In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  All the while, a tragic sense of foreboding hovered over the young Washington’s life. Lawrence, whom he called his “best friend,” was dying of tuberculosis. (“I hope your cough is much mended since I saw you last,” he wrote worriedly in the spring of 1749.) After trips to England and the hot springs of Virginia in search of a cure, Lawrence resolved to sail to the island of Barbados in the fall of 1751, with his brother, now nineteen years old, as his companion.

  It was the first and last time Washington ever went to sea. The diary he kept during the voyage shows him both fascinated and appalled by the life of a sailor. Much of it came naturally to a boy who had grown up in the Virginia Tidewater, and in his journal he quickly adopted the shorthand of the sea to denote the day’s sail changes, using the initials RMTS for reefed maintopsail and DRTS for double-reefed topsail.

  As Washington soon discovered, however, this was very different from the circumscribed world of an inland river. On the Rappahannock and Potomac, a ship materialized almost instantly from around the nearest bend. On the ocean, a ship emerged slowly, indistinctly, from the seeming depths of the sea itself. First you saw only the uppermost sails rising out of the horizon (“hull down” in the phraseology of the sea) until there it was—the entirety of the ship—briefly beside you and then, as the distance between the two vessels increased, receding back into the rounded, wave-flecked obscurity from which it had come.

  Mostly, however, you were alone with the waves and the pitiless wind. “Hard squalls . . . and rain with sea jostling in heaps,” Washington wrote on October 19, “the seamen seemed disheartened, confessing they never had seen such weather before.” This was not the sea of heroism and romance that Lawrence had promised him back when he was fourteen. This was an alien realm full of danger and fear. As they approached Barbados, he was disturbed to learn that the ship’s navigator had misjudged their position by almost five hundred miles. Only by luck had they stumbled on their destination.

  As it turned out, Washington’s brief stay amid the tropical delights of Barbados almost killed him. Within a few weeks of his arrival, he was, in his own words, “strongly attacked with the smallpox.” A month later, he emerged from his sickbed with barely a trace of pockmarks on his face and determined to go home. While his consumptive brother opted for the cooler breezes of Bermuda, Washington sailed for Virginia. By the following winter, Lawrence’s condition had so worsened that he decided he must “hurry home to my grave.” In the summer of 1752, he was laid to rest in the family vault at Mount Vernon, where forty-seven years later, he was joined by his brother George.

  Washington seems to have been permanently influenced by this sea voyage to a distant island whose promise of rejuvenation had brought only illness and, in the case of his half brother, death. As he demonstrated on the Hudson River to the French minister Luzerne, Washington knew his way around boats and was even proud of his expertise. But that did not mean he trusted the sea and the rivers that flowed into it. For the rest of his life, he preferred the saddle of a horse to the deck of a ship, even when the quickest way to reach his destination was by water. Despite eventually inheriting a house that overlooked a beautiful, mile-wide river, he did his best to put the view, quite literally, behind him. While Lawrence’s most impressive rooms had faced the Potomac, Washington added a large parlor and dining room on the opposite side of the ground floor that effectively flipped the house around so that it looked inland. The house might be named for a British admiral, but it now faced what Washington called the “infant woody country” of his future.

  His experiences during the middle years of the Revolutionary War only confirmed his prejudice against the sea. The United States’ efforts to create an ocean-going navy of its own had proven to be a disastrous waste of the country’s nearly nonexistent resources. It has been estimated that close to 10 percent of Congressional spending during the war years was dedicated to building a navy that one historian has claimed “inflicted no more than a few pinpricks against the British navy.” By the fall of 1780, with the royal navy in control of the Atlantic Seaboard and with his army cooped up amid the Hudson highlands north of British-occupied New York, Washington knew that only the French navy could break the deadlock. However, given the challenges of communication, the unpredictability of the ocean, and Britain’s well-deserved reputation for naval dominance, could he realistically expect the French navy to make a difference? What good was the alliance with France if all it did was create what he called on October 4, 1780, “false hopes”? “I see nothing before us,” he wrote despairingly from his headquarters on the west bank of the Hudson River at New Windsor, “but accumulating distresses. . . . We have lived upon expedients till we can live no longer.”

  Washington at the age of forty-eight was much as he’d been at fourteen: marooned on the banks of a river, wondering what, if anything, might come from the sea.

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  FRANCE HAD JOINED the War of Independence not to help America but to strike a blow against Great Britain. Ever since the humiliating conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, which resulted in the loss of Canada to Britain as well as a disastrous loss of prestige among the powers of Europe, France had embarked on a strategy of revanche, or “revenge.” She had no interest in conquering Britain; she simply wanted to restore the balance of power that had existed during the first half of the century when the two countries had functioned more or less as equals. By rebuilding her army and particularly her navy, France hoped to force her haughty rival (which had included a provision in the treaty that ended the Seven Years’ War demanding that a British commissioner be installed at Dunkirk) to stop treating her as a subservient, second-tier nation. In 1775, with Britain becoming increasingly preoccupied with a colonial rebellion in North America, the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, had seen his opportunity, and three years later, after British general John Burgoyne suffered a mortifying defeat at Saratoga, France joined the war on America’s behalf.

  What the United States did not fully appreciate was that her new ally did not have to send a single soldier or ship to North America to start challenging an already militarily overextended Great Britain. With a mere twenty-one miles of water between her and the south-eastern edge of England, all France had to do was send a significant number of warships into the Channel from the naval port of Brest, and Britain would be forced to respond in kind.

  Sure enough, in the summer of 1778, all of Britain watched in breathless suspense as her navy rushed to assemble the fleet required to meet the thirty warships under the command of the Comte d’Orvilliers. The Battle of Ushant, conducted at the southern edge of the English Channel, was ultimately indecisive, but it was now frighteningly obvious that with France in the war, Britain’s naval resources were going to be stretched to the absolute limit. And then, with the entrance of France’s ally Spain the following year, Britain found herself threatened in a way that had been unimaginable just a few years before. In the summer of 1779, a huge French-Spanish invasion fleet of 66 warships, 400 transports, and an army of 40,000 assembled in the waters to the south of Britain. Due to poor planning and uncooperative winds, a landing was never attempted, but even without a shot being fired, France, with the help of Spain, had succeeded in proving to her once vaunted antagonist that she could no longer take her dominance at sea for granted.

  Since then, the waters between Britain and France continued to be the scene of numerous naval skirmishes while the war expanded into a truly global conflict with fighting as far away as India. But it was the waters surrounding the sugar islands of the Caribbean (which accounted for more than a third of France’s overseas trade) that soon became the chief naval battleground of the war outside of Europe.

  It may be difficult to appreciate today, but when the war for American independence broke out, Britain’s possessions in the Caribbean were worth much more to her than all thirteen of her colonies in North America. Once France
entered the war, Britain chose to concentrate a large portion of her naval resources in these commercially valuable and militarily vulnerable islands (an estimated 33 percent of her total navy compared with just 9 percent in the coastal waters of North America). France and Spain followed suit, and soon the Caribbean was engulfed in war.

  It began with Britain taking the French island of St. Lucia, to which Admiral d’Estaing responded by capturing British Grenada. The Spanish, based in Cuba, were hopeful of winning back what they had lost to Britain in Florida during the Seven Years’ War as well as taking back the island of Jamaica. Adding to the complexity of competing interests was the presence of the supposedly neutral Dutch trading post at St. Eustatius, whose opportunistic merchants furnished American coasting vessels with a steady stream of gunpowder, arms, and other supplies for the Continental army.

  From the European perspective, the Caribbean (which was referred to as the West Indies in the eighteenth century), not North America, was where their navies were needed most. As a result, the island harbors in Cuba, Haiti (then known as Saint Domingue), Jamaica, Antigua, and Martinique remained filled to overflowing with warships while the lack of naval support in the north left the armies of both Washington and his British counterpart Sir Henry Clinton stranded in and around New York.

  From Washington’s perspective, it was as if “a chasm” divided him from the French fleet in the Caribbean. “There seems to be the strangest fatality and the most unaccountable silence attending the operations to the southward that can be conceived,” he wrote in despair. Without the intervention of a large French fleet, the war in North America was likely to stagnate to the point that Britain could win what was proving to be a test of economic and political endurance rather than military might.

  By the fall of 1780, it seemed as if France’s preoccupation with the Caribbean might prevent a significant-sized fleet from ever making its way to the shores of the United States to aid the Continental army. Then, on October 3, one of the most powerful hurricanes in recorded history struck the waters between Jamaica and Cuba.

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  THE PHOENIX WAS A BRITISH FRIGATE, meaning that she was smaller and faster than the larger line-of-battle warships. Rather than blast away at the enemy, the Phoenix had the speed and maneuverability to act as the eyes and ears of the British fleet. She had cannons to be sure, forty-four of them, but her chief role was that of a sentinel and scout.

  She had left Jamaica on September 30, and after sailing north to British-held Pensacola on the Florida panhandle, which was bracing for an attack by the Spanish, the Phoenix sailed south to the coast of Cuba, where her captain, forty-one-year-old Sir Hyde Parker Jr., had seen evidence of a large fleet of Spanish ships gathering in Havana harbor.

  Parker and his crew of 280 officers and men had been stationed in the western Atlantic since almost the beginning of the war. The Phoenix had been one of the first British warships to arrive in New York in the summer of 1776, when the city was still occupied by Washington’s Continental army. Disdaining the barricade of sunken ships the Americans had laid across the Hudson, as well as the cannons clustered at the city’s battery, Parker had sailed boldly past New York to the very verge of the Hudson highlands—an early setback to Rebel pride that had earned him a knighthood.

  Soon after the British took New York, a printing press had been set up aboard the Phoenix to produce counterfeit American currency that was offered to loyalists (who were in on the scam) for the price of the paper. “The artists they employed performed so well,” Benjamin Franklin later wrote, “that immense quantities of these counterfeits . . . were circulated among the inhabitants of all the states, before the fraud was detected.” Not only did this provide the loyalists with some extra spending money, the injection of bogus dollars into the already shaky American economy greatly accelerated the currency’s depreciation. Indeed, it might be argued that no vessel in the entire British navy had done more for the British cause in America than the Phoenix.

  Now, on the evening of October 3, she was cruising between Cuba and Jamaica when, in the words of First Lieutenant Benjamin Archer, the wind began “to snuffle with a monstrous heavy appearance from the eastward.” By eight the next morning, it was “blowing hard from the east-northeast with close-reef topsails . . . and heavy squalls.” By the afternoon, after jibing, or “wearing” the ship across the wind (a tricky maneuver in any weather but especially difficult in a storm), it was blowing what Archer called “a hurricane,” somewhere in the vicinity of seventy to eighty knots, and building fast. Realizing that “no canvas can stand against this a moment,” Archer ordered all the sails to be taken in.

  In addition to securing the triangular foresails at the bow and the gaff-rigged mizzen at the stern, a crowd of sailors leapt into the rigging to furl the Phoenix’s dozen or so rectangular sails as tightly as possible before securing them to the yards with gaskets. To reduce windage aloft, the upper segment of the mainmast, the topgallant, was brought down and tied to the deck. To keep the rain and spray from pouring through the gratings of the deck’s hatchways, the carpenters secured tarpaulins to the lids by nailing battens to the hatches’ sides.

  By eight p.m., it was blowing so hard that birds began to seek refuge aboard the Phoenix. “The poor devils . . . dashed themselves down upon the deck without attempting to stir till picked up and when we let them go . . . they would not leave the ship, but endeavored to hide themselves from the wind.” If the wind continued to build until the ship was in danger of capsizing, it might become necessary to cut away the masts. “Knowing from experience that at the moment you may want to cut away to save the ship an axe may not be found,” Archer stationed a carpenter at each mast with a broad axe.

  With no sails to steady her motion, the Phoenix wallowed wildly in the massive seas, creating an unearthly metallic squealing within the ship as the more than forty cannons secured to the vessel’s sides shook in their carriages. When Archer went below for some supper, he found two marine officers (both landsmen) “white as sheets, not understanding the ship’s working so much, and the noise of the lower deck guns, which by this time made a pretty screeching to people not used to it.” Since the mattress on his bunk was saturated with water, Archer lay down between the two sea chests in his cabin and tried to fall asleep.

  At midnight he was awakened by a young midshipman, who told him they must jibe the ship again to put some distance between them and Jamaica. He found Sir Hyde on the quarterdeck. “It blows damned hard, Archer,” the captain said. “I don’t know that I ever remember its blowing so hard before.”

  Even without a stitch of canvas set on the yards, the horizontal spars needed to be carefully manipulated during the jibe as the helmsman worked the ship across the eye of the wind. After a great struggle, which forced Archer to order most of the sailors into the forward rigging to help turn the ship, the Phoenix was finally on the other tack. The frequency and magnitude of the waves had increased to the extent that the ship “had not time to rise from one sea before another lashed against her.” Even though the sails had been tied with extra care, the ever strengthening wind began to shred the canvas from the yards into what Archer called “coach whips”—something that not even the most experienced seamen had ever seen. “My God!” Archer wrote, “To think that the wind could have such force!”

  So much water had leaked through the ship’s seams that the lower gun deck was now virtually awash. To prevent the seawater from dislodging one of the cannons (a disastrous development since one wayward cannon, which weighed more than two tons, could punch a hole through the ship’s side), Archer went below with an axe and chopped a hole through the gun deck. As the resultant surge of water flowed down into the well in the ship’s hold, Archer searched out the men at the pumps and made sure they understood the urgency of the situation. For the next half hour, he stood at the pumps, “cheering the people” as they worked furiously to prevent the s
hip from sinking.

  Once back on the quarterdeck, he discovered that Captain Parker had lashed himself to the windward rail to keep from being washed over the side, and he quickly followed suit. By now the wind was, according to Archer, “roaring louder than thunder (absolutely no flight of imagination)” as “a very uncommon kind of blue lightning” lit up the seas, “running as it were in Alps or peaks of Tenerife (mountains are too common an idea).” All the while “the poor ship [was] very much pressed, yet doing what she could, shaking her sides, and groaning at every stroke.”

  By four a.m. they had begun to approach the coast of Cuba. The wind had reached the point that the ship was almost completely on her side—“on her beam-ends, and not attempting to right again.” Word came from below that the severe heel made it impossible for the men to work the pumps. Archer turned to his captain. “This is not the time, Sir, to think of saving the masts; shall we cut the mainmast away?” “Ay! As fast as you can.” Before Archer had a chance to act, “a very violent sea broke right on board of us, carried everything upon deck away, filled the ship with water, the main and mizzen masts went, the ship righted, but was in the last struggle of sinking under us.”

  As soon as the two of them could, in Archer’s words, “shake our heads above water,” Captain Parker exclaimed, “We are gone at last, Archer! Foundered at sea!” “I then felt sorry that I could swim,” Archer recalled, “as by that means I might be a quarter of an hour longer dying than a man who could not.” Then they heard a “thump and grinding under our feet.” To their astonishment, the ship had washed up onto the Cuban coast with her stern toward shore and her bow into the waves. By now, the quarterdeck, usually the domain of the captain and his officers, had become crowded with seamen, who scurried aft as the waves at the bow “wash[ed] clear over at every stroke.” Captain Parker cried out, “Keep to the quarterdeck, my lads; when she goes to pieces it is our best chance!”