First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [72]
First, the seamen trim the yards as close as possible to the axis of the hull, and haul in taut the sheet of the fore-and-aft driver or spanker on the mizzenmast so as to kick her stern around. The officer of the deck shouts “Ready, about!” and the boatswains pass the word by piping. The man at the wheel turns it hard—all the way—to starboard, which puts the helm that connects with the rudderhead to leeward, and when he has done so, he sings out, “Helm’s hard a-lee, sir!” The jib and staysail sheets, which trim the headsails, are let go. As the rudder brings the ship up into the SE wind, the yards point directly into it, the sails shiver, and the lines, with tension released, dance about wildly. As soon as the ship’s head has passed through the eye of the wind and is heading about, SE by S, the port jib and staysail sheets are hauled taut; and their action, added to that of the foresail, fore topsail and fore-topgallant sail, which are now back-winded—that is, blown against the mast—act as levers to throw the ship’s bow away from the wind onto the desired new course. As soon as the wind catches the starboard leach (edge) of the square mainsail or maintopsail, the officer of the deck cries, “Mainsail haul!” This is the great moment in coming about.… All hands not otherwise employed then lay ahold of the lee braces on the main and mizzen yards and haul them around an arc of about seventy degrees until the sails catch the wind from the port side. If done at just the right moment, the wind helps whip them around. By this time, unless the ship is very sharp and smart and the sea smooth, her headway has been lost.…
The next important order is “Let Go and Haul!” This means let go fore braces and sheets, and haul the foreyards, whose sails have been flat aback all this time, until the wind catches them on their after surfaces. The weather jib and staysail sheets are let go and the lee ones hauled taut, and all other sails are trimmed so that she gathers headway and shoots ahead on her new course.… In a warship with a big crew this process would take at least ten minutes, probably more.…
This laborious process for every change of direction, called tacking, while it made for tense and exciting moments, cannot be called an efficient form of locomotion. To tack a big ship with its billowing mass of sail might be done in good weather with a trained crew in ten minutes, but otherwise could take several hours, and in rough weather as long as half a day or in a really bad blow might become impossible. To arrive at any place not lying in the direction of the wind meant tacking zigzag the whole way, exhausting ship and crew, so that it is hardly to be wondered why both were frequently weak and unfit for service.
In the renewed strife for supremacy of the sea that filled the mid-century, the opening clash of navies took place in the Battle of Toulon in 1744. It was not a heroic combat, like John Paul Jones’s against the Serapis, but a messed-up composite of all the troubles and defects that were to beset naval warfare in this period, and it evoked from a French minister, M. Maurepas, a disgusted dimissal of warfare with its waste of lives for some inconclusive result: “I don’t think much of these naval combats. C’est piff poff on one side and the other, and leaves the sea afterwards as salty as before.” At Toulon, England was engaged against France and Spain, allies in the Bourbon Family Compact, which suffered from the strains of most family efforts at union. Apart from colonial hostilities in America and India, which were the true source of conflict, the secondary struggle lay as usual in the complex of continental quarrels, this time known as the War of the Austrian Succession, in which remote and irrelevant Silesia was again in contention. It would be wasted effort to try to follow