The Commodore Uses Bomb-Ketches: Schooner Days DCXCV (695)

by C. H. J. Snider

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COMMODORE HORNBLOWER, By C. S. Forester. (S. J. Reginald Saunders, Toronto).

MIGHT an admirer of Horatio Hornblower and The Ship — what sailor is not? — say a word or two about C, S. Forester's latest, the fast-reading full length "Commodore Hornblower" into which Horatio has blossomed under Forester's typewriter or dictograph or lead pencil, or whatever it is he writes with?

S. J. Reginald Saunders & Co., Toronto, published the Canadian edition on the first of this month.

We recognized Horatio as pearl of great price when he first appeared somewhere in South America as the anxious captain of HMS Lydia in the Happy Return, followed his Flying Colors, and were a little miffed over his second marriage in Ship of the Line. It didn't seem so bad when the three-decker omnibus "Captain Hornblower" rolled all these adventures into one. He comes back to sea in 1811 or 12 (and 1945) as Commodore, and will, we trust, sail successively and successfully as Admiral of the Red, Admiral of the Blue, Admiral of the White and Admiral of the Fleet. We do not wish anything worse than a harp for Lady Barbara in the interim.

The Napoleonic era at the beginning of the 19th century seems to have been a duplicate of the dictator era of the fourth decade of the twentieth. Britain against the world was Hornblower's background as it was Churchill's. Uncertainty where Sweden stood, where Russia stood, where everybody stood—except Napoleon, the Hitler of his day. Hornblower's task as commodore is to hold Napoleon on the eastern front while his brother-in-law Arthur Wellesley fights him in Spain.

Much more interesting than Hornblowers' flea-bitten amour in the court of Russia are the descriptions of his flotilla's activities in the Baltic.

As a commodore now, he has a ship-of-the-line, the equivalent of a modern battleship or battle cruiser, with a full-fledged captain, to command her for him. He himself commands the whole squadron, which includes two ship-sloops, like our first class cruisers, a cutter, corresponding to a destroyer; and two bomb-ketches, which were air-craft carrier, monitor, and floating battery, all in embryo. Forester's is the best depiction of the work of the bomb-ketch yet discovered in history or fiction. The author puts his back into it as thoroughly as he does into the workings of a light cruiser in The Ship.

THESE bomb-ketches were products of the 17th and 18th centuries, developed from a rig called the howker, which had a very tall mast amidships, a shorter mast astern, and a long high bowsprit on which were carried enough headsails to balance, the rest of the sail-plan, which was all in the other half of the ship. Both masts were square rigged. Sometimes there were four square sails on the mainmast and on the mizzen only a square topsail and lateen or gaff fore-and-aft sail.

Why the howker rig was evolved is not known. It was probably convenient for lying-to and hauling nets or trawls, with the forward half of the vessel free of masts and sails. The navy saw a use for this, and mounted mortars in the wide open space; and so came the bomb ketch, awkward looking as a donkey with one ear, unhandy for beating to windward from the misplaced square sails, but the handiest tool for hammering fixed targets the navy had yet found.

Hornblower uses the two ugly ducklings in his fleet most effectively blowing a great French privateer to bits with them at sea and floating them up on "camels" or pontoons where ship's boats could with difficulty venture and destroying siege works on land with their heavy shell-throwing mortars.

Forester gives a vivid picture of how they were maneuvered. They sailed to their station and anchored, with springs or long ropes on their anchors and cables. They were twisted sidewise by trimming or backing the square sails. Then the spring, led through a sternport, was hove in by the capstan so as to train the mortars on the target, a scale being chalked on the deck and a mark on the cable being brought over the exact degree. The cable was shortened or eased a paul at a time to maintain the position, and the range was obtained by using more or less powder. The mortars were fired at a fixed high trajectory, and the young captain of the bomb-ketch appears to have acted as chief gunner. The sailing cutter in the squadron acted as spotter, signaling the result of each shot—over, under, near miss, or hit. The explosions were timed by the length of the hemp fuse sticking out of the big shells. I have seen some of those shells. They had necks and ears like carboys, but round bottoms. Some of the ketch's rigging was of chain, to keep it from catching fire, and they hosed the rest of it and the sails, for the bombs rose up flaming like torches. Sometimes they were solid shot, heated red hot.

The bomb ketches were looked down on in the old navy. Forester makes them and their young captains glorious. They passed out before steam came in. But thousands of fishermen and coasters maintained an improved ketch rig on Britain's shores up into this century, dropping the square sails and using gaff mainsails and mizzens. They are all practically all gone now, but the rig survives in yachts and in the spritsail barges of the Thames river, North Sea and English Channel, which numbered thousands up to the time of the World War. There must be some of them that have escaped the blitz.

We had a bomb ketch on Lake Champlain in the American Revolution, the Thunderer, and a thunderer she must have been, with six 24-pounders and eighteen 12-pounders crowded into her 80-foot length. It will be noted that she was armed with cannon, not mortars. Her rig as shown in a contemporary picture, was the two awkward masts with square sails on both. But her mainmast was not so inhumanly far aft. Perhaps because she was firing broadside guns.

It has always been a wonder why the fore-and-aft ketch rig did not flourish on this side of the Atlantic, and particularly on the Great Lakes, as it has done in Europe. It is a handier rig for fishing craft and small coasters than the schooner, up to 100 tons burden, and it can be useful in much larger vessels.

Indeed. the only commercial "ketches" on the Great Lakes known to the writer were craft of 700 tons carrying capacity, running about 140 feet long. They were three-masted schooners from which the mainmast had been removed, and, they sailed well. This was known as the Grand Haven rig, having been evolved among the lumber hookers of Grand Haven, Mich., and copied from them by some vessels on all the other lakes. One on Lake Ontario was the John Magee, which carried coal to Toronto in the early 1900's.

Yachtsmen appreciated the merits of the ketch rig for cruising purposes. Two local examples out of dozens are the champion R-class sloop Nayada, which was designed for a marconi sloop rig and changed to a marconi ketch by the late T. B F. Benson. Mr. Wm. Binch, her present owner, retained both rigs and uses either as circumstances dictate — which is usually the sloop for racing and the ketch for cruising. The smaller mainsail, all inboard, and the balanced jib and mizzen, are what has made the ketch rig preferred for pleasure sailing. The sloop rig is faster to windward.

When Peter Laing built the Rainbow he rigged her as a schooner, making her as much like Commodore Jarvis' famous schooner Haswell as possible. Haswell's mainmast was amidships, giving her a mainsail twice as large as the foresail, and Rainbow's sails were in the same proportion.

Mr. Laing found that while this was all very well for working to windward, it made for trouble in reefing and handling Rainbow under short sail, so he re-rigged her completely, as a ketch. Her little foresail was used as a mizzen, her big mainsail stepped forward, mast and all. She sailed just as well, was easily reefed because her mainboom was now all inboard, and the ex-foresail balanced the jib from its new position.

But, to get back to the book and season any expression of approval or admiration with the proper amount of faultfinding, as Hornblower was always forcing himself to do, would Mr. Forester oblige by naming the manual of seamanship in which he discovered such a compass point as (page 80) "east-by-north-half-east"? The navy manual of 1915 calls that east half north, and that's what it was in the Albacore in 1891. Of course, now all steam steering is done by degrees.

BOMB KETCH—from a drawing by Gordon Grant for the excellent "Book of Old Ships."

COBOURG SAILORMEN MOURN SHIPMATE

The late wheelsman ROBERT GEORGE "JERRY" LISCUMB, who died aboard the LETHBRIDGE, was the upstanding lad at the left of the group. Beside him are Billy Davidson and John Wilson, both retired. Seated, late Capt. Angus Peterson.

Cobourg, June 2. - Great Lakes sailor for the past thirty years, Robert George ("Jerry") Liscumb was laid to resting Cobourg Union Cemetery Monday. Services were conducted by the Rev. E. W. MacKay of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church. He was 64 years of age. The late Jerry Liscomb died suddenly of a heart attack while aboard the Lethbridge on Thursday while she was died up at Montreal. For the past 29 years he had been employed on C.S.L. ships and for many years he was a wheelsman. His trips were from Fort William with grain to Montreal. On return trips package freight was carried.

The late sailor was born at Camborne, the son of Mr. and Mrs. William Liscumb. He came to Cobourg when he was five years old and in past years spent the winter with his sister, Mrs. Fred Irish, the only survivor, at their home on College street in Cobourg. Two brothers died some years ago. Pallbearers were Edward McCurdy, Edward Kelley, Capt. Son Mathews, Fred Precious, James Goody and Arnold Comrie.