Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms

by Simon Winchester

  As coda, though, there is one further account worth relating—that of a white American who after crossing the Atlantic became a slave in coastal Africa, and thus provided history with the mirror image of a trade that was otherwise overwhelmingly conducted in the opposite direction.

  He was James Riley, a Connecticut farmer’s son who was master of the American trading brig the Commerce, which set out from Hartford, Connecticut, in 1815 to trade in North Africa. That August, while trying to make the Cape Verde Islands, he was blown off course inside the Canaries, got himself lost in a fog, and rode up onto the rocks near Cape Bojador—the cape that Gil Eannes had managed so famously to double nearly four centuries before. He and his crew were captured and used as slaves by Sahara nomads, were forced to trek for weeks through the desert, half starved and compelled to drink the urine of camels.

  Eventually, using all his of resourcefulness and cunning, but only by the greatest stroke of luck, Riley managed to get a note to the British consul in Essaouira, William Willshire, telling him of their plight. After a tortuous northbound journey through the sands of the southern Sahara, he and his principal Arab owner made it to the coastal city, and once the consul paid his captors off, with $920 and two double-barreled shotguns, he was freed and rescued. Willshire also procured the freedom of four crewmen who had traveled with Captain Riley—describing the five when he met them as “skeletons of men, with bones that appeared white and transparent through their thin and grisly covering.”

  Once he recovered his strength—his ordeal had caused his weight to drop from seventeen stone to six—Riley was sent home to Connecticut, his wife and five children, and promptly wrote a book about his experiences—An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce. It was published in 1817 and sold more than a million copies—and because it presented for the first time the perfect inverse to the story of African slavery with which all Americans were familiar, it became an influential book as well, remaining in print until 1859 and going through at least twenty-three editions.45 No less a figure than the young Abraham Lincoln read it: he later said that except for the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress, no other book had influenced him more. And Riley himself campaigned vigorously both for the abolition of slavery and for the settling of freed slaves in the newly created Liberia, which altruistic America colonists would establish a few years later on the African Atlantic coast close to where he had first been shipwrecked.46

  6. THE RULES EVOLVE

  The war against the slavers and the ceaseless campaigns against the pirates did indeed help influence naval tactics by offering instruction to professional sailors in two very basic areas of oceanic fighting. These sailors became more adept at using the seaborne gun, which was in any case changing fast in its design and lethality; and it also had an impact on just where in the sea the fights with this type of weapon would take place.

  Traditionally, all early naval engagements took place within sight of land, or very close to it—in part because early mariners had such difficulty knowing precisely where they were, once they were in the gray and heaving sea that was entirely without landmarks. But as the techniques of determining both latitude and, more crucially, longitude, improved, ships’ masters were able to tell more or less exactly where they were. Then they were able to determine where their enemies were on the high seas, which made it possible to fight them there. Once that happened, the expression “command of the sea” started to become a reality: in the early days, fighting navies who might claim command of the sea in reality had command only of the coastal waters in which they operated; post-longitude, they could extend this command into the deep oceans. And command of the sea was becoming of paramount importance in the new age of commerce and trade: the secret at the heart of imperial ambition held that winning control of the sea was becoming much more important than winning control of land.

  Whoever exercised the most influence over the Atlantic—over the ocean sea-lanes that were just beginning to make themselves apparent—would enjoy an enormous commercial advantage. The European nations grouped around the eastern Atlantic shores—and as time wore on, the American powers on the western side—would each dispute who had the ultimate sovereignty of the sea. Most often, such disputes were settled with the application of common sense. But from time to time fighting would develop—and rather than any need for the deployments of armies to settle such fight on foreign fields, this kind of fighting would and could be settled by confrontations between navies, and by battles that would be staged out in the neutral wilderness of the open ocean.

  To conduct these fights there had to be an new set of tactics, and in tandem with these the sensible and efficient use of the new death-sport of naval gunnery. The first such confrontation came at a battle known only by its date—the Action of the 18th September 1639—and it took place in the English Channel, between the navies of Holland and Spain. Up until this point all naval confrontations were highly chaotic affairs,47 spray-filled donnybrooks with the sailing vessels ponderously wheeling and turning this way and that in a furious melee, colliding with one another, firing at each other from guns mounted in the bows, not infrequently committing friendly-fire errors, sending flag signals to one another that could not be seen through the smoke, with each master taking his own chance to fight through the fracas as he saw fit. But in the 1639 battle, the Dutch commander decided on the simple idea of standing all his vessels in a line, such that their sides all faced the enemy fleet—and opened fire with broadside after broadside, sending a withering cannonade of shot directly at any Spanish ship within range.

  This technique, from then on called a line-of-battle arrangement, was to remain paramount in naval actions until the invention of steam-powered ships at the beginning of the Victorian era. Since it required stronger and stronger vessels to keep station in the middle of a line of battle—more particularly so when enemy forces did the same thing, and battles became fantastic exchanges of fire between two long lines of opposing vessels—the very best and most suitably strong and well-armed vessels came to be known as ships of the line of battle, a phrase that with the elisions of time became the battleship.

  The action in the channel—which led to an even greater battle in a roadstead known as the Downs, off the coast of Kent, and which resulted in a rout of the Spaniards, the death of six thousand of their men, and the loss of forty-three Spanish ships—was still a confrontation that took place within the sight of land. The first battle to be joined out in the deep ocean took place more than a century and a half later: this was the battle of 1794 that has come to be known as the Glorious First of June.48 It was fought, and using much the same adopted tactics, between twenty-five ships of the line from the British and twenty-six from the French navies, and nowhere near the coast but in deep Atlantic waters some four hundred miles to the west of the French island of Ushant. It was seemingly won decisively by the British, and it made a hero of the fleet’s astute and brave commanding admiral, the then sixty-eight-year-old Richard Howe. In fact the aim of the French navy was to secure passage for a convoy of American grain ships bound for the relief of a starving France—and all of them got through. So the outcome of the first truly oceanic fight was somewhat ambiguous—a tactical victory for England, but a strategic success for France. More important, though, it was an action that presaged fights over convoys that would be much deadlier, less than a century and a half later.

  During the remaining age of sail, there would be many Atlantic battles that would quite deservedly pass into the history books, either because of their textbook elegance as naval engagements or because of their profound significance in signaling or triggering some great shift in the placement of the world’s political chess pieces. The defeat of the Spanish Armada by Queen Elizabeth’s navy in 1588 was an action that led essentially to the creation of the British Empire and the reduction to mere decadence of its Spanish predecessor. The defeat of Napoléon’s navy (along with more Spaniards) at the classic battle of Trafalgar in 1805 is be
st remembered for the death of Nelson—a man still regarded with great reverence by all in Britain, and by all sailors everywhere. (His uniform, with the bloodied hole left by the musket shot from the Redoubtable, remains the most prized possession of the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England; Trafalgar Square in London, with Nelson’s Column as its centerpiece, has long overtaken Piccadilly Circus as the most iconically British of London’s gathering places; his massive flagship, the 2,600-ton HMS Victory, remains in fine fettle in Portsmouth;49 and a captain in the French navy is to this day called capitaine, not mon capitaine; Napoléon stripped away the honorific because of what he perceived as his sailors’ unheroic failure.)

  By disposing of the French maritime threat during the battle off Cape Trafalgar, Britain was now able to enjoy total mastery of the Atlantic Ocean and could throw her imperial weight around with almost total impunity there and in seas still farther away. As with all naval battles, there is no memorial—the two square miles of ocean, more or less, some forty miles west of the Strait of Gibraltar, swallowed up all the victims, and the place where twenty-seven British ships fought against a combined Franco-Spanish fleet of thirty-three—2,100 guns against 2,500, and 17,000 British sailors against 30,000 Frenchmen and Spaniards—is just waves and swell. But Nelson’s famous flag signal, England Expects That Every Man Shall Do His Duty, still flies above his ship now pinned in that Portsmouth dry dock,50 and his famous prayer, asking his God for a great and glorious victory, is still memorized by many English schoolchildren to this day.

  Moreover, Nelson’s grand and unorthodox tactic, that of sending his two parallel but well-separated lines of battle directly into the sidewall of the enemy fleet, piercing both the enemy’s heart and his lower limbs rather than sailing alongside and hoping to cannonade him into submission—is still taught as an example of bravery and naval chutzpah; and the tragedy of the day, with the admiral lying bleeding to death on the deck, wounded by a sniper’s luck, cradled in the arms of his doctors and his trusted captains, all the while warning his fleet to take shelter from a coming storm and with his last words, allowing how humbled he was to have been able to do his duty, remains etched with acid on the British public mind.

  The Pax Britannica was in essence conceived at Trafalgar: and since the British Empire was au fond an oceanic empire—dependent on the navy to secure it, on islands to coal and sustain it, and on fertile oceanside countries to victual it and bring it fortune—and as one might argue further that it was an Atlantic Empire, too, so the siting of its inaugural battle in the heaving gray seas forty miles off the coast of Spain could hardly have been more apposite.

  Nelson was England’s greatest naval hero, and his greatest triumph was to be his last: the defeat of the Franco-Spanish fleet in the Atlantic off Cape Trafalgar, on the Spanish coast, in October 1805.

  The romance of the great battle lingers to this day. On Trafalgar Day in October 2009, more than two centuries after the encounter, one of the last remaining battle ensigns from the day, the union flag that flew from the jackstaff of HMS Spartiate, one of Nelson’s most prized attack vessels, was sold at auction in London for some 384,000 pounds—more than twenty times its estimated worth. Perhaps the extraordinary price was a mark of affection for the Royal Navy’s ship, which had been captured from the French at the Battle of the Nile; perhaps it signified a more general affection for the battle itself; or perhaps one has to suspect that in truth it was a formal recognition of the story of the family that had owned it—descendants of the notably courageous first lieutenant aboard the Spartiate, a thirty-seven-year-old Scotsman named James Clephan. This young man, uneducated and low-born, had joined the merchant navy out of need, when his job as a weaver was swept away by the industrial revolution. He had then been press-ganged into the Royal Navy, but had then climbed steadily through the complicated and class-bound ranks of the senior service until he became an officer, and an evidently very capable one. The giant flag, eleven feet long and seven feet high, had been hand-sewn by his crew as a gift—a mark of respect and admiration, it was said, for one of the very few—sixteen out of three hundred thousand, naval lore has it—who rose from the press-gang to become officer. Clephan indeed went on to become a commander in the navy, dying a much-honored man in 1851.

  7. WALLS OF WOOD, CASTLES OF STEEL

  Great sailing-ship battles would take place in the Atlantic theater for many years to come. The War of 1812, the endlessly stalemated conflict between Britain and the United States, which arose as a sideshow to Britain’s ongoing war with Napoléon, saw many memorable naval encounters: despite the entire U.S. Navy being a quarter the size of the Royal Navy’s force assigned to blockade duties—a mere twenty-two American ships to the eighty-five British—the courage and good seamanship of the crew of the USS Constitution thrills to this day: not only did she soundly defeat the thirty-eight-gun frigate HMS Guerriere off Cape Cod, but she then took off south to Brazil, where she forced another British capital ship, HMS Java, to surrender and scuttle herself. The first battle was all neatly done in half an hour, but the second endured for three hours—a long exchange of shot and shell that gave the Constitution—which still floats in Boston Harbor—her current nickname: Old Ironsides.

  But then, and all too swiftly for some, the age of sail, with all its honors and rituals and romance, came to an end, and in its place there came the ruder replacements of coal and steel and steam, and Winston Churchill’s sardonic remark suggesting that British naval tradition was henceforth to be based on rum, sodomy, prayers, and the lash. Vessels that had been made of great walls of teak, pine, and oak were soon to give way to ships that resembled nothing more than immense castles of iron. The last British wooden warship to be built was the Howe, a three-decker with 121 guns and a full suite of sails, but with a thousand-horsepower steam engine and a screw for good measure, launched in 1860. She swept off for her duties just as the keel of the first British ironclad, HMS Warrior, was laid down—a vessel fully intended “to overtake and overwhelm any other warship in existence.” The new shipyards on the Clyde and the Tyne and the Wear, equipped with furnaces and foundries, welding torches and rivet guns, would then promptly set to, clanging and fizzing for decades to come, to produce many thousands of successors. They were all wooden ironclads first, then eventually ships entirely made of steel, with their production continuing into the twenty-first century.

  The first ironclad ships to enter into battle with one another did so in the Americas during the Civil War. They went at each other with hammer and tongs—and by doing so in the New World, also offered an early indication, unrecognized at the time, of the torch of technological advance being passed westward across the Atlantic.

  The first involved a British sidewheel steamer, the Banshee, which managed to break through a fiercely imposed Union blockade and sneak into South Carolina waters no fewer than seven times, with much-needed cargoes for the Confederate forces. After more than a year running between Britain, Bermuda, and various ports on the secessionists’ coasts, her luck eventually ran out, and she was captured in a battle in Chesapeake Bay. In a delicious example of the cruel irony of fate, a judge in New York ordered this Liverpool-built ship to be transmuted into a gunboat and commissioned into the Union Navy—as the USS Banshee. Moreover, she would join the very same North Atlantic Blockading Squadron with which the federal government was then trying to seal off the Confederacy from supplies and outside sympathy—a classic case of poacher turned gamekeeper, even if accomplished by force of arms.

  The somewhat better-known early battle that involved metal-encased ships—and here two of them, for the Banshee’s captors had been made of wood—also involved an enforced turncoat: in this case a former Union forces’ steam frigate, the USS Merrimack, which cunning Confederates had plated with iron and festooned with guns and had renamed the CSS Virginia.51

  On the morning of March 8, 1862, this strange-looking but evidently formidable weapon of war steamed slowly out of Hampton Roads, Virginia, intending
to join battle with the local units of the Blockading Squadron. To the Virginia’s delight, dawn delivered her a magnificent potential prize: a federal twenty-four-gun wooden sailing frigate, the USS Cumberland, was riding in the shallows, at anchor. She and a sister vessel, the USS Congress, clearly stood no chance: though both ships, along with various other sister ships hastily summoned, rained shot and shell down on the Virginia, everything bounced off her flanks without causing injury. When finally the Virginia opened up her guns from short range, the USS Cumberland and the USS Congress were sunk in a matter of hours. Almost three hundred Union sailors were burned to death as the ships went down.

  The Virginia’s dominance of the waters would be a short-lived affair. Overnight, while she and her crew were resting, the Union admirals were planning. The White House was frantic with the belief that this extraordinary new vessel might well next turn her attentions to the Potomac River, sail into the estuary, and begin shelling the seat of the Union government within a day or two. She had to be stopped by all means possible.

  As it happened, the timing was perfect. The union forces’ brand-new and purpose-built ironclad, the USS Monitor, was that very night battering her way down through the Atlantic rollers on her way from her builders in Brooklyn. She reached the shelter of Hampton Roads just in time to hear the last of the gunfire from the Virginia—and despite her crew being dog-weary from the storms en route, took up station immediately alongside the Minnesota, her enormous revolving gun offering formidable protection. When the sun came up the following morning, and the Virginia steamed out from shelter, an historic battle was immediately joined.