by Roger Knight
I must give you an account of a Transport, my party consisted of nine gentlemen, two ladies … two children, and Betty the Maid. At meals all was delightfully formal, and immediately after, just the reverse: each followed his fancy, and I assure you the jargon that usually succeeded in nine feet square, provided all the charms there must be in variety; ridiculously comical as this was for a moment, fifty-three days would have indeed been heavy, if the men had not been excellent.44
Losses were caused, in the main, by winter gales. When shipwreck occurred with crowded ships, casualties were horrific, often exceeding those from sea battles. The Channel and the North Sea were particularly dangerous. Over 400 soldiers were drowned on passage from Yarmouth to the Downs during the operations against Copenhagen in 1801.45 In November 1802 over 450 homecoming soldiers drowned when an old troopship, the Dutch prize Vryheid, lost her mast in the Channel and quickly broke in pieces on the beach off Dymchurch near Romney Marsh.46 The seas during the voyage across the North Sea towards Copenhagen in the early autumn of 1807 were particularly violent, and seven foundered with the loss of 400 soldiers.47 Two transports were lost on the passage back to England from Corunna in early 1809, both wrecked on the Cornish coast: nearly sixty officers and men of the 7th Hussars, and their horses, were lost in the Dispatch, whose master was drunk in his berth; in the Smallbridge, over 200 soldiers belonging to the King’s German Legion were drowned.48 In a fresh breeze on a dark night in February 1811 a transport, without lights, was run down off Falmouth by a large frigate: 197 officers and other ranks, 15 women, 6 children and 6 seamen perished.49 In the winter of 1809, however, the calmness of one master was much admired by an army officer when his vessel, returning from Corunna, got into difficulties on a lee shore off the Lizard, very near the infamous Manacles Rocks, two miles offshore. The army officer returned to his cabin and lay down on the floor, expecting the ship to strike, but it was saved by a fortunate shift in the wind. The master had prevented panic: ‘I attribute our safety to the conduct of the Captain. His manner was so cool and encouraging to the sailors; not an oath was sworn, nor a harsh expression made use of.’50 In general, however, the masters of these ships came under heavy criticism, and relations were worsened by the social distance between the gentlemen army officers and the masters, which significantly reduced real communication and understanding.
Yet these accidents must be set against the thousands of voyages that were made efficiently, in every year of both wars. In the French Revolutionary War alone, 135,000 troops were transported successfully from Britain to five theatres of war.51 Historians have emphasized the failures of large amphibious operations, citing the consequent boards of enquiry, and indeed evidence of shortcomings is more readily accessible than that of successes. Enemy territory overseas was occupied and taken under British control in Newfoundland, the French and Spanish West Indies, Minorca and Malta in the Mediterranean, the Cape of Good Hope, and the French enclaves in India, Mauritius and islands in Indonesia. Often these territories were occupied by British troops stationed in nearby garrisons, using transports already present on the station. For instance, Madeira was occupied in 1801 by an expedition leaving from Lisbon, with a minimum of fuss and little publicity.52 Most of these acquisitions were given back to France under the terms of the Peace of Amiens in 1802, but they were again taken and occupied after May 1803. In all, between 1793 and 1815, at least fifty amphibious expeditions, some of them of no great size, took possession of hostile overseas possessions.53 Most of the ships involved in these expeditions were merchant ships, amounting at times to a significant proportion of the British merchant fleet.* Such expeditions were in addition to the regular work of the transports in supplying provisions and stores to warships on blockade duties in home waters, and those serving on foreign stations and to an increasing number of overseas garrisons.
A typical example of a locally organized operation in the Mediterranean occurred in late 1805, when British troops under the command of General James Craig took part in the efficient and all but forgotten Anglo-Russian invasion of Naples. At Malta, in July, seventy transports, measuring 22,000 tons, were gathered, though with some difficulty, from all corners of the Mediterranean, with a view to conveying nearly 8,000 soldiers to Naples, from which the French had just withdrawn. An additional 13,000 tons of transports, sent from England, had to be provided to carry Russian troops from the Ionian Islands to Naples.54 After two months of negotiations, the British troops withdrew, in the same transports, having secured agreement from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to occupy Messina in Sicily. It was an operation in which not a shot was fired; it concluded with a permanent British armed force in Sicily, which in turn ensured the security of Malta.55 In the West Indies, at Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1809 and 1810, 6,000 veteran troops, with close support from the navy, overcame the local militia in ten days.56 The worldwide movements of British troops in the Napoleonic War achieved such success that by 1811 France and its allies did not possess a single overseas territory.
Nevertheless, large expeditions in home waters were a problem from the start of the war and remained so to the end. After the first expeditions – to Holland in 1793 and to the West Indies in 1794 – the supply of merchant ships immediately began to run dry. By October 1795 the Transport Board had 717 ships under contract, with a total tonnage of 194,501 tons, but had produced only 60,000 to 70,000 tons for Admiral Christian’s expedition, when 100,000 tons were required. By the middle of 1796, Rupert George was compelled to write to the Admiralty Board requesting that warships be used to transport troops, ‘there being no adequate supply to be obtained from the several Ports of this Kingdom, or from Transports lately returned Home’.57 The utility of 44-gun ships for carrying troops and stores had been suggested to Charles Middleton by an agent for transports in the late 1780s.58 The Admiralty had already turned to medium-sized warships to fill the gap: as early as the first year of the war, in 1793, four 44-gun ships, each just under 900 tons, about three times as big as the average chartered transport, were adapted to carry troops and stores, which these warships did for much of the rest of their working lives through the wars. Twenty-two warships were adapted to this use before 1798, including five large 64-gun Dutch ships captured at Camperdown.59 Additionally, in 1796, the Transport Board had to turn to the East India Company, with the support of Henry Dundas, as chairman of the Board of Control, hiring six large East Indiamen, measuring 6,500 tons.60 In the hurry of remobilization after the Peace of Amiens in 1803, the Company also ‘supplied Government with 10,000 tons [of] shipping armed free of expense in order to carry convoys to be employed as the Admiralty may direct’. These ships came under the control not of the Transport Board but of the Admiralty.*
Yet there was insufficient tonnage to meet peak demand. Following the great losses in the West Indies, no large amphibious expeditions were attempted between 1796 and 1798.* At this time the Pitt government was trying to negotiate peace with France and had to deal with the naval mutinies at Spithead and the Nore, while Henry Dundas, as secretary of state for war, was building up the army after the West Indian débâcle. Towards the end of 1797, however, the decision was taken to convert many more older, medium-sized warships into troopships. They were refitted in the dockyards: the lower tier of guns was removed and accommodation for soldiers fitted in its stead. The first conversion was completed in April 1798: by the end of the year fourteen had been adapted, and by the end of 1800, with all the home dockyards undertaking the conversions, forty-three. By 1801 fifty-three troopships, measuring a substantial 52,000 tons, were available. The cost of the exercise was not negligible, for, in all, the conversions cost more than £270,000 over three years, at a time when the money voted to the Transport Office for 1801 for chartering transports was just under £1 million.61 Significantly, these warships were not transferred to the Transport Board but, as with the East Indiamen, controlled by the Admiralty, their officers commissioned and their crews naval seamen. These troopships, however, were to pr
ove no more popular than the transports. Henry Bunbury, a junior army officer, later recalled that ‘It was a badly arranged service, and equally disagreeable to the officers of the army and the navy, who were always quarrelling.’62
Although no amphibious operations took place in 1798, the troopships were put to immediate use, because soldiers had to be evacuated from San Domingo, and many army movements to and fro over the Irish Sea were essential to deal with the rebellion. At the end of that year Henry Dundas wrote to Lord Spencer saying that he wanted to discuss improvements in transporting troops with him and Pitt. Among other things, he wanted vessels in readiness, bigger ships and changes to the naval discipline on board transports. Of the Transport Service, he commented: ‘I have long thought it was radically erroneous.’63
However, the government was still unable to achieve the right balance of troops and ships for a successful amphibious operation. In 1799 a large, over-complex operation was mounted to invade Holland at Den Helder, to establish a bridgehead on the Continental mainland and to encourage the Dutch to resist the French. It was to be carried out with the assistance of Russian troops. Planning for this expedition had begun only in June, and it was, as usual, late in sailing. The duke of York, commanding the operation, was not appointed until early July. The landings took a month to complete: ‘the soldiers had to wade and scramble out of the surf as well as they could … Everybody was out of humour, and out of heart,’ Henry Bunbury recalled later.64
Sixteen British battalions were put ashore under Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Abercromby on 27 August, seven on the following day, and thirteen between 12 and 15 September. Russian troops, conveyed by British transports (for they had no ships themselves), did not reach the Dutch coast from the Baltic until 19 and 23 September. The duke of York did not arrive until ten days after the landing of the first troops, taking a frustrating five days on passage from the Downs.65 By the last week of September the troops in Den Helder reached the maximum at nearly 34,000, although 3,000 were sick; by 14 October this figure had risen to 6,500.66
The Anglo-Russian landings were far too slow and unloading was chaotic. Strategic surprise evaporated. The French and Dutch brought up reinforcements, destroyed bridges, flooded dykes and dug themselves in. The British Army performed well, landing skilfully and fighting immediately it landed, under difficult conditions through sand hills. However, its supplies were dangerously short. No storehouses or reserves of provisions were available. One old Dutch frigate had to be broken up for firewood because of the great shortage of coal. The British admiral, Andrew Mitchell, kept ten days’ worth of navy provisions and handed over the rest to the army.67 The main reason for this dire situation was the lack of sufficient transports. From a Transport Office memorandum circulated at cabinet level in 1800 we learn that no more than 296 transports, measuring 73,000 tons, took part in the operation, not counting the Admiralty troopships. Most of the transports made two and sometimes three trips from the Downs to Den Helder with soldiers, equipment and stores, landing in all 200,000 tons’ worth of troops and equipment. The Transport Board commented that ‘The troops and horses were more cram[m]ed into these ships than would be consistent with their health.’68 Unsurprisingly, a heavy military defeat by a smaller French army ensued, followed by capitulation on 18 October 1799. Only the capture of the Dutch Fleet in the Texel in the early days of the operation prevented the expedition from being a total catastrophe.
Ministers, led by Henry Dundas, started to plan a major offensive against French territory even while the duke of York’s forces were gathering for the Den Helder expedition. They still aimed high, planning to capture the naval base at Brest, a difficult and well-defended target, with no nearby sheltered bays for a fleet anchorage. The question was how large this operation should be and where it should land?* Planning was aided by a high level of intelligence for operations at sea, supported by an accurate map, but was thin on information on the countryside and rivers around Brest. The debate exposed how great were the fissures between ministers and departments, the divergent attitudes of the navy and army, and the lack of appreciation by the services of each other’s point of view.
Lord Spencer wrote to Pitt on 2 September 1799, reflecting the opinions of his senior admirals when he put forward three planning principles: that as large a force as possible should be landed as quickly as possible; that it should be landed as near to Brest as possible; and that the landing place should allow direct communications between army ashore and the fleet.69 Having rejected a large number of possible landing places as being unsafe for the fleet, Spencer suggested the compromise of Douarnenez Bay, the opposite side of the Rade de Brest from the dockyard. The contrary view of the army was expressed two weeks later by General Sir Charles Grey: the landing at Douarnenez, as he wrote to Dundas, appeared ‘so full of difficulties, as to render it hardly practicable’. It is clear that Grey had no enthusiasm for this operation, correctly emphasizing the importance of choosing the right season of the year, and insisting that the only time to attempt it was spring, when the settled weather gave the fleet the best chance of staying at anchor in support of the army. His decided opinion was that not fewer than ‘70,000 actual effective men’ would be needed to take and hold Brest. He based this upon the intelligence that the French had ‘37,000 men capable of bearing Arms without rendering the Men of war in harbour totally useless’. Besides, there would only be a narrow window in which to achieve it, as Brest was just six days’ march from Paris, ‘where there is always an immense body of Troops’.70 Grey would have known that nothing like 70,000 troops were available for such an operation.71
Dundas was trying to devise an offensive strategy at a particularly complex time. Lord Grenville wanted the army to go to the Mediterranean to support Austria, but Austria was an ally in which Dundas had no trust. Dundas had his eye instead on securing Atlantic bases to enable trade with Spanish colonies in South America and, in truth, he did not possess a clear idea on how best to use the army.72 The three ministers who decided foreign policy, Pitt, Dundas and Grenville, were never more divided.73 By the end of November, William Huskisson, the undersecretary for war, produced a preliminary analysis of the shipping that would be needed to transport such an expedition of 70,000 men. In a letter of 30 November to Dundas, he suggested that the amount might be 160,000 tons (a gross underestimate, judging by the figure at which he finally arrived), to be ready by 1 March in the year it was to sail. But in order to obtain even this tonnage, ships in the Baltic trade would have to be taken up, which, Huskisson pointed out, would cause ‘real distress to the commercial interests of this country’. Nor did he have much faith in taking up neutral shipping:
Such ships are navigated and commanded by Neutrals (most of them Enemies at bottom) who have no Idea of the Service, are under no subordination, and have nothing of the necessary activity, exertion, or Seamanship for Services of this description; These Qualities might perhaps be found in the Americans, but they are not disposed or at liberty to engage in any such Service.74
This tightly argued report sowed doubts in Dundas’s mind, as he wrote to Pitt from his home in Wimbledon, ‘being quite alone all the day, I had full Opportunity to ruminate on the Subject, and the result was to make one more and more sceptical on the Question’.
Pitt, however, was not immediately persuaded by these doubts and replied, ‘I should like to know the particulars on which Huskisson’s Opinions are founded, but from all that I recollect, I cannot help thinking that the Expence at least if not the difficulty of providing the Transports is much overrated.’75 Huskisson’s final tonnage calculations for Grey’s 70,000-strong expedition in his letter to Dundas of 18 December made the position devastatingly clear. The force would be composed of 60,000 regular infantry rank and file, with officers and sergeants, and 60 women to a regiment.* An infantry force of this magnitude would require seven regiments of cavalry, containing 4,000 rank and file, to which one would have to add officers, farriers, equipment, 12,000 horses and forag
e. When artillerymen, engineers, the medical Commissariat and members of the Quartermaster-General’s Department were included, the total, according to Huskisson, would be 83,628 individuals, requiring no less than 350,000 tons of shipping, or at least a thousand ships. This total was the final proof that Grey’s estimate of an expeditionary force of 70,000 men was a pipe dream, for at no time between 1793 and 1815 did the British government come within 100,000 tons of this figure.76
The British government had finally come to realize the limits of its ambitions so far as amphibious operations were concerned. But it seems extraordinary that it took seven years of war, until the last days of 1799, to work out what was essentially an arithmetical sum, albeit a complicated one. Had the Transport Board been represented in cabinet by a single, senior minister, the logistical limitations would have been heard at that level. But Dundas, never a man to listen to advice that contained problems, had planned the West Indies expeditions in a vacuum and overstretched the system, driving them through to completion by sheer force of personality. He had not delegated enough, nor trusted subordinates, nor allowed generals and admirals to plan together, keeping detail in his hands that would have been better handled by others while he concentrated on strategy and wider political issues. Now much wiser, Dundas realized that Brest was impregnable, and he fell back on planning much smaller expeditions.
Still another element essential to amphibious success was a steady and trusting relationship between the army and navy commanders. Dundas had a stroke of luck when planning his next expedition. General Sir Charles Stuart, the energetic and ascerbic army commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean (who had been brilliantly successful in taking Minorca in 1798, dominating the dullard admiral John Duckworth, responsible for transporting Stuart’s troops), suddenly resigned on being given orders with which he did not agree.77 Sir Ralph Abercromby was appointed in his stead. A clash of personalities had been avoided, as described by General O’Hara, the governor of Gibraltar, who wrote to Admiral Lord Keith, commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean:
