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

by Willis, Sam

  Night appeared grand beyond Description, tho’ the light was a melancholy one: Five Thousand Loads of fine seasoned Oak Knees for ship building, an infinite Quantity of Plank, Masts, Cordage, & numbers of beautiful Ships of War on the Stocks were all the Time in a blaze, & all totally consumed, not a vestage remaining, but the Iron Work, that such things had been.19

  The most destructive British raid of the war, it fired both Collier and Clinton with energy for more. Within days of returning to New York they were off again, this time Collier’s ships taking Clinton’s soldiers far up the Hudson, where they seized crucial strong points which guarded north–south communication across the river. Collier then sailed downriver and into Long Island Sound, where his ships raided several Connecticut coastal towns, destroying shipping of any type wherever it was found. He was enraged at Norwalk, where, ‘for the treacherous conduct of the rebels in murdering the troops from windows of houses after safeguards were granted them’, he destroyed the entire town, ‘together with five large vessels, two privateer brigs on the stocks and twenty whaleboats, as also two saw mills, a considerable salt work, [and] several warehouses of stores’. He rather nonchalantly added that the ‘small town of Greenfield suffered the same Chastizement’.20 Primarily thanks to Collier’s ruthlessness, by July 1779 every ship in the Connecticut Navy had been captured or destroyed.

  The most damning strike on American naval strength, however, fell far away from New York in the beautiful stillness, the colourful wilderness, the hitherto peacefulness of Maine. The reason that the war now descended on such an isolated spot was the result of a strategic jigsaw, every piece shaped by sea power.

  In recent months Boston had become the leading centre of rebel maritime power. D’Estaing’s arrival in American waters had forced the British to lift their blockade, and armed American ships now sailed in large numbers from Boston at will. Clinton complained of them growing ‘insolent’ and he ‘trembled’ for the fate of British supply convoys. British naval officers raged at their impotence.21 In March seven British transports were captured, and in July eight rich prizes in a single cruise by the Queen of France and Ranger.22 This new-found American strength, however, seemed threatened when the British decided to seize a dominant strategic location with an excellent anchorage to the north of Boston, in Maine.

  The target was Bagaduce, modern-day Castine, a tiny headland near the mouth of the Penobscot River. The British would use it as a base from where they could police their maritime supply lines, which ran northward from New York, past rebel-held Boston, to the naval base at Halifax in Nova Scotia. Bagaduce was also a crucial source of shipbuilding timber, which was floated downstream from Maine’s copious inland forests. It was hoped that a major military presence in the region would encourage loyalists displaced from Boston, Philadelphia and elsewhere to resettle. It was even hoped that this would be the start of a new colony called New Ireland. This British move, therefore, was far more than the small visible military operation that it seemed. Like an iceberg, that small military operation in forgotten Maine hid a far larger body of imperial weight.

  A tiny British force, supported by just three naval sloops, seized Bagaduce on 12 June 1779. Rebel leaders in Massachusetts, chests puffed out in indignation at British temerity and faces flushed with pride in their new-found maritime power, decided to drive the British out. They drew on their own maritime history for inspiration. Bostonians had undertaken their own major maritime operations on several previous occasions: to capture Quebec in 1690, French Acadia (Nova Scotia) in 1704 and 1707, and Louisbourg in 1745. As a chance to demonstrate Massachusetts’ ability to stand up for itself against its mighty imperial foe, and as a metaphor for the entire rebellion, this was too good an opportunity to miss. The British force in Bagaduce was nearby, it was small and it was utterly isolated. How difficult could it be?

  * * *

  The biggest naval force that had ever sailed under American colours gathered at Boston, their intention nothing less than to ‘captivate, kill or destroy the whole force of the enemy’.23 Manpower was a major problem. Abigail Adams noted how more than half of the men aged between sixteen and fifty had already been drafted into army service, and so the Penobscot expedition was forced to rely on whatever was left, a large portion of which was either small boys or old men. The need for men was so bad that Massachusetts was forced to issue a press to man their ships – something that was used regularly by the British but which, hitherto, had deliberately been avoided by the Americans, who were so keen to paint their cause as one of liberty fought by volunteers.

  All three branches of American sea power – the Continental Navy, state navies and privateers – took part. The Massachusetts State Navy provided three armed ships, and the New Hampshire State Navy, in a rare example of interstate naval co-operation, its only warship, the Hampden. They were boosted by the presence of three warships from the Continental Navy, including the 32-gun frigate Warren, and sixteen Massachusetts privateers and twenty-two troop transports. The men involved did not suffer the language barriers experienced by the French and Spanish in their terrible attempt to work together in the English Channel, but they would soon discover that working such an alliance as a unified fleet raised more than enough problems of its own.

  The American fleet consisted of ships of widely varying capabilities, captained by men with varying interests in the war. The majority of the captains were from Massachusetts, but their commander, Dudley Saltonstall, was an officer in the Continental Navy and was from Connecticut.24 They did not have any shared culture or experience of working together. They would find it difficult to keep station in relation to each other in a flat calm, let alone in relation to an enemy who was firing back steadily, accurately, and with no intention of stopping. They had little experience of naval warfare at all. Most who had served on privateers knew next to nothing about battle because most merchantmen were either unarmed or poorly manned and their captains had no interest in risking their lives or the lives of their men for the sake of someone else’s profit.

  To wage naval warfare in the confines of an inland waterway was also to test the crews’ seamanship in the most rigorous way. To avoid collision they would need to tack and wear with great accuracy and confidence, and in the noise of battle they would, ideally, execute those manoeuvres by hand signal alone. Their captains would have to cope with changes in their ships’ capability as their men were wounded and the ships’ rigging damaged. And they would have to do all of this in shallow water, near invisible mudbanks, in waters that raced this way and that with tidal flow and river currents.

  Their enemy, on the other hand, had been able to nose their way into their anchorage at Bagaduce at their own pace, dropping a lead line here and there to sound the water. They would also, by now, be armed with detailed knowledge of winds, currents and tides in their new home. The ships would be anchored at bow and stern and probably attached to each other with giant hawsers, possibly even chains, to prevent their line from being broken. If attacked, therefore, none of the British sailors would be required to handle sail but could all focus on gunnery. Those men would have been trained to similar levels of competence according to similar rules by officers with similar professional expectations.

  It is unclear how much of this the rebel leaders in Boston who had conceived the operation realized, but it is certain that the levels of American expectation associated with this expedition were unrealistic. Once again, sea power was seen as a type of cure-all: the Americans believed that they could just whisper its name to benefit from its strength, and they were now going to suffer for that misjudgement as both the French and the Spanish had already suffered.

  When the Americans arrived, the British were unprepared to receive a major assault but immediately drew heart from the visibly woeful mismanagement of the American ships in the narrow tidewater.25 This was a key characteristic of naval warfare in the age of sail: competence was visible, the motions of a ship a sensitive indicator of the ability and stren
gth of her crew. The British, under command of Lieutenant Henry Mowat, quickly adopted a strong defensive position; the fleet of transports protected by the three British sloops carefully positioned and securely anchored near the newly constructed fort.

  PENOBSCOT

  Faced with this, the man in command of the American land forces, Solomon Lovell, was unable to agree with the naval commander, Saltonstall, on the next step. Should Saltonstall’s fleet take out the British sloops first or should the army secure the fort? At its most basic the conundrum was this: the first option would make it easier to take the fort; the second would make it easier to take the ships. The first option, however, would lead to the death of more sailors; the second to the death of more soldiers.

  Saltonstall, at least, understood the difficulties of inshore naval operations and realized that to attack the well-defended Mowat was a dangerous proposal indeed. He stood up to Lovell and refused to take his ships into that ‘dam hole’,26 an interesting choice of words that reveals the thought process of an experienced mariner. He was horrified at the prospect of sailing into a narrow waterway which, in his own words, he was ‘totally not acquainted with’.27 He knew that, if his attack failed, there would be no escape unless the wind miraculously changed direction at the exact moment that it was required and the British ships politely allowed his ships room to turn around.

  It made far more sense for the American soldiers to launch a lightning raid on the unfinished British land defences, but Lovell, blinded by the presence of the British ships, refused to stand down. The distant, ignorant war-planners in Boston were also blinded by the presence of their own ships and rebuked Saltonstall from afar when news of the American inaction reached their ears. ‘We have for some time been at a loss to know why the enemy’s ships have not been attacked … It is agreed on all hands that they are at all times in your power.’28 Criticized from all sides, Saltonstall prepared to launch a naval attack, but he never even got the opportunity.

  On 12 August a British squadron under the fiery George Collier arrived at the mouth of the bay. Collier, based in New York, had rushed his ships to sea as soon as he heard of the American expedition, which was far too large to have escaped the network of loyalist spies that ran like an artery from Boston to New York.

  At the sight of Collier’s ships – at nothing more than the threat of British sea power – the Americans panicked. They could clearly see how the British manoeuvred their much larger ships with skill and efficiency, and they were all too aware that their own force was too inexperienced, too young, too old and too sick to prevail.

  They fled upriver, in ‘an unexpected and ignominious flight’, wrote Collier, with the wind and the tide behind them, so tightly packed that only the rearmost few ships could fire safely at their pursuers without endangering the others. With the exception of two ships that were captured, the entire American force was destroyed on the riverbanks of the Penobscot. A chilling contemporary map of the action shows the American ships crammed into the river as the British chased, with the inscription ‘Rebel Fleet on fire’ [see fig. 11]. It was a stunning feat of seamanship by the British. Collier wrote how ‘the King’s ships continued their pursuit of the rebel fleet up the river Penobscot, & considerable hazard attended this part of the chace, from the extreme narrowness of the River, from the shoals & from the flaming ships on each side’.29 In the words of Lovell, ‘To attempt to give a description of this terrible Day is out of my Power … Transports on fire. Men of war blowing up … and as much confusion as can possibly be conceived.’30 It ranks as one of the most one-sided and decisive battles in all naval history. ‘We have lost a fine little navy’, wrote Jabez Bowen, deputy governor of Rhode Island, a classic example of the Americans misunderstanding the nature of their sea power:31 it was a terrible little navy and it was destroyed for its incompetence.

  In time the British looted the American ships’ guns and took them into their own service. The wrecks settled into the riverbanks. Some timbers remained exposed well into the twentieth century and served as climbing frames for children to play where once men and ships had burned. The thick, grey mud of the Penobscot, meanwhile, preserved immaculately the abandoned personal remains of hundreds of American sailors fleeing for their lives. One ship, the privateer Defence, was excavated between 1975 and 1981 by archaeologists who still purr over the quality of the artefacts left behind, undoubtedly the finest of any revolutionary-era shipwreck. We have tankards so perfect that they look like replicas used by modern-day re-enactors; we have initialled wooden name-tags for identifying lumps of meat boiled in a communal cauldron; we even have a potato skin. Most tellingly of all, however, we have immaculate leather shoes. Those shoes really are cause to pause and think. So easily celebrated simply as evidence of sailors’ clothing from the era, that approach rather misses another crucial point: they are evidence that some poor sailors, assuming they survived the fleet’s destruction, were forced to run for their lives through the Maine woods, possibly all the way to Boston, barefoot. Collier was convinced that the subsequent trial by wilderness those sailors now faced would kill many of them,32 but in reality most made it home.33 News of the destruction of the American fleet caused Arbuthnot in New York to jabber with excitement.34

  * * *

  The year 1779 was thus a disaster for the Americans, most of it at the hands of George Collier. The occasional bright point lit up the sky, including the American recapture of Stony Point and Paulus Hook on the Hudson in July and August,* and the capture of HMS Serapis by John Paul Jones off Flamborough Head in March, but the tide of allied American-French-Spanish failure seemed unstoppable. The state of the American army camp at Morristown, New Jersey, was also desperate. The horror of Valley Forge in the winter of 1777–8 survives in American folk memory as the nadir of Washington’s army, but the winter of 1779–80 at Morristown was actually worse.

  Washington now found himself immobilized by the ghost of French sea power. He needed to be ready to act in case d’Estaing appeared, but he had no idea where d’Estaing was or what he was planning to do. He ended up writing an extraordinarily servile letter that reveals the full extent to which the American army had been held hostage by d’Estaing’s fleet. He begged d’Estaing ‘to entreat that you will favour me as soon as possible with an account of your Excellency’s intentions’.35 Little did he know the shocking state of d’Estaing’s fleet, which had been scattered to the far corners of the Atlantic, or that his faith in French sea power was entirely misplaced.

  In blissful ignorance, Washington kept his soldiers blooded by allowing them to raid, with immense savagery, the Iroquois Indians of Pennsylvania and upstate New York who had sided with the loyalists. Led by Major-General Sullivan, the man who had failed to operate effectively with d’Estaing of Rhode Island in 1778, those raids are now famous for changing forever Indian and American history, but it is never acknowledged that Sullivan was unleashed for the simple reason that Washington was able to turn his mind and his forces to the interior because of the absence of d’Estaing’s fleet: there is a direct link between d’Estaing’s failure to maintain a naval presence in America in 1778 and the dramatic reshaping of American–Indian relations.

  * * *

  Winter then closed in. Temperatures plummeted and inflation rocketed. American credit was exhausted both at home and abroad. In the words of one young American, the Royal Navy’s patrols had ‘annihilated our commerce’.36 The lush funding that had been available for the American navy at its inception vanished and all naval shipbuilding ceased. Captures at sea became the only means of increasing the numbers of American warships, though with so few ships now available and a far more wary and committed enemy, those prizes became harder to come by.37

  The brief period of strength enjoyed by American armed ships sailing out of Boston in the spring and summer of 1779 was extinguished at Penobscot. Collier had done his bit in the south to shock American shipbuilding into submission, and isolated disasters befell the frigates that were actu
ally at sea: the Randolph exploded in battle with HMS Yarmouth in February 1778; the Alfred was captured in the West Indies in March that year; the Virginia grounded in the Chesapeake and was easily captured the same month; the Raleigh was captured by two weaker ships off Maine in September. Though the Continental Navy had boosted its numbers with ships lent by France or purchased, of the original thirteen frigates Congress had set out to build in December 1775, by the end of 1779 only the Boston, Trumbull and Providence survived. In fact, five American ships – Raleigh, Randolph, Alfred, Columbus and Independence – had been lost or destroyed within just ninety days of each other.* While John Paul Jones often gets the headlines in the history of American naval power in 1779, this catastrophic loss is the story that matters far more. Jones’s capture of a ship that was severely damaged in the fight – a fight in which his own ship was also ruined and therefore unable to continue his war against British merchantmen – was the only reason to ‘celebrate’ that year. In practice, those British observers with a keen understanding of naval warfare were more than happy that, for all the boost in morale Jones’s action had caused in America, he had, effectively, put himself out of commission: he had shot himself in the foot, and it was actually Captain Pearson who could celebrate how he had ‘over set’ the ‘cruise and intentions’ of Jones’s troublesome squadron.38

  The armed American ships now left at sea were small and outgunned by any British warship of comparative size. Few were coppered. Their masts and spars tended to be weak. They could barely afford to dress their sailors – something that the Navy Board described as a ‘disgust to the service’.39 ‘In looking over the long list of vessels belonging to the United States taken and destroyed, and recollecting the whole history of the rise and progress of our navy, it is difficult to avoid tears’, wrote Adams.40 On the rare occasion that a capture was made, the British recaptured their prizes 35 per cent of the time.41 On the occasions those American captures actually remained in American hands, the American legal and administrative naval infrastructure was so inadequate that it proved almost impossible to get the money from the prize’s sale back to Philadelphia where Congress so desperately needed it.42 In an attempt to tighten up the navy’s administration, the Marine Committee’s responsibilities were refined and centralized by the creation of a Board of Admiralty. It was intended that five officials, each from a different state, would constitute the board, but they struggled even to find three, the minimum required for a quorum. From the day of its creation onwards, the American Board of Admiralty gradually became less active.43