:m^. '^^■(^ mmsmr^^mm^ X^'^: :^?'::^ im 0^- m iVi!i!fK:'>^- e^ "t;"^ ^m ■i:;'c rc^s;^ A CHAT ABOUT THE NAVY "three cheers !' '-'^:-fc:^b. A CHAT ADULT <;; Tin: N A V Y IIY //'. /. CORDON LONDON : SIMPKIN, MAR-llALL, HAMILTON, KKNT, & CO., LTD. 1891. Illustrated and Printed BY DAY & SON {2j years Lithog7-aphers to the Queen), 21 A, Berners Street, London, W. ILLUSTRATIONS '^ 1 ^ I. Tlircc Cheers — "All toi;clhcr from Admiral to IJoy." 2. The Sii;nal. 3. The Painter. 4. Hand Signalling I^nmp. 5. Tol>acco. 6. Boatswain's Call. 7. Poris- mouth. 8. H.M.S. Royal Sovereign, First-class Battle- ship, 14 heavy guns, 24 quick- firing guns, 14,150 tons displacement, 13,000 horse power, 634 officers and men. 9. II.M. Indian Troopship Malabar, 3 guns, 6,211 tons displacement, 4,200 horse jxiwcr, 243 officers and men. 10. Broadside Ironclads with and without military masts. 11. Singlestick practice. 12. A Torpedo catcher. 13. II. M.S. Hannibal, Linc-of-battle .ship, 91 guns, 4,150 tons displacement, 820 men. 14. Tailoring 15. Shocmaking. 16. Turning; in- " Place one cllow in your own hammock, and the other in the next, then throw your l>ody up I" 17. Drafted — ^Jack and his belongings ; in the bag arc his kit and bedding, the clothing at the l>oltom, the l)cil at the top, the straw hat is tied to the mcnith of the bag, the Ikjx is iT- - ' 3 2()2-l82J) the ditty-box for odds and ends. i8. Revolver practice (Sul>Lieutenant). 19. Reefing topsails. 20. Masthead cleared for action ; the enemy in sight. 21. II. M.S. Hercules, Second-class Battle- ship ; 14 heavy guns, 17 quick-firing guns, 6 |1^^_J other.s,. 8,680 tons displacement, 8,500 horse ji! power, 683 officers and men. 22. Vocabulary 4. signalling (the men are wearing the now obsolete blue jacket). 23. First-class Batileships, "Ad- miral " class. The nearest is the Camperdown, 10 heavy guns, 19 quick-firing guns, 7 others, 10,600 tons displacement, 11,500 horse power, 526 officers and men. The other is the Rodney, 10 heavy guns, 14 quick-firing guns, lo others, 10,300 tons displacement, 11,500 horse power, 515 officers and men. 24. Holystoning deck. 25. Sword Bayonet exercise. 26. Captain Peel's Battery; Naval Brigade before Sebastopol. 27. H. M.S. Marlborough, First Rate Line-of-Battle Ship, 131 guns, 4,000 tons B.O.M., 1,100 men. 28. Slinging the monkey. 29. Cutlass Exercise. 30. H.M.S. Royal Arthur, First-class Cruiser, 13 heavy guns, 12 quick-firing guns, 7,700 tons dis- placement, 12,000 horse power, 500 officers and men. 31. Gun-vessel and Third-class Cruiser (of the " M " class). 32. Lieutenant Lucas, R.N., throwing the Russian Shell off the deck of the old Ilecla in the Baltic. 33. H.M.S. Vulcan. Torpedo Depot Ship, 8 quick-firing guns, 12 others, 6,620 tons displacement, 12,000 horse power, 300 officers and men. 34. Steam Tactics. 35. Making a Plum Duff (when raisins are used the duff is a " figgie"). 36. A Mess Dinner. 37. Serv- ing out cocoa. 38. Three-decker Pie (layer of meat and vegetables, then one of duff; over that two similar series, six layers in all, covered with a clolli and tied down in the mess kettle). 39. A Store Ship. 40. First-class Torpedo Boat riding in the Atlantic while taking water on board. 41. Chief Petty Officer. 42. Sir Provo W. P. Wallis, G.C.B., Admiral of the Fleet (Second Lieutenant of the Shannon in the action with the Chesapeake on the 1st of June, 1S13). 43. Admiral, Captain, and Midshipman. 44. Heaving the Log. 45. Getting out Torpedo Booms and Nets. 46. Royal Marine Artillery at Machine Gun Drill. 47. Royal Marine Light Infantry. 48. P. and O. S.S. \'ictoria, 6,268 tons register, 7,000 horse power. Royal Naval Reserveil Merchant Cruiser. 49. II. M.S. Empress of Imlia, First-class Battleship, 14 heavy guns, 24 (luick firing g:ms, 14,150 tons displacement, 13,000 horse power, 640 officers and men. 50. II. M.S. Howe, First-class Battleship, lo heavy guns, 19 quick-firing guns, 7 others, 10,300 tons dis- placement, 11,500 horse power, 515 officers and men. 51. H.M.S. Dreadnought, First-class Battleship, 4 heavy guns, 6- quick-firing guns, 15 others, 10,820 tons displacement, S,2iO horse power, 440 officers and men. 52. Boatswain's Mate (First-class Petty officer). 53. Heaving the lead. 54. The lead. 55. The Chief Admirals of the great war. 56. II. M.S. Hero, Second-class Battleship, 6 heavy guns, 12 quick-liring guns, 5 others, 6,200 tons displacement, 6,000 horse power, 335 officers and men. 57. H.M.S. Inconstant; one of the last of the sailing frigates on her trial cruise. 58. Hand-FKig Signalling. 59. The Carpenter and his crew. 60. Pulling — " Give way ; bend your backs ; up with her ! " 61. H.M.S. Victory, First Rate Line-of- Battleship, 104 guns, 2,164 tuns B.O.M., 850 men. ^SSSHHpW^ She is here shown as flagship at rortsmoulh with her proper spars, which are now replaced l)y those of a frigate. 62. Boat Exercise, Sailing. 63. H.M.S. Terror nipped in Fox's Channel during Back's Expedition in 1836. 64. Gunboats of the so-called "flat-iron" class. 65. H.M.S. Enterprise at noon in midwinter off Point Leopold, during Sir James Ross's expedition in 1849. 66. The Tobacco- nists. 67. H.M.S. Alert leaving Portsmouth on the Nares expedition of 1875. ^^- Naval Brigade in square with 5-barrel Nordcnfelt in the angle. 69. H.M.S. Bulldog at the bombard- ment of Bomarsund, August 15, 1854. Sir Charles Napier has the telescope under his arm. 70. A Battleship's Mast, fitted with military top, crow's nest, and semaphores. 71. Field-Gun Drill. 72. Musketry Exercise. 73. The Log Ship. 74. H.M.S. Victoria, First-class Battleship, 15 heavy guns, 21 quick-firing guns, 8 others, 10,470 tons displacement, 14,000 horse power, 588 officers and men (she is firing one of her Ill-ton Guns). 75. The Search Light. 76. Disabling Field- Gun. 77. Nelson's Monument, Trafalgar Square. 7/ie Ilhistrations are ly Henry Coish, E. T. Dolby, Sir Oswald Brier ly, K.W.S., William Sinipson, E. W. Cooke, R.A.^ Captai?i Smyth, R.N., Lietit. IK H. Browne, B.N., W. H. Overend, /. R. Wells, R. H, Neville Gumming^ and others. A CHAT ABOUT THE NAVY OUR Navy is the finest fighting force on earth — but there is not enough of it. When Trafalgar was fought the population of the empire was twice what that of London alone is now. Since then the people have increased thirty-fold ; and yet the Navy of 1805 had three times as many ships, and twice as many men, as our Navy in 1891. It is the Navy's pride that it gave us the world to choose from for our colonics, and made us what we are. But that existence, due to the Navy, is more than ever dependent on it. Our interests on the seas are vastly H.M.S. ROVAL SOVEREIGN— FIKST-CLASS DATTLESHU', greater than they were, and ever)' year they increase ; the development of our sea-borne trade lias exceeded anything known in the world's history ; and the growth of popula- tion in these islands has been such that we, in crowded Britain, can neither feed nor clothe ourselves with home-grown produce. If we lose the command of the seas, we must go half-clad, and starve. Expenditure on our Navy is really the premium we pay for insurance against a risk. There is no question here of mere glory or the bubble reputation ; it is a matter of plain bread and cheese. In a Royal Naval Exhibi- . ^ tion there is thus a living interest for us all, inasmuch as it is on the Navy, under the Good Providence of God, that our Food and Raiment, as well as our Wealth, Prosperity, and Peace, / X' depend. j^ In these days of peace, the seamen of our fleet are recruited ' ^"^ by voluntary enlist- 12 ment ; and the service being popular, and the demand being small in proportion to the popula- tion, there is no difficulty in finding recruits. In the past volun- tary enlistment was also in vogue, but it had to be supple- mented by compul- sion. In the Nelson days the taverns and street corners of the dockyard towns were gay with bills stating, for instance, that His Majesty's fast-sailing frigate londa, thirty-six guns, Captain Crodjack, had a few vacancies for smart men wishing to go to sea ; bounties, ^5 for Able Seamen; £1 los. for Ordinary Seamen; £1 ids. or Landmen — early application recommended for quartermasters and boatswain's mates. *'N.B. — Great advantages in His ^Majesty's service over mere privateer- ing !" And if the londa did not fill up her complement in this pleasant way, she had to trust to the press-gang and complete her crew with pickings from the crowd, or in -1 - U- r.'y, K M'.S . 14 cases of unpopu- lar captains, with all whom they could lay hands on. Nowadays our fleet is manned almost entirely from our naval training ships. The boys are mostly of the class of skilled mechanics, a large proportion being sons of warrant officers, and petty officers who have been through the work and know what the serviceis like from experience. Sailoring runs in families, even more than soldiering ; and in Portsmouth, Chatham and Devonport there are families who have sent five or six generations to the lower deck. The boys come from all parts of the Kingdom, the majority from the South Coast. Most of them are introduced by the Coast Guard who are always on the look-out for likely lads, the encouragement for doing so being a premium of ten shillings to the man for every acceptable boy he sends. The system works well ; the old sailor is jealous of his trade and careful in his choice ; he is not indifferent to the half-sovereign but he scorns the lubber ; he knows the ■sort of lad that has the making of a seaman in him, and he sends only samples that do credit to the recruiter. The best of the boys come from Circenwich Naval School direct, with no interval between leaving' school and beginning work in which to slip back into ignorance. The worst come from London and the great cities, where the notion still lingers that the Navy is the last refuge of the hopeless — whicli is not the case. Jack is not what he was, and he is in no way the Jack of our novels and caricatures. Officers and officials who know him best, and even the petty shopkeepers in the dockyard towns, are all agreed as to the improvement in his bearing and condition. The modern man-o'-war's- man docs not run away to sea ; he is not caught in a miscellaneous haul by the press-gang ; and he does not come from a workhouse or a gaol. A few hail from the charity training ships which occupy the place of pre- paratory schools. To many people all training ships are alike, but there are vital differences between them. Some arc industrial schools and reformatories to which the boys are sent by magistrate's order, some arc for honest boys not neces- sarily poor, some for the honest and very poor. No boy can enter the Navy who has been convicted before a magistrate, or detained in a reforma- tory or industrial school, either alloat or ashore. No matter where he may have been trained he must pass through the course in one of the Nava training ships. The Impregnable at Devonport is the headquarters of the training department. She is the last and largest of the old three-deckers ; once she was the Bulwark but it was as the Howe that she was launched at Pembroke in i860. At Devonport there is also the training ship Lion, and with her the Implacable ; at Portland is the Boscawen ; at Falmouth is the Ganges ; at Portsmouth is the St. Vincent. To one of these ships the boy must go, no matter where he comes from ; he can be received on board the various flag, drill, and guard-ships round the coast, but he is sent south to be trained at the earliest opportunity. The young sailor enters the service in his sixteenth or seventeenth year as a " second - class boy." He is educated and trained under picked officers for a year or so ; he becomes in time a " first-'Class boy;" and then he goes to sea and mixes with men. He must be sound in body and mind and able to read and write, and the antecedents of himself and his parents must l)car in- vestiyjation. He has to bring with him a registrar's certificate of birth and the written consent of his parents or guardians to his serving his country continuously for twelve years from the age of eighteen, and this consent has to Ixi certified by the clergyman of his parish or a resident householder of position ; and he must be prepared to be vaccinated or re-vaccinated as the case may be. When he come? on board the training ship he is mea- sured and weighed and medically examined, and he has to pass a test examination in reading and writing. If approved he is measured for his clothes ; and loose as these clothes may look they are in each case made to fit him. He is credited in the books with £^^ for his kit and £\ for his bedding, and against these the articles given are charged. At the end of six months his kit is increased ; when he passes as " first-class boy," it is again increased ; and it receives its final increase when he is kitted for sea. n 8 We miy as well run through his kit ; it will show us that a sailor^s outfit is not a simple one. A blue serge frock and jumper and two working jumpers, two pairs of trousers, a black silk handkerchief, two hat ribbons, — one plain, one with a name, — a serge cap, a blue cloth cap, a comforter, two flannels, two check shirts, two night shirts, a serge frock, two pairs of trousers for night wear, two pairs of socks, two towels, a type for marking his clothes, a knife and two lanyards, a pair of shoes, two bedcovers, a bed and blanket, two jerseys, a pair of scissors, a comb, clothes brush, scrubbing brush, duck bag, haversack, soap bag, two pocket handkerchiefs, a ditty box, as the sailor's desk is called, and a seamanship book. The chaplain gives him a prayer book, and he can have a bible if he asks for one. At the end of the six months he <^^ gets a pair of blue cloth trousers, a pair V^ j' /*P^^ of working trousers, and an extra working jumper, and both his hat ribbons are named, and both his caps are blue cloth. When he joins the battalion for drill ashore, he has a pair of half boots and a housewife with sundries for clothes-mend- ing. He has to pay for all this out of his £6 bounty and his pay of 6d. a day, but to help him, on going to sea, he has a further gratuity of £2 los. His first duty is to go over the mast- «9- school, the course being every morning for six weeks. During; the first week he is taught to look after his ham- mock and bag, to mark and wash his clothes, and use a needle. He then begins to spend his forenoons in gymnastics, and his afternoons in scripture, reading, writing, geography, and arithmetic running up eventually m some cases into trigonometry and conic sections. Four stages he has to pass, and when safe through the last he has a prize writing case and a certificate exempting him from any school in the Navy. When his gymnastic instruction is over he sj)ends his forenoon in seamanship, taught first from the model, then from the real thing. In the Lcimre Hour not so very long ago, the writer in describing the .St. Vincent spoke of this remarkably thorough course as follows : "Here is a model of the foremast of the St. V^incent, answering in every detail to the actual foremast that can be seen froin it. Mere is a model an( hor, answering to the real anchor at the bows ; and here is a model semaphore, answering to the real one on the poop. Here is a model brig, answering to the real brig now cruising ofif Southsea Castle. Here is a model lead and line ; and here is a model of every tackle used in the Govern- 'ment service. A monkey or dum- my topsail-yard is rigged for the novicetopractise on. The sail has the names of its parts painted on it so that there can be no excuse for ignorance ; and the boy is taught to lay out en the 20. yard, to loose and furl, pass an earing, reef and shake out reefs, and bend and unbend the sail and its gear. Then he joins his comrades in handling the spars that rise so proudly from the deck, and, with spar drill and sail drill is gradually smartened up to man-o'-war form. On the day of our visit spar drill is in progress, the rigging and decks are dotted with the lads of one of the divisions, Jl. M.M.b. nUKCtLb^-SiauM. UASS ..Mnl^i.i.. and as we come up the hatchway down come the royal yards Hke huge fishing-floats in mid-air. " The boy has to learn swimming, and concurrently, with seamanship, gunnery, the gunnery including cutlass drill and rifle and revolver practice ; and in time he drills on shore in the naval battalion, and when his course is terminating he takes to ball cartridge and working heavy guns. As tenders to the training ships there are a few smart little brigs like the Martin, Seaflower, Pilot, and Nautilus, in which the boy gets his first taste of sea life during a summer cruise in which he is kept in a painful state of alertness and receives the finishing tcuch to his school career. He leaves the training ship as a first-class boy, and is generally drafted to one of the vessels with a full outfit of spars and sails, ''floating gymnasia"' as they are facetiously called, generally forming part of a training squad- ron. At eighteen he be- comes an ordinary seaman and is paid fifteen pence a day. It was when he reached this grade 23 ^1 4- aj. TWO HKbT-CLASS UAT iLEbMll'S OV Till ALi.MlKAL that he used to have to provide himself with the tunic or "bluejacket'' from which he took his name. l>ut there are no blue jackets now, unless the more sensible monkey jacket used as a great coat can be called by the name. 24 -^^ A# Every seaman has a number, and the crew is halved, all the odd numbers — r'~-- " ^^- forming the ^3 ^' Starboard watch, all the evens the port f ^^ watch. The red stripe on the right shoulder shows the starboard watch ; on the left it shows the port watch. When the crew is large (and some ships will have six hundred men on board) the watches are further split into divisions, when two watch stripes show the second division of the watch. Yet another point of difference between the present and the past. The "calls," military and disciplinary, some forty-four in number, are now nearly all given by bugle, the boatswain's pipe, without which no nautical spectacle would be complete, being almost entirelyconfined to seaman- ship matters ; and the drum that used to " beat to quarters " so thril- lingly has come down in the world to a much humbler duty. TlIK NAVAL BRIGADE nEKOKE SKUAS! Thewarshipof to-dayisafloatingfort; the sailor, like the viking of old, is a sca-goini; soldier. When the old ships were cleared for action the partitions and wooden screens were hooked up and the decks cleared all along ; now-a- days when "quarters for action " is sounded the steel doors are closed, the ship cut up into as many sections as possible, and the crew enclosed in compartments to which the captain's commands come by voice tube. The crew is in fact a regiment with the lieutenants in in charge of the comi)anies, each with subordinate officers responsible for a certain part of the ship. The sailor breakfasts at half-past five in the morning. Soon afterwards he stows his hammock and learns the rig of the day. When the ship is not cruising alone, the ''^'\:"}i 27. H.M.S. MARI.BOROUGH— FIRST-RATE SCREW LIXn-OF-BATTI.E SHU' 27 Older as to how the men arc to dress comes from the senior commanding ofTicer, so that the whole fleet appear in the same uniform— hats, cai)s, covers or not, bkics or whites as the case may be. After the settHng of the raiment comes a spell of cleaning, the watches taking it turn about at the brass » \ 7T'^<^N^^r^^^^>^ and woodwork, scrubbing -^^sJ^X \^ "x^V ^28 the decks in man-o'-war fashion in gangs of forty or fifty at a lime all on their knees in rank and file, every movement of every man iden- tical, polishing up the floor with as much precision as if they were polishing olT the enemy. When the cleaning is over (and attacked in this orderly manner it is not likely to take long) the bugle sounds and the day's drill begins. Every man knows what that drill is to be, for every shij) has its routine board announcing the work of '"^'^^^'^S^ 28 the week ; and about the ship are other boards giving every man's station in the various du- ties that fall to him. On a fine morning the drill of a fleet at sea is always in seamanship, and wonderful are the things that are done with so many hands at work on spar and sail. As we have said elsewhere " the art of organisation by which one particular man does one particular thing at one particular moment, steadily and with perfect knowledge of what he is about, is nowhere better shown than in these drills, which are practised ship against ship so that each crew may have a chance of excelling the rest ; there is a deftness of grip, combined with a freedom from fumble which cannot be praised too much ; it is precision itself, nautical legerde- main with every twist and pass done without falter and in full view of the audience." ■%-i'y At eight o'clock the drill ends, the watch changes, and the men clean guns and arms and themselves ready for inspection ; and then every man is inspected. At nine o'clock come j^rayers, which last five minutes, the service being read by the captain or someone appointed by him when there is no chaplain on board. Every Sunday on board ship service is held, generally twice, compulsory in the morning, voluntary in the evening. And every ship has now its lending library, the libraries being in classes like the ships ; a first-class library for a first-class ship is "not to exceed three hundredweight," and so on, — a praise- worthy but delusive method of favouring light literature. But with regard to 33- these classes of ships. In the old days the Navy was divided into ships of the line, with — speaking generally — not less than two rows of ports, frigates with one row of ports, and corvettes, sloops, K 7 UK ^AIl.INi ^/ter Sir OnvaU lirUrly, K /»'. S. D 50 nought, and Inflexible. A few of the names, such as ImmortaHtd, Imperieuse, Magicienne, Mutine, and Pique, come from French prizes, owing either to the circumstances of their capture, or their sub- sequent services under the British flag, the names being perpetuated as a sort of glory roll, just as the army has its regimental " honours." One of the best examples of this is that of the Pique, a name deserving a chapter to itself in every naval history. It was at daybreak on the 4th of January, 1795, that Robert Faulknor found the Pique under the guns of a battery in Guadeloupe. Faulknor was one of the most brilliant of the young heroes of the old war, and his monument is in St. Paul's. He was an officer somewhat of the modern style, having been one of the first pupils trained at the then new Naval Academy at Portsmouth. When Jervis captured Martinique on St. Patrick's Day, 1794, Faulknor, in the Zebra brig, had run right in to the bastion in the thick of the showering grape, laid alongside the wall, leapt overboard at the head of his brig's company, and stormed and carried the position unaided, while the boats of the fleet were occupied else- where capturing the frigate Bienvenue. Jervis gave 5» Faulknor the command of the capiurcd frigate, but he re-named her. " Like you, sir," —runs the legend— he said to the young captain, "she is Undaunted!"— and the name survives in the Navy. Soon afterwards Faulknor exchanged into the Blanche, and in her cut out a French schooner from under a fort in Uesirade. Five days afterwards he found the Pique. Like the Blanche, she was a 32.gun frigate, carr>'ing really 38 guns, but, as it afterwards appeared, she had 279 men to the Blanche's 198. At daybreak the Pique was sighted, and the day was passed in luring her out in pursuit ; and when, at eight o'clock at night, she was seen astern, Faulknor turned to meet her. It was just after midnight when the vessels crossed, the French- man, to windward, giving broadside for broadside as he went by. About went the ships, and for half an hour they mancLU- vred in a seamanship duel. Then, as the Blanche was within musket shot, the Pique suddenly wore to rake; at the same momc the Blanche bore up ; and away in the ni^hi, amid the crash and Hash ^u of the guns, rolled the frigates side by side before the wind, their upper canvas lurid amid the smoke, their lower torn with shot and ruddy with the fire. For an hour the fight roared on, Faulknor gaining inch by inch along the Frenchman until he was far enough ahead to luff and rake his enemy ; but hardly had he altered his course, than the Pique's bowsprit was aboard him on the starboard quarter. The Pique's quarter-deck guns were run in amidships, and fired forward ; and the musketry from the tops rained on to the Blanche's deck, as overboard w^ent her mainmast and mizenmast, and confusedly, amid the wreck, attempt after attempt to board her was repulsed. Then the Pique began to drift away ; but that did not suit Faulknor, who had no intention of being satisfied with a mere repulse. He managed to catch into the rigging with his grappling irons : again the ships came together, and, while helping his men to lash the Pique's bowsprit to the capstan, Faulknor was killed, shot through the heart by a musket ball. Watkins, the first lieutenant, took the command. Soon the lashing of the bowsprit gave way, and again the ships parted, the guns going uncensingly the while- ' I ii.M.s. viLi. KV IN lOHisMoi. in iiAKiujLK. A/ttr E. W . Coi'ie, R.A. Down went the Frenchman's foremast, then his mizen- mast ; and the frigates fought on, each having only one mast. Then llie Blanche i)aid off before the wind, and 54 fell aboard the Pique ; and again did the Blanche's men lash her bowsprit to hold her, this time to the stump of the mainmast, and thus towed her along. But in that position nearly all the fire available came from the two quarter-deck six-pounders ; and in the thick of the fight, the carpenter's crew went to work to cut out new ports where they were wanted. But the frigate was strongly built, and time was precious, and a desperate step was taken ; the Blanche's guns were run in, and fired through her own stern-frame, and then, through the gap they had made, were fired on the enemy. Down went his main- mast ; sullenly gun after gun be- came silent amid the havoc ; and in the growing daylight the fire grew feebler. Again the vessels broke asunder, and slowly the Frenchman was reduced to fight only with his musketry, until at a quarter-past five, some of his crew ran out on the bowsprit and called for quarter; but as every boat in both ships had been ruined by shot, the second lieu- tenant of the Blanche, subsequently Sir David Milne, had to jump into the sea with ten seamen, and swim to take possession of the prize, ^\ hich afterwards had a \ / iM- V^ vt * •'' t \'s (. UANNKL. Jijf Captain Stnyth, R..\ Captain Rous, in 1835, to Portsmouth, 2,000 brilliant career as a 36-gun frigate. In time came another Pique to carry on the name, and she "^ "-^ T- was the ship brought home by from the Straits of Belleisle miles in 20 days, without a rudder, her keel gone, her main and mizen masts sprung, and the water leaking in at the rate of two feet an hour. And now we have her representative in the second-class cruiser building at Palmer's, on the Tyne, where there is also building the new Retribution, a name of even greater interest in the Navy. In 1797 the crew of the Hermione, then on the West India Station mutinied and murdered their officers, the only three to escape being a master's mate and two midshipmen. The mutineers took the ship into La Guayra and handed her over to the Spaniards who received her gratefully and manned her ; two years afterwards the Surprise found her at anchor in Puerto Cabello. The Surprise had been the Unite ; the Unite had been taken by the Revolutionnaire ; the Revolutionnaire had been taken by the Artois ; the Artois had been taken by the Romney ; that was the way our men got their ships ready-made in those days. Puerto Cabello had 65- M.M.S. EHTFKI-RISK OFF lOINT I.EUl'UM). I>v Luut. H'. II. BrCTH-nf, R.N. 200 guns in position, but Captain Hamil- ton resolved to have the Hermione at any risk, although she was moored head and stern between the two batteries. When the darkness of the 24th of October he with a hundred men and officers went off in boats and pulled for the harbour. They were discovered; and the Hermione' s launch, rowing guard in front of the ship, with a 24-pounder came to attack them ; but she was beaten off, and then the frigate's guns opened on them and then her musketry as the crew of the captain's boat came fighting their way up over her bow on to her forecastle. Every foot was fought along the port and starboard gangways ; on the quarter-deck there was a stubborn prolonged struggle for an hour and a half, ending in the driving of the Spaniards to the main deck; and there some continued the strife while the rest of the Surprise men cut the cables, set sail, and, man- ning the boats, began to tow the frigate out. The ALtKT LI.A\1N(. iLiKI^ MOl I II IIAKUOUR. 6o whole town was aroused ; the two hundred guns were pounding away on to the ship and boats ; the musketry- crackled along the shore ; the fight raged hand to hand on the main deck ; and regular as at practice went the oars as the harassed boats towed the ship. And not until she was out of gunshot and within range of the Surprise did the fight on the main deck cease by surrender. Thus was the Hermione restored to the Navy to be henceforth known as the Retribution. And so we might go on giving ship after ship with some good reason for the retention of the name until, with the Victory, the Lion, the Dreadnought, and the Triumph, we went back to the days of the Spanish Armada. When a prize was taken and added to the Navy, she was bought by the Government and the money was shared among the officers and crew of the ship that captured her. In these days a few vessels have been bought ready-made during a war-scare, but as a rule our 62 ships are built in the Royal dockyards and in private shipyards under special contract and survey. The Royal Corps of Naval Construc- tors, whose headquaiters are in Whitehall, at the Admiralty, superintend their building. Ships used for exploring expeditions and other purposes not necessarily of police or war are generally bought in and adapted. Captain Cook's ships were all bought in; the Sirius, in which Phillip began the colonisation of Australia, was a bought ship; and many of the Arctic ships have been bought and altered to suit the service. Of the Polar work of their Navy Britons may well be as proud as of their triumphs on the open sea. The wearisome search for the North-West Passage brought much honour, although we now know of seven North- West Passages and all of them useless owing to the caprices of the ice. To the North, on the tenth meridian, we have Phipps's farthest with the Racehorse and Carcass expedition of 1773, the latter ship having then as midshipman one Horatio Nelson, who shot the bear to bring the skin home to his father. On the twentieth meridian is Parry's farthest on the famous journey from the Hecla over the rotten pack, which slowly drifted southwards as the boats toiled to the north. In a hun- dred and twenty west we have Banks's Land, where. while Collinson in the companion ship Enterprise lay in the fierce grip of Mercy Bay, McClure was frozen up for years in the Investigator, from which Crcsswcll started with the sledi^-^e party to find the passage, and unlike Franklin, come home alive. And further east we have the stations of the Alert and Discovery under Nares and Stephenson, Markham and Parr's farthest with the sledges on the 12th of May, 1S76, being in 83^, 20', 26", nearly four hundred miles from the Pole. And besides these we have Back's work in the Terror, afterwards one of Franklin's ships, and also one of the ships with which James Ross went to the Antarctic. Sir James was the greatest and most fortunate of these Arctic heroes. In 1831 he reached the northern mag- netic pole ; in 1842 he found the southern magnetic pole ; and nine winters and sixteen navigable seasons did he pass in Polar waters. The Navy is not like the Army. The 1! prohibits a standing army in time of peace without the consent of Parliament, and hence £i^ every year a vote i^A.^^ necessary to sanction^^- the number The Navy manent force, and Par- of Ri-hts sancti of men. is a per- >**i 64 liament merely votes the sum required for the seamen's wages. The Navy as a permanent force with trained officers was instituted by Henry the Eighth, who founded the Navy Office and Trinity House, and Portsmouth, Deptford and Woolwich Dockyards. But the Tudor fleets were of a character of their own, and the modern system really dates from Cromwell, who divided the Navy into rates and classes, and, under Blake, raised it ^^' to pre-eminence on the ocean. Among all our naval heroes it may be doubted if we ever had a greater than Blake, the man whose corpse, in that cursed party spirit which is the shame of our race, was dragged from its grave to be thrown into a hole in St. Margaret's churchyard. Since his time what a list of services the Navy has to show I During the two centuries and a quarter the battle roll of actions large and small, on land and sea, in which the Navy has taken part, runs to nearly 1,500 I But of the greater actions the story is old and known to most, and for the minor fighting, ship to ship, a library would be required to detail it. We have all heard of Russell at Barfleur and La Hogue, of Rooke, "who Gibraltar took," and of Vernon and his capture of Portobello, the Vernon 65 of the grop^ram breeches, from which " old ^^rogram " as a nickname, and "grog" for the watered spirit he introduced. We have heard of Anson, his voyage round the world, and his victory oflf Finisterre ; of thoughtful IJoscawen, who crushed De la Clue ; of Hawke, who "did bang Mounscer Conflang" in a raging tcmj)cst on a lee shore ; of Rodney, who saved us off Dominica, when so gallantly he broke the line and began a new era in naval tactics. In story and picture wc are familiar with I^lack Dick Howe's "glorious first of June," off Ushant, and familiar to our ears is the name of handsome Hridport, who helped him there, and afterwards on his own account had a June engagement ofT L'Orient. We have all heard of Duncan, whose fire saved him from the severe Winter at Camperdown ; and of St. Vincent, who was with Wolfe at Quebec, and lived to win the great victory of Valentine's Day, and become the most efficient of our naval administrators. Of Exmouth, the Penzance boy who won the first frigate action of the long war by capturing the Cl(?opatre in 55 minutes, who fought the Droits de I'Homme in the storm, and lived to bombard Algiers nineteen years afterwards, the tale has often been told ; and of Collingwood and Nelson 'V^ /r\ the stor)' will never die. - -«;^IIl2^^"^ \\ Let those who would know what -^I^^^I^c*^ jr- our sailors do go first to the panorama 73. ^ ^ E 66 of Trafalg-ar, and see what a sea fight used to mean. Then let them go to the Victory, and see her in her every-day trim along one side, and her guns cleared for action along the other. Look around at the heavy timbers and the wide space made wider by the beams so close overhead that you instinctively stoop to 74. H.M.S. VICTORIA FIRING ONE OF HER III-TG.\ OL No. 67 avoid thcni ; fancy yourselves among the groups of eight that bent over the guns on that warm October afternoon, at Trafalgar ; people the deck in imagination as it was peopled then ; think of the tumult going on overhead and around ; hear the roar of the 75. cannonade and the crash of des- truction as the iron hail tears in among your comrades, and ask yourselves if your hearts would beat as bravely for your country and your race as did those of the nicn who stood where you arc standing when the old ship did her duty. Then go to the picture galleries, and see what the men looked like who made Britain what she is ; see what the ships looked like, and then go to the models and see how they were built, and how they have changed in build ; and trust to the models rather than the i)ictures, for the presentments of all pre-Cromwell ships produced by monks, needlewomen, die sinkers, and artists in general, are simply impossible. And as the ships have changed so have the guns. Great has been the change since the days of Trafalgar ; the discharge from one of our {present guns being etiual to that of a whole broadside of the Victory. Our present guns are forty times the weight of those which Nelson L2 68 handled, more than double the calibre, and five times the length, and they have twelve times the range, and take one hundred and twenty times as much powder. The guns with which Napier bombarded Bomarsund were an advance on those used in the French war, and the Lancastcrs of Peel's battery before Sebastopol were even more advanced ; but vast is the difference between them and our present Armstrongs. And the guns take as long to make as the ship to build. For a iio-tonner fifteen months are required working night and day. And what a tremendous projectile it hurls ! It weighs over i6 cwt. and requires a powder charge of 960 lb. which of itself is 9 feet long. Guns are now compared with regard to their " energy," and the energy of a iio-tonner is 55,253 foot-tons, or in other words it has a range of about fourteen miles, and could shoot right over London and bombard Hampstead from Woolwich Common. And one of the projectiles at a trial has been fired through a mass of shielding consisting of a 20-inch steelplate, 8 inches of iron, 20 feet of oak balks, 5 feet of graniie, 1 1 feet of concrete, finally stopping 3 feet deep 69 in a mass of brie kwork. But the i lo-tonncr, or to speak more correctly llic iii-tonner, is ko'"K out of fashion in favour of llie handier 67-tonner, which has the great advantage on the score of economy in using up /loo less at every shot. The projectile has of course increased with the gun. There may not be much to choose between the bomb which Lucas picked up off the Hecla's deck and threw overboard into the Baltic, and the shell which Harding popped into the tub of water at the bombardment of Alexandria ; but the shells for our present naval guns are very difierent to these in size and destructive power. And in this matter of weapons we can- not be over-prci)arcd. The best of work cannot be done with bad tools, and good tools take time to make. The Maid of Orleans drove the English out of France with the aid of the newly invented cast iron cannon shot of Bureau ; our sailors! won victory after victory on the seas with the aid of the newly invented carronade. The carronade of these days is the (juick- firing gun in which the use of a metal ^^. ^ 70 cartridg-c case containing a priming tube saves the time spent not only in sponging out the powder chamber after each round, but in extracting and inserting the primer. A 6-inch quick-firing gun will throw ico-lb. projectiles at the rate of 6 a minute, a 3-inch gun will throw a 12-lb. projectile every 3 seconds, and the intermediate sizes will throw intermediate weights at intermediate rates. There are over 400 of these guns in the Navy at present, originally devised as a defence against torpedo attacks and now seen to be of immense value in other ways. Smaller than these are the machine guns — but this chat has lasted long enough ; we need not venture on a course of gunnery and torpedo, and we have lost sight of the men with whom we had intended to keep throughout. And thereby we are reminded of what we were told when we looked at the personal ledgers on the Excellent. "Do you ever lose sight of a good man?" "Lose sight of a man ? No, sir ! Tell us of a place vacant, and we know the man for it. We know where he ought to be this very day, and when he will be within hail. We have only to turn to his page in one of those books, and we can tell you his present latitude and longitude I AD\EKTlSEMBiNTS. THE LITTLE ONE'S OWN COLOURED PICTURE PAPER EDITED BY MRS. ELIZABETH DAY. Among the Distingiiishcd Sjtbscrihers ivill he found \W Princess Louise, Marchioness of Lorne. (H.R.H. subscribes for the benefit of two of the Children's Hospitals). The Right Hon. the COUNTESS OF ABERDEEN, 8 Copies. 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It is printed on the best pa/er, and attractively bo t/nd, price los. 6d. Large paper copies, price 21 s. ; only forty copies printed. Edition de Luxe.—.-/ limited number (300) of large paper copies handsomely ioiind and gilt edges, £,2 2s. each ; only ten copies remaining. NOW READY, size and shape of a horseshoe, paper sides, Is.; post-free, Is. 2d. BITS ABOUT HORSES (Quotational and Equitationalj FOR EVERY DAY. SELECTED AND ILLUSTRATED BY 8. TURNER. The tjuotalions are from ihe earliest to llie present time — from Huiiier, Xenophon, Virgil, Chaucer, Spenser, Cervantes, Shakspcare, Hen Jonson, Milton, Pope, Hudibra'^, Burns, InKoldsby, Byron, Scott, Coleridge, M.-icaulay, Longfellow, Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, Ruskin, elc, etc., while the 140 Illustrations depict in the most spirited and masterly manner all sorts, conditions, and circumstances of K- family to whom the glorious annals of the Services are matters of interest and pride. The whole of the icg Illuminated Illustrations are so arranged tliat they may l>e framed and seen at one view, and, as they are attractively Chromo- Lilhographed, they make an imposing and deeply interesting addition to the decorations of any house. .li/io/if/ the Siibscrihet's appear — Her Most dracious Majesty The Qlkkn, for Royal Library, Windsor Castle. ' Field-Marshal H.R.H. The Prince ok Wales, K.G., K.T., K V G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.C.M.G., P.C, &c., &c., for Sandringham Library. Vice-Admiral H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh, K.(;, K T.. K.I' G.C.S.I., G.C.M.G., P.C, &c., &c. Major-General H.R.H. The Di ke ok Connaught and Stkathkarne. K.G., K.T., K.P., C.B., G.C.M.G.. G.C.S.I.. &c., &c. Field-Marshal H.R.H. The Dike ok CAMiiKioch, K.G . K.T., K P. G.C.B., G.C.H.. (l.C.M.G., G.C.S.I., P.C, D.CL., &c., &c.', Commander-in-Chief. General H.R.H. Pki.nce Christian. 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