Chapter 24

British sea-power. Spain promised to take away from the British all the trading rights she had been forced to grant them in America, while France promised to help Spain to win Gibraltar back again.

When the secret began to leak out the feeling against the Bourbons ran high; and when a merchant skipper called Jenkins paraded London, showing the ear he said the Spaniards had cut off him in South America, the people clamoured for immediate war. Admiral Vernon became immensely popular when he took Porto Bello in the Spanish Main. But he was beaten before Cartagena. He was a good admiral; but the Navy had been shamefully neglected by the government during the long peace; and no neglected navy can send out good fleets in a hurry.

Still, the Navy and mercantile marine were good enough to enable British sea-power to turn the scale against Prince Charlie in Scotland and against the French in Canada. The French tried to help the last of the Stuarts by sending supply ships and men-of-war to Scotland. But the British fleet kept off the men-of-war, seized the supply ships, and advanced along the coast to support the army that was running the Jacobites down. Prince Charlie's Jacobites had to carry everything by land. The British army had most of its stores carried fen times better by sea. Therefore, when the two armies met for their last fight at Culloden, the Jacobites were worn out, while the British army was quite fresh. In Canada it was the same story when the French fortress of Louisbourg was entirely cut off from the sea by a British fleet and forced to surrender or starve. In both cases the fleets and armies worked together like the different parts of one body. At Louisbourg the British land force was entirely made up of American colonists, mostly from enlightened Massachusetts.

A fleet sent against the French in India failed to beat that excellent French admiral, La Bourdonnais. But Anson's famous four years voyage round the world (1740-44) was a wonderful success. The Navy having been so much neglected by the government for so many years before the war, Anson had to put up with some bad ships and worse men. Even poor old pensioners were sent on board at the last minute to make up the number required. Of course they soon died off like flies. But his famous flagship, the _Centurion_, got through, beat everything that stood up to her, and took vast quantities of Spanish gold and silver. Yet this is by no means the most wonderful fact about the _Centurion_. The most wonderful thing of all is, that, though she was only a one-thousand-tonner (smaller than many a destroyer of the present day) she had no fewer than eight officers who rose to high and well-won rank in after years, and three--Anson, Saunders, and Keppel--who all became First Lords of the Admiralty, and thus heads of the whole Navy.

Three years after his return Anson won a victory over the French off Cape Finisterre, while Hawke won another near the same place a few months later. In both the French fought very well indeed; but, with less skill in handling fleets and smaller numbers than the British, they had no chance. One of Hawke's best captains was Saunders. Thus twelve years before Pitt's conquest of Canada the three great admirals most concerned with it had already been brought together.

The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which ended the war in 1748, settled nothing and satisfied nobody. It was, in fact, only a truce to let the tired opponents get their breath and prepare for the world-wide struggle which was to settle the question of oversea empire.

The British in America were very angry with the Mother Country for giving back Louisbourg. But they were much too narrow in their views; for their own fate in America depended entirely on the strength of the Royal Navy, which itself depended on having a safe base in the Mother Country. Now, France had conquered those parts of the once Spanish but then Austrian Netherlands which included the present coast of Belgium; and Britain could no more allow the French to threaten her naval base from the coast of Belgium then than she could allow the Spaniards before or the Germans in our own time. Therefore both she and her colonists won many points in the game, when playing for safety, by giving up Louisbourg, from which there could be no real danger, and so getting France out of Belgium, from which the whole Empire might some day have been struck a mortal blow.