against French
van ship, wherever the latter was. Rodney states--in his letter to
Carkett--that the French van was then two leagues away. "You led to
the van ship, notwithstanding you had answered my signals signifying
that it was my intention to attack the enemy's rear; which signal
I had never altered.... Your leading in the manner you did, induced
others to follow so bad an example; and thereby, forgetting that the
signal for the line was only at two cables' length distance from
each other, the van division was led by you to more than two leagues'
distance from the centre division, which was thereby not properly
supported."[84]

Carkett was the oldest captain in the fleet, his post commission
being dated March 12th, 1758. How far he may have been excusable in
construing as he did Fighting Instructions, which originated in the
inane conception that the supreme duty of a Commander-in-Chief was to
oppose ship to ship, and that a fleet action was only an agglomeration
of naval duels, is not very material, though historically interesting.
There certainly was that in the past history of the British Navy which
extenuated the offence of a man who must have been well on in middle
life. But since the Fighting Instructions had been first issued there
had been the courts-martial, also instructive, on Mathews, Lestock,
Byng, Keppel, and Palliser, all of which turned more or less on the
constraint of the line of battle, and the duty of supporting ships
engaged,--above all, an engaged Commander-in-Chief. Rodney perhaps
underestimated the weight of the Fighting Instructions upon a dull
man; but he was justified in claiming that his previous signals,
and the prescription of distance, created at the least a conflict of
orders, a doubt, to which there should have been but one solution,
namely: to support the ships engaged, and to close down upon the
enemy, as near as possible to the Commander-in-Chief. And in moments
of actual perplexity such will always be the truth. It is like
marching towards the sound of guns, or, to use Nelson's words, "_In
case_ signals cannot be understood, no captain can do very wrong if he
places his ship alongside that of an enemy." The "In Case," however,
needs also to be kept in mind; and that it was Nelson who said it.
Utterances of to-day, like utterances of all time, show how few
are the men who can hold both sides of a truth firmly, without
exaggeration or defect. Judicial impartiality can be had, and