The high reputation he justly held as a seaman and commander amongst his contemporaries has long been buried under his undeserved failure at Cartagena; but trained in the flagships of Rooke and Shovell, and afterwards as a captain under Sir John Norris in the Baltic, there was no one till the day of his death in 1757, at the age of 73, who held so high a place as a naval authority, and from no one was a pregnant tactical reform more likely to come.

The Lestock pamphlet, moreover, makes it clear that through all the time of his service--the dead time of tactics as we regard it now--tacticians so far from slumbering had been striving to release themselves from the bonds in which the old instructions tied them.
This is confirmed by two manuscript authorities which have fortunately survived, and which give us a clear insight into the new system as it was actually set on foot.

The first is a MS.

copy of some Additional Instructions in the Admiralty Library.

They are less full and clearly earlier than those used by Boscawen in 1759, and are bound up with a printed copy of the regular Fighting Instructions already referred to, which contain in manuscript the additions made by Mathews during his Mediterranean command.[2] In so far as they differ from Boscawen's they will be found below as notes to his set.
The second is a highly interesting MS.