strategical conditions under which the battle was fought. The paper is an admirable and suggestive essay on the tactics of the two fleets; but it is not, it does not pretend to be, the story of the battle, still less of the campaign; and thus in a measure loses sight of the circumstances which neutralized the greater force of the Italians, and originated the successful attack of the Austrians.
But imperfect as it is. Captain Colomb's paper is the only account of Lissa which has appeared in English; with the exception, of course, of the hasty, incorrect, or entirely false accounts which were sent home on the spur of the moment by the correspondents of the several newspapers, some of whom dated their letters from Trieste or Pola, but many from Vienna or Milan, retailing the merest gossip of the cafés. It thus happens that of this battle, which Captain Colomb has described as ‘‘beyond all bounds the most important naval occurrence since Trafalgar," a battle fought only twelve years ago, little or nothing is accurately known: scarcely an incident in it that is not every day misrepresented, and even the name of the victorious admiral misspelt.[1] This is not very satisfactory: to us, as a nation supposed to be the nursery and the storehouse of naval science and naval tradition, it is not very creditable.
Wilhelm, the son of Lieutenant-Colonel Karl von Tegetthoff, was born at Marburg in Styria on the 23rd of December, 1827. We are, as yet, told nothing of his childhood, except that he spent some of it in the gymnasium at Marburg; but at the age of thirteen he was sent to the College for Naval Cadets at Venice. There he stayed for five years; he was nearly eighteen when he made his first experience of sea-service. On the 23rd of July, 1845, he was appointed to the "Montecuccoli," brig, and afterwards to the corvette "Adria;" on board which ships, whilst cruising in the Adriatic and Archipelago, he learned the more practical part of his duties. On the 27th of January, 1848, he was made an ensign of the second class; and was raised to the first class, three months later, on the 18th of April.
The Austrian navy was, at this period, a service of extremely small importance, either from a national or political point of view. It was feeble: it was neglected by the government; and every kreuzer spent on it was grudged. In the interior of the country, it was scarcely known that there was a navy at all. The officers were, almost to a man, natives of the Italian provinces: the few Germans amongst them — sons of government officials civil or military, whose rank and position gave them an opportunity of pushing forward their relations in a service where competition was not keen — had either to assimilate themselves to their Italian comrades, or to lead a life of solitude or seclusion. In Venice the fleet was openly spoken of as belonging to the Italian nation; and "Young Italy" counted many of its warmest supporters on board the Austrian ships of war. The two Bandieras, chiefs of the rising of 1844, wrho had been shot at Co-senza, were naval officers, a lieutenant and ensign, and the sons of a naval officer, an admiral. Of the seven who were executed with them, one other, Moro, was also an officer of the navy. They had tampered, on a large scale, with the fidelity of the seamen; and they had all but made themselves masters of the "Bellona," frigate. These were things of public notoriety; and those Austrians who knew that a navy did exist, connected their idea of it principally with the memory of convicted traitors; in which they were afterwards justified by the fact that when the war of 1848 broke out, and Venice threw off the Austrian yoke, most of the naval officers flung in their lot with the revolutionary cause. In doing so, however, they failed to secure the ships. These were still held by the Austrians, but were for the time useless, as the few officers that remained were insufficient in number, and the Sardinian fleet, mistress of the Adriatic, prevented all attempts at reorganization. It was not till
- ↑ The misspellings show considerable ingenuity. Starting with the data that its consonants are t, g, f, and a doubtful h, these have been arranged by ones or twos, in almost every possible combination. Tegethoff, Tegetoff, Teggetoff, Tegnetoff, are only some of the many ways that have come under my notice.
