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

by Willis, Sam

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  The initial British effort to prevent the importation of gunpowder to America was unfocused and hamstrung by logistical and diplomatic weakness.

  Ships bound for America from British waters were policed in home ports, but it was not until 22 December 1775 – eighteen months after the passage of the Coercive Acts – that Parliament passed the Capture Act, which declared the American colonies in a state of open rebellion, authorized the seizure of all American ships and prohibited trade with America.6 Until then the British were legally restricted to searching only those suspicious ships that were within two leagues* of British territory, and they could do nothing at all about American ships in foreign ports or indeed about foreign ships on the high seas.

  Pressure was put on the Dutch, via the Prince of Orange himself, to stop their trading with America, but what, in practice, could be achieved politically or militarily when confronted with the merchants of Amsterdam who, in the words of one contemporary, ‘would sell arms and ammunition to besiege Amsterdam itself’?7 The Spanish made no attempt whatsoever to limit trade in arms with the Americans and were particularly active in smuggling munitions up the Mississippi.8

  Under the guidance of the foreign minister, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, a dedicated, prudent and idealistic politician utterly committed to resurrecting French political and military power, the French were both brazen and sly in their help of the Americans. One ruse was to load American ships with gunpowder in a French port but to issue the ship with false French papers and even to man the ship with French officers who would conduct any negotiations with British naval officers.9 They also set up a company, cunningly called ‘Roderigue Hortalez et Compagnie’ to disguise its French origins, through which they shipped to America some 30,000 muskets and 2,000 barrels of powder.10 In abject terror of provoking a naval arms race, British politicians actually instructed the navy not to intercept French ships carrying munitions and supplies to America in European waters.11

  In the Caribbean, powder simply poured into, and then out of, French Martinique, Spanish Cuba and the Dutch Antilles. There were simply too few British ships here to be in any way effective – four slow cruisers to cover the entirety of the Leeward Islands station – and the merchants worked together to defy the Royal Navy. There is good reason to think that many of these players were British merchants.12 The British envoy to the Dutch island of St Eustatius, a key location in the powder trade, threw his hands in the air: ‘All our boasted empire of the sea is of no consequence,’ he raged, ‘we may seize the shells but our neighbours will get the oysters.’13 This was military power undermined by mercantile power; this was sea power weakened by a lack of political alliances with foreign nations.

  With such a gaping net in Europe and the Caribbean, an increased responsibility fell on British ships in American waters to stop the smugglers, but it had been clear for some time that the North American squadron was too small even to blockade Boston Harbour, let alone the entire coast. In 1774 the British had twenty-six ships to blockade the east coast of America and to support the British policy of the coercion of New England. Hugh Palliser, a leading British naval officer and strategic thinker, thought that they needed twenty-two to blockade Boston alone.14 Vice-Admiral Graves in Boston simply stood no chance, even though he had received some limited reinforcements in the winter of 1774.15 In a telling letter to the Admiralty in April 1775, he wrote that ‘smuggling is carried to such a height, and so systematically followed, that without the utmost vigilance and care, there is no detecting them [the smugglers] to condemnation’.16 On the rare occasions when smugglers were actually seized by Graves’s ships, no contraband arms or ammunition was ever secured, and on 19 March 1775 he admitted to the Admiralty: ‘I am extremely mortified that notwithstanding the King’s Ships and Vessels have been very active all this Winter, no seizures of any Consequence have been made.’17 The British squadron in the Chesapeake was equally impotent.18

  The result of these combined failures was that over 90 per cent of all the American powder used during the first two-and-a-half years of the struggle for independence was imported to America by sea.19

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  The other source of gunpowder – of far less significance in terms of quantity than imported powder, but of far more significance in terms of direct American–British confrontation with the antagonism it both revealed and provoked – was the powder that already existed in the colonies. Although usually considered in terms of land-based operations, the struggle for this powder had significant maritime themes.

  Powder was stored throughout the colonies in specially designated buildings, tended by men who knew the fickleness of their charge. A fine example of a powder house from the period survives in Somerville, Massachusetts. In 1774 this was already seventy years old and had been converted from its original use, a windmill. A perfect powder house, it stood high on a hill, a good six miles from Boston, where any accidental explosion would cause no harm to the city itself. It was also sturdily built of brick and sufficiently large to house all of the powder of the Province of Massachusetts as well as the powder designated to individual towns within that province: gunpowder storage and distribution was not simply a question of logistics but of bureaucracy and law.

  This was one of the largest caches of powder in the colonies, and when, in August 1774, Thomas Gage heard detailed reports that it was being systematically emptied of powder belonging to the towns surrounding Boston, he launched a lightning amphibious raid to secure what was left. Two hundred and sixty men rowed from Boston in thirteen long-boats and pulled for the Mystic River. They followed the ever-narrowing river deep inland before disembarking and racing across open country to the powder house. With dawn breaking at their backs, they carried the remaining barrels to the longboats and then cruised down the river and then across the bay to Castle William, the island fortress some distance offshore at the mouth of Boston Harbour.

  The boats provided the troops with the mobility and speed they needed to achieve the surprise that was essential to its success. Given sufficient warning, the remaining powder would have vanished in the night and the troops would have found nothing but a building echoing with missed opportunity. Gage’s safeguarding of the Massachusetts powder was a bold move made by a man who refused to be left behind by swiftly changing events. He secured the powder that was rightfully his and he denied it to his enemy. Unfortunately, however, his actions made many of the existing problems much worse.

  As news of the operation spread, the Americans were both outraged and alarmed by the idea of armed British troops marching around the countryside. The American concern – and this was characteristic of so many of these flare-ups between British forces and the colonists from 1772 onwards – was enflamed by wild and inaccurate rumour. In this case there were claims that six Americans had died and even that Gage’s operation was only the first move in a co-ordinated British offensive. Some even claimed that the British warships were bombarding Boston.

  None of this was true, but it was exactly what so many of the committed rebels actually wanted to hear and it served to persuade the uncertain of the righteousness of the rebel cause. Civilian mobs gathered in larger numbers than had even been seen in New England. One Boston customs commissioner, Benjamin Hallowell, was unfortunate enough to be discovered in a sumptuous carriage. ‘How do you like us now, you Tory son of a bitch?’ howled one of the mob.* Hallowell leapt from his carriage, forced his liveried servant from his horse and galloped for Boston.20

  By securing the Massachusetts powder, Gage had opened the floodgates to a torrent of rage that had been building in the Massachusetts countryside, and the Americans responded to Gage’s raid in kind, launching several focused and daring amphibious raids to secure powder from British coastal forts in Portsmouth in New Hampshire, Newport and Providence in Rhode Island, and New London in Connecticut. Only a narrow escape saved an entire British ship loaded with ordnance from falling into rebel hands off Rhode Island.21 All
of these American successes were made possible by inadequate British sea power that should have linked these isolated coastal fortresses together with a chain of patrolling warships.22 Things did not all go well for the Americans and there were a few other successful British operations, but we know that, by an impressive concerted effort throughout the colonies, in this period the rebels secured somewhere in the region of 80,000 pounds of gunpowder from stores in British hands.23

  Against this background Gage wrote to London with news that ‘the whole country was in arms and in motion’,24 and he made it quite clear that the situation on the ground had changed alarmingly. The question was no longer one of tea or tax but of guns, powder and bullets – the currency of war. In a terrible mistake that the British would repeat throughout the war, Gage’s crucial dispatch was not sent to London via a fast naval ship but by a slow merchantman that took no less than seven weeks to reach Whitehall.25

  News of this type convinced Lord North that the policy of coercion had failed, and in September 1774 he unexpectedly chose to dissolve the government six months before its scheduled ending, to create a new one that would be free from the burden of past colonial strategy and would not have to interrupt its policy on America for an election.26 North won with a large majority and it was this government that was in place for the majority of the subsequent war. Their language immediately hardened with Lord Dartmouth taking the lead. He declared that Massachusetts Bay was in a state of rebellion and that conflict could not be avoided.27 George III oversaw everything with grim approval. ‘The dye is now cast, the colonies must either submit or triumph.’28

  In this atmosphere of unravelling control, Graves surrounded Boston with ships. Nothing is more indicative of the changing situation than the fact that, in April, Graves surveyed the channels between Charlestown and Boston and ordered the largest ship in his squadron, the Somerset, to anchor between the two towns.29 The smuggling of powder was, by now, far from Graves’s mind; he was now worried that the rebels would actually launch an amphibious invasion of Boston.

  Gage soon received orders to take decisive action by targeting rebel leaders and disarming the population. He also received another injection of reinforcements, while Graves was informed that six sloops were being built in the Royal Dockyards, all for him.30 This was part of a limited naval mobilization in 1775 that was still wholly inadequate for the challenge that faced Graves.31

  As so often in this period, rumour of Gage’s new orders reached American shores long before the orders actually reached Gage, and the orders themselves soon found their way into rebel hands. Both sides had a full twelve days to skitter nervously amid full knowledge of the storm that was coming.

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  The basic story of the subsequent British campaign that began with fighting in the New England villages of Lexington and Concord and ended with the British forces desperately fighting their way back to Boston is well known, but the role of sea power in that campaign is not as well known as it should be.

  It all began on the evening of 18 April 1775. The movement of the fleet’s boats told its own story as they were gathered together from all over Boston into a great bobbing raft under the stern of the Third Rate Boyne. As so often with British military operations, the earliest hard information was to be had at the seafront, straight from the mouths of British sailors who were sent ashore on errands, the secrets spilling from their mouths like the coin from their pockets.32

  Soon the Americans had detailed intelligence that confirmed the harbour-front rumours and named the target. The detail was so specific that some historians suspect none other than Gage’s wife as the spy who betrayed the British plan. By mid-afternoon the Americans knew that the British were heading for Concord, a hard day’s march from Boston – a hot-house of rebel activity where the Provincial Congress met and the location of a cache of rebel powder. It just so happened that Gage had heard rumours that the rebel leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock were there.

  Through a network of runners and spies the information quickly came to the ears of Paul Revere, a silversmith who acted as a messenger and co-ordinator for rebel activities and interests. He and another man, a tanner by the name of Richard Dawes, then set off, primarily to warn Adams and Hancock. Dawes went by land, across the defended neck which joined Boston to the mainland, but Revere first set off by sea. Shortly after 10.15 p.m. he headed to the shore opposite Charlestown, found his boat and set off with two others. ‘It was then young flood, the ship was winding, and the moon was rising’, he later wrote of a moment that stuck in his mind because, blocking his way, was the 64-gun Somerset. Revere could not hide himself in river traffic because there was none: the ferries had been seized and all ‘boats, mud-scows and canoes’ banned from taking to the water. His only hope, therefore, was that the British sentries would be slack or the darkness would hide his crossing. He was lucky. His little boat bobbed silently past the massive hulk of the creaking Somerset, the event immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’: ‘A phantom ship, with each mast and spar, / Across the moon like a prison bar.’ Revere was across.

  The British troops, meanwhile, were preparing for their own crossing of the harbour. They chose not to get to the mainland via the neck but, as everyone had already worked out, by the flotilla of boats that had been so obviously mobilized that afternoon. Shortly before Revere crossed Boston to his hidden boat, British troops marched to a scarcely populated stretch of coast known as Back Bay, divided by a narrow stretch of ink-black water from the Cambridge marshes, a landing point chosen for its isolation.

  With the tide running swiftly against them, naval crews struggled with their cargo of soldiers. To keep together in the darkness, the boats were connected to each other at bow and stern in chains of three or four. There were too few boats to take the men over in one crossing, and it was a full two hours before they were all across. They disembarked and stood shivering in the Cambridge marshes, wet to their waistbands as they waited for the navy to return with their supplies. Time passed. Revere, meanwhile, had made his crossing undetected and swiftly because his route had taken him inland at an angle, with the tide.33

  The subsequent events twisted and turned in countless ways. The British eventually marched inland. They were cold, wet and late. Revere was captured on his way to Lexington but subsequently released. In spite of several warnings, the men of Lexington were unprepared for a British attack. Hancock and Adams narrowly escaped. An unidentified shot began a full-scale engagement on Lexington Common, while another engagement was fought at Concord. Eight times American militias held their ground against British troops, and twice the British lines were broken. The British then retreated in the face of highly effective skirmishing tactics that devastated the British ranks. They were chased all the way back to Charlestown, where they were finally left alone by the Americans. The Royal Navy took the shattered remains of the expeditionary force back to the relative safety of Boston. The wounded went first, but there were so many of them that it took the navy three hours to ferry them all to Boston.34

  General William Heath, commander of the rebel militia, saw too much strength in the British position as they closed on Boston and called off the chase. Graves, no doubt to talk up his own role in halting the American advance, believed that it was the fear of his ships alone that had prevented the British troops from being routed and had secured the safety of Boston.35 The Somerset was still anchored in the channel between Boston and Charlestown where, in the words of Graves, it kept the inhabitants of Charlestown ‘in awe’.36 To that mighty presence Graves now added a ring of boats right around Boston. Every ship was kept clear for action and any spare boats were hauled alongside the larger ships and armed.37

  British naval power certainly played a role in this campaign, therefore, and had things been done differently, there might well have been a markedly different outcome. If the navy had been more subtle and more efficient with its preparations, British troops might have had more suc
cess in their attempts to surprise the inhabitants of Lexington and Concord. Adams and Hancock might have been captured. Bloodshed might have been avoided. From the American perspective, an absence of British ships in the channel between Charlestown and Boston might have led to a direct assault on Boston.

  On the evening of 19 April the countryside around Boston reeled from the fighting, and the rumour mill began its manic grinding. Stories of half-seen events of shocking violence were told alongside blatant falsehoods and established facts. Had a British soldier really been discovered lying on the roadside with no ears? Had he even been scalped to mimic the Indian way of warfare? Had British soldiers fighting their way back to Boston really burst in on a family and massacred them all? What really happened in that orchard, where the vile rumour of atrocity grew like so much mistletoe on the bows of the apple trees? And, of course, there is the question at the heart of the story that was so well hijacked by both sides that we still do not really know the answer: who fired the first shots on Lexington Common? As one contemporary wrote: ‘At all corners People inquisitive for News – Tales of all Kinds invented, believed, denied, discredited.’38

  Truth and fiction blended together on numerous levels. The Americans understood the events in a different way from the British; farmers in a different way from soldiers; soldiers who had been there in a different way from soldiers who had not; men in a different way from women; children in a different way from adults. But in the coming months, what actually happened would become less relevant than what people thought had happened. Thus began a race for public opinion that was ultimately of far greater significance to the war than the men, women and children who actually died during the Lexington campaign; and it was, of course, a maritime race, because the dispatches of both sides had to be taken to England by sea.