ir Charles Douglas. Douglas was one of those whose minds had been
influenced by new theories on naval war, which were just then in the air.
In Britain a Scotch country gentleman, John Clerk, of Eldin, had been
arguing for some time in pamphlets and manuscripts circulated among naval
officers against the formal methods that led to indecisive results. His
paper plans for destroying an enemy were no doubt open to the criticism
that they would work out beautifully if the enemy stuck to the
old-fashioned ways and attempted no counter-stroke. But the essence of
Clerk's theories was that parallel orders of battle meant only indecisive
cannonading; that to crush an enemy one must break into his line, bring
parts of it under a close fire, not on one side, but on both, and decide
the fate of the ships thus cut off by superior numbers and superior gun
power before the rest could come to their help. His plans might not work
out with the mechanical exactitude described in his writings, but they
would tend to produce the close melee, where the best men and the steadiest
fire would win, and after such an encounter there would not be merely a few
masts and spars shot away, and a few holes to be plugged, but the beaten
side would be minus a number of ships sunk, burned, or taken, and condemned
to hopeless inferiority for the rest of the campaign. Clerk was not the
only man who put forward these ideas. A French Jesuit professor of
mathematics had worked out plans for securing local advantage of numbers in
a sea-fight at close quarters; but while French naval officers laughed at
naval battles worked out with a piece of chalk and a blackboard, British
sailors were either themselves thinking out similar schemes or were
beginning to think there might be something in the Scotch laird's diagrams.
It was at the critical moment when the two fleets lay side by side in
parallel lines on opposite courses, wrapped in the battle-smoke, that
Douglas, looking out through a gap in the war-cloud, saw that a sudden flaw
of wind blowing steadily from the south-east was flattening the French
sails against the masts and checking their speed. The same sudden change of
wind was filling the English sails, and the masters were squaring the yards
to it, while the Frenchmen to keep any way on their ships had to bring
their bows partly round towards the English line. Between the "Glorieux,"
the ship immediately opposed to Rodney's flagship, the "Formidable," and
the
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