Royal Navy 74. HMS Bellona and HMS Courageux arriving at Spithead by Geoff Hunt. Courageux was a heavy 74-gun ship of the line of the French Navy, launched in 1753. She was captured by the Royal Navy in 1761 and taken into service as HMS Courageux. HMS Bellona was a 74-gun Bellona-class third-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy. Designed by Sir Thomas Slade, she was a prototype for the iconic 74-gun ships of the latter part of the 18th century.
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The French by this time were also applying some scientific precision and method to their warship design. Most eighteenth-century Royal Navy design improvements resulted from the “taking of the lines” of captured French and Spanish warships. Still, the numbers of first-class warships engaged in naval combat diminished drastically, from the hundreds involved in the great Punic Wars, to Michiel de Ruyter’s 91 Dutch warships against 81 British in 1666, to Nelson’s 27 against 33 enemy at Trafalgar 140 years later.
The situation hardly improved, even with the coming of the ironclad steam warship. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the limited size of British dry docks also restricted dimensions and tonnage. The British have traditionally and irritably replied that the French and the Spanish, and later the Italians, built better ships than they could fight. The Royal Navy’s near-perfect record of naval victories can be credited to its better training, seamanship, and leadership. When the British were later matched against a naval enemy that ordered these personnel matters considerably better than the French and the Spanish, the outcomes were not always so completely favorable to the Royal Navy. The British learned the mettle of American seamen in the most sanguinary ship-to-ship clash of the age of fighting sail: John Paul Jones’s cobbled-up merchantman Bon Homme Richard versus HMS Serapis (1779). The British dismissed this and the U. S. frigate victories of the War of 1812, as well as the less remembered American fresh-water victories on Lake Erie and Lake Champlain, as extremely rare defeats of an entire Royal Navy fleet, not involving first-class ships-of-the-line. British naval battle superiority lay in its rapid and well-aimed gunnery; a Royal Navy 74 (smaller ship-of-the-line) could discharge its broadside twice as quickly and effectively as its French counterpart. Further, the less-well-trained French aimed high, for the British masts and rigging, more often than not hitting air and sky. British gun crews aimed straight for the hull.
The guns were being classified more rationally by the late seventeenth century, with the earlier hodgepodge of guns, sakers, demicannons, and culverins giving way to guns classified by the weight of shot fired, eventually settling basically on 42-pounders (i. e., the weight of the shot-only used in the largest first-rates) followed by 32-, 24-, 12-, 18-, 9-, and 6-pounders, arranged with the heavier guns on the lower decks. These first-rates had also settled into the standard classification of 90-, 80-, 70-, 60-, and 50-gun warships. They also reached their full glory by the early eighteenth century, with double or triple tiers of ornate stern galleries for the higher officers to take their leisure in relative privacy, and with carved wooden figureheads often representing the reigning monarch, surrounded with trophies, figures from nautical mythology, emblems, and the like. Circular gun ports also passed out of fashion in favor of the more practical square hull openings.
The early eighteenth century also saw the replacement of the ancient, wearying, and complex whip staff by the steering wheel. Although the steering wheel was an enormous improvement, it still, like the whip staff, required that the helmsman turn his helm in the opposite direction that the ship was to go. In other words “Port your helm!” would send the ship to starboard. This most confusing state of affairs was not put to logical rights until the twentieth century. The dimension shackles of 1719 were not finally loosened until 1832, with the appointment of Captain Sir William Symonds as surveyor of the Royal Navy. Symonds was able to lift all restrictions on size and armament. Although RN warships still lagged behind the French and Spanish in scientific construction, at least they enjoyed increased speed and stability, with more room below decks. Paradoxically, Symond’s reforms would become irrelevant within three decades, when iron-built ships permitted dimensions that would be limited only by Britain’s docks.
The other hobbling development was the initially realistic decision to rely on line-ahead tactics. Admiral Robert Blake formalized the line-of- battle formation during the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652-1654). The Dutch were the only naval power to challenge the Royal Navy aggressively, winning about as many naval battles as they lost. The French were much more the land power; the army absorbed far more resources than the navy, and French naval tactics consisted of shooting at the top hamper of the enemy-losing most battles in the process. Ideally, two enemy fleets would fight in parallel lines, their guns battering each other and trying to get the weather gauge (to be upwind) and then to “cross the enemy’s T,” that is, to maneuver so that one fleet’s weak and under armed bow (or, less commonly, stern) was exposed to its opponent’s broadsides. Line-ahead also gave the commanding admirals more control over their warships. But two opposing schools of thought emerged within the line-ahead concept. One stood for unwavering adherence to the line, emphasizing the lack of control that would inevitably follow a mêlée. The other, often called the mêlée school, believed basically in the line-ahead approach to the battle but then argued that ship and squadron commanders should be free to attack or pursue on their own as the clash developed and opportunities presented themselves to the adventurous. Given that signaling was primitive at best during the Age of Fighting Sail, and that the foremost proponent of the mêlée school was Horatio Nelson, it would seem that the latter school of thought had the better argument. Nonetheless, the formal line-ahead school prevailed through the late eighteenth century, becoming calcified in the Admiralty’s Fighting Instructions of 1691, which had the force of law. One who felt the full force of that law was Admiral Sir John Byng, who was actually executed by firing squad in the wake of the Battle of Minorca for failing to depart from the tactics laid down in the Fighting Instructions. (Byng was obviously being used as a scapegoat for one of the Royal Navy’s very rare defeats in a fleet action.) The formalized line-ahead’s grip on the Royal Navy was at last broken in a series of actions by younger commanders, who brought victory with their mêlée tactics at the Glorious First of June (1794), Cape St. Vincent (1797), and, of course, Trafalgar.
Whether adhering rigidly to Fighting Instructions or breaking into a mêlée, the Royal Navy never suffered one decisive defeat at sea after the Battle of Beachy Head (1690). The Great Age of Fighting then passed its peak, and there would be only one more large sailing fleet battle, the one-sided slaughter of an Egyptian-Turkish squadron by a combined fleet composed of British, French, and Russian warships at Navarino Bay in 1827.
