Fighting Instruction, 1530-1816: Edited With Elucidations From Contemporary Authorities (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Fighting Instruction, 1530-1816: Edited With Elucidations From Contemporary Authorities

AS to the general results, perhaps the most strik ing feature which the collection brings out is that sailing tactics was a purely English art. The idea that we borrowed originally from the -dutch is no longer tenable. The Dutch themselves do not even claim the invention of the line. Indeed in no foreign authority, either Dutch, French or Spanish, have I been able to discover a claim to the inven tion Of any device in sailing tactics that had per manent value. Even the famous tactical school which was established in France at the close Of the Seven Years' War, and by which the French ser vice so brilliantly profited in the War of American Independence, was worked on the Old lines of Hoste's treatise. Morogues' T actz'gue Nam/e was its text-book, and his own teaching was but a scientific and intelligent elaboration of a system from which the British service under the impulse Of Anson, Hawke, and Boscawen was already shaking itself free.

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