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

by Willis, Sam

  Not only was Byron’s squadron outnumbered, it was also in worse condition than the French. It had, in fact, been in a shocking state when it first arrived in the Caribbean the previous year, and the Caribbean climate had only compounded the problems. His men fell like flies to sickness and a large number of his surgeons and their mates were ill.7 Aware that they were in the grip of an epidemic and that continued service in the British fleet was akin to a death sentence, Byron’s men deserted like rats. He didn’t even dare to sail to the naval dockyard at English Harbour in Antigua, usually a sanctuary for British ships in the Caribbean, because it had become renowned for desertion. There was little point taking the risk because the dockyard suffered from ‘a total want of every kind of stores, but particularly of masts’.8 The single most significant advantage that the British traditionally held over the French in the Caribbean – their access to quality repair facilities and naval stores at Antigua – had therefore been lost.

  The result was that, in the summer of 1779, Byron commanded a fleet full of unhappy men on rotting ships with empty holds. To make matters worse, if it was at all possible, his squadron was now almost entirely out of water, having consumed what they had taken on their trip to St Kitts.9 The very last thing that the British needed now was a battle.

  Byron sailed in the hope that he could surprise the French, perhaps while they were still unloading their troops. The French, however, had already secured the island, and were now united, focused and ready to defend it. An efficient network of scouts warned them long in advance of the British arrival.10 Naval battle in such a scenario was always tentative because the defending side would be unwilling to commit to a decisive encounter. To secure the island they simply needed to retain control of their anchorage, and we have seen at Ushant just how difficult it was in the age of sail to force an unwilling enemy to battle. Byron, who had never commanded a fleet in battle, was about to find out just how difficult it was.

  His first problem was that his fleet was in very poor order because two sections of three ships had broken away from the main body. He was also burdened, and preoccupied, with a convoy of blundering transports full of troops. To allow the French to fall on a defenceless flotilla of transports would be catastrophic.

  Byron signalled to attack the rear of the enemy fleet, which required those isolated sections of his fleet to pass within range of an overwhelming number of French ships. They fought their way towards the enemy rear but were horribly damaged in doing so. A bold British captain, Robert Fanshawe of the Monmouth, wore out of line without orders, and attacked the van of the French fleet, to distract them from the crippled British ships in their rear – a move that was almost identical to the much more famous one made by Nelson at the battle of St Vincent in 1797.* Byron praised Fanshawe’s move in his dispatch and the French were deeply impressed; it was reported that they toasted the gallantry of that ‘little black ship’ after the battle.11

  The battle of Grenada. The French fleet is shown in the foreground, the British in the background.

  Several British accounts recalled how the French fired at their rigging and then drifted away to leeward, thus preventing the British from engaging closely in their traditional manner, and Byron was careful to complain that the French ships sailed much faster than the British, allowing them to choose the range of engagement.† It is also clear that, once the full size of the French fleet became clear, Byron deliberately and quite sensibly kept to windward of the French to prevent them from doubling his line and attacking it from both sides at once. The Admiralty later praised Byron’s conduct: this was no situation to try anything rash.12

  The battle drifted to a close with both fleets out of range and content to remain so. The French could easily have secured four isolated and dismasted British ships but did not. One of d’Estaing’s subordinates, the fiery bailli de Suffren, blamed d’Estaing’s want of seamanship skill for this failure. ‘Had our admiral’s seamanship equalled his courage,’ wrote Suffren, ‘we would not have allowed four dismasted ships to escape.’13 Perhaps that is fair; but what is certain is that the prize of capturing four ships was not worth the risk of losing an entire sugar island newly prised from the British. Less likely but certainly possible, d’Estaing may very well have been making a remarkably restrained and impressive strategic decision.

  Byron returned with most of his ships to St Kitts to repair in safety under the guns of British batteries.* The French threatened him at St Kitts twice but, to British astonishment, made no attack.14

  * * *

  French and British sea power were damaged in different ways by the battle. At least nine of Byron’s fleet were badly damaged in the rig, many of them entirely dismasted, and the lack of available stores to get those ships quickly back to sea was the death knell of British sea power in the Caribbean for 1779. It was the worst British naval defeat for ninety years – since the battle of Beachy Head in 1690. The capture of St Lucia the previous year had put a deceptive glow on the shape of things in the Caribbean, but the loss of Grenada had revealed them for what they really were.15 Byron, fed up with being expected to wage naval war with inadequate supplies, too few men and too few ships, resigned. Yet another leading British naval flag officer experienced in naval battle, to go with Keppel, Palliser, Howe and Barrington, was thus lost to the war.*

  The French fleet, shown in the foreground on the starboard tack, reconnoitring the British fleet at St Kitts, 22 July 1779. The British are shown beyond the French fleet, advancing along the coast on the port tack.

  D’Estaing’s fleet suffered many more casualties than the British,† a reflection of the thin construction of the French hulls. The French, however, were able to recover much more quickly than the British because they had a better supply of men available than the British did of masts. D’Estaing simply continued his campaign by taking 1,600 men from Saint-Domingue, 2,000 from Guadeloupe and patching the damaged hulls with whatever timber the shipwrights had to hand.‡ In only a short time he had at his disposal a truly massive fleet, fifty-two ships strong, of which no fewer than twenty-two were ships of the line.

  The British quaked in London, where the news was met with abject horror, and, in the Caribbean, where anxious eyes waited for the next strike to fall.16 The British Caribbean fleet was immobilized and Jamaica, the engine of the entire British economy, was on d’Estaing’s doorstep. A strike there would be an unparalleled and grievous wound against the British empire and it would probably force them out of the war. Nelson, who had been responsible for improving the island’s defences, joked in a letter home that he might soon be learning to speak French.17 Rumour of the danger they were under flew home in letters like this, and Barrington, furious, was now in London weaving tales of misery and woe, defending his actions by justifiably blaming those who had failed to provide him with an effective weapon with which to fight. ‘Admiral Barrington is come home in very ill humour,’ wrote James Cornwallis, brother of William, ‘and represents our situation in the West Indies as truly lamentable, where we thought ourselves strongest … we are every day in apprehension of some bad news. How different from the last war, when we were only accustomed to hear of victory.’18 The British were on the verge of disaster.

  * An interesting parallel which is rarely mentioned. Nelson was in the Caribbean at this time. It is highly likely that he heard a detailed breakdown of Byron’s battle and knew all about Fanshawe’s manoeuvre.

  † An important observation which counters the traditional view that the British ships sailed better than the French during this war, and which is intimately linked with the issue of coppering. T. White, Naval Researches, 27.

  * William Cornwallis, captain of the Lion, managed to raise some canvas on the stumps of his masts and claw his way to Jamaica, where he met the young Captain Nelson, thus sowing the seeds of a warm professional relationship that would last for the rest of Nelson’s life. Cornwallis’s account is in TNA: ADM 1/241, f.297.

  * Though both Keppel and Howe returned
at the war’s end, after the fall of the North government.

  † The French had a similar number of deaths (190 to the British 183) but far more killed and injured (759 to 346). Mahan, Major Operations, 81.

  ‡ These new men included the first free black regiment to serve in the French military, the ‘Volunteers of San Domingo’. Wilson, Southern Strategy, 137; Dull, French Navy, 161.

  21

  FRENCH INCOMPETENCE

  Luckily for the British, whose empire was sitting like a fat grape beneath d’Estaing’s heel, the eighteenth-century sailor’s fear of the weather saved them. With the hurricane season fast approaching, even though he might still have struck at the British in Jamaica, d’Estaing abandoned the Caribbean. When the British finally discovered that he had left, they panicked, thinking that he had chosen to attack a major British naval base, probably New York, Newport or Halifax. Vice-Admiral Marriot Arbuthnot, the new commander-in-chief of the North American Station,1 was furious that d’Estaing had been ‘unattended, unobserved and without interruption to pursue any enterprize he might be daring enough to begin’,2 and in a complete fuss the British abandoned Newport, leaving Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island Sound wide open. Here, the threat of French sea power alone caused the British to abandon a hard-won and valuable position. Of less immediate significance but still with an impact on the war, d’Estaing’s presence in American waters also caused Clinton to postpone a new plan to attack Charleston.3

  The British were right, at least, in thinking that d’Estaing was heading to America, but they were wrong in supposing that he would attack a major naval base – an interesting difference which reveals the wide gulf in thinking between Arbuthnot and d’Estaing, between British and French perceptions of naval strategy. The Frenchman, in fact, had decided to head for the southern states, which had been struggling to fend off a British offensive launched in the dying weeks of 1778 that had culminated in the capture of Savannah. The British offensive had been planned with the Caribbean in mind. British Caribbean plantations were suffering because the Americans had cut off the imports of rice, meat and timber that kept the plantations going, and Savannah was the key to that trade.

  The city fell rapidly to a force of Scottish soldiers in November 1778. The plucky Georgia State Navy, which had boasted one of the earliest examples of a ship armed by the rebels with the explicit intention of attacking a British military vessel,4 was destroyed. The behaviour of the rampaging Scots – some of them on their first operation after two years as American prisoners, having been captured by American naval ships outside Boston in 1776 – was horrific. It was so bad that, after the war, the Georgia legislature passed a law prohibiting Scots from settling in the state unless they had fought for the Americans.5 As so often in campaigns in America during this war, the initial British assault was impressive but the long-term strategy it reflected was ill considered. Savannah became yet another isolated strong point on the eastern seaboard that was reliant on naval support but whose presence stretched the available naval resources too far.

  The British had nearly been trapped in Philadelphia, Newport and New York, and they had been saved in Jamaica by the coming hurricane season. Now d’Estaing was on the loose again, bending his orders so that he could respond to numerous pleas for American aid, sent from the Continental Congress and the governor of South Carolina.6 This time he was heading for Savannah. What would he make of this next clear opportunity to capture or destroy an isolated British garrison?

  * * *

  D’Estaing’s attack on Savannah in October 1779 was influenced by the difficulties of waging war at sea from start to finish. His ships were struck by a storm shortly after their arrival at the mouth of the Savannah River. Neither the storm’s arrival nor the extreme damage caused by it would have surprised an experienced mariner with detailed local knowledge of the coast of Georgia. A captured English sailor had warned the French that, off the Savannah coast at that time of year, ‘an English squadron had never dared to remain for eight hours even in the most beautiful weather’, and they were subsequently astonished that the weather remained fine for the first few days. It soon turned, however.7 The storm fell on the fleet with such suddenness that many of d’Estaing’s captains were unable to raise their anchors. Their only choice now was to head out to sea ‘to escape destruction’.8

  The storm lasted a week, and when the French returned, they were in tatters. Seven ships had lost their rudders and had to be steered by a recently invented system of ropes and tackles. The French Magnifique was so leaky that her sailors had to take out her guns, until she was hardly magnifique at all. The entire fleet lacked rope for running rigging, without which the sails could not be set.9 This all meant that, to repair his ships, d’Estaing had to stay far longer at Savannah than he had ever intended, and it is likely that this changed his plan from a lightning attack to a full-scale siege.10

  Congress was delighted that d’Estaing was there and crowed. Yet again they saw success written all over the sails of French ships, as if the disappointments in New York and Newport, and the excruciating tension caused by the presence of the French fleet in Boston, had simply never happened: they were utterly blinded by the ‘promise’ of sea power. ‘We did proclaim a general Day of Thanksgiving, to be held in these States, on the ninth Day of December next, not doubting but a complete victory over all the British forces in Georgia was “fixt as Fate”’, declared Congress, who held the ‘most sanguine expectations of success’.11 The local press in South Carolina simply bubbled with excitement.12

  As far as the Americans were concerned, French sea power was about to save the day.

  * * *

  The reports d’Estaing had received about the weakness of the British position in Savannah were not entirely accurate, or at the very least they needed significant qualification. The real situation was this. The city was very well stocked after the British raids of that summer into South Carolina. They had enough flour to last 6,000 men until January, and enough beef and pork until March. There were very few substantial fortifications of any type, but the city was defended on three sides by the Savannah River, a significant obstacle in itself but daunting indeed when patrolled by a number of British naval vessels. Other vessels had been sunk to block the main passage to the city. There was, moreover, no shortage of manpower to build fortifications to protect the city’s one undefended side, because the British had seized hundreds of slaves on their raids inland. They also had an ace up their sleeve in the talented, energetic and highly motivated Captain James Moncrief, the chief engineer of the British southern army.13 The most significant weakness in the British defences was that the trained military forces were split between the city itself and Beaufort, a town a little to the north of Savannah in Port Royal Sound. If d’Estaing could strike hard and fast, he could do so before the British had the opportunity to unite their troops. Savannah, in theory, was there for the taking.

  In practice, however, the French landings were poorly organized, poorly led and poorly executed. The first was on an island at the mouth of the Savannah estuary, which had been abandoned by the British. D’Estaing was so impatient to be ashore and to get to grips with the British that he landed in his fast, lightly manned cutter well in advance of the rest of his troops. Completely isolated, he then fell asleep while his men struggled in the open boats against the rising wind and turning tide. Many were unable to land that night and were forced to spend an uncomfortable night in their open boats.14 The next day the rest of the army landed, paraded around an empty island and then re-embarked.

  The second landing, this time on the mainland, was also a disaster. Again, the organization was shoddy, and a far larger body of men – 1,500 this time – was forced to spend the night in their open boats. The next day the wind and sea rose. One of the boats, rowed by men ‘who knew not the difficulties which confronted them’,15 turned over, drowning everyone aboard. One witness claimed that, in total, 100 men died this way.16 The position was also poorly chosen and
d’Estaing raged that ‘a post of a hundred men would probably have repulsed us’.17 The wind then rose to another storm, forcing the warships to slip anchor again, thus abandoning the French army on the beach without any tents and with only three days’ rations.

  The utter chaos of these landings stand in marked contrast to the skilful efficiency of the British landings at New York and Newport in 1776, at Head of Elk for the Philadelphia campaign in 1777 and at St Lucia in 1778. It seems that the French had dreams of sea power that they were simply unable to realize.

  The French at least knew about the British military outpost at Beaufort and had recognized its significance. They had stationed frigates at the mouths of both the Savannah River and Port Royal Sound to prevent the two from uniting. What they did not do, however, was block the route to Savannah from Beaufort that wound its way through coastal marshes. An American army under General Benjamin Lincoln had already made its way towards the French army camp and several armed rebel galleys – ideal craft for guarding the shallow inland waterways – had joined the French fleet. But nothing was done to block this passage, probably for want of local knowledge: we know that the French had no local pilots.18

  The British, on the other hand, who had been exploring the coast for nearly a year, knew it well, and they knew about a passage through the marshes known as Wall’s Cut, passable only by boats and small ships and only at high tide.19 They sneaked through, guided by Lieutenant Goldensborough of the Vigilant, on the very same day that a French frigate was negotiating the sand-bars at the entrance, some seven miles away. Utterly overjoyed at their achievement of defying such a mighty force, the British sailors ‘could not be prevented from giving three cheers’.20