The devil and the deep blue sea.(Editorial)

IF WE HAPPENED to be looking for some exemplary institution at the cutting edge of "social progress"--some paragon of permissiveness, of "inclusion" and political correctness--few of us would think at once of the Royal Navy. (Nor, for that matter, of its direct descendant, the Royal Australian Navy.) To many, "The Navy" suggests stitched-up conservatism, inflexible tradition, savage discipline and rigid social separation between the upper and the lower decks. The adjectives "brassbound" and "hidebound" might win wide assent as summary descriptions of the senior service. Even Winston Churchill, sometime First Lord of the Admiralty, limited the Navy's traditions to three: "rum, sodomy and the lash".

Well, perhaps, Lord Copper, but only up to a point. Closer study reveals sufficient striking exception as to cast doubt on such a general reactionary picture.

For example, did you know that as early as 1804, there was a chief petty officer serving in the ship of war Queen Charlotte who was both black and female? Not only that, but she was "Captain of the Main Top", an appointment of no small prestige. One learns this from Professor N.A.M. Rodgers' monumental naval history of Britain; he tells us also that this remarkable NCO was there for ten years; clearly, she did a good job.

What single social advance subtracted more from the sum of human misery than the extirpation of slavery in the nineteenth century? (Perhaps one should say "near-extirpation", for slavery, chiefly by Arabs, continues discreetly to this day.) This immense moral gain was carried into practical effect by the Royal Navy.

Between about 1792 and 1807 the British parliament legislated to outlaw both slavery as an institution, and in particular the monstrous trade in black Africans across the Atlantic to North and South America.

The parliamentary struggle and the propaganda campaign which preceded and accompanied it were led largely by Quakers and by the evangelical Clapham Sect, but it drew the support of all manner of people: Doctor Samuel Johnson and Adam Smith; Pitt, Fox and Burke. After the Napoleonic Wars, it was the archreactionary Castlereagh who secured abolition in most of the European nations. Slavery had at last come to stink in the nostrils of all civilised men and women.

But good laws are one thing; their effective enforcement quite another. So great was the demand for slaves, and so high the profits, that shipowners and captains continued (now as smugglers) to sail the ghastly "middle passage", trafficking flesh and blood. Without the Royal Navy, slavery, legal or illegal, would have continued indefinitely.