In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  By September 4, the French fleet’s longboats and cutters, accompanied by the ship of the line Experiment and two frigates, had begun to transport Saint-Simon’s troops up the James River to combine with Lafayette’s army in Williamsburg. This meant that almost two thousand of the squadron’s officers and sailors (close to 30 percent of the ship’s crew in at least one instance) were away from their vessels as they rowed the soldiers more than sixty miles upriver. Depending on the weather, it could take as much as a week for these officers and sailors (whom de Grasse described as “the best drilled part of the crew”) to complete the voyage up and down the James.

  De Grasse then sent three additional ships of the line and a frigate to the mouth of the York River to prevent Cornwallis’s army from escaping by water. As a result of these detachments, the French fleet stationed at the entrance of the Chesapeake was now down from twenty-eight ships of the line and five frigates to twenty-four ships of the line and just two frigates to act as roving pickets. On September 4, in response to a request from Washington to assist in transporting the American and French troops down the bay, de Grasse agreed to send seven additional men-of-war to Baltimore. The fleet upon which French naval superiority depended was about to be reduced by almost a third.

  At ten the next morning, before he had a chance to send the ships up the bay, de Grasse learned that sails had been sighted off the entrance of the Chesapeake. At first it was hoped these were the ships under the command of Admiral de Barras, already overdue from Newport.

  And then the truth began to set in. The fleet was far too big for this to be de Barras’s squadron—at least twenty-five sails were now visible on the horizon. This could only be the British.

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  • • •

  NO ONE IN THE BRITISH ADMIRALTY had ever wanted Rear Admiral Thomas Graves to be where he was now—in command of a fleet of nineteen ships of the line and eight frigates approaching an even larger fleet of French warships in possession of the Chesapeake. Even before Graves’s predecessor, Mariot Arbuthnot, had resigned back in July, the Admiralty had decided to move Graves to a subordinate position in the Caribbean while Rear Admiral Digby replaced him as commander of the North American squadron in New York. Unfortunately, Digby had not yet arrived from England, and since Graves outranked Hood, it fell to Graves to lead the present expedition.

  Graves was the antithesis of Hood’s former commander, the forceful and temperamental George Rodney, who once reminded a subordinate that “the painful task of thinking belongs to me.” Instead of dictating to his captains, Graves encouraged his officers to do their own thinking—partly because that was how it had been done where he had previously served (the Channel Fleet in England) and partly because decisiveness had never been a part of his makeup. As his superiors in the Admiralty understood, Graves lacked the force of character to command a large squadron of ships of the line. But thanks to Rodney’s swollen prostate and Arbuthnot’s defective eyes, here he was.

  He had been led to believe by his second in command, Samuel Hood, that de Grasse’s fleet would be considerably smaller than his own. Hood had been confident that given the French navy’s long-standing commitment to escorting convoys of merchant vessels back to France, the most ships de Grasse would take north was twelve, or “about the number they had coppered.”

  But de Grasse had fooled them all. By bringing every ship of the line he had available, he had caught the British completely by surprise. One can only imagine the sickening sense of dread that washed over Rear Admiral Thomas Graves when on the morning of September 5 he “discovered a number of great ships at anchor, which seemed to be extended across the entrance of the Chesapeake.” Not only had the French beat him to the Chesapeake but they had twenty-four ships of the line—five more than he had under his command—and as Hood noted, “their topsail yards [were] hoisted aloft as a signal for getting under sail.”

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  • • •

  DE GRASSE’S SQUADRON was anchored just inside the Middle Ground—the wide shoal between Cape Charles to the north and Cape Henry to the south. In addition to being depleted by four ships of the line and three frigates, the squadron was missing a significant portion of its officers and crew—a deficiency of which the British were thankfully unaware. Of the two frigates performing lookout duty, one had run aground on Cape Henry that morning and spent several hours attempting to free itself. Instead of a frigate, the 74-gun Marseilles, anchored inside the Middle Ground, was the first to sight the enemy.

  As a consequence, de Grasse did not receive word of the British fleet until it was almost upon him. Worst of all, the tide was flowing in, making it impossible for his ships to sail out of the bay until the tide changed at noon. With luck, the French ships would be able to clear Cape Henry before the vanguard of the British fleet arrived, but it would be close.

  De Grasse might have elected to remain at anchor and make the enemy come to him—a strategy that made a great deal of sense given the foul tide and missing crew members. But that would have required the impulsive de Grasse to sit and wait for the enemy. No matter what disadvantages he was operating under, he resolved to set sail and attack.

  By 10:30 a.m., de Grasse had ordered his ships (still tethered to their anchors as they waited for the tide to shift) to clear for action. By 11:15 he had given the signal to heave in their cables until their bows were directly above their anchors. Since the majority of the longboats and cutters were dozens of miles up the James River, the ships’ crews lacked the small vessels required to get their larger anchors aboard, and at 11:45 de Grasse ordered his ships to leave their anchors behind and slip their cables (to which they attached buoys for later retrieval) and set sail.

  Under normal circumstances, de Grasse would have overseen the painstaking process of assembling his fleet into the line of battle—a preestablished order in which he positioned himself in the center of the line, with designated captains commanding the vanguard and rearguard. But these were not normal circumstances. For only the second time in the history of the French navy, de Grasse ordered a “ligne de vitesse,” or line of speed, calling for his captains to form a line according to their ships’ relative speeds rather than their assigned positions. Since the ships that sailed out of the bay the fastest would have the honor of leading the fleet into battle, this turned the usually ponderous and often frustrating process of forming the line into an exhilarating race.

  Making it all the more exciting, if not downright terrifying, was the challenge of maneuvering a ship of the line at close quarters without her full complement of crew. The Chevalier de Thy was the captain of the 74-gun Citoyen. De Thy had hoped to begin sailing out of the anchorage on port tack, but the captain of the frigate Aigrette, which had run aground earlier that morning, warned him “that if I didn’t put about I ran the risk of running aground on Cape Henry.” Reluctantly de Thy set out on starboard, heading north through the French anchorage. He soon found himself coming up on de Grasse’s Ville de Paris, which was just getting under way. De Thy was tempted to shoot up to windward of the giant flagship, but not wanting “to disturb” the admiral (who was renowned for his temper), de Thy wisely bore off to leeward.

  Finally at 1:15 p.m., “finding myself free of all ships that were under sail to exit the bay,” de Thy tacked to port. De Grasse was “a little ahead of me,” signaling the leading ships “that had gone out and were forming up, to keep close to the wind.” At 1:30, having finally secured his smaller anchor to the cathead on the bow, de Thy “crowded sail,” and he passed Cape Henry about fifteen minutes later. Once he had manned his two batteries of cannons “as well as I could,” he reduced sail so he could take up a position behind the Northumberland. Suddenly another ship, the Palmier, made it clear she wanted “that station.” In addition, the Solitaire was “crowding sail” and threatening to overrun all three of them. “To avoid disputing further,” de Thy headed up, made sail, and went looking for yet another p
lace in the line. It was a no-holds-barred competition to secure the best possible position. At one point the Caton attempted to force her way into an apparently nonexistent space between the César and the Destin. “The latter only saved its bowsprit by backing all sails.” As it was, the Destin lost a foretopsail mast and punctured a sail.

  Up until now, Admiral de Grasse—a tall, imposing figure from one of the oldest families in France—had established a reputation as a demanding leader. After the indecisive engagement against Hood off Martinique on April 29, he’d called his captains together and “with the sharpest reproaches made known the dissatisfaction he felt with [their] behavior . . . , adding that another time he would lay down his command unless they showed a better conduct in obeying signals and fulfilling their duties.” In the early afternoon hours of September 5, as those same captains raced one another out of the Chesapeake toward the approaching enemy, de Grasse was going to have to settle for whatever line of battle they created.

  As might have been expected, given the tumultuous circumstances of the fleet’s leave-taking, the French fleet was, according to one officer, “in a very bad order.” The normal distance between two ships varied between one and two cable lengths, or between 600 and 1200 feet. Now there was a mile and a half between the first cluster of four French ships and the next group of two. Then it was another three miles to the fourteen ships that made up the rest of the fleet, with de Grasse’s Ville de Paris commanding the center and Baron de Monteil’s Languedoc in charge of the rear.

  It was hardly an encouraging way to begin a battle. With huge, irregular gaps in the French line, with their ships drastically undermanned, and with the British approaching on the opposite tack “in the best possible order, bowsprit to stern, bearing down on us,” de Grasse’s fleet—despite having once enjoyed an overwhelming numerical and strategic advantage—now appeared to be at the mercy of the enemy.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE WAY TO WIN a naval battle in the eighteenth century was to isolate a portion of the enemy’s fleet and attack it with a greater number of your own ships, a process that could be repeated as the opponent was defeated piece by piece or decided to end the battle by sailing away. In the early afternoon hours of September 5, there was more than a mile between the French vanguard and the rest of de Grasse’s squadron. As the British fleet approached on starboard tack under foresails and topgallant sails, the French vanguard was there for the taking. According to Samuel Hood, whose Barfleur commanded the vanguard of the British line, the half-dozen or so enemy ships might have been “demolished . . . a full hour and [a] half . . . before any of the [French] rear could have come up.”

  Several French captains sailing out of the Chesapeake feared that was exactly what the British were about to do. When the ships in the British van began to bear off toward the French vanguard, Balthazar de Gras-Préville, captain of the Zélé, assumed the British were about to “cross [our] ships’ course” and place the leading French ships between two lines of fire.

  Admiral Graves also recognized that “the French van had extended themselves considerably too much from their own center and seemed to present the favorable moment for an attack.” He, however, chose to take a different, more conservative course, and given the realities of communication at that time in the British navy, one can hardly blame him. While the French used a system of signaling that was consistent throughout their entire navy, there was no such uniformity among the British. The commands, as well as the flags Graves used to signal them (a system he’d inherited, for the most part, from Arbuthnot), were in several critical instances different from those used by the captains in Hood’s fleet from the Caribbean. Given that the two fleets had only recently been combined, there was a high likelihood of confusion when it came to signaling (which, as it turned out, proved to be the case). Rather than pounce on the enemy’s vanguard and begin a series of maneuvers that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to communicate given the limitations he was operating under, Graves elected to do the more conventional thing: adjust his line of battle so as to “bring his Majesty’s fleet nearly parallel to the line of approach of the enemy.”

  Seeing that his own vanguard was approaching the shoal water of the Middle Ground at the bay’s entrance, Graves ordered his fleet to wear (or jibe) so that they were now sailing on the same tack as the enemy. Unlike Destouches at the Battle of Cape Henry, Graves did not order his fleet to jibe in succession, which would have preserved the existing order of the British line. Instead, his fleet jibed in unison, which placed Rear Admiral Francis Samuel Drake (and some of the oldest ships in the fleet) in the van and put Hood in the rear. Soon after, Graves ordered his ships to cease all forward motion so as to “let the center of the enemy’s ships come abreast of us.”

  After two hours of adjusting his ships’ relative positions as they gradually edged downwind toward the enemy to leeward, Graves began to realize that he was running out of time. Even though de Grasse had not yet been able to form a proper line of battle (his center and rear still lagged far behind and below the vanguard), he must begin the fighting. “The enemy’s ships advancing very slow, and evening approaching,” the log of the London, Graves’s flagship, reads, “the Admiral, judging this to be the moment of attack, made the signal for the ships to bear down and engage their opponents.”

  Unfortunately, like Arbuthnot before him at the Battle of Cape Henry, Graves neglected to lower the signal for line ahead, a signal that contradicted the order to engage the enemy, a simple but potentially fatal human error. Most of the ships in the British line followed Graves’s example and headed for the French. But not Samuel Hood and the rest of the rearguard, who continued to follow in his commander’s wake rather than peel off for the enemy. Whether the result of honest confusion or an act of passive-aggressive protest, Hood’s actions (or lack thereof) ultimately had little impact on the result of the battle. Because by four p.m., when Graves ordered the attack, the wind had begun to shift.

  Over the course of the next two hours, the wind clocked more than 30 degrees to the right. The effect of this shift from north to east was to squeeze the two opposing vanguards together while increasing the distance between the rearguards, which never came within effective range of each other during the battle. Even the lines’ two centers, from which Graves and de Grasse issued their orders, had a difficult time engaging with any effectiveness. As a result, the Battle of the Chesapeake would be fought almost entirely between the ships of the two vans. As the Chevalier de Gras-Préville recorded in the log of the Zélé, “From the center the [rest of the] two navies looked on.”

  * * *

  • • •

  ONE OF THE FIRST FRENCH SHIPS out of the anchorage that afternoon had been the 80-gun Auguste commanded by the fifty-one-year-old Louis-Antoine de Bougainville. Bougainville had begun his military career in the army, and after serving under Montcalm during the fall of Quebec in the Seven Years’ War, transferred to the navy, where he’d led exploring expeditions to the Falkland Islands and, most famously, to the South Pacific, becoming the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe. (It was during this voyage that one of his naturalists discovered the flower that was ultimately named Bougainvillea.) Besides being a military officer, Bougainville enjoyed a considerable intellectual reputation (the writer and philosopher Denis Diderot described him as “ballasted to starboard by a treatise on differential and integral calculus and to port by a voyage around the world”), and when not at sea, he frequented the salons of Paris, where the intellectual elite of the Enlightenment gathered to discuss literature and science, and to gossip.

  Despite Bougainville’s considerable accomplishments as a mariner, his humble birth (his father had been a notary) limited his options in the French navy, where aristocratic, academy-trained officers (known as “the Reds” for the color of their uniforms) looked down on “the Blues,” auxiliary officers recruited from either the merchant service
or the army who tended to come from less distinguished families. According to the Spaniard Francisco Saavedra, who was shocked by the class warfare he witnessed in de Grasse’s squadron, “These factions have the navy divided into scandalous bands; each ship of the line; each vessel is a battlefield. The nobility defends the cause of the old navy, the commoners that of the auxiliary officers.” Being a confirmed Red, de Grasse (who had regarded his predecessor, the army-trained Comte d’Estaing, with “irreconcilable enmity”) was predisposed to view Bougainville as an “intruder,” and the two had been on “unfriendly terms” ever since the engagement off Martinique on April 29, when de Grasse blamed Bougainville for not bringing up the fleet’s rearguard in a timely fashion.

  But the afternoon of September 5 promised to be different. Out of the Darwinian competition unleashed by the line of speed, Bougainville, one of the smartest, most talented mariners on the water that day, had taken his rightful place at the head of the fleet. History has made de Grasse the hero of the Chesapeake, but it would be Bougainville and the French vanguard that did the fighting.

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  • • •

  THE BATTLE OF THE CHESAPEAKE • September 5, 1781

  At 10:00 a.m., the French sight the British approaching on starboard tack. De Grasse must wait until noon, when the tide begins to ebb, before he can order his fleet to leave the anchorage.

  Without the time to form the standard line of battle, de Grasse orders his captains to form the line according to their ships’ relative speeds. By 2:15, there is a three-mile gap between the French vanguard and the rest of the fleet, providing British admiral Graves with the opportunity to isolate and destroy the leading French ships.