From what I read, it wasn’t so much “harder to operate”, as the rigging, etc… was more or less standard, but rather that the sailing qualities of the British ships were less favorable- they weren’t as fast, they weren’t as nimble, couldn’t sail as close to the wind, etc…
But like you say, they were like seagoing wooden tanks- they were very sturdy and built for combat in a way that the French ships were not.
IIRC, he wrote in encrypted code, and it was not deciphered until well after his death. But yes, he honestly relates a number of interesting tidbits - like he married his wife when she was 15 but waited a while to consummate the marriage; being caught by his wife with his hand up the maid’s skirt. (Not all that went up there) and regularly boinking the wife of a sailor.
I recall also reading that somewhere around 1700 when the British navy was really in full swing, someone invented one of the first assembly lines, where each station specialized in a separate step in fabricating and assembling the hundreds of pulleys needed to outfit a large sailing ship.
One thing that was key in developing Britain’s maritime inclination was the Atlantic cod fishing industry. A lot of future sailors learned the ropes (literally) in civilian fishing vessels. And this maritime tradition had been going on for a couple of centuries by the time of the emergence of the royal Navy. Note that this also helped create the high quality mariners found in the US navy.
As for French vs. British ship quality, there are a couple of caveats to keep in mind. First, the French had a* reputation* for top rate ship building that was based on the fact that many Enlightenment-age French scientists were attempting to create the science of ship building. Much of their efforts were in vain since they were still in their infancy but it still created the idea among the English scientists that French ships were more advanced.
A second caveat is that whenever a RN ship brought in a foreign-built prize, the captain and crew were highly motivated to get the ship appraised for as much as possible. So there was a lot of exaggeration and hyperbole about the fine qualities of French-built ships.
Wrongo. A lot of his top officers had been officers in the ancien regime and some did have an aristocratic background. Not the top aristocracy, of course, but there were an awful lost of aristocrats around before the revolution and they had a penchant for joining the military.
From what I have read, the French ships were of a better design, but their construction was not, and many prizes that were taken had to be extensively repaired and improved. One point is that RN ships tended to be over-gunned for their size and some had a mid-life modification by being cut down as razees to a more useful and realistic size.
Bear in mind anyway that the French navy was good and it was never an easy task to take on French naval ships. Of course, the revolution cost the French navy many of its best officers on ideological grounds, and the British blockade made it harder for them to obtain naval supplies, including wood and tar. Europe was stripped of suitably large trees, one source was Scandinavia.
Thanks Hypno-Toad, can you suggest any books or articles referencing the cod-fishing angle of this discussion? I’m very interested in that aspect.
My wife is currently reading a book called ‘Cod’, which is all about the influence that particular fish has had on certain economies.
Britain was the world’s major population center that was also an island. Britain has been the world’s third most populous island for centuries, and remains so today.
If you compare Britain with the world’s other most populous islands, Java and Honshu, you’ll also find people who built very large naval empires and began colonized their immediate neighbors around the same time the English began conquering the Welsh, or earlier.
Advances in naval technology were an important factor.
One development that emerged in the early stages of the industrial revolution was the huge advantage to the navy of steam powered ships. Sail powered ships are very constrained by available wind and at the mercy to currents and tides, especially on rivers. Steam powered gun boats were much more flexible and opened up the major river systems and made the rich inland cities of major asian states militarily vulnerable and opened up river based trading routes. They just needed a supply of fuel and they could be armoured with steel. Steam powered gunboats ushered in an era of Palmerstons ‘gunboat diplomacy’ in the 1850s and the expansion of empire. The steamboat opened up the major river systems. It gave the industrialised seafaring nations a huge technological advantage and Britain was right at the head of that in mid 19th century.
In order to hold onto an empire bound by marine trading routes the UK later developed the ‘two navies’ policy for naval power. The standard called for the Royal Navy to be as strong as the world’s next two largest navies combined. This lead to the famous Dreadnought arms race with Continental powers, especially Imperial Germany from the 1890s.
The rate of military spending on the navy was exceptional, a significant percentage of GDP. The Navy was known as ‘the senior service’, the army was in second place. This policy contrasts with Continental powers who historically invested in major land armies.
The navy guaranteed the control of the trade routes and allowed the British empire to project military power across the world. Before the development of naval technology, trade routes were all land based, controlled by land armies of empires and their elites. The sea was regarded as good only for poor fishermen. This outdated mindset affected a lot old empires like China and India which made them very vulnerable to colonisation by countries that had a naval capability.
This is an important point. I think the OP’s question can be broken down into two different approaches:
- Why were the British able to build the world’s strongest Navy?
- Why did the British direct so much effort to building the world’s strongest Navy?
There’s a lot of excellent posts in this thread addressing both questions. After a certain point, one answer that covers both approaches is:
“Because they had the world’s strongest Navy”.
There’s a path-dependency factor at play: once “Britannia rules the waves” has become not just policy, not just observable fact but near-mythic part of national identity, it would require a severe effort of will to turn away from naval power, or even to conceive of turning away from naval power as an option.
Plus, of course, like the joke about getting a million dollars, it’s a lot easier to have the world’s strongest navy if you start off with the world’s strongest navy. That’s less about the ships you have at a given point in time (although that helps) and more about the various levels of knowledge and expertise across a range of different disciplines that enable you to be confident you can keep on producing new ships, new sailors and new officers that are the best in the world. By contrast, going from second-rate to first-rate is harder, precisely because you have knowledge and experience gaps across the whole range of factors that give you a top-rate navy, by definition.
There were various attempts by other powers to challenge, but Britain was always able (and willing to make the investment) to maintain their top slot. The naval race with Germany is a good example: from c.1890 Britain was making major investments in new fleets to keep ahead of Germany’s new efforts, and from 1906 doubled down by investing in dreadnoughts and super-dreadnoughts that literally made every ship they’d built up till 1905 second-rate. That’s a huge investment of the nation’s capital and represents a political will to remain the biggest naval power that shouldn’t be underestimated.
By contrast, after the collapse of Empire, and notwithstanding the need to be a little watchful in the North Sea/Baltic region, the UK was content to cede its place as pre-eminent naval power, because the need to project power globally wasn’t there, and neither was the will.
Fundamentally, because Britain is an island it needs to trade by sea with its continental neighbours. That requires a merchant navy and those routes need to be protected by a navy.
It is of strategic importance because the British Isles are not is a particularly agriculturally productive latitude and so once the population reached a certain level it became dependent on food imports. That dependency on food imports started getting serious following the huge population growth that took place during the industrial revolution. Many of the imports from the empire were food stuffs of one sort or another which just don’t grow in cold countries, exports were manufactured goods.
Yes absolutely, and this became particularly acute during the industrial revolution because it co-incided with the growth of colonies and empire. If your trade is mainly across the narrow English channel, plus the Med and the Baltic to be fair, you don’t need an enormous navy to protect your merchant shipping. Because a) your trade partners are motivated to maintain smooth trade so they will do some of the heavy lifting vis-a-vis anti-piracy/ keeping other states in line and b) you can employ diplomatic power relatively easily to address grievances. And because you’re so close to home, you know you can regroup fairly easily in the event of a setback, even a big one such as, say, the Dutch sailing up the Medway and burning your fleet.
When you need to protect traders on the other side of the world, among “people of whom we know little” then you need to project much greater force and you need to build up infrastructure to maintain the viability of that force at great distance. You also need captains and admirals who can be relied on to make their own decisions without close oversight from a distant government. BEcause they’re so far away, replacing them will be a pain in the arse, so the cheapest option is to make sure you don’t have to replace them, which you achieve by making them comfortably more powerful than any conceivable opposition.
On the relatively meritcratic navy vs the relatively oligarchic army, the thought belatedly occurs that this is an effect of peacetime risk, and resource cost.
In peacetime, a chinless inbred idiot can only do so much harm to your relatively cheap regiment of ill-paid cannon fodder. They won’t lead them off a cliff, or smash up tons of field artillery - the worst they can do is leave them ill-trained and low in morale when a war starts. By contrast, a moron in charge of an expensive warship is entirely capable of sinking the damn thing on a clear calm day. And there will be many days that are neither clear nor calm. The sea is inherently dangerous and keeping a ship afloat even without anybody actively trying to destroy it is harder than it might first appear.
So the navy was pretty much forced to adopt a meritocratic promotion system, because otherwise they would have had a meritocratic survival system where the weaker commanders weeded out not only themselves but also their crews and their vessels. Whereas the army could afford to carry idiots in peacetime provided it was prepared to go through a rapid and enforced swerve towards meritocracy during war.
Woe betide an admiral who did not show courage in the face of the enemy.
:eek:
Those guys with guns look awfully enthusiastic.
:dubious:
Even before computers, everyone hated Byng.
Churchill is famously quoted on the effects of British anxiety during the dreadnought race (see bolded part below):
source: http://www.winstonisback.com/WinstonIsBackHomePage/1Big.html
Churchill also pushed for the new dreadnoughts to run on oil, rather than coal - a very controversial decision at the time, but one which gave the British ships a significant advantage in WWI.
From a 2008 article by Senator John McCain:
That innovation led to control over oil producing countries becoming a strategic objective of nations with big navies.