"The fleet being thus more inclosed will more readily observe the signals, and with greater facility form itself into the line of battle a circumstance which should be kept in view in every order of sailing"
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Beneath the clipped, procedural tone, you can hear an 18th-century obsession: order is not just desirable, it is survival. Falconer writes like a man who has watched confusion swallow ships. “More inclosed” isn’t decorative phrasing; it’s the geometry of control. Keep the fleet tight, and you reduce the ocean’s favorite trick - distance. Signals carry, eyes align, hesitation shrinks. The line of battle, that rigid architecture of naval power, depends on being able to convert motion into formation on command. This sentence is essentially a wager that discipline can beat weather, noise, panic, and human error.
The subtext is managerial and almost psychological. “Readily observe the signals” assumes sailors are not failing from incompetence but from friction: mist, swell, smoke, glare, the literal spacing between hulls. Falconer’s solution is to design away uncertainty. Close ranks and you don’t have to trust individual interpretation; you can enforce a shared picture of the commander’s intent. It’s early systems thinking dressed as seamanship.
Context sharpens the intent. Falconer wasn’t merely a poet in the parlor sense; he wrote out of maritime labor and peril, in an era when fleets were bureaucracies afloat and battle was choreography under fire. The line reads like a manual because it is trying to be one: poetry here yields to precision, and the aesthetic becomes the ethic. Keep the fleet “more inclosed” is, finally, an argument that coherence is a weapon - and that every “order of sailing” is already an order of thinking.
The subtext is managerial and almost psychological. “Readily observe the signals” assumes sailors are not failing from incompetence but from friction: mist, swell, smoke, glare, the literal spacing between hulls. Falconer’s solution is to design away uncertainty. Close ranks and you don’t have to trust individual interpretation; you can enforce a shared picture of the commander’s intent. It’s early systems thinking dressed as seamanship.
Context sharpens the intent. Falconer wasn’t merely a poet in the parlor sense; he wrote out of maritime labor and peril, in an era when fleets were bureaucracies afloat and battle was choreography under fire. The line reads like a manual because it is trying to be one: poetry here yields to precision, and the aesthetic becomes the ethic. Keep the fleet “more inclosed” is, finally, an argument that coherence is a weapon - and that every “order of sailing” is already an order of thinking.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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