NAVY RECORDS.
Tim energetic Navy Records Society, which is helping to put the study of our naval history on a new and firmer basis by publishing original documents, has just issued two more volumes to its members. One is the second instalment of The Life and Works of Sir Henry Mainwaring, edited by Miss G. E. Mainwaring and Mr. W. G. Perrin. This contains the writings of the redoubt- able Jacobean sailor, namely, the Discourse on Pirates which he presented to King James the First, and the Seaman's Dictionary which was printed at least five times between 1644 and 1682, but is now reproduced from a manuscript written for Buckingham before 1623. Mainwaring, a converted pirate and a thorough seaman, had a profound contempt for the " gentleman captain " who gained his place by Court influence and did not even understand the language of the sea. The old sailor admitted, however, that the " tarpaulin " or professional seaman seldom had either the ability or the will to teach the landlubber the terms of art used in a ship. Mainwaring, therefore, compiled his dictionary; which was the first English treatise on seamanship as distinct from navigation. Many of the words explained are still in use ; words that have become obsolete with the passing of the three-decker are as accurately defined here as in any later book, for Mainwaring knew his business.
The other volume now published by the Navy Records Society is the first part of Letters of Admiral of the Fleet the Earl of St. Vincent, edited by Mr. D. B. Smith, from the letter- books in the British Museum. Jervis, Lord St. Vincent, served as First Lord of the Admiralty in Addington's Ministry from 1801 to 1804. In view of the grave dangers facing the country, Addington had decided to revert to the old custom, abandoned in 1788, of appointing an Admiral as First Lord, just as Pitt, in the critical Trafalgar year, was to appoint Lord Barham. The King's illness delayed the formal acceptance of Pitt's resignation, so that the Copenhagen expedition under Hyde Parker and Nelson, which sailed on March 12th, 1801, was actually ordered by Pitt, who did not leave office till two days later. Lord Spencer had appointed the commanders before he made way for St. Vincent on February 20th, 1801, and the new First Lord made no change in the arrangements. But it may be questioned whether a civilian would have acted so decisively .as St. Vincent did when he heard the true story of Copenhagen. At the first news of the victory of April 2nd he had, on April 17th, con- gratulated Hyde Parker on the vigour and promptitude of the attack. Three days later he learned that the Admiral in command had been most reluctant to attack and had, in the middle of the engagement, made the signal to cease fire which Nelson, putting his blind eye to his telescope, refused to see. St. Vincent instantly ordered Hyde Parker to return home and appointed Nelson in his place. Next month, when Nelson received a Viscountcy, it was publicly intimated that Hyde Parker would get nothing, and he was refused a court-martial. St. Vincent's drastic action must have had a wholesome effect on the Service as showing that an Admiral's grievous blunders—" his idleness, for that is the truth, no criminality," said the generous Nelson— were not to be glossed over for political reasons, as had happened too often in the eighteenth century. Tierney and his Whig faction took up Hyde Parker's case in the House but were silenced. It must be said that St. Vincent's letters, covering the period from Febraary, 1801, to the summer of 1802, are relatively unimportant, but they contain some significant details about naval organization and they are well edited. Mr. Smith gives separately the letters relating to the Baltic, the North Sea, the Mediterranean and so on, and prefixes a careful introduction to each section. He thus brings out clearly, for example, the profound importance of the two brilliant but for'otten actions fought by Saumarez against a French squadron and a Spanish squadron off Algeciras in July, 1801. These victories frustrated Bonaparte's hopes of relieving the hard-pressed French army in Egypt by concentrating the French and Spanish fleets in the Eastern Mediterranean. General Menou, at Alexandria, capitulated at the end of August, and Bonaparte signed the peace preliminaries a few weeks later. The British Navy had foiled all his designs.
Previous page
