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

by Willis, Sam

  We thought it an enterprise, worthy of an English ship of the line, in our King and Country’s sacred cause, and an effort due to the gallant defenders of Quebec, to make the attempt of pressing her, by force of sail, thro the thick, broad and closely connected fields of ice, as formidable as the gulph of St Laurence ever exhibited, to which we saw no bounds, towards the western part of our horizon.44

  By nightfall they had made their way twenty-four miles into the ice, ‘describing our path all the way with bits of the sheathing of the ship’s bottom, and sometimes pieces of the cutwater’. Occasionally they stuck fast, and as they were unaware of what they would find at Quebec, the troops were unloaded and exercised on the ice. Time and again they would set every stitch of canvas on the ship, heave against grapnels set in the ice, and shift the ship’s ballast to try and break her free; and occasionally it worked, only to find themselves beset again almost immediately and forced to repeat the entire exhausting process.45 Nine days later, and after ‘unspeakable toil’ for fifty or sixty leagues, Douglas arrived in Quebec, the Isis being one of the earliest ships ever to have done so. It was 6 May. And it was a stunning achievement. Understandably, Douglas was immensely pleased with himself.46

  The American strategy was dramatically and directly altered by the arrival of Douglas’s convoy. They immediately retreated from Quebec to Sorel and then, after several weeks of sustained British reinforcements arriving amid the constant crash of salutes, they skulked all the way back to Trois-Rivières and abandoned their invasion. This was the last time that the Americans attempted to make Canada their fourteenth colony, though the idea was mooted several times more during the war: in 1778, 1780 and 1781.47

  The arrival of the British ships not only saved Canada but also provided an important psychological fillip to the local Canadians and Indians. When the main victualling fleet appeared in late spring, the presence of over eighty sail in the very heart of Canada had a profound impact. The impression gained of awesome maritime strength was long-lasting, and Canada remained a potentially hostile threat to the Americans throughout the war.

  In the north, therefore, the ideological boundaries of the revolution seemed to have been reached. Too often the shape of the modern United States and Canada is associated with Wolfe fighting the French at Quebec in 1759. It should, instead, be associated with the British naval patrol that spotted Arnold crossing the St Lawrence in November 1775 and with Captain Charles Douglas fighting the ice in the mouth of the St Lawrence in the new year of 1776.

  * Committees of Safety were formed in 1774 to monitor the British government. By 1775, with the British royal officals expelled, they were undertaking governance roles of their own.

  * Others were the evacuations of Boston in 1776, Philadelphia in 1778, Newport and Gibraltar in 1779, Charleston and Savannah in 1782, and New York in 1783.

  * NDAR II: 132, 331. On the way to the Kennebec Arnold’s ships passed the ruins of the English colony founded in 1607 by Sir John Popham, a sister colony to the successful one at Jamestown. Those early settlers had hated the severity of the Maine winter so much that they built a ship from the surrounding forests – the first ever ship built in North America – to take them home.

  † A setting-pole is used to propel a craft through the water, pushing against rocks or the riverbed.

  * Those artefacts, including axe-heads, cutlery and belt buckles, can be seen at Reuben Colburn’s house, now preserved as a State Historic Site.

  * Fort Western was built in the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) and is now beautifully restored. It is the oldest log fort in the United States.

  5

  COLONIAL SEA POWER

  Back in Boston the rebels began to flex their muscles at sea as soon as the changed situation post-Lexington became apparent. For all their impressive numbers, the American soldiers encamped upon the hills overlooking the city remained toothless, even though, on 14 June, the Second Continental Congress had used those men to form a new ‘Continental Army’. In those initial months after Lexington they lacked everything that an army needed: powder, leadership, a logistical infrastructure, medicine, transport and, worst of all, guns. The British also had a significant weakness, however. With the surrounding countryside cut off by the presence of the rebel army, everything that was required to sustain the garrison, the navy and the civilian population in Boston now had to come from the sea. The rebels therefore knew that they could severely damage the British position by targeting British shipping and the British maritime infrastructure in the immediate vicinity of Boston: the lighthouse that would guide the trans-Atlantic supply ships and packet-ships safely in; the island caches of livestock, powder, shipbuilding supplies and hay; the store schooner, where the British kept so much of their maritime stores; even one of the small British warships themselves anchored in the shallows of Boston Harbour. If that maritime fingerhold could be broken, then the British could be driven from America.

  While the American soldiers pitched camp on the hills around Boston, therefore, a parallel bustle was raised – in and around the jetties and wharfs of Boston Harbour, up the wooded creeks and muddy inlets of Massachusetts Bay, and on the banks of the Charles, Mystic, Danvers, Weymouth Fore, Weymouth Back, Monatiquot, North, Indian Head, Saugus and Neponset rivers – in a hell for leather race for anything that could float. Its significance struck both Gage and Graves at roughly the same time. Gage told Graves to seize ‘all the Boats you can lay your hands on everywhere’, and Graves later recalled how ‘all scows, sloops, schooners & boats of every Kind’ had to be secured, and at all costs. The Americans, meanwhile, were doing exactly the same thing and became increasingly aggressive. Off Dartmouth, a little to the south of Boston, two British tenders manned by British soldiers sent to steal sheep were taken by rebels and the men imprisoned. Inevitably this led to more armed confrontation.1

  The boats successfully secured by the British were kept under guard just to the south of the long wharf, and those by the Americans were spirited inland to hidden caches, in ‘swampy Land & Woods’. Some were piled onto wagons and then hauled from Charlestown to Cambridge, which nestled up the Charles River, an easily defendable location where the fledgling American army was encamped.2 Shipbuilders throughout New England, meanwhile, were ordered to build craft, and oars were gathered and stockpiled.

  Soon enough, all along the coast and up the rivers, bundles of twigs that hid the distinctive shape of boats’ hulls were cast aside, screens of foliage were swept back and the Americans took to their craft, sometimes in great shoals, to harass the British in every way they could.

  * * *

  The Americans’ favourite craft was the whaleboat. Double-ended, which made landing and relaunching so easy, they were rowed by ten to sixteen men – a sizeable force in its own right that took on significant proportions if whaleboats were used together in fleets. They were like Viking raiders, launching lightning raids on strategic targets. This included attacks on local fishermen who were supplying the British garrison: rather cleverly the rebels thus imposed their own kind of blockade on the British who were blockading Boston.

  There were notable successes against the lighthouses on Little Brewster Island at the mouth of Boston Harbour and on Thatcher Island off Cape Ann. Both were excellent raids conducted in the utmost secrecy. One British officer ruefully observed how ‘the Flames were generally the first Notice of their Intentions’,3 such a telling comment for its implied naivety as much as for what it says about the boldness of the Americans. It is astonishing that the British were surprised that the Americans would attack Boston’s lighthouses when they were the key to the entire maritime infrastructure that was sustaining the beleaguered British forces in Boston, and the removal of coastal navigation markers is an ancient tactic of maritime war.

  The scale and tempo of the whaleboat attacks were such that British anxiety became infectious.4 Exhausted lookouts jumped at shadows and nervous officers wrote to Graves, whose growing desperation is palpable in his letters
to the Admiralty. There was soon real concern that the rebels might have the temerity to attack one of the larger warships in Boston Harbour, perhaps even the largest of them all, the 70-gun Boyne. British naval officers were diverted from other missions to meet the threat.5 James Warren sensed the change in the wind. He wrote to his friend, the astute lawyer John Adams, declaring the British ‘more afraid of our whaleboats than we are of their men-of-war’.6

  * * *

  The Americans held all the initiative, constantly testing the strength of British sea power to discover and expose its limits. A major breakthrough was perhaps inevitable and it came in early June. A large band of rebels had launched a whaleboat attack on Noddles Island and Hog Island, which were used by the British as stores for livestock, maritime supplies and hay.7 The admiral’s nephew, Lieutenant Thomas Graves, slipped anchor on his armed schooner, the Diana, and took her as close to land as possible to fire on the rebels.

  The admiral had given his nephew the most specific instructions that he was only to stay until the tide changed and the younger Graves dutifully turned his ship back to Boston, but the change of tide brought with it a change in the weather too. The cooling breeze that had so surely brought the Diana across the harbour died, and with it the confidence of her captain and crew. She began to drift as the ebb gathered pace. News flashed around the harbour, from rebel to rebel, like the sun reflected in a network of mirrors. By early evening, in the words of Samuel Graves, ‘the whole Country was alarmed’.8 A team of British boats was launched to take the Diana in harness like a coach and four while militia poured down to the coast.

  Some 2,000 armed rebels, led by General Israel Putnam, lined the shore and busied themselves around two large field pieces they had dragged into position. The Diana, meanwhile, now being towed by British boats, was making painfully slow progress within touching distance of the rebels, who took leisurely pot-shots at the sweating, groaning men sitting in their open boats, skin prickling for the hot sting of lead.

  Two oarsmen died and several were wounded, and the Diana’s progress slowed enough for the tide to win the race. Two feet of water became one foot, and then six inches, and then, with a sickening thud, she stuck fast in the clinging mud of Boston Harbour. The water relentlessly drained towards the sea around her. At three o’clock in the morning she heeled onto one side and an hour later a path to the schooner from the shore was dry. The Diana’s crew abandoned ship and climbed into the Britannia sloop which had come to her aid. By four o’clock the estuary was completely dry and the rebels marched through the mud to take away her cannon, empty her sail locker, steal what clothing and money was aboard, and then burn her as she lay helpless.

  Just like the Gaspee, the Diana burned like a giant warning fire, but this time she burned within clear sight of Boston, under the very noses of the British armed forces, with thousands of witnesses lining the beaches, watching from rooftops, hanging out of windows. This was no great strategic victory such as the capture of Ticonderoga, but it was a hostile act in the lion’s den itself that displayed both American courage and resourcefulness and convinced many of the direction that the revolution was taking. If, as was so clear, the revolution was succeeding in spite of the Royal Navy, then its providence seemed manifest. It also raised the interesting question of what could be achieved if such daring could be prosecuted on a much larger scale, and in that thought lay the seed of another idea – one that would lead to the creation of the American navy.

  * * *

  The man with the idea was George Washington: by profession a surveyor and farmer from Virginia, by limited experience a frontier soldier, by political demand the new commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.*

  In 1775 Washington knew more about farming than anything else. Like many thousands of Americans, however, he had fought with the British in the Seven Years’ War (1754–63). That military training had taught him the basics: the difference between a well-fortified and a poorly fortified position; the dangers of raw sewage in camp; the importance of discipline, good food and water; the value of well-maintained arms. For all that experience, Washington had never commanded more than a regiment, and after the Seven Years’ War he had left the service for Mount Vernon, an estate that commanded thousands of acres of prime slave-farmed Virginian tobacco land.

  Washington’s personal experience of sea power was nonexistent and his first-hand experience of the sea nearly so. The only voyage he appears to have been on occurred in 1751 when he was nineteen. Then, he had sailed to Barbados with his brother, who was ill with tuberculosis and sought the popular tropical air. Surviving documents from that voyage are very revealing. As soon as his ship tasted the Atlantic swells, Washington took up a notebook, ruled some lines and began to make a rudimentary log-book. It is the action of a young man deeply enthused by this new environment and stimulated by the challenge of recording the things he saw in their correct way, for George did not write as a landlubber on a sea voyage but learned to imitate the phrases and abbreviations of the mariner. He particularly enjoyed the demanding challenge of identifying strange ships on the horizon from their silhouette. Was it a trader or a warship? If so, what type and how large? What nationality? Often overlooked, this was one of the most important skills of an officer in any navy.9 This, clearly, was the work of a man with maritime potential.

  Washington may have lacked experience in sea power, but it is too easy to overlook his knowledge of waterways and skill at boatmanship. He may well have been a ‘farmer’ – a traditional seaman’s insult – but he was a farmer in Virginia, and in the 1770s all farmers in Virginia had a keen nose for matters maritime. Virginia was a colony that constantly looked to the sea. The most significant aspect of the Virginian economy was the exportation of tobacco, and vast fleets, well over 100 ships strong, made an annual migration to Virginia to move the tobacco crop from its magnificent natural harbour at Hampton Roads back to Europe.

  With Hampton Roads as its primary maritime focus, Virginia also has 112 miles of coastline so deeply scarred by rivers and inlets that it creates a tidal shoreline nearly thirty times larger than its coastline, some 3,315 miles. There is, in fact, so much water in Virginia that it was impossible to travel in the colony without frequent use of boats. In Washington’s youth forty-three ferries operated on the James River and its tributaries alone, twenty more on the York River, twenty more on the Rappahannock, fifteen on the Potomac and two on the Nottoway.10 He was brought up beside rivers, the Rappahannock as a child and the Potomac as a man. So while he had no experience of sea power, he did have experience of boats on rivers which would certainly come in handy.*

  When offered command of the Continental Army in June 1775, Washington accepted but with a rather loud, important and honest caveat: ‘Tho I am truly sensible of the high honor done me in this appointment, yet I feel great distress from a consciousness that my abilities and military experience may not be equal to the extensive and important trust.’11 Nonetheless, Washington was picked because he was a natural leader, a thoughtful and careful speaker, and the very embodiment of authority.

  Washington began to work with sea power as soon as he arrived at Cambridge in early July 1775 and immediately organized whaleboats to patrol the waterways as part of a package of precautions taken to prevent surprise British attacks.12 For the first eight weeks or so of his command, however, he was a powerful voice in a group of men who spoke against those who urged the Americans to take to the sea in a far more ambitious way: in ocean-going armed ships. For these anti-navy men, to challenge the Royal Navy at sea was crazy and their opposition ‘loud and vehement’; this was a child ‘taking a wild bull by the horns’.13 They baulked at the seemingly endless political, logistical and financial implications of sending large armed ships to sea. Samuel Chase, a delegate from Maryland, simply declared it the ‘maddest idea in the world’.14 The idea of a navy was even questioned by those colonies with significant natural harbours and waterways, particularly those colonies around the Chesapeake and
Delaware.15

  This disagreement over a possible American navy was symptomatic of numerous disagreements between the colonies at this stage in the war. In fact the question of whether or not there should even be a war was still very much open, and a petition for peace in May 1775 – the Olive Branch Petition – had, among other things, stalled the creation of a colonial navy.16 This was no coincidence. The construction of a navy was behaviour intimately associated with an independent nation state. The idea of a colony raising armed ships to fight the Royal Navy was simply unprecedented – and clearly illegal. Raising an army, on the other hand, as they already had done, was not, because raising militias was an ancient colonial right and the army outside Boston was, in reality, a collection of long-established militias: engaging with the British certainly was illegal, but existing was not.17 This was a period of hazy lines and boundaries that were kept deliberately hazy by both sides as they jockeyed for position. The overt adoption of a navy would have irrevocably hardened those lines. It would have been provocative to any state, but particularly so for the British simply because of the size and reputation of her navy. In many ways her navy defined Great Britain. In these circumstances the Americans who had drafted the petition realized that the overt establishment of a navy would have been nothing less than a tacit declaration of independence, and any chance of reconciliation, or even of delaying the war to allow them time to strengthen their hand, would have been impossible.

  It was essential, therefore, that the politicians should come to terms with the revolution before they could come to terms with the navy, which is why the subsequent Congressional resolutions to establish a navy shadow perfectly the gradual hardening of the official stance towards Britain, for the two went very much hand in hand. Indeed, naval developments in America in this period were fundamental in resolving the great question of independence versus reconciliation.18