When the Ariadne’s fit-out was completed, she joined several squadrons patrolling in the Channel. Having already been a captain in the Portuguese navy, where he had commanded both a frigate and a line-of-battle ship, Phillip knew the responsibilities of leadership that were involved. He was the person responsible for the route the ship took, the food the men ate, the drink they were allowed and the discipline they received. If the men were fortunate, a bold captain might secure a ‘prize’ to be shared among them. On a well-run ship, united in the mutual experience of a dangerous profession, in which teamwork was essential to survival, and discomforts were shared, ties of personal loyalty to the captain often developed. If a captain were humane and successful, he generated trust and respect, even love, and men would follow him loyally from ship to ship.
On 30 November 1781 the Ariadne was ordered to proceed to the Elbe River to escort a transport ship bringing a detachment of Hanoverian troops to England en route to service with the British army in India. This would be a sensitive assignment requiring fortitude and flexibility, and Phillip’s fluent German would be of undoubted assistance. The Elbe River meets the North Sea at Cuxhaven, a port town and a centre for shipping, shipbuilding and fishing. Its harbour was well known for its hazardous features; at low tide, its waters receded so far that the island of Neuwerk, several miles offshore, could be reached on foot. In winter the harbour froze, preventing the movement of inbound and outbound shipping and driving to pieces any wooden vessels still moored there.
George III was the third successive British Hanoverian monarch and the Elector of Hanover. Hanoverian troops were generally loyal to Great Britain and usually responded favourably to British requests for reinforcements. Among other engagements, the 15th and 16th Hanoverian Regiments were called upon in 1782–83 to serve under British command in India where the last distant battles of the American Revolutionary Wars were taking place against the French and Dutch. It was some of these troops that Phillip was to escort to England. But the assignment did not go smoothly.
Phillip reached Cuxhaven on 28 December 1781. It was late in the season and ice was expected at any moment. The transport ship that Phillip had been sent to escort was empty: the troops had mutinied and the harbour master had ordered her to be run ashore, out of the reach of the impending ice. Phillip moved swiftly to locate the troops, who had withdrawn to Otterdorf, and within 48 hours he had arranged with their commanding officer to embark them on his own ship, the Ariadne. He hoped to use his frigate to get the troops out of the harbour before it froze. But time and weather were against him, and the estuary filled with ice before he could act. As no wooden ship could withstand the inexorable pressure of the encroaching ice, the Cuxhaven pilots insisted to Phillip that he run the Ariadne into the mud to prevent her being crushed. They made clear that they would refuse to ‘take any further charge of her if she remained at Anchor’. Phillip had no choice but to remove her guns and equipment and drive the Ariadne clear of danger. For the next two months, he waited out the winter in Saxony. He was not inactive, however, moving in influential circles and taking the opportunity to discuss the recruitment of German seamen for the Royal Navy with one of George III’s Hanoverian Privy Councillors. When Phillip eventually returned with the Hanoverian troops in March 1782, he recommended to the Admiralty that it station an officer at Stade to recruit among the seamen of Hamburg and Hanover.
In the following months of 1782 the Ariadne cruised in the English Channel, patrolling along the southern coast and in the western approaches. Phillip brought on board a new lieutenant, Philip Gidley King, but then left his ship towards the end of summer to attend to ‘private affairs’ in London. Once again, Phillip was involved in consultations concerning possible intrigue in South America. The further occasion for doing so followed the change of government that occurred in March 1782. Sandwich retired at the Admiralty, Lord Shelburne became Home Secretary and Evan Nepean became his Under-Secretary. This was the beginning of Nepean’s long reign of influence. Both Shelburne and Nepean maintained Sandwich’s interest in attacking the Spanish in South America – and so did Thomas Townshend (later Lord Sydney), who became Home Secretary in July when Shelburne moved to Prime Minister. Nepean naturally played a central role. Shelburne left a memorandum for Sydney listing matters requiring his urgent attention, including ‘Preparations and Plans for W. India [Spanish America]. Expeditions require to be set forward – Major Dalrymple has a Plan against the Spanish settlements’.
Coincidentally, during August widespread reports emerged of insurrection by the native Indians and Creoles against the Spanish in South America. This seems to have been both the catalyst and the opportunity that Britain sought. On 13 August, Shelburne openly informed the Portuguese ambassador that Britain might try to capture the Spanish settlements on the Plate estuary and offer assistance to the rebellious Creoles and Indians against Spain. Phillip spent late August and most of September in London, again ostensibly on ‘private affairs’. In reality he was in discussion about attacks on the Spanish settlements, offering private advice to the new administration about the Plate estuary and the strength of Spanish forces there. Just as had been done with Sandwich in 1780–81, Phillip’s charts of the South American coastline were scrutinised. On this occasion, the consultations were not at the Admiralty but at the Home Office with Sydney and Nepean. These were the beginnings of a close relationship between the three men. And Shelburne, as Prime Minister, oversaw the proposal. In fact, Phillip was so extensively engaged in these consultations with the administration that by 25 September Augustus Keppel, who was by then the First Lord of the Admiralty, asked peevishly if he could have him back so that he could ‘send him to his ship’. When Phillip eventually sailed downriver a few days later the Portuguese ambassador, aware of the latest intelligence, reported to Lisbon that there was good reason to suppose that Captain Phillip was going ‘to investigate the situation in the River Plate’. Phillip’s experience in Brazil was beginning to pay dividends, both for him and for the administration.
Keppel’s inquiry as to whether the administration had finished with Phillip occurred on the same day on which the Cabinet, led by Shelburne, firmly decided to press ahead with the scheme to attack Spain in South America. One historian has referred to it as the ‘Phillip plan’. The capture of some of Spain’s South American settlements was seen as a means of breaking the impasse in the peace negotiations. On 26 September the Navy Board informed the Home Office that it would be necessary to have warships and transports, landing boats, artillery, ordnance and provisions including ‘arms for the Chileans and presents for the Indians’. The expedition was known as the ‘Southern Expedition’ and its object was to ‘give great alarm and probably do great Mischief in support of the Rebellion’. Not to put too fine a point on it, the British intended to foment an incipient insurrection in a foreign country as part of a wider diplomatic strategy. If all went according to plan, the expedition would eventually proceed to India and the East Indies to provide reinforcements of ships and troops to meet the French and Dutch threat faced by Admiral Hughes’ India Squadron.
Progress was, however, slow. As events unfolded, anxiety about the urgent need for a swift increase in the naval forces in the East appears to have become the paramount consideration. The priority of the proposed attack on the Spanish settlements in the Plate estuary receded in importance. In November Nepean requested the Admiralty to prepare three line-of-battle ships and a frigate ‘with all possible expedition’. Reserves of stores and provisions, and transports carrying troops, could follow later. Expedition, indeed haste, certainly seemed to be the order of the day. A few days before Christmas 1782, the Lords of the Admiralty ordered Phillip to hold himself ready for foreign service. Two days later he was commissioned as captain of the Europe, a 64-gun line-of-battle ship, taking command a few days later and sailing on 16 January 1783. The squadron, under the command of Robert Kingsmill, consisted of the 74-gun Elizabeth, the 70-gun Grafton, the 31-gun Iphigenia and the Eur
ope. The alacrity with which the expedition was despatched was counter-productive – winter conditions in the North Atlantic were never propitious for sailing.
CHAPTER 6
CAPTAIN OF THE EUROPE
The American Revolutionary Wars in the East and Phillip’s command of the Europe
The Europe was Phillip’s first line-of-battle ship in the Royal Navy, something for which he had waited ever since completing his meritorious Portuguese service four years earlier. He was now 44, somewhat old for such an appointment, but more than ready to acquit himself. And his sense of the expedition’s significance must have been reinforced by the urgency that accompanied his appointment as captain and the speed of the squadron’s embarkation in mid winter. His charge was a third-rate line-of-battle ship with a complement of approximately 600 men. As a class, third-rates were not as large or as powerful as first- and second-rate vessels. They had fewer guns and only two gun decks, not three. But they were more numerous and more manoeuvrable than larger ships of the line and were often considered the optimal configuration.
In India and the East Indies, the war that had started as a rebellion by the thirteen American colonies had developed a distant and improbable life of its own. France’s decision to help the American cause made its Indian territories and possessions a legitimate target. Within months of France joining the war in 1778, the British laid siege to the French port of Pondicherry and moved on French holdings on the west coast of India, including the key port of Mahé. When the French Admiral de Suffren was eventually despatched to India to redress the situation, the stage was set for a naval war between Great Britain and France in the Bay of Bengal. On four separate occasions in 1782, de Suffren’s squadron and the British India Squadron under Sir Edward Hughes met in full battle – off Sadras on 17 February, Providien on 12 April, Nagapatam on 6 July and Trincomalee on 3 September. They would do so one more time, on 20 June 1783 off Cuddalore, unaware that by then the war had ended. Although he did not yet know it, this was the theatre of war to which Phillip was headed.
In late January 1783, when the violent gales and winter seas in the Bay of Biscay swept through Phillip’s squadron, he lost sight of the other ships. The Grafton had lost her mainmast, the Iphigenia had sprung her bowsprit and Commodore Kingsmill’s Elizabeth was in distress. Their captains, including Kingsmill, returned to England. The Europe pressed ahead alone. One seaman wrote subsequently, referring to Phillip, that ‘our captain dreaded the idea of an order to return’. We will never quite know what motivated Phillip, but once he departed from Portsmouth, his return was a distant prospect. When he opened his first rendezvous directing him to Madeira, he did not know that approximately a week earlier at Versailles, the British government’s emissary in Paris had exchanged peace declarations with the representatives of the new ‘United States’ for the mutual cessation of hostilities. The declarations were part of a general armistice between all of the belligerents except the Dutch republic, which held out until 2 September. The truce eventually led to the series of treaties that formally concluded the global war. Great Britain, France, Spain and the United States signed their treaties on 3 September 1783. The Dutch eventually signed a separate peace treaty on 20 May 1784. All of this passed Phillip by. Oblivious of the truce, he set his course for sundrenched Madeira, the Portuguese island in the Atlantic 500 miles west of Casablanca. From the moment he separated from his squadron, and for the next fifteen months, while the western world readjusted to peace, he was alone at sea on the Europe – far from the intrigues of Whitehall, the demands of the Admiralty and the politics of the day.
Although the Europe was alone, Phillip was not without companions. He brought with him a number of followers including Gidley King, who had joined him briefly the year before on the Ariadne during her short period of Channel service. Gidley King was 20 years younger than Phillip and became his lifelong friend and admirer. The attractive aphorism describing Phillip as someone in whom ‘is blended, which is not common with captains, the gentleman, the scholar and the seaman’ has its origin with him. The ship’s complement also included a number of captain’s servants whose surnames suggest that Phillip exercised the same patronage that gave him a start 30 years earlier. There was a Harry Duncombe, presumably a relative of his friend Charles Slingsby Duncombe. There was a Thomas Lane, presumably a relative of Phillip’s close friend and banker, John Lane. And there were family relatives too – Gayton (or Gaiton) and Herbert. Everitt’s widow was Elizabth Gaiton Everitt and of course his mother’s first husband was John Herbert.
It is also possible that a woman came on board in the Cape Verde islands for whom Phillip had a distinct partiality. The Europe had proceeded directly to Port Praia in the Cape Verde islands and never made the first planned rendezvous at Madeira. Philip subsequently provided a lengthy explanation to the Admiralty for the change of course – that the weather continued to be bad; that there were only two days when the lower deck ports could be open for fresh air; that scurvy had consequently appeared among the crew; and that a malfunctioning of the ship’s compasses placed the ship 70 leagues off course. The passage to Port Praia does appear to have been difficult, for fresh water ran short, leading Phillip to put himself and his officers on two quarts of water a day, though he refused to ration the crew. However, the ship’s boatswain Edward Spain said that Phillip had no intention of calling at Madeira ‘lest there be orders there for us to return to England’. Whatever the reason, the Europe limped into Port Praia on 1 March 1783 where the ship was repaired as best it could and wood, water, food and livestock, including pigs, goats, fowls and turkeys, were taken on board. Also brought on board were four women, one of whom, a Mrs Brooks, is said to have captured Phillip’s affection – and gained free access to the great cabin.
The presence of women on board fighting ships was not at all unusual in the eighteenth century. The practice was originally tolerated in peacetime but it continued during times of war too. Most common were the wives of warrant officers such as the gunner, carpenter or purser, all of whom had a higher status than the ratings. Like the boys and the captain’s servants, women were often not entered on the ship’s books and their status was unofficial. Sometimes they brought children with them and some even gave birth at sea. There was a supposed understanding that such women should be plain in order to avoid unwanted disruption. But any such restriction is doubtful and it certainly did not apply to senior officers who carried women to sea with them. Captains were in the best position to indulge themselves but other officers did so as well. And service in foreign stations naturally seemed to generate more liaisons. Augustus Hervey had a woman on board in the Mediterranean for some time. And in the North American station in the 1760s, Lord Colville showed a marked reluctance to investigate claims that his commanders were carrying ‘lewd women’ to sea. Invariably the practice was more likely on a distant ship, remote from an Admiral’s eye. Providentially, this was the Europe’s situation when she called at the Cape Verde islands.
It is quite impossible, however, to be sure about Phillip’s personal arrangements. No one refers to the woman except Spain, whose journal is not wholly reliable. He was a crew member of American origin who had been pressed into naval service and bore a grudge against Phillip. But his account cannot be entirely rejected. Unreliable witnesses more often embroider the truth rather than construct a wholesale fabrication. Elements of Spain’s story, possibly much of it, may well reflect the reality. There was also something vaguely headstrong about Phillip’s behaviour on this expedition, at least at the start. Perhaps it was simply overconfidence and impatience. He was, it seems, unwavering in his determination to complete the mission. When in the Bay of Biscay, prudence might have dictated that he return to Portsmouth with the rest of the squadron. And when, three months later, the Europe reached the harbour at Rio de Janeiro, he conducted himself with a distinct and uncharacteristic haughtiness – quite unlike the gentleman whom Lavradio had praised as not suffering from those exaggerated and un
bearable excesses of temper for which English naval officers were renowned.
For reasons best known to himself, when the Europe entered the harbour at Rio de Janeiro, Phillip ignored the long-standing Portuguese regulations that applied at the port. Everyone knew that a visiting ship was required to stop off the fort at Santa Cruz and wait there for instructions. A boat would come out from the town with an official to ascertain the purpose of the visit. If permission were granted, the ship would be allowed to proceed to an anchorage under the guns on the island of Ilha das Cobras. Guard boats would then encircle the ship to ensure that no contraband changed hands. And a team of officials would then come on board to examine the captain, the senior officers, the ship’s papers, the log book and the cargo, if any. Only when this process was complete would the Viceroy decide how long the ship should be allowed to stay and under what conditions.
Perhaps Phillip thought he was emulating Cook, who had a contretemps with the Portuguese authorities in Rio de Janeiro in 1768. Perhaps he thought that his illustrious record of Portuguese service entitled him to special treatment. Whatever the reason, he simply sailed past Santa Cruz and should not have been surprised when he was duly fired on. He then reacted like the excited Englishman that he was not, at least not usually. He had only himself to blame, but still protested vigorously and demanded satisfaction for the ‘insult’ to which he had been subjected. The language of his account of the incident seems almost laughingly inappropriate. He told the Admiralty that when the fort fired on him:
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