Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  The cat was silenced, but leave was rare or granted grudgingly, and the impulse to desert remained strong. In 1865, when H.M.S. Sutlej, flagship of the British Pacific Squadron, put into San Francisco, a third of the crew deserted, taking the ship’s boats with them. Safely immune from British authority, these former sailors enjoyed insulting their former officers when they came on shore. Seamen given liberty who did return to their ships usually came back drunk and penniless. Conditions improved with the passage of time but even in 1890, the men of the cruiser Hawke were allowed on shore only once a month, and men with bad records only once in three months. There was a solution, found by captains willing to defy St. Vincent’s decree. One captain, following this course, had to deal with an excellent seaman who habitually returned late from leave. Summoning the man, the captain told him how valuable he was and instructed him to come to him personally and ask for forty-eight hours’ leave whenever he wanted it. The seaman was never late again.

  A sailing ship’s most valuable men were those who went aloft. Three huge pine masts thrust up from the deck and were crossed at different levels by wooden yards from which as many as twenty canvas sails were hung and stretched. By changing the alignment of the yards and thus the angle of the sails to the wind, the ship could be made to sail in almost any direction. For the men who worked there, this interlocking web of wood, canvas, and rope made an extraordinary gymnasium in the sky. Men scampered through the rigging, sometimes running along the yards without holding on even though the ship was rolling wildly. Sometimes they fell, usually catching the yard or a line to save themselves. When a ship changed course, falling off before the wind, the heavy rolling caused the great yards to strain and shudder; the sails went slack and the huge sheets of canvas rolled and crackled like thunder. If a line parted, the violent backlash could kill anyone in the way. Topmen developed arms and hands as strong as a gorilla’s. Everyone who went aloft went barefoot, not only because the grip of the toes was essential, but so that shoes would not hurt the hands or heads of men below or alongside. Feet thus exposed became horny and callused, and most topmen could not wear boots without discomfort; indeed, they went ashore barefoot, with their boots slung around their necks for the sake of propriety. When winter came and Her Majesty’s ships remained at sea, men worked aloft in icy wind, sleet, and snow, dressed only in flannel vests and trousers with their heads, arms, ankles, and feet bare. When their work was done, they would swing down the lines, land on deck with catlike spring, and go below—to find a freezing gundeck awash in water, the galley fire out, and nothing but cold water and hard biscuits.

  And yet despite flogging, poor food, no leave, and constant danger, the average seaman had immense pride in himself and the navy. One had only to see a competitive sail drill among the ships of the Mediterranean Fleet moored in Malta’s Grand Harbor to understand the spirit of the fleet. General sail drill was carried out every Monday morning. Crowds gathered along the yellow stone ramparts to watch the ships compete in making sail, shifting topsails, striking topgallant masts and upper yards, all against the clock.

  The men who worked aloft had been picked for their quickness, agility, and courage and they had a fierce pride in their ability and their ship’s standing. The elite were the upper yard men, who attracted the eyes of the entire fleet; to be known as the smartest Royal Yard Man in the fleet was to reach a pinnacle of fame.

  At one moment, the fleet would be silent and immobile, the men frozen on each deck. At the flagship’s signal, the fleet erupted into life. Men swarmed aloft, darting along the yards, shifting lines and moving sails with astonishing speed. Time was at stake, not life, and with the ship’s reputation to make, men took extraordinary risks so that for a while it was necessary after each drill to make the signal “Report number of killed7 and injured.” At fault were not the officers but the men themselves, who cared passionately about winning at these perilous but thrilling games. It was this same spirit which maintained the tradition that when a ship sailed for home from the Grand Harbor in Malta, a man would be standing erect on the top of each mast—main, mizzen, and fore. “Many a time8 have I seen these men, balanced more than 200 feet in the air, strip off their shirts and wave them,” recalled Lord Charles Beresford. In 1909, one of these old topmen wrote to Lord Charles about the sailing-ship navy of fifty and sixty years before: “I am doubtful9 if there are many men in the Navy today who would stand bolt upright upon the royal truck of a line-of-battle ship. I was one of those who did so. Perhaps a foolish practice. But in those days fear never came our way.”

  Along with her officers, boatswain’s mates, and ordinary seamen, a great Royal Navy man-of-war in the nineteenth century was home to a small group of adolescent boys, the midshipmen. Until the great reforms of Jacky Fisher, these future officers were almost exclusively the sons of gentlemen. Not necessarily aristocrats—the dashing young earls and viscounts tended to go into the Brigade of Guards or the elite cavalry regiments of the army. The navy, with its long stretches of sea duty and service on foreign stations, seemed too far away from the attractions of living in England. When a boy bearing a title did go into the navy, he was likely to be a younger son. Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, became a career officer, eventually rising to the rank of admiral and command of the Mediterranean Fleet. King Edward VII’s second son, Prince George, was a career navy man until his elder brother died and he stepped forward as Prince of Wales and eventually became King George V. Most midshipmen, however, were of neither royal nor noble blood, but the offspring of the solid, conservative gentry of rural England. It was essential that a boy’s parents possess sufficient connections to have their son nominated by the First Lord of the Admiralty and sufficient money to pay the expenses of his schooling and training until he received an officer’s commission.

  A prospective cadet had to be nominated by the First Lord before his thirteenth birthday. This achieved, he traveled to Portsmouth for a written and physical examination. Neither exam was onerous, particularly if the boy had some education. A little English, some French or Latin, a “satisfactory knowledge10 of the leading facts of Holy Scripture and English history, a certain amount of geography, and an elementary knowledge of arithmatic, algebra and geometry” were what was required. Lord Charles Beresford, second son of the Marquess of Waterford, signed his application and was asked if he always signed his middle name, “William,” with a single “1.”

  Beresford paused only a second. “Only sometimes, sir,”11 he said. He passed.

  Prince Louis of Battenberg, entering the Royal Navy at twelve, survived his physical by a different application of wit. Bothered by shortsightedness and knowing that his vision would be tested by being asked to read the time on the Naval Dockyard Tower clock, Battenberg carefully set his watch by the clock before going in to be examined. Just before the question was asked, he managed a furtive peek at his watch.

  Not all candidates survived the hurdles. In a typical mid- to late-nineteenth-century year, of one hundred boys presenting themselves for examination at Portsmouth, sixty-four would pass and become Royal Naval Cadets. They were dispatched to H.M.S. Britannia, an old three-deck ship-of-the-line brought into the river Dart and permanently moored in 1863 just above the town of Dartmouth. The following year, the two-decker Hindustan was moored upstream of Britannia. Most of the masts and rigging were removed from both ships, a walkway connected them, and together they became a floating school for future officers of the Royal Navy.

  New cadets joined the Britannia twice each year and settled in for two years of courses which included seamanship, navigation, mathamatics, and French (France remained the likely foe). It was a Spartan life of exercise and discipline. Britannia’s upper deck had been enclosed and converted into classrooms and officers’ quarters. Belowdecks, all the guns had been removed and the gundecks transformed into dormitories and messrooms for the cadets. The boys slept like ordinary seamen in hammocks slung close beneath the low-beamed ceilings. Each
kept all his belongings in his sea chest, fitted with a mirror on the inside of the lid and a small washbasin which nestled among his clothing. The day began with a cold saltwater bath on deck and progressed through dressing, prayers, inspection, meals, classes, and exercise.

  A single mast had been left in place on Britannia. Towering 120 feet above the deck, with safety nets stretched beneath, it was used to train cadets in sail drill; the boys could also climb it for fun whenever they liked. Before the end of his second term, each cadet was required to touch the truck, the round piece of wood at the top of the mast. This could only be done by shinnying up the last fifteen feet of bare pole. Every term, a few boys, dizzied by the height, fell into the nets; some were so badly injured that they had to be sent home for good.

  Officially, discipline rested with the officers and consisted of confinement on bread and water or caning with trousers lowered. In fact, the older boys kept the younger in line. As late as 1893, Cadet (later Vice Admiral) K.G.B. Dewar considered himself “comparatively lucky12 in receiving only two really severe beatings whereas some of my contemporaries were kept in a state of constant terror by frequent thrashings.” This kind of bullying and beating of thirteen-year-old boys by fifteen-year-olds tended, Admiral Dewar noted dryly, to “suppress independence13 and initiative in our future naval officers.”

  After two years, cadets who survived their courses, Britannia’s foremast, and the older boys left the school and went to sea as midshipmen. Here their home was the Gunroom, a tiny cabin on the lower gundeck next to the ordinary seamens’ quarters. They slung their hammocks just as they had done on the Britannia. Each boy got a pint of water every morning for washing. He opened his sea chest and put the water in his basin inside. In a heavy sea, water slopped over onto his clothing, but this was infinitely preferable to having it spill onto the spotless deck, an infraction which brought swift punishment. The midshipmen ate simply and sparingly, salt pork one day, salt beef the next, and many of them carried memories of pangs of hunger through the rest of their lives.

  Discipline remained strict. Midshipmen could not be flogged; it was thought too degrading for one of Her Majesty’s future officers to bear the stripes of the cat. They could be ordered to the top of the mast as punishment (“Masthead for the midshipmen,14 the cat for the men” was a navy saying). Cadet John Jellicoe, future Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, did not mind; he enjoyed the view, and once that grew boring he pulled out a book. Harsher discipline lay in the hands of the older midshipmen. Younger midshipmen who misbehaved or somehow displeased their seniors were subject to Gunroom trials. If found guilty, they could be bent over the Gunroom table and beaten with a dirk scabbard. On occasion, midshipmen, bullied or beaten beyond endurance, rose in revolt. In 1905, on board the cruiser Kent, a desperate young midshipman fired a revolver at the senior midshipman. The tormentor must have opened his mouth very wide in surprise at this behavior, because the bullet passed through both of his cheeks without touching his teeth.

  The midshipmen’s purpose at sea was learning to sail and fight a ship. Boys soon discovered that climbing the mast of a ship at sea was quite different from climbing the mast of the stationary Britannia. High in the rigging, a midshipman looked down between his feet at the deck pitching and rolling, the sea hissing and seething. There were no safety nets. Sir Percy Scott, who survived to become an admiral, vividly recalled this part of a midshipman’s training: “On a dark night,15 with the ship rolling, [a midshipman] was awakened from his slumbers by a scream, ‘Topmen of the watch in royals!’ In a pouring rain squall, he had to feel his way aloft to a yard 130 feet above the deck.... There the sail was aback, wet and stiff as a board, the clewlines fouled. But the sail had to be furled.... Fine training for a boy,” said Scott, placidly adding: “although it cost a good many lives.”

  Down from the yards, during the long nights at sea, midshipmen made up their own games. Cockroaches were trapped, a spot of melted candle wax was dripped on their backs, and a piece of spun yarn planted in the wax. The yarn was lighted and the insects released; if they could be made to go in the same direction, it became a race. (On one ship, the cockroach escaped, its yarn still burning, and set the ship on fire.) Maggots, coaxed from bad meat, were saved for maggot derbies. The course was the Gunroom table, lined with books to define the track. Each maggot owner was allowed to touch his entry on the tail with a pencil to spur it on or to prevent it from climbing the books or reversing course. Sometimes, when two maggots collided, one climbed on the back of the other and rode piggyback, confusing the outcome.

  It was a mixture of danger, excitement, fear, and boredom, and in later life most midshipmen looked back with fond memories on their early years aboard sailing ships. Part of the reason was the ship and the sea, and part was the friendship they felt for each other and the companionship they found among the older men. On a sailing ship, the young midshipmen lived close to the ordinary seamen, working side by side aloft in the rigging, barefooted as the men had taught them. When they were hungry, they chewed tobacco because the men advised that this would dull the pangs. This juxtaposition of ordinary seamen and future officers bred respect on both sides: the men were quicker to obey an officer who knew what it was to reef a sail in the teeth of the wind; the officers were more effective in command because they understood and admired the stuff of which British seamen were made.

  Sir Percy Scott, the gunnery Jeremiah of the Royal Navy, looked back warmly on “those old sailing days16 in fine weather” and on the soft nights on the warm trade winds when “in the evening17 the men always sang and it was fine to hear a chorus of eight hundred men and boys. We midshipmen knew all the men’s songs...”

  Before 1851, the British ship-of-the-line was built as she had been for centuries: a three-deck, wooden sailing vessel propelled by the wind, armed with tiers of smoothbore cannon firing solid round cannonballs. In that year, the first major change in this traditional construction occurred. A British three-decker was equipped with a steam engine deep inside her oaken hull. A funnel was raised above her decks, a propeller shaft protruded through her stern, and H.M.S. Sans Pareil could go where she wished, with or without the wind. By 1858, the British Navy had built or converted thirty-two steam-fitted ships-of-the-line. The French Navy, spurred by the ambitious Emperor Napoleon III, followed the same course and by the end of that year also possessed thirty-two propeller ships-of-the-line. It was not this temporary equality, however, that brought momentary jeopardy to Britain’s otherwise serene domination of the oceans.

  On March 4, 1858, in Toulon, the French Navy laid the keel of the frigate La Gloire, the world’s first oceangoing ironclad. La Gloire was not truly an iron ship; rather, she was a wooden-hulled frigate with iron plates bolted to her timber sides above the waterline. The plates were a response to new rifled guns which, tests had proved, could hurl a solid shot through the oaken sides of wooden ships. Convinced that his ironclad, protected by her heavy metal shielding, would be able to overwhelm any number of conventional ships, Dupuy de Lôme, her designer, proclaimed that La Gloire amidst a fleet of wooden vessels would be like a lion amidst a flock of sheep.

  Britain refused to believe that her wooden walls were crumbling. With splendid British disdain, the Lords of the Admiralty reacted to this French impertinence by ordering another, bigger three-decker of 131 guns. H.M.S. Victoria, launched in 1859, was a larger edition of Nelson’s Victory, built exactly a century before. Like Victory, Victoria had a solid hull of oak, and dumpy, muzzle-loading cannon, poking out through gunports as British warships had been designed since the time of Sir Francis Drake.

  Two years after learning the details of La Gloire, the Lords of the Admiralty thought better. Tradition was important, but the new French warship must not be allowed to threaten British naval supremacy. They concluded that British counterparts were necessary and in December 1860, H.M.S. Warrior, Britain’s first seagoing ironclad, was launched. She was a hybrid vessel. Forty of her guns were old-fashioned muzzle-l
oaders, fourteen were new breech-loaders. Her hull was made of oak, but iron plates four and a half inches thick were bolted to her sides. She was a full-rigged sailing ship, but the enormous extra weight of her iron plates made her slow and cumbersome under sail, so she was equipped with a powerful steam engine which could drive her at fourteen knots.

  Within a year of Warrior’s launching, confirmation of De Lôme’s metaphor of the lion among the sheep came from across the Atlantic. Since the outbreak of the American Civil War, the superior Union Navy had blockaded Confederate ports. Squadrons of wooden sailing ships cruised in Chesapeake Bay and off Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans, blocking all trade. Southern cotton could not reach Europe, and crucial war materials, paid for by the cotton, could not return. Desperate to break the blockade and failing to persuade Britain or France to sell an ironclad, the Confederate Navy decided to make one for itself. When the Norfolk Navy Yard fell to the South upon Virginia’s secession from the Union, the 4,636-ton frigate Merrimack had been captured. Her masts and upper decks were stripped down to the lowest deck on the waterline. Here a casement of heavy armor was installed to protect a battery of ten guns, four nine-inchers on each side and a pivoting seven-inch gun on the bow and the stern. Jutting from her bow was a twenty-four-foot ram. The vessel was rechristened C.S.S. Virginia; her mission was to attack the Union frigates blockading Norfolk.