In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Instead of immediately attacking the French vanguard, Graves spends the next two hours waiting for the French fleet to emerge from the Chesapeake and form a line of battle. At 4:15, just as the wind begins to shift to the east, Graves orders his fleet to engage the enemy. Since only the leading ships are within effective range, the battle is fought almost entirely by the two vanguards, commanded by Drake and Bougainville.

  THE ONCE FRESH BREEZE had begun to die as the leading British ships bore down on the French. Since the enemy’s bows were pointed at their port sides, Bougainville and his vanguard had the opportunity to “fight them with advantage.” Once the British were within what an ensign aboard the Auguste described as “a very small half-cannon range,” the undermanned French batteries (Bougainville’s usual 700-man crew was down by 200 officers and sailors) began to fire, and soon both vans were “fiercely engaged.” Almost immediately, the ship at the head of the British van, the Shrewsbury, had “her fore and main topsail yards shot away” and was disabled. As the Shrewsbury drifted off station, the second in the British line, the Intrepid, found herself besieged by the more powerful Pluton and Marseilles. One of the first French casualties of the battle was Captain Brun de Boade of the Reflechi, who was killed by the initial British broadside. “All that could be seen,” the Chevalier de Thy recorded from the rearguard, “was fire and smoke on either side.”

  By 4:30, Drake’s flagship, the 80-gun Princessa, had begun to fire at close range on the French 74 Diadème, captained by the Marquis de Montecler. The ships were so close to each other that the wadding from the British cannons “set fire to [the Diadème] at every shot.” Their vessels surrounded by a disorienting cloud of fire and smoke as the constantly shifting breeze continued to shuffle the ships’ positions, the crews of the two vans blasted away at whatever vessel was beside them, and instances of friendly fire were almost inevitable.

  To better align the French van with the rest of the fleet, which had an increasingly difficult time reaching the leading ships because of the more easterly direction of the wind, de Grasse ordered the van to bear off more than 20 degrees. However, since such a maneuver would have, in the words of one French officer, “presented the stern [to the enemy]” and caused the van to receive an even more “severe handling” than it already had, the captains found the order “impracticable” and remained side to side with their British opponents. Too closely involved with the enemy to bear off and with the rest of their fleet too far to leeward to provide any assistance, “[t]he four ships in the van soon found themselves . . . entirely cut off from the rest of the fleet and constantly engaged with seven or eight vessels at close quarters.” It may have taken longer than it should have, but Graves had finally succeeded in bringing a larger number of his own ships against the enemy’s isolated vanguard.

  At one point, with the British at what an ensign aboard the Auguste described as “the infinitesimally small range of langridge shot, nearly rifle range,” Bougainville drew so close to Admiral Drake’s Princessa that even de Grasse was impressed. “That is what I call fighting,” the admiral later enthused; “I thought you had boarded!” Although the Princessa was able to elude capture, this allowed Bougainville to turn his undivided attention on the Terrible, which he quickly pounded into a barely floating wreck. Two cannonballs were later found buried in the British 74’s foremast, one of which weighed a reported thirty-nine pounds—four pounds more than the supposed maximum size of a naval cannonball. According to Bougainville, the gunners aboard the Auguste fired an impressive 654 cannon shots that day.

  In the midst of this furor, a British cannonball cut through the bowline of the Auguste’s foretopsail (one of the primary sails used in battle). Without the bowline (which pulled the forward edge of the sail tight when sailing close-hauled), the foretop was “rendered incapable of service,” and Bougainville would have a difficult time remaining on the attack.

  The way to repair the bowline was to lower a man from the yardarm—a challenging procedure at the best of times but close to impossible in the midst of a battle. Twice a man ventured onto the foretopsail yard to make the repair and twice that man was killed. Assuming “no one would make a third attempt,” Bougainville offered, with what the officer Karl Tornquist described as “his usual kindness,” the contents of his “purse to the one who would put the bowline in shape.” A sailor immediately leapt onto the yard and calling out, “‘My captain, we do not go there for money . . . ,’ tackled his work and fortunately carried it through.”

  Because of the time it took to repair the bowline, Bougainville’s Auguste dropped too far to leeward to assist the beleaguered Diadème, “which could scarcely hold out . . . , having only four 36 pounders and nine 18s fit for use and having all on board killed, wounded, or burnt.” Just when it seemed the Diadème might be in danger of being totally destroyed, Chabert Cogolin, captain of the Saint Esprit, “seeing the imminent danger of the Diadème, hoisted sail and was soon in her wake; then . . . opened a terrible fire” that forced the British 74 Albion to “haul her wind” to escape.

  Taking up the rear of the French vanguard was the 64 Caton, the only uncoppered ship to make it to the front of the fleet. By the end of the fighting this smallest of the ships of the line had suffered, according to Captain Framond, “more than fifty gunshots in the planking of my . . . bottom, including several under the water, one in my rudder, at least three times as many in my sails, mast, and rigging.” With no ships to support her from behind, the Caton, “whose natural position was . . . the 28th ship in the rearguard,” endured “continual fire” for an hour and forty-five minutes “without bending or yielding by a line.”

  By 5:30, after an hour and a half of intense fighting, both the French and British vanguards had reached the point of exhaustion. “For our part,” an officer aboard the Saint Esprit recorded, “we were so tired that though within gunshot, the vans no longer fired.” While sporadic fighting continued between the centers of the two lines for the next half hour, the cessation of combat in the front of the line allowed the leading French ships to start complying, at long last, with de Grasse’s order to bear away from the wind. As the French vanguard sailed almost directly downwind, the French center and rear, “by crowding sail . . . closed our line to the extent possible.” By six, de Grasse had finally succeeded in closing the gaps in the French line of battle and had hopes of renewing the fight, but in thirty minutes, with the approach of darkness, all firing had ceased.

  The vessels in both vans had suffered mightily, and yet, given the ferocity of the fighting, it was amazing how little overall damage the French had experienced, especially compared with the British. The Diadème was in need of assistance, but the rest of the fleet was still capable of continuing the fight. Not so their opponents: Admiral Graves soon learned that “the Shrewsbury, Intrepid, and Montague [were] unable to keep the line, and the Princessa [was] in the momentary apprehension of the maintopmast going over the side.”

  That night, as sailors throughout the French squadron worked frantically to repair their ships’ rigging, de Grasse had no choice but to acknowledge that “the honors of the day” belonged to Louis-Antoine de Bougainville. “These two gentlemen had since April 29 been on unfriendly terms,” Tornquist wrote, “but now and thereafter became attached to one another.”

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  • • •

  FOR THE NEXT FOUR DAYS the two fleets kept in sight of each other as they sailed farther and farther from the Chesapeake. Above all else, de Grasse wanted to attack the British. “My dear Bougainville,” he wrote on September 7, “if the wind continues and the English do not escape us tonight, we shall meet them at closer range tomorrow morning. . . . I have great hopes based upon the damages to the enemy which I can see. I judge by them that they are not as well-outfitted as we are, and by the slowness of their movements that they are not as ready for battle.”

  While de Grasse wished for a rematch with the British,
Bougainville believed they should have long since given up the chase and returned to the Chesapeake. “It is what we ought to have been doing since the battle,” he wrote in his journal on September 9. “Perhaps we would also find the squadron of M. de Barras.” As Bougainville realized, occupation of the Chesapeake—not attacking Graves—should be the top French priority. If the British fleet should slip away in the night and get into the bay first, de Grasse would have, like Destouches before him, squandered the victory that might have won the war.

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  • • •

  IN THE DAYS AHEAD, the two fleets attempted to take advantage of the constantly shifting wind. While de Grasse tried to gain the weather gage and attack, Graves did his best to keep the French fleet a safe distance to leeward while he and Samuel Hood, his second in command, traded politely worded barbs. Hood made it clear he thought Graves had failed to take advantage of what he called “a most glorious opening.” Graves made it clear he thought Hood had willfully failed to engage the French rearguard and thereby “a most glorious victory was lost.”

  It all came to a head during a conference aboard Graves’s flagship, the London. According to an account published the following year, “Admiral Graves asked Admiral Hood why he did not bear down and engage? The answer was: ‘You had up the signal for the line.’ Admiral Graves then turned to Admiral Drake, and asked him how he came to bear down? He replied: ‘On account of the signal for action.’ Admiral Graves then said: ‘What say you to this, Admiral Hood?’ Sir Samuel answered: ‘The signal for the line was enough for me.’”

  By the night of September 9, the British had lost sight of the enemy. That same night William Clement Finch, the captain of the Terrible, reported that the pumps were having difficulty keeping up with his leaky ship. Two days later, at a council of war, Graves, Hood, and Drake decided they must sink the Terrible. But when a sea cock was opened, the old and broken ship refused to go down. So on September 12, Graves ordered her burned. “At half past 8 saw the Terrible on fire,” the logbook of the Royal Oak reads, “at 2 am saw the explosion of the Terrible, all the fleet in company.”

  The following day, Graves learned from one of his frigates that while he’d been focusing on the state of the Terrible and the lack of support he’d received from Hood, de Grasse had finally decided to head back to the Chesapeake. To add insult to injury, the enemy fleet now included de Barras’s squadron from Newport, which had snuck into the bay the day before de Grasse’s return. Even worse, two British frigates had been captured after pausing in the Chesapeake to clip the buoys attached to the French fleet’s anchor cables.

  Once again, Graves called a council of war. “Upon this state of the position of the enemy, the present condition of the British fleet . . . , and the impracticability of giving any effectual succor to Lord Cornwallis in the Chesapeake, it was resolved that the British squadron . . . should proceed with all dispatch to New York, and there use every possible means for putting the squadron into the best state for service.” Until the British fleet’s return, Cornwallis was on his own. And so, after more than a week of hesitancy and hand-wringing, the Battle of the Chesapeake ended with the British in retreat and a newly fortified French fleet in possession of the Chesapeake.

  The following night, September 14, George Washington and Rochambeau rode into Williamsburg.

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  • • •

  LAFAYETTE HAD BEEN STRICKEN by a fever, but when he learned of Washington’s approach, he immediately rode out to meet his commander in chief. St. George Tucker, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer and lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia, watched wide-eyed as Lafayette “caught the general round his body, hugged him as close as it was possible, and absolutely kissed him from ear to ear once or twice . . . with as much ardor as ever an absent lover kissed his mistress on his return.”

  Word of de Grasse’s victory had not yet reached Williamsburg, but at some point that night Washington learned the good news. “I am at a loss to express the pleasure, which I have in congratulating your Excellency on your return to your former station in the bay,” he wrote to de Grasse the following day. “I take particular satisfaction in felicitating your Excellency on the glory of having driven the British fleet from the coast, and taken two of their frigates. These happy events, and the decided superiority of your fleet, gives us the happiest presages of the most complete success in our combined operations in this bay.”

  But as Washington soon learned, de Grasse was not as sanguine about the progress of the allied armies. “I am annoyed by the delay caused by the first division,” he wrote on September 16; “time is passing, the enemy is profiting by it, and the season is approaching when, against my will, I shall be obliged to forsake the allies for whom I have done my very best and more than could be expected.” Washington and Rochambeau must get themselves to de Grasse’s flagship—a voyage of some sixty miles down the James River—and persuade the French admiral to remain in the Chesapeake for as long as the siege lasted.

  On September 17, Washington, along with Rochambeau, Chastellux, Duportail, and artillery chief Henry Knox, boarded what the aide Jonathan Trumbull referred to as “the fine little ship Queen Charlotte.” Captured by de Grasse during the passage from Cuba to the Chesapeake, the Charlotte had been modified to accommodate Cornwallis’s second in command, Lord Rawdon, for a voyage back to England. Having been “fitted for his lordship” (who was now a prisoner of the French), this was just the luxury craft to transport them down the James on what may have been Washington’s longest voyage by water since sailing to Barbados with his half brother Lawrence.

  Despite Washington’s lack of saltwater experience, he was intimately familiar with the rivers of the Tidewater. Up until it was stolen by the British earlier that spring, he’d owned a copper-bottomed schooner that he docked in front of his home at Mount Vernon. In addition to growing crops, Mount Vernon’s slaves busied themselves every spring with harvesting huge numbers of shad from the Potomac, using seines to capture the wriggling fish much as Washington now hoped to use the combination of sea and land forces to trap Cornwallis. It might be argued that the commander in chief of the Continental army had a more nuanced understanding of the importance of naval superiority than Admiral de Grasse, who’d seemed strangely indifferent to the dangers posed by the British fleet both before and after the Battle of the Chesapeake.

  By the next morning, the Queen Charlotte was within sight of the French fleet, which with the addition of de Barras’s squadron now totaled thirty-six ships of the line. No piece of eighteenth-century technology could compare in complexity, sophistication, and heart-stopping beauty to a ship of the line, and here were three dozen of them anchored inside Cape Henry. Washington would have no doubt agreed with Trumbull’s description of the fleet as “a grand sight.”

  Elation, at least on the part of de Grasse, appears to have been the predominant mood of the meeting aboard the Ville de Paris. According to legend, de Grasse wrapped the over-six-foot-tall Washington in a hug while crying out, “Mon cher petit general!” If true, this marked the third time in two weeks the American commander in chief found himself in the arms of a Frenchman. By the end of the conference, de Grasse (who had already sent several ships up the bay to retrieve the remaining American and French soldiers) had agreed to remain in the Chesapeake an extra two weeks, until the end of October. He was also willing to contribute as many as two thousand of his own men, if needed, in a coup de main against Cornwallis.

  Dinner was followed by a tour of the ship. At 104 guns and 177 feet in length, the Ville de Paris was the largest ship of the line in the French navy. “[T]he world in miniature,” Trumbull recorded in his diary. After “receiving the compliments of the officers of the fleet,” Washington and his retinue were back on the Queen Charlotte. The sail through the anchorage at sunset must have made for a magnificent spectacle. Sailors clustered on the yards, shouting, “Vive le Roi!” as below them the powder
smoke from a thirteen-gun salute billowed across the water. By nightfall, the Charlotte, whose captain would one day father a son named John James Audubon, had turned up the river and was headed back toward Williamsburg.

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  • • •

  JOSEPH PLUMB MARTIN was twenty years old. Although born in Massachusetts, he’d been raised in Connecticut and as a private and now a sergeant in the Continental army had been present at virtually every major battle of the Revolution. Now he was headed for Yorktown. His voyage south had begun at Philadelphia in a schooner so loaded with gunpowder that he feared a random bolt of lightning might “compel me to leave the vessel sooner than I wished.” Once he’d sailed down the Delaware and gone overland to Head of Elk, he’d found “a large fleet of small vessels waiting to convey us and other troops, stores, etc. down the bay.”

  Martin was a member of the Sappers and Miners, a corps of soldiers specially trained in the art of digging the trenches and fortifications used in conducting a siege. As a consequence, he was aboard one of the first groups of vessels to begin sailing down the Chesapeake. “We passed down the bay making a grand appearance with our mosquito fleet to Annapolis,” he remembered. There they paused to await the outcome of the Battle of the Chesapeake. On September 15, they learned of de Grasse’s victory, and pushed by the same northeasterly gale that would make Washington and Rochambeau’s return to Williamsburg a four-day ordeal, they were soon approaching the mouth of the James, where they enjoyed an excellent view of the French fleet. One of Martin’s compatriots described the ships as “the most noble and majestic spectacle I ever witnessed.” Martin, the ever sardonic New Englander, was less impressed, comparing the French ships’ hundred or so masts to “a swamp of dry pine trees.”