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

by Willis, Sam

  PHILADELPHIA

  The explosion was heard for miles around. The pamphleteer Thomas Paine, then a volunteer aide to Nathanael Greene, witnessed it on the road between Germantown and Whitemarsh. He wrote: ‘We were stunned with a Report as loud as a Peal from a hundred Cannon at once, and turning round I saw a thick smoke rising like a Pillar and spreading from the Top like a Tree.’65 In Philadelphia the explosion ‘felt like an earthquake’.66

  A moment clearly laden with significance, John Adams believed the defence of the Delaware, encapsulated by the destruction of the Augusta, to be the turning point of the war, and his over-optimism was shared.67 The Pennsylvania Navy was given a vote of thanks from Congress for its part in the action.68 Even today it remains a powerful symbol of the grit of American rebellion. The Augusta’s wreck was raised in 1869 and timbers from her hull were used by the Daughters of the American Revolution to clad and furnish the New Jersey Room in their Continental Hall in Washington.69 Nor was the Augusta the only casualty of that day: skewered by one of the chevaux de frise, the Merlin was abandoned and burned to prevent her from falling into enemy hands.70 The Americans hungrily fell on the corpses from both vessels, stealing their rings and pulling their gold teeth. There was an enormous amount to loot. Guns, clothing and naval stores were spirited away inland.71

  Thus Philadelphia fell to the British, but American bite ensured that the river remained in American control, sucked British naval resources into Pennsylvania, and left the British army and loyalists in the city isolated. Of even greater significance, however, was that, far to the north, Burgoyne had also become isolated. The Philadelphia campaign had been delayed, but there was no doubt that the Royal Navy, already regrouping and reinforcing after Red Bank, would eventually triumph in the Delaware and that Howe would be safe. But there was no such confidence regarding Burgoyne.

  * Painted at a time when Leutze’s own country, Germany, was in the grip of revolution, it was designed to inspire and encourage his country’s revolutionaries.

  * Even today ice floating down the Delaware can create an ice jam at this location in a matter of hours, lying five feet deep across the entire width of the river.

  * If one considers the retreat from Cornwallis on 7 December as the first crossing, this was in fact the fourth; the second and the third being the famous attack and retreat of 25 and 26 December.

  † The expected proportion of guns to men in traditional European armies was around two or three per 1,000 men. Callahan, ‘Henry Knox’, 246.

  * Of the many ‘what ifs’ that surround the American War, one of the least discussed, but perhaps the most interesting, must surely be the result of a British landing somewhere safe on the Delaware estuary, perhaps at Marcus Hook, fifteen miles or so to the south of Philadelphia. Washington’s army would have posed no more of an obstacle than it later did at Brandywine, and the British campaign would have been shortened by several crucial weeks, perhaps even months.

  * One other is known to exist and is now located at the Camden County Historical Society in New Jersey.

  10

  BRITISH SURRENDER

  During the winter of 1776 neither the British nor the Americans, once again at either end of Lake Champlain, had been idle. The British took their fleet back to St Jean, where the vessels’ masts and rigging were removed. It was so cold that the ice which formed so quickly around their hulls had to be broken every morning to save the British ships from being crushed.1 The momentum behind British shipbuilding, begun under Carleton in the summer of 1776, was maintained into 1777, though the frenzy of effort that had led to the creation of Carleton’s fleet now became more focused.

  The challenge now was to build a really powerful ship. Yes, the British had built the three-masted sloop Inflexible in 1775, which had been far larger than any American ship on the lake, but the story of her success was really one of logistics: of cutting a road through the woods, of dragging the timber and materiel up the Richelieu Rapids, and of building the ship in under thirty days. The British now wanted a still more impressive symbol of their sea power, both in terms of its reality on Lake Champlain, and in terms of the potential of British sea power. A sloop, after all, was only a sloop – an unrated warship – even if its construction had represented a singular feat of logistics and engineering.

  The British, therefore, spent the winter of 1776 building a proper warship – a 26-gun Sixth Rate frigate nearly twice the size of Inflexible. She would be the biggest ship yet built on Lake Champlain, and the biggest ship built on any of the American lakes, ever. She was to be named the Royal George, yet another example of significant imagery and symbolism used in the maritime landscape of this war. Not only would she control the lake, but she would also embody British royal authority, might and naval power in the northern colonies.

  * * *

  The Americans, in direct contrast, had abandoned any attempt to contest naval control of Lake Champlain. All they had left of their navy was a handful of boats, a single sloop, and very few sailors. The gondola New York, which had been undermanned with only forty-five men at Valcour, now had a crew of eleven.2 Nonetheless, the Americans worked extraordinarily hard to defend the route southwards down Champlain at the Ticonderoga narrowing.

  The fort’s defences were improved and they also fortified the hill directly opposite Ticonderoga, which they christened Mount Independence. Under the guidance of the resourceful farmer-turned-engineer Colonel Jeduthan Baldwin,3 they built a boom and a floating bridge 700 feet across the lake, from Mount Independence to Fort Ticonderoga. This, it was hoped, would block the passage of any British ship.

  The bridge was anchored to twenty-two massive caissons – timber-lined chests the size of large cars full of stones, similar to those which anchored the Delaware’s chevaux de frise; these were manhandled into position on the ice before the ice was cut away beneath them, plunging them to the bottom of the lake.* One of the few mentions of the building operations appears in Baldwin’s journal on 10 March 1776, just nine days after the work began. It simply, and chillingly, reads: ‘the ice began to fail’.4

  The spaces between the sunken piers were then filled with ‘separate floats, each about fifty feet long and twelve wide, strongly fastened together with iron chains and rivets’.5 A boom and ‘double iron’ chain was laid alongside the pontoon bridge. An impressive achievement of maritime engineering, it is visible in several contemporary illustrations,6 [see fig. 7]. Various diary entries record pride in its achievement. ‘It does honor to human mind and power,’ wrote one, ‘it may be compared to the work of Colossus in the fables of the heathen.’7 Only time, however, would tell if the Americans had expended unimaginable effort wrapping a steel garrotte around the neck of the lake or simply decorating it with a necklace of shells.

  They waited for the British, a lull in the storm. They had no blankets, ‘nothing but the Heavens to Cover them’, but took their pleasure where they could. On one spring evening the soldiers at Ticonderoga sat down to eat a plate of fried fish and roasted pigeon. A certain Lieutenant Childs would not have enjoyed the pigeon because he had shot his left hand off while hunting them.8

  * * *

  The man who led the British attack down Champlain in 1777 was Lieutenant-General John Burgoyne. The king and George Germain, who already disliked Carleton, had taken badly the news of Carleton’s failure to press his attack after Valcour.9 Burgoyne, equipped with driving ambition and close to both the king and Germain, made certain that he was on hand to argue his case.10 He won command of the northern army while Carleton was ordered to resume command at Quebec. The change in command was perceived as more than a little unfair among the British troops, and it was ill judged. Burgoyne, like Carleton, was a soldier rather than a sailor, and yet Carleton had demonstrated so clearly that any operation down the lake was a massively complex naval problem, in terms of both logistics and strategy, and one that required a high-ranking and experienced naval commander to oversee. Burgoyne was a light cavalryman.11

/>   The fleet that he came to command was deeply impressive. Behind the new and mighty Royal George came the ships built the previous year: the sloop Inflexible; the radeau-on-steroids Thunderer; various schooners and cutters; and three American prizes seized at Valcour – the Washington galley, the cutter Lee and the gondola New Jersey. There were also forty-four armed gunboats, twenty-three longboats and 260 bateaux. There was so much firepower here that the Loyal Convert, Washington and Lee were stripped of their guns to make more space for stores, provisions and artillery, and several gunboats that had been sent from England in pieces were left unassembled. The need for seamen was so great that every sailor was sucked inland from the fleet of transports in Quebec, which were abandoned at their moorings, unmanned.12

  Not only was Burgoyne’s fleet bigger than Carleton’s had been, but also the men were now experienced in living on these boats and fighting from them. One soldier proudly described his tented area at the stern of his gunboat: ‘about 6 feet by 5 … sufficient to contain a small Table & your Baggage &c and cou’d be kept constantly covered when not Rowing against the Wind.’ The men had also learned how to create a tent when at anchor, by making two basic A-frames with four oars, joined down the centre by a fifth, over which they draped their sail.13 These men were adapting to their unique maritime environment. On 13 June, just before they left St Jean and headed south, the ‘Standard of England’ was hoisted aboard the Thunderer, a banner under which to rally and a psychological boost for these British forces in Canada about to re-enter American waters.14

  Under the command of Skeffington Lutwidge,* the fleet moved systematically down the lake, between seventeen and twenty miles per day. They travelled successively in brigades, the second taking the encampment of the first and so on, always leaving at daybreak. When, finally, the entire army joined together, the effect was astonishing: ‘the most complete and splendid regatta you can possibly conceive. A sight so novel and pleasing could not fail of fixing the admiration and attention of every one present.’15

  An army of Indians led the fleet in large birch canoes, with twenty or thirty soldiers in each, followed by the main British army in bateaux supported by the gunboats. The Royal George and Inflexible sailed in the centre of the fleet, towing two huge booms, which could be used to divide the lake to protect British shipping and territory from American raids such as that launched by Arnold in 1775. Generals Burgoyne, Phillips and Riedesel followed in pinnaces, surrounded by a British brigade and a German brigade. The camp-followers, officially numbered at 225 women and 500 children, but closer to 2,000 according to subsequent claims, came behind them.16 This was an entire city afloat, not just an army, a massive naval invasion that dwarfed the previous year’s already impressive effort. One British soldier wryly noted: ‘Upon the appearance of so formidable a fleet, you may imagine they were not a little dismayed at Ticonderoga.’17 The British knew the psychological impact that such a display of force, logistics, ingenuity and perseverance would have. And they were right.

  * * *

  In the middle of the Atlantic, meanwhile, two particularly intrepid ladies, both wives of officers, were making their separate ways to America, and they both left diaries which are among the most engaging primary sources that survived the war. It was by no means unusual for women to travel with the army, but it certainly was unusual for such high-ranking women to travel on campaign. Their diaries provide some of the clearest evidence that the war forced all sorts of people to sea for all sorts of different reasons, and the maritime experience that they enjoyed (or loathed) changed their lives.

  The first we shall meet is Frederika Riedesel, wife of the Hessian general Friedrich Riedesel. Frederika had been unable to travel to America with her husband because she was pregnant with her third child. When that child, a third daughter, was born in March 1776, she began to make preparations for her journey. In April 1777, while her husband was preparing to reinvade Champlain from St Jean, she set out for Canada from Spithead aboard a ship owned by a rich, one-legged merchant.* Frederika and her three children were almost instantly, and terribly, seasick, but after three full days of unremitting nausea and dizziness they were dancing on deck to fife and drums. Later, when the weather turned rough again, Frederika was better prepared and swiftly discovered the sailors’ cure for seasickness: keep busy. She wrote at the time: ‘I had no time to be sick, as my servants were sicker than all the rest, and I had to take care of my three children alone. I believe there is no better preventative against seasickness than to keep busy.’ Her servants also seem to have been particularly unlucky: one slammed her fingers in a door when the ship took a big roll and another hurt her chin. In contrast with many of the surviving accounts of soldiers crammed into stinking transports, Frederika had a charming crossing. She ate magnificently, ‘five or six dishes daily, all excellently cooked’, and her only real concern was the welfare of her children, with whom she shared a bed, during storms; she was terrified that she would crush one of them. She knitted manically to pass the time: by the end of their 2,760-mile voyage, she had finished a night-cap for her husband, two purses, seven caps ‘and a number of other small articles’. The rest of her journey down through the lakes was considerably more alarming, not least when she and her daughters inadvertently camped on an island known to the locals as the charming-sounding Île à Sonnettes, which actually translates as ‘Rattlesnake Island’. Well-meaning British sailors from her naval escort built a huge fire and spent all night making as much noise as possible to frighten off the snakes. She was doubly shocked the next morning when ‘we found on every side the skins and slime of these nasty creatures, and accordingly, made haste to finish our breakfast’.18

  Lady Harriet Acland, wife of Major John Acland, meanwhile, had also crossed the Atlantic, and with her mother. She also kept a wonderfully detailed journal of her voyage on the transport ship Kent, though there is some suspicion that at least some of the journal was kept by an as yet unidentified man. Not only is the Acland journal a detailed diary but it is a detailed maritime log, full of observations of weather conditions, miles travelled each day, latitude readings, records of communication with other ships, and even observations on the impact of war rumours on the crews of the fleet. On 10 April she noted with some mirth how Captain Winchester turned out ‘with great alertness’ to attack what he thought was a whale, which turned out to be a bundle of hay. The bundle of hay, at least, is physical evidence that they were sailing the same waters through which a horse transport bound for America or Canada must recently have passed. She also managed to see ‘penguins’ in the middle of the North Atlantic, an impressive feat indeed. It is more likely that she saw great auks, now extinct. One of her most striking memories was a stunning aurora borealis: ‘None of the Company had ever seen any thing at all equal to it in England, the edges of the streaks of light were of a beautiful purple, & sometimes green, & the outline excessively noble, in the shape of large rocks.’ Once arrived, and like so many soldiers who had already travelled to Quebec in the war, she and her companions were stunned by the beauty of the Canadian landscape, and even claimed that it felt as if ‘we were walking on magic ground’.19

  * * *

  The British fleet, meanwhile, had made its way down Lake Champlain and had arrived to find the few surviving American ships at anchor beyond their famous bridge and boom, where they remained, out of range, while patrol boats continually criss-crossed between Ticonderoga and Mount Independence.20 Command of the American defences on Champlain had by now shifted into the hands of Arthur St Clair, promoted for his service with Washington at Trenton.* The Americans were confident. The boom and bridge, they felt, were well constructed. They watched as the British probed the boom and returned to out of the range of gunshot.21 The Americans exhaled.

  The defenders had food; they had gunpowder and shot; they had water. What they did not have, however, was an appreciation of the ingenuity and skill of British sailors and engineers. The problem with the American defences was that they w
ere dominated by a high ridge, 760 feet above water-level at the summit, known as Sugar-Loaf Hill, so named because it looked like a sugar-loaf when approached from the south. A gun emplacement on the hill would endanger the American positions at Mount Independence and Ticonderoga, and of course the American ships at anchor in the bay. The Americans had noted this strategic weakness but had dismissed it; indeed, the officer who officially raised the possibility that the Sugar-Loaf could be scaled and armed ‘was ridiculed for advancing such an extravagant idea’.22 They simply did not think that the British would be able to get to the top. But they could, and they did. ‘Where a goat can go a man can go, and where a man can go he can drag a gun’, reasoned Burgoyne.23 Using the same logistical and haulage skills which had allowed them to hoist guns to the very top of the towering New Jersey Palisades prior to the New Jersey campaign in 1776 – a skill at which British sailors excelled – the British established a gun emplacement on Sugar-Loaf Hill on 5 July ‘by hoisting cannon from tree, to tree, till they reached the summit’.24

  On the same day ‘a large ship’,25 presumably the Royal George, approached the American bridge and boom. That boom, which had taken such effort to build and which had appeared to be well constructed, was painfully, achingly and shockingly broken by the British at just their second attempt. One witness claimed that it took about as long to break the boom as it did to describe its breaking.26