Even so, Ocean’s old timbers, straining under the weight of additional armor, leaked at the seams, and “when we got into heavy weather,89 the timbers of the ship would open when she heeled and squirted water inboard,” Fisher wrote. “Always we had many fountains playing in the bottom of the ship.” Returning at last to England around the Cape of Good Hope, she ran into enormous gales. Mountainous seas washed away two boats, smashed in the side of the quarterdeck, and buried the men on deck in water up to their waists. (In the teeth of this gale, with the ship rolling 41 degrees, thirty-one-year-old Commander Fisher climbed the foremast to help his seamen furl a foretopsail.) Nevertheless, by the time the ship reached Plymouth all damage was repaired and the admiral of the naval dockyard reported to the Admiralty that “his ship is a perfect yacht.90 The crew... have shown the most perfect discipline... [They are] contented, active and cheerful... Ocean fulfills all the conditions entitling her to be called a British man-of-war in its most comprehensive meaning.”
Fisher’s shore assignment was back to H.M.S. Excellent as head of torpedo instruction. Eventually, during his four-year tour, he managed to separate torpedo training from the gunnery program and have it established as a separate school. H.M.S. Vernon, another dismasted three-decker, was brought into Portsmouth Harbor, moored next to Excellent, and became the Royal Navy Torpedo School. Thirty-three-year-old Jacky Fisher, newly promoted to captain, was its first commanding officer.
Fisher’s devotion to torpedos did not mean that he had forgotten gunnery. It was simply that he applied himself to whatever task he was given. He explained his attitude to his own student officers on board Vernon: “If you are a gunnery man,91 you must believe and teach that the world is saved by gunnery, and will only be saved by gunnery. If you are a torpedo man, you must lecture and teach the same thing about torpedoes. But be in earnest, terribly in earnest. The man who doubts, or who is half-hearted, never does anything for himself or hs country. You are missionaries; show the earnestness—if need be, the fanaticism—of missionaries.”
In December 1876, Fisher went back to sea for six years, holding command of five ships during this period. The first was the old corvette-ram Pallas, a vessel so decayed that “in order to keep92 her [iron] plates from falling off, a chain cable was passed under her hull to hold them in place.” Pallas was with the Mediterranean Fleet and, in company with the major vessels, Fisher took his ship through the Dardanelles and anchored off Constantinople. He and a party of British naval officers dined with the sultan, Abdul-Hamid II, “a little man93 with a hook nose, a very black beard and whiskers cut close, and looking very delicate and careworn, but with a most sweet smile when he spoke.”
Fisher moved up to a cruiser and two battleships, the most interesting being the old battleship Bellerophan, which was in the middle of a fourteen-year tour as flagship of the West Indies Station. Known affectionately in the navy as “Old Billy,” Bellerophan was suffering, when Fisher came aboard, from a sense that the Admiralty was indifferent and that her chances of ever engaging an enemy were practically nil. Captain Fisher had a different vision: he wanted any ship he commanded to sparkle with discipline, pride, and fighting efficiency as if she were the flagship in the Mediterranean and an enemy squadron were on the horizon, clearing for action. Upon arrival, Fisher assembled his crew, promising them three months of hell. At the end of this span, if the ship was not ready, there would be another three months of hell. The second term was unnecessary, and although discipline was rigorous, one of his officers remembered that the men “were very proud of their captain.”94 The same officer had other recollections of Fisher: “[When in port] he attended95 morning and evening sermons [at a church ashore].... His spirits were inexhaustible... he developed a most extraordinary passion for dancing... he would come to the schoolroom or the verandah or the lawn, it did not matter where, and we would dance for any length of time to his own whistling... And on shipboard eventually.”
Success on these ships prepared Fisher for the prize appointment in the Royal Navy: command of the newest, most powerful vessel in the fleet, the battleship Inflexible. Fisher was only forty and still a relatively junior captain in January 1881 when the assignment came, but his reputation was shining and every officer he served under added to its luster. Old Shadwell, his China captain, was now an admiral and went around introducing Fisher to his fellow admirals as “my boy”—adding,96 in a stage whisper: “the best boy I ever had.” Fisher himself told a tongue-in-cheek story about how he was selected: “As each name was discussed97 by the Board of Admiralty it got ‘butted,’ that is to say, it would be remarked: ‘Yes, he’s a splendid officer and quite fit for it, but—’ and then some reason was adduced why he should not be selected (he had murdered his father, or had kissed the wrong girl!). Lord Northbrook, who was First Lord, got sick of these interminable discussions as to who should be captain of the Inflexible, so he unexpectedly said one morning: ‘Do any of you know a young captain called Fisher?’ And they all—having no notion of what was in Lord Northbrook’s mind, and I being well known to each of them—had no ‘buts’! So he got up and said: ‘Well, that settles it. I’ll appoint him captain of the Inflexible.’”
Inflexible was not only the prize appointment in the navy, she was also a prize anomaly, the last queen of the hybrids. Fisher described her as “a wonder...98 with the thickest armor, the biggest guns, the largest of everything, beyond any ship in the world,” but she was also the last battleship in the Royal Navy built to carry canvas. Inflexible was an 11,880-ton armored vessel carrying two masts, two smokestacks, two propellers, and twelve steam boilers. Her guns, four sixteen-inch muzzle-loaders each weighing eighty tons and mounted in two turrets amidships, were the largest ever installed in a British warship at that point (“A man could crawl99 up inside the bore of one of her guns,” noted Fisher). Their rate of fire was supposed to be one shell every two minutes, but they “took so long to load100 that they could be fired only once in five minutes, and for a long time after they had been fired the whole ship would be enveloped in a yellow fog while the projectile could be seen soaring away in the distance like a huge bird.” If, in battle, one of these shells were actually to hit another ship, that ship would surely sink, although most navy men reckoned the likelihood of hits from the occasional discharge of Inflexible’s guns as remote.
Inflexible was seven and a half years under construction and, Fisher noted with mixed amusement and exasperation, she contained “endless inventions,101 accumulated by cranks in the long years she took building. There were whistles in my cabin that yelled when the boiler was going to burst or the ship was not properly steered and so on.” When he came aboard, her complicated internal structure, a maze of compartments and tortuous passages, had thoroughly confused the crew, who sometimes “knew not what deck102 they were on or what compartment they were in, or whether they were walking forward or aft.” Fisher’s solution was to paint compartments and passages different colors, each with specific directional or locational meaning. Because there were no portholes, all drills and daily life inside this iron labyrinth would have been by the flickering light of candles—except that Inflexible was the first ship in the fleet103 to be equipped with electric lights (she was also the first British warship in which a sailor was fatally electrocuted).
The best measure of Inflexible’s hybrid uniqueness was that she possessed both sails and torpedo tubes; the latter, a pair submerged in her bow. Fisher lacked complete faith in the efficacy of these two tubes, so he carried on board two large steam launches, each also carrying a torpedo tube. When action impended, these launches were to be lowered over the side to bedevil the enemy. As for the sails, they were little used for motive power and Fisher held them in high contempt. Nevertheless, when he found his ship was ranked low in the Mediterranean Fleet because his crew could not shift topsails as quickly as others, he sent his men aloft to drill. Soon, his men could shift topsails faster than any ship in the Fleet, and the Admiral wrote home—Fisher reported
wryly—that Inflexible was regarded as “the best ship in the Fleet.”
In the spring, Fisher took his new ship to the Mediterranean, where Inflexible’s first assignment was to act as guard ship during Queen Victoria’s visit to Menton on the Riviera. The Lords of the Admiralty, proud of their new ship, seized the occasion to anchor Inflexible in the harbor at Villefranche and thus display the world’s most powerful warship both to their sovereign and to the French. Captain Fisher was invited ashore to dine with the Queen and her visiting grandson, Prince Henry of Prussia, the future Admiral of the Imperial German Navy. Fisher’s infectious enthusiasm charmed the reclusive widow and, when she left for England, she sent him a print of herself and a photograph of her daughter Princess Beatrice.
That summer of 1882 the British Navy fired its guns for the first time in a major action since the Crimean War a generation earlier. It was the first time Fisher had heard serious gunfire since China. Egypt, nominally a vassal state of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, was ruled by a local khedive. An Egyptian general, Ahmed Arabi (also known as Arabi Pasha), rebelled against the Khedive and his European advisors. To protect their citizens and commercial interests, Britain and France both dispatched warships. Thirteen vessels of the British Mediterranean Fleet, commanded by Sir Beauchamp Seymour (“The Swell of the Ocean”) steamed into Alexandria’s harbor and anchored. When a mob poured through the streets, killing, burning, and looting, and besieging the Khedive in his palace, hundreds of European refugees were brought out to the warships; seven hundred civilians crowded the deck of H.M.S. Monarch alone. Arabi’s soldiers began strengthening the harbor forts, whose guns were aimed at the fleet. Although reluctant to provoke more trouble, the Gladstone government eventually authorized Seymour to demand that this work be stopped. Shortly before this ultimatum expired on July 11, the French squadron weighed anchor and disappeared. All refugees aboard British warships were transferred to commercial vessels, which left the harbor. On July 12, work on the forts having continued, the Mediterranean Fleet went into action.
Seymour’s fleet of eight battleships accompanied by five gunboats was a hodgepodge collection, typical of the navy in that era. The battleships had each come from a different drawing board; each had its own design, machinery, and armament. Among them, they mounted ninety heavy guns—sixteen-inch, twelve-inch, nine-inch, eight-inch, seven-inch, and six-inch. All they had in common was masts and sails.
In the bright sunlight and gentle offshore breeze of early morning, the bombardment began, soon enshrouding masts and spars in smoke. Each captain was permitted to anchor or steam slowly back and forth while firing at the fort selected as his target. Aboard some vessels trained to fire from a rolling deck in the open sea, the calm waters were a problem; one captain assembled on deck all members of his crew not serving the guns and had them run back and forth from one side to the other to create a roll which would assist his gunners. Inflexible anchored outside the breakwater and began spasmodically belching sixteen-inch shells. A cloud hundreds of feet high formed over her masts. By five-thirty P.M., when the bombardment ceased, she had fired eighty-eight sixteen-inch projectiles. The fleet as a whole had fired three thousand shells—with a lack of success which disgusted Scott and other gunnery experts. Ten of forty-four modern Egyptian guns had been hit and silenced; several dozen of the older smoothbore Egyptian cannon no longer fired. Fifty percent of all British shells fired malfunctioned, either exploding prematurely or failing to explode at all. Damage to the British fleet was slight; Fisher’s Inflexible, hit by a ten-inch shell, was the most seriously hurt. Five British sailors died and forty-four were wounded; the Egyptian figures were 150 killed and four hundred wounded.
The bombardment achieved its purpose: Arabi’s soldiers withdrew from the forts and the city. A naval landing brigade of 150 sailors and 450 marines came ashore to protect the Khedive’s palace and form a defense perimeter around the town. Its commander: Captain Fisher of Inflexible, who two weeks earlier had written to Kitty, “You need not have104 the least worry about me as there is not the slightest prospect of my landing with the men.” Fisher’s arrival was the beginning of Britain’s involvement in Egyptian affairs, which lasted until after the Second World War.
Fisher established his headquarters in the harem chamber of the Khedive’s palace and defended the city until regular British troops arrived from Malta to relieve his landing force. During this period, Fisher, lacking cavalry for reconnaissance, came up with the idea of attaching iron plates to the sides of a locomotive and eight railway cars. On the cars, he mounted three Gatling guns and a naval cannon—thus creating the world’s first armored train. Manned by two hundred sailors, it sortied daily into the city’s outskirts, usually with Fisher in command. The sailors were excited by their new weapon and adapted quickly: when one, stationed as a lookout on a roof, was hit by a bullet, he reported faithfully in naval terms, “They’ve found the range, sir.”105 Correspondents and illustrators covering the fleet heard about Fisher’s train and hurried to observe. Their reports and sketches of the armored train and its inventor brought Captain John Fisher his first reputation with the general British public.
Fisher’s duty ashore left him with an unpleasant aftereffect: a severe case of dysentery. Despite eight pills of ipecacuanha and a dose of opium every four hours, “the sickness was simply indescribable,”106 he wrote to Kitty. He remained in his cabin aboard ship, anchored first at Alexandria, then at Port Said at the mouth of the Suez Canal. The disease worsened and then was complicated by malaria. Inflexible sailed for Malta, where although Fisher was offered home leave, he refused. He feared that if he left the ship, he would lose this prize command. Further, he could not afford to go on sick leave at half pay; he had only £50 in the bank and travelling home on a private steamer would have swallowed it all. Finally, Lord Northbrook intervened, declaring that “the Admiralty could build107 another Inflexible but not another Fisher,” and ordered Fisher invalided home. As he was being carried aboard at Malta, he overheard a doctor say, “He’ll never reach Gibraltar.”108 “Then and there,” Fisher said later, “I determined I would live.” In England, at home in Chelsea with his family, Fisher was unable to leave the house for months.
Fisher’s illness was the subject of much solicitous concern. One letter he treasured and promised to frame came from the entire ship’s company of H.M.S. Inflexible: “Sir... it is our whole wish109 that you may speedily recover and be amongst us again, who are so proud of serving under you.... Sir, trusting that you will overlook the liberty we have taken in sending this to you, We beg to remain, Your faithful and sympathizing ship’s company, INFLEXIBLES.” There were other letters from more exalted pens. The Prince and Princess of Wales wrote, through an equerry, to Mrs. Fisher, asking for information as to the progress of her husband’s illness. The Queen asked repeatedly for news of the irrepressible young captain who had come to dinner and charmed her on the Riviera, inviting him to come to visit her at Osborne House as soon as he felt better.
In January 1883, Jacky Fisher, who had entered the navy “penniless, friendless, and forlorn,” traveled to the Isle of Wight and for two weeks, joined the household of his sovereign. “I am all right,”110 he wrote to his wife, who had stayed home. “Two cups of tea and bread and butter, and a very comfortable sofa and a delightful sitting room... [next to] my bedroom, deliciously quiet, have all combined to rehabilitate me.” In March, Fisher’s former Commander-in-Chief, Sir Beauchamp Seymour, now elevated to the peerage as Lord Alcester, was invited to Osborne House and wrote to ask Fisher about dress and protocol. Briefing the Admiral, Fisher sketched a picture of his own visit. The prescribed dress for dinner, he said, was knee breeches and pumps, “but I was let off with trousers111 on account of being an invalid.... She [the Queen] talks to one a good deal more than I expected.... She is sometimes silent for awhile, preparing her next subject of conversation, and I believe the [best] plan is to remain silent also. They say ‘Your Majesty’ to her much more frequently than I w
as led to suppose. The Princess [Beatrice] sits next to her, and the most pleasant place is next to the Princess, as she is so very pleasant and helps on the conversation. The other folks at the table talked in a very low tone.... I would suggest your asking Ponsonby if you are to kiss the Queen’s hand on first seeing her. I ought to have done so, but they did not warn me about it, so when she put her hand out I was all adrift.... You are very much left to yourself during the day.... You had better take some matches with you in case you want a light in the night, as they don’t have them. A little oil lamp burns all day in all the rooms and passages.... Dinner is not till 9 o’clock... breakfast at 9:30 and lunch at 2 p.m.... The Queen is uncommon particular about medals, etc. being put on the right way.”
One night at dinner during this stay, when Fisher was seated far down the table from the Queen, an uncharacteristic burst of laughter from this quarter reached the ears of the august lady. She inquired as to its cause. Fisher spoke right up: he had been telling Lady Ely, he said, that there was enough flannel wrapped around his tummy to go around the room. The Queen laughed too. Thereafter, every year until her death, she invited Fisher to come to Osborne if he was stationed in England.
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