales and rough
weather. All there was to do, practically, was now and again to stop
some wretched neutral passing by--usually a Portuguese trading brig, or
a Prussian galliot, for or from Bordeaux--and examine her papers; but
for days together sometimes--
The Wind at the West or thereabout,
Nothing gone in and nothing come out,
was all that went down in their logs, according to the refrain on the
dull routine of their daily life of a gun-room ditty composed on board
one of the ships blockading Rochefort. Every two or three months, as
her turn came round, one or other of the ships would part company for a
week or ten days and proceed to Cawsand Bay--communicating on the way
with the fleet off Brest to take letters for England--to fill up her
water-casks and take in fresh stores and provisions, overhaul spars and
rigging, and then return bringing bullocks and bread and vegetables for
the squadron. That was their only relaxation. In her turn, towards the
end of May, the _Téméraire_ went in to Cawsand Bay, as the 'Plymouth
Report' of the Naval Chronicle records.
_May 26._--Came in from the Channel Fleet, which she left all well,
last Wednesday, the _Téméraire_ of 98 guns. The enemy as usual. Our
frigates frequently go in to reconnoitre within a mile and a half of
the outer-most ships, and within range of their shots and shells of
which the enemy give them plenty but without damage.
In August, when Collingwood had relieved Calder, a closer watch on the
enemy than before was maintained, owing to the prevalence of rumours
that the French were on the point of putting to sea. Collingwood,
we are told, frequently passed the night on the quarter-deck of his
flagship, at intervals lying down on a gun-carriage to snatch a short
sleep, 'from which Admiral Collingwood would rise from time to time to
sweep the horizon with his night glass lest the enemy should escape in
the dark.'[87] The French, though, remained quiet all the time. One or
two of their ships would come out now and then and exercise at sail
drill in Basque Roads, and they had a small sham fight once, but no
attempt was made to run or force the blockade.