Admiral Duncan at Camperdown

A convention in war outlives the conditions that made it sensible. Fleets line up parallel and trade their broadsides because that is what fleets have done; admirals raised inside the convention rarely think to break it. Now and then a man arrives at the head of a fleet who has lived long enough inside the old practice to see what it cannot do, and old enough to no longer fear what his juniors will say if he sets it aside. He is not a young firebrand. He is, in this case, a Dundee merchant's son in his sixty-seventh year, half a century in the service, who has spent the spring and summer of 1797 holding the North Sea against mutiny, weather, and a Dutch fleet penned in the Texel, and who on a clear October morning will quietly throw the eighteenth-century rule book over the side.

THE SHIPMASTER'S SON

Adam Duncan was born at Dundee on the first of July 1731, son of Alexander Duncan of Lundie, provost of the burgh, and Helen Haldane of Gleneagles. He went to sea in 1746, the year after Culloden, in a navy that had not yet learned what it would become. Quiberon Bay, Havana, the long American war: he was at each of them in turn, climbing by service rather than display. He was tall, six foot four by the recorded measure, soft-spoken, slow to anger, devout in the Presbyterian manner of his city. By 1795 he was Commander-in-Chief of the North Sea Fleet, which is to say the man set to watch the Dutch coast from Yarmouth Roads, in winters of black water and easterly gales, while the glory cruised under Jervis off Cadiz and under Howe in the Channel. In the spring of 1797 the Nore mutineers stripped him of every ship but two. He took Venerable and Adamant alone to the mouth of the Texel and signalled to an empty horizon as if a fleet stood behind him, holding de Winter in port by bluff for the better part of a fortnight. Nine months he kept that blockade. The Admiralty in London understood, by autumn, that the invasion of Ireland which Wolfe Tone had been pressing on Paris and the Hague depended on whether this old man's ships could be drawn off the Dutch coast.

THE BREAK-OUT

On the seventh of October 1797 Duncan put into Yarmouth to water and refit, and de Winter, with sixteen of the line and a stiffening wind, came out of the Texel at last. The signal reached Yarmouth on the ninth. Duncan was at sea again within hours. By the dawn of Wednesday the eleventh his frigates had the Dutch in sight, standing in for the shoals about ten miles off the village of Camperduin, the low Dutch shore a smear on the eastern horizon. The wind was westerly, fresh; the sea moderate; the light clean. De Winter had drawn his sixteen sail of the line into the formal line ahead, north to south, the Vrijheid fifth from the van, gun-ports open, colours flying, a textbook page from the Tactique navale. Behind him, dangerously close under his lee, lay the banks. He was not running. He meant to fight where his pilots knew the water and Duncan's did not.

THE QUARTERDECK OF VENERABLE

Twenty past nine. Duncan stood on the weather side of Venerable's quarterdeck with the glass at his eye and the sea-wind taking the skirts of his coat. Sixteen to sixteen of the line. Crews drilled hard through nine months of blockade-running practice, gunnery he respected, a lee shore at their backs that they knew as Scotsmen know the Tay. To form line of battle in the French manner, lay parallel at half-pistol shot, and pound them through the afternoon was to give them every advantage they had. The day would close, the tide would turn, the shoals would have his disabled prizes by nightfall. He had seen Howe break the line on the Glorious First of June. He had read Jervis's despatch from St Vincent in February with the closeness of a man who studies what his juniors are doing. The doctrine was not his invention. The decision to use it here, on this water, with the Dutch coast under the enemy's lee and his own pilots blind, was. He turned to Captain Fairfax at his elbow and said, in the brief Scots manner that those who served under him remembered, that he would bear up and pass through their line. Onslow with the lee division would break it about the seventh ship from the rear. He himself with the weather division would break it about the third from the van. The Dutch fleet would be cut into thirds and engaged at musket-shot from leeward, with the British between them and their own coast, so that any prize taken would drift seaward into safety rather than landward into wreck. Captain Fairfax, by the Naval Chronicle's record of the action, looked once at the lee shore, once at the admiral, and said nothing. The signal-midshipman was already at the halyards. The flags went up. Venerable put up her helm.

THREE HOURS OFF CAMPERDUIN

They came down in two ragged columns, not the parade-ground wedge of a tactician's diagram but a working seaman's approximation, the faster sailers ahead, the slower closing as best they could. Venerable broke the Dutch line astern of the Staten-Generaal a little after noon, raked her as she passed, and laid herself alongside the Vrijheid at half-pistol shot. Triumph came up to support. To the south Onslow in Monarch cut through abreast of Jupiter and the lee division fell upon the Dutch rear. The action was general by half past noon. The Vrijheid fought as her admiral had trained her to fight; her main and fore came down together a little after one; her mizzen followed; her decks, by de Winter's own later account, were so cumbered with dead and wreckage that he could not work his guns. At twenty past three he struck. He was rowed across in his own launch, climbed the side of Venerable unaided, and on the quarterdeck where Duncan had stood that morning offered up his sword. Duncan, by his own despatch to the Admiralty written that evening from the same quarterdeck, received the Dutch admiral's sword and immediately returned it to him with the courtesy due to a brave and honourable opponent. Eleven of the sixteen Dutch sail of the line were taken. Five fled north into the Texel. About one thousand one hundred and sixty Dutchmen were dead; about two hundred and twenty British. The action had lasted, from the first gun to the last, a little under three hours.

DE WINTER IN THE GREAT CABIN

Below in the great cabin afterwards, the two admirals dined. De Winter was a tall man too, taller than Duncan by a finger's breadth, and he remarked upon it in the careful French of a Republican officer addressing a peer of an enemy realm. He said, by the account preserved in the family papers and printed long afterwards, that it was a matter of marvel that two such ungainly figures should be the only two left standing on their respective quarterdecks. He said also that he had been beaten by the only manoeuvre against which his line could not defend, and that he held no grievance in the matter. Duncan answered him in English; the Dutch admiral's English was good. They spoke of the Texel, of the weather of the past nine months, of mutual acquaintances in the Russian service from years before. The shoals to the east, which would have wrecked any prize attempted to be carried out under de Winter's plan, were not mentioned. There was no need.

THE PEERAGE AND THE FIELD

London received the news on the fourteenth. The City illuminated. Pitt, in a Commons that had spent the spring frightened of its own seamen, rose to move the thanks of the House. On the thirtieth of October Adam Duncan was created Viscount Duncan of Camperdown and Baron Lundie of Lundie, with a pension of two thousand pounds a year settled on the title for two lives. He took his seat, made his bow, and asked to be returned to the North Sea station. He kept the command four years more, struck his flag in 1801, and retired to the Borders. He died at an inn at Cornhill near Coldstream on the fourth of August 1804, on the road home from Edinburgh, in his seventy-fourth year. He was buried in the family vault at Lundie kirk in Angus, the parish his father had been laird of. Eight years later a young Vice-Admiral named Nelson, who had read the Camperdown despatch in 1797 with the same close attention Duncan had given Jervis's, broke the French line at Trafalgar in two columns at right angles to the enemy. The doctrine at Trafalgar was not new. Camperdown was where it had been proved against an equal fleet on open water and shown to do exactly what its champions had claimed it would do.

THE PARK AT DUNDEE

The man at the head of the fleet that morning had spent fifty-one years learning a convention before he chose, in the space of a glance at a lee shore, to set it aside. The decision was not a young man's leap. It was the considered act of an old one who had outlived his fear of being thought irregular, and who knew that the tide and the shoals would not wait on the conventional answer. His son Robert was made Earl of Camperdown in 1831; the earldom ran in the Duncan male line until 1933 and then, the third earl dying without sons, was extinguished. The Camperdown estate north of Dundee, two thousand acres of oak and beech that the first Viscount's prize-money had bought, was sold to the burgh in 1946 and opened as a public park. On a clear October day the trees there carry the same westerly off the Tay that took Venerable down on the Dutch line, and the gates at the foot of the long avenue still bear the one word the family kept above all others: Camperdown.