100 Mistakes that Changed History

by Bill Fawcett

  Washington needed a victory, but no one in that time fought in the dead of winter. But right across the river were garrisons of the hated Hessian soldiers in their winter quarters. A victory over them would be doubly effective. Today we have often heard about how Washington crossed the Delaware River amid the ice floes and surprised the Hessians, and in hindsight it seemed as if the conclusion was foregone. This is very, very far from the truth.

  Actually the plan called for two groups of rebel soldiers to attack across the river. The other failed to make the crossing at all. And the success of Washington’s attack was far from guaranteed. He led 2,400 men, some poorly armed and partially trained, against nearly 1,500 crack troops who would be on the defensive.

  The rebels’ only edge would be surprise. To ensure they had this, the river crossing was done in darkness. The problem was that the same darkness and fierce cold that hid them also slowed the crossing. Instead of arriving at Trenton to attack at sunrise on December 26, 1776, the Americans were still marching toward the Hessians. Not all of the local people were rebels. In fact, at this point many were still loyal to the crown. As the army marched down the road toward Trenton in the very early-morning hours, a loyalist farmer realized who they were and hurried off to warn the Hessian commander, Colonel Johann Rall.

  The farmer got as far as the colonel’s door. There a guard stopped him and would not budge. Tradition says the colonel was deep into a game of either chess or cards and had left orders not to be disturbed. The farmer hurriedly scrawled a note to Colonel Rall. The note reached the colonel, but was in English. Rather than trying to summon a translator that early and leave his game, the colonel put the warning note, unread, into his pocket. From that point on victory was inevitable. Washington’s 2,400 rebels surprised the Hessians, many of whom were asleep and mostly hungover or still drunk from the prior night’s Christmas celebrations. For the loss of four wounded and no one killed, Washington’s army killed 22 Hessians, wounded 94, and captured almost 1,000; the remaining 400 German soldiers scattered into the countryside. Just as important, Washington captured the food, clothing, and supplies of a well-equipped British regiment.

  Had Colonel Rall bothered to read the farmer’s note there is a high probability that the well-trained Hessians would have thrown back any rebel attack. Another defeat, combined with the ending of many of his men’s enlistments, would have broken Washington’s army. The Revolutionary War would have ended with a victory for Lord Howe, and today America might still be a British colony. The world would have been turned upside down.

  41

  FINANCED HIS OWN WORST NIGHTMARE

  Did unto Others

  1776

  There are few records of someone in such a position of power that he managed, by his own decisions, to destroy himself and end a 1,000-year-old dynasty. This feat was accomplished by Louis XVI of France. Louis had taken the throne in 1774 and inherited his nation’s antipathy toward Britain. His father, Louis XV, in 1771 had managed to reduce the power of France’s parliament until it was nothing more than an advisory body. When the American colonies revolted, this seemed a good chance for France to hurt Britain at no risk to itself. Over the next five years, France sent aide and soldiers to assist the American colonists. This may well have made all the difference: The French fleet holding the bay outside Yorktown in 1881 ensured Cornwallis had to surrender and guaranteed American independence.

  Louis XVI’s American intervention was a foreign policy coup that greatly discomforted the British. But in the long run, it did more harm to his own monarchy. Supporting the American war was very expensive. It virtually bankrupted the royal treasury. This, in turn, meant that the French financial system had to be modernized and taxation changed so that the losses could be replaced. A specially summoned session of the Assembly of Notables was called to approve the changes. They refused to do so. This left the French king with only one more place to turn for approval of his financial plan. This was to summon the Estates General, the grand parliament with representatives from every level of French society. That was where his encouragement of the American Revolution and its popularity in France once more turned on the king who made it successful.

  To justify their independence, the American rebels had to make the point that the rights of men were more important than the prerogatives of any monarch. The Americans meant the will of George III of Britain, but the ideas also took root among the intellectuals of France. When the Americans won, again with Louis XVI’s help, the writings of such men as Paine and Adams were reflected in those of Rousseau and the leading minds of Paris.

  Having financed and legitimized a revolution against a monarchy in the name of the rights of men, it should not have come as a surprise when the Estates General took the same view. Only this time, the king was Louis himself. The Estates General not only didn’t pass the laws the king had summoned them to consider but instead began to rebuild the entire French government based on the philosophy begun by the leaders of the American Revolution. By 1787, the most powerful king in Europe had become a very limited, constitutional monarch who derived his power not from his throne but from the people. By 1789, Louis XVI, never an active leader, had withdrawn from involvement in the government and spent all his time on his hobbies of locksmithing and masonry. By 1793, the man who legitimized revolution in the name of the rights of men and financed the first one was beheaded in the name of the people of France.

  For Louis XVI, financing and supporting the American Revolution put into motion results, attitudes, and actions that cost him first his throne and then his head. For him, and perhaps the thousands of those who died in the Terror of the French Revolution, it was a mistake that changed the world. It also was the mistake that ensured American independence and led to the rise of Napoleon.

  42

  DESTROYING THE ENVIRONMENT

  Breeding Like a Rabbit

  1788

  We have seen how poor leadership and bad decisions can affect socioeconomic climates. Now let’s look at what changes occur when a seemingly good idea alters the ecosystem of an entire continent.

  When English sportsman Thomas Austin arrived in Australia to make a new life for himself, he was sorely disappointed. He had spent much of his leisure time back home hunting pheasants, quail, partridges, hares, and—his favorite—rabbits. Much to his dismay, Australia had no rabbits. So, Austin wrote to his nephew back in England and had twenty-four rabbits shipped to his home in Barwon Park in southern Victoria. After all, what harm could twenty-four little rabbits do? There had been earlier attempts to populate Australia with these furry critters. The first fleet brought them over in 1788, but they did not become feral, except in parts of Tasmania.

  Other residents in Victoria took up the cause and had rabbits shipped over too. They were most likely enticed by Austin’s own words, “The introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting.” They listened well. The trend caught on, but Austin is the man who gets the credit, or rather the blame, for this enterprise.

  Only seven years later, a recorded 14,253 rabbits were shot on Austin’s property alone. The population had increased so much that 2 million could be shot or trapped without making the slightest dent in the growth of the species. Hunters prided themselves on being able to shoot 1,200 rabbits in just three and a half hours. This was a record unheard of back in England. It was the fastest growth of any mammal ever to be seen in the world. And yes, this is where the saying “breeding like rabbits” originates.

  So, why had this accelerated growth taken place in Australia and not England? This is likely the same question that Austin and the other settlers asked themselves. First of all, the milder winters allowed the rabbits to breed all year round. This, coupled with the fact that much of the area had been converted to farmland, created the ideal conditions for a mass growth in population.

  Because of this quick growth, the people of Australia experienced a turnaround in their
thinking concerning the rabbits. Around the year 1850, a man was charged £10 for poaching rabbits on the property of a certain John Robertson of Glen Alvie. A few years later, Robertson’s own son spent £5,000 trying to control the population. The effort proved futile. The rabbits caused irreversible damage. Rather than providing a “touch of home,” they became a terrible nuisance.

  In less than fifty years, the population stretched all the way to the New South Wales border, through Queensland, and across western Australia and the Northern Territory. This massive spread is still referred to as the “grey blanket.” Ironically, the hunters themselves caused this mass migration. Socially, rabbits tend to stay together. Contrary to popular belief, rabbits are not rodents and are more closely related to horses than rats. And in some ways behave as such. Young bucks will leave to establish new territory only at the brink of starvation or a possible collapse in the population. Drastic events such as fires, floods, and other natural disasters may also cause a mass exodus. The hunters did not understand that the mere threat they posed to the growth of the species caused the rabbits to seek less-threatening territory.

  Hunters also contributed to the migration by transporting the rabbits from shooting farms to establish them on their own properties for use as sporting game. Farmers became indignant over the practice, but the gentlemen hunters shrugged off the complaints, saying, “Farmers are the universal spoilers of a gentleman’s sport.” So, the continent-wide spread of these destructive creatures would not have taken place had it not been for the English gentleman and his love of hunting.

  And why were the farmers so up in arms about something as harmless as rabbits? Well, farmers tend to be very practical and they saw the rabbits for what they really were—pests. They devastated crops and considerably reduced the carrying capacity of the land. They also posed a threat to the native wildlife. And, it became impossible to keep their populations under control. They tore through fences, they climbed fences, and they would often pile up on one side of a fence and act as a ladder for their fellows. Rabbits have even been known to climb trees up to five meters tall. One local Australian official described in his records the attempts at controlling the rabbits as “trying to hold back the tide with a pitchfork.” Since the use of fences proved mostly useless, other methods of pest control were initiated.

  Many people hired rabbiters to control populations on their properties. But these bunny bounty hunters had an agenda. If the rabbits were eliminated altogether, rabbiters would be out of a job. So, while seemingly eradicating a property of the pests, rabbiters often employed other tactics, such as releasing rabbits onto lands, freeing pregnant rabbits from traps, and allowing the young ones to simply carry on. In 1888, the New South Wales minister for lands decided to stop subsidizing farmers to pay bounties. Officials passed legislation to try to regulate the rabbit population, but to no avail. The onset of myxomatosis provided some hope at quelling the population. But, as it turns out, the disease that usually proves fatal to rabbits does not discriminate between species. It also proved fatal to some of the native Australian wildlife. The infection remains, but most rabbits today are immune.

  Australia has been facing an invasion that has lasted more than 200 years. Her landscape has been devastated, her people have been forced into continuous hours of labor to deal with the problem, and the intruder has completely taken over. Some success has been achieved in limiting the rabbit population using traditional methods, but only at great effort and cost. A small mistake, by a few selfish hunters, has had a high cost in time, money, and environmental damage.

  43

  IMPATIENCE

  With a Dash of Indecision

  1798

  Napoleon became emperor of France, and Europe fought almost twenty years of the Napoleonic Wars because Admiral Horatio Nelson blew it in 1798. While the British fleet led by Nelson eventually destroyed the French fleet that had carried General Napoleon Bonaparte and his army to Egypt, the operative word in that sentence is eventually.

  The situation in 1798 was not good for Britain. It was at war with revolutionary France, and one by one its allies had been defeated or intimidated out of the war. Things had gotten so bad that by 1797 there was no British fleet in the Mediterranean for the first time in 150 years. In fact, there were only a few ports in the Mediterranean Sea that any British ship could even enter. Those friendly ports were Gibraltar, Malta, and Naples, among the hundreds of ports that were found on the shores of the Mediterranean, Adriatic, and connected waters.

  The French were on a roll, and one general was definitely making a name for himself. He was Napoleon Bonaparte, who had conquered and revitalized the French army in Italy. Napoleon had effectively defeated the entire peninsula except for Naples: a conquest that came soon after that. Bonaparte had returned to Paris to be hailed by the masses, which made the members of the Directorate rather nervous. Fortunately for them, Napoleon began agitating in February 1798 for an army with which to conquer Egypt. The idea appealed to the French politicians on many levels.

  Egypt, while technically part of the Ottoman empire (a French ally), had been, in reality, an independent nation ruled by the Mameluke horsemen for centuries. Placed where it was, if France could control Egypt, it had an easy route to India. Since the American Revolution, India had become a vital part of the trade empire that financed Britain and her allies. If India could be threatened, then England might be forced to accept a peace on France’s terms. If Egypt were captured, the only route the British would have to India would involve going completely around Africa, taking months to send any reinforcements. With Egypt, French troops could reach India in a few weeks. Egypt would effectively give the French Republic interior lines in any expansion of the war to India or the Orient. It would put the British at such a disadvantage, there was a good chance of France taking over the entire subcontinent. Without the wealth of India, continuing the war would bankrupt Britain within months.

  There also was another important factor that had to be on the minds of those who approved Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt: It got him out of Paris. In fact it got him out of Europe entirely. Win or lose, the venture seemed to remove Bonaparte as a political threat.

  By the spring of 1798, more than 31,000 soldiers and almost 200 scholars had gathered in Toulon for the invasion of Egypt. It was impossible to gather such a force without the British knowing. Word had reached the British weeks earlier, and in response, Nelson had reentered the Mediterranean. His fleet was hovering about seventy miles south of Toulon harbor, hoping to engage the French ships commanded by Admiral Baraguey as soon as they sailed. This was important because Nelson had no idea what the final destination of this powerful army would be. He knew only that from Toulon the fleet would be headed for an invasion. If Napoleon and more than 30,000 men got loose in the Mediterranean, the possible targets ranged from Ireland and Portugal to Malta and Constantinople or Egypt. So the young admiral waited anxiously for the French to sail into his arms.

  Most plans do not survive contact with the enemy, but Nelson’s plan did not even have to wait for the enemy before it began to unravel. Weather scuttled any chance Nelson had of intercepting Napoleon near Toulon. A sudden and locally severe storm in early May swept across the Mediterranean and slammed through where the British fleet stood guard. It caught that fleet in the open waters. Nelson’s flagship, the Vanguard, lost all of its masts. She had to be towed into a port and was nearly lost in the effort. The few frigates Nelson controlled were unavoidably scattered as they ran before the storm and were soon out of contact. Frigates were the scouts of the fleet and losing them proved costly later. All the British ships were separated and damaged. While the British were scattered and battered, the French sailed. Luck helped them avoid the storm. More than fifty merchant ships and a dozen men-of-war were able to slip south past the crippled British ships totally unobserved.

  Nelson really had no choice but to put his hopes in meeting the French near their destination. This was because in the day
of wooden ships and iron men, locating the enemy on the open sea was incredibly difficult. Today, with GPS and real-time satellite photography it can be hard to picture just how little a sea captain 200 years ago could observe. In an ocean that encompassed tens of thousands of square miles, a crewman perched on the top mast might be able to spot a ship ten or twelve miles away. His vision was greatly limited by the effective horizon. If they passed just a mile beyond the effective horizon of the enemy, a hundred ships, or in this case nearly eighty, were effectively invisible. Even sailing in a line at the normal speed, a ship’s best speed was around ten miles per hour. Plus the warships could not separate too fully as they would have to be able to signal one another if anything was found. So all of Nelson’s fleet, once it was reassembled and repaired, could search only a tiny portion of the sea at a time. Frigates, being faster and more able to stop merchant ships and ask questions, helped. But after the storm, Nelson’s frigates mostly managed to find one another, not the main fleet. This meant that they were of no use to Nelson in the weeks just after the French sailed. Even if one of the frigates found the French vessels, its captain wouldn’t know where Nelson’s ships were to report that finding to him.

  So Nelson had lost sight of Napoleon’s army and protecting ships. But he knew that he had to find them. Everyone was in a panic as to what the already famous French general might do. Nelson got new orders and information from Gibraltar, but they were of no help. The orders made it clear that no one in England or Gibraltar had any better idea where Napoleon was going than Nelson did. The French fleet had vanished, and when it reappeared the cost to the British was likely to be high. Nelson’s orders were for him to search the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, Greek waters, and even the Black Sea as needed. They also warned that the French could be planning to invade Ireland, or maybe grab Gibraltar, or Naples, or Sicily, or Malta. It is interesting that the list in his orders did not include Egypt, a tribute to the disinformation being put out by the French. So basically Admiral Nelson’s orders read “look somewhere” but gave him no idea where to look.