In the meantime, Cosby in the Robust continued to push forward the attack. After surviving the first onslaught of fire, he drew to within fifty yards of the Conquérant and, having jibed onto starboard tack, forced his French opponent to turn away from the direction of the wind until both ships were sailing side by side with the wind directly behind them. Now that they were on a run, the ships were rolling back and forth with the rise and dip of the waves instead of heeling to one side. This allowed Cosby to use both decks of cannons, and he was soon giving as he had so far received.
For the next half hour, the vanguards of the French and British lines went after each other in a wild melee. Since they were sailing with the wind, the powder smoke followed the fleet in a smothering, fire-licked cloud. The recoil of the great guns shook the ships to their keels; cannonballs shot at point-blank range tore into the vessels’ sides, sending jagged splinters of oak pinwheeling through the crowded gun decks where men cheered and screamed and died.
Up above on their quarterdecks, the ships’ captains and their fellow officers, immaculate in their dress uniforms, attempted to maintain a surreal sense of serenity amid the bloody chaos that surrounded them. Claude Blanchard, the French army’s commissary, stood on the quarterdeck of the Duc de Bourgogne beside Destouches and a group of officers. “I displayed a coolness,” Blanchard recorded proudly in his notebook. “I remember that in the midst of the hottest fire, Mr. de Menonville having opened his snuff box, I begged a pinch of him, and we exchanged a joke upon this subject.”
Six were killed and five wounded aboard Destouches’s flagship, but it was the Conquérant, which found herself in the midst of the fighting from first to last, that suffered the highest casualties of the battle. Before long, every man on the poop deck (the raised deck at the ship’s stern) was either killed or wounded. “A hundred soldiers and sailors . . . were hit,” Blanchard wrote, “among them forty were killed on the spot and an equal number mortally wounded.” One of the grenadiers of the Soissonnais Regiment, dressed in a uniform with crimson lapels, a sky-blue collar, yellow buttons, and with a fur hat on his head, “especially distinguished himself” when a cannonball ripped off one of his legs. “Thank heaven,” he was reputed to have cried out in a story that was repeated several times in the French press, “I still have two arms and a leg to serve my King!” Since the soldiers aboard Destouches’s ships had nothing to do during the battle other than fire blindly into the smoke with their muskets and provide the sailors with moral encouragement, their heavy losses were, in Blanchard’s words, “glorious, but useless.”
After forty-five minutes of fighting, Destouches realized that thanks to the ambiguity of the signals flying from the British flagship, the last three ships of the enemy line had not yet come within cannon range of the French rear. Before the fight could extend across his entire line of battle, Destouches decided to give the enemy vanguard, which had already suffered mightily, the equivalent of a kick in the gut. “I gave the signal to reestablish the line of battle on port tack, without regard for position.” By spinning around to the opposite tack and looping past the Robust, Prudent, and Europe (which were so heavily damaged that evasive maneuvers were now impossible), the first five ships in Destouches’s line did their best to end the battle as it had begun. Once again, the Robust got the worst of it. Particularly memorable, according to Destouches, was when “[t]he Neptune placed itself in musket range of [the Robust’s] poop and raked it with its entire broadside, while [the British ship] was unable to respond with a single gunshot.”
As the tail end of the French line followed in the wake of the leaders sailing off on port tack to the east, several ships in the British rearguard tried to mount one final attack. Unfortunately for the British, this attempt at a last-minute rally did not go well. As the largest ship in the fleet, the London, bore down menacingly on the tiny Romulus, a gunner on the French ship got off a lucky shot that took out the London’s maintopsail yard. To have such a small ship (and a former British ship at that) “disable and beat our London of 90 guns” was a sadly fitting end to what one British captain called a “very dishonorable humiliating day’s disgrace.”
BATTLE OF CAPE HENRY • March 16, 1781
About 1:00 p.m., with the vanguard of the British fleet gaining to within a mile and a half of the French fleet’s rear, Destouches orders his fleet to jibe around to starboard and attack the British from the favored leeward position so that they can use their lower gundecks in the rough seas (see inset).
As the French vanguard comes to within a mile of the enemy, the British vanguard suddenly bears off and heads at the leading French ships, which respond by bearing off as firing begins. Soon the vanguards of the two fleets are heavily engaged and sailing directly downwind.
The fighting extends back to the middle of both lines, both fleets sailing downwind.
Destouches orders his fleet to jibe to port tack and head up in a looping movement that allows the entire French squadron to file past (and fire on) the British vanguard.
The leading British ships suffer heavy damage as the British rear attempts to engage the rear of the French.
As the French fleet sails off on port tack, the heavily damaged Conquérant draws the fire of the London, which loses its maintopsail yard to the much smaller Romulus. Meanwhile, the Robust, also heavily damaged, sails away on starboard.
Firing having ceased, the French fleet forms a line of battle on port tack and sails off to the south while the British head west. Unaware of the extent of the damage he has inflicted on the enemy, Destouches returns to Newport while the British, despite having been bested, sail into the Chesapeake.
Destouches prepared his fleet for another possible attack by the British, but after more than two hours of fighting, Arbuthnot had no interest in continuing the battle. As a consequence of the British tendency to fire low, the French had suffered more casualties (164 killed and wounded to 97 for the British), but their ships—with the exception of the Conquérant (which had temporarily lost control of her rudder) and Ardent—had received relatively little damage. The British ships, on the other hand, had been decimated. “If Admiral Arbuthnot tells the truth,” a British officer later wrote, “he must confess to the eternal disgrace of our navy, that with a much superior fleet both in number and size of ships, he behaved as shamefully ill as the French behaved gallantly well.”
Destouches had done what he, and certainly his opponent, had not thought possible: beat a superior British fleet to the point that if Destouches chose to resume the fight, he stood a more than even chance of “totally destroying this stronger squadron.” Even the British acknowledged that the French admiral could have “done as he pleased.” He would have then been free to sail into the Chesapeake and capture the traitor Benedict Arnold. This was exactly the kind of daring and improbable victory the British had inflicted on the French at Quiberon Bay in 1759, when Sir Edward Hawke had sailed boldly, if not recklessly, into the wave-battered verge of a rocky lee shore and destroyed six enemy ships, killing or drowning an estimated twenty-five hundred French sailors in the process. After Hawke’s stunning victory, the French navy had no longer been a factor in the Seven Years’ War.
Destouches now had the opportunity to deliver a similar blow to the British. He had demonstrated his superior grasp of naval tactics. But did he have the audacity and bloodlust to finish the job?
* * *
• • •
ON MARCH 16, 1781, the day of what came to be called the Battle of Cape Henry, Benedict Arnold was in Portsmouth, Virginia, overseeing the construction of what was to be a British naval base in the Chesapeake. It was also turning out to be a kind of self-created hell. After his initial successes along the James River—crowned by the burning of Richmond—he and the expedition’s naval commander had fallen into a violent argument about the distribution of prize money, and the two w
ere no longer talking. In the meantime, his own army officers had made it increasingly clear that they detested him as a traitor. Johann Ewald, the captain of the jaegers, was better than most about keeping his feelings hidden, but amid his personal papers was a poem that spoke to how he and his fellow officers felt about their commander.
Honor is like an island,
Steep and without shore:
They who once leave,
Can never return.
On the day of the clash between the British and French fleets, Arnold received word that an enemy ship of the line had been seen near the entrance of the Chesapeake. “This caused some anxiety among us,” Ewald wrote, “since we knew the [French] fleet, which had three thousand troops on board, was off the coast of Virginia, and that . . . [the American general John] Muhlenberg had reinforced the Southern army with a strong corps [of militia]. From this, one could conclude that if this French fleet was not beaten, it intended to undertake something against Portsmouth.”
The following day, Ewald wrote, “every minute a bearer of evil tidings arrived.” First they received word that Lafayette “approached at quick step with a corps of ten thousand men.” Then they heard that the French fleet was off the coast of Virginia, followed by the report of a “union between Rochambeau and Lafayette.” Ewald remembered, “Now the water rose up to our necks.” Up until then Arnold had regularly entertained his officers at the dinner table with tales of his exploits as an American general. He also talked about “his ingenious trick at West Point, a story which he could make ridiculous with much wit.”
But on the day he learned of the imminent approach of the combined French and American forces, Arnold suddenly lost his sense of humor. “General Arnold, who had constantly beaten the French and Americans at table,” Ewald wrote, “lost his head and wanted to make up all at once for what had been neglected up to now. We now worked hastily to make his post impregnable, although the entire place consisted of miserable works of only six to eight feet on the average.”
The very next day, March 18, they learned that a fleet of warships had entered the Chesapeake. A naval officer was sent by land to investigate. He returned that afternoon with “the bad news that he had seen the French flag.”
Destouches had apparently done it. Not only had he defeated Arbuthnot; he was about to disembark his soldiers and begin operations against Arnold. “General Arnold,” Ewald wrote, “the former American Hannibal, now stayed on horseback day and night. . . . Everyone . . . continually asked him [questions], which he answered with another one, until a cold sweat broke out over him, [saying,] ‘What do you think of this fine works? By God! The French will not take it by assault! By God they cannot!’”
The next morning at dawn, three days after the Battle of Cape Henry, Ewald’s pickets captured an American soldier who claimed that “a corps of five thousand men under the Marquis de Lafayette, Baron Steuben, and General Muhlenberg was on the march toward Portsmouth to join the French troops which were on board the French fleet in the Chesapeake, and then to take Portsmouth by storm.” Ewald instructed his men to notify him the moment of the enemy’s arrival and went back to report to Arnold, “who could not be indifferent to this news, because he ran the risk of being hanged.” The two of them were about to sit down to dinner when Ewald heard “many shots in succession . . . and rushed toward my picket,” where he discovered “to my astonishment that the entire opposite bank of the creek was occupied by the enemy.” The much anticipated American-French assault was about to begin.
During the fighting that followed, Ewald received a bullet to the knee and had to be carried to his quarters for medical attention. On the way, he came upon Arnold, who asked “if the enemy would possibly take the post.” Ewald was exasperated by the question. “I said, ‘No!,’” he remembered. “‘As long as one jaeger lives, no damned American will come across the causeway!’”
Soon after returning to his lodgings, Ewald received the news that the American soldiers had, for no apparent reason, retreated. “Like everyone else,” he wrote, “I was transported with joy.” That evening, he learned the reason behind the enemy’s sudden withdrawal. In hopes of deceiving the Americans on shore, Arbuthnot’s fleet had sailed into the Chesapeake flying the French colors. It was the British—not the French—who were anchored inside Cape Henry at the mouth of the Chesapeake.
* * *
• • •
LAFAYETTE COULD NOT BELIEVE IT. After leaving his detachment in Annapolis, he had sailed down the Chesapeake in a small boat and eventually joined the American forces surrounding Arnold’s army in Portsmouth. Everything seemed to be in place to take the British works by storm. And then he had received the heartbreaking news. Even though Destouches’s fleet had bested the British, “they did not pursue their advantage” and had sailed for Newport.
On March 27, Lafayette wrote to Governor Jefferson. “How much the disappointment is felt by me, Your Excellency will better judge than I can express. This however may be a satisfaction that on our part we have been perfectly ready, and that with a naval superiority our success would have been certain.”
Destouches later claimed he had been unaware of the extent of the damage he had inflicted on the British, and given the losses his fleet had sustained, he felt it would have been unwise to continue the fighting. Having only recently become commander of the French squadron after the death of Admiral de Ternay in December, Destouches, in the words of the artilleryman Comte de Clermont-Crèvecoeur, “did not wish to compromise himself since he held only a temporary command. He could not bring himself to renew the battle when prudence indicated a retreat.” Destouches’s replacement, Admiral de Barras, later defended his predecessor’s decision to abandon the contest and return to Newport for repairs: “It is a principle in war that one should risk much to defend one’s position and very little to attack those of the enemy. Destouches, whose object was purely offensive, could and should, when the enemy opposed him had superior forces, renounce a project which could no longer succeed unless, contrary to all probability, it ended not only in beating but also destroying entirely that superior squadron.”
That did not change the fact that all Destouches had to do was resume the fight and he would have, in all likelihood, destroyed the British fleet. Instead he chose, in de Barras’s words, to “retreat with honor after punishing the enemy’s arrogance and establishing the reputation of French arms in the eyes of the people of America.” Unfortunately, that did nothing to further the war effort. Even though the British had been soundly trounced, they were the ultimate victors since Arbuthnot, who was forced to tow two of his ships from the scene of his ignominy, was free to continue into the Chesapeake the following morning. Thus, a battle that might have resulted in the capture and hanging of Benedict Arnold had come to what has been called “a farcical end.”
In the weeks to come Lafayette tried to put the debacle in the best possible light. However, his commander in chief, George Washington, was less forgiving.
CHAPTER 4
Bayonets and Zeal
WASHINGTON DID NOT RECEIVE WORD of the Battle of Cape Henry until two weeks later, on March 30. The French had fought bravely and well, he was told, but never had a chance of accomplishing their objective due to the appearance of the British fleet.
At first Washington did his best to take the high road, assuring Destouches that “the winds and weather had more influence than valor or skill.” And then the British published irrefutable evidence of what he really believed had happened.
Back when Washington was still awaiting word of the French squadron, he had written a letter to his cousin Lund, who managed his plantation at Mount Vernon. Between paragraphs about the state of the property, Washington inserted the same tirade he had been repeating throughout the month about the interminable delays associated with the departure of the Destouches expedition. If the French had only done as he’d first suggested, “the destruction of Arnold�
�s corps would have been inevitable before the British fleet could have been in condition to put to sea.”
Unfortunately, the letter was intercepted by the British and published in the loyalist Gazette in New York on April 8. The French were not amused. In a private letter to Washington, Rochambeau pointed out that he and Destouches had not received Washington’s request to send the entire French fleet until well after the Tilly expedition had departed for the Chesapeake—an expedition requested by both the state of Virginia and the Continental Congress. Even the ever loyal Lafayette felt compelled to inform Washington that the letter to Lund “gives me pain on many political accounts.” What Lafayette could not understand was how Washington—renowned for his tact and restraint—could have been so careless. Hadn’t he been lectured by Washington countless times in the past about the “many things I had to say not being of a nature which would render it prudent to entrust them to paper”?
Washington went through the motions of explaining himself, insisting that the letter had been dashed off after learning that the French fleet had not arrived in the Chesapeake as of March 15. What he failed to tell both Lafayette and Rochambeau was that the letter to Lund was one of five he had written complaining about the French. Washington knew better than anyone that the mails were not safe. Either anger had made him reckless, or, more likely, he had embarked on a conscious campaign to broadcast the fact that the French had once again wasted an opportunity to establish naval superiority, this time by not sending out the entirety of the fleet at Newport until more than a month after the three British ships at Gardiners Bay were scattered and wrecked by the January storm.
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