Under such conditions of continued similarity in means, advance in the practice of any profession is effected rather in the realm of ideas, in intellectual processes; and even their expert application involves mind rather than matter.  In the nineteenth century such intellectual processes have been largely devoted to the purposes of material development, and have found their realization, in the navy as elsewhere, in revolutionizing instruments, in providing means never before attainable.  The railroad, the steamer, the electric telegraph, find their counterpart in the heavily armored steamship of war.  But in utilizing these new means the navy must still be governed by the ideas, which are, indeed, in many ways as old as military history, but which in the beginning of the eighteenth century had passed out of the minds of naval men.  It was the task of the officers of that period to recall them, to formulate them anew, to give them a living hold upon the theory and practice of the profession.  This they did, and they were undoubtedly helped in so doing by the fact that their attention was not diverted and absorbed, as that of our day very largely has been, by decisive changes in the instruments with which their ideas were to be given effect.  Thus they were able to make a substantial and distinctive contribution to the art of naval warfare, and that on its highest side.  For the artist is greater than his materials, the warrior than his arms; and it was in the man rather than in his weapons that the navy of the eighteenth century wrought its final conspicuous triumph.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] This wording and punctuation is exact from the text.

[2] So far was literalism carried, that, before the signal for battle, Byng evened numbers with his opponent by directing his weakest ship to leave the line, with no other orders than to be ready to take the place of a disabled vessel.

HAWKE

1705-1781

The first great name in British naval annals belonging distinctively to the eighteenth century rather than to the seventeenth, is that of Edward Hawke.  He was born in 1705, of a family of no marked social distinction, his father being a barrister, and his grandfather a London merchant.  His mother’s maiden name was Bladen.  One of her brothers held an important civil office as Commissioner of Trade and Plantations, and was for many years a member of Parliament.  Under the conditions which prevailed then, and for some generations longer, the influence attaching to such positions enabled the holder to advance substantially the professional interests of a naval officer.  Promotion in rank, and occupation both in peace and war, were largely a matter of favor.  Martin Bladen naturally helped his nephew in this way, a service especially valuable in the earlier part of a career, lifting a man out of a host of competitors