"As soon as we had passed each other, both tacked, the Hollander having still the wind, and we keeping close by, we passed very near and did very great execution upon each other. In this bout we cut off some of his fleet, which could not weather us, and therefore forsook him, and some of them were sunk, and we had the =Oak= fired by one of their Branders. We again tacked upon them and they upon us, and in this bout we fought most desperately, almost at push of pike. A Flushinger was sunk close by the =Victory=. He intending to board the =Victory=, had entered three or four of his men with their pole-axes, but the =Victory's= carpenter's axe cut them down on the side of the ship."
The movements described by Captain Cubitt are not conceivable unless we suppose that the English fleet was in line ahead. When he says, "We went through their whole fleet, leaving part on one side and part on the other of us," and again when he says, "We cut off some of his fleet which could not weather us," he describes the movement which was deliberately executed by Rodney on the 12th April 1783, and was unwittingly performed by all the ships of his fleet, counting from Commodore Affleck's to the rear at another breach in the French line. It could not have been executed except by ships in a line ahead, and we have therefore sufficient reason to believe that this formation was adopted by our fleets in the first Dutch war. The second piece of evidence is to be found in the "Instructions for the Better Ordering of the Fleet in Fighting," issued by Blake, Monk, Disbrowe, and Penn, in March 1655. Here it is distinctly ordered that, when the fleet prepares to engage, the vice and rear admirals are to place themselves respectively to right and left of the commander-in-chief, "giving a competent distance for the admiral's squadron"; that, when in action, every ship is to keep in a line with the chief of its own squadron, or, if he falls out crippled, then with the commander-in-chief; that, if one vessel falls out injured, the others are to "keep in a line" between her and the enemy; while signals are provided by which an admiral can order his van or rear, which are leeward or windward of him, to come into his "wake or graine," that is, into a line behind or ahead of him. It may be allowed that the order of line ahead was not very accurately preserved. It is as near impossible as may be to keep sixty to ninety ships of very different sizes and sailing powers manoeuvring for any length of time without allowing them to fall into disorder. But the weakness of the execution does not prove the want of a system. We may therefore consider it as established that, however ill the plan may have been executed, our ancestors in the first Dutch war did endeavour to fight in that formation which experience has shown to be the most effective for a fleet of ships depending on their broadsides for their power of injuring the enemy. That the Admiralty of the time did no more than prescribe a method of engaging in general terms, and then order their captains to do their best, is to their honour. This is what Nelson did at Trafalgar, at a time when nobody supposes that the line was unknown to our seamen. What the reticence of the Admiralty of the Commonwealth proves is, that the formation had not been degraded to the superstition which it became in the last quarter of the century.