Though their virtuosity is immense, the stories lack vigour and, while they have their admirers, there is not one likely to find its way into a selection of Kipling’s best six or best twelve. Obviously they gave their author great pleasure but this enthusiasm is rarely conveyed to readers who are not already familiar with naval jargon. The best of the series, perhaps, is the set of light verses, "Poseidon’s Law", which accompanies "The Bonds of Discipline".

In my view they (the Pyecroft stories) are easily the best stories woven round the Navy that have ever been written; and while I am airing my views I may as well add that I make Colonel Drury a good second, C.S. Forester third and Captain Marryat fourth – ‘Taffrail’ and ‘Bartimaeus’ also ran. The remarkable feature of the Pyecroft series has always seemed to me be the absolute verisimilitude of the conversation, whose tiniest details are quite impeccable. Kipling’s consciousness of this is engagingly shown by a remark he puts into the mouth of Pyecroft who says on one occasion, referring to Kipling, ‘I know he’s littery by the way he tries to talk Navy-talk’. It is fairly certain that no other author of the period would have dared to turn round and laugh in our faces like that, and it would be interesting to know how Kipling acquired this singular sureness of touch.

[Colonel Drury was Lieutenant Colonel W.P. Drury, Royal Marines, a fairly prolific writer of novels and short stories in the period 1890-1935. Many featured Private Pagett of the Royal Marine Light Infantry, a (in my view) rather inferior Mulvaney/Pyecroft. C.S. Forester was the creator of the ‘Hornblower’ sea-stories, set in the time of the Napoleonic wars, and just after. He also wrote excellent stories about the 20th century Royal Navy and United States Navy. ‘Taffrail’ was Captain Taprell Dorling Royal Navy, who wrote sea-stories, mostly about the Royal Navy, in the period 1910-1950, while ‘Bartimaeus’ was Captain (Sir) Louis Ricci (anglicized as Lewis Ritchie), who was a near contemporary of ‘Taffrail’, and who, in this editor’s opinion, conveyed the most accurate picture of the Royal Navy at the turn of the 19th century. Most modern readers will know only Forester and Marryat.]

Traffics and Discoveries is, perhaps, Kiplings most depressing book. The naval stories about Petty Officer Pyecroft never won wide popular favour. Pyecroft was too much of an eccentric to be a representative sailor, as Mulvaney had been a representative soldier. But the desire to extol the navy hindered Pyecroft’s eccentricity from flowering to the fullest farce. The character remained popular with the family.

The cruise in the Channel in 1898 started an association with the Navy and naval officers, suited to his political concerns in the coming years. But his interest, of course, lay back in his friendship with Captain Bayly and his meetings at Simonstown Naval Officers’ Club in South Africa in 1891.

At the time of the Jubilee in 1897, the British Fleet was still the source of pride it had been for two centuries … it was beginning to seem quite inadequate to our expanded concerns. German rivalry was not yet seen as the sole danger. Even Kipling had strong fears of France, his loved nation from 1910 or so, as one can see from the story of the French spy disguised as a Portuguese castaway [he means stowaway] on a British naval vessel in “The Birds of Paradise” [“The Bonds of Discipline”] The Frenchman’s over-ingenious imagination makes him an easy prey to the crew’s powers of Stalky spoofing once they grasp that he is a spy (an over-ingeniousness, it must sadly be said, matched by the over-ingeniousness of Kipling’s narration which was to grow in the last decades of his life).

… his own advocacy of naval increase [the “arms race” of the years immediately preceding World War I] had long preceded the national mood. And he had been able to plead the naval cause with professional skill, for his friendship with naval officers and his participation as a guest in naval exercises made him an amateur expert on naval engineering and naval economy, the accuracy of whose fictional accounts of ships and their workings still arouses controversy among professional sailors …”

Unfortunately, I think, Kipling’s position as an honoured guest on board paradoxically told against his getting the emotional balance of naval life right, as his more distanced position as a hearer of tales and a casual observer served him so well in gauging the mixture of gaiety and despair in the lives of Soldiers Three. He was nearer the scene, but as a well-known writer and a guest of honour on board he saw only the side of life on board that was intended for publication – the duty and the larks that lightened that duty. I am sure that he took his visits seriously, that he listened with close attention – perhaps, he suspected, over-attention, for he gets a crack at himself.

When Pyecroft, the petty officer who is the Mulvaney of the naval stories, say, in “Their Lawful Occasions”, “I know ‘e’s littery, by the way ‘e tries to talk navy-talk”. As the officers’ guest, he was not best placed to absorb the ratings and petty officers who are the core of his naval stories. The result is that the Pyecroft stories have a kind of jocosity, a sort of ‘out on the spree’ quality that sets them far, far below the adventures of Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd , who even at their most comic picaresque have that ambiguous, amoral quality of Shakespeare’s Pistol and his associates, but have also the dark despair that gives their positive performance of duty a depth that goes beyond Sunday School morality.

This makes Pyecroft an empty narrating device, compounded only of comic knowingness, cockney accent and of naval jargon, in the stories of adventures aboard ship, like “Birds of Paradise” and “Their Lawful Occasions”, and, more decidedly still, an intrusive unfunny ‘funny’ voice in the tales of motoring larks on shore, “Steam Tactics” and “The Horse Marines”, the last of the Pyecroft stories, published in 1910. The truth is that Kipling did not know the life of the man he was describing and so he cast him in careful arranged farces, often on shore. A sailor’s peacetime life, at any rate on the lower deck, must have had much of the sadness, the tension and the reduction of humanity which he captures so wonderfully in the Mulvaney stories, which probably reproduce only what he learned.

Kipling was not concerned to plead on behalf of ratings or the petty officers or indeed the officers, but to interest the general public in the Navy itself, to pass on his own enthusiasm for a neglected Service, not to pass on his compassion for neglected men. Reading these naval stories, published in popular magazine, so full of jargon, one wonders how much he can have fulfilled even this socio-political aim, for who but naval men or engineers could stay with such stuff, however larky. As artisitic productions, they are among his worst.

His longing to find a private world to match his own privacy, his longing to find a secret society that would match his own freemasonry, his longing to find a loneliness that would match his own creative isolation, must have seemed miraculously answered when he was allowed to penetrate that rare world of Her Majesty’s ships at sea in peacetime. ‘Life out of which [the Navy’s] spirit is born has always been a life more lonely than any there is’ (A Book of Words), he told the Naval Club in 1908. And he went on to note how only from the trun of the century, with the arrival of Marconi’s wireless, were fleets in touch. I think that naval privacy and isolation defeated the empathy of even Kipling’s extraordinary powers of making himself one with other men. He went on board as an honoured guest, he was even chaired by the crew, but he remained apart. Yet he loved the peace-time Navy enough still to write about it when he was on holiday in Jamaica in “A Naval Mutiny”, as late as 1931. It is another elaborate farce that fails.”

• A Note on the Royal Navy in 1905.
  
• British warships’ boats, 1905.
  
• 'Knots an hour'.