"From his early youth, a fortunate instinct seems to have directed his mind to naval affairs. It is always interesting to observe the small and almost invisible causes from which genius receives its first impulses, and often its most durable impressions. 'I had, (says he,)[1] acquired a strong passion for nautical affairs when a mere child. At ten years old, before I had seen a ship, or even the sea at a less distance than four or five miles, I formed an acquaintance at school with some boys who had come from a distant sea-port, who instructed me in the different parts of a ship from a model which they had procured. I had afterwards frequent opportunities of seeing and examining ships at the neighbouring port of Leith, which increased my passion for the subject; and I was soon in possession of a number of models, many of them of my own construction, which I used to sail on a piece of water in my father's pleasure grounds, where there was also a boat with sails, which furnished me with much employment. I had studied Robinson Crusoe, and I read all the sea voyages I could procure.'
"The desire of going to sea," continues Mr Playfair, "which could not but arise out of these exercises, was forced to yield to family considerations; but fortunately for his country, the propensity to naval affairs, and the pleasure derived from the study of them, were not to be overcome. He had indeed prosecuted the study-so far, and had become so well acquainted with naval affairs, that, as he tells us himself, he had begun to study the difficult problem of the way of a ship to windward. This was about the year 1770, when an ingenious and intelligent gentleman, the late commissioner Edgar came to reside in the neighbourhood of Mr Clerk's seat in the country. Mr Edgar had served in the army, and with the company under his command, had been put on board admiral Byng's ship at Gibraltar, in order to supply the want of marines; so that he was present in the action off the island of Minorca, on the 20th of May, 1756. As the friend of Admiral Boscawen, he afterwards accompanied that gallant officer in the more fortunate engagement of Lagoo Bay."
To what extent Mr Clerk was indebted for his nautical knowledge to this gentleman, we are not informed; but it appears that previous to the year 1779, he had become very extensively and accurately acquainted with both the theory and practice of naval tactics. The evil to which Mr Clerk more particularly applied his active genius was the difficulty of bringing the enemy to action. The French, when they met a British fleet, eager for battle, always contrived by a series of skilful manœuvres, to elude the blow, and to pursue the object of their voyage, either parading on the ocean, or transporting troops and stores for the attack and defence of distant settlements; and thus wresting from the British the fair fruits of their superior gallantry, even while they paid a tacit tribute to that gallantry, by planning a defensive system to shelter themselves from its effects ; in which they succeeded so well that the fleets of Britain and France generally parted, after some indecisive firing. Mr Clerk now assured himself, from mathematical evidence, that the plan followed by the British of attacking an enemy's fleet at once, from van to rear, exposed the advancing ships to the formidable battery of the whole adverse fleet; by which means they were crippled and disabled, either for action or pursuit, while the enemy might bear away and repeat the same manœuvre, until their assailants are tired out by such a series of fruitless attacks. This Scottish gentleman, in the solitude of his country house, where after dinner, he would get up a mimic fight with bits of cork upon the table, discovered the grand principle of attack, which Buonaparte afterwards brought into such successful practice by land—that is to say, he saw the absurdity of an attacking force extending itself over the whole line of the enemy, by which the amount of resistance became every where as great as the force of attack; when it was possible, by bringing the force to bear upon a
- ↑ Preface to the second edition of his "Essay on Naval Tactics," 1804.
