minds might have devised tactical variations or surprises, as Rodney himself was one day to do. But the navy was not a home for innovative minds, being considered the place to dispose of the unteachable or stupid son of a family whose more promising brothers qualified for the army or clergy. While breaking the line was the most radical and important contribution to tactics of the time, after which they were never the same again, it was the idea not of a professional seaman but of a schoolboy of Edinburgh, who made a hobby of sailing homemade toy boats in a pond as a child and eventually worked out his plan in a treatise, which Rodney had the nerve to employ when the chance offered. The boy, John Clerk, was first drawn to the ways of seagoing vehicles by the tale of the shipwreck in Robinson Crusoe. Studying the movement of ships in response to the wind blowing through Leith, Edinburgh’s harbor, he began experimenting for himself with a schoolmate’s model boat. Soon he was making model boats of his own to watch as they sailed across his father’s pond. Meanwhile, public attention had fastened on the Keppel-Palliser court-martial, and as he followed the testimony the boy learned about “line ahead” and the problems it raised in naval combat. Possessor of that alert Scottish intelligence that so often caused uneasiness below the Border, Clerk noticed the major flaw in line ahead: that if the enemy did not offer himself in a comparable line, there could be no fighting that day under the rules of Fighting Instructions. As he watched his little ships move as directed by the breezes, he evolved the solution for breaking the deadly grip of the line. It was to allow the full line to concentrate against one section of the enemy, instead of each ship against its opposite in line, thus smashing a gap through which to penetrate and “double” the enemy while it was caught in the slow process of coming about and sailing back into the wind to assist its companions. Drawing charts to accompany his text, John Clerk explained his thesis in a small book entitled An Essay on Naval Tactics, which, circulating among friends and naval enthusiasts, found a publisher and soon came to the notice of navy professionals, among them Admiral Rodney. Investigators were later to find that he had come into possession of a manuscript copy, which he had annotated and was to put to use at Cape St. Vincent and in the aborted battle off Martinique in 1780, and most distinctly in his ultimate triumph in the Battle of the Saints of 1782, in which he was to win a decisive victory over the French that restored British self-confidence after the loss at Yorktown. The battle’s name refers to two islands so named marking the channel between Guadeloupe and Dominica where the action took place.
Conditions that kept half the manpower of a ship in illness most of the time as a result of living between decks for months on end in fetid and stale air, on rotten food and brackish water in a hot climate, were other lazy submissions to old ways that could have been changed if the authorities had had the wit or the will to permit the entry of a ray of enlightenment. For two centuries, from 1622 to 1825, the official diet of the Royal Navy consisted of beer, salt pork and salt beef, oatmeal, dried peas, butter and cheese, usually rancid, and biscuit that walked by itself, as Roderick Random tells in Smollett’s novel, by virtue of the worms that made it their home. Since the diet supplied nothing of the body’s need of vitamin C, the result was widespread scurvy, whose symptom after the telltale skin lesions was generalized weakness deepening into exhaustion followed by death. It took the Admiralty forty years to adopt the known remedy of citrus fruit discovered within the navy itself by a ship’s surgeon, James Lind, who obtained wonderful cures by issuing oranges and lemons and limes to dying men and who published A Treatise on the Scurvy in 1754, prescribing a ration of lime juice for all. Because this was judged too expensive, it was not made compulsory until 1795. Enlightenment had