In April France dispatched the Toulon squadron to North America but retained a more powerful fleet at Brest. The Admiralty responded by sending half of its ships of the line to the West Indies while keeping back the remainder of the fleet to match the French squadron at Brest. In July at Ushant, the island that sits at the mouth of the English Channel and marks the north-westernmost point of France, the two fleets came together and the French inflicted considerable damage on the British. Admiral Keppel, who bore the brunt of the indignity, explained that the object of the French guns ‘was at the masts and rigging and they have crippled the fleet in that respect beyond any degree I ever before saw’.
By the spring of 1779, a French invasion of England appeared imminent. In June, when Spain joined forces with France, it seemed certain. Their combined fleet in the English Channel numbered 66 ships of the line, while the Royal Navy could marshal only half that number. The threat of invasion was the most formidable that England had faced since the Spanish Armada in 1588. One commentator observed that there was ‘great affright and terror in every part of the kingdom’. At Plymouth, many shopkeepers and their families fled inland. And a royal proclamation directed that all horses and cattle be driven from the coast.
In this war, unlike in the Seven Years War, Phillip would not participate in any of the major battles. The responsibilities given to him, initially by Lord Sandwich at the Admiralty, and later by Evan Nepean at the Home Office, would be more clandestine, reflecting his unique experience and his particular talents. But Phillip’s first task was promotion. In Portugal’s navy, he had held the rank of captain and commanded the best ship, but in Britain’s navy he was still a mere lieutenant. And his patron Augustus Hervey had retired as a Lord of the Admiralty in 1775 and ceased to be influential. Despite a testimonial from his Portuguese service that described him as ‘one of the officers of the most distinct merit that the Queen has in her service in the navy’, Phillip could not assume that promotion and command would come easily or immediately. For in Great Britain’s eighteenth-century navy, there were always ‘many suitors and little to bestow’ and many a talented junior officer would remain undistinguished.
For Sandwich, the distribution of promotion, employment and distinction was his most vexatious single responsibility. Nonetheless he had, it was said, a favourite type of sea Officer: one who was able, hardworking, somewhat obscure and not closely linked with any obvious political rivals. Phillip fitted this description and wasted no time pressing his claims. In late 1778, on the final leg of his homeward voyage on the packet boat from Lisbon, he sighted more than 30 French ships sailing south from Brest. Immediately on the arrival of his coach in London, Phillip reported his observations to Philip Stephens, the Admiralty Secretary, announcing that he had returned to His Majesty’s service and adding adroitly that he had most recently commanded the Portuguese Santa Antonio.
Having brought himself to notice, Phillip was suitably rewarded. On 9 October 1778, just four days after he arrived back in London, he was appointed as the first lieutenant of the Alexander, a 74-gun line-ofbattle ship with a crew of over 600 men. For the next eleven months she cruised as part of the Channel fleet, sailing out to the western approaches to meet the threat from the combined French and Spanish navies. As first lieutenant, Phillip was the second in command – the highest-ranking officer below the captain and responsible for the ship’s day-to-day operations. Of all the officers on a ship, the first lieutenant was the one subject to the crew’s most constant scrutiny. They looked to him for his skill and professionalism because the safety of the ship often rested on his decisions. And they depended on his fairness, for among many other things, he devised the sleeping plan and determined how much living space each seaman would have and with whom he would share it. It was a saying among seamen:
that every man’s comfort afloat depended upon the kind of man a ship had for its first lieutenant, for that he was the Prime Minister of the small community over which the captain ruled as absolute Monarch, and as every measure and arrangement was to be carried out by him, it was better to sail with a bad captain and a good first lieutenant than to have the conditions reversed.
Phillip must have proved to be a worthy first lieutenant, for when the fleet returned to Spithead in September 1779, he was immediately promoted to the rank of master and commander. He was then 40 years old. His new rank was the navy’s first position of independent command – effectively captain of a smaller vessel that was not rated. The rating system categorised all line-of-battle ships and frigates into six ‘rates’ that were nominally determined by the number of guns each ship carried. The first, second, third and fourth rates were the huge line-of-battle ships that carried between 50 and 100 guns. The fifth and sixth rates were the frigates. They were not ‘ships of the line’ and usually only carried between 24 and 36 guns. The non-rated vessels included sloops, brigs and fire ships. Phillip’s first command in the Royal Navy was of the Basilisk, a fire ship. She carried eight guns and a crew of 45.
Fire ships were a permanent part of all eighteenth-century naval fleets and had been used since at least Alexander the Great’s Siege of Tyre in 332 BCE. For understandable reasons, their command carried additional dangers and special rewards. When packed with explosives a fire ship could be used to devastating effect against a fleet at anchor. With the wind in the right direction, it would be cut loose and allowed to drift towards the target. If there were no wind, the crew would steer it towards the objective, before abandoning ship and escaping, all going well, in a small pinnace. If they were successful in destroying an enemy ship of over 40 guns, the crew would receive £10 each, and the commander had a choice between £100 and a medal with gold chain. Phillip’s opportunity for derring-do, however, never arose. The Basilisk was too old and weak for immediate operations and required extensive fitting out and repairs to make her seaworthy. In fact, so much time was required to make the Basilisk seaworthy that after months of waiting, dockyard officials abandoned the ship in early 1780 as not worth repairing. Phillip’s appointment was never consummated and the Basilisk did not put to sea under his command.
While Phillip waited for the Basilisk to be repaired, he took other steps to distinguish himself. On 5 September 1779, he wrote to Sandwich requesting permission to cruise as a volunteer on the Victory. We cannot be entirely certain that Sandwich acceded to Phillip’s request. His name does not appear in the Victory’s muster book, although that by itself would not be determinative. If Phillip did serve on the Victory, it would have been an enviable experience for a man of his ambition. The Victory was the flagship of the Channel fleet; years later she would be Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar. The Victory was, in truth, a manoeuvrable floating weapons platform. She carried 100 great guns distributed across her three gun decks, the quarterdeck and the forecastle. The sheer weight of the largest of these great guns was enormous. But they were also a marvel of contemporary engineering. By the mid eighteenth century, foundries had begun to cast cannon in solid iron, without a barrel or bore hole, which would then be painstakingly drilled using a boring lathe linked to a horse-mill around which plodding horses endlessly circumvolved. The job could take weeks, but the result was a precisely machined barrel free of the usual imperfections that reduced the efficiency and accuracy of firing.
Phillip had an interest in naval ordnance but it was the Victory’s prestige and symbolism that must naturally have acted as a magnet for him. And if he did serve as a volunteer on the Victory, he may have come in contact with Evan Nepean, if he had not already done so. For there is a suggestion, of questionable veracity perhaps, that in late 1779 Nepean was the Victory’s purser. Nepean certainly served as a ship’s purser, notably on the Foudroyant. In the coming years, he would become one of the most influential men in Whitehall.
Sandwich on the other hand had been First Lord of the Admiralty when Phillip was granted permission to travel to France during the 1773–74 alarm and again when Phillip took leave of absence to serve in the Portugu
ese navy in 1774. He was still there when Phillip returned from Brazil and continued in the position until the change of government in 1782. He was one of the dominant figures in the administration and was reputed to have been an excellent judge of men – and of himself. When Phillip came to know him, Sandwich was at the peak of his career. He presided over the whole of the operational strategy of the Georgian navy from the Admiralty building on Whitehall, a building that was constructed in 1726 as the first purpose-built government office in Britain. Symbolically, in the Admiralty Board Room, where the great discoveries of Cook were planned and Nelson’s victories were later celebrated, the First Lord sat beneath a wind dial over a circular map of the world. The wind dial was connected to a weather vane on the roof. It informed the Sea Lords which way the wind was blowing, which in turn determined whether the fleet in the Solent could be ordered to sail. When a decision was made, the Admiralty’s instructions were sent to the fleet by semaphore, relayed by teams of signalmen stationed on prominent points such as churches all the way to the Hampshire coast. By this means, a message from Sandwich at the Admiralty Board in Whitehall could reach Portsmouth in twelve minutes.
In March and April 1780, with the Basilisk unfit to go to sea and without a ship on which to serve, Phillip appears to have had the first of a series of private consultations with Sandwich. His euphemistic explanation was that private affairs took him to London. But it seems safe to assume that over a period of four weeks in the spring of that year, Phillip consulted Sandwich at the Admiralty, sharing his charts and his experiences of South America. Spain’s recent entry into the war had generated renewed interest in the vulnerability of its South American possessions. In July Phillip wrote to Sandwich, reminding him of his promise that when an occasion offered he would be provided with ‘an opportunity of getting what is due to me at Lisbon’. Pointedly, he added that service in any part of the world whatsoever would be agreeable to him. For the rest of 1780, however, there was no foreign service nor even Channel service. Phillip stayed in London, for at least part of the time with John and Eleanor Lane, from where he corresponded with Stephens, the Admiralty Secretary. His naval service was limited to light relieving duties for the captains of the St Albans and the Magnanime while their ships were being fitted out on the Thames.
January 1781 seems to have brought the reward that Phillip sought. During that month, he provided more private advice to Sandwich about the east coast of South America. He then disappeared until October. Significantly, his reappearance was promptly followed by his promotion to captain of the Ariadne. The inference is reasonable that his promotion was a reward for services rendered during these nine months.
There is a legend about Phillip that may have its genesis in these missing and undocumented months. According to the legend, when Phillip’s ship’s company and its cargo of Portuguese convicts were confronted with an epidemic of illness during a voyage across the Atlantic, Phillip persuaded the healthiest prisoners that if they assisted him in working the ship, he would in return represent their good behaviour to the Portuguese King. Not only was the voyage successfully completed and the prisoners subsequently emancipated, but they were also given small grants of land in Brazil. The provenance of this story may lie in the work Phillip did transporting troops, and possibly degredados, between Rio de Janeiro and Colonia during his Portuguese service between 1775 and 1778. But contemporary newspaper reports and respected historians speak uniformly of Phillip’s trans-Atlantic transport of 400 criminals ‘from Lisbon to the Brasils’. As Phillip’s time during his service with the Portuguese navy is almost entirely accounted for, and there is no mention of any such assignment, or any time during which it might have occurred, it is likely that if there were a trans-Atlantic crossing with convicts, it occurred later and in different circumstances.
The evidence to support the legend is circumstantial but it is unlikely that the newspaper report is pure invention. The known facts are these. Throughout 1780 the Admiralty had been considering how Great Britain might most effectively wound Spain, which had joined in the war in 1779 on the side of France and the American colonies. In fact, the Spanish suspected an attack in South America and believed that Phillip would have command of any British expedition because of his known experience of Rio de Janeiro. Sandwich consulted Phillip in March and April 1780, no doubt discussing and reviewing with him the secret charts that Phillip had made of the South American coastline and harbours while serving in the Portuguese navy. By November 1780, the Cabinet had resolved to send a flying squadron to the Plate estuary under the command of Commodore George Johnstone. Its ambitious purpose was the sacking of the Spanish settlements at Buenos Aires, Maldonado and Montevideo and the capture of the Spanish treasure fleet. Advice was sought from Phillip and also from McDouall, Phillip’s former commander in the Portuguese navy.
McDouall estimated the Spanish forces to be one line-of-battle ship, three frigates and 5000 troops. It is clear from later despatches that Phillip believed the Spanish forces were much weaker than that. The strategic objective of the proposal was the disruption of trade between Spain and Buenos Aires and the capture of Spanish bullion being transported from Peru and Chile around Cape Horn to Buenos Aires. Before the plan could be implemented, however, there were complications as a result of the British declaration of war against the Dutch on 20 December 1780. This opened up a new front and as a result, the squadron’s initial target became the Dutch-owned Cape Town. Only then, it seemed, would the squadron swing across the South Atlantic Ocean to the Plate estuary.
In January 1781 Sandwich called Phillip to London where his South American charts were again pored over. In his letter to Sandwich dated 17 January 1781, Phillip advised the First Lord that he had delivered sealed copies of the charts to his friend John Lane in Lombard Street. He clearly expected imminent orders, observing in his letter that ‘it is probable that I may be call’d forth by your Lordship at very short notice’. At the time, the Portuguese were sending large numbers of recruits, including convicts and degredados, to India via Brazil. Johnstone’s expedition sailed on 13 March but Phillip was not part of it and had probably already set off in January. At the Azores, Johnstone sent McDouall ahead to Rio de Janeiro, among other things, to enquire about a regiment of fusiliers ‘being sent from Lisbon via Rio de Janeiro to Buenos Aires’. A fusilier was a common private soldier and the lowest rank of infantryman – the type that the Duke of Wellington would later describe as ‘the scum of the earth … who enlist for drink’. Many of them were convicts and degredados.
This is where the legend about Phillip probably has its origin. It seems distinctly possible that Phillip may have sailed to South America ahead of Johnstone, transporting Portuguese troops or convicts. These were the fusiliers for whom McDouall was searching. If Phillip did do so, and if there were an outbreak of disease during the voyage, this would explain the legend and the later newspaper reports about Phillip’s skill in handling convicts. The speculation gains credibility from the fact that Johnstone’s initial recommendation was for 2500 troops, yet the Cabinet only agreed to 1000 troops. The need for additional troops was obvious and Sandwich may just have been sufficiently imperious to go about secretly procuring additional troops his own way, in league with Phillip and the Portuguese. The truth, however, is opaque.
In fact, circumstances conspired against Phillip. Johnstone’s intended raid on the Spanish settlements in the Plate estuary never eventuated. The fleet under his command was mauled en route by a French squadron under Admiral de Suffren at the Cape Verde Islands and the planned attack on the Dutch at the Cape was abandoned. Instead of swinging across to South America, Johnstone sent the British troops onward to India and took his own damaged squadron to the safety of the harbour at Jamestown on the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. For Phillip, this was a grand opportunity lost. Later reports confirm how ardently he felt about the intended raids on the Spanish settlements in the Plate estuary. On two subsequent occasions he expressed his regret
, reiterating his keenness for the expedition and sighing for past disappointments, knowing that the Spanish forces had never been as numerous as McDouall had estimated. He later reminisced to Nepean with obvious feeling – ‘You know how much I was interested in the intended expedition against Monte Video.’
Whatever Phillip had in truth been doing since January 1781, we do know that by October he was back in England and that early that month the Admiralty appointed him as acting captain of the Ariadne, a 24-gun frigate. In November he was confirmed in command of his ship and promoted to the rank of post captain. Promotion to the rank of post captain brought with it independence, prestige and the chance of wealth. There was no examination and seniority was not a determinative factor – just a good reputation for professional ability. Without it, even the well connected fared badly. The selection was made by the naval members of the Admiralty Board, who acted on recommendations and their own personal knowledge. In the case of ships on foreign service, the commander-in-chief of an overseas station might promote officers, subject to later confirmation by the Board. officers distinguished in action were usually given priority, although no seaman, let alone the Admiralty Board, wanted ‘a mere fighting blockhead without ten grains of commonsense’. That, in any event, was never Phillip’s style.
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