other—­counterbalancing considerations have in past wars enforced the adoption of a medium homogeneous type, as conducive both to adequate numbers,—­which permit the division of the fleet when required for strategic or tactical purposes,—­and also directly to offensive fleet strength by the greater facility of manoeuvring possessed by such vessels; for the strength of a fleet lies not chiefly in the single units, but in their mutual support in elastic and rapid movement.  Well tested precedent—­experience—­has here gone to the wall in favor of an untried forecast of supposed fundamental change in conditions.  But experience is uncommonly disagreeable when she revenges herself after her own fashion.

The British Navy of the eighteenth century in this way received an unpleasant proof of the faultiness of its then accepted conclusions, in the miscarriages of Mathews off Toulon, in 1744, and of Byng off Minorca, in 1756.  So fixed were men’s habits of thought that the lessons were not at once understood.  As evidenced by the distribution of censure, the results were attributed by contemporary judges to particular incidents of each battle, not to the erroneous underlying general plans, contravening all sound military precedent, which from the first made success improbable, indeed impossible, except by an inefficiency of the enemy which was not to be presumed.  These battles therefore are important, militarily, in a sense not at all dependent upon their consequences, which were ephemeral.  They are significant as extreme illustrations of incompetent action, deriving from faulty traditions; and they have the further value of showing the starting point, the zero of the scale, from which the progress of the century is to be measured.  In describing them, therefore, attention will be given chiefly to those circumstances which exhibit the shackles under which fleet movements then labored, not only from the difficulties inherent to the sea and sailing ships, but from the ideas and methods of the times.  Those incidents also will be selected which show how false standards affected particular individuals, according to their personal characteristics.

In Admiral Mathews’ action, in February, 1744, an allied fleet composed of sixteen French ships-of-the-line and twelve Spanish lay in Toulon, waiting to sail for a Spanish port.  The British, in force numerically equal, were at anchor under the Hyeres Islands, a few miles to the eastward.  They got underway when the allied movement began on February 20th; but anchored again for the night, because the enemy that day came no farther than the outer road of Toulon.  The next morning the French and Spaniards put to sea with a wind at first westerly, and stretched to the southward in long, single column, the sixteen French leading.  At 10 A.M. the British followed, Vice-Admiral Lestock’s division taking the van; but the wind, shifting to east, threw the fleet on the port tack, on which the rear under Rear-Admiral Rowley had to lead.  It