Flag and Fleet: How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the SeasWood, William
History
Flag and Fleet: How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas
Wood, William
Great Britain -- History, Naval; Sea-power
When the battleship _Majestic_ was sunk in the Dardanelles a bluejacket
ran along her upper side as she rolled over, then along her keel as she
turned bottom upwards. Finally, seeing that she was sinking by the
stern, and knowing both her own length and the depth of the water, he
climbed right up on the tip-top end of her stem, from which he was
taken off as dry as a bone. Meanwhile a very different kind of rescue
was being made by Captain Talbot, who, having gone down with the ship,
rose to the surface and was rescued by a launch. He had barely
recovered his breath when he saw two of his bluejackets struggling for
their lives. He at once dived in and rescued both at the very great
risk of his own.
From East to West, from the Tropics to the Poles, the Navy has gone
everywhere and done nearly everything that mortal man can do. Think of
the Admiralty "rating" Newfoundland, a country bigger than Scotland and
Wales put together, as one of His Majesty's Ships and putting a captain
in command! Yet that was done in the early days; and it worked very
well. Think of the naval brigades (that is, men landed for service
ashore) which have fought alone or with the Army, or with many foreign
armies and navies, all over the world for hundreds of years. Drake, as
we have seen, always used naval brigades, and they have always been the
same keen "first-class fighting men" wherever they went. The only
trouble was in holding them back. At the siege of Tangier in North
Africa in the seventeenth century Admiral Herbert "checked" Captain
Barclay "for suffering too forward and furious an advance, lest they
might fall into an ambush"; whereupon Barclay said, "Sir, I can lead
them on, but the Furies can't call them back." A naval brigade
man-handled the guns on the Plains of Abraham the day of Wolfe's
victory, and took forty-seven up the cliff and into position before the
army had dug itself in for the night. Nelson lost his right arm when
leading a naval brigade at Teneriffe in 1797. Peel's naval brigade in
the Indian Mutiny (1857-9) man-handled two big guns right up against
the wall that kept Lord Clyde's army from joining hands with the
British besieged in Lucknow, blew a hole in it, though it was swarming
with rebels, and so let the Marines and the Highlanders through.
In Egypt (1882) Lord Fisher, of whom we shall soon hear more, rigged up
a train like an ironclad and kept Arabi Pasha at arm's length from
Alexandria, which Lord Alcester's fleet had bombarded and taken.
Lieutenant Rawson literally "steered" Lord Wolseley's army across the
desert by the stars during the night march that ended in the perfect
victory of Tel-el-Kebir. Mortally wounded he simply asked: "Did I lead
them straight, Sir?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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