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

by Willis, Sam

  Everything was set for the most interesting fleet battle in the age of sail that was never fought. A vicious storm, one so fierce and relentless that it lived long in Rhode Island folk memory, rose out of nowhere. Ships of both fleets were instantly ‘all jumbled together’, the sailors no longer able to test each other against the wrath of their enemy but utterly focused on fighting for their lives against the wrath of nature.38

  In the storm’s aftermath a number of British and French ships blundered into one another: the 50-gun British Renown into the 80-gun Languedoc; the 54-gun Preston into the 64-gun Marseillais; and the 50-gun Isis into the 74-gun César – an action that one contemporary thrillingly labelled ‘as brilliant as any on record in the history of the English navy’.39 Feverish, maybe, it is at least certain that, in each of these actions, the British were massively overmatched by their French opponents, but still fought until they were forced to flee by the arrival of other French ships. Howe barely survived the storm. His ship, the Apollo, had been pushed to the very limit. Captain Hamond risked his life to get a cutter across to Howe’s ship, where he found him ‘sitting by the Rudder Head to which he was lashed and the ship in a deplorable situation, all the half ports washed out and the sea running through and through the cabin’. Hamond took command, ordered a jury-mast rigged to ease the motion of the ship, transferred the crew to his ship, the Roebuck, and towed the Apollo back to New York.40

  D’Estaing’s flagship the Languedoc, dismasted by a storm on the night of 12 August, is attacked by HMS Renown the following day.

  When the French returned to Newport, the mood in their navy had significantly changed and the change was tangible ashore. The violence of the storm, the lurking presence of Howe and the temerity of the warships they had encountered after the battle seemed to have given d’Estaing pause for thought. ‘The devil has gotten into the fleet’, wrote Nathanael Greene to a friend.41 It certainly had. Even with Howe safely back in New York, d’Estaing wanted nothing more to do with the plan to take Newport from the British and fell back on his orders which required him, if outnumbered, to find safety in Boston. On 22 August the French left Newport and the Americans raged in their wake. From the perspective of Sullivan and his army, the French had ‘abandoned’ their allies ‘in a most rascally manner … inexplicable upon military principles’.42 Their leaving was, unquestionably, a terrible blow to American morale, casting a ‘universal gloom’ on the army. Thousands of volunteers, who had joined Sullivan’s army cradling hopes of victory born by the presence of French sea power, instantly left. Washington, however, saw d’Estaing’s actions in a more nuanced light, appreciating the immense difficulties that d’Estaing had faced. The very fact that the French squadron still existed as a viable force after the storm was itself a deeply impressive achievement, and the French sailors’ heroic efforts to repair the fleet at sea off the Delaware coast, where they had been blown by the storm, were carefully recorded by Ozanne.

  The French fleet repaired at sea and re-formed, with the exception of the César, now making way, 17 August 1778.

  One can sense from his sketch that he, as well as the sailors knotting and splicing the rigging, fishing the masts and yards, and bending the sails, knew that this was a crucial moment. Less easy to defend, however, is the fact that, inexplicably, the French fleet abandoned their anchors when they left Newport, cutting them free rather than taking the time to weigh and secure them.43

  For a brief time the chase was on again because Howe, remarkably, had also managed to repair his ships under intense logistical and time pressure in New York. They sailed ‘in full Cry after the French Fleet’, but – partly because one ship, the St Albans, grounded near Cape Cod – they were unable to catch them up before ‘Monsieur, to Our great mortification … got into Boston’.44 Perhaps wisely because of the awkwardness of Boston Harbour, Howe chose not to risk a lightning attack on the French in Boston.

  With things in America thus carefully balanced but with the initiative now firmly in British hands, Howe handed over his command to Gambier and left for London to defend his conduct in the 1776 and 1777 campaigns in a public circus of recrimination that had been begun by Ushant and would continue for the rest of the war. The loss of Howe was another sorry blow to British naval power.

  * * *

  Washington lamented another grievous lost opportunity. He believed that the loss of the British army at Newport would have broken the British will to continue the war. In his words, he believed it would have landed ‘the finishing blow to British pretensions of sovereignty in this country’.45 Perhaps he was right; this could well have been Yorktown three years before the real thing.

  As it was, nothing had been achieved apart from a serious souring of the American–French relationship and a startling reality check on the effectiveness of sea power. At the start of the campaign, d’Estaing had sent Sullivan kind words, pineapples and lemons; now Sullivan, never calm even at the best of times, sent him back letters dripping with bile in which he explicitly attacked d’Estaing’s honour.46 Even worse, American expectations of the efficacy of French sea power had been demonstrated to be false. The magic wand of sea power they had all so craved had simply failed to work. It had emitted a few sparks, but the all-empowering sorcery of sea power, which was supposed to make armies lie down with a single swish, remained elusive.

  It was a sobering moment for everyone. The French were finding the realities of prosecuting an aggressive naval strategy 3,000 miles from home extremely difficult. So many variables had to fall into place for it to work, and at every turn so far they had been thwarted: in turns by Mother Nature, by their own incompetence, and by a skilful enemy. The Americans were immensely disappointed. Abigail Adams summed it up: when the damaged French fleet limped into Boston having achieved nothing at New York or Newport, she wrote, ‘I own I am mortified, because I never before saw the people so zealous, or so much engaged & Determined. I thought it portended success to our Aims.’47 The French and the Americans were starting to realize that the struggle for sea power went hand in hand with a struggle with sea power. Abigail, shoulders back, chin high, wrote: ‘in bold & difficult enterprises we should endeavour to subdue one obstacle at a time, nor suffer ourselves to be depressed by their greatness and their number.’48 She had yet to realize, however, just how large and numerous those obstacles would be. Operational failure in the face of the Royal Navy was only the start of the Frenchman’s troubles.

  Rather brilliantly, d’Estaing had met Sullivan’s rudeness with ‘the painful but necessary law of profound silence’,49 but the manifest tension between the new allies erupted into violence in Boston. Classic prejudices of both nations were reinforced. The Frenchmen sneered at the appearance of the American soldiers on their ‘bad nags’, and the Americans at the French in their high-heeled shoes.50 Indeed, the French behaviour at Newport became the subject of a humorous ballad that poked fun at d’Estaing:

  To stay, unless he rul’d the sea,

  He thought would not be right, sir,

  And Continental troops, said he,

  On islands should not fight, sir.51

  This caricature of distaste for each other’s cultures and harmless sniping actually hid something far more destructive. Yes, the Americans felt let down by what they perceived to be the French abandonment of Sullivan at Newport. But more importantly – especially for the folk of Boston – the French navy now represented competition for meagre resources at a time of nervousness and desperation.

  The French fleet was given priority in the use of all shipbuilding resources and the Americans were expected to pay for the numerous repairs to the French fleet. In fact, the French navy dominated dockyard labour to such an extent that several American ships were left ‘in a most destitute and forelorn situation’.52 This all put immense pressure on the immature American Navy Board of the Eastern Department, based in Boston, which was unable to cope. In the words of John Langdon, they were forced to ‘alter our minds’. He raged at ‘the most ex
travagant expense, the exorbitancy of the demands … the imposition of every kind we are obliged to submit to’.53

  The French navy also affected the sensitive balance in Boston between the supply of and demand for food. The French fleet was the size of a large town and had appeared with no notice. To cope with such unpredictable demands required a logistical infrastructure matured over decades. The Americans had nothing of the sort, nor did they have the financial resources to compete with the French navy. With chests of specie and bills of exchange and thousands of hungry mouths to feed, the French had no scruples in outbidding Continental agents trying to feed the American armed forces.54

  The arrival of the French fleet in Boston, therefore, meant that conditions for the American army and for American civilians in the city worsened. Several riots broke out, and it is no coincidence that one of the worst happened at a baker’s shop, one of several set up along the seafront to provide bread for the fleet. A French officer tried to prevent an angry and hungry American mob from breaking into the shop and had been murdered. It was particularly unfortunate that the dead officer was the chevalier Saint-Sauveur, the first chamberlain of the French king’s brother, the comte d’Artois. Desperate diplomatic attempts to ease the crisis followed, and in an impressive feat of spin-doctoring the British were officially blamed.55 Wounds were healed over a large feast and an orgy of toast-making and mutual reassurance with a necessary bias towards the rebels. The Massachusetts House of Delegates agreed to erect a memorial in his honour.*

  D’Estaing remained jumpy. When invited by the Americans to dinner, he insisted it was held at Colonel Josiah Quincy’s house because it was in sight of the harbour: d’Estaing could not let his ships out of his sight.56 Such dinners at least gave the American and French leadership a chance to study each other properly and, generally speaking, both sides were impressed. Abigail Adams managed to secure an invitation to the flagship where she saw ‘entertainment fit for a princiss’, which compared favourably with an earlier event, a sumptuous feast followed by ‘Musick and dancing for the young folks’.57 John Adams commented in a letter back that ‘accounts from all hands agree’ that there was ‘happy harmony upon the whole between the inhabitants and the Fleet’. He also observed that ‘the more this Nation is known, and the more their language is understood, the more narrow Prejudices will wear away’.58 He may have been right, but this mixture of street-level violence and diplomatic curtseying is a distinctive feature of the alliance in this period, the one born from the other. The British, however, were not easily fooled. ‘The French and the rebels are most cordially sick of each other, a most reciprocal enmity and contempt’, wrote Gambier in New York.59

  * * *

  Towards the end of 1778 d’Estaing was ready to move again, his soldiers’ clothing and equipment boosted by British army supplies that had been captured by American privateers. He had achieved nothing in the interim: the grand dreams of American sea power working in harness with the French had been proven entirely unrealistic. He had given the British a major scare at Newport and had forced them to destroy some of their own shipping, but he had not even captured or destroyed a single British warship, let alone worked with the American army to secure any territory.60 Washington had forced Sullivan to apologize to the Frenchman, but winter had now arrived in New England and nothing more could be done. An opportunity to surprise and dominate the British still existed in the West Indies, however, and d’Estaing was never one to sit still for long.

  On 4 November he ran from Boston with his powerful fleet for Martinique. On the very same day a British force under Commodore William Hotham left New York, also for the West Indies. This had nothing to do with d’Estaing’s movement but was a much-delayed response to orders sent from London to shift the strategic focus of the war to the Caribbean. Both Britain and France could almost taste the easy victories waiting for them in the Caribbean, and they were both equally terrified of easy defeat. The arrival of French sea power in the war was the single cause of this major strategic realignment from North America to the Caribbean, a change that directly and immediately affected the likelihood of the British being able to retain their American colonies.

  Hotham’s force consisted of 5,000 troops in fifty-nine transports, protected by nothing more than a nominal naval escort, the most powerful ships being two 64-gunners. Even the inexperienced d’Estaing could have taken the entirety of Hotham’s force with ease, had the two fleets met, and the entire British Caribbean would then have been in his lap. British luck held, however, and the fleets did not meet but sailed almost parallel with each other, in total ignorance, all the way to the West Indies – yet another extraordinary turning point in this extraordinary war.61

  * This was the last diplomatic attempt to end the war by negotiation. The fact that there were no more efforts made when several opportunities presented themselves was a major weakness in the British war effort. Dull, Diplomatic History, 123–4.

  * Howe’s fleet consisted of six 64-gunners, two 50-gunners and some smaller ships. Clowes, Royal Navy, III, 399–401.

  * It is likely that one of those ships is the Lord Sandwich. Originally built in Whitby, she was once none other than the Endeavour, Captain James Cook’s ship on his first circumnavigation. Her presence in Rhode Island is important evidence of the pressure on British shipping caused by transport and supply problems. You can follow the ongoing search for Endeavour at www.rimap.org. See also Abass, ‘Newport’; Abass, ‘Endeavour and Resolution’.

  * In fact nothing happened for 139 years. Then, in 1917, when France and America were allies in another war, a memorial was finally erected in the King’s Chapel Burying Ground in Boston. It is still there today.

  15

  CARIBBEAN SEA

  The Caribbean sugar islands were the principal source of British and French wealth, and their importance to the war cannot be overstated. George III summed it up:

  Our islands must be defended even at the risk of an invasion of this island, if we lose our sugar islands, it will be impossible to raise money to continue the war and then no peace can be obtained but such a one as He that gave one to Europe in 1763 never can subscribe to.1

  The Americans also realized that a British defeat there ‘will put our affairs on a favourable footing, and … will effect the full completion of all our wishes, in securing the independence of America’.2 The income from the Caribbean trade was important in itself, but the guarantee of its arrival gave Britain a far bigger borrowing capacity than its rivals. The British government essentially paid for the war by raising revenue against its sugar islands.

  The islands lay like a great fleet of warships across the entrance to the Caribbean Sea, the Windward Islands to the south, the Leeward Islands to the north, and there was plenty to worry about. At the outbreak of war the British owned Jamaica, Antigua with its crucial naval base at English Harbour, St Kitts, Dominica, St Vincent, Barbados, Grenada and Tobago. The French were also heavily committed. They then owned Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti), Martinique, Guadeloupe, St Lucia and Cayenne on the South American coast.

  All these islands were vulnerable to defeat in isolation. Distances in the Caribbean are far larger than many people suspect; it is well over 500 miles from the southern tip of the Lesser Antilles, which comprise both the Windward and Leeward Islands, to the northern tip, and from there it is well over 1,200 nautical miles to the westernmost tip of Cuba. To make matters worse, there were very few troops on the islands – around 1,000 British troops in the entire British Caribbean in 1778.3 The islands’ defence therefore relied almost entirely on sea power. It is no coincidence that more major fleet battles in this war were fought in the Caribbean than anywhere else.

  With so much at stake, it was ironic that the demands of exercising sea power in the Caribbean were as steep as anywhere in the world. Any navy there would struggle against nature more than they would ever struggle against an enemy. Simply surviving in better condition than your enemy was to win a major naval victor
y.

  Sea power in the Caribbean was governed by the predictable wind system. During the calm winter months the winds blew steadily, almost always from the east, and in the summer months storms and hurricanes rolled through with steady frequency. The currents caused by the meeting of the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea in a stretch of water populated by numerous islands were also powerful and influential. With their large, blunt hulls, warships were poor at sailing to windward and vulnerable to currents of any sort. Local knowledge was a massive advantage.

  The ships themselves fell apart rapidly in the Caribbean. Admiral James Young complained that ‘the weather and climate destroys everything so fast it is with great difficulty we can keep them in repair’.4 The shipworm – Teredo navalis – grew as large as a small snake in the warm water. The sun dried and frayed rope, and sudden squalls sprang masts and yards. Limited dockyard facilities – in Antigua, Barbados and Jamaica for Britain, and in Martinique for France – added a far greater significance to damage received in the Caribbean than to similar damage received in home waters. Even basic wear and tear could be problematic. There were no dry docks anywhere in the British or French Caribbean.5 In a strange way, therefore, successful naval warfare in the Caribbean was actually all about minimizing any naval activity. This was always true but it was particularly true in 1778. Then the British problems were exacerbated by a shocking lack of stores and experience in the dockyard at Antigua. When war broke out, a ship’s carpenter was working in the role usually occupied by a highly experienced master shipwright, and there were no masts at all ‘fit for a frigate’s main mast or larger’.6