by Willis, Sam
* On 6 February France signed a treaty of ‘amity and commerce’ with America and a separate defensive alliance. The treaties were more than the Americans could have hoped for: it was agreed that neither could negotiate peace without each other’s consent and, best of all, the French promised to fight until the Americans had achieved independence.
* Perhaps a part of the French fascination with this battle was the fact that the Arethusa was actually a French frigate, which had been captured in the previous war.
13
FRENCH FIREPOWER
The French entry into the war had an immediate impact on the type of sea power that was exercised and contested. Hitherto, relatively small warships had conducted the sea war in America. Admiral Howe’s flagship Eagle, from which he had commanded the attacks on New York and Philadelphia, was a two-decked 64-gun Third Rate. It was chosen for its shallow draft and for its compromise between firepower and manoeuvrability. When Howe arrived in America, it was far more powerful than anything that the Americans could summon. Most of the other large ships in America were 50- and 44-gunners, obsolete classes of ship that had been reintroduced in the mid-1770s specifically in response to the challenge of war in America. Back in British waters, however, a 64-gun ship of the line was barely adequate even to be called a ‘ship of the line’, with the implicit assumption that it was powerful enough to hold its own in a line of battle. In the previous war the backbone of the line of battle had become 74-gunners – long, sleek, formidable ships.
With the French entry into the war, everything suddenly changed because the French had very large ships and the British were afraid of invasion.1 They were right to be afraid: with so many troops in America, in February 1778 the entirety of England and Wales was garrisoned with only 14,471 troops.2 French sea power and fear of invasion went hand in hand. In recent memory people could recall the several invasion scares of the Seven Years’ War of the 1750s and the War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740s, and folk memory recalled the Nine Years’ War in the 1690s, when Louis XIV had raised vast fleets in an attempt to seize control of the Channel as a crucial precursor to invading and replacing the Protestant William of Orange with the Catholic James Stuart.
To face the new French naval threat in 1778 the British now needed a different type of navy from the one they had in America; they needed a navy that consisted of the largest moving objects in the world – three-decked First Rate ships of 90 guns or more – to provide focus points in battle for long chains of 74-gunners.
The ship that encapsulated these hopes, this strength, this investment, and the newest First Rate in the navy, was HMS Victory, named for the annus mirabilis of 1759, when Britain had repeatedly beaten the French at sea. Victory’s subsequent famous history has in some respects played against her. She is now known worldwide as the only surviving ship from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and as Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar. But she is, in fact, the only surviving ship of the line from the War of American Independence – a far more impressive feat.
The Victory is enormous. If you have not seen her, one of the quickest ways to get a sense of just how massive she is is to consider her anchor cables. They have a circumference of 24 inches, roughly the same as a mature birch-tree. The cable itself, at least 600 feet long, weighed something like 4.5 tons, far more when wet. When she was fitted out for service in the Channel Fleet in early April 1778, sixty-five men were needed simply to get her anchor cables aboard.3 Those cables were used to raise a two-ton anchor using two capstans, each of which was fitted with twelve capstan bars, and six men pushed each bar. No fewer than 144 men were therefore required to raise just one of HMS Victory’s anchors.
A comparison with Howe’s flagship HMS Eagle is useful here to get a sense of the difference in sea power between 1776 and 1778. The Victory’s full complement was 850 men, 350 more than the Eagle. The heaviest guns of the Eagle were 24-pounders, whereas the Victory was designed for 42-pounders on her lowest deck.* The result was that the weight of broadside of Victory’s lowest deck was larger than all of the guns on the Eagle’s broadside added together. On 1 May 1778 Victory’s powder stores were stocked with 42,000 pounds of gunpowder – that is the explosive capacity of 25.2 tons of TNT.4
Victory was destined to be the flagship of the Channel Fleet and, more than that, she was destined to be one of seven threedeckers in that fleet, one of the most powerful fleets of sailing warships ever assembled. The British pinned their hopes on Victory as the fleet’s material and symbolic figurehead. She was widely considered then, and has been ever since, one of the finest examples of a three-decker ever to have been built, with beautiful lines that translated into surprisingly impressive speed and manoeuvrability for such a large vessel. Unusually, the king visited her as the final touches to her fitting-out were completed.5 In this way and others, George brought a bristling energy to British preparations. Utterly outraged by the French joining the war, he had since threatened to abdicate rather than concede America’s independence.6
This energy from the king flowed down through the Admiralty and Navy Boards and into the dockyards, both royal and private. In an attempt to reduce the damage of lost time, a greater number of shipbuilders than ever before were engaged to build ships in this period and resources committed in hitherto unknown amounts.7 Expectations of British naval success, in both the navy and the public, soared. Significantly, however, one man was cowed rather than inspired by the challenge of fighting the French at sea. Unfortunately for the British it was Lord North, the prime minister. On receiving news of the French declaration he immediately asked to resign, claiming that capital punishment was preferable to his anguish of mind.8 Conscious of North’s political skill at this time of deep political division, the king refused. From that moment on, a man who was both weak and unwilling led the British war effort. It was not a good mixture.
* * *
The first opportunity to test each other’s mettle arose in July 1778. Victory’s admiral was Augustus Keppel who, with the advent of war with France, had finally found an opportunity to serve in the war. Born into the Rockingham Whig aristocracy, Keppel was an opinionated opposition politician and had refused to fight in America – a significant loss to the British war effort. He had been one of the leading naval officers, if not the leading naval officer, of his generation. His naval career began at the age of ten and he was made captain at the age of nineteen – nearly two years in age earlier than Nelson. An experienced fighting sailor with knowledge of amphibious operations and well liked by his men, Keppel would have been a perfect choice to share command with Carleton and Burgoyne in the lakes, and it has been made clear how a naval mind could have significantly altered the campaigns of 1776 and 1777. There was no doubt, however, that in the summer of 1778 Keppel was a little rusty; he had, in fact, been ashore for fifteen years.
His second-in-command was Hugh Palliser. Slightly older than Keppel though still three years his junior because of Keppel’s lightning promotion, Palliser was another competent officer. He sat on the Admiralty Board and was well respected and liked by his men. He was, however, a staunch Tory and thus ideologically opposed to Keppel. Nonetheless, both men were committed career naval officers, both men had fought the French over a life-long career, and both men now faced a threat that they understood and were committed to destroying: Keppel and Palliser sailed to war as naval brothers, not as rival politicians.
Their crews, however, were not so experienced and skilled. Remember that war in America had already been draining British resources of fighting sailors for four years. By the summer of 1778 the British were unable to man the ships of the Channel Fleet until the merchant fleets from the Caribbean and Mediterranean had made their annual return voyage. Most of the crews, therefore, were pressed into service and had very little time to work together, to form the links of trust and respect – or, indeed, of mistrust and wariness – that allowed the best fleets to perform competently. Boatswains needed to know the quirks of their men just a
s sailing masters needed to know the quirks of their ships. The French may have had no more recent battle experience than the British, but they certainly had more experience of naval seamanship, acquired through training squadrons in the early 1770s. Furthermore, the man who had led one of those training squadrons, the comte d’Orvilliers, was now in command of the Brest fleet.9
D’Orvilliers’s early military career had been in the army, but at the age of twenty he had joined the navy. In 1778 he was sixty-eight years old, a true veteran of French sea power who had served in both the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8) and the Seven Years’ War (1754–63). Of particular interest, d’Orvilliers had fought at the battle of Minorca in 1756. Then, the British admiral John Byng had been sent with a fleet to relieve British-held Minorca, a crucial key to British naval strength in the Mediterranean besieged by the French. The fleets met and the French fought a skilful defensive action, teasing Byng by regularly drifting away to leeward while retaining a dominant position between the British and Minorca. Not only was d’Orvilliers equipped with a well-trained fleet in 1778, therefore, but he also had personal experience of one of the finest defensive naval actions of the century.
D’Orvilliers’s orders in the summer of 1778 have been criticized by generations of naval historians for being inadequately aggressive,10 but they were also entirely realistic. Sent out on a month’s cruise in the approaches to the Channel, he would protect French trade and American privateers while threatening both incoming and outgoing British trade. In so doing he would maintain an already impressive level of French seamanship in his skilled sailors while improving it in the unskilled. His presence alone would reinforce the pre-existing and strong belief in Britain that the Brest fleet was a very serious threat indeed, thereby hobbling British naval strategy and forcing it to remain Channel-focused. He had specific orders to avoid battle unless the odds – determined by a comparison of the number of ships in his and the British fleet – were very much in his favour.11 This was sea power carefully applied and well understood, a reflection of the cunning Vergennes and sensible Sartine behind it.
Keppel, meanwhile, was cruising the western approaches, protecting British trade, when he received intelligence that the French were preparing to sail with a fleet that would outnumber his own. He headed back to St Helen’s, the fleet anchorage in the lee of the Isle of Wight, where he received reinforcements that would make the fleets roughly equal in number – twenty-nine French to thirty British* – though the British would have a marked advantage in number of guns: 1,950 French to 2,280 British.12 Keppel headed back out to sea, this time in the knowledge that d’Orvilliers was out there somewhere, probably to the west and north of the island of Ushant.
* * *
To understand what happened next, and to be able to place those events in a realistic framework of expectation, it is first necessary to stop and consider a number of crucial factors relating to fleet battle under sail.
The first and most important point to make is one that is most often overlooked: relatively small squadrons had achieved most of the overwhelming British fleet victories of the previous two wars.† This is not a coincidence. Fleet command in the age of sail was extraordinarily difficult. Signalling systems were very limited throughout the eighteenth century and it was all too easy for signal flags to be missed in the gun-smoke that clouded the battle. Station-keeping was also very difficult. The warships were cumbersome, all manoeuvres took a great deal of time to execute, and most manoeuvres, in particular tacking, were unreliable. All warships, moreover, performed differently. Uniformity of performance was impossible. As a rule, things went wrong. The one consideration that reduced the negative impact of these awkward truths was the smallness of a squadron. A small squadron was more likely to be able to concentrate its fire on a given location; a small squadron was more likely to be able to see and then react to its commander’s orders; a small squadron was more likely to be able to act together as a single unit, rather than as a confused jumble of ships.
The two fleets that now faced each other at Ushant in the summer of 1778 were enormous. Keppel had thirty-one ships of the line, and when he initially left Brest, d’Orvilliers had thirty-two. They were unwieldy. Keppel’s fleet, when sailing in line ahead, was nine miles long. On one occasion when Keppel gave the order to anchor, the entire rear third of the fleet was so far behind the van that they were unable to come to anchor in the desired place until the next day.13 Hitherto, such large fleets had never produced a decisive result in any eighteenth-century battle, and in every decisive battle won by a large sailing fleet in the years that followed the enemy was either trapped or willing to stand and fight until the battle was decided one way or another. This had nothing to do with tactical ideas but was the nature of sailing warfare. Ideas of concentrating ships on a part of the enemy line or of disrupting the enemy line were as old as the line of battle itself. The problem was making it happen against an enemy who did not want to stand and fight. Experienced naval minds knew this, and for that reason several leading British thinkers and decision-makers were relatively unconcerned about what d’Orvilliers might actually achieve.14 Another key factor to consider is that, unlike the British, the French had no ships in reserve at Brest: the nearest were in Toulon.15 By no means, therefore, could they risk the type of confrontation that the British public so feared.
D’Orvilliers sailed in full knowledge that, in the haunting words of Sartine, ‘the eyes of Europe’ were on his fleet.16 On 23 July the fleets made first contact and d’Orvilliers cleverly and skilfully won the weather gage from the British during the night. From that moment on, if Keppel had wanted to attack the French, he would have had to tack his fleet, probably several times, to get anywhere near them – and that assumed that the French would not try to escape to windward or, if they did, that the British had superior windward performance. Such manoeuvring, moreover, was very likely to create divisions in his fleet, if not outright chaos, which would either force Keppel to stand his attack down or present d’Orvilliers with a wonderful opportunity to counter-attack by dividing and overwhelming a section of the British.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the fleets continued like this for four entire days while the British hoped for a change in the wind; eventually it shifted enough to allow the British to close the gap. Keppel fortified his crew with an allowance of grog while a squall brought the fleets close enough for a distant action to commence. The fleets passed on opposite tacks at a deathly slow pace. The angle of attack meant that the British rear, under Hugh Palliser, suffered particularly severely in the ships’ rigging from excellent French gunnery. Keppel later claimed that the effect of their gunnery was ‘beyond any degree I ever before saw’,17 testament to the quality of French gunpowder and the training of the French sailors. The tactic of firing high put immense pressure on the relatively untrained British crews. We know that Keppel’s crew were forced to unbend a main topsail in the thick of the action, a tough and demanding job requiring precise teamwork on deck and aloft as well as perfect communication between the two teams.18 To do this in the middle of battle with smoke obscuring their vision, the sound of cannon-fire deafening their ears and enemy shot snapping in the air around their heads and feet was an immense challenge. Faced with many similar challenges, Palliser’s flagship and several others were unable to rejoin the British centre and van squadrons to launch another attack.19
The battle fizzled out. No ships were lost on either side, though the statistics of dead and injured were at least encouraging to the British. Relatively speaking, the British had more guns per ship than the French, and it appeared that those guns, when fired at the enemy hulls, were effective at smashing the timber and killing the men.* After the first pass, the French fleet formed neatly into line as the sun set. The next morning they were twenty miles distant and soon entirely out of sight, their job done. The French had not won a crushing victory, but they had not tried to win a crushing victory. Rather, as one officer said, they had ‘beaten y
ou as much as the kind of battle that had been fought, would permit them’.20 D’Orvilliers had followed his orders to the letter. He had taken his fleet out, he had fought only once, and he had prevented his fleet from being defeated while delivering a stinging slap to the enemy.
We know that the French suffered from cohesion problems and communication problems in their own way and that one French flag officer, the duc de Chartres, shouldered some blame for preventing the French fleet from continuing the action. Still, they performed well enough and comparatively so much better than the British that, for once, British naval officers came away scratching their heads, deeply impressed with the quality of French seamanship they had witnessed. ‘It is a general observation of the Officers of the fleet, that no ships could be fought better or better managed than the Enemies ships were, their line was formed very exact’, wrote one sailor.21 Another commented that ‘The French behaved more like seamen, and more officer like than was imagined they would do, their ships were in very high order, well managed, well rigged and … much more attentive to order than our own.’22 Yet another, in a particularly telling description of the workings of the French fleet, explained how the French frigates, bustling around the main fleet, passing messages this way and that, providing support as and where it was needed,
showed an alertness … not equalled by any of ours. When their signals were at any time thrown out to make sail, they were in an instant under a cloud of canvas; when they returned to their admiral, or were called to him, they run close up to his stern with all sail set, when in a moment all disappeared but the topsails. If a ship was but at a small distance, if called to the admiral, she immediately spread all her sail, even to stunsails, if they would draw.