The Royal Navy A History From The Earliest Times To The Present Volume 6

Author : William Laird Clowes
Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9781333924669
Total Pages : 698 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (246 download)

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Download or read book The Royal Navy, Vol. 5 of 6 written by William Laird Clowes and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2016-10-12 with total page 698 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Royal Navy, Vol. 5 of 6: A History From the Earliest Times to the Present And yet, in spite of all, Trafalgar ranks as a British victory, and as the greatest and most pregnant success that has ever been won upon the seas. In addition, it ranks as a striking exception to the law that, in eet actions, victory usually inclines to the side of the bigger battalions. But, some may say, surely that law, if there be a law of the sort, does not apply with much consistency to the experiences of the British Navy. On that point, also, strange misconceptions prevail. Most of our great victories have been gained by superiority of numbers. With superiority of numbers we gained the battles of the Kentish Knock, of Portland, of Lowestoft, of Bar eur, of' Vigo Bay, of Cape Passaro, of Finisterre of Lagos, of Quiberon Bay, of Cape St. Vincent of Martinique, of Lorient, of Camperdown, of November 3rd, 1805 and of San Domingo, as well as many other actions; and in engage ments to which we have been parties, and in which victory has not inclined to the side of the bigger battalions, we have been almost as often the vanquished as the victors. We cannot, for instance, be said to have beaten the Dutch in any one of the three very hard fought battles of 1673 1 yet on each occasion we had on our side the superiority of force. And, as late as 1801, the French, with inferior forces, caused us to miscarry in Algeciras Bay. It is true that, with numerically inferior forces, we beat the Dutch, off Scheveningen, in 1653, and in the mouth of the Thames in 1666; but, from that time forward, there seems not to have been any case: of our defeating a superior enemy in a eet action until 1794. Even on The Glorious First of June, the forces on each side were so nearly equal that the difference between the two lines of battle was a matter of about thirty guns only in an action in which upwards of four thousand guns were engaged. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."