In the Hurricane's Eye
Page 7
A square-rigged vessel in the eighteenth century could not sail effectively against the wind. For the next two days, with land almost within sight, Destouches’s ships actually lost distance as they attempted to work their way toward the Chesapeake. By March 16, eight days after leaving Newport, they had been blown well to the east of the bay entrance. At 6:30 that morning, they were on port tack (meaning the wind was coming over the ship’s port, or left, side) sailing toward the Maryland shore in a rain-filled mist and heavy sea when the frigate Hermione signaled that up ahead, in the direction of the bay, she had seen a sail.
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WHILE THE FRENCH had been struggling for the last two days in a southerly, Arbuthnot’s copper-sheathed fleet—pushed along for a time by a violent northwester—had caught up to and actually passed the French. Worst of all, from the French perspective, the British were in the coveted windward position, giving them what was known as the weather gage, the naval equivalent of a soldier’s high ground. Now that they were closer to the direction of the wind, or “upwind,” of the French, the British were ideally positioned to reverse course and sail with the wind, or “downwind,” to attack their enemy.
Centuries of tradition had determined that the best way for two opposing fleets of warships to engage in combat was by means of the line of battle: Following a series of maneuvers orchestrated by the two opposing admirals (who usually positioned their own ships at the center of their respective lines and communicated their wishes with signal flags), the two lines of battle edged close enough to start hammering away with their artillery.
The line of battle was an essentially defensive configuration by which a fleet of warships attempted to create an ocean-borne imitation of a land-bound fortress. For the line of battle to work, each ship had to maintain its station by providing support to the ships ahead and behind even as it blasted away at its opponent on the enemy line. A ship of the line needed to be both powerful and maneuverable, and by the latter part of the eighteenth century, it had been determined that the 74—meaning that the ship had 74 cannons arranged on two decks (24 pounders below, 18 pounders above)—represented the perfect compromise between agility and firepower.
While the smaller frigate was built for speed, a 74, which had a crew of between 500 and 750 men, was more like a large floating tank constructed of wood. It took two thousand oak trees, or fifty-seven acres of forest, to build a single 74, whose ribs and planking were so thick that cannonballs, if shot from a distance, regularly bounced off the ship’s sides. The 74s were large and powerful but they were by no means the biggest of the battleships. Destouches’s flagship, the Duc de Bourgogne, was a two-decker with 84 guns; even more massive was British admiral Thomas Graves’s London, a 90-gun three-decker with the biggest cannons of them all, the 32 pounders (each measuring nine and a half feet in length and weighing close to three tons) mounted in her lower deck. The smallest ship of the line that day was the Romulus, which Destouches had pressed into service after her capture during the Tilly expedition. With just 44 guns, she was 16 guns shy of qualifying as a legitimate line-of-battle ship, but she was better than nothing. Largely because of the disparity between the London and the Romulus, the British fleet held a slight, 22-gun advantage over the French.
Since opposing ships often positioned themselves within less than a pistol shot (fifty yards) of each other, a typical naval battle brought to bear a far higher concentration of artillery at far closer quarters than ever seen on land. And yet fleet actions in the eighteenth century, which generally lasted several hours but could continue for a day or more, were rarely conclusive. Part of the problem was that while the hull of a line-of-battle ship was incredibly strong, her rigging of wooden spars, cloth sails, and hemp ropes could be seriously damaged by a single cannon shot. To take advantage of this weakness, the tactically minded French tended to fire high. The more aggressive British, on the other hand, preferred to kill as many of the enemy sailors as possible by firing low. In either instance, the mobility of a warship allowed the fleet that was getting beaten to avoid complete destruction by simply sailing away. According to one British captain, “Two fleets of equal force never can produce decisive events unless they are equally determined to fight it out, or the commander in chief of one of them bitches it, so as to misconduct his line.”
Of the two commanders, Destouches was less inclined to fight. Now that the British were between him and his objective, he believed he had no choice but to abandon his original plan. Even if he was able to work his way into the Chesapeake, how was he to disembark his troops under the guns of the enemy? From his perspective, there was nothing to be gained by engaging the more powerful and faster British fleet in battle. Arbuthnot, however, had other ideas.
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AN ADMIRAL IN THE AGE OF SAIL had the ability to control the movements of his ships, but there was one thing he could not control: the wind. No matter how expertly he maneuvered his fleet relative to the enemy, all it took was one detrimental shift of wind to negate everything. This is what happened to British admiral Arbuthnot over the course of the next two hours as the southwesterly wind veered to the right by almost 180 degrees. The effect of this monumental change of wind direction was to reverse the relative positions of the two opposing fleets. With the wind out of the northeast, the French now had the weather gage, requiring that the British sail upwind if they were to continue the pursuit.
The coppered ships of the British were faster, but the weather gods had finally begun to work in Destouches’s favor. Instead of simply chasing the French, the British now also had to battle the wind—tacking back and forth at an angle of approximately 60 degrees as they attempted to decrease the distance (approximately five miles) between them and the enemy to windward. To capitalize on his newfound advantage, Destouches ordered his fleet to tack in succession so that the order of his ships would be the same as they sailed upwind on the starboard tack (with the wind coming over each ship’s right side) toward the Maryland shore.
Tacking a square-rigged ship (which took between five and fifteen minutes) was never easy, especially in the jumbled seas following a major wind shift. If the yards were not manipulated correctly as the ship’s bow worked its way through the eye of the wind in the disorganized waves, damage to the spars could result. While the British announced the final, most perilous stage of a tack with the order “Helm’s a-lee!” the French shouted “Adieu-va!,” or “Go with God!”—which one naval historian describes as a prayer “reflecting the uncertainty of the outcome attending tacking.”
Whether or not Destouches’s men used this soulful ejaculation (by the end of the eighteenth century, “Envoyez!” or “Away you go!” was in more common usage), two of the French ships did indeed run into trouble, with both the Eveillé and Ardent breaking the yards of their maintopsails. This seriously impeded their ability to sail to windward. According to Destouches, the damage to the two ships “made me lose hope of keeping upwind of the enemy, whose sailing capacity was infinitely superior to that of my squadron.” Before long, the French would have to fight.
Within minutes of the French tack to starboard, the British followed suit. Over the course of the next hour, in what the log keeper of the Royal Oak described as a “drilling rain,” the British piled on sail and “gained sensibly upon the rear of the French fleet.” While Destouches kept his fleet in an orderly line, Arbuthnot allowed the faster and more weatherly ships of his fleet to climb ahead toward their prey. According to the Bavarian nobleman Guillaume de Deux-Ponts, “The inequality of the speed in the enemy’s ships separated them into two divisions.”
As the ships pounded through the waves in the rain, the officers and crews of both fleets prepared for battle. The sailors’ hammocks were brought up from below and stuffed into netting over the ship’s gunnels, where they formed a barricade against small arms fire. The thin partitions that formed the walls of the office
rs’ cabins in the aft portion of the ship were removed along with any furniture. The small boats stowed between the quarterdeck and foredeck were packed with nonessential items, lowered over the side, and towed behind the ship, safely out of harm’s way. The boatswain and his mates secured the yards with extra rope to prevent them from tumbling down onto the men in the midst of a cannonade. The carpenter and his crew prepared plugs of wood to close up any holes in the ship’s sides below the waterline. The gunner and his mates busied themselves with the cannons, making sure that in addition to being ready to fire, there were adequate supplies of powder. Down in the lightless bowels of the ship, just above the sloshing, malodorous bilge water of the hold, was the cockpit, where the surgeon laid out his instruments in preparation for the grim harvest of legs and arms to come.
By one p.m., after a series of tacks, the two fleets were on port tack with the British advancing rapidly from behind. The ships were heeling so much in the freshening breeze that their lower gun ports on the leeward side were underwater. This prompted Arbuthnot to order the captain of the leading British ship, the 74 Robust, to begin the attack not from the usually preferred windward position but from to leeward of, or below, the enemy. By attacking with the windward sides of his ships facing the French, Arbuthnot’s fleet would be able to fire both rows of cannons while the lower gun ports of the enemy would be buried beneath the waves. “Nothing could bear a more pleasing prospect than my situation,” Arbuthnot wrote.
But as he was about to discover, Destouches saw an opportunity of his own.
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SO FAR, ALL HAD GONE according to the usual British script: through an exemplary display of seamanship and aggression, Arbuthnot’s fleet had made a mockery of Destouches’s attempts to take advantage of the setback the British had suffered during the January storm at Gardiners Bay. In keeping with the reputation established by the royal navy during the Seven Years’ War, when the British had handed the French a series of lopsided defeats (the most humiliating of which had been suffered before the eyes of their own countrymen at Brittany’s Quiberon Bay in 1759), Arbuthnot seemed on the verge of both saving Benedict Arnold and annihilating the French fleet.
There were reasons, however, for the British admiral to give pause as he watched the Robust climb toward the stern of the last French ship, the 64-gun Provence. Since France’s entry into the American War of Independence, its navy had shown unsettling signs of improvement, especially when it came to tactics. Rather than following the British model—which emphasized tradition and seamanship and encouraged officers to learn by doing—the French set out to approach naval combat analytically. Embracing the Enlightenment’s belief in the power of reason, the French established in 1752 the Académie de Marine in Brest, where instructors such as Vicomte de Morogues produced groundbreaking treatises on naval tactics that enabled students to think of a naval battle in terms of a chess game rather than a brawl. While British ships communicated with a relatively limited series of signal flags dating back to the previous century, the French instituted what was called a numerary system of signals, which gave their admirals the ability to relay a much wider range of orders. To increase its officers’ familiarity with the new signaling system and the tactics promulgated by Morogues, the French navy created an “Evolutionary Squadron” that practiced fleet maneuvers over the course of several extended cruises.
With the outbreak of war between France and Britain, it became almost immediately evident that this was a new, revitalized French navy. On June 17, 1778, a French frigate with what turned out to be the wonderfully ironic name of Belle Poule (“Beautiful Chicken”) fought the much larger HMS Arethusa to a brutal draw off the coast of Brittany. (The excitement caused by this early encounter was so great that the fashionable ladies of Paris invented the “Belle Poule” hairstyle, featuring a model of the frigate balanced atop a pile of carefully arranged hair.) When a month later at the Battle of Ushant, the French fleet displayed a crispness and cohesion that made the poorly directed British look like amateurs, the alarm was sounded. “There is something surprising,” Captain Richard Kempenfelt wrote in January 1780, “that we, who have been so long a famous maritime power, should not yet have established any regular rules for the orderly and expeditious performance of the several evolutions necessary to be made in a fleet. The French have long set us the example.” For the first time in centuries, a whisper of doubt had entered the collective psyche of the British navy.
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DESTOUCHES’S ORIGINAL PLAN had been to sail unmolested into the Chesapeake and disembark the soldiers who were to capture Benedict Arnold. The appearance of the British squadron had, to Destouches’s mind at least, destroyed those plans. If it had been possible, he would have simply sailed away from the enemy and returned to Newport. Unfortunately, the British ships were significantly faster, enabling them to force a confrontation. Since Destouches had no choice but to fight and had little to no chance of completing his mission, what concerned him now was “the problem of preserving the honor of the King’s arms without endangering his fleet.” With the British vanguard about to open fire on his rearguard, a battle was inevitable. To improve his odds against a faster and more powerful opponent, he must deny Arbuthnot the advantage of the leeward position.
So Destouches ordered his fleet to reverse direction. First the lead ship in the squadron, the Conquérant, commanded by Charles-Marie de la Grandière, bore down and jibed to starboard; then each subsequent ship followed in succession, until the entire French fleet was to leeward of the British line of battle and approaching on starboard. As Destouches later noted with considerable satisfaction, it was a “movement which the enemy had not foreseen.” Just when Arbuthnot thought he had the French in his grasp, Destouches had seized the initiative. The French were now racing toward him in the favored leeward position, the heel of their ships keeping both rows of cannons well above the choppy seas, while the lower gun ports of the British were buried underwater. Suddenly, the French had an almost two-to-one advantage in firepower. It was a brilliant move on Destouches’s part that, in his own words, “threatened to batter the head of [the British] line against two scythes.”
Adding to Arbuthnot’s woes was the disorganized state of his line of battle. Up until just a few minutes before, he had been in dogged pursuit of the enemy, and the three leading British ships, the Robust, Prudent, and Europe, had worked themselves significantly ahead of his flagship, the Royal Oak, which occupied the fourth position in the British line. Arbuthnot was about to signal for the Robust to shorten sail and “to continue to press the enemy on the larboard [or port] tack” when Captain Phillips Cosby decided to retake the initiative.
Cosby was supposed to have passed just to windward of the leading French ship (the Conquérant) as the rest of the British squadron followed him in running the length of the enemy line. Instead, he bore dramatically away from the direction of the wind until the Robust’s bow was pointing directly at the Conquérant. To avoid a collision, the leading French ship also bore away until her starboard side and all her cannons were facing the bow of the leading British ship.
Cosby’s aggressively spontaneous move was well intentioned but ill advised. With his ship’s bow pointed toward the French ship’s side, Cosby was virtually defenseless against the Conquérant, which almost immediately unleashed a frightening rain of cannonballs and canister shot (clusters of smaller balls capable of clear-cutting a ship’s deck of men), along with an evil cloud of langridge (bolts, nails, bars, and other pieces of iron) that began to wreak havoc with the Robust’s sails and rigging. In the parlance of naval warfare, Cosby’s T had been crossed, and the subsequent raking fire inflicted a hurt upon the leading British ship from which she never recovered.
Making matters worse, from a British perspective, the captains of the two ships behind Cosby (who both assumed Cosby was following Arbuthnot’s orders) also bore off
and were quickly subjected to similar treatment by the next two ships in the French line, the Jason and the Ardent. “For a long while,” Destouches wrote, “three vessels from their van were in a head-on position athwart mine, which took advantage of this by brisk, sustained fire.” For the first three British ships, time must have seemed to have stopped as the French artillery blasted splintered chunks out of their spars, topsides, and hulls while riddling the sails with holes.
Arbuthnot had lost control of his squadron. But what to do? Reluctantly, the British admiral decided he had no choice but to follow in the wake of his wayward vanguard and attack the nearest French ship. What Arbuthnot should have done at this point was raise the blue and yellow checked flag that ordered “every ship . . . to engage the enemy as close as possible.” Instead he kept up the signal for forming a line of battle, which ordered his captains to close up any gaps between their ships but made no reference to attacking the enemy. And so, with the captains of his rearguard “in a quandary, whether to continue to windward or bear away,” Arbuthnot followed his vanguard into battle.
The British flagship was soon in the midst of the same firestorm that had afflicted the three British ships ahead of her. And with a large gap between the Royal Oak and the British vanguard, the enemy, led by Destouches’s flagship, the Duc de Bourgogne, and what Arbuthnot described as the French admiral’s “two seconds,” the Neptune and the tiny Romulus, had plenty of time to make a mess of the Royal Oak’s spars and rigging. “My ship’s foresail was so torn with shot,” Arbuthnot wrote, “that it hung to the yard by four cloths and the earings [small ropes that attached the upper corners of the sail to the yard] only; the maintopsail halyards, braces, ties, also the foretop and fore braces and bowline [were also damaged], and . . . for a little space . . . the ship was ungovernable.”