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THE RED-LETTER DAY OF NELSON’S CALENDAR. HOW THE DREADNOUGHT LED THE ATTACK ON THE 21st OF OCTOBER, 1757

“Edinburgh.”

“Augusta.”

“Dreadnought.”

Painted by Swaine. Engraved and Published in 1760.

It was the direct outcome of party politics and short sighted naval retrenchments in time of peace, pandering to the clamour of ministerial supporters in the House of Commons. The printed Debates and Journals of the House between 1773 and 1781 are extant, as are also the summaries of the Gentleman’s Magazine, for those who care to learn what passed.

Out-matched and out-classed at every point, the British fleet found itself held in check all the world over. Colony after colony was wrested from us, or had to be let go, while our squadrons in distant seas had not strength enough to do better than fight drawn battles.[2] Gibraltar, closely beset by sea and land, was still holding out, but no man dared prophesy what news of the great fortress might not arrive next. Minorca, England’s other Mediterranean possession, had to surrender. The enemy were masters of the island, after driving the garrison into their last defences at St. Philip’s Castle. Nearer home, Ireland, in the enjoyment of Home Rule, was using the hour of Great Britain’s difficulty as her opportunity for demanding practical independence, with eighty thousand Irish volunteers under arms to back up the threats of the Dublin Parliament.

The Channel Fleet, though reinforced with every ship it was possible to find crews for, held the Channel practically on sufferance. Once it had to retreat before the enemy and seek refuge at Spithead. On another occasion the enemy were on the point of attacking it in Torbay with such preponderance of force that overwhelming disaster must have befallen it. Fortunately for England the French and Spanish admirals disagreed at the last moment and turned back.

Hanging in a frame on the walls of the Musée de Marine at the Louvre the English visitor to Paris to-day may see a draft original “State,” giving the official details of the divisions and brigades and the ships to escort them, of one of the French armies which was to be thrown across into England. It was no empty menace, and for three years the beacons along our south and east coasts had to be watched nightly; while camps of soldiers, horse and foot and artillery—the few regulars that had not been sent off to America—with all the militia regiments in the kingdom, extended all the way round, at points, from Caithness to Cornwall. To safeguard London there were camps of from eight to ten battalions each, mostly militia, at Coxheath, near Maidstone, at Dartford, at Warley, at Danbury in Essex, and at Tiptree Heath. To secure the colliery shipping of the Tyne two militia battalions were under canvas near Gateshead. A camp at Dunbar and Haddington watched over Edinburgh. The West Country was guarded by a big camp of fifteen militia battalions at Roborough, near Plymouth, with an outlying camp on Buckland Down, near Tavistock. To prevent the enemy making use of Torbay, Berry Head was fortified, the ruins of the old Roman camp of Vespasian’s legionaries there being utilized to build two twenty-four pounder batteries overlooking the passage into the bay. Every town almost throughout England had its “Armed Association” or “Fencibles,” volunteers, the men of which, by special permission from the Archbishop of Canterbury, drilled after church time every Sunday.

The effect on the oversea commerce of the country, penalized by excessive insurance rates, was calamitous. From 25 to 30 per cent premium was paid at Lloyds on cargoes from Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow to New York (still in British hands); and 20 per cent to the West Indies. As to the reality of the risk. On one occasion the enemy captured an Indiaman fleet bodily off Madeira, only eight vessels out of sixty-three escaping, with a loss to Great Britain of a million and a half sterling, including £300,000 in specie. We have, indeed, at this moment a daily reminder of the disaster. One of the unfortunate underwriters was a Mr. John Walter. His whole fortune swept away, he took to journalism, and the Times newspaper was the result. Home waters were hardly more secure. Rather than pay the excessive extra premium demanded for the voyage up Channel, London merchants had their goods unladen at Bristol, and carried in light flat-bottomed craft called “runners,” built specially for the traffic, up the Severn to Gloucester, thence to be carted across to Lechlade for conveyance to their destination by barge down the Thames. At the same time the North Sea packets from Edinburgh (Grangemouth) to London refused all passengers who would not undertake to assist in the defence of the vessel in emergency. Printed notices were pasted up at the wharves announcing that no Quakers would be carried.

To such a pass had the loss of her supremacy at sea reduced Great Britain in the closing year of our fourth Dreadnought’s career.

Our fifth Dreadnought fought at Trafalgar. She was a 98-gun ship, one of the same set as the famous “fighting” Téméraire. The newspapers of the day made a good deal of her launch, which took place at Portsmouth Dockyard, on Saturday, the 13th of June, 1801. Here is an extract from one account:—

“At about twelve o’clock this fine ship, which has been thirteen years upon the stocks, was launched from the dockyard with all the naval splendour that could possibly be given to aid the grandeur and interest of the spectacle. She was decorated with an Ensign, Jack, Union, and the Imperial Standard, and had the marine band playing the distinguished martial pieces of ‘God save the King,’ ‘Rule Britannia,’ etc. etc. A prodigious concourse of persons, to the amount, as is supposed, of at least 10,000, assembled, and were highly delighted by the magnificence of the ship and the beautiful manner in which she entered the watery element. But what afforded great satisfaction was, that, in the passage of this immense fabric from the stocks, not a single accident happened. She was christened by Commissioner Sir Charles Saxton, who, as usual, broke a bottle of wine over her stem. Her complement of guns is to be 98, and she has the following significant emblem at her head; viz.—a lion couchant on a scroll containing the imperial arms as emblazoned on the Standard. This is remarkably well timed and adapted to her as being the first man-of-war launched since the Union of the British Isles.”

WHEN GEORGE THE THIRD WAS KING. OFFICERS AT AFTERNOON TEA ASHORE.

Thomas Rowlandson. 1786.

MANNING THE FLEET IN 1779. A WARM CORNER FOR THE PRESS GANG.

James Gillray. Oct. 15, 1779.

For twelve months before Trafalgar, the Dreadnought was Collingwood’s flagship in the Channel Fleet. Collingwood passed most of the time cruising on blockade duty in the Bay of Biscay, where he used to spend his nights pacing on deck to and fro restlessly, expecting the enemy at any moment, and snatching intervals of sleep lying down on a gun-carriage on the quarter-deck. Collingwood only changed from her into the bigger Royal Sovereign ten days before the battle. Under the eye of the former captain of our first Excellent man-of-war, the Dreadnought’s men had been trained to fire three broadsides in one minute and a half—a gunnery record for that day.

At Trafalgar the Dreadnought fought as one of the ships in Collingwood’s line, and did the best with what opportunity came her way.

“This quiet old Dreadnought” wrote Dickens of his visit to the ship in her last years, “whose fighting days are all over—sans guns, sans shot, sans shells, sans everything—did fight at Trafalgar under Captain Conn—did figure as one of the hindmost ships in the column which Collingwood led—went into action about two in the afternoon, and captured the San Juan in fifteen minutes.”

While fighting the San Juan—the San Juan Nepomuceno, a Spanish seventy-four—the Dreadnought had to keep off two other Spaniards and a Frenchman at the same time; Admiral Gravina’s flagship, the Principe de Asturias, of 112 guns, and the San Justo and Indomptable, two seventy-fours. The San Juan in the end proved an easy prize, for she had been already severely mauled by some of Collingwood’s leading ships. On being run alongside of she gave in quickly. Without staying to take possession, the Dreadnought pushed on to close with the big Principe de Asturias, and gave her several broadsides, one shot from which mortally wounded Admiral Gravina. The Spanish three-decker, however, managed to disengage, and made off, to lead the escaping ships in their flight for Cadiz. Thus the Dreadnought was baulked of her big prize.

It was the Trafalgar Dreadnought that gave the name to that great international institution, the Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital, at Greenwich. This, of course, was long after Trafalgar, for the “wooden whopper of the Thames,” as Dickens called the old three-decker in her old age, did not make her appearance off Greenwich until a quarter of a century later. The fine old veteran of “Eighteen Hundred and War Time,” lasted until 1857, and to the end they preserved on board as the special relic of interest, “a piece of glass from a cabin skylight scrawled over, with somebody’s diamond ring, with the names of those officers who were in her at Trafalgar.” Another old three-decker replaced the Trafalgar ship until 1870, when the institution was removed on shore. At Chatham to-day, in the dockyard museum, visitors may see the Dreadnought’s bell which was on board the old ship during the battle, and was removed from her when the Dreadnought was broken up. Yet another memento of the Trafalgar Dreadnought exists in the Eton eight-oar Dreadnought, one of the “Lower Boats,” and so-called originally, together with the boat that bears the name Victory, in honour of Nelson and Trafalgar.

Our sixth Dreadnought is a still existing ironclad turret-ship, mounting four 38-ton muzzle loaders, launched in 1875. She is a ship of 10,820 tons, and cost to complete for sea £619,739. She served for ten years—from 1884 to 1894—in the Mediterranean, and after that as a coast-guard ship in Bantry Bay. Paid off finally in 1905, the Dreadnought now lies at her last moorings in the Kyles of Bute, awaiting the final day of all for her naval career, and the auctioneer’s hammer.

To conclude with a flying glance at our mighty battleship, the Dreadnought of to-day, the seventh bearer of the name until now, and as all the world knows by far the most powerful man-of-war that has ever sailed the seas. She is the biggest and the heaviest and the fastest and the hardest-hitting vessel that any navy as yet has seen afloat. And more than that. The Dreadnought has been so built as to be practically unsinkable by mine or torpedo; while at the same time her tremendous battery of ten 12-in. guns—huge cannon, each forty-five feet long—makes her absolutely irresistible in battle against all comers; a match for any two—probably any three—of the biggest battleships in foreign navies afloat at the present hour.

These are some of the “points”—some of the leading features—of this grim mastodonte de mer of ours, His Majesty’s battleship, the Dreadnought. With her coal, ammunition, and sea stores on board, the Dreadnought weighs—or displaces in equivalent bulk of sea water, according to the present-day method of reckoning the size of men-of-war—17,800 tons.

Put the Dreadnought bodily inside St. Paul’s and she would fill the whole nave and chancel of the Cathedral from reredos to the Western doors. Her length would take up the whole of one side of Trafalgar Square. Her width would exactly fill Northumberland Avenue, leaving only some half-dozen inches between the house fronts on either side and the outside of the hull. Two Victorys and a frigate of Nelson’s day, fully manned and rigged, could be packed away within the Dreadnought’s hull.

[Our Dreadnought of to-day: deck-plan to scale; showing the disposition of the 12-in. 58-ton turret-guns and their arcs of training. (Bows to the right.)][3]

Measured from end to end, from bows to stern, the ship’s hull extends 490 feet. From forecastle to keel, measuring vertically, is a matter of some 60 feet down, equivalent to about the normal height of a church tower.

What, however, above everything else, specially distinguishes the Dreadnought from all other warships afloat, is her terrific battery. Hitherto four 12-inch guns have formed the standard main armament for all battleships. The Dreadnought carries ten 12-inch guns of a new and more powerful type than any heretofore in existence. They are mounted in pairs in “redoubts,” armoured with Krupp steel eleven inches thick, and are so grouped on board that when fighting broadside-on with an enemy, eight of the ten guns will bear on the enemy and be in action throughout. In chase, or fighting end-on, six of the guns are available at all times. The firing charge per gun of “modified” cordite weighs by itself 2 cwt.—the weight of a sack of coals on a street coal-cart. In the hour of battle each discharge from the Dreadnought’s broadside will hurl into the enemy three tons of “metal”—bursting shells—each shell being from three to four feet long, and weighing singly 7½ cwt. With each shot also, bang goes £80, the cost of the cartridge and its projectile. Twelve thousand yards will be the Dreadnought’s chosen range for engaging—six miles—about as far as clear vision is possible above the horizon.

[Curve of flight, or trajectory, of 850 lb. projectile from a Dreadnought 12-in. turret-gun fired with full service charge.]

[The 12-in. gun is about the same weight as an ordinary railway passenger train engine.]

“Mark X” is the official style for the Dreadnought class of 12-inch gun. It is the most powerful piece of ordnance in the world. It weighs upwards of fifty-eight tons, about the weight of a larger “tank” railway engine of the kind that brings the suburban bread-winner up to London every morning. Its muzzle velocity—the speed at which the shot flashes forth from the gun—is 2900 feet (966⅔ yards, or well over half a mile) in a second. The force with which the shot starts off is enough to send it through a solid slab of wrought iron set close up in front of the muzzle of the gun 4¼ feet thick. When fired with full charges, each gun develops a force able to lift the Dreadnought herself bodily nearly a yard up, exerting a force equivalent to 47,697 “foot-tons,” in gunnery language. The entire broadside of eight 12-inch guns, fired simultaneously, as at the gun trial off the Isle of Wight, develops a force sufficient to heave the huge vessel herself, 21 feet up—nearly out of the water, in fact.

[Extreme range of the Dreadnought’s turret-guns:—Fired from in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral.]

As an instance of the tremendous range of the Dreadnought’s guns: mounted on one of the Dover forts, they could easily drop shells on the deck of a Channel packet in the act of leaving Calais harbour. Imagine one of them mounted in front of St. Paul’s and firing with full charges in any direction. Its shells would burst over Slough in one direction and over Gravesend in the other. Hertford, St. Albans, Chertsey, Sevenoaks, would all be within range. Twenty-five miles is the extreme estimated range of a shot fired with a full service charge, and the trajectory of the projectile would, at its culminating point, attain a height in the air of nearly six miles, twice the height of Mont Blanc.

They are “wire guns,” as the term goes, constructed in each case by winding coil on coil of steel ribbon or “tape” (a quarter of an inch wide and ·06 of an inch thick), round and round on an inner steel tube, the barrel of the piece; just as the string is wound round the handle of a cricket bat. The tape or “wire” is then covered by outer “jackets,” or tubes of steel. Upwards of 228,800 yards of wire—a length of 130 miles—weighing some 15 tons, are required for each of the Dreadnought’s 12-inch guns, and it takes from three to four weeks to wind on the wire. The rifling of the barrel comprises forty-eight grooves, varying in depth from ·08 of an inch at the muzzle to ·1 at the breech. Each of the Dreadnought’s guns, separately, employs in its manufacture from first to last upwards of five hundred men in various capacities, and costs, as turned out ready to send on board, but without sighting and other vital appliances, between £10,000 and £11,000.

The Dreadnought carries eleven inches of Krupp steel armour on her sides, turrets, and conning tower, and rather thinner armour at the bows and stern. Her speed of twenty-one knots makes her a full two knots faster than any existing battleship. She is the first battleship in any navy to be propelled by the Parsons turbine, to which her speed is due. Lastly, the cost of the Dreadnought is officially stated at £1,797,497.

Exceptional in themselves, and of exceptional historic interest as well, are the honours that have fallen to the Dreadnought’s lot within the few months that our great naval masterpiece has been in existence.

At the outset the Dreadnought had the good fortune to be named and sent afloat by His Majesty King Edward personally. That in itself was an exceptional honour, and one that has fallen to the lot of very few ships of the Royal Navy—to be named and sent afloat by the reigning sovereign. There have been just six instances in all, from the earliest times to the present day. Queen Victoria launched four men-of-war during her long reign; but no King of England ever launched a ship in the four hundred years between King Edward and Henry the Eighth: King Edward with the Dreadnought and Henry the Eighth with the Great Harry are the two historic instances. Many of our sovereigns, of course—practically all of them: Edward the Sixth, Queen Elizabeth, the Stuart kings, Cromwell also, George the Third, and William the Fourth—attended in state on various occasions to witness the launch of some notable man-of-war, but they were present only as spectators, and took no part in the actual proceedings. Charles the First was to have personally named the famous Sovereign of the Seas, with the same ceremonial used at the launch of our first Dreadnought, and rode down with his Court to Woolwich to do so; but they could not get the ship out of dock, and the King rode back to Whitehall disappointed, deputing the Lord High Admiral to name the ship when she did get clear—not till between eight and nine in the evening. Charles the Second, in like manner, was to have personally named our first Britannia, but His Majesty was taken ill on the day before. Again too, as it also happened, there was a hitch at the launch. The Britannia stuck fast for twelve hours, and then went off at midnight to the flare of torches and cressets, after which a courier was hurried off at gallop to Whitehall, to acquaint the King, “lest certain base reports (i.e. that the Britannia had fallen over in dock) may have reached your Majesty.”

Yet another exceptional honour that befel the Dreadnought was after the great review of the Home Fleet off Cowes, on the first Monday of August this year, when King Edward, with Queen Alexandra, the Prince of Wales, and Prince Edward of Wales, with Sir John Fisher and members of the Royal suite, went out on board the Dreadnought to beyond Spithead to witness target-practice with the Dreadnought’s turret-guns; the memorable occasion on which, at 2640 yards’ range, the four 12-in. guns that fired, scored within two and a half minutes nine bull’s-eyes and two “outers” out of twelve rounds discharged. Never to be forgotten was the scene as the Dreadnought passed down the double lines of the Home Fleet in the brilliant sunshine; the ships all dressed with flags, and with decks manned, and cheering, and firing salutes—the giant ship herself flying the Royal Standard at the masthead and at either yard-arm the Union Flag, symbol of His Majesty’s rank as Admiral of the Fleet, and the Admiralty Anchor Flag, a combination not seen on board a British man-of-war of the fighting-line, even in those historic waters, for over a century—not, indeed, since that summer’s morning of 1794, when the three flags flew together at the mastheads of the famous Queen Charlotte, denoting King George the Third’s presence on board, with his Queen, on his visit to present a diamond-hilted sword of honour to Lord Howe, then just arrived with the prizes taken on the Glorious First of June. That also was the last occasion, until the other day, on which a King and Queen of England were together on board a British man-of-war at sea.

The guns fired before the King and Queen were those in the two after-turrets, and the targets used were the usual service ones, 16 ft. by 20 ft., with a central bull’s-eye 14 ft. square. The range was about a mile and a half, and six rounds were fired from each turret. Of the three shots placed outside the bull’s-eye, two went through the target, whilst the third, which missed, cut away the rope fastening the canvas of the target to the framework. Two of the shots in the bull’s-eye went through the very centre, through a small circle, about thirty inches in diameter, marked in the middle of the target.

We will conclude this outline of our Dreadnoughts’ story with a brief tabular statement of certain points in detail of comparison and contrast between the Dreadnought of to-day and the historic Victory.

THE DREADNOUGHT AND VICTORY COMPARED

	DREADNOUGHT.	VICTORY.
Time Building	16 months	Five years ten months
Total Cost	£1,797,497	£89,000
Displacement	17,900 tons	3400 tons.
Total Weight Broadside	6800 lb.	1160 lb.
Extreme Range of Guns	25 miles	3 miles.
Penetration of armour at six miles	9 in. Krupp Steel
Penetration at all distances		Nil.
Heaviest Gun	12 inch	6 inch.
Weight of Charge	265 lb. (M.D. cordite).	10½ lb. (gunpowder).
Time to make Gun	12 to 15 months	Four guns a week.
Cost per Gun	£11,000	£57. 15s.
Average Weight per Gun	58 tons	56 cwt.
Complement	780 men	850 men.
Length	490 ft.	226 ft. 6 in.
Breadth	82 ft.	52 ft.
Mean Load Draught	26 ft. 6 in.	25 ft.
Number of Guns	37	104
Speed	21½ knots	10 knots.