wayfarer among the uplands of the Kent and Sussex Wealds would have met
processions of “tugs,” as the local timber conveyances were called, drawn
by teams of oxen, laboriously hauling along the rough oak trunks, lopped
and barked, stamped with King George’s broad arrow, and each numbered
with a smear of red paint, that were in the course of events to form the
frame and side timbers of the _Victory_. From Frant and Ashdown, Eridge
and Mabledon, over all the wooded country round Tunbridge Wells where
Kent and Sussex march, by Wadhurst, Buxted, and Mayfield, from Horsham
on the north to nearly as far south as Lewes, they might have been seen
working slowly along the clay-bound forest roads, two-and-twenty oxen
to one trunk in wet weather sometimes, in charge of smock-frocked,
leather-breeched Wealden peasants (“them leather-legged chaps o’ the
Weald”), toiling from cross-road to cross-road towards Maidstone,
where, alongside Messrs. Prentice’s wharves, the Medway timber hoys for
Chatham lay in waiting. Kent and Sussex oak was proverbial at that day
as being without equal in strength and toughness for the frame timbers
and sides and upper works of a man-of-war—the fighting parts of a ship.
And, at the same time, the wayfarer in another land, wandering where the
Vistula rolls its sluggish course northwards to the Baltic, would have
met a great part of the rest of the future _Victory_ in the long rafts
drifting downstream from the oak forests of Poland and East Prussia,
floating slowly along, to arrive at length at the Dantzic contractor’s
yard, and thence finally pass oversea to the saw-pits of Chatham. For
the under-water timbers and planking of our old-time men-of-war and
other parts of a ship exposed to salt water there was no timber in
the world, so it was generally considered at that time, to compare in
durability with “East Country” oak—“‘K’ brand, Dantzic,” in particular.
Also it was cheap. By the end of the year 1754 the pick of the best
shipbuilding timber in England and in all Europe had been placed in store
on the berths and racks at Chatham, available for the expected big ship,
thenceforward to season gradually and improve in keeping year by year.
The order to the Dockyard Commissioner at Chatham to get ready to take
the _Victory_ in hand was dated the 13th of December, 1758. It directed
Commissioner Cooper to “prepare to set up and build a new ship of
100-guns as soon as a dock shall be available for the purpose.” A sum
of £3200, it also informed the Commissioner, would be set aside in the
coming Navy Estimates for preliminaries. It was the custom at that time
to build first-rates in a dock; they were thought too big to build on a
slip.
The new ship—no name was as yet officially announced for her—was to be,
as we should nowadays say, an “improved” _Royal George_ (the _Royal
George_ was our latest completed big ship, the same _Royal George_
that came at a later day to so unfortunate an end), and for six months
the draughtsmen in the office of the Surveyor of the Navy, under the
supervision of Mr. Thomas Slade (afterwards Sir Thomas), Senior Surveyor
of the Navy, the designer of the _Victory_, were busy on the working
plans. These were completed by the first week of June, 1759, and laid
before the Admiralty. They were formally passed on the 14th of June, and
a few days later the Rochester stage-waggon from London stopped at the
dockyard gates to deliver the box with the duplicate plans, all ready to
be laid off and chalked down in detail, each part of the ship the actual
size, on the mould loft floor. Master-Shipwright Lock would then get
his mould-boards and have the saw-pits set going, in readiness for the
arrival of the regulation Navy Board Order to commence building. That
order came on the 7th of July.
The dock allotted for the building of the new ship at Chatham was that
then known as the “Old Single Dock,” the dock now called “No. 2 Dock,”
near the Admiral Superintendent’s Office and opposite the old yard clock
and bell turret. There, on a Monday morning, the 23rd of July, 1759—an
auspiciously bright and sunny morning as it befell—the keel of the
_Victory_ was laid.
The ship was to be afloat, according to Admiralty calculations, within
thirty-three months—by the 31st of March, 1762. That meant, in the
existing state of things at Chatham, working on her, at any rate during
the earlier stage of getting the vessel into frame, day and night. They
had two 90-gun three-deckers and two seventy-fours in various stages of
building, besides the _Victory_ to take in hand; and in addition they had
nearly every week extra refits or repairs to undertake for ships coming
in from the fleets at sea—a complication of tasks which involved the
keeping of every man and boy of the two thousand and odd hands then on
the muster-sheets of Chatham yard hard at work from Monday at daylight to
Saturday at dusk. Half the establishment alternately were on overtime,
working on Sundays and nightly through the week, for spells of three
or five hours after bell-ringing—in dockyard lingo, “double tides” and
“nights.” It was the same just then in all our dockyards; the day-gangs
as they worked having each man’s meals brought from home into the yard to
him, to eat in the half-hour allowed, near by his job; the night-gangs
all toiling on under the flaring light of cressets and links, without a
break, until past ten o’clock.
Amid such surroundings at Chatham they began building the _Victory_,
a hundred and fifty men being employed on the ship at first, to set up
and bolt together the various frames and floor timbers, and fit and fix
together in place the stem and stern pieces and brackets and the huge rib
timbers and beams, as fast as the converter and the sawyers could supply
them. So things went on from August to the following January (1760). Then
the gangs of shipwrights employed on the _Victory_ were reduced, and the
rate of working allowed to slacken down. With the French Mediterranean
Fleet broken up by Boscawen—one half taken or burned and the other half
cut off and shut up at Cadiz—and the French Channel Fleet shattered by
Hawke, and its refugee ships lying broken-backed and stranded up the
Vilaine, on the sandbanks above the bar, the stress of the war was past.
And there was little need to trouble for the immediate future with only
M. Berryer at the Ministry of Marine.
By August, 1760, the hull timber-work had been put together into the
outline of a ship, and was practically complete in frame, the skeleton of
the future man-of-war. The workmen were then almost all called off, and
the ship, according to custom, was left aside for a space, to “stand in
frame” and season. She had cost so far, according to the Navy Estimates,
upwards of £14,000 in materials and labour.
Two months later, on the 28th of October, the Admiralty officially named
the _Victory_. On that day their lordships signed an order that “the new
100-gun ship building at Chatham,” as the vessel had hitherto been styled
in all official documents, should take the name of the _Victory_. At the
same time a notification was sent to the Navy Board, directing them “to
cause the name appointed by my Lords to be so registered in the List of
His Majesty’s Navy,” and “communicated” to Chatham Dockyard.
The name, of course, from the first had been an open secret. There were
at that period seven British warship names which were tacitly accepted
as set apart for first-rate ships of war. They were: _Royal Sovereign_,
_Britannia_, _Royal William_, _Royal Anne_, _Royal George_, _London_, and
_Victory_. These seven had stood at the head of the Navy List as a group
by themselves, in successive ships, for some seventy years and more.
The name _Victory_, in 1760, was the only one not appropriated to any
existing ship. It had been wanting ever since the disaster of 1744, and
the new 100-gun ship, as a first-rate, had a right to it in accordance
with the custom of the service. Thus our present _Victory_ man-of-war is
linked directly with the old-time veterans of her name; thus, indeed,
from the Armada to Trafalgar, in a line of continuous succession—
Victory to Victory ever
Hands the torch of Glory on.
But that is not quite all. In a special sense no more appropriate name
could have been given to the British man-of-war laid down as the special
first-rate of the year 1759. In that sense the _Victory_ commemorates in
her name the most brilliant year of warlike achievement in our annals,
the most successful year for British arms that the world ever saw. In
her name, in this regard, our Nelson’s _Victory_ of to-day stands as an
abiding national memorial of England’s greatest year of victory; the
“Wonderful Year,” as our forefathers themselves called it, the year of
Minden and Lagos Bay and Quiberon and Quebec. “We are forced,” wrote
Horace Walpole, in October, 1759, “to ask every morning what victory
there is for fear of missing one.”
March 31st, 1762, came—the date by which the _Victory_ was to have been
afloat. She was, though, still in frame, hardly advanced beyond that; her
bottom planked over, but all above practically as yet only in skeleton,
little advanced, in fact, beyond the stage at which the shipwrights had
left her eighteen months before. The Admiralty’s change of plans after
the French collapse at sea at the end of 1759 had put her completion off
for two years. It was, however, not entirely lost time. An additional
£12,000 had been laid out meanwhile for the ship in preparing and working
up materials to be used in her, and seasoning them in readiness to push
on with the building when work on the vessel was resumed.
[Illustration: THE _VICTORY_ ON HER FIRST CRUISE
_Drawn by Captain Robert Elliot, R.N. Engraved and Published in 1780._]
The new date for completion, March, 1764, came in its turn, but again
the _Victory_ was not ready. Upwards of £50,000 had by now been spent on
her, and the ship was four-fifths finished, her sides planked to the
upper works and the decks laid. They had slackened off considerably in
regard to new construction at Chatham after the war ended. The dockyard
establishment had been reduced by two-thirds and overtime stopped.
General repairs were the order of the day, to make good the wear-and-tear
of war service at all the dockyards, and practically a third part of the
whole sea-going navy fell to Chatham’s share of mending.
Another six months was then officially granted for the finishing of
the _Victory_; but this time the Admiralty themselves, and the French
incidentally, caused fresh delay. My Lords did their share by coming down
to Chatham at the end of May, 1764, on a visit of inspection, walking
over the _Victory_ and leaving suggestions for alterations to be made
which would take at least four additional months to carry out. The French
hindered the intended progress by a display of aggressiveness towards
England over the Newfoundland fisheries question, as left arranged by
the recent Treaty of Paris. That trouble at the outset looked so serious
that the workmen at the dockyards were drawn off all ships building and
repairing in order to get part of the Ordinary, the ships in reserve,
into sea-going state at once. So the _Victory_ had her completion again
put off.
In the midst of this French “disturbance”—as our ancestors of that time
termed international unpleasantnesses of the kind—we may conveniently
take our leave of the _Victory_ on the stocks at Chatham, in the midst of
a series of strange scenes the like of which, happily, have not often
been witnessed in an English dockyard.
The Newfoundland difficulty was still unsettled, when, at the end of
October, 1764, secret information of a startling nature suddenly reached
the Admiralty from abroad. It was to the effect that a plot was on foot,
with the connivance of the French Government, to destroy the English
dockyards by incendiarism and fire the ships of war under construction.
There proved to be reason to consider the news in a most serious light,
and extraordinary measures of precaution were forthwith ordered at all
the yards.
At Chatham, the nightly guard-boats patrolling the line of ships laid
up at moorings in the Medway Ordinary, were doubled. Strict orders were
issued to those in charge of the ships in Ordinary to keep their gun-room
ports close shut all night, to send adrift before dark all shore boats
lying astern, to hoist in all the ship’s boats, to haul up on board at
night all the Jacob’s ladders over the stern used by the ship-keepers
for getting on board. All fishing boats and hoys passing up and down
the Medway were kept under observation. All doubtful or strange boats
of any kind on the river were to be challenged and reported. Special
dockyard guard-boats were told off to patrol from sunset to sunrise
along the river front of the yard. All persons landing at the yard from
the guardships after dark were to come alongside and disembark only at
certain specified points. Strangers visiting the yard on business during
the day were to be accompanied throughout their stay; no foreigner of
whatever quality or rank was to be allowed to pass the gates without a
written permit from the Commissioner. The yard-warders posted ashore
on look-out round the walls of the yard were doubled, and marines were
drafted into the yard to keep watch at night, “conformable to the
strictest rules of Garrison duty.” A captain’s guard was posted at the
dockyard gates, and a subaltern’s guard at the North-East Tower. A
special parole with countersign was given out by the Commissioner every
twenty-four hours. Constant patrols of marines were kept on the move
round and about the yard all night. Armed sentries were posted on the
river front, by the workshops and storehouses, the hemp and rope houses,
and the timber berths. No fewer than twenty-two of these sentry-posts
were appointed in and about Chatham dockyard, and each man going on duty
was supplied with three rounds of ball.
To safeguard the _Victory_, the pride of Chatham, “the finest man-of-war
ever built for the Royal Navy,” as they already spoke of her, a
cocked-hatted, high-gaitered marine sentry, loaded firelock on shoulder,
was kept pacing up and down with steady tramp alongside the dock where
the ship lay, all the night long. His orders were to challenge all
suspicious persons and loiterers, and all persons approaching the ship,
twice—“Halt, who comes there!” If not answered after that, he was to
fire. To prove himself on the alert, at every quarter of an hour, when
the warders on the wall look-out towers struck their bells, the sentry
had to call out the number of his post, passing it on to the next sentry,
and echoing back the hail “All’s well!” A fresh man came on duty every
two hours. To further ensure the safety of the _Victory_, once at least
during every night a “visiting rounds” patrol, comprising an officer
from the main guard and a corporal and file of marines with lantern and
jingling keys, boarded the ship to explore between-decks and below for
lurking evil-doers or any combustibles that might be secreted.
But Jack the Painter’s time had not yet come. Nothing in the way of
incendiarism happened at Chatham, or at any of the other dockyards in
1764, and after two or three months of unrest, things resumed their
normal state of tranquillity.
Nothing more happened after that to hinder or delay the completion of
the _Victory_, and by the following March her bulkheads and magazines
were fitted, the port-lids and the rudder hung, and the poop lanterns
in place, and the caulkers and painters were getting through with their
finishing touches.
On St. George’s day, April 23rd, 1765, the Commissioner at Chatham
reported the _Victory_ to the Admiralty as ready to be launched. The
requisite order in reply, dispatched through the Navy Board, arrived
on the 30th of April. It directed the launch to take place at the next
spring tides These were due on the 7th of May.
VII
ON VALENTINE’S NIGHT IN FRIGATE BAY
If we go forward, we die;
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. In every sense it was a
daring and dashing deed of arms, and its moral effect on the enemy at the
time was immense and widespread. It was in February of the year 1782, in
the closing year of England’s long war with France and Spain in alliance
with the rebel American Colonists. At that moment the French under the
Comte de Grasse were in overpowering force in the West Indies, and were
about, as they loudly vaunted, to make a sweeping attack on the five
remaining British Islands, which, they declared openly, would prove an
easy prey.
Rodney, the British Commander-in-Chief in the West Indies, had gone home
on sick leave for a short time at the end of the preceding season. He
was now on his way out again, with what reinforcements the sorely-tried
Admiralty, at their wits’ end for ships and the men to man them with,
could get together for him; but he had not yet arrived. Sir Samuel Hood
(the famous Lord Hood of a later day), Rodney’s second in command, was
in charge of the station in Rodney’s absence. It was by him that the
brilliant exploit which forms our story here was achieved in Frigate Bay,
St. Kitts.
Hearing in December, 1781, that the French Admiral, de Grasse, who had
been co-operating with Washington in the Chesapeake, had arrived with
his whole force at Martinique, and was on the point of sailing thence,
or had already sailed, with a large force of troops on board to attack
and capture Barbados, Hood at once followed; to try and hold the enemy in
check till Rodney joined. He had only twenty-two ships of the line to de
Grasse’s twenty-six, but he meant to make a fight of it in any event.
Six of Hood’s ships, it should be noted, were only 64-gun ships, the
smallest class of vessels placed in the line of battle; and two of the
fleet, also, the _Invincible_ and the _Prudent_, were old vessels, worn
out and crazy. Both, indeed, had been officially reported on as unfit for
sea. Hood’s biggest ship was his own flagship, the _Barfleur_, a 90-gun
ship. De Grasse’s ships, on the other hand, comprised the most powerful
man-of-war in the world—the gigantic _Ville de Paris_ of 112 guns; and
the French had as well twenty seventy-fours and three sixty-fours.
On his way to Barbados, Hood put into English Harbour, Antigua, the
naval head-quarters of the Leeward Islands Station. There he heard fresh
news. The blow had fallen elsewhere. De Grasse had been delayed on his
way to Barbados by bad weather. He had turned aside, and swooped down
on St. Kitts. He had already begun a fierce attack, it was reported,
and the small British garrison of regulars in the island were in a very
precarious position. They were, however, still holding out. They occupied
an impregnable position on Brimstone Hill, but their supplies were short
and there was treachery among the islanders.
Hood received details at Antigua of the attack on St. Kitts. Taking on
board the 28th and 69th Foot and two companies of the 13th, part of the
garrison of the island, and arranging also to form two battalions of
marines, made up from the marines serving on board his fleet, Hood sailed
at once to try and save the island. “He sailed,” to use the words of one
of Hood’s officers, “with the inadequate force of 1500 troops, which was
all he could get from the general commanding at Antigua, on the 23rd of
January, to relieve St. Christopher’s, attacked by 9000 Frenchmen under
the Marquis de Bouville” [_sic_] (i.e. de Bouillé).
Hood proposed to surprise de Grasse at anchor and attack him at daybreak
on the morning of the 24th of January. He knew that the enemy were lying
in Basseterre Roads, a few miles from Brimstone Hill. To counterbalance
the numerical superiority of the French fleet, Hood, in his plan of
attack, proposed to throw the entire British squadron on one portion of
the enemy, which he hoped to overwhelm before the rest could weigh and
come to the rescue. Then he would be able, he expected, to match himself
effectively against what would remain of the French. The plan was foiled
at the outset by the blundering of the officer of the watch on board
the _Nymphe_, a frigate, which, during the night of the 23rd, in the
dark got across the bows of the _Alfred_, a seventy-four, the leader of
the battle-line. She caused a collision that damaged the _Alfred_ very
seriously, and nearly cut the _Nymphe_ in two.
Owing to the collision Hood’s entire plan had to be altered. The repairs
to the _Alfred_ took all day on the 24th and until ten o’clock on the
morning of the 25th, before the ship was again fit for service, and
during that time the rest of the British fleet lay-to. They were already
in sight of St. Kitts, with the result that the news of Hood’s arrival in
the neighbourhood, up to then unsuspected, reached the French Admiral.
Now there was no longer a question of surprise. Before he actually
sighted the British fleet, de Grasse had got ready for Hood, and had had
time to get under way and stand out to meet him.
Hood, disappointed though he was, was not baffled. He had a second plan
of action in his mind. He next began to manœuvre as if he did not wish to
come to close quarters with de Grasse—as, indeed, might well be the case,
looking at the odds. He made a series of feints, as though he desired to
shirk a battle and slip away, on which the French Admiral, becoming more
and more confident, stood boldly out to sea after him. That was Hood’s
game. He drew de Grasse clear of St. Kitts and to leeward of the island,
manœuvring meanwhile so as to keep the weather-gage for himself. Then,
suddenly hauling his wind, Hood dashed in, making for the anchorage the
French had quitted in Basseterre Roads.
He swept in so close along the shores of Nevis—to prevent the enemy
getting within him—that one of his frigates, the _Solebay_, “was wrecked
from not having room to pass between the line-of-battle ship she was
abreast of and the western point of Nevis.”
Holding his way ahead, Hood slipped right past the French and raced de
Grasse for his own anchorage. Hood won the race on the post. After a
flying interchange of broadsides he brought in his whole fleet, well in
hand, right into Frigate Bay, Basseterre Roads, exactly where de Grasse
had been lying previously, and occupied the very moorings that the French
had originally had. In that way he placed the British fleet between the
French troops on shore and their supporting fleet It was a masterstroke.
Hood had turned the tables exactly. He completely cut off the French
troops on shore from receiving aid from their fleet.
* * * * *
Completely surprised and outwitted by the British Admiral’s daring move,
all that de Grasse could do was to attempt to overpower Hood while he was
in the act of anchoring. What happened is described by the officer in the
British fleet who has already been quoted.
“When he perceived the whole fleet following their leader, he tacked
his fleet together ... and, in consequence, the French fleet approached
within gunshot at a little before three o’clock. De Grasse, who was in
the centre of his line, fetched in the _Ville de Paris_ nearly abreast
of the _Canada_, while the headmost ship of his fleet was drawing in
abreast of Sir Samuel Hood’s ship, the _Barfleur_. Their whole van boldly
advanced towards the _Barfleur_, which reserved her fire until the
brave Frenchman approached within musket shot, when she opened such a
well-directed and quickly repeated fire, that in a few minutes the French
ship had her jib-boom shot away, her sails nearly cut into ribbons, and
her rigging so cut up that she quickly put her helm a-weather, and bore
away from her redoubted antagonist. De Grasse perceiving an opening in
our line, boldly attempted to sever it; but Cornwallis placed himself
in the breach, which he so ably defended that his gigantic opponent was
glad to relinquish the hazardous enterprise. Hood looked on undismayed
at this attack upon his rear, knowing that he could confide in every
individual captain, and very coolly ordered the signal to be made for the
ships ahead to make more sail, in order to hasten their anchoring as soon
as possible. In the meantime, the _St. Albans_ (the leading British ship)
had taken up her station, and anchored at 3 p.m., and the other ships did
the same in succession, while the centre and rear were closely engaged
with the enemy, who pressed them close until every ship was anchored,
when the French wore in succession and stood out to sea.”
De Grasse made two fierce attacks on Hood next day.
“On the morning of the 26th, at half-past eight,” continues our officer
eye-witness, “the French fleet were seen coming round Nevis Point,
intending to force a passage, but so singularly felicitous was the
position taken up by the British Admiral, that when the enemy’s leading
ship approached, the wind headed her, so that she could not fetch
above the third ship in our line. The springs of our van ships were so
admirably attended to that the broadsides of four of them were brought
to bear at the same time upon the unfortunate Frenchmen, and were opened
with tremendous effect.