had got half Channel over he could see the Dutch fleet with their starboard tacks aboard standing towards him, having the weather-gage.  Upon which the general made a sign for the fleet to tack.  After which, having their starboard tacks aboard (the general’s ship, the Old James, being the southernmost and sternmost ship in the fleet), the rest of his fleet tacking, first placed themselves in a line ahead of the general, who after tacking hauled up his mainsail in the brails, fitted his ship to fight, slung his yards, and run out his lower tier of guns and clapt his fore topsail upon the mast.’  If Gibson could be implicitly trusted this passage would be conclusive on the existence of the line formation earlier than any of the known Fighting Instructions which enjoined it; but unfortunately, as Dr. Gardiner pointed out, Gibson did not write his account till 1702, when he was 67.  He is however to some extent corroborated by Blake himself, who in his official despatch of May 20, relating the incident, says that on seeing Tromp bearing down on him ’we lay by and put ourselves into a fighting posture’—­i.e. battle order—­but what the ‘posture’ was he does not say.  If however this posture was actually the one Gibson describes, we have the important fact that in the first recorded instance of the complete line, it was taken as a defensive formation to await an attack from windward.

The only other description we have of English tactics at this time occurs in a despatch of the Dutch commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, Van Galen, in which he describes how Captain Richard Badiley, then commanding a squadron on the station, engaged him with an inferior force and covered his convoy off Monte Christo in August 1652.  When the fleets were in contact, he says, as though he were speaking of something that was quite unfamiliar to him, ’then every captain bore up from leeward close to us to get into range, and so all gave their broadsides first of the one side and then again of the other, and then bore away with their ships before the wind till they were ready again; and then as before with the guns of the whole broadside they fired into my flagship, one after the other, meaning to shoot my masts overboard.’[4] From this it would seem that Badiley attacked in succession in the time-honoured way, and that the old rudimentary form of the line ahead was still the ordinary practice.  The evidence however is far from strong, but really little is needed.  Experience teaches us that the line ahead formation would never have been adopted as a standing order unless there had been some previous practice in the service to justify it or unless the idea was borrowed from abroad.  But, as we shall see, the oft-repeated assertion that it was imitated from the Dutch is contrary to all the evidence and quite untenable.  The only experience the framers of the order of 1653 can have had of a line ahead formation must have been in our own service.