With the Additional Instructions used by Rodney the system culminated.  For officers with any real feeling for tactics its work was adequate.  The criticisms of Hood and Rodney on Graves’s heart-breaking action off the Chesapeake in 1781 show this clearly enough.  ’When the enemy’s van was out,’ wrote Hood, ’it was greatly extended beyond the centre and rear, and might have been attacked with the whole force of the British fleet.’  And again, ’Had the centre gone to the support of the van and the signal for the line been hauled down ... the van of the enemy must have been cut to pieces and the rear division of the British fleet would have been opposed to ... the centre division.’  Here, besides the vital principle of concentration, we have a germ even of the idea of containing, and Rodney is equally emphatic.  ’His mode of fighting I will never follow.  He tells me that his line did not extend so far as the enemy’s rear.  I should have been sorry if it had, and a general battle ensued.  It would have given the advantage they wished and brought their whole twenty-four ships of the line against the English nineteen, whereas by watching his opportunity ... by contracting his own line he might have brought his nineteen against the enemy’s fourteen or fifteen, and by a close action have disabled them before they could have received succour from the remainder.’[7]

Read with such remarks as these the latest Additional Fighting Instructions will reveal to us how ripe and sound a system of tactics had been reached.  The idea of crushing part of the enemy by concentration had replaced the primitive intention of crowding him into a confusion; a swift and vigorous attack had replaced the watchful defensive, and above all the true method of concentration had been established; for although a concentration on the van was still permissible in exceptional circumstances, the chief of the new articles are devoted to concentrating on the rear.  Thus our tacticians had worked out the fundamental principles on which Nelson’s system rested, even to breaking up the line into two divisions.  ‘Containing’ alone was not yet clearly enunciated, but by Hood’s signals for breaking the line, the best method of effecting it was made possible.  Everything indeed lay ready for the hands of Howe and Nelson to strike into life.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] Admiral Sir John Norris had been commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean 1710-1, in the Baltic 1715-21 and 1727, in the Downs in 1734, and the Channel 1739 and following years.  Professor Laughton tells me that Norris’s papers and orders for 1720-1 contain no such signals.  He must therefore have issued them later.

[2] Catalogue, 252/24.  The reason this interesting set has been overlooked is that the volume in which they are bound bears by error the label ’Sailing and Fighting Instructions for H.M.  Fleet, 1670.  Record Office Copy.’  The Instructions of 1670 were of course quite different.