Evan Nepean had been the Under-Secretary of the Home Office since March 1782. In the small and hierarchical world of the then British government, this was a position of considerable power and influence. Nepean’s counterpart at the Foreign Office, William Fraser, had no naval experience and little involvement in gathering intelligence on French naval operations. And Nepean’s Home Secretary from July 1782, Thomas Townshend, soon to become Lord Sydney, was supposedly not energetic. This may be debatable but it is entirely possible that Sydney was uneven in his attention to the quotidian affairs of the Office. Whatever the truth, when it came to the collection of French naval intelligence, Nepean almost single-handedly directed the espionage operations of the Home Office with little oversight from Sydney. And there were no formal budgetary restraints. The Home Secretary, and therefore Nepean, had an unlimited entitlement to draw on the Treasury for Secret Service funds, provided the money was for national defence or the detection of treason. In fact, between 1782 and 1801 the Treasury disbursed over £1.3 million for Secret Service operations, of which a significant proportion was drawn by Nepean.
Nepean took an unusually active and personal role in gathering French naval intelligence. He was intensely security conscious, tightly controlled the service and gave many detailed orders himself. In fact, all surviving copies of Home Office letters, accounts and ledgers in connection with Secret Service activities of the period are in his own hand. Ordinarily, clerks would perform the menial chirographic functions – writing up ledgers and laboriously listing amounts in columns of figures. But in Nepean’s time, he kept the business of the Secret Service effectively classified to himself.
The Home Office, from where Nepean conducted operations, was located on Whitehall. All of the British government departments were housed in a motley collection of buildings on or around Whitehall. None was purpose-built except the Admiralty. The Palace of Whitehall had once occupied much of the area but all except the Banqueting House went up in flames in January 1698 and was never rebuilt. In its time the palace had constituted the largest and most complex aggregation of government buildings in Europe. Although the palace ceased to exist, government Offices continued to cluster around Whitehall and the name became a metonym for government. In Nepean’s time, the Home Office carried on business upstairs in a nondescript and unpretentious two-storey building known as the Montague lodgings. Until 1782 the building had been occupied by the Board of Trade, and before that it had been the site of Henry VIII’s real tennis court. The whole of the office occupied only the first floor where there were four rooms, each with its own fireplace. The private Offices of the Home Secretary and Under-Secretary, but not that of the clerks, had carpets and curtains. The ten clerks shared a single room known as the boardroom where they sat at a long table with quill pens, ink and blotting sand, copying letters, papers and despatches. Correspondence was filed in leatherbound volumes stored in wooden presses around the room.
It was a small and intimate establishment. But notwithstanding its size, the Home Office handled a remarkable amount of business, all of which Nepean directed. In fact, during the 1780s decisions were made in the Home Office that affected every inhabited continent on earth. Nepean controlled the Office and opened the incoming correspondence, deciding which letters and despatches should go to Lord Sydney. In turn, Sydney sent the most important ones to George III. With some exceptions, Nepean would sign the outgoing correspondence. He also drafted letters for Sydney, who customarily signed only those addressed to the heads of other government departments, colonial governors and most private citizens. Sydney did not concern himself with the Secret Service, leaving it to Nepean.
Espionage agents engaged by the Home Office had no recognised institutional existence. Many, like Phillip, were naval officers on half pay. Some were merchants with a penchant for adventure. When their services were required by the Home Office, Nepean would engage and employ them on an ad hoc basis, sometimes for considerable periods. Phillip, for example, was engaged by Nepean and remunerated by the Home Office for twelve months from 14 October 1784 and for another twelve months from 1 December 1785. From Toulon in January 1785, and again on 21 March of that year, he sent reports to Nepean setting out his observations and confirming the administration’s apprehensions about French re-arming. Ominously, Phillip said that the French arsenal at Toulon was very superior to that which he had seen ‘before the War’ – referring to the early 1770s before the American Revolutionary Wars (1775–83) or the Third Colónia War (1774–78). Phillip’s second surviving report is numbered ‘No 5’ so it is evident that there were others, quite possibly from other ports. The two Toulon reports contain information about the escalation in French shipbuilding, including the importing of timber from Albania; the recruiting of shipwrights from neighbouring ports and the state of refitting of line-of-battle ships and frigates in the basin at Toulon. In one of those reports, Phillip observed that at Toulon harbour there were twelve men-of-war with their lower masts in and rigging up and nine frigates and store ships with their lower masts stepped.
Spying on each other’s navies was the ‘great game’ of the late eighteenth century. The French and English were constantly engaged in mutual espionage activities to assess the naval capacity of the other or to ascertain and emulate the latest advances in shipbuilding techniques. Each despatched clandestine missions to the ports of the other to gather information. After the end of the American Revolutionary Wars, Britain’s primary concern was with any increase in the French navy’s size and capacity and its possible deployment for global political and commercial advancement. France’s objective was to learn about the latest innovations in shipbuilding techniques in order to be able to match the Royal Navy’s prowess. While Phillip went about his work in Toulon, French spies reported from the Thames dockyards, and no doubt also from Portsmouth and Plymouth. They had been doing so throughout the century. Few reports survive but one of the most comprehensive was written by the French naval officer Daniel Lescallier in 1789, only a few years after Phillip was sent to the ports of France to investigate its naval force. Another earlier surviving report was written by Blaise Ollivier, a master shipwright from Brest. And among other examples, we know that one French officer visited Britain to examine the construction of naval vessels at the dockyards at Deptford, Woolwich and Chatham under the disguise of a ‘débonnaire bourgeois commerçant’ – an easygoing, middle-class businessman.
The work of such agents was dangerous and required discretion, but at least in England it was not as difficult as might have been thought. Although foreigners were forbidden to enter the Royal Navy’s arsenals and dockyards, it was easy enough to assess armed warships at close quarters on the river and in the ports. And the banks of the Thames were covered by a huge jumble of docks and dry-docks owned by large private shipyards that did not present the difficulties of access surrounding naval establishments. There the latest techniques could be readily observed – on which Lescallier reported in impressive detail. He described improvements in the cultivation and use of timber for shipbuilding and new techniques and developments in construction, copper sheathing, launching, tarring, pulleys, pumps and cordage. He even went so far as to include a summary of British naval administration and information on the salaries paid to the Lords of the Admiralty.
British intelligence was thought to be ‘prodigiously efficient’. In 1778, for example, less than 48 hours after the signing of the treaty of alliance between France and the American colonies, the terms of the treaty were passed on to London. But intelligence gathering operated at many levels and its quality was inevitably variable. Naval intelligence was a specialised area, but half pay officers such as Phillip, who were under orders to collect specified intelligence in closed areas, were not Nepean’s only sources of information. Sometimes intelligence was haphazardly obtained from enthusiastic informants who volunteered information of variable quality and invariably requested a fee for their trouble. Another regular conduit of information to Nepean on s
hipping news and naval affairs was Thomas Taylor, the Master of Lloyd’s Coffee House – an institution in eighteenth-century London and the pre-eminent coffee house for those with shipping and maritime connections. Thomas Taylor managed the operations of Lloyds for the whole of the period from 1774 to 1796. He knew all that there was to know about the arrivals, departures and losses of ships, of all European countries. As a source of naval intelligence, Taylor was so valuable that, as he did with Phillip, Nepean fostered a connection with him.
The rapid expansion of French naval shipping at Toulon was not the only cause for British concern in the mid 1780s and not the only subject of rumour and gossip in the coffee houses and taverns of London. During early 1785 Brest was the centre of much frenetic activity of a different kind. The expedition of the Comte de Lapérouse was planned in conscious emulation of the voyages of Captain Cook and designed to advance France’s reach of empire. Although it was promoted as having scientific and geographic objectives, it also had a political and commercial dimension. Louis XVI’s instructions, separate from those setting out Lapérouse’s scientific and geographic mandate, required him to consider and report upon the political conditions, the possibilities of commerce and the suitability for settlement of the lands visited by him. He was to note likely places for French settlement and report on all European commerce and possessions ‘which may be interesting … in a military point of view’. Among other things, he was directed to the South Pacific and specifically requested to ascertain whether the English had formed a settlement on the islands of New Zealand. If so, he was directed to report on the ‘condition, strength and object of the [English] settlement’.
The French curiosity as to whether the English had actually settled any of the newly discovered lands in the South Pacific was matched by an equivalent British concern that the French might themselves do so before they did. Thus Dorset, the British ambassador in Paris, demonstrated his anxiety when he reported in May 1785 that he had heard that Lapérouse had orders to visit New Zealand and that ‘the French have a design of establishing some kind of settlement there’. The following month, both Dorset and his friend Lord Dalrymple passed on intelligence, which each of them had separately received, that there was little room to doubt that the French had a desire to make a settlement in New Zealand by landing convicts there. In particular, the intelligence included the alarming but erroneous information that ‘sixty criminals from the prison at Bicêtre were last Monday conveyed under strong guard and with great secrecy to Brest, where they are to be embarked on board Monsieur de Lapérouse’s ships, and it is imagined that they are to be left to take possession of that lately discovered country’.
The British assumption that France might be engaged in a race for territory in New Zealand or New South Wales or both was more paranoid than real but it had a sound historical basis. There was widespread belief in France during the eighteenth century of the existence of a vast southern land. It was called ‘Gonneville land’ after the French explorer of the same name. And there was tremendous enthusiasm for the tales of the English pirate and explorer William Dampier, who had landed on the west coast of Australia in 1688. The first French translation of Dampier’s story appeared only a year after the original English publication, which was soon followed by seven more editions. Equally popular were Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, both of which were immediately translated into French. Two of Gulliver’s voyages were set in or off the Australian coast. By the middle of the century, French appetites for new discoveries in the southern seas were stimulated even more by the publication of Charles de Brosses’ popular two-volume Histoire des Navigationes aux Terres Australes (1756). It summarised the explorations of Abel Tasman and William Dampier and all that had so far been discovered about the southern seas. De Brosses was convinced that France had a unique opportunity to win wealth and glory by discovering and exploring these unknown lands. He urged Louis XV to ‘turn his gaze entirely to his navies … at a time like the present when a neighbouring power … has the manifest ambition of being ruler of the seas’. He was referring to Great Britain.
De Brosses’ encouragement may have had some effect, at least after the Seven Years War. Enlightenment aspirations and the confidence that came with the end of the war coincided with a surge in maritime and scientific exploration. The British moved first but France was not far behind. Commencing in 1764, ships of the Royal Navy carrying botanists, naturalists and astronomers undertook history-making scientific voyages to distant parts of the world. The first voyages were by the Dolphin and the Swallow, commanded by captains Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret. They were followed in 1766 when the French commander Louis Antoine de Bougainville set off on his voyage around the world (1766–69). In very the same year, the Admiralty commissioned Lieutenant James Cook to undertake the first of his three famous voyages (1768–70). When Cook returned without solving the puzzle of the unknown southern continent, Louis XV commissioned Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen to search for the fabled Terres Australes – in the hope of ‘improving France’s strategic position in the Indian Ocean’. De Kerguelen, like Phillip, had previous experience in espionage. Louis XV emphasised to him that finding the southern continent was one of the most important discoveries still to be made in the geography of the world. In March 1771, in a joint memorandum with his Minister of Marine, Louis XV commanded that de Kerguelen’s mission remain ‘secrète’.
De Kerguelen was the first Frenchman to go in search of the southern continent with the backing of the state. He did not solve the mystery but on 30 March 1772, less than two years after Cook first claimed possession of the east coast of Australia, de Kerguelen’s second in command, François de Saint-Aloüarn, landed on the west coast and claimed possession of it. The annexation ceremony took place on the cliffs above Turtle Bay on Dirk Hartog Island. Just as Cook had done, the French wandered inland and did not recognise any evidence of organised human occupation. They then raised the flag, read a formal proclamation claiming possession in the name of Louis XV, shouted ‘Vive Le Roi’ three times and fired three volleys of musket shot. Before leaving, they buried one of their seamen in the sand and left several bottles, a few French coins and a white ensign. Remarkably, Saint-Aloüarn’s annexation was not the only French activity in this part of the world at the time. Almost simultaneously in Van Diemen’s Land, another Frenchman, Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne, was making the first European contact with the Aboriginal people of what is now Tasmania.
Louis XVI inherited his grandfather’s enthusiasm, and more. After he ascended the throne in 1774, it soon became apparent that he was a keen geographer, an avid reader of the accounts of Captain Cook’s voyages and determined that France should rival Britain’s naval supremacy. His exploratory zeal was motivated by the impact of the Enlightenment and a desire for new knowledge of the geographical and scientific dimensions of the world. The flora and fauna brought back from past expeditions had stimulated advances in natural history, science, anthropology, medicine and geography and contributed to the sense of ‘improvement’ that characterised the age. The expedition of the Comte de Lapérouse was one of Louis XVI’s proudest achievements. The young King actively participated in drawing up the instructions for his commander and enthusiastically supported the expedition’s objects. Even on his way to the guillotine in 1793, he is supposed to have enquired, ‘What news of Lapérouse?’
Phillip could not have failed to be aware of Lapérouse’s expedition or of its significance while he was undercover in France between 1784 and 1786, especially after May 1785 when it began to be reported in newspapers. As it turned out, Lapérouse sailed from Brest on 1 August 1785 without convicts and had no plans to establish a colony – despite British apprehensions to the contrary. But this did not prevent the continuation of British suspicion and anxiety about the French naval build-up. On 1 December 1785 Phillip sought and obtained from the Admiralty an extension of his leave of absence, this time to go ‘on his private affairs�
�� to Hyères for a further twelve months. This was another implausible mask. For although Hyères was fast becoming a popular location for British visitors and expatriates, it was only ten miles east of Toulon. At the beginning of November Nepean confirmed the true purpose of Phillip’s leave by paying him another £160 of Secret Service money – once again recorded in his own hand in the Secret Service ledger.
Phillip’s instructions from Nepean were not confined to Toulon. They included ‘other ports of France’, of which Brest in western Brittany – France’s major naval base on the Atlantic – was the most significant. There were also Rochefort, Le Havre and Dunkirk. And by 1784, in the harbour at Cherbourg, the construction of several massive jetties had commenced. During the two-year period of his assignment, Phillip probably visited and investigated all of these ports. However, other than the two reports sent from Toulon in January and March 1785, nothing survives to indicate where Phillip lived and travelled in France; whether he adopted a disguise; what name he used; who he met; the circles in which he moved; or just how he carried out his responsibilities. But as the showpiece of the French naval machine, Toulon clearly featured in his peregrinations. Its old town was a place of narrow streets, small squares, white stone houses and many fountains. The town was secured by a formidable gate and drawbridge. And its harbour was one of the best natural anchorages on the Mediterranean and one of the largest in Europe. A naval arsenal and shipyard dominated the township and had done so since 1599. The waterfront was a hive of activity where thousands of tradesmen and workers were employed in the service of the French marine administration. Every trade and service associated with wooden ships could be found there – rope-makers and sailmakers, caulkers and coopers, timber merchants, providores, suppliers of pitch and tar and blacksmiths with their iron forges. The smell of paint, varnish, vinegar, timber and hemp was everywhere. Hemp was turned into rope in a long narrow building known as the ‘Corderie’, which was 21 yards wide by 350 yards long. This unique configuration was designed to enable ropes to be twisted and stretched along the entire length of the building by convicts who worked in an enormous treadmill like plodding mules. They came from the nearby Bagne of Toulon, the notorious prison created in 1748 to house the convicts who, in an earlier era, had been sentenced to row the galley ships of the French Mediterranean fleet.
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