Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 by Various

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But we skip a score of the poets, and bring our wet day to a close with
the naming of two honored pastorals. The first, in sober prose, is
nothing more nor less than Walton's "Angler." Its homeliness, its calm,
sweet pictures of fields and brooks, its dainty perfume of flowers, its
delicate shadowing-forth of the Christian sentiment which lived by old
English firesides, its simple, artless songs, (not always of the highest
style, but of a hearty naturalness that is infinitely better,)--these
make the "Angler" a book that stands among the thumb-worn. There is good
marrowy English in it; I know very few fine writers of our times who
could make a better book on such a subject to-day,--with all the added
information, and all the practice of the newspaper-columns. What Walton
wants to say he says. You can make no mistake about his meaning; all is
as lucid as the water of a spring. He does not play upon your wonderment
with tropes. There is no chicane of the pen; he has some pleasant
matters to tell of, and he tells of them--straight.

Another great charm about Walton is his childlike truthfulness. I think
he is almost the only earnest trout-fisher I ever knew (unless Sir
Humphrey Davy be excepted) whose report could be relied upon for the
weight of a trout. I have many excellent friends--capital
fishermen--whose word is good upon most concerns of life, but in this
one thing they cannot be confided in. I excuse it; I take off twenty per
cent. from their estimates without either hesitation, anger, or
reluctance.

I do not think I should have trusted in such a matter Charles Cotton,
although he was agricultural as well as piscatory,--having published a
"Planter's Manual." I think he could, and did, draw a long bow. I
suspect innocent milkmaids were not in the habit of singing Kit
Marlowe's songs to the worshipful Mr. Cotton.

One pastoral remains to mention, published at the very opening of the
year 1600, and spending its fine forest-aroma thenceforward all down the
century. I mean Shakspeare's play of "As You Like It."

From beginning to end the grand old forest of Arden is astir overhead;
from beginning to end the brooks brawl in your ear; from beginning to
end you smell the bruised ferns and the delicate-scented wood-flowers.
It is Theocritus again, with the civilization of the added centuries
contributing its spangles of reason, philosophy, and grace. Who among
all the short-kirtled damsels of all the eclogues will match us this
fair, lithe, witty, capricious, mirthful, buxom Rosalind? Nowhere in
books have we met with her like,--but only at some long-gone picnic in
the woods, where we worshipped "blushing sixteen" in dainty boots and
white muslin. There, too, we met a match for sighing Orlando,--mirrored
in the water; there, too, some diluted Jaques may have "moralized" the
excursion for next day's "Courier," and some lout of a Touchstone (there
are always such in picnics) passed the ices, made poor puns, and won
more than his share of the smiles.

Walton is English all over; but "As You Like It" is as broad as the sky,
or love, or folly, or hope.

* * * * *

THE FRENCH STRUGGLE FOR NAVAL AND COLONIAL POWER.

In comparison with our national misfortunes all beside seems trifling.
Else nothing would so fasten our attention as the French invasion and
conquest of Mexico. A dependency of France established at our door! The
most restless, ambitious, and warlike nation in Europe our neighbor! Who
shall tell what results, momentous and lasting, may follow in the train
of such events?

What is the explanation of this conquest? Is it the freak of an
ambitious despot? Or is it only a stroke in the line of a settled
policy? one fact, which we see, amid a great number of facts which we do
not see?

This particular enterprise comes close to us. It affronts our pride and
tramples upon our political traditions. It establishes, what we did not
wish to see on this Western Continent, another foreign jurisdiction. But
for more than twenty-five years France has been engaged in a series of
like enterprises. In places not so near to us, by the same arbitrary
methods, she has already achieved conquests as important. With
soft-footed ambition, she has planted her flag and reared her
strongholds on spots full of natural advantages. But the aim is the same
everywhere: the reestablishment of her lost colonial and naval power.
And the hope of France is, that in the race for mercantile and naval
greatness she may yet challenge and vanquish the Sovereign of the Seas.

* * * * *

The peace of 1815 left France with her naval and colonial power broken
apparently beyond hope. Even in the thirteen years preceding that peace
England had taken or destroyed not less than six hundred of her
war-ships. In the Mediterranean, on the Atlantic, amid the islands of
the West Indies, in the far-off golden East, wherever contending, fleet
against fleet, or ship with ship, everywhere she had been vanquished and
driven from the sea. That boundless colonial empire, of which Dupleix in
the East dreamed, and for whose establishment in the West Montcalm
fought and died, had shrunk to a few fishing-ports off the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, a few sugar-islands in the West Indies, and some unarmed
factories dotting the coasts of Africa and the shores of Hindostan, and
existing by British grace and permission. To so low an estate had fallen
that towering ambition which thought to exercise uncontrolled dominion
over this continent, to rule with more than regal sway the rich islands
and peninsulas of Asia, and to dictate peace to fallen England from the
guns of her armadas. After five wars waged with no craven spirit in less
than three-quarters of a century, after she had exhausted every resource
and more than once banded against her island foe every naval power in
Europe, she was forced to succumb to British perseverance and to the
gallantry of British sailors. The peace, which came not a moment too
soon, found her with a navy literally annihilated, and with little
remaining of her colonial empire but the memory. When we compare this
hopeless failure with the mercantile activity and naval force of Modern
France,--when we call up, in imagination, her new colonies, the germs
almost of empires,--we cannot admire too much the courage and energy
which have called into existence such magnificent resources. To what are
we to attribute this stupendous change? What have been the methods of
this growth? By what steps has this grand progress from weakness to
strength been achieved?

* * * * *

In such a work of restoration, France had everything to create,--ships,
armaments, machinery, and sailors even, to replace those who had fallen
in the front of battle. To produce capacity of production was her first
work,--to establish new ports or replenish old ones, to build docks, to
rear workshops, to gather materials. This is what she has been doing.
Silently and steadily she has been laying the foundations of maritime
greatness. Her ports, in everything which contributes to naval
efficiency,--in size, in mechanical appliances, in concentration upon
one spot of all the trades and all the resources necessary for the
construction and repair of war-ships,--excel all other naval depots in
the world.

This is no exaggeration. There is the port of Cherbourg. Originally it
was little more than an open bay, hollowed by the waters of the English
Channel in the French coast, with a rocky shore exposed to every
northern blast. But it was situated just where France needed a harbor,
midway on her northern coast, facing England. Across this open bay, as a
chord subtends its arc, a gigantic sea-wall has been stretched. Built in
deep water more than a mile from the head of the bay, it extends almost
from shore to shore. It is nearly three miles long. It is scarcely less
than nine hundred feet wide at its base. Rising from the bed of the sea
sixty-six feet, it is firm enough to bear up fortresses strong as human
engineering can rear. This is the famous _digue_ of Cherbourg. Its
construction has been a seventy years' battle with the elements. Many
times the waves have destroyed the work of years. Once a furious tempest
swept away the whole superstructure, with its forts, armaments,
barracks, and even garrison. But failure has only awakened fresh energy,
and it stands now complete and rooted in the sea like a reef. At each
end of the _digue_, between it and the main land, are broad
ship-channels, affording a free passage at all tides to the largest
ships. Thus science has called into existence a safe harbor, protected
from the assaults of the sea by its granite barrier,--protected none the
less from man's assaults by the concentric fire of more than six hundred
guns.

This is but the exterior of Cherbourg. In the bosom of the rocky cliffs
of its western shore three basins or docks have been hewn with gigantic
toil. The first, finished in 1813, is 950 feet long, 768 feet wide, and
55 feet deep, and will hold securely fifteen ships of the line. The
second, of somewhat smaller dimensions, was completed in 1829, and will
float a dozen ships. The third, far larger than either, was opened with
great ceremony in 1858: it is 1365 feet long, 650 feet wide, and 60 feet
deep, and will contain eighteen or twenty ships of the largest size. On
the sides of these basins are twelve building-slips and seven docks. And
radiating from them, and in close contiguity, are arsenals, storehouses,
timber-yards, ropewalks, sail-lofts, bakeries, and machine-shops capable
of turning out marine engines, anchors, cables, and indeed every piece
of iron-work which enters into the construction of a ship. It is no vain
boast that an army of a hundred thousand men can be embarked any fine
morning at Cherbourg, and that the fleet necessary for its transport can
be built and armed and equipped and protected to the hour of its
departure in this fortified haven.

Yet Cherbourg is but one of five ports equally efficient, equally
protected, and equally furnished with the products of mechanic and
nautical invention. Brest, L'Orient, and Rochefort, on the west, have
far greater natural and scarcely less acquired advantages; while the old
port of Toulon on the Mediterranean, old only in name, has been so
enlarged and strengthened, that it can supply for the southern waters
all and more than Cherbourg does for the northern. One fact will show to
what an extent this power of naval production has been carried. In these
five ports are some eighty building-slips or houses, and twenty-five
docks, and, connected with them, all the materials, all the trades, all
the labor-saving machines, all the mechanical forces, which the
nineteenth century knows. If she wished, France could build at the same
time forty ships of the line and forty frigates, while twenty-five more
were undergoing repairs. The result of all this activity is, that, in
extent, in completeness, in concentration of forces upon the right spot,
the naval ports and dockyards of France are absolutely unequalled. And
the work goes on. To-day twenty-two thousand men are employed upon naval
works. Within six months a wet dock has been completed at Toulon, and
another at L'Orient, while at Brest great ranges of workshops are
hastening to completion; and it is whispered that at Cherbourg another
basin is, like its predecessors, to be chiselled out of the solid rock.

* * * * *

Do we ask now what France has gained, in fleets and armaments, from this
immense work of preparation? Everything. Not to dwell upon
sailing-ships, which the progress of invention has made of inferior
worth, she has a steam-navy second to that of no power in Europe. Her
present ruler has fully appreciated the importance of that new element
in naval warfare, steam,--an element all the more important to France,
that it tends to lower the value of mere seamanship, in which she has
always been deficient, and to increase the value of scientific knowledge
and training, in which she has ever been with the foremost. For ten
years her energy has been tasked to produce steamships of the greatest
power and of the finest models. Since 1852 her ships of the line have
increased from two to forty, and her frigates from twenty-one to
forty-six. A fleet has thus been created which is numerically equal to
that of England, and which, so far as these things depend upon the
stanchness of the ships and the weight of the armaments, is perhaps in
force and efficiency superior.

If we turn our attention to iron-clad ships, we shall see best displayed
the sagacity, energy, and secretiveness of Louis Napoleon. In the
Crimean War, three floating batteries covered with iron slabs, and each
mounting eighteen fifty-pounders, silenced the Russian fort at Kinburn.
This was a lesson it would seem that any one might learn. Louis Napoleon
did not fail to learn it. If a ship can be made invulnerable, or nearly
so, in every part, then of what avail is that strategy which secures
choice of position, and which, of old, almost decided the battle? Will
not he come off victor who can produce guns from which the heaviest shot
may be hurled at the highest velocity, and gunners who shall launch them
on their errand of destruction with the greatest accuracy? The French
emperor has fairly overreached his island rivals. While they were
experimenting, he laid the keels of two iron-clads of six thousand tons
burden. In 1859 he ordered the construction of twenty steel-clad
frigates and fifty gunboats. Lord Clarence Paget declared in debate last
March, that, while England had, finished or constructing, only sixteen
iron-clad frigates, France had thirty-one. And even this takes no
account of floating-batteries and gunboats, wholly or in part protected,
and of which, if we are to trust her papers, France has an almost
fabulous number.

* * * * *

But who shall man this fleet? Where are the skilful mariners to make
efficient these tremendous elements of naval power? It was Lord Nelson,
I think, who exclaimed, when he saw the stanch ships of Spain, "Thank
God, Spaniards cannot build men!" The recent changes in naval
construction, decreasing perhaps the relative worth of mere seamanship,
may have made the exclamation less pertinent than of old. But, after
all, on the rude and stormy ocean, proverbially fickle and uncertain,
nothing can take the place of sailors,--of brave and skilful men,
trained by long struggle with wind and wave, calm in danger, apt in
emergencies, finding the narrow path of safety where common eyes see
only peril and ruin. France understands tins. She knows how many of her
past humiliations can be traced directly to defective seamanship. But
where to seek the remedy? How to find or make sailors fit to contend
with those who were almost born and bred on the restless surge? By what
methods, with a slender commercial marine and a people reluctant to
encounter the hardships and dangers of sea-life, to fill up the scanty
roll of her able seamen? That is the problem France had to solve; and
she has done everything to solve it,--but remove impossibilities.

The first counsel of wisdom was to make the number of her sailors
greater. France has, at the most liberal estimate, only one hundred and
fifty thousand men at all conversant with the sea; while England has,
including boatmen, fishermen, coasters, and sailors of long voyages, the
enormous number of eight hundred thousand. Remove this disproportion and
you settle the whole question. Unfortunately, this is a matter in which
government can do but little, while national tastes and habits do
everything. No despotism can make a commercial marine where no
commercial spirit is. And no voice, charm it ever so wisely, can draw
the peasant of France from his vine-clad hills and plains. The French
rulers have done what they could. They have fostered, with a steady and
liberal hand, the fisheries. Every spring, twenty thousand men have set
sail to that best nursery of seamanship,--the Banks of Newfoundland.
These men are paid a bounty by Government, and, in return, are subjected
to a naval discipline, and, upon an emergency, are liable at a moment's
notice to enter into the naval service. To quicken mercantile
enterprise, by which alone mariners can be called into existence,
enormous subsidies have been paid to the great lines of steamers to
Brazil and the East. And the yearning for colonies, which in our day has
led to almost simultaneous attempts to found settlements in both
hemispheres and in all waters, has no doubt for a leading cause the
desire to build up a mercantile marine, and with it a numerous body of
expert seamen. If these efforts have not accomplished all that their
projectors could wish, it is not because their plans lacked sagacity,
but because it is hard to put the genius of the sea into the breasts of
men who are essentially landsmen.

To increase the number of French sailors would unquestionably be the
best possible method of adding to French naval power. But suppose that
this cannot be done. Supposes that there is in the heart of the French
people an invincible attachment to the soil, which makes them deaf to
every siren of the sea. What is the next counsel of wisdom? This, is it
not? To make what sailors you have efficient and available for naval
emergencies. In this respect the French authorities have achieved an
entire success. Every sailor, nay, every man whose employment savors at
all of maritime life, though he be only a boatman plying the river, or a
laborer in harbor or dock, is enrolled in what is called the marine
inscription,--thenceforward in all times of need to be called into
active service. This puts the whole seafaring population at the disposal
of Government. Nor is this all. Regular drafts are made upon the seamen;
and it is computed that in every period of nine years all the sailors of
France serve in their turn in the navy. They are trained in all that
belongs to naval duty: in the use of ships' guns, in the sailing of
great ships, and in the evolutions of fleets. No matter how sudden the
call, or from what direction the sailors are taken, no French fleet
leaves or can leave port with a crew of green hands.

The training which is given to sailors actually in service is an equally
important matter. The French Admiralty keeps no drones in its employ;
certainly it does not promote them to places of trust. Honors are won,
not bought. Every step up, from midshipman to admiral, must be the
result of honorable service, and actual proficiency both in the theory
and practice of a sailor's profession. The modern French naval officer
is master of his business, fit to compete with the best skill of the
best maritime races. Then the sailors themselves are trained. Even in
time of peace, twenty-five thousand are kept in service. Gathered on
board great experimental fleets, officers and men alike are schooled in
all branches of nautical duty. In port or out of it, they are not idle.
Every day a prescribed routine of exercise is rigidly enforced. Great
have been the results. The French sailor of 1863 is not a reproduction
of the sailor of 1800. In alertness, in knowledge, in silent obedience,
he is a great improvement upon his predecessor. Actual experiment shows
that a French crew will weigh anchor, spread and furl sail, replace
spars or running-ringing, lower or raise topmasts, or perform any other
duty pertaining to a ship, with as much celerity as the crew of any
other nation. And no confusion, no babbling of many voices, such as the
British writers of the last generations delighted to describe, mars the
beauty of the evolutions. One mind directs, and one voice alone breaks
the stillness. Since the Crimean War, the English speak with respect of
French seamanship; and though they do not believe that it is equal to
their own, they do not scruple to allow that a naval battle would be
disputed now with a fierceness hitherto unknown.

All that sagacity and experience would prompt has been attempted. All
that training and discipline can do has already been accomplished. Yet
there is one source of weakness for which there can be no remedy. France
has no naval reserves. And if she war with England, she will need them.
To put her marine on a war-basis would require all her available seamen.
To fill the gaps of war, she has not, and she cannot have, until a truly
commercial spirit grows up in the hearts of her people, the multitudes
of reserved men, more familiar with the sea than the land, such as swarm
in English ports. Yet, with every deduction, her capacity of naval
production, her strong fleets, and her trained seamen make her a naval
power whose might no one can estimate, and whose assault any nation may
well shun by all means except the sacrifice of honor and rights.

* * * * *

If now we turn from the naval progress of France to her recent colonial
enterprises, we shall find fresh evidence that she has resumed that
contest which came to so disastrous a close fifty years ago. The old
dream of colonial empire has come back again. This was inevitable. A
great nation like France cannot always drink the cup of humiliation.
With an ambition no less high and arrogant than that which pervades the
British mind, she would plant far and wide French ideas and
civilization. While England has colonies scattered in every part of the
habitable globe, while Holland has almost monopolized the rich islands
of the Eastern Archipelago, and while even Spain has Manila in the East
and Cuba in the West, it could hardly be expected that France, the equal
of either, and in some respects the superior of all, should rest content
with a virtual exclusion from everything but her narrow
home-possessions.

And then, however disguised, there is in the heart of France an intense
naval rivalry of England. Though the stern logic of events has been
against her more than once, she does not accept the verdict. She means
to revise it with a strong hand. But she must have a navy, and a navy
cannot exhibit its highest vigor, unless it have a just foundation in an
energetic, wide-ranging commerce. And such a commerce cannot exist
except it have its depots and its agencies, its outlets and its markets,
everywhere. Above all, we are to seek the source of this new colonial
ambition in the character and purposes of that singular man who controls
the destinies of France. Not even his enemies would now question his
ability. The power he wields in Europe, the impression he has stamped
upon its policy, the skill with which he has made even his foes minister
to his greatness, all bear witness to it. But no one can study him in
the light of the past and not see that his is no ordinary ambition. To
be the ruler of one kingdom does not fill out its measure. To be the
arbiter of the fortunes of states, the genius who shall change the
current of affairs and shape the destiny of the future,--to exercise a
power in every part of the globe, and to have a name familiar in every
land and beneath every sun,--this is his ambition. No wonder that under
such a ruler France has embarked in a career of colonial aggrandizement
whose limit no one can foresee. The same hand which curbed the despot of
the North, and made the fair vision of Italian unity a solid reality,
may well think to place a puppet king on the throne of the Aztecs, or to
carve rich provinces out of Farther India.

* * * * *

France made her first practical essay in colonization by her conquest of
Algiers. A Dey once said to an English consul, "The Algerines are a
company of rogues, and I am their captain." The definition cannot be
improved. That such a power should have been permitted to exist and
ravage is one of the anomalies of modern history. Yet within the memory
of living men this hoard of pirates flaunted its barbarism in the face
of the civilization of the nineteenth century. But in 1830 the Dey
filled the cup of wrath to the brim. He inflicted upon the French
consul, in full levee, the gross insult of a blow in the face. The
expedition sent to revenge the insult showed upon what a hollow
foundation this savage power rested. The army landed without opposition.
In five days it swept before it in hopeless rout the wreck of the
Algerine forces. In three weeks it breached and captured the corsair's
strongholds. The history of the French occupation of Algeria is a tale
of unceasing martial exploits, by which France has extended her empire
six hundred miles along the shores of the Mediterranean, and inland
fifty miles,--two hundred miles, according, we had almost said, to the
position of the last Arab or Kabyle raid and insurrection.

Whatever else Algeria may or may not have done for France, it certainly
has furnished a field whereon to train soldiers. Here seventy-five
thousand men, day and night, have watched and fought a wily foe. Here
all the great soldiers of the Empire, Arnand, Pelissier, Canrobert,
Bosquet, have won their first laurels. Here, amid the exigencies of wild
desert and mountain campaigning, has grown up that marvellous body of
soldiers, the Zouaves: "picked men, short of stature, broad-shouldered,
deep-chested, bull-necked," agile as goats, tolerant of thirst and
hunger, outmarching, outfighting, and outenduring the Desert Arab; men
who have never turned their backs upon a foe. Subtract from the army of
Louis Napoleon the heroes of Algeria, and you leave behind a body out of
which the fiery soul has fled.

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