In a pamphlet published by Admiral Sir Charles Henry Knowles in 1830, when he was a very old man, he claims to have invented the new code of numerical signals which Howe adopted.  The pamphlet is entitled ‘Observations on Naval Tactics and on the Claims of Clerk of Eldin,’ and in the course of it he says that about 1777 he devised this new system of signals, and gave it to Howe on his arrival in the summer of that year at Newport, in Rhode Island, ‘and his lordship,’ he says, ‘afterwards introduced them into the Channel Fleet.’  Further, he says, he soon after invented the tabular system of flags suggested by the chess-board, and published them in the summer of 1778.  To this work he prefixed as a preface the observations of his father, Sir Charles Knowles, condemning the existing form of sailing order, and recommending Pere Hoste’s old form in three columns, and this order, he says, Howe adopted for the relief of Gibraltar in September 1782.  He also infers that the alleged adoption of his signals in the Channel Fleet was when Lord Howe commanded it before he became first lord of the admiralty for the second time—­that is, before he succeeded Keppel in December 1783.  For during the peace Knowles tells us he made a second communication to Howe on tactics, of which more must be said later on.  The inference therefore is that when Knowles says that Howe adopted his code in the Channel Fleet it must have been the first time he took command of it—­that is, on April 2, 1782.[4]

Now if, as Knowles relates—­and there is no reason to doubt this part of his story—­Howe did issue a new code of signals some time before sailing for Gibraltar in 1782, and if at the time, as Knowles also says, he had been studying Hoste, internal evidence shows almost conclusively that these folios must be the Signal Book in question.  From end to end the influence of Hoste’s Treatise and of Rodney’s tactics in 1782 is unmistakable.[5]

From Hoste it takes not only the sailing formation in three columns, but re-introduces into the British service the long-discarded manoeuvre of ‘doubling.’  For this there are three signals, Nos. 222-4, for doubling the van, doubling the rear, and for the rear to double the rear.  From Hoste also it borrows the method of giving battle to a superior force, which the French writer apparently borrowed from Torrington.  The signification of the signal is as follows:  ’No. 232.  When inferior in number to the enemy, and to prevent being doubled upon in the van or rear, for the van squadron to engage the headmost ships of the enemy’s line, the rear their sternmost, and the centre that of the enemy, whose surplus ships will then be left out of action in the vacant spaces between our squadrons.’