I recently went to the Musée de la Marine in Paris (I don't think I need to translate) and came across this painting that stroke me : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Bataille_de_Gondelour_20_juin_1783.jpg
It depicts a battle between the french and the english during the American Revolutionary War (it's actually a coincidence I post this today).
Did they actually fight like this or is this just a way to picture the great number of ships involved?
While not that neat to be sure, navies from say 1625(with some wiggle room) to 1941 really, sought to find themselves in a similar situation.
To find the enemy on a parallel heading deployed in line and willing to give battle was the goal. If you had the weather gauge all the better, you could dictate the battle, it if your ships were faster, or you had the larger fleet. All could allow you ro seek a decisive victory. But the start of it all usually was in trying to get your enemy to deploy for battle and you to do the same, then you could ideally try to disrupt his line and ruin his cohesion. As Nelson at Trafalgar.
Line ahead has much to recommend itself to a battle formation. It allows the ships to bring their firepower to bear, as they relied upon broadside strength. Also made command easier, a ship in the end just had to fire at his opposite and follow the one ahead if signals from the flagship didn't come.
Hi there, to add on to what /u/DBHT14 said elsewhere in the thread, although the strict line-ahead or line-astern formation was a naval ideal that was enshrined in the 17th century, to the extent that British captains faced heavy penalties for steering their ships out of line, the line-of-battle formation was falling out of favor by the Napoleonic era due to its propensity to produce stalemates. The goal of the line of battle was partly to ensure that ships could support one another, but it was also partly (and importantly) meant to solve problems of command and control. But the strict line of battle meant that battles could go on for days without a decisive result.
The idea of breaking the enemy's line had been floated by the French admiral Pierre André de Suffren in the late 1770s, and the British admiral George Rodney also tried this at the Battle of Martinique in 1780, and successfully in 1782 -- essentially, admirals would attempt to surround and overwhelm a part of an enemy's line of battle before the rest of the fleet could backtrack in support. Horatio Nelson had studied these tactics as well, and used them to devastating effect at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent in 1797.
I wrote more about this in a few places, if you'd like to read more:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ebdk5/how_did_nelsons_tactics_work_at_trafalgar/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jh7og/why_was_horatio_nelson_able_to_succeed_so/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mwla6/what_were_the_tactical_options_facing_naval/
