Four years after the end of the Nine Years’ War, Charles II of Spain died leaving his throne to Philip of Anjou—his grandnephew and Louis XIV’s grandson. The specter of the House of Bourbon ruling France and Spain prompted England and the Dutch Republic to declare war. Apart from the political calculus, Dutch and English merchants saw an opportunity to increase their trade to the West Indies at Spain’s expense. In the first engagement of the War of the Spanish Succession, in July 1702, an Anglo-Dutch force under George Rooke destroyed a Spanish treasure fleet and its French escorts in the Spanish port of Vigo. The attack came after most of the cargo had been taken ashore, but the loss of ships hobbled Spain’s transatlantic trade, the lion’s share of which fell to French merchants, and opened the West Indies to further encroachment by English and Dutch interlopers. Of greater strategic consequence was the British capture of Gibraltar and of Port Mahon, on Minorca. An attack on Toulon ultimately failed, but not before the French scuttled fifty ships to prevent their capture. With two bases in the western Mediterranean and the French fleet sunk at Toulon, the Royal Navy, as it was now called, could guarantee British merchants access to the lucrative trades of the Mediterranean, harass France’s commerce with the Levant, and keep an eye on North African corsairs. Although Minorca was lost in the Seven Years’ War, Gibraltar would prove a springboard for the extension of British power into the eastern Mediterranean, especially Egypt, and until the 1950s it was a vital link in the chain of British ports that led via Malta and Suez to the Red Sea, India, Hong Kong, and Australia.
By the 1730s, Britain possessed the most powerful navy in the world, and it was possibly the equal of those of France and Spain combined. In addition to its English bases it had Mediterranean outposts at Gibraltar and Minorca, and Antigua and Jamaica in the Caribbean, as well as ships stationed from Barbados to Boston, and access to the facilities of the Bombay Marine, the East India Company’s naval arm since the early seventeenth century. Even so, apart from the capture of Portobelo, on the Caribbean coast of Panama, by a force of only five ships, decisive naval operations in the War of the Austrian Succession were limited to European waters. But the experience of long-range campaigns would prove invaluable for the British, who put the naval conflict’s hard-won lessons to work in the campaigns of the Seven Years’ War. The scale and scope of naval warfare was completely different, and the stunning blockade and eventual destruction of the Brest fleet was one of only three battles fought in European waters. Between 1757 and 1759, British and French naval squadrons of up to eleven ships of the line fought in the Indian Ocean in support of their respective East India companies and their allies, and after Spain joined the war Royal Navy ships sailed from India to the Philippines to capture Manila. However, the most widely dispersed operations were in the Americas. In 1758, twenty ships took part in the capture of the French fortress of Louisbourg in eastern Nova Scotia. From there the fleet advanced up the St. Lawrence and managed to land troops upstream from Quebec, which enabled them to take the city from the rear, and set the stage for the capture of Montreal and all Canada. Extensive though this territory was, its population was a fraction of that of the thirteen colonies to the south; and in commercial terms, Britain’s North American holdings paled in comparison with its Caribbean plantations. George III made the case in a letter to the first sea lord at the height of the American Revolution: “If we lose our sugar islands, it will be impossible to raise money to continue the war; the islands must be defended, even at the risk of an invasion of this island.” Great Britain was never at risk during the American Revolution, and Britain’s Caribbean islands were maintained. But against all odds the thirteen rebellious colonies won their independence.
The American Revolution
The proximate causes of the American Revolution can be traced to crown policies implemented in the wake of the Seven Years’ War, but the roots of the colonists’ self-confidence can be traced to the previous century. All but ignored by king and Parliament during the English Civil War of the 1640s, merchants and cod fishermen in British North America had carved out a place for themselves in the trade with the West Indies, which, stripped of their forests to make way for sugarcane, depended on North America for much of their food and virtually all of their wood. As a result, the eighteenth century saw an explosive growth in shipbuilding in British North America, which accounted for about one-third of the ships in the British merchant marine. American shipwrights launched about a thousand vessels in the 1600s, the majority of them relatively small by the standards of the day and not competitive with larger, English-built vessels but more than adequate for the trade of the western Atlantic and Caribbean. Colonial seamen and shipwrights benefited from the Navigation Acts because they were allowed to serve under the British flag and to build ships for British owners. On the whole, however, the colonists deeply resented the prohibitions in the Navigation Acts, the expectations of which were unrealistic for the simple reason that there were not enough ships to serve all of Britain’s far-flung colonies. Moreover, by law European goods imported into the colonies had first to be unloaded and reloaded in England. This re-exportation caused unnecessary delays, drove up handling costs, and resulted in the imposition of double duties on some goods—for import to and export from England. The number of enumerated goods that could be exported only to England and not to other British colonies, much less to foreign ports, increased steadily. By the 1750s, these included sugar, molasses and rice, copper and iron ore, tobacco and cotton, and naval stores like tar, lumber, pitch, and hemp, and as a result, smuggling was rampant.
Although Britain’s financial system gave it the flexibility to prosecute wars more easily than its enemies, the conflicts of the eighteenth century were enormously expensive. To allay the cost of servicing the debt, and to pay for the continued defense of the North American colonies—including those won from France in the Seven Years’ War—the government imposed taxes designed to raise revenues and regulate trade; enforced the Navigation Acts more stringently to prevent illicit trade with non-British colonies in the West Indies; and transferred jurisdiction over smuggling cases from the provincial courts, where it was virtually impossible for the government to win a case, to vice admiralty courts. Resistance to these policies took many forms and reached a theatrical climax in the Boston Tea Party of 1773. That spring, the East India Company had received permission from Parliament to get a tax drawback on tea exported to Ireland and North America. This allowed them to set prices that undercut smugglers, but at a cost to the treasury of about £60,000 per year. The focus of the ensuing debate turned on the principle of taxing the colonies. Despite dire predictions from such parliamentarians as William Dowdeswell—“I tell the Noble Lord now, if he don’t take off the duty they won’t take the tea”—Prime Minister Lord North refused to reconsider.
When three East India Company ships reached Boston, citizens demanded that their tea be returned to England. A standoff was resolved when thirty to sixty colonists boarded the ships and dumped their cargoes into the harbor. In retaliation, Parliament passed the Intolerable (or Coercive) Acts, which annulled the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter, closed the port of Boston, allowed legal cases against agents of the crown to be heard in England, and required private citizens to quarter soldiers in their homes. All but the last applied to Massachusetts alone, but in solidarity many of the colonies closed their ports to ships from England, and in the fall of 1774 the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia. In February 1775, Parliament tightened the noose with the passage of the Restraining Act, which prohibited New England fishermen from “carrying on any Fishery … upon the banks of Newfoundland … or any other part of the Coast of North America.” Two months later a British regiment sent to round up rebel leaders in Lexington, Massachusetts, fought the local militia in the opening skirmish of the American Revolution.
The patriots’ prospects were dim. The Royal Navy maintained more than two dozen ships of the line in North American waters; the colonies had none.
While the colonies had laid down thousands of merchantmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they had virtually no experience of building warships and they had limited access to ships’ guns, ammunition, or powder. Few colonists had any naval experience and most coordinated efforts failed, notably two attempts to seize gunpowder on Bermuda and in the Bahamas, and a catastrophic expedition to Penobscot Bay in which all of thirty-nine ships were lost in a bungled effort to seize a small British fort at Castine, Maine. What few successes there were at sea invariably resulted from individual initiative, almost always by privateers bearing commissions issued by either the Continental Congress or individual states. American privateers also played a vital role freighting war matériel from sympathetic French and Dutch suppliers, mostly via the Caribbean, though such support was not without risk for all involved. In retaliation, British privateers and warships seized Dutch shipping and trading stations in the Caribbean, West Africa, and South Asia.
The French were happy to support an enemy of Britain without actually going to war, but American diplomats lobbied persistently for a more decisive relationship and in February 1778 France signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce. This would not have happened without a less heralded success for the Americans’ freshwater fleet at the battle of Valcour Island in Lake Champlain. The British had hoped to sever New England from the rest of the colonies by driving down Lake Champlain between New York and Vermont and into the Hudson River valley. To counter this threat, Benedict Arnold assembled a small force of soldiers and shipwrights at Skenesborough, New York, and built a fleet of three galleys, one cutter, and eight flat-bottomed gunboats called gundalows. In October 1776, Arnold’s fleet fought a four-day battle against Captain Thomas Pringle’s five warships, twenty gunboats, and twenty-eight longboats. The battle was a tactical defeat but a strategic victory for Arnold because Pringle was forced to postpone his southward advance until the following spring. In the meantime, the Continental Army reinforced its position in the Hudson valley and when fighting resumed, the Americans forced the surrender of a British army at Saratoga, New York. It was this success in turn that persuaded the French that the rebels might win the war.
In 1780, a French fleet brought the Comte de Rochambeau with an army of six thousand soldiers to support General George Washington. The following March, the Comte de Grasse sailed for North America via the West Indies. On August 30, 1781, his fleet of twenty-eight ships of the line reached Chesapeake Bay where another thirty-three hundred French troops disembarked to join Washington and Rochambeau’s siege of General Charles Cornwallis, then dug in on the Yorktown peninsula. A few days later the Royal Navy’s Rear Admiral Thomas Graves sailed from New York to the Chesapeake, arriving on September 5. Rather than attack while de Grasse’s ships were at anchor, Graves formed up in line of battle. The French fleet stood out of the bay in some disorder and Graves attacked, but as a result of mixed signals the rear division barely took part in the battle of the Virginia Capes. The French lost about two hundred men, double the British casualties, but they drew the British away from the Chesapeake and prevented a junction of Graves and Cornwallis. Light winds over the next few days prevented a renewal of the battle but by September 10 de Grasse was back in the Chesapeake. Caught between the French fleet and the Continental Army, Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, and the independence declared by the United States five years before was secure.
War between France and Britain continued in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, where Vice Admiral Pierre André, Bailli de Suffren, led an especially impressive campaign. Suffren had left France at the same time as de Grasse, and after preventing a British takeover of the Dutch Cape Colony in southern Africa, in February 1782 he succeeded to command of the French naval forces in the Indian Ocean: three 74-gun ships, seven 64s, and two 40s. The British had taken the Sri Lankan port of Trincomalee from the Dutch and were fighting Hyder Ali, sultan of Mysore and a French ally in southern India. Despite being outnumbered and having no local base—he was forced to winter in Dutch-held Aceh on Sumatra—Suffren captured Trincomalee in August 1782 and the following year prevented the British from taking Cuddalore four days before news of the peace negotiations arrived. En route home, Suffren returned to Cape Town where the British officers he had just finished fighting readily acknowledged his brilliant conduct of the Indian campaign. “The good Dutchmen have received me as their savior,” Suffren wrote, “but among the tributes which have most flattered me, none has given me more pleasure than the esteem and consideration testified by the English who are here.” His success did nothing to alter the balance of power on the subcontinent, and whatever tactical and strategic lessons he imparted to his subordinates would be swept away in the French Revolution a decade later.
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
Just as animosity between England and the Dutch Republic survived England’s transition from monarchy to commonwealth and back to monarchy in the seventeenth century, French hatred of perfidious Albion endured the revolution from monarchy to republic to empire from 1789 to 1815. Eight months after France declared war on Britain in 1793, Vice Admiral Samuel Hood accepted the surrender of Toulon by French royalists, but in so doing he had diverted resources from the more urgent campaign to seize France’s Caribbean colonies, which accounted for 40 percent of her foreign trade and two-thirds of her blue-water merchant marine. The British took a number of islands, but their initial success was undermined by a combination of presumption toward the French colonists and the loss of about sixty-five thousand men, including roughly twenty thousand sailors, to tropical disease between 1793 and 1801. Even the tactical victory in the battle of the Glorious First of June 1794—fought so far out to sea that it could not be associated with a landmark—was a strategic failure because the British failed to prevent a desperately needed grain convoy from reaching France.
Attention turned again to the Mediterranean in 1798, when Admiral Horatio Nelson was assigned to watch a French fleet mustering at Toulon under François-Paul Brueys d’Aigalliers. “Exceeding hard Gales” forced Nelson off station just as Brueys sailed for Egypt with an armada of twenty warships, three hundred transports, and more than thirty thousand soldiers under Napoleon Bonaparte. Initially ignorant of Brueys’s intended destination and lacking ships suitable for scouting the enemy—“Was I to die this moment, want of frigates would be found stamped on my heart!”—Nelson caught up with the French in Egypt just after Napoleon’s army landed. Brueys had anchored his thirteen ships and four frigates off Aboukir east of Alexandria, but he made two crucial miscalculations: that Nelson would not attack until morning, and that his own ships did not need to clear for action their shoreward-facing guns because Nelson would be unable to attack from that side. He was disappointed on both counts. Nelson attacked at once and sent five ships between the French line and the shore to achieve an overwhelming tactical and strategic victory that cost the French eleven ships of the line and two frigates, and stranded their army in Egypt for two years.
In the meantime, Napoleon had returned to France and as first consul scored a series of stunning victories over continental armies. Britain subsidized a number of countries to keep them in the war, but they were antagonized by the Royal Navy’s insistence on the right to search their vessels for contraband. At the end of 1800 Russia, Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark declared a policy of armed neutrality, embargoing British shipping in their ports and denying the Royal Navy the right to search neutral ships. Diplomatic efforts to change Danish policy failed, and in March 1801 Admiral Sir Hyde Parker and Nelson sailed for the Baltic with thirty-nine ships. A preemptive attack on Copenhagen to prevent Denmark from going over to the French compelled the Danes to lift their embargo (Russia and Sweden soon followed suit), and netted the British fifteen Danish ships of the line and as many frigates.
Exhausted by war, Britain and France concluded the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, but hostilities resumed the next year. When the British got wind of Napoleon’s plans for an invasion of
England, Nelson was ordered to contain Vice Admiral Pierre Villeneuve’s fleet at Toulon. In the spring of 1805, Villeneuve slipped Nelson’s blockade, rendezvoused with the Spanish fleet at Cádiz, and crossed the Atlantic to Martinique, all in an effort to keep the British from massing their ships for the defense of England. Nelson set off in hot pursuit, and when Villeneuve learned that Nelson had reached the Caribbean, he returned to Cádiz almost immediately with Nelson again on his heels. Daunted by the prospect of an engagement with the British fleet, Villeneuve stayed put until he learned that Napoleon was relieving him of command. Early on the morning of October 19, eighteen French and fifteen Spanish ships of the line weighed anchor; within two and a half hours, signal flags had passed the news to Nelson along a chain of frigates stretching fifty miles to the southwest. The Combined Fleet took two days to straggle out of Cádiz, and at first it seemed as though Villeneuve would make a run for the Mediterranean, but on October 21 he turned back to face the enemy off Cape Trafalgar.
Eleven days before, Nelson had outlined his plan of attack in a memorandum to his officers:
The whole impression of the British Fleet must be to overpower from two or three ships ahead of their Commander-in-Chief, supposed to be in the Centre, to the Rear of their fleet … something must be left to chance; nothing is sure in a Sea Fight, beyond all others. Shot will carry away the masts and yards of friends as well as foes. I look with confidence to a Victory before the Van of the Enemy could succour their Rear.… [I]n case Signals can neither be seen or perfectly understood, no Captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy.
Nelson divided his fleet into two divisions and as the fleets closed he ordered his most famous signal run up: “England expects that every man will do his duty.” The battle was hard fought from the outset, and Nelson’s Victory was in the thick of it, at one point being enfiladed by three French ships. In the early afternoon Nelson was shot as he paced the quarterdeck and three hours later—having been informed of the capture of fifteen of the enemy ships—the hero of Aboukir, Copenhagen, and now Trafalgar died. His death was not in vain, for with Trafalgar he had destroyed the French battle fleet and the Royal Navy would have no serious rivals for a century.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 68
