Struggle for Sea Power : A Naval History of American Independence (9781782397403)

by Willis, Sam

  Five years later I have completed it, and it is time for me to say sorry. So I’m sorry, Fred. I’m sorry that I wasn’t paying attention and that your precious boat was damaged. On the banks of that river we had our own mini maritime revolution, and when I finally started to pay attention and eased off that line, your beautiful boat won her liberty.

  INTRODUCTION

  How do you begin a naval history of the greatest war of the age of sail? Consider the scale of the problem. From first gasp to final whimper, the American War of Independence lasted a decade and was the longest war in American history until Vietnam two centuries later. It involved no fewer than twenty-two separate navies and was fought in five different oceans, as well as on land-locked lakes, majestic rivers, barely navigable streams and ankle-deep swamps. It involved more fleet battles than any other naval war, one of which was the most strategically significant naval battle in all of British, American or French history. Those battles were fought by some of the largest fleets of sailing warships ever to set sail, and some of them by the strangest and most eclectic fleets in history, including one that was taken to pieces, dragged twelve miles overland, and then rebuilt and launched on a lake.

  The war bursts with tales of heroism and cowardice, loyalty and treachery, political blood-letting, military ingenuity, medical innovation and stunning incompetence. It encompassed tidal waves, three of the worst Atlantic storms on record, the gravest invasion threat faced by Britain since the Spanish Armada in 1588, shipwrecks, smuggling, riots, mutinies, convict labour, treasure ships, slavery, financial collapse. There were nervous breakdowns, epic feats of survival and endurance, as well as love stories, epidemics, miserable evacuations and narrow escapes. There were unstoppable invasions, unprecedented shipbuilding programmes, one of the longest sieges in history and one of the most outrageous examples of military treason in history, horrifying and systematic cruelty, a ‘floating’ town, spies, the world’s first military submarine and a native Indian tribe descended from shipwrecked slaves.

  Starring in this spectacular were historical figures of the highest distinction, from George Washington and George III of England to Louis XVI of France, Charles III of Spain and Catherine the Great of Russia. While naval officers of great fame such as John Paul Jones, Abraham Whipple, John Manley, George Rodney, Samuel Hood, Horatio Nelson, the comte de Grasse and the bailli de Suffren navigated the oceans, Titans of political and diplomatic history, including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, George Germain, the Earl of Sandwich, Lord North, the comte de Vergennes and the conde de Floridablanca, navigated the labyrinthine corridors of power. Countless unsung heroes, meanwhile, made their mark on history in a myriad ways, and all of this happened in a conflict that dramatically shaped the modern world.

  So how do you begin? The answer, you might be surprised to hear, lies with a woman precariously balancing a model of a fully rigged sailing warship on her head.

  In the summer of 1778 a new and bizarre fashion swept Paris as ladies began to wear their hair in a style known as à la Belle Poule. The Paris salons and society balls were transformed as dozens of ships sailed by on elaborately coiffured heaving swells of curled and powdered hair. What on earth was going on?

  A perfect historical puzzle, it encapsulates everything I love about history. Sufficiently bizarre to seem ever so human, it also hints at far deeper historical themes and questions than the tastes of Parisian women and the techniques of Parisian hairdressers in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Sailing warships, after all, were the tools of war and empire. They were used to protect trade, fight battles, transport troops and blockade enemy fleets. They represented staggering investment on a scale that, if mismanaged, could bankrupt nations. Those ships were engineering achievements of the very highest calibre that have been compared with the construction of medieval cathedrals, and the dockyards that maintained them were the largest industrial sites that then existed.

  A contemporary cartoon of a fashionable French lady wearing her hair ‘à la Belle Poule’.

  Sailing warships were thus the very opposite of fashionable whimsy. Clearly, something quite remarkable must have happened, perhaps thousands of miles from Paris, to have had such an influence on urban society as to affect fashion in such a profound and remarkable way. This is what I discovered.

  On 17 June 1778 a British frigate, HMS Arethusa, in company with a smaller armed naval ship, was patrolling off Cornwall when she came across a French frigate, the Belle Poule. The two frigates hove to within firing distance of each other, and the British ordered the French to return with them to the bosom of the main British fleet for inspection.

  The French had long been covertly assisting the Americans with their rebellion, but Britain and France were not yet at war. In Paris, however, the moment for the declaration had finally arrived and a message had already been sent to Brest, ordering the Belle Poule’s captain to engineer a confrontation that could provide a pretext for war. He therefore refused to follow the British and opened fire. The ferocity of the subsequent engagement surprised the Arethusa, and though neither ship was taken, the British ship was severely damaged and her captain forced to break off the action.

  The French crowed over their success. Anticipation of this exact moment had been rising for three full years and had reached fever pitch. Horrified by their humiliation in the previous Anglo-French conflict, the Seven Years’ War (1754–63), the French had rebuilt their navy. The American rebellion had given them the excuse they needed to join a conflict that could return French diplomatic prestige to its accustomed level, and the Belle Poule action was interpreted as evidence that the dream could come true. At the same time it was the most visible evidence possible to the Americans, whose rebellion was then wilting after a year of unexpected bloom, that the French really were coming to their assistance and that they would bring with them the one thing that the Americans lacked and yet desperately needed if they were ever going to win this war: a navy that could contest control of the seas with the British.

  These themes had already been popularized in Parisian society, chiefly through the efforts of one man, Benjamin Franklin. The canny Franklin had spent a year and a half in France acting as a commissioner from the American Continental Congress. His role, and that of his two colleagues Arthur Lee and Silas Deane, was to nurture friendship between the two nations and secure both political and military aid. He was a revelation. He knew his way round the minefields of French eccentricities, having visited before the war as a scientist promoting his convincing theories about electricity and lightning. The French loved him, and Franklin’s major triumph was to make the American cause not just politically and diplomatically appealing but fashionable.

  Thus, in the summer of 1778, both French society and the French government were primed for something dramatic and the Belle Poule action provided the spark. France officially declared war and French ladies began to appear with their coiffure à la Belle Poule. Viewed in a crowded room, the ships would constantly appear and disappear, rise and fall, pitch and roll in an extraordinary and involuntary theatrical display. What at first sight seems entirely absurd was, in fact, a rather clever piece of performance art, way before its time, that thrived on the contrasts that it exposed and delighted in. It brought all things maritime and naval – which is to say all things tough, hard, frightening, dangerous, wet, outdoors and masculine – deep into the perfumed, feminine warmth and cosy chatter of a high-class indoor party. Unsurprisingly, the French absolutely loved it.

  My discovery of that extraordinary image was the principal inspiration for this book, for it was soon clear that ‘The Great Hair Mystery’ was just one piece of a far greater jigsaw. My subsequent research slowly uncovered what I believe to be the most intriguing naval story in history.

  * * *

  It is no longer necessary to entirely bemoan a lack of maritime or naval perspective in our histories of American independence. There are now excellent histories available on numerous aspects of the maritim
e war, such as the various roles of the Royal Navy, the French navy, the Spanish navy, the American navy, the maritime economy, privateers, fishermen, shipping, logistics and leadership. These focused studies are supported by an ongoing project of astonishing scale to publish significant documents pertaining to the war at sea. Under the aegis of the US Naval History and Heritage Command, the Naval Documents of the American Revolution series has been running since the mid-1960s and has become an important historical document in its own right. It now stands at twelve volumes, each well over 1,000 pages long, with forewords from several generations of American presidents: from Kennedy through Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush to Obama.

  Nevertheless, no attempt has yet been made to unite or combine these many themes into a comprehensive narrative naval history of the war. As a result, the role of sea power tends to retain a limited profile in our most general histories of the war. Indeed, it is most commonly restricted to a single example, the battle of the Chesapeake in 1781, when the defeat of a British fleet by the French led to the isolation and subsequent surrender of an entire British army at Yorktown in Virginia. Cornwallis’s capitulation led directly to the fall of the bellicose North government in Britain and its replacement by one committed to ending the war. Thus is the link between sea power and American independence made manifest.

  This argument has been well made by many historians and I make no attempt to challenge it here, at least not directly. What I have tried to do, however, is to extend this idea of the influence of sea power to the entire war, rather than to one isolated and very short-lived battle in a single location, whose influence is more debatable and far more complex than many suspect. What I have set out to do, essentially, is to provide the reader with a proper maritime and naval context within which to place the more widely known battle of the Chesapeake. By doing so, I hope to demonstrate that sea power did indeed influence the American war, but not in the way that one might suspect.

  Within this broad approach, I have been careful to follow certain rules or themes. The first is that I do not restrict my ‘naval’ history to formal and established navies. It is often not appreciated that sea power can exist without navies – that is, without the formal funding stream, infrastructure, bureaucracy, professional manpower, permanence and warships that the term ‘navy’ suggests: an idea that is particularly true of this war. Twelve of the thirteen rebellious colonies formed their own ‘navies’ without any formal administrative or logistical infrastructure, and even before these were created on paper, some of the colonies already wielded significant sea power. The same can be said of the Continental Navy, which represented the rebellious colonies acting together. Ships fighting on behalf of the Continental Congress exercised sea power long before the Continental Navy actually came into existence.

  I have also been careful to include the role of privateers, because the relationship between navies, state formation and privateers is far too complex to be separated. A privateer, after all, cannot be a privateer until he has received a licence to conduct private warfare that has been issued by a state: you cannot have non-state maritime violence if a state does not exist first. Thus the rise of American privateers is an essential, if surprising, part of the story of American independence.

  My second rule is to make no distinction between navies operating on rivers and freshwater lakes and those operating on oceans. The contributions made by the former to this war are of equal significance to those by the latter. Naval historians tend to make a false distinction between ‘inland navies’ and those that disputed ‘command of the sea’, but contemporaries saw no difference. They simply talked of ‘command of the water’,1 an excellent phrase that has sadly gone out of use. If you are struggling to see a lake in the same terms as an ocean, I urge you to stand on the shores of Lake Michigan in a storm. You will not want to go out in a boat. Shallow it may be, but that shallowness and the relatively short fetch of the shores make for particularly brutal conditions on the water. And what about rivers? Rivers were to an eighteenth-century army as railways were to armies of the nineteenth century, but these were no passive, gently bubbling streams but evil and treacherous tongues of brown water whose currents could create whirlpools big enough to suck down a fully manned cutter. Figures do not survive, but it is safe to assume that during this war hundreds, perhaps thousands of sailors drowned in rivers, or otherwise died fighting on, in or near them. Most of the riverine warfare I describe in this book, moreover, happened on the lower reaches, where powerful ocean-bound currents met relentless land-bound tides. Operating vessels in such conditions was the ultimate test of seamanship. The slightest misjudgement could endanger the lives of everyone aboard, and with them the success of an entire military operation. Historians have tended to ignore men who fought in these liminal areas between land and sea, but I have the utmost respect for them. Indeed, one should remember that, for all his lack of ‘naval’ experience and understanding, Washington was the son of riverine Virginia and, of necessity, an experienced river boatman.

  My third rule is not to restrict my narrative to the fates of Britain and America. Readers already familiar with the war will know of the major roles played by the French and Spanish fleets but may be less familiar with the roles played by those belonging to the Dutch, the Russians, the Danes, the Swedes, the native American Indians and by the East India Company’s navy, the Bombay Marine.

  My fourth aim is to try to bring together what is conventionally kept apart by emphasizing the links between these apparently separate navies and the seemingly separate theatres in which they operated. This is a major departure from previous approaches.2 Trade ran from Britain and America to Newfoundland, Africa, South America, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Indian Ocean and beyond, and where trade went, navies followed. The transient presence of foreign-bound trade convoys in home waters always carried significant historical significance, especially if they were captured. Each theatre, moreover, was affected by what was happening elsewhere in the world. If, for example, a major naval threat was posed to Britain in the English Channel, then one, or perhaps all, of the British forces in American, Caribbean, Mediterranean and Indian waters would be weakened to strengthen the Channel Fleet.

  Such connections had a profound impact on the outcome of the war. The situation at Gibraltar, that lump of rock at the entrance to the Mediterranean, repeatedly set the war in America on a different course, while the situation in the Caribbean constantly affected everything on both sides of the Atlantic. One contemporary put it simply: the war in America ‘has and ever must be determined in the West Indies’.3 There are even direct links between the construction of a canal system in northern France and American independence.4 The way that these theatres interacted is both a fascinating intellectual puzzle and the key to understanding how the war developed. Exploring these unexpected links has been one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing this book, and the strength of them is most eloquently described by a single, captivating fact: a warship in the Pennsylvania State Navy was named Hyder Ali, after the warlord then fighting against the British 5,000 miles away in India.5 If you need any more convincing, consider this: everyone knows that the first shot of this war was fired between soldiers on Lexington Common in 1775, but did you know that the last was fired between warships at the battle of Cuddalore in the Bay of Bengal on 20 June 1783?

  The fifth rule is that I have tried to emphasize the various different ways that sea power affected the war and the nations in question. The obvious military narratives concern fleet battles, invasion and blockade, but such a traditional view misses a great deal. There are numerous strands to this narrative – the effect of sea power on strategy, internal politics, diplomacy, economics (and of course hairdressing) – but consider for now the arrival of the British fleet off New York in 1776, because it makes a significant point that transcends all of these themes. Before it fired a single shot or unloaded a single soldier, its mere presence dramatically altered t
he situation in New York. It terrified the rebels, gave hope to the loyalists, triggered a massive civilian evacuation causing untold misery to thousands, and affected the economy. Time and again the presence, or even just the anticipated presence, of a naval fleet had such an effect, and the war was particularly sensitive to it. In 1778 and 1780 just the rumour that the French were sending a major fleet to America dramatically changed the war. To understand the impact of sea power on the war, therefore, one must first realize that military commanders and civilians reacted not only to the reality of enemy sea power – measured in soldiers landed or cannon-balls fired – but also to its promise, and sometimes even to its ghost: the effects of sea power often lingered long after the fleets themselves had vanished.

  This may be a naval history, but it is a history more of people than of ships, and I have also been careful to emphasize how navies affected people’s lives in a far more personal way. The American Revolution meant that the sea, in some way, touched many more people than it had before the war. Throughout this war, an unknown number of people, but measured easily in the thousands, took to the sea in military operations or civilian evacuations and thereby experienced the world in a new way. A charming feature of the period resulting from this is that so many diaries are filled with awe at the majesty of nature. Here are narwhals, flying fish and icebergs, even islands covered in so many birds that, if startled, they would darken the sky.6 Those same diaries are also filled with shock at the unique life of the sailor – the smell, the cramped conditions, the hot, the cold, the damp, the noise, seasickness. All of these goggle-eyed innocents were baptized in sea power by the war. For them the scale and potential of the world expanded during this period, their horizons broadened. This war was nothing less than a vital moment in the history of the human race reconnecting with itself, and with our world, by sea.