In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  As Washington could have predicted, the three French vessels proved inadequate to the task at hand. Once alerted to the appearance of the French squadron in the Chesapeake on February 13, Arnold and Commodore Thomas Symonds in Portsmouth withdrew their fleet of frigates and smaller vessels into the shallows of the Elizabeth River, beyond the reach of Tilly’s deep-drafted ship of the line. Since the two French frigates would have been cut to pieces if they had attempted to attack the British vessels gathered in the river and Tilly was without the soldiers to mount an assault on the fortifications at Portsmouth, he had no hope of taking Benedict Arnold. To “compensate for his inability to carry out his orders,” he anchored his fleet at the entrance to the Chesapeake under a British ensign, “ready to fall upon the first ship that attempted to reach Arnold.” In addition to capturing several valuable merchant vessels, Tilly succeeded in taking the Romulus, a 44-gun British frigate on its way to the Chesapeake from Charleston. Unfortunately from Washington’s perspective, these well-intentioned efforts to salvage a failed expedition consumed a great deal of valuable time. Not until the end of February did Tilly return to Newport.

  By then Destouches and Rochambeau had received Washington’s proposal to send the entire French fleet to the Chesapeake. They’d also learned that with the return of the America to Gardiners Bay and the refitting of the Bedford with the Culloden’s masts, the British and French fleets were essentially even. Even though the delay imposed by the Tilly expedition had resulted in their losing the numerical advantage they had once enjoyed, Destouches and Rochambeau decided to do as Washington had originally suggested: Destouches would lead the entire French fleet to the Chesapeake. “The great consequence that Your Excellency seemed to lay to the establishment of Arnold at Portsmouth,” Rochambeau wrote on February 25, “has determined Monsieur Destouches to sacrifice every other object to this one.” Also figuring into Destouches’s thinking was the acquisition of the Romulus, which if it did not tip the balance in his favor, at least helped to even the odds.

  Washington seems to have been more than a little perplexed by the French commanders’ sudden enthusiasm for an expedition that was no longer the sure thing it would have been just two weeks before. If the French hadn’t thought to sail south with the entire fleet in early February when they had a clear advantage over the British, why were they so enthusiastic to do so now when the odds were no longer as good? Lafayette believed he knew the answer. Once Rochambeau and the other French officers learned that he was on his way south under the command of a small army, they had been filled with jealous alarm over the possibility that the young marquis might succeed in capturing the hated Benedict Arnold while they had been left loitering in Newport. “I laugh at the arrangement as far as I personally am concerned,” Lafayette wrote to Luzerne (whom he regarded as a confidant), “and am very glad we have finally found a means to set Monsieur de Rochambeau in motion, the more so because he decided on this expedition after he had been told there was not so much need for it as had been believed earlier.”

  Washington had no choice but to remain hopeful that this overdue demonstration of French resolve would be worth the considerable risk. Just to make sure his allies followed through with the projected expedition, he decided to pay a personal visit to Newport. On the morning of March 2, accompanied by his aides Tilghman and Hamilton (who had agreed to remain with him until a replacement could be found that spring), Washington boarded a boat and set out across the Hudson River.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Delays and Accidents of the Sea”

  RIDING WITH WASHINGTON, Tilghman, and Hamilton across the winter rural landscape toward Newport was Baron Ludwig von Closen, an aide to Rochambeau sent to deliver the latest intelligence about the British fleet at Gardiners Bay. Von Closen reported that although the British warship America had returned to the anchorage in eastern Long Island, the refitting of the 74-gun Bedford was not yet complete. For now, the French fleet still held a narrow, one-ship advantage. However, given “the energy with which the British repaired their ships,” the advantage was not going to last long. With time quickly running out, Washington was determined to do everything he could to hasten the departure of the French fleet, and he and his entourage rode toward Newport at a blistering pace.

  Two days after leaving New Windsor, they were charging across a small wooden bridge in Connecticut when Washington’s horse, “frightened by [the bridge’s] springy action,” lurched to the side and broke its leg. Even though it was one of his cherished saddle horses, Washington showed little outward emotion. “In seeing His Excellency’s face at that moment,” von Closen wrote, “you could appreciate very well this great man’s very tranquil nature, for he was unmoved and not at all agitated by such an incident. He shrugged his shoulder and said, ‘Well! We must leave him behind!’” Given the urgency of their mission, Washington hadn’t the time for heartfelt goodbyes. By the end of the day they were in Farmington. Two days later, on the morning of March 6, they were being rowed from Narragansett Bay’s Conanicut Island to Destouches’s flagship, the Duc de Bourgogne.

  Washington had hoped the French fleet would be on the verge of departure; instead the ships were dressed in ceremonial splendor in anticipation of his arrival. As they glided across the harbor in Destouches’s magnificently appointed barge, the cannons of the assembled ships erupted in a thirteen-gun salute.

  The previous month Rochambeau had celebrated Washington’s birthday with a similar display of artillery along with a parade of French troops through Newport. When informed of the celebration by letter, Washington had thanked the French general for “the flattering distinction” even as he privately fumed over the time lost by the ill-conceived Tilly expedition. Now he wanted nothing more than to see the French fleet of eight ships of the line and assorted frigates and troop transports on its way to attack Benedict Arnold. Instead, he would have to suffer through a seemingly endless succession of meetings, dinners, balls, and troop reviews, all the while knowing that fewer than sixty miles away in Gardiners Bay the British were preparing their ships with all possible haste for the battle that might decide the fate of Arnold and, just perhaps, the war.

  Making it all the more frustrating was the realization that this outward show of veneration on the part of the French high command was, to a certain extent, a lie. Even though Washington was the supposed commander in chief of the armies of the French-American alliance, Rochambeau and Destouches had shown no interest in including him in their decision making. It was true they now appeared intent on righting the wrong of the Tilly expedition by sending the entire fleet in pursuit of Arnold. But as Washington came to appreciate during a two-hour council of war aboard the Duc de Bourgogne, Rochambeau and Destouches had their own set of priorities when it came to the capture of Benedict Arnold.

  Washington had assumed Lafayette would lead the land forces in Virginia. Rochambeau had other ideas. As the Duc de Lauzun, a French cavalry officer, had explained to Washington during an earlier visit to New Windsor, many of the French officers resented Lafayette as a young upstart who had used his relationship with the American commander in chief to gain an influence beyond anything he deserved. Some officers had gone to the extreme of taking a vow never to serve under the young marquis.

  Washington had expected Destouches to use his fleet’s frigates to transport Lafayette’s division from Head of Elk down the full length of the Chesapeake to Portsmouth. But the French naval commander insisted this was impossible. “Destouches,” Washington wrote to Lafayette, “seems to make a difficulty, which I do not comprehend, about protecting the passage of your detachment down the bay.” In other words, if Lafayette did not find a way to get himself and his soldiers from Head of Elk to Portsmouth, a voyage of some two hundred miles, his French compatriots planned to leave him stranded at the top of the Chesapeake.

  Even if Lafayette succeeded in getting himself to Portsmouth, Rochambeau had, by selecting a higher-ranking general, the Baron de Vi
oménil, to command the French ground forces sent south, denied the marquis the chance of leading the expedition against Arnold. “This arrangement was peculiarly distasteful to [Washington],” Lauzun claimed, “and he did not conceal his annoyance.” He fell short of insisting that Rochambeau change his decision, but he did make it clear that in the future “his requests were to be regarded as orders.”

  Already exasperated by the maneuvering Rochambeau and Destouches had done behind his back, Washington could barely contain himself as the French insistence on pomp and circumstance postponed the departure of the fleet by another day. Finally, at midday on March 8, the French fleet set sail as Washington and Rochambeau looked on from the hill at Brenton Point. But even that long anticipated event was temporarily delayed. The Fantasque, which had been converted into a troop ship by the removal of her upper-deck guns, ran aground on Brenton Point, in full view of Washington and Rochambeau and the entire town of Newport. With the help of some small boats, she was eventually set free, but not until six in the evening was the fleet able to clear the harbor mouth in a light northwesterly breeze.

  In the weeks ahead, as he waited anxiously for word of the expedition, Washington complained repeatedly in letters to friends, fellow officers, and politicians about the “unfortunate and to me unaccountable delay of twenty-four hours in their quitting Newport after it was said they were ready to sail; the wind being as favorable to them and as adverse to the enemy as heaven could furnish.” Rochambeau later insisted that what Washington had perceived as a delay was, in actuality, the time required to fully prepare the fleet. Destouches went so far as to claim the fleet should have never set out in such a light and fluky breeze and that it was only because of Washington, “who had the strongest desire to see us set out,” that he reluctantly allowed his ships to depart on the evening of March 8. Whatever the case may be, almost a month after Washington had first proposed the operation, the French fleet had finally set sail.

  * * *

  • • •

  BRITISH ADMIRAL ARBUTHNOT was in his seventies and desperately unhappy with spending a winter at the eastern end of Long Island, which he described as “an uninhabited land [with only] a few Indians.” As he had repeatedly requested in letters to the head of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, he wanted to be relieved of command. He and Henry Clinton, who commanded the British army, had been at each other’s throats for more than a year. His health was not good. Just a few weeks before Arbuthnot had listed his symptoms to Sandwich. “My constitution is destroyed,” he wrote from Gardiners Bay on February 16. “I have lost almost totally the sight of one eye, and the other is but a very feeble helpmate, constantly almost obliging me to call in assistance to its aid in discovering particular objects. Besides this I have lately been seized with very odd fits, resembling apoplexy. . . . I faint, remain senseless and speechless sometimes four hours and sometimes longer and when I recover I am ignorant of the past but remain very low with cold sweats for two or three days after.”

  And yet somehow, this rheumy-eyed, half-blind excuse of a British admiral, who was regularly derided by Clinton as a do-nothing fool and who would never have secured his current position had he not been a personal friend of Sandwich’s, had found a way to rise to the occasion. After more than fifty years of service in the British navy, he had learned a thing or two about seamanship. When presented with the problem of turning two broken ships of the line—one wrecked on the Long Island coast, the other dismasted—into a single workable vessel, he had, contrary to the expectations of almost everyone in the British army and navy, leapt into action. The prospects were grim, he wrote to Clinton, but he would “put up a bold countenance.”

  On March 5, while Washington and his entourage were riding hell-bent for Rhode Island, Arbuthnot oversaw the installation of the Culloden’s masts into the Bedford—a difficult task in the best of times but all the more challenging when stationed in the lee of an island along a storm-ravaged coast in winter. And yet, by bringing the Bedford alongside the largest ship in his fleet, the 90-gun London, he was able to use the London’s masts as cranes that gently lowered the Culloden’s reconditioned spars into place. When he learned four days later that the French fleet had sailed from Newport, the Bedford was only twenty-four hours away from being ready, and on March 10, Arbuthnot and eight ships of the line set sail.

  The following day Washington was passing through New London, Connecticut, on his way back to his headquarters in New Windsor, when he received word of the British departure. “I think the French had so much the start that they will first reach [Chesapeake] Bay,” he wrote to Lafayette. And yet, as he had learned through long and bitter experience, “there is no accounting for the delays and accidents of the sea.”

  * * *

  • • •

  ARBUTHNOT KNEW THE FRENCH FLEET had left at least a day (actually thirty-six hours) before him. He also knew that the bottoms of the entire British fleet had been sheathed in plates of copper, which gave them a significant speed advantage (some claimed as much as a knot and a half) over vessels whose bottoms had grown shaggy with sea growth. Only a portion of the French warships had received this latest technological improvement, and since the enemy fleet could sail only as fast as its slowest ship, Arbuthnot had a distinct chance of making up distance on Destouches’s squadron; the question was how far ahead were they?

  On March 12 Arbuthnot learned the answer. He and his eight ships of the line and four frigates were laboring under a light and variable breeze off the coast of New Jersey when they came upon a packet ship from Ireland bound for New York. Just the day before the vessel had been briefly chased by one of the frigates attached to the French fleet. The packet’s captain reported that the French were twenty-four leagues (approximately seventy-two nautical miles) to the south. “Immediately after this man was dismissed,” Arbuthnot wrote to Sandwich, “a smart wind sprung up at north-north-west.” Steering a course “as would best enable me to intercept the enemy,” the British fleet headed south with the wind on its beam. The race was on.

  * * *

  • • •

  FLOWING NORTH ALONG the Eastern Seaboard of the United States is a dark-blue river of Caribbean-heated water that today we call the Gulf Stream. As early as 1735, a Maryland tobacco farmer and mariner named Walter Haxton drew the first large-scale chart of the Chesapeake that included a detailed written description of what he called the “Northeast Current,” based on his experiences during twenty-three voyages to England. “The knowledge of its limits, course, and strength,” he wrote, “may be very useful to those who have occasioned to sail in it.”

  In addition to mariners in the tobacco trade, whalers from Nantucket Island, who regularly pursued sperm whales along the current’s edges, gained an intimate familiarity with the stream. Benjamin Franklin’s mother, Abiah Folger, had been born on Nantucket, and in 1769, using information provided by an island cousin, Franklin published the first chart of what he named the “Gulf Stream.” At that time, Franklin was living in London, and like Haxton before him, he assumed any British mariner who regularly sailed to America would recognize the significance of the stream.

  What Franklin did not take into account was the British mariners’ inveterate sense of superiority. English packet captains, it turned out, “were too wise to be counseled by simple American fishermen,” and Franklin’s chart was ignored. As a result, westerly bound English packet ships continued to take more than two weeks longer to sail across the Atlantic than American merchant vessels, whose captains knew enough to cut quickly across the Gulf Stream rather than linger in the north-flowing current.

  With the outbreak of the Revolution, Franklin resolved to make his chart available to the French, and it was eventually published in Paris. In March 1781, as Destouches and his fleet headed south along the American coast, the location of the Gulf Stream, which flowed in the opposite direction at more than three knots, was of vital importance. Unfortunately, Destouches el
ected to make what Baron von Closen termed “a great turn” out into the Atlantic, and for at least a day, maybe two, the French ships were fighting the north-flowing stream.

  Destouches’s greatest nemesis, however, proved to be the weather. On March 12, four days after their departure from Newport, the French fleet became separated in a dense fog. When Destouches realized that just three ships were in the company of his flagship, the Duc de Bourgogne, he spent the morning firing cannons and tacking back and forth in an attempt to “rally his squadron.” If the British fleet should come upon a portion of his divided fleet, all would be lost. Unable to locate the missing vessels, the French admiral had no option but to proceed to the Chesapeake and hope for the best.

  Two days later, on March 14, just as Cape Henry at the entrance of the Chesapeake was about to come into view, they spied the missing part of the French squadron. Finally, after a passage of six days (two days longer than it had taken the Tilly expedition back in February), Destouches was poised to implement his plan: “arrive first at Chesapeake Bay and so entrench myself in the James River that I could not be chased out by any naval force, and cut off all retreat and communications by sea for Mr. Arnold’s fleet.” Then it started to blow hard out of the southwest, putting Cape Henry directly upwind of the newly reunited French fleet.