John Clerk of Eldin

Sir John Clerk (10 December 1728–10 May 1812), known as John Clerk of Eldin, was the seventh son of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik. Clerk of Eldin was a figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, best remembered for his influential writings on naval tactics in the Age of Sail. He was a great-great-uncle of James Clerk Maxwell.

The Clerk family were not mariners. Clerk of Penicuik was a judge and political figure of some importance who took part in the negotiations leading up to the Acts of Union 1707. Young John attended Dalkeith Grammar School and was enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study medicine, but abandoned his studies and entered into business.

Clerk made his fortune as a merchant and manager of a coal mine, and was able to buy himself the property of Eldin near Edinburgh. There, he devoted himself to science and art. A typical enlightenment figure, he was a man of many interests, among them geology, and conducted several geological surveys with James Hutton in the 1780s.

Work in Naval Tactics

From an early age the landlubber Clerk had been interested in shipping, and had cultivated contacts among owners, sailors, and others involved in seafaring. He made the acquaintance of engineer and sometime naval architect Patrick Miller of Dalswinton, who encouraged Clerk's interest in nautical matters.

In about 1770, a former Royal Navy officer, Commissioner Edgar, took up retirement in the village of Eldin where Clerk lived. Inevitably he met Clerk, and shared stories of his experiences at sea. He had served under Admiral John Byng, and was a friend of Admiral Edward Boscawen. Edgar appears to have taken a keen interest in naval tactics and was the key source for Clerk of Eldin's writings. As well as relying on Edgar's personal experience and knowledge, Clerk began to research naval tactics through the memoirs of former officers and campaigns, such as the operations during the War of the Austrian Succession by Admiral Thomas Mathews in the Mediterranean in 1744, and also more recent events, such as the Battle of Ushant, which led to a court case between Admirals Augustus Keppel and Hugh Palliser.

The unexpected defeat at the Battle of the Chesapeake may have been the event that led to Clerk moving on from studying tactics, to theorizing and writing about them. In doing so, he broke new ground in English. While technical manuals, notably signaling books and the various "Fighting Instructions", had been published before, no study of naval tactics in English had been written. The earlier 1762 work of Christopher O'Bryen sometimes advanced as such was merely an abridgement and translation of the late 17th century works of French writer Father Paul Hoste, and of the same genre as the "Fighting Instructions".

In his "Essay on Naval Tactics" (1779, published 1790), Clerk expounded on the tactic known as "cutting the line" (i.e. sailing into the enemy's line of ships and attacking the rear ships of the enemy's line with the whole force of the attacking fleet). Horatio Nelson used several sentences from Clerk's work in his orders to the British fleet before the Battle of Trafalgar.

Legacy

In "Guy Mannering", Sir Walter Scott described Clerk of Eldin in the following manner:

You who are a worshipper of originality should come a pilgrimage to Edinburgh to see this remarkable man. The table at which he sits is covered with a miscellaneous collection of all sorts — paints and crayons, clay models, books, letters, instruments, specimens of mineralogy of all sorts, vials and chemical liquors for experiments, plans of battles ancient and modern, models of new mechanical engines, maps, sheets of music — in short an emblematical chaos of literature and science. [ [http://www.victorianweb.org/science/maxwell/forfar2.html J. C. Maxwell's Heritage: the Ancestral Origins of his Genius ] ]

References

* Depeyre, Michel, "Entre vent et eau: un siècle d'hésitations tactiques et stratégiques, 1790–1890." Paris: Editions Economica/Institut de Stratégie Comparée, 2003. ISBN 2-7178-4701-4
* Depeyre, Michel, "Tactiques et stratégie navales de la France et du Royaume-Uni de 1690 à 1815." Paris: Editions Economica/Institut de Stratégie Comparée, 1998. ISVBN 2-7178-3622-5
* Lambert, Andrew, "The Last Sailing Battlefleet: Maintaining Naval Mastery, 1815–1850." London: Conway Maritime, 1991. ISBN 0-85177-591-8

External links

* [http://www.victorianweb.org/science/maxwell/forfar2.html The James Clerk Maxwell Foundation site]