William Dixon - The Fleets Behind the Fleet

What follows is not written to praise our merchant sailors and fishermen. They are indeed worthy of all praise. But we looked for nothing else than that they would in every circumstance of trial and danger show themselves to be what they are, peerless. At what date or on what occasion in their history have they failed? From a fierier ordeal a firmer courage and a harder resolution have emerged, as we believed it would. Of this the world is already very well aware. Their friends know it and their foes. What remains then is not to praise them but to instruct ourselves. Our vision has been limited. We knew that in the Navy lay our strength, but in our thoughts we defined it as the Royal Navy. Till these troubled years the Merchant Service had for many Englishmen only a shadowy existence. For the first time it has come acutely home to us that "the sea is all one, – the navy is all one." That ships are Britain's treasure, her shipping trade her most vital industry, her sea-faring population her unique possession, the sea itself her partner in her national fortunes, and her merchant sailors the builders of her empire have been facts manifest enough to others, perceived perhaps by Britons in moments of reflection, but how rarely reflected in the full light of national consciousness.

Let it not be said that we shall do justice to our merchant sailors and fishermen when the history of their doings in these days comes to be written. It will never be written. And for several good and sufficient reasons. Battles on sea or land may be described, great moments in the dreary annals of war. In armies masses of men, in fleets numbers of ships act together, and some picture of the great assault or the heroic defence can be painted in broad outlines. But the ships of the merchant service are solitary wayfarers, scattered units in a waste of waters. The adventures of a thousand ships, the deeds of a thousand skippers, how are these to be set forth in a convenient handbook? On each the sleepless watch, on each the long anxious hours, and for how many of them the same tragic disaster? One record is like another record; one story like another story. And as for their deeds they differ hardly at all. If to meet the crisis as it should be met, with perfect skill and perfect devotion to duty, be heroism, then all are heroes. A hero to-day has for his Valhalla a newspaper paragraph. Many good men have walked the earth as many good sailors have sailed the sea without so much. Men do not always fight and die in the light, and legions of shining acts must remain unsung. With the best will in the world you cannot number the brave men in the world; nor make your battle canvas as huge as you please will you find room in it for all the gallant faces. If it be sad to think that they will be forgotten, it is inspiring to think they are so many. Because courage and resource and determination are everywhere, a single scene or act is nowhere elevated above the rest. The unit is merged in the magnificent total. You will say they form a wonderful series. It is indisputable, but the historian cannot unify such a series or do justice to the individuals who form it. Not this or that exceptional act which chance reveals, but the compact body of its achievement, the pluck, the unshaken heart of the whole service is the impressive thing. So we may put aside the hope that the future will help us better than the present to appreciate the "captains courageous" who in our time have upheld the long incomparable tradition of British seamen and seamanship. Yet if Britain be persuaded by their deeds to do justice to their successors, which will be nothing more than to do justice to herself, we may believe that even though unrecorded nothing has been lost. In the temple or cathedral or national monument one does not count less essential or less worthy the stones that are hid from view.

Cease to think of Britain's naval power in terms of battleships and cruisers and you begin to understand it. Think of it rather in terms of trade routes and navigation, of ship and dockyards, of busy ports and harbours, of a deeply indented coast line, 7,000 miles in length; of great rivers flowing into wide estuaries; of liners and tramps; weatherly east coast trawlers and burly Penzance luggers; of ancient fishing villages looking out from every bay and rocky inlet. Built by nature to be the home of a maritime people, inhabited by the descendants of sea-faring races, accessible only from other lands by water, every stone in the British Isles is fitted into a geographical foundation. Not many of us know it but we are none the less children of the sea and live by it. We are its captives and masters, imprisoned by it and forcing it to serve our needs. In the language daily on our lips are phrases salt as the ocean itself – we "make headway" and "weather a difficulty"; we are "taken aback," or "out of soundings" or have "the wind taken out of our sails," or discern "rocks ahead," or find "another shot in the locker." To the people who made this language the sea has been the "nursing mother." View it thus, and the Royal Navy becomes no more than a symbol, the expression of a peculiar national life. Science may think of it as the tough exterior hide, the armour, like that of the dinosaurus, with which nature in the process of evolution provides her mightiest creatures. It is in fact simply the glittering shaft on the string of a powerful bow, the power is in the bow and not the arrow. Any one can see that the mere possession of a fleet cannot bestow naval power. The Royal Navy occupies indeed to-day the centre of the picture, yet without the vast and supporting background of arsenals, building yards, docks, harbours, bases, a fleet is nothing. Behind it lives, moves and has its being, the great maritime nation – an organisation of extreme complexity with its coal and iron mines, its manufactories, its endless machinery and, far above all, its age-long tradition and experience of the sea. View it historically, and the Royal Navy is the heir of the Merchant Service, the inheritor of its fighting spirit and tradition. Not till Victoria's reign was any clear line of division drawn between the merchant sailor and the man-of-war's-man. Both stood together in the nation's first line of defence during the critical moments of its history, when Philip planned his great coup , and Napoleon bestrode the world like a Colossus. And now that the fiery wheel of fate has revolved once more and swept the peoples into the maelstrom of war, history repeats itself, and the mariners of England from the merchant and fishing fleets are fighting men once more as in the old and famous days.