Struggle for Sea Power : A Naval History of American Independence (9781782397403)
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The squadron then bombarded the city, and for the first time British cannon-balls flew through New York and Greenwich Village, where three entered ‘Captain Clarke’s House’ and one lodged itself in the headboard of Miss Clarke’s bed.26 The ‘shrieks and cries’ of the women and children were, according to Washington, ‘truly distressing and I fear will have an unhappy effect on the ears and minds of our young and inexperienced soldiery’.27 Much to Washington’s irritation, many of the American soldiers just stood and gawped, and only half of the artillerists even manned their guns, being utterly transfixed by this new and shocking spectacle of British sea power. Washington condemned the ‘weak curiosity’ that ‘makes a man look mean and contemptible’,28 a judgement that seems a little unfair. It was a sight that would have stopped people in their tracks, eyes on stalks, mouths chattering: British sea power had a physical effect on those who witnessed it. We also know that the British did receive some casualties: one of the ships’ captains, Hyde Parker, reported a total of nine killed and eighteen wounded aboard the three ships.29
The British knew that they had filled the Americans with ‘astonishment’,30 and Howe greatly appreciated the role that captains Hyde Parker and James Wallace, the ranking officers, had played in expanding the aura that already surrounded British sea power with their raid. He immediately recommended them both for knighthoods.31
All the while, further reinforcements and refugees joined the British fleet at New York, but the build-up in strength was not as flawless as the evident size of the fleet, the psychological impact of its presence and the successful raid up the Hudson would suggest. Seasick and weak soldiers arrived on over-packed transports from England, and barely more than half of the 950 horses survived the voyage; Clinton and Parker’s force returned, damaged and disgraced from Charleston; and the shattered and disease-ridden remnants of Dunmore’s floating town, whose collapse in strength had forced him to conduct a ‘predatory war’ simply to survive, skulked in from Virginia.32
If one adjusts the lens through which the force at New York is viewed, these three new additions were a hideous trinity of British sea power, a powerful corrective to the display of strength already achieved. Such was the paradoxical nature of British sea power in this period and in this location: awesome and feeble, inspiring and lacklustre, dominant and self-destructive. The Howes made final offerings of peace, but in the shadow of their strong and weak armada, they were rejected. Too much water had already passed under the bridge. In a last-ditch meeting between Admiral Howe and an American delegation sent by Congress, Benjamin Franklin, with a ‘sneering laugh’, made it clear that it was too late for conciliation. He argued that, because ‘Forces had been sent out and Towns destroyed’,* the Americans ‘could not expect happiness now under the Domination of Great Britain’. For his part, Howe was unable to offer anything in return if the rebels ‘would not give up the system of Independency’.33 And so it came to an attack.
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The problem that now faced the British was this: how, exactly, would they get 35,000 troops, their heavy guns, their horses, and their baggage, tents and countless tons of apparel ashore, to a location from which they could threaten New York? It is worth pausing to consider the logistical challenge in some detail because, in the shadow of the failed Charleston expedition, it leads us to a better understanding of the grand capability of British amphibious sea power in the 1770s, if the plan was well considered. Indeed, by the 1770s the British had developed sophisticated doctrine and practices for joint operations that would influence the war from its beginning to its end.34
The landing was planned for Long Island, a short hop across the bay from Staten Island, where most of the troops were camped. The advantage of seizing Long Island lay in the high ground on its north-western shore overlooking Manhattan, together with the low-lying, gently sloping, sandy beaches on its southern shore, which so lent themselves to an amphibious landing.
The British had one crucial factor in their favour: this was not an amphibious operation from ships to shore, but one conducted from shore to shore. The troops, therefore, were able to organize themselves into their divisions on the Staten Island beach from where they could easily embark. This was always an enormous advantage as it allowed the horses, which hate being at sea, crucial time to recover ashore.35 Forming up in this way at sea was also time-consuming and dangerous.
Cavalrymen were all required to be strong swimmers and horses swim naturally and well, but they cannot cope with distances of much more than a mile. The distance between Staten Island and Gravesend Bay, the chosen landing spot, was at least one mile and might be as many as three, depending on the embarkation points and route. It is likely, therefore, that the horses were taken in boats across to Gravesend Bay, possibly in craft specially designed with stalls. The troops were certainly loaded into specially designed landing craft known as ‘flatboats’; flat-bottomed, they were easy and safe to beach and disembark. The sailors manned the oars and the soldiers sat in rows along the inside facing each other. The boats had a removable tiller and rudder and were cleverly constructed in a way that allowed them to be easily stacked on the decks of transports.
The next challenge was to get the army ashore in the right order and formation. An army that is not in battle formation is useless. The soldiers do not know where to go and the officers do not know who to command or where to look for their own orders. It was essential that the troops were landed in a way that allowed them to perceive themselves as an army in the midst of an operation, rather than as an army simply moving from A to B. The solution was to travel in battle formation. The loaded flatboats would rendezvous offshore and form up. Each boat would be distinguished by a number painted on its bow and by a flag denoting the division it carried. Then, with warships ahead, astern and abeam, orchestrated by a special signalling system that allowed the ships and the flatboats to work in harmony, the fleet would head for shore, in utter silence and with no firing from the flatboats.36
Sometimes a separate naval squadron would bombard the enemy defences to provide as much time and space as possible for the troops to land. The boats would be run ashore and a grapnel thrown over the side to act as a kedge, while sailors leapt into the surf to hold the bows steady. The soldiers clambered over the side, into the surf, and then waded ashore. The first to land would be the specialized light infantry – grenadiers or Hessian Jägers. Highly mobile, experienced and aggressive, they would secure the landing site and enable the main body of infantry to land in waves.
The flatboats would then return to their source of men to reload and then make the journey all over again. There were usually several journeys: the flatboats that the British had were excellent but there were never enough.
Heavy guns were also transported in specially designed landing craft with a bow that could be lowered, to allow the guns to be run straight onto the beach on their carriages – an eighteenth-century equivalent of the more familiar landing craft of the Second World War.37 The soldiers all carried two or three days’ worth of rations, depending on the scale of the operation envisaged and the distance that they would travel from shore. They were also provided with a canteen full of a mixture of rum and water, sixty rounds of ammunition and two flints. Then, while the army fought its way ahead, the navy would tirelessly secure its lines of supply: by no means was their job done once the soldiers had been landed.38
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The American army, which had been transported efficiently from Boston to New York by sea39 – a little-known achievement of American Sea power in this period – had then made certain that ‘every kind of watercraft … that could be kept afloat’40 was secured for their own use and denied to the British, but they did nothing to prevent the actual landing when it came on 22 August. The British had absolute command of the local waters, and the Americans a poor intelligence network. Washington therefore had no idea exactly where the British would strike. He admitted that the potential of British sea power had left him ‘in a stat
e of constant perplexity’,41 and as a direct result the American forces were divided when the strike finally fell as a full-blooded, single and focused assault on Long Island.
With HMS Rainbow anchored at an angle where she could cover the landing site and protect the seventy-five flatboats, eleven bateaux and two galleys waiting quietly in formation under the command of William Hotham, at 8.30 a.m. the signal was raised for the boats to go ashore at Gravesend Bay. The operation was mightily impressive both in its execution and in its impact:
in ten minutes or thereabout 4,000 men were on the beach, formed, and moved forward … by 12 o’clock or very soon after, all the troops were on shore, to the number of 15,000, and by three o’clock we had an account of the army being got as far as Flat Bush, six or seven miles from where they landed.42
The Hessians formed part of the preliminary invasion force, and so too did the runaway slaves who had joined Clinton’s and Dunmore’s regiments of black loyalists. Not only were the British invading, but also they were doing so in exactly the way that was certain to enrage the Americans by using foreign mercenaries and by turning their own slaves against them. The experienced British sailors and soldiers were well aware of the mixed nature of the invasion force and celebrated the achievement of their invasion ‘effected without the loss of a man, except two or three Hessians, who were killed through their own faults’.43
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The subsequent battle for Long Island was more of a rout than a pitched battle, though the Americans retained spirit and pride throughout and always kept an eye out for anti-British propaganda. The British drove the Americans from the field but nothing would drive away the stories of Americans being skewered to trees by Hessian bayonets, being decapitated by Highland broadswords, or being harnessed to British gun-carriages to pull them through the mud for want of horses.44 The British perspective was a little rosier: ‘it was impossible for troops to behave better than every corps of ours did; the Hessians behaved exceedingly well.’45
The victory at Long Island was not what it could have been, however. The Royal Navy had failed to get into the East River and thus outflank the retreating American army, and once the main battle of Long Island had been fought and won, the British army had failed to press home its advantage. Even while this was happening, the trapped American army was growing because Washington made the mistake of sending reinforcements into a hopeless position. The result was that the American army teetered on the Brooklyn shore with the mile-wide and fast-flowing East River behind it, while the British dug in on Long Island. American defeat was a certainty if the armies remained like this. Washington understood what had to be done, and for the first time in the New York campaign, he acted decisively and with great clarity. To avoid capture, perhaps even to ensure the survival of the revolution, he would have to evacuate his army across the East River before the British army attacked his lines or the Royal Navy blocked his escape.
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Such a maritime evacuation of an army and its equipment is one of the most difficult of all military operations and Washington oversaw the operation personally, scarcely dismounting for forty-eight hours. The evacuation began under cover of darkness and in enforced silence. Wagon-wheels were muffled; no one was even allowed to cough. The troops were ordered to move to the shore, while every available boat ‘from Hellgate on the [Long Island] Sound to Spuyten Duyvil Creek [on the Hudson]’ was taken to the Brooklyn shore by the many men in Washington’s army who could row and sail. We know next to nothing about the type of craft used, but it is likely they would have included flat-bottomed vessels for loading cannon and horses.46 This maritime operation was led by John Glover’s regiment of mariners from Marblehead, assisted by Israel Hutchinson’s regiment of fishermen from Salem, Lynn and Danvers. Both Glover and Hutchinson were experienced mariners and were well liked. Everything about the ‘soldiers’ in their ranks spoke of the sea. They wore blue jackets, white caps and tarred trousers – the uniform of fishermen from the Grand Banks, where the harshness of life at sea had forged them into units who knew how to overcome hardship and also the value of discipline and teamwork.47
The American position was so precarious that, even for these sailors, pretence was maintained – these boats, it was claimed, were to be used to ferry the injured to Manhattan and to ship over reinforcements to fight the British. Fires in the American camps, meanwhile, were kept burning to deceive the British lookouts. When dawn came, however, the operation was still incomplete, even though some boats had made the crossing as many as twelve times, each time with water lapping over the gunwales from overloading. Panic set in. At one stage too many men boarded a boat that threatened to capsize, and Washington himself picked up a huge stone and threatened to ‘sink [the boat] to hell’ unless they all got out, which they did.48 With dawn, however, came a fog as dense as cotton wool that cloaked the last few boats as they rowed in across to the safety of Manhattan.
A similar but little-known operation evacuated the American troops on Governor’s Island.49 In total, 9,500 American soldiers and their stores, horses and all but five of their cannon were evacuated in a single night and not a life was lost. The battle for Long Island had been a disaster for the Americans, but the evacuation was a triumph that must rightly take its place among other contemporary examples of maritime evacuations in close proximity to the enemy.* It confirmed in the minds of his soldiers, and the politicians who watched on from Philadelphia, that Washington was, indeed, the right man for the job and that the American army, if it put its mind to it, could achieve impressive operational feats. Thus from defeat on Long Island the Americans drew strength.
It was certainly a failure by the Royal Navy. They had tried to prevent an American maritime escape by sailing up the East River, but they had been baffled by contrary winds and foul weather. Indeed, five different ships on five separate occasions had tried and failed to get into the East River to surround the American army.50 It was certainly an opportunity to crush the rebels that went begging. Even to get into the East River in good numbers, a small lookout boat, stationed in the East River, could have passed word to the army that the Americans were escaping. It seems that the British never considered that the Americans would be capable of moving so many men over such a long distance in such a short time. The army had underestimated the tenacity and fighting spirit of the rebels at Bunker Hill and the navy had repeated the mistake at Charleston. Here – and not for the last time – the navy underestimated their logistical capability and maritime skill.
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Nearly three weeks went by before the British were ready for the next assault, a period remarkable for a single event which passed by with barely a raised eyebrow. On 6 September the Turtle, a craft built by David Bushnell of Connecticut which was able to travel underwater, made its maiden hostile voyage. The Turtle is now considered an important precursor of military submarines, but we know very little indeed about it. There are no contemporary illustrations at all – the famous image of the Turtle is an exercise in nineteenth-century imagination.51 This proto-submarine was towed from Manhattan towards the anchorage of Admiral Howe’s flagship the Eagle, where it was cast adrift. Her operator, Ezra Lee, spent two hours working across the tide towards the Eagle. We know that the Turtle was operated by a system of pedals and cranks to turn the propeller and pump water from the ballast tank, a process flawed by its complexity.52 We also know that Lee’s compass was broken. Working across the rapid tides of the harbour while constantly having to check location and direction would have rapidly driven Lee to the point of collapse. Unable to attach the explosive device, crammed with 150 pounds of gunpowder,* to the Eagle’s hull, Lee ‘thought the best generalship was to retreat as fast as I could’. The device later exploded in the East River ‘throwing up large bodies of water to an immense height’.53 The failed attack on the Eagle is the best known of the Turtle’s activities, but she also went on to attack, unsuccessfully, the frigates Phoenix, Roebuck and Tartar, which were anchored downstrea
m of Fort Washington prior to running the river defences on 9 October.54
This famous image of the Turtle was drawn in 1875 by an American naval lieutenant, Francis Barber.
Such diversions aside, the British spent these weeks consolidating their control of Long Island and planning for the next assault. This was launched directly into Manhattan at Kip’s Bay on 15 September, under cover of a ferocious shore bombardment by five British warships which had anchored unnoticed, in close formation, at night, within fifty yards of a hostile shore – a seriously impressive feat of seamanship. The subsequent bombardment was an impressive feat of gunnery. One sailor claimed that, on one ship alone, they expended ‘five thousand three hundred and seventy-six pounds of powder’.* The fire of the British ships at Kip’s Bay was shocking even to those hardened by war. Ambrose Searle, General Howe’s private secretary, exclaimed, ‘So terrible and so incessant a roar of guns few even in the army and navy had ever heard before.’55 A soldier in the American lines later described how ‘all of a sudden there came such a peal of thunder from the British shipping that I thought my head would go with the sound’. He then ‘made a frog’s leap for the ditch and lay as still as I possibly could, and began to consider which part of my carcass would go first’.56
Not only did the bombardment hammer the American defences but also it created a giant wall of smoke, behind which came the flatboats, ghosting out of Newtown Creek and down from Turtle Bay. A British witness declared that the ‘water covered with boats full of armed men pressing eagerly towards the shore, was certainly one of the grandest and most sublime scenes ever exhibited’.57 Others noted how it was ‘highly dramatic’, a ‘most striking spectacle’ and ‘a most magnificent sight’.58 The landing on Long Island was no doubt impressive, but the key difference here was that Manhattan itself was being attacked rather than an isolated stretch of Long Island beach, which meant that many more Americans, both civilians and soldiers, witnessed the event. We know that, as the British landed, the surrounding hills ‘were cover’d with spectators’.59 It is not surprising that Robert Cleveley, a young clerk on the 64-gun Asia, which was involved in the action, chose to preserve it in a famous painting, which for years was mistakenly identified as the landing on Long Island [see fig. 3]. Historians who were too quick to think of the Long Island landing as the key set piece of this operation are now coming to appreciate just how much Kip’s Bay meant both to the British forces who took part and to the many Americans who witnessed it.