In the Hour of Victory
Page 34
‘ … so exasperated our men that they kept singing out – ‘For God’s sake Brave Captain let us fire! Consider Sir two pour souls are slaughtered already’ – but Captn Duckworth would not let them fire till we came abrest of the ship we were to engage, when Capt Duckworth cried out ‘Fire my Boys. Fire’, upon which our enraged Boys gave them such an extraordinary warm reception that I really believe it struck the rascals with the panic.’11
This is clearly a captain who was deeply respected, a man who was cool-headed and courageous in battle and who could control a nervous crew with nothing more than a word or two. The very fact that this episode survives in a diary is evidence that his crew, in turn, were proud of their captain and that they celebrated his sangfroid. When the Orion returned from that battle and her crew mutinied, flooded with relief, adrenaline and too much booze, Duckworth was understanding and lenient when he could have been ferocious. One sailor recalled how he ‘had them before him to-day & said that as he was of a forgiving nature he gave them into the hands of the ships company, that he restores them with love for the services they had done him.’12
At the Battle of San Domingo we know that Duckworth chose to signal nothing more than ‘This is Glorious’ as he piled headlong into an engagement with the massive 118-gun Impérial and her two powerful seconds, the 80-gun Alexandre and the 74-gun Diomède. In a piece of theatre which may well be unique in naval warfare, he did so with his band playing ‘God Save the King’ on the poop deck and with a portrait of Nelson hanging from the mizzen stay, put there by Keats.13 Such behaviour suggests a unique commander with a unique sense of shipboard community. Sailors appreciated uniqueness more than many other traits: it glued a crew together and made it possible for them to endure the terrors and horrors of battle.
If Duckworth’s thirst for battle was undoubted and renowned, so too was the degree to which he cared for the welfare of his men and it is important to realise its full extent. Duckworth was not just another officer who was thoughtful and kind, but one who actively promoted new schemes for the welfare, training and education of young gentlemen. He was, in fact, instrumental in creating a production line of fine officers and seamen that were central to British naval success. An example of his attention to detail, regardless of the expense, was that he insisted that the ships’ boys all slept in cots, rather than hammocks, believing that hammocks were bad for growing boys.14 It is no coincidence that one of the finest of the post-Trafalgar generation of flag-officers, Admiral of the Fleet Sir William Parker, was trained, protected, nurtured and educated by Duckworth. This caring nature was matched in his private life, in which he was well known for his benevolence and compassion.
The fact that Duckworth was a caring and zealous officer may well, however, have been the reason for his ultimate failure, since it meant he was promoted beyond his abilities. Most at home when training the navy’s future officers or when fighting an enemy directly in his path, he was lost when considering wider strategies or making important executive decisions. The naval administration did not match the man with his strengths, and in this regard Duckworth merits some sympathy.
Admiral J. Duckworth to W. Marsden 16 February 1806
Duckworth’s final letter is written more than a week after his first burst of correspondence. The adrenaline rush of battle has now cooled, though the energetic Duckworth is still sufficiently fired with enthusiasm to begin with a bang: ‘Sir!’
This letter concerns the confusion over the behaviour of the Diomède described so awkwardly in Duckworth’s first dispatch. Did her captain, as Duckworth believed, surrender his ship before deliberately running her ashore in a calculated move to spite the victors? The answer now appears to be that he did not and it is not surprising that the man at the source of the confusion is the bungling Sir Edward Berry.15 Indeed, the confusion seems to have arisen as a result of Berry’s account of the surrender of an altogether different ship, the Brave, which he appears to have later misidentified as the ship which had run aground alongside the unmistakable Impérial. Duckworth finished his letter with a grumbling apology ‘feeling that Character is much more valuable than Life’. Well-meant maybe, but unfortunately for Duckworth this whole episode was yet more proof of the impulsiveness that had characterised his several chases, the ensuing battle and his subsequent description of it. This letter, designed to save the reputation of an enemy officer, undermined that of its author.
SUPERB PORT ROYAL JAMAICA FEBY 16th 1806
Sir!
Captain Henry of the french ship Diomede which ran on Shore, and I afterwards ordered to be burnt being with His Officers among the Prisoners rescued the afternoon of the 9th before that event took Place He approached to offer Captain Keats His Sword which He from the Report that had been made to me by Sir Edward Berry, and except in the Act of Hailing confirmed by Captain Dunn that the Ship had Struck before She ran on shore, it was disdainfully refused. This or of course made explanation necessary on my Sides & I acquainted Captain Henry, that I had marked His dishonourable Conduct in my publick Letter, when feeling as He appeared to do like a Man of Honor, & referring to His Officers & L’Equipage they gave the strongest Testimony that the Pendant was always Flying though the Ensign was Shot away, and this from strict investigation since my arrival Here, appears to be the case, and as Sir Edward is not present to refer to and the commander in the Brave allows He Hailed the Agamemnon, and what has been recited passed between them I begin to have no doubt that the Diomede has been mistaken for the Brave by Her Ensign Being Down & therefore Sir, feeling that Character is much more valuable than Life, am to beg the heavy Charge on Captain Henry may be done away in such manner as in their Lordships Judgment may appear most proper. I am Sir
Your Obedient
humble Servant
J. T. Duckworth
TO WILLIAM MARSDEN ESQR
SECRETARY &CO &CO &CO ADMIRALTY
The Battle of San Domingo was a tidy little victory, though the British participants were mightily aggrieved that the magnificent Impérial could not be brought back to Portsmouth: the victors only had the satisfaction of watching her burn on the shores of San Domingo. Duckworth’s victory was wildly celebrated in the Caribbean, where British merchants had been quaking at the prospect of a powerful French raiding squadron in their waters, and Duckworth himself was immediately presented with a Sword of Honour by the Jamaica House of Assembly.
Once home, he was granted a substantial pension of £1,000 from the Commons, which he later described with some bitterness as ‘my dirty annuity’, and he was awarded the Freedom of the City of London, another award created with the backing of powerful merchants. But he never received the title he so desired. His victory was tainted by the abandonment of his post at Cadiz, which had forced Collingwood to divert valuable resources from his Mediterranean command, though too late to prevent the escape of a frigate squadron from Cadiz. In fact Collingwood, who was Duckworth’s commander-in-chief, was seriously unimpressed. It is now widely accepted that, had it not been for his victory at San Domingo, Duckworth would probably have faced his fourth court martial for failing to engage Willaumez, the enemy he had unsuccessfully chased halfway across the Atlantic.
Duckworth’s victory at San Domingo must be placed alongside Hyde Parker’s at Copenhagen; both were operations in which the fleet commanders failed to perform as expected. British politicians and senior naval figures, however, were not in the business of showering apparently successful naval officers with awards regardless of the detail of their performance. The Royal Navy was an exacting profession. Yes, advancement and employment went hand in hand with personal or political influence, but only those deemed professionally worthy were lauded. Duckworth thus never received the peerage he expected, although his subordinate, Thomas Louis, received a baronetcy and his third-in-command, Alexander Cochrane, became a Knight of the Bath.
Significant doubts about Duckworth’s professional ability remained but, in accordance with the accepted rules of automatic promotion,
he was promoted over time and became Vice-Admiral of the Red in 1808 and Admiral of the Blue in 1810. Rather surprisingly, he remained in employment, and was even chosen to lead a significant but logistically doomed expedition to the Dardanelles in 1807. He continued to believe he had been poorly treated after San Domingo and sent ‘folios of grievance’16 to St Vincent who, however, was unmoved and maintained that Duckworth was not entitled to a British peerage. Nonetheless, the Battle of San Domingo created temporary security for British possessions and trade in the West Indies, which in turn secured the financial foundations that allowed Britain to continue the war. The captured ships did not make as much difference as they could because the Brave foundered off the Azores on the way home and the Alexandre was too badly damaged to be of any use and was broken up. Of the five French ships of the line at San Domingo, only the Jupiter went on to enjoy a career in the Royal Navy. The French frigates that escaped all made it safely back to France.
Duckworth’s victory caused no significant strategic alteration, either to British or French strategy. Willaumez enjoyed some success on a cruise that took him to the Cape of Good Hope, back into the South Atlantic and then into the Caribbean. Napoleon continued to pour money into shipbuilding to provide his growing empire with an appropriate scale of seapower, which he envisaged to be somewhere between 100 and 150 ships of the line, and to force Britain into a parallel shipbuilding programme that would threaten her economic stability. His Continental System, meanwhile, continued to impose more economic pressure on the British war machine. In 12 years of warfare, the British had won seven major fleet victories but, by 1806, the French empire was as large and aggressive as it had been at any stage in its troubled history.
ENDNOTES
1 These prizes are all described in detail in Appendix II.
2 This word is spelt very clearly and is repeated in the original document, though it is unclear what this is. From its location, it probably means Spirketting – the name given to the timbers between the decks and the gunports.
3 His rather impressive full name was Don Manuel Francisco Domingo de Godoy (di Bassano) y Álvarez de Faria, de los Ríos y Sánchez-Zarzosa.
4 For a biography see Appendix I.
5 Where she still lies. She was discovered by a fisherman in 1977, 20 nautical miles from Schevningen. Only a handful of artefacts have been recovered including two splendid bronze cannon which can be seen at the Rotterdam and Amsterdam Maritime Museums.
6 He was struck just above the right elbow by a musket ball in the disastrous attack on Santa Cruz, Tenerife in June 1797. His arm was immediately amputated high above the elbow.
7 Nelson also had a writing desk and coffin, in which he was buried, made from her timber.
8 The most accurate Nelson statue is also the easiest against which you can measure yourself. The life-size bronze by Lesley Pover is outside the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich.
9 The island was besieged by a vast Ottoman horde from May to September 1565.
10 On August 31, 1794, at 7.15 a.m., 65,000 of powder exploded at the store of the Château de Grenelle, near Paris. More than 1,000 people died and the explosion was heard as far as Fontainebleau.
11 Who held out, in 480 bc, against a vast army of Persians before being killed to the last man.
12 Flinders himself was a veteran of naval battle. He was a Midshipman on the Bellerophon at The Glorious First of June and left behind a series of magnificent tactical diagrams. They are published in S. Willis, The Glorious First of June: Fleet Battle in the Reign of Terror (London: 2011).
13 The Spanish Real Carlos (112) and the San Hermenegildo (112) and the French Saint Antoine (74).
14 Note that both the British and Allies had ships called Swiftsure.
15 Ever after this dispatch was published, Strachan was known as ‘the Delighted Sir Dicky’ for this phrase. Mariner’s Mirror, 34 (1948), 151.
16 Whose grandfather, according to family tradition, was an illegitimate son of Louis XIV.
17 A strait between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico that connects the Atlantic with the Caribbean. An awkward passage full of tidal currents and sandbanks.
18 www.nationalhistoricships.org.uk
CONCLUSION
The Paradox
Here is an interesting question. If two fleets were to meet miles away from anywhere and destroy each other with no survivors or witnesses, and therefore no dispatches, would the battle’s impact on history be the same as if dispatches had been written? Or, to put it another way, what exact role do dispatches have in the formation of history?
Battles at sea have consequences, and they do so regardless of whether their course is subsequently related by admirals or others directly involved in them. Ships and sons fail to return home. The detritus of battle washes ashore. What is less obvious, though by no means less important, is that such documents may influence history and its interpretation more widely, and in ways that are only partially connected with the battle they describe. There are, after all, many ways to describe an event, and even the most apparently straightforward fact can be interpreted in a variety of ways.
These dispatches describe history, of course, but they also shape it, even now, and both that power and that process remain enigmatic. Besides, at the heart of this material lies a paradox. It was collated in an era of peace to celebrate the achievements of an earlier, war-mongering generation. The association between peace and war is explicit. The generation of naval officers, politicians and administrators who ran the navy in 1821, when the dispatches were first collated, and later in 1859, when they were bound into their magnificent velvet volume, knew an unprecedented period of peace. This was the age of Pax Britannica, when the size of the Royal Navy was as small as it had been for two generations. In 1812 there were 98 ships of the line crewed by 130,000 men. By 1817 no more than 13 ships of the line carried just 20,000 men.1 The once mighty British battle fleet was reduced to small squadrons of gunboats policing distant colonial coasts. Tristan de Cunha, Ceylon, Ascension Island, Trinidad, Tobago, St Lucia and Australia were all British territories from 1815. But those men who now ran the Admiralty also knew the preceding era of war, an apocalyptic age of violence and blood-letting. For them, the association between the one and the other, between war and peace, was transparent.
For us it is not so clear. Indeed, if one stops to consider, this collection of dispatches defies its own myth. By recording a generation of naval battles that ended almost a decade before the end of the war, it argues not for the triumph of naval battle, but for its ineffectiveness. It is, in fact, powerful proof that naval battles did not win wars.
By studying these battles in sequence, we can make new connections and we can appreciate the sheer scale of the challenge that faced the Royal Navy as the fortunes of war shifted and as new theatres of operations opened where others had been closed. We can see, for example, how the war turned sharply against Britain in the autumn of 1794 in spite of the victory on 1 June. We can see how Spain recovered sufficiently from defeat at St Vincent in 1797, and France from defeat at the Nile in 1798, to pose a significant Allied threat at Trafalgar in 1805. We can see how the destruction of the Spanish at St Vincent eased the naval threat in the Atlantic but encouraged a new theatre to open in the North Sea. We can see how the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801 was irrelevant to the progress of the war and we can see how a crushing victory for Britain at Trafalgar did nothing to prevent France from sending powerful squadrons to sea in the following months, which in turn led to new naval threats in the Caribbean and East Indies and to battle at San Domingo in 1806.
The question that arises most forcefully from these dispatches, therefore, concerns the role of fleet battle in the shaping of history and, by demonstrating as it does the inability of decisive battle to bring about lasting peace, the collection necessarily draws our eye away from naval battle. Wars in this period were never brought to an end by apocalyptic battle but by negotiation. Military victories on land secured positions of strength from
which to negotiate. Territory was the currency of war and it was armies and their soldiers that robbed the banks. The invasion threat under which the British laboured almost constantly between 1794 and 1815 can be understood in these terms. To seize a slice of British territory was not an end in itself but a desperate attempt by the French to secure a powerful bargaining chip. The very ability to wage such war, moreover, was governed by international politics and alliances which, themselves, were governed by money. Alliances were rarely offered freely but were purchased through vast subsidies.
So how does successful fleet battle fit into this picture? The Battle of the Nile had perhaps the most clearly defined strategic results. The British destroyed Napoleon’s invasion fleet and thus prevented his army from receiving the maritime support it needed to wage a successful campaign in Egypt. But most of the others have less obvious military results. The Battle of Copenhagen, it can be argued, was fought for nothing. The Tsar, who had pressured the Danes into joining an Armed Neutrality, was already dead. The remaining battles fit somewhere between these extremes and what they share must be measured in less clearly defined terms.
As a general rule, British naval victory made it more difficult for her enemies to secure their own maritime trade and to target that of other nations, which in turn made it more difficult for them to fund the war. British success also made it more difficult for her enemies to launch amphibious operations to secure the territory required to force a peace. British naval victory therefore strangled her enemies’ ability to wage war and to negotiate from a position of strength. British trade, meanwhile, became more secure. With more money to hand, more troops could be raised, more alliances bought and more ships built. Moreover, control of the sea lanes in turn increased the ability of the Royal Navy to launch military operations overseas.