From several points of view these observations are of high interest.  Not only do they contain the earliest known attempt to get away from the unsatisfactory method of engaging in parallel lines ship to ship, but in seeking a substitute for it they seem to foreshadow the transition from the Elizabethan idea of throwing the enemy into confusion to the eighteenth century idea of concentration on his most vulnerable part.  In so far as the author recommends a concentration on the weathermost ships his idea is sound, as they were the most difficult for the enemy to support; but since the close-hauled line had come in, they were also the van, and a concentration on the van is theoretically unsound, owing to the fact that the centre and rear came up naturally to its relief.  To this objection he appears to attach no weight, partly because no doubt he was still influenced by the old intention of throwing the enemy into confusion.[3] For since the line ahead had taken the place of the old close formations it seemed that to disable the leading ships came to the same thing as disabling the weathermost.  The solution eventually arrived at was of course a concentration on the rear, but to this at the time there were insuperable objections.  The rear was normally the most leewardly end of the line, and an oblique attack on it could be parried by wearing together.  The rear then became the van, and the attack if persisted in would fall on the leading squadron with the rest of the fleet to windward—­the worst of all forms of attack.  The only possible way therefore of concentrating on the rear was to isolate it and contain the van by cutting the line.  But in the eyes of our author and his school cutting the line stood condemned by the experience of war.[4]

In his ‘Observations’ he clearly indicates the reasons.  He would indeed forbid the manoeuvre altogether except when your own line outstretches that of the enemy, or when you are forced to pass through the enemy’s fleet to save yourself from being pressed on a lee shore.  The reasons given are the disorder it generally causes, the ease with which it is parried, and the danger of your own ships firing on each other when as the natural consequence of the manoeuvre they proceed to double on the enemy.  The fact is that fleet evolutions were still in too immature a condition for so difficult a manoeuvre to be admissible.  Presumably therefore our author chose the attack on the weathermost ships, although they were also the van, as the lesser evil in spite of its serious drawbacks.

The whole question of the principles involved in his suggestion is worthy of the closest consideration.  For the difficulty it reveals of effecting a sound form of concentration without breaking the line as well as of adopting any form that involved breaking the line gives us the key of that alleged reaction of tactics in the eighteenth century which has been so widely ridiculed.

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