Struggle for Sea Power : A Naval History of American Independence (9781782397403)

by Willis, Sam

  An interesting offshoot of this approach is that I have taken care to emphasize the reverse image – the intriguing paradox of sailors operating and fighting ashore – and this soon became a dominant theme. Almost every major military operation had a significant maritime component, for it was impossible to move any meaningful distance around colonial America without quickly finding oneself confronted by a river, estuary or lake which was impassable without significant maritime resources and skills. One of the most important parts of Washington’s army – and, on several occasions, the most important part – was a regiment of mariners from Marblehead, Massachusetts. On more than one occasion land-battles were contested entirely by sailors on both sides firing naval guns from land-batteries. The presence and, perhaps even more so, the absence of sailors at critical moments in crucial theatres sent this war hurtling off in unexpected directions.

  Another significant approach I have adopted has been to explore the little or completely unknown maritime aspects of otherwise well-known campaigns. Consider the famous battles of Lexington and Concord. Known most widely for the skirmishing on Lexington Common and in the woods on the way back to Boston, there were key naval aspects to the operation at both its beginning and end that directly affected its outcome. Then, the way that the battle was interpreted in Britain, which turned on the key question of who fired first, was directly influenced by a trans-Atlantic maritime race for intelligence. Consider also Benedict Arnold’s ‘march’ through the Maine wilderness to Quebec in 1775, one of the best-known military campaigns of the period. This was actually an amphibious operation from start to finish. Arnold’s troops first sailed from Newburyport in Massachusetts to the Kennebec River in Maine in a fleet of eleven ships and then headed into the wilderness with a fleet of 220 bateaux, which brought them down to the banks of the St Lawrence, but on the wrong side of the river to Quebec. Even the final act of the ‘march’, therefore, was a voyage. And what of Washington crossing the Delaware in 1777, sparking a hugely significant revival of American fortunes? Now that maritime operation is famous, one of the most famous maritime operations of the war, but did you know that Washington actually crossed the Delaware four times? Its popular title is actually misleading: ‘Washington’s Crossings’ would be far more accurate. Finally, at least for now, what of the most famous naval event of the war, the battle of the Chesapeake and Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown? Intriguingly, Cornwallis was not as isolated in Yorktown as we might think, helplessly stranded and waiting for naval rescue; in fact he had nearly 1,000 sailors embedded with his army and a fleet of sixty-eight ships to hand. Sixty-eight!

  Above all, however, I have tried to emphasize just how difficult it was to wage naval war of any type in this period and the different ways that difficulty could be experienced. Naval warfare, for example, raised unique problems simply because of the slowness of communication. It would usually take at least a month for a message to travel across the Atlantic and, of course, twice as long to receive a reply. Key decision-makers, therefore, were working not with real-time information but with historical documents; in a curious link across the centuries, military commanders had to analyse information as historians.

  The idea of a naval ‘strategy’ as we might conceive it was also rudimentary. The word did not even exist. That is not to say that planning or strategic thought was not attempted, but that war planners had only a loose understanding of exactly how one theatre of war would affect another, while capability was so limited and unpredictable that, when combined with the slowness of communication, any real planning was far more likely to fail than succeed. Sea power was hardly a surgical instrument of war, and this was not an era of men leaning over huge chart tables moving little model ships around: so many here to meet this threat; so many there to put pressure on that government; so many here to defend trade or blockade the enemy. Indeed, if there is one prominent theme to emerge from the operations described in this book, it is that, with only a handful of exceptions, none of them worked out as planned. The weather also played an immense part. Naval warfare in the age of sail was always influenced by the weather, but its impact seems to have been particularly severe in this war.

  At the level of tactics, naval operations were confounded by limitations in signalling and by the fact that there was no shared inter-service doctrine. In essence, this meant that a fleet under one commander in one part of the world would operate with different signals, tactics and doctrine from another fleet, though from the same nation, elsewhere in the world. It is, in fact, more helpful to think of a navy not as one navy but as numerous different navies that worked in different ways. This did not make for reliable performance. Fleets working in international alliances suffered particularly severely from this type of problem. It was almost impossible to get different fleets within a single navy to co-operate with each other, let alone different fleets from different navies.

  From the point of view of the economist and administrator, navies were enormously expensive to run and very difficult to maintain at any level of strength. Men had to be found to man the ships, and those men then had to be fed, clothed and kept healthy. In some theatres, such as the Caribbean, this was a herculean task and one at which everyone failed, but then, as we shall also see, every naval administration failed at this task even in the comfort of home waters. The occasional examples of success in this war within a war, when fleets were well manned and healthy, become fascinating exceptions.

  All navies faced similar problems, but both old and new navies also had their own unique challenges. While the British, for example, were struggling with the problem of getting 5,000 sailors into a fleet without infecting one another with typhus, and the French with how to source sufficient nails to secure sheets of copper to their ships’ hulls, the Americans grappled with problems specific to fledgling navies. What rules and regulations should the men abide by at sea? How were prizes to be distributed and administered? Even the most basic questions took up time and mental effort. Who was going to design the uniform? And what was it going to look like?

  This struggle with sea power is one of the most important themes of this book. Yes, it describes the struggle for sea power that was fought between various nations, but it also explains how the difficulty of wielding sea power shaped the modern world. True, the battle of the Chesapeake turned the tide towards America and her allies at a crucial moment and can therefore be seen as an example of how sea power affected the war; but, in many respects, it is the exception that has been used to prove the rule. Time and again, it is held aloft as an example of how the magic wand of sea power could be waved to bring nations and empires to their knees, but nothing could actually be further from the truth. The war by then had become a maze without any exits, not because of the potency of sea power, but because of the difficulty of wielding it.

  And yet with every dead end met, with every failure and disappointment suffered, the expectation of the success that could be achieved with navies remained curiously unaffected. It was almost as if the enormous investment expended on sea power gave it the right, like a spoiled child, to get away with anything, preventing any significant critical analysis by those who had borne it. In every country, in spite of staggering naval expenditure, it remained the case that politicians who made policy had no detailed knowledge of naval affairs and few expert advisers, and lacked any appreciation of how chance and the weather could ruin everything as easily as bad planning. The concept of a ‘chain’ of events is therefore almost completely unhelpful in this war. Far from being tightly joined by iron links, events were flimsily connected like a house of cards. There was, correspondingly, a constant sense of apprehension and drama from 1774 right up until the Peace of Paris in 1783, and throughout this long period, there was a total absence of any realistic expectation attached to sea power. The promise of sea power remained far more powerful than the reality, so that, in a curious way, this is a story about blind faith – it is a story of faith in the god of sea power.

  Thi
s difficulty of wielding sea power lies at the heart of the most fascinating question of the age – one of two questions that are central to this book: how did a loose collection of colonies, without any standing army or navy, win its independence from the most powerful country in the world, a country which wielded such sea power that it could block out the sun with its sails and hide the surface of the sea with its ships? Washington himself believed that, in the future, the story of American independence would actually be considered a fiction:

  For it will not be believed that such a force as Great Britain has employed for eight years in this Country could be baffled in their plan for Subjugating it by numbers infinitely less, composed of Men oftentimes half starved; always in Rags, without pay, and experiencing, at times, every species of distress which human nature is capable of undergoing.7

  The numbers are compelling. At the start of the war, Great Britain, with the largest navy in the world, had committed nearly half of its commissioned ships to America and had successfully transported nearly 50,000 highly trained troops 3,000 miles across the Atlantic. It was an astonishing achievement. There, they faced an army that was no more than 20,000 strong, consisted in large part of hastily trained militia, had few experienced leaders, and was supported at sea by nothing more than a handful of ships without any supportive infrastructure. How on earth did the British lose?

  The second question is intimately linked to the first: how and why did the war end with the Americans winning their independence, in spite of the fact that, by then, Britain was in a position of exceptional strength at sea – far stronger, even, than she had been at the start of the war?

  On the surface, both questions appear to pose propositions as incongruous as the idea of a fashionable woman, anxious above all else over the way she looks, appearing in public with a ship balanced on her head. But as we have already seen, this was an extraordinary period of history in which the inconceivable was conceived and the impossible was an article of faith.

  This inclination towards disbelief and a consequent acceptance that the independence of America was somehow pre-ordained should not therefore lead us away from historical investigation but towards it, and in this book I will show how a naval and maritime perspective unlocks these mysteries and many more. Not only does a study of sea power in this period help us understand the events that led to American independence, but also it helps us understand sea power itself and the way that it has influenced history, for, ultimately, this was a war at sea that encourages us to think about what a war at sea actually is.

  PART 1

  AMERICAN REVOLUTION

  1773–1775

  1

  BRITISH PYRE

  It was surprisingly difficult to destroy a warship in the age of sail. The first problem is that warships were immensely difficult to sink. There are several reasons for this. The first is that, as the water in the hull rose, it became relatively easier for a tired crew to pump the water up onto the weather deck and then out over the side. The second reason is linked to the first: as the hull filled with water, the rate of influx decreased because of the pressure of water that had built up inside the hull; it would soon reach a state of equilibrium in which the water coming in would be balanced by the water being pumped out. This bought time, often far more than sailors expected, and we now suspect that many stricken ships were actually abandoned by their crews far too soon.1 Given sufficient time and material, moreover, wooden ships could easily be repaired from the same material from which they were built. They were, in that respect, essentially organic: you could take a piece from here to mend it there; you could mend a rudder with a spar; a spar with a rudder; a piece of hatch coaming with a hull plank.

  This all meant that the only way to destroy a wooden ship utterly was to burn it and that ship-burning carried with it a powerful symbolic element. Decisive, determined and greatly feared, to burn a ship was to kill a ship. Ship-burning was also symbolic because neither the activity nor the remains could be easily concealed. The spectacle created by a burning sailing ship is similar to that created by a burning church, because both create a vast pyramid of fire: the masts and sails of the ship conduct the fire in the same way as the steeple of a church, and the ship’s hull feeds the fire in the same way as the church’s nave. Gun-ports act like windows and allow the fire to breathe. Depending on the size of the hull, the masts of a warship could be anywhere between 50 and 220 feet above sea level, and the flames would burn higher still, 20 or even 30 feet above the top of the mast. The thick black smoke of burning timber and tar would then drift with the breeze for miles. Given the right landscape and atmospheric conditions, such a fire could be seen for 30 miles in any direction. But perhaps most importantly of all, a ship burned in a shallow river would not disappear. Ships’ timbers are too large and too damp to be destroyed completely, and the waters are too shallow to cloak the evidence. Either the entire ribcage of the hull’s beams or a few significant chunky timbers would survive as an enduring reminder of the violence that once destroyed her, as well as the method chosen for that destruction. To burn a ship was therefore to create an enduring spectacle that linked the present with the past across a bridge of maritime violence. It was a statement as much as an action and a symbol as much as a tactic. It was intensely and consciously provocative.

  Burning a ship, however, raised a surprising number of problems. First, the fire would be difficult to start. It is an established fact of seafaring that all wooden ships leak, a factor of the way they are built and the stresses they are put under in their working lives. Wooden hulls torque and twist, constantly opening and closing the seams between the planks. The hull of any wooden ship is always damp, and in the bowels of the hull – the bilge – it is always wet. If a fire is to destroy a ship, it must be carefully set in the correct location and with appropriate material.

  Secondly, an alert crew, especially a British naval crew, could quickly put out the fire. Consider this: the newest British chain-pumps in the 1770s, operated by only four men, could spill a ton of water onto deck in 43.5 seconds,2 and there was an endless supply of it – it came from the sea. The crew were certainly motivated to use their pumps: there were never enough boats to take the entire crew to safety. If a ship took fire, some men would burn and others would drown. All crews of British warships were, unsurprisingly, acutely aware of the dangers of fire.3

  To successfully set fire to a warship, therefore, first required the crew to be neutralized. This could be achieved in one of two ways: either by a bold approach from a heavily armed ship or by some element of surprise. The method chosen on the sand-banks of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, on 9 June 1772, was surprise by stealth, followed by deception.

  * * *

  The attackers’ target was the British schooner HMS Gaspee, a ship that had been patrolling the waters of Narragansett Bay since early 1772, enforcing British customs laws. On 9 June she chased the Hannah, a packet-boat bound for Providence from Newport. The Hannah’s captain refused to heave to and led the Gaspee a merry dance before the latter struck the sand on Namquit Point off Pawtuxet. The possibility that the Gaspee was lured to her fate cannot be discounted.4 The Hannah fled the scene.

  The Gaspee could have been left alone to refloat with the tide and continue her business of irritating the local Rhode Island merchants and inhabitants, but as she lay so vulnerable and so close to shore, the opportunity was too good to miss. Her attackers came in boats from the nearby towns of Providence and Bristol. They had no cannon and they were facing the well-trained crew of a British warship led by a captain notorious for his unforgiving violence. Everything depended on surprise. Time was also limited because the tide was coming in and the Gaspee was sure to refloat.5 Her attackers pushed off, wet feet braced in front of them. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke.

  Their main concern was noise because the moon was invisible that night, and the attackers had blackened their faces and hands.6 Oared craft make a surprising amount of noise. If you are ever strolling up the Cam
bridge Backs, ambling along the Isis in Oxford or striding along the banks of the Thames in Connecticut, and you are lucky enough to see a crew of eight cutting through the river, shut your eyes as the shell surges past. It appears to glide, but the oars splash, the rowlocks clunk, the hulls make the water ripple, creating a distinctive whooshing noise, while the crew grunt, pant, growl and curse. The more men there are, the more noise the crew collectively, and unavoidably, make. A twenty-man crew forcing the blunt hull of a mid-eighteenth-century cutter through the water would be an orchestra of maritime effort. One technique that might reduce the noise, but by no means eliminate it, was to muffle the oars by putting some cloth, canvas or leather around the part of the oar that rested in the rowlock.

  These men, more than sixty in total in eight boats and perhaps as many as two hundred in seventeen boats, depending on whose testimony you believe,7 kept impressively quiet and got very close before they were seen. A British lookout challenged the boats three times and three times the challenges were ignored.

  Stealth now made way for deception. Within sixty yards of the ship, one of the boats’ leaders, a man named Abraham Whipple, stood up and claimed, inaccurately, that he was the local sheriff. He was, in fact, a merchant, and brother-in-law of Chief Justice Stephen Hopkins.8 It was a bid to buy time to get the boats closer, and it worked.

  * * *

  Consider now the position of the Gaspee. The majority of any warship’s armament, regardless of her size, was on either side. To bring her guns to bear, therefore, a ship had to present her broadsides to the enemy. If she could not move, she became immensely vulnerable at bow or stern. The way to attack a large, stationary ship at night with a flotilla of small boats was therefore to pull, as quickly as possible, for the ship’s bow or stern, and to keep as far as possible from the broadside guns and their gun-ports. Of the two, the bow was always preferable for an attack from low-lying boats. With anchor cables hanging from the side or piercing the sea at a shallow angle, and with the rigging of the bowsprit reaching out across the sea, the climbing was good there, while at the stern there was often a large glass window, which made climbing tricky and increased the likelihood of being spotted.