guns; of the powder cartridges ready far below, the crews in their allocated places; the weekly practice at gunnery known and understood.
The fleet itself, and each ship within it, just as much as a contemporary dockyard or factory, or even the new efficient prisons, was seen by all as an evolving and gyrating machine.
For every task, from getting up the anchor to unbending the sails, aloft and below, at the mess tub or in the hammock, each task has its man and each man his place. A ship contains a set of human machinery, in which every man is a wheel, a band, or a crank, all moving with wonderful regularity and precision to the will of the machinistâthe all-powerful captain.
Late in September, on arriving back after a short rest in England, Nelson had written to the unsatisfactory and ailing Rear-Admiral John Knight in Gibraltar:
I was only twenty-five days, from dinner to dinner, absent from the Victory. In our several situations, my dear Admiral, we must all put our shoulders to the wheel, and make the great machine of the Fleet intrusted to our charge go on smoothly.
The phrase âgreat machineâ had a richer resonance in 1805 than it does today. The Newtonian universe was a machine. Beauty, as Newton had revealed, was systematic. The interlocking, gyrating cogwheeled spheres of the orrery were a model of how things were. No one element could matter more than the system of which it was a part. The universe, in one part of the 18th-century mind, was a uniquely ordered affair, a smoothly clarified machine of exquisitely oiled parts, whose majesty consisted in its rationality. God, it had become clear, did not feel, intuit or imagine. He thought.
As a reflection of that, machines were what grandees loved to visit. The opening of the Albion Steam Mill in March 1786 on the south bank of the Thames in London had been accompanied by a grand masquerade. Dukes, lords and ladies flocked to it. Lords Auckland, Lansdowne and Penrhyn were given tours by Matthew Boulton the great steam machinist and entrepreneur. The East India Company directors were there, as was the President of the Royal Society. A distinguished French Académicien, the Marquis de Coulomb, was caught doing a little industrial espionage on the side. The machine then was still a model of what might be, the image of dynamic exactness, of undeluded inventiveness harnessing natural forces, which not only mimicked the workings of the universe but stepped outside the limits which human muscle had always imposed on human enterprise.
That was at the heart of the machineâs allure: it was rational potency, an enlargement of the possibilities of life. When James Boswell had visited Birmingham in 1776, he made a beeline for the works belonging to Boulton at Soho. Boswell stood amazed at the scale and energy of the âManufactoryâ where 700 people were employed (almost exactly the number on a ship-of-the-line) and regretted that Dr Johnson was not there with him
for it was a scene which I should have been glad to contemplate by his light. The vastness and the contrivance of some of the machinery would have âmatched his mighty mindâ. I shall never forget Mr Boltonâs expression to me. âI sell here, sir, what all the world desires to haveâ POWER .â
It is an analogy that is everywhere in the navy. Lord Barham, First Lord of the Admiralty, a carping, wheedling, occasionally intemperate and unattractive man, who never hesitated to wag the finger, nor remind his superiors of the length, intensity and importance of his labours, who congratulated himself on âhaving naturally a methodical turn of mindâ, saw his job simply as âkeeping the engine movingâ. As he wrote to Pitt on 22 May 1805, âI thought it right to lay these few ideas before you, that, if possible, the whole machine should be made to move a little brisker, so as to afford us some prospect of success. We may flatter ourselves, from what has
The fleet itself, and each ship within it, just as much as a contemporary dockyard or factory, or even the new efficient prisons, was seen by all as an evolving and gyrating machine.
For every task, from getting up the anchor to unbending the sails, aloft and below, at the mess tub or in the hammock, each task has its man and each man his place. A ship contains a set of human machinery, in which every man is a wheel, a band, or a crank, all moving with wonderful regularity and precision to the will of the machinistâthe all-powerful captain.
Late in September, on arriving back after a short rest in England, Nelson had written to the unsatisfactory and ailing Rear-Admiral John Knight in Gibraltar:
I was only twenty-five days, from dinner to dinner, absent from the Victory. In our several situations, my dear Admiral, we must all put our shoulders to the wheel, and make the great machine of the Fleet intrusted to our charge go on smoothly.
The phrase âgreat machineâ had a richer resonance in 1805 than it does today. The Newtonian universe was a machine. Beauty, as Newton had revealed, was systematic. The interlocking, gyrating cogwheeled spheres of the orrery were a model of how things were. No one element could matter more than the system of which it was a part. The universe, in one part of the 18th-century mind, was a uniquely ordered affair, a smoothly clarified machine of exquisitely oiled parts, whose majesty consisted in its rationality. God, it had become clear, did not feel, intuit or imagine. He thought.
As a reflection of that, machines were what grandees loved to visit. The opening of the Albion Steam Mill in March 1786 on the south bank of the Thames in London had been accompanied by a grand masquerade. Dukes, lords and ladies flocked to it. Lords Auckland, Lansdowne and Penrhyn were given tours by Matthew Boulton the great steam machinist and entrepreneur. The East India Company directors were there, as was the President of the Royal Society. A distinguished French Académicien, the Marquis de Coulomb, was caught doing a little industrial espionage on the side. The machine then was still a model of what might be, the image of dynamic exactness, of undeluded inventiveness harnessing natural forces, which not only mimicked the workings of the universe but stepped outside the limits which human muscle had always imposed on human enterprise.
That was at the heart of the machineâs allure: it was rational potency, an enlargement of the possibilities of life. When James Boswell had visited Birmingham in 1776, he made a beeline for the works belonging to Boulton at Soho. Boswell stood amazed at the scale and energy of the âManufactoryâ where 700 people were employed (almost exactly the number on a ship-of-the-line) and regretted that Dr Johnson was not there with him
for it was a scene which I should have been glad to contemplate by his light. The vastness and the contrivance of some of the machinery would have âmatched his mighty mindâ. I shall never forget Mr Boltonâs expression to me. âI sell here, sir, what all the world desires to haveâ POWER .â
It is an analogy that is everywhere in the navy. Lord Barham, First Lord of the Admiralty, a carping, wheedling, occasionally intemperate and unattractive man, who never hesitated to wag the finger, nor remind his superiors of the length, intensity and importance of his labours, who congratulated himself on âhaving naturally a methodical turn of mindâ, saw his job simply as âkeeping the engine movingâ. As he wrote to Pitt on 22 May 1805, âI thought it right to lay these few ideas before you, that, if possible, the whole machine should be made to move a little brisker, so as to afford us some prospect of success. We may flatter ourselves, from what has
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