In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  If they had any hope of survival, the bow had to remain pointed out to sea; should the ship turn broadside to the waves, it would immediately capsize, tossing them all into the rock-strewn sea. Unfortunately, the only mast left standing was the foremast, and the added windage of the spar threatened to force the bow around. The mast had to be cut down as soon as possible. Archer ordered a group of sailors forward, five of whom were almost immediately washed overboard when a huge sea swept the mast over the side. “That was nothing,” Archer remembered, “[since] everyone expected it would be his own fate next.”

  At daybreak they discovered the Phoenix had come to rest “upon a bed of rocks, mountains of them on one side, and Cordilleras of water on the other; our poor ship grinding and crying out at every stroke between them, going away piecemeal.” Over the course of the next several hours, “[t]hat unmerciful sea lifted and beat us up so high among the rocks that at last the ship scarcely moved. She was very strong, and did not go to pieces at the first thumping, though her decks tumbled in.”

  A relatively narrow span of water now lay between the stern and shore, and two sailors soon swam across with a line that they made fast to the rocks. By ten in the morning, everyone was ashore, with First Lieutenant Archer being the last man out of the ship. “Sir Hyde came to me,” he remembered, “and taking me by the hand, was so affected that he was scarcely able to speak. ‘Archer, I am happy beyond expression to see you on shore, but look at our poor Phoenix!’ I turned about, but could not say a single word, being too full. My mind had been too intensely occupied before, but everything now rushed upon me at once, so that I could not contain myself, and I indulged for a full quarter of an hour in tears.”

  Eventually, once they’d brought across the necessary supplies and materials from the ship to build some crude shelters, they began to consider what to do next. They were stranded on the south shore of Cuba, about twelve miles to the east of Cape Cruz. There were 250 of them left alive, and “the prospect of being prisoners during the war at Havana, and walking 300 miles to it through the woods, was unpleasant.” But Archer had an idea. There were still some pieces left of one of the ship’s boats. What if they repaired it, and Archer sailed for Jamaica’s Montego Bay (a voyage of more than 150 miles) with the hope of returning with a rescue party?

  A few days later, Archer and a crew of four sailors set out for Jamaica. Four days after that, he was back off the coast of Cuba with three small vessels. “I thought the ship’s crew would have devoured me on my landing,” he remembered. “They presently whisked me up on their shoulders and carried me to the tent where Sir Hyde was.”

  But Archer had some disturbing news. The same hurricane that had destroyed the Phoenix had decimated Jamaica’s Montego Bay to the extent that “scarcely a vestige remained” of the many houses that once lined the shore. In addition, every British warship anchored in the bay had been driven out to sea and lost. Clearly, they were very lucky to have escaped a watery death. “Thy works are wonderful, O God!” Archer wrote. “Praised be thy holy name!”

  But as it turned out, another, even bigger storm was on the way.

  * * *

  • • •

  ON OCTOBER 10, what came to be called the Great Storm of 1780 hit the island of Barbados. By the following day, virtually every house, including those built of stone, had been leveled to the ground, and six thousand inhabitants were dead. Many of the cannons at Fort James, which the young George Washington had visited almost thirty years earlier, were hurled more than a hundred feet through the air. The extraordinary surge of water and wind carried a ship so far onto shore that it landed on top of the island’s hospital. The hurricane-whipped rain stripped the trees of bark, indicating that the winds at Barbados must have exceeded 200 mph.

  A similar scene of destruction occurred at St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Martinique, where a convoy carrying several thousand French troops was blown out to sea. One estimate puts the total death count of the Great Storm of 1780 at twenty-two thousand, making it the deadliest hurricane in recorded history.

  And then, on October 18, two days after a Spanish fleet of seventy-four ships bearing four thousand soldiers under the command of General Don Bernardo de Gálvez departed from Havana to attack Pensacola, a third hurricane struck. Known today as Solano’s Hurricane for José Solano, the admiral in charge of the fleet, the storm ravaged the Gulf of Mexico for three days and ultimately drove the remains of the Spanish fleet back to Cuba. With dozens of vessels sunk and dismasted and hundreds of soldiers and sailors drowned, Solano and Gálvez reluctantly decided to postpone the attack until the following year.

  It would take the English, French, and Spanish months, if not years, to recover from the three hurricanes of October 1780. When British admiral George Rodney, who’d spent the late summer and fall in New York, arrived at Barbados in early December, he was astounded by what he saw. “Had I not been an eyewitness,” he wrote to his wife, “nothing could have induced me to have believed it. More than six thousand persons perished, and all the inhabitants ruined. . . . The hurricane proved fatal to six ships of my squadron.”

  The lesson was impossible to ignore. Given the seasonal dangers of this storm-battered string of islands, the best place for a navy in the summer and fall was anywhere but the Caribbean. Up until this point, France had viewed a naval expedition to the north on the behalf of the United States as a possibility but hardly a priority. After that horrendous October, a different attitude prevailed.

  Once France had repaired her hurricane-ravaged ports and ships and done what she could to further her objectives in the Caribbean during the winter and spring of 1781, she must send a sizable fleet to North America. Not only might the ships strike a helpful blow against the enemy, the fleet’s survival could very well depend on being away from the Caribbean in August, September, and especially October.

  * * *

  • • •

  AS HURRICANES ROILED THE WATERS of the Caribbean in 1780, another kind of storm gripped the states of North and South Carolina. Lord Charles Cornwallis was in command of the British forces in the region. Ignoring the advice of his commander in chief, Sir Henry Clinton in New York, who recognized the danger of venturing far from British naval support, he had decided to plunge into the Carolina interior. Since it isolated him from the source of his army’s supplies at Charleston, it was a risky move, but at least he was on the offensive, and at this late stage in the war, King George III and Secretary of State for the Colonies George Germain back in London had pinned their hopes on the subjugation of the south.

  Initially, the news was good. Cornwallis’s young cavalry commander Banastre Tarleton quickly established a reputation for brutal and terrifying efficiency, and on August 16, Cornwallis eviscerated a larger American army under General Horatio Gates at the Battle of Camden in South Carolina. But even with that resounding victory, Cornwallis had detected some disturbing signs that the people of the Carolinas were hardly awed by the power of the British military. “The approach of General Gates’s army unveiled to us a fund of disaffection in this province of which we could have formed no idea,” Cornwallis’s second in command, Lord Francis Rawdon, wrote, “and even the dispersion of that force did not extinguish the ferment which the hope of its support had raised.” Instead of being welcomed by enthusiastic loyalists, Cornwallis was shocked and perplexed to discover that “the majority of the inhabitants . . . are in arms against us.”

  That, however, did not prevent him from sending Major Patrick Ferguson and an army of 1125 loyalists even farther into the northern interior of South Carolina to “awe that district into quiet.” Despite a reputation as a clever innovator (he had invented and patented the first breech-loading rifle in the British army and employed a silver whistle to better communicate his instructions to his troops in battle), Ferguson issued a proclamation that did little to enamor him with the local populace. “If you choose to be pissed upon forever and ever by a set
of mongrels,” it read, “say so at once and let your women turn their backs upon you, and look out for real men to protect you.”

  By the morning of October 7, Ferguson had set up camp on King’s Mountain—a flat-topped, steep-sided, and heavily wooded ridge—unaware that a band of frontiersmen from the other side of the Smoky Mountains, who came to be known as the Overmountain Men, was approaching through the trees. Ferguson had had earlier premonitions of danger and even sent Cornwallis a request for reinforcements. His army temporarily immobilized by fever, the British commander had failed to send the extra troops, assuring Ferguson in a message he did not live to receive, “I now consider you perfectly safe.”

  About four in the afternoon, while 200 of Ferguson’s soldiers were out looking for forage, 1790 Overmountain Men crept up the wooded sides of King’s Mountain and caught the British army of just 900 men completely by surprise. Over the course of the next hour, Ferguson, dressed in a checked shirt with his silver whistle held tightly between his lips, rode back and forth across his flat-topped island amid the trees, attempting to beat back the Rebel hordes. Spurning his men’s repeated requests to surrender, he was shot from his horse and killed while leading a desperate charge through the enemy line. The British casualties were horrific—290 killed, 103 wounded, and 688 captured, compared with just 29 Americans killed and 58 wounded.

  Fearing the Overmountain Men might overwhelm his own army, Cornwallis retreated to Winnsboro, South Carolina, even as American militia leaders such as Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter led daring assaults on British and loyalist forces to the south and east. Brigadier General Charles O’Hara, presently in New York but soon to join Cornwallis in the south, had grave misgivings about the war in the Carolinas. “How impossible must it prove to conquer a country,” he wrote, “where repeated successes cannot ensure permanent advantages, and the most trifling check to our arms acts like electrical fire by rousing at the same moment every man upon this vast continent to persevere upon the least and most distant dawn of hope.”

  Only later, once the war was over, did Henry Clinton realize that this “trifling check” in the Carolinas, coming as it did amid the setbacks suffered in the Caribbean, was “the first link in a chain of evils that . . . at last ended in the total loss of America.”

  * * *

  • • •

  EVER SINCE THE SUMMER, the five thousand soldiers, seven ships of the line, and six frigates of the French Expédition Particulière (Special Expedition) under the command of General Rochambeau and Admiral Charles-Henri Louis d’Arsac de Ternay in Newport, Rhode Island, had suffered the same indignity they had known in France. Just as the French navy had been forced to contend with smothering enemy blockades at its naval ports in Brest and Toulon, now the expedition’s fleet, anchored in a defensive half circle off Newport, was bottled up by a British squadron under the command of Admiral Mariot Arbuthnot.

  Four different times Admiral de Ternay had attempted to send out dispatches to France, and each time they had been intercepted by the British. Now there was a message of extreme urgency that needed to be delivered. In late September, Washington had met with General Rochambeau in Hartford, Connecticut, where they had agreed on a plan for the following year that depended on two critical ingredients—money and naval support. Rochambeau’s son, a lieutenant colonel in the French army, had been designated as the messenger; in case his ship should be captured and he be forced to destroy the dispatch, he had committed the entire memorandum to memory. With the end of the year approaching, time was of the essence. But what to do about the British ships hovering outside the entrance of Newport harbor? On October 28, as the remnants of Solano’s Hurricane worked its way up coastal New England, scattering the British fleet, de Ternay saw his chance.

  That evening, three French frigates sailed into the stormy night. Once it became clear they had eluded the enemy, the ships separated, and the Amazone, with the young Rochambeau aboard, headed east for France. On December 6, after a passage of only thirty-nine days, he was in Brest and on his way to the French court at Versailles.

  CHAPTER 2

  “An Enemy in the Heart of the Country”

  WHEN WASHINGTON FIRST LEARNED of Benedict Arnold’s betrayal on September 25, 1780, he turned to Lafayette and asked, “Whom can we trust now?” Based on what Washington did next, the answer to that question was the thirty-eight-year-old major general on whose good sense and clarity of thought he had come to depend: Nathanael Greene.

  Within days, he had chosen Greene to oversee the highly controversial trial of John André, the captured British espionage chief with whom Arnold had conspired to surrender West Point. Soon after André was hanged as a spy, Washington picked Greene to step into the black hole left by Arnold and restore order at West Point. A few weeks after that, he assigned Greene the most unenviable task of the war, which was saying something given that Greene had already served as the army’s quartermaster during the terrible winter at Valley Forge.

  On October 14, Washington ordered Greene to take command of the beaten and demoralized Continental army in North Carolina. At that moment, the enemy appeared poised to extend Britain’s southern dominion as far north as Virginia. News a few weeks later of the American victory at King’s Mountain certainly provided a flicker of hope. But as Greene discovered during his hurried journey south, which included stops at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and the residence of Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson in Richmond, the unexpected American triumph had given government officials the mistaken impression that the tide had already turned. As Greene’s friend Lafayette wrote on November 10, “I wish [King’s Mountain] had been postponed.”

  Relations between America’s military and civil leaders had become increasingly strained as both the Continental Congress and the states failed to provide the bare essentials required to maintain a functional army. The American people had decided to rebel from the mother country because they did not want to pay the taxes insisted upon by a distant king and the Parliament. Now they refused to pay the taxes needed to fund the war to win their independence. By the fall of 1780, with Congress wallowing in debt and no apparent way to set things right, it seemed as if this five-year experiment in creating a republic was about to founder for a lack of will on the part of the people and their elected leaders. Greene had already established a reputation as one of Congress’s more outspoken critics, and during his journey south, he found only confirmation of his already low expectations. When he asked for the soldiers, provisions, and supplies he needed if he had any hope of opposing a British army that was more than twice the size of the shattered remnant he was about to inherit from outgoing commander Horatio Gates, he received only shrugs and evasive replies.

  Greene was a most unlikely soldier. A Quaker pacifist by birth, he suffered from asthma and had walked with a limp since childhood. He developed an early love of reading and often tended the family forge in Potowomut, Rhode Island, with a book in hand. Painfully aware of his lack of formal education, he cultivated younger and better educated friends who could contribute to his ongoing program of self-improvement. By the time of the Boston Tea Party, Greene was no longer a practicing Quaker and felt free to assume a leadership role in organizing his community’s militia company. However, when the company voted to select its officers, Greene was overlooked. The reason: his physical disability detracted from the impression his company made when performing military exercises.

  Initially devastated at being considered “an inferior point of light” (“I confess it is my misfortune to limp a little,” he admitted, “but I did not conceive it to be so great”), he nonetheless continued to drill and parade with his company as a lowly private. All the while, Greene acquired as many works of military history and tactics as he could find (some of them purchased at the bookshop of future Continental artillery chief Henry Knox in Boston). By the spring of 1775, Greene had come to the attention of several influential lawmakers. That May the Rhode Is
land assembly voted to promote the thirty-two-year-old private who marched with a limp to the rank of brigadier general so that he could lead the fifteen hundred soldiers being sent to join the provincial army in Boston.

  Greene quickly impressed Washington with his knowledge and judgment, and despite one, potentially career-ending lapse (when in the fall of 1776 he wrongly insisted that New York’s Fort Washington could withstand a British attack), he had emerged as the Continental army’s most capable and dependable major general. Adversity, it seemed, was something on which Nathanael Greene thrived. But even Greene, it turned out, had his limits.

  It was in Richmond, on November 19, 1780, after a disheartening meeting with Governor Jefferson, that the utter impossibility of what he was about to undertake threatened to overwhelm him. “I cannot contemplate my own situation without the greatest degree of anxiety,” he admitted to Washington. “I am far removed from almost all my friends and connections and have to prosecute a war . . . attended with almost insurmountable difficulties. . . . How I shall be able to support myself under these embarrassments God only knows.”

  “You have no doubt an arduous task on hand,” Washington responded on December 13, “but where is the man charged with conducting public business in these days of public calamity that is exempt from it? Your difficulties I am persuaded are great; they may be insurmountable; but you see them now through a different medium than you have ever done before, because every department is now centered or combined in the commanding officer, exhibiting at one view a prospect of our complicated distresses.” Greene, who had not seen his wife, Caty, and their two children since the previous winter, now knew what Washington had been living with for the last five years: the overpowering loneliness of command.