Men of War: The Changing Face of Heroism in the 19th Century Navy. David Crane

Edward Scott suggests that he was not immune to the navy’s more dashing and chivalrous traditions. ‘SCOTT. (CAPTAIN, 1838)’ Scott’s entry in O’Byrne’s 1848 Dictionary of Naval Officers begins, and nothing could speak more eloquently of the depths of the tradition he represented than that a career of such variety and distinction should now be so utterly and irrecoverably lost:

      EDWARD HINTON SCOTT was born about 1789. This officer entered the navy in May, 1798, as Fst. Cl. Vol. on board the ANSON … With five of the [enemy] frigates … she came, 12 Oct., singly into collision, and sustained a loss, with injury to her masts and yards, of 2 men killed and 13 wounded. On 18 of the same month we find her, in company with the KANGAROO 18, enduring a similar loss in a gallant action of an hour and a quarter which terminated in the capture of La Loire of 46 guns and 664 men … While attached to the ANSON Mr Scott contributed, also, to the capture of several fine privateers … In the course of the same year he commanded a rocket-vessel in Sir Sidney Smith’s attack on the Boulogne flotilla. On leaving the BLAZER he became Acting lieutenant of the SKYLARK 16; and while in that brig … he had charge of her boats in a running fight with a French cutter privateer of 8 guns and 48 men, whom, after having cut away her sweeps and chased her for three hours, he drove under the guns of the SKYLARK. On one occasion he landed at Flushing, spiked the 8 guns of a battery, and brought the guard off prisoners … He was frequently, in the SATURN, and her boats engaged with the enemy’s forts and armed vessels (several of which he captured). During his servitude in the ORLANDO he took part in many boat-affairs in the Adriatic and Chesapeake. He commanded her boats too in several skirmishes with the Malay proas in the Straits of Sunda and Malacca, and once succeeded in repelling an attack made by them at night on a wrecked Indiaman, of which he had been placed in charge. In the boats of the CAMBRIAN we find him cutting out, in the Gulf of Athens, with much spirit and judgement, a piratical schooner, carrying two long guns and 50 men, together with three of her prizes … He also assisted at the reduction of Napoli di Romania and, at the head of a hundred seamen, landed there at the request of the Provisional Government, had the good fortune, when the troops entered the town, to save the lives of 2000 Turks, men, women, and children … For these services … was presented with a sword by the Greek Provisional Government … For his conduct in jumping overboard from the ORLANDO and saving the lives of four persons, Capt Scott (who is senior of 1838) received the thanks of the Royal Humane Society.

      In an ideal world it would be possible to trace Scott’s inheritance down the generations – in any decent fiction ‘Evans of the Broke’ would be wielding Hastings’s sword in the hand-to-hand fighting with a rammed German destroyer in the Channel in 1917. (In any fiction, on the other hand, it would now be rusting in shame on the bed of the Persian Gulf.) But history is seldom so obliging. It seems doubtful that the sword even got as far as Edward Scott, but the idea of the bequest is too good to let go of; so what follows here, in the lives of Hastings and of two other figures who dazzled their generations – the brilliant William Peel, third son of the Prime Minister, and James Goodenough, the outstanding officer of his time – is a kind of ideal progress of the sword through the late Georgian and Victorian navy that answers to the spirit of Hastings’s will with a faithfulness that no literal or historical descent could possibly hope to do.

      There are various reasons for choosing these men in preference to more obvious candidates – Goodenough instead of his more famous contemporary Tryon, for instance – but the first and foremost is that they were, in that special sense of the word reserved to the armed forces, ‘lucky’. In the century between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of the First World War the Royal Navy fought only one fleet-to-fleet action, but in an age in which many a gifted officer was doomed to fret on half-pay, Peel and Goodenough were fortunate enough to see action against the Russians and the Chinese, in ships of the line and in gunboats, at sea and in trenches, off the walls of Acre and on the walls of Canton, in the Baltic and the Crimea, in open boats against pirate junks and on open ground in front of Lucknow against sepoy mutineers.

      These were the careers that every nineteenth-century naval or army officer wanted and needed, the opportunities for glory, distinction and advancement that were the life blood of both services. ‘I stay in hopes that war may again break out in some part of our Indian territory,’ one typical young ex-Harrovian, contemplating the horrors of peace, wrote from India to William Peel’s future housemaster in 1829, ‘or that the Russians, succeeding better than they deserve, will at last reach India, when a man who distinguishes himself may have a chance of being rewarded by an extra step in rank, or medal, or something of that kind, instead of, as it is now with us, receiving bare thanks from our worshipful masters the shop-keepers of Leadenhall Street.’

      Whether or not it was entirely a matter of ‘luck’ that Peel and Hastings were in the right place at the right time when Russia and British India finally obliged is a nice question – there is at least half a case for arguing that the natural ‘warrior’ gets the wars he ‘deserves’ – but either way, they were born ‘fighters’ in the sense that Hastings understood the word. If this had simply been a matter of courage one could open any nineteenth-century navy list and stick in a pin to find his successors, but Peel and Goodenough were not just men who could and did fight – in Wilfred Owen’s startling boast – like ‘angels’, but officers who in a period of institutional stagnation brought to the business of war all the intelligence, thought, empirical skills, leadership, ambition, aggression, imagination and ‘thirst for glory’ that had once characterised the Nelsonian service that shaped Hastings’s ideals.

      And if the absolute dominance of the Royal Navy during the nineteenth century – the French could never be relied on for a fight, and the Russians would rather sink their ships in the Black Sea than face battle – meant that they had to do their fighting in some odd places, they remained always loyal to that tradition. In many ways Peel’s and Goodenough’s careers might have been those of any Victorian army officer, but even when they fought as part of naval brigades hundreds of miles from their natural habitat, in the heat and dust of India or up the rivers of the Mosquito Coast, they remained as unmistakably the products of Hastings’s navy as did the bluejackets under their command.

      But while these three careers, spanning a period of seventy years that opens with Trafalgar and closes on the beach of a remote Pacific island, are a celebration of continuity and tradition, they equally reflect an age of rapid and radical change. When Hastings first saw action from the deck of a man-of war he would have approached the enemy at a slow walking pace; but by the time Goodenough took his place on the Admiralty Committee on Designs for Ships of War in the early 187os, sail had given way to steam, wood to armour, and the ad hoc improvisations and confused hell of Trafalgar to dreams of choreographed fleet actions, centralised command, signalling hegemony and speeds of fourteen knots.

      In a sense these technical developments left the subjects of this book relatively untouched: Peel did most of his fighting on land, and Goodenough died a very eighteenth-century death. But the navy has always been a microcosm of national life, and no one was immune to the wider social and intellectual changes shaping nineteenth-century Britain. Both Peel and Goodenough first went to sea in the last leisurely days of sail, but if they were Georgians by upbringing and age they were Victorians by instinct and high moral seriousness, and in crucial matters of temperament and faith as remote from Hastings as they were close to him in their gift for war.

      And while there are certain men, as John Masters put it in his wonderful evocation of pre-Second World War soldiering with the Indian Army, Bugles and a Tiger, who only come fully alive in battle, there are fewer who are prepared to admit it even to themselves. Over the middle years of the century both Goodenough and Peel would throw themselves into conflicts every bit as savage as anything Hastings knew, but even so they could no more have publicly signed up to his reductive vision of ‘the art of war … in other words, the method of killing men most expeditiously’ than could the Christian country and governments that sent them into action.

      Hastings had come of age in a war of national survival that left little room for moral reflection, and had fought for Greece in a savage war of liberation that left still less room for sentiment, but these were dispensations that the generations who fought for Turkey in the Crimea or in the Opium Wars against China never enjoyed. In every war there will always be men