effect.  “Directing your chief attention,” they run, “to the destruction of the ships, vessels, or boats having men, horses, or artillery on board (in preference to that of the vessels by which they are protected), and in the strict execution of this important duty losing sight entirely of the possibility of idle censure for avoiding contact with an armed force, because the prevention of debarkation is the object of primary importance to which every other consideration must give way."[22]

  [22] Admiralty Secretary’s In-Letters, 537, 8 August 1803.

In tactics, then, the idea was the same as in strategy.  The army was the primary objective round which all dispositions turned.  In the French service the strength and soundness of the British practice was understood at least by the best men.  When in 1805 Napoleon consulted Ganteaume as to the possibility of the flotilla of transports effecting its passage by evasion, the admiral told him it was impossible, since no weather could avail to relax the British hold sufficiently.  “In former wars,” he said, “the English vigilance was miraculous.”

To this rule there was no exception, not even when circumstances rendered it difficult to distinguish between the enemy’s fleet and army as objectives.  This situation could occur in two ways.  Firstly, when the invading army was designed to sail with the battle-fleet, as in the case of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt; and secondly, when, although the design was that the two should operate on separate lines, our system of defence forced the fleet to come up to the army’s line of passage in order to clear it, as happened in the case of the Armada and the French attempt of 1744.

In the latter case the invading army, whose objective was unknown, was at Dunkirk, and a French fleet was coming up the Channel to cover the passage.  Sir John Norris, in command of the home fleet, was in the Downs.  Though his name is now almost forgotten, he was one of the great founders of our naval tradition, and a strategist of the first order.  In informing the Government of his plan of operations, he said he intended to proceed with his whole squadron off Dunkirk to prevent the transports sailing.  “But,” he says, “if they should unfortunately get out and pass us in the night and go northward, I intend to detach a superior force to endeavour to overtake and destroy them; and with the remainder of my squadron either to fight the French fleet now in the Channel, or observe them and cover the country as our circumstances will admit of; or I shall pursue the embarkation with all my strength.”  In this case there had been no time to organise a special squadron or flotilla, in the usual way, to bar the line of passage, and the battle-fleet had to be used for the purpose.  This being so, Norris was not going to allow the presence of an enemy’s battle-fleet to entice him away from his grip on the invading army, and so resolutely did he hold to the principle, that he meant if the transports put to sea to direct his offensive against them, while he merely contained the enemy’s battle-fleet by defensive observation.