THE INTELLECTUAL CONDITION OF THE NAVAL
SERVICE.
—1THE Court-martial on the loss of the ' Vanguard ' is the most serious warning which England has yet received that in intellectual discipline she is not up to the emergencies of modern life. A fortnight ago we described the impression which the evidence made upon us by saying that the costly Ironclad Fleet seemed to us much in the condi- tion of a human body without a nervous system to govern and combine its movements. That impression has been deepened by every subsequent disclosure. The truth cannot be denied that we have got in our modern Navy an instrument requiring the highest technical skill, discipline, and delicacy, not merely to use it to advantage, but to preserve it from the most obvious and serious perils ; and that we have not got officers with the proper technical discipline to manceuvre it. The Navy is almost in the condition in which the Greenwich Observatory would be, if, instead of the highly-trained staff of accomplished observers, manipulators, and calculators who extract from all the exquisite instruments of the place the utmost amount of information they are capable of giving and recording, the Observatory was officered by raw students, hardly masters of spherical astronomy, and trained only to the use of common ship quadrants or sextants. That may seem an exaggerated inference from the evidence, but what are we to think of the astounding indifference to the commonest pre- cautions which was shown from the highest to the lowest point in the Service ? First, then, the Admiralty orders for manceuv- ring ships in a fog are evidently themselves exceedingly de- fective. Next, the knowledge possessed by the commanders of those orders, and of the means of carrying them out, is more defective still. Again, it was a clear blunder for the commanding officer of the fleet to keep up his speed to seven knots in a heavy fog,—a blunder which he ought to have known to be exceedingly likely to result in such a misfortune as that which actually followed it. Worse still, if we may judge by the case of two ships,—the ' Vanguard ' and the 'Iron Duke,'—nothing could be more capricious and confused than the notions of the various officers as to the proper policy to pursue in a fog, or the mode of telling other ships what they had determined on. The 'Vanguard' arbitrarily reduced its speed, instead of keep- ing pace with the flag-ship. The 'Iron Duke' as arbitrarily increased its speed. And neither ship took steps to tell the other what had been done. Indeed, in the case of the Iron Duke,' the fog-signal was suddenly found to be out of order, and could not be made to sound. Then on board the Iron Duke' the officers of the watch seemed to have their own notions as to the safest thing to do, some of which were carried out on their own discretion. Thus the 'Iron Duke' was sheered out of line by the officer of the watch on a personal inspiration of this sort. When the ' Vanguard ' slackened speed, Captain Dawkins had to consult an inferior officer as to the best mode of indicating what he had done, and, no quick process of giving this important bit of information being suggested, the only thing done was to turn on the steam-whistle to its full power. Now it is bad enough that the very common and very serious emergency of a sea-fog should find a fleet of such immense value to England, value both pecuniary and political, so utterly helpless, but if that was all, we might say it was just the sort of blunder of which even highly-disciplined services are sometimes guilty,—a fatal oblivion affecting them on some one important point which had never been properly considered, even while in other respects the utmost superfluity of minute and delicate organisation had been provided. But, unfortu- nately, it is by no means solely in relation to the proper mode of acting in a fog that the naval officers responsible for this disaster showed incapacity. There was hardly any material naval arrange- ment tested in this case which did not prove to have been out of
lin!ar. Some of the most important of the pumps had not been rigged for use before the vessel was abandoned. The forty-horse engine could not be started after the collision, because the engine-room artificer "could not get the plate up," and the chief engineer of the 'Vanguard' ventures the supposition that this was because he had forgotten "that the plate was intended to be lifted by a small portable handle, several of which were hanging about the stoke-hole, to be used for this or similar purposes." The closing of the water-tight compartments was con- fessedly very inadequately done, where it was done at all. And this, again, was partly due to so great a dearth of those most important instruments, the "spanners "—with which the doors of the water-tight compartments are opened and closed,—that one "spanner" had to be carried about and used successively at the different doors, many most valuable minutes being thus lost.
Even this slovenly organisation is not, perhaps, so painful to observe, as that want of energy and resource after the calamity had happened, on which the Court-martial severely commented. Whether or not there might have been any real prospect of partially stopping the leak by stuffing in hammocks and thrummed sails from outside, it is impossible for any one who is not technically trained to judge, but the several officers who sat on the Court- martial evidently thought that such an effort might have been crowned with sufficient success to render it worth trying. And one most obvious precaution, which might have saved the ship to the Service, though it would not have prevented her from sinking, was neglected, even though it was not entirely for- gotten. Captain Dawkins, prompted by one of his inferior officers, did send a message to Captain Hickley, of the 'Iron Duke,' to ask him if he could not tow the 'Vanguard ' into shallower water so that if she sank, she might sink where it would be less difficult to recover her. The fact that this was thought of and hurriedly suggested, but that no peremptory point was made of it, and that no answer to the inquiry was ever received from the 'Iron Duke,' and hardly perhaps even expected, shows a certain want of common-sense and collectedness of purpose at a critical moment, which is almost more alarming than the want of method and of scientific organisation evidenced by the haphazard arrangements in relation to the machinery. That the highest possible courage and discipline were shown on board the ship, only shows that we have as good moral stuff in the Navy as ever. But that is not enough for England in the present day. What we want also is good intellectual stuff, equal to the per- fect organisation of a most delicate, costly, and elaborate machine ; and the recent inquiry seems to show not only that such an organ- isation does not at present exist, but that even the intellectual material for it is defective,—that there is a deficiency in the steady common-sense needful to make the best of the materials actually at hand, no less than of the more perfect instruments which a higher organisation would have had at hand. Pos- sibly this may be somewhat too much of a generalisation from an individual case. But it seems very strange that neither Captain Dawkins, nor Captain Hickley, nor any of the inferior officers, insisted sufficiently on the importance of getting the 'Vanguard' into shallow water, to compel at least an attempt for that purpose,—which apparently must have been successful, so long was it before the ship actually went down.
On the whole, it is perfectly clear that there has been a terrible want of high technical drill in the education of the officers of our Iron Fleet. There is a hand-to-mouthness' —a want not merely of systematic method and nicety, and of the perfect fit of correlative responsibilities, but even of a strong sense of official responsibility and alertness, such as alarms us, when we think of some of the nations with whom we might be put in competition. When we recall the perfection of the discipline and the accuracy of the minute arrangements made by the German Army in the Franco-German War, and then look at the evidence of intellectual slipshodness in our Navy, we cannot but be dismayed. It is quite obvious that the scientific training of our Naval Constructors has been far in advance of the training of the officers who are appointed to carry out those Naval Constructors' plans. A very delicate and refined system of machinery has been devised for the new ships, which needs a very intelligent, dutiful, and highly-taught naval service to work it. But such a service we have not got. We have men of gallantry, and with a certain rough know- ledge of what they have to do, but no comprehension of the absolute necessity of that elaborate care which must be taken on all sides, if such machines are to be safely worked. And this is the time at which we are told that our Naval officers should I be chosen by patronage, and not by virtue of the evidence they I give of superior knowledge and skill. Mr. Ward Hunt has I been unfortunate in many respects lately, but in nothing more ' than in having had this inquiry into the loss of the Vanguard'
published as a comment on his new doctrine as to the best method of determining Naval appointments and promotions.
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