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

by Willis, Sam

  The British took care to burn every vestige of American sea power on the Delaware before they left.11 The evacuation was yet another massive naval operation. Howe made the bold and impressive announcement that the Royal Navy would give any civilian who wanted it, together with his family and his property, transport to New York.12 It soon became clear, however, that there were insufficient ships to honour this promise. It was a major political blunder. ‘No man’, wrote one royal official, ‘can be expected to declare for us when he cannot be assured a fortnight’s protection.’13 The British relationship with the loyalists, upon whom they had heaped so much expectation for the conduct of the war, was thus damaged.

  Those who had the muscle or influence crammed themselves aboard a cumbersome evacuation fleet to rival, in both size and misery, the one that had left Boston in 1775. Yet again, carts overloaded with household goods were dragged to the harbour and, yet again, British sailors maximizing space on their ships for bodies and food threw anything else into the sea.14

  With all the space on Howe’s ships taken up by loyal civilians, the least trustworthy Hessians, and a last-ditch and utterly toothless peace commission led by the Earl of Carlisle,* Henry Clinton, who had now taken over General William Howe’s role as commander-in-chief of the British army in America, had no choice but to take his army to New York overland.15 A sorry, vulnerable parade that stretched twelve miles across New Jersey, Washington seized the opportunity to attack it at Monmouth, a significant strike against Cornwallis that created fresh enthusiasm for the American cause. The Americans, meanwhile, had regained the key port of Philadelphia, which became one of the leading privateer ports for the rest of the war. Hundreds of slaves, mostly young men, fled with the British for New York. When the Americans retook Philadelphia, they found a black community that was largely composed of children, the elderly and women.16

  All this upheaval, misery, strategic vulnerability and death had been caused by nothing more than the promise of French sea power – another striking example of how French warships affected both life in America and the shape of the American war before they even arrived.

  * * *

  Fortunately for the British, Admiral Howe, who had been given permission to return home, remained in American waters even while his replacement, James Gambier, settled into New York. Howe, who had been itching to get at the French, knew that his real talents lay in fleet warfare. He also knew that Gambier had no real talents.

  Howe’s formidable task was clear. He knew that naval reinforcements were arriving under John Byron, a naval officer of immense experience, who had been sent to America as soon as it became clear in London that d’Estaing had escaped and his location was known. This strategy of using small squadrons to react to French initiatives characterized British naval strategy throughout the war. Sandwich, terrified of French invasion after their navy’s competent display at Ushant, was responsible for it, prioritizing strength in home waters over strength abroad. Until Byron arrived, Howe would have to use his badly manned and small fleet of small ships to hold off a much larger French fleet, consisting of twelve large ships of the line designed and built for fleet battle.*

  The French fleet entering the Delaware and chasing the frigate Mermaid, 8 July 1778.

  Howe’s first priority was intelligence: if he knew exactly what the French were doing, then he could make the most effective use of his force. British cruisers were therefore sent south to find the French and to shadow them wherever they went. The French arrived at the Delaware on 8 July, terrifyingly close to the sailing of the vulnerable British evacuation fleet.

  The French arrival was not without incident and one of their ships grounded on the sand-bar at the entrance to the Delaware. It raised the obvious point that, although the French warships were more powerful than those of the British, they were, necessarily, larger and drew more water.17 For all its materiel weakness, therefore, Howe’s fleet would be able to go to places where d’Estaing’s could not.

  Having landed the Philadelphia evacuees in New York, Howe assumed a strong defensive position just inside the bend of Sandy Hook, New Jersey, with his ships positioned broadside to the main channel heading towards New York. The positioning of his ships was the result of careful study, deep knowledge of seamanship, and a willingness to share information with his subordinates:

  He sounded its several depths in person; he ascertained the different setting of the currents, and from the observations thus made, formed different plans with a view to the points of wind with which d’Estaing might resolve to cross the bar. These plans, with the grounds on which they rested, he daily communicated to the commodores and captains, soliciting their opinions, and desirous of profiting by their objections.18

  With his ships anchored at bow and stern, Howe also had his sailors run extra lines, known as ‘springs’, to their own anchors, which meant that the broadsides of the British ships could easily be swung into new positions by manipulating the main anchor lines.19 The naval defences were augmented with army positions, dug in on the Hook itself. With Howe’s fleet positioned in this way, every French ship would be forced to sail past every British ship before entering the Narrows, and all this in a seaway renowned for its shallows and racing tides, and only at high tide on a day with a settled easterly or south-easterly wind. Any attack, therefore, would be both risky and predictable: the British would know how and when the French would come, and they would then have every chance of disabling the French ships as they headed to New York.

  For several days the French lurked just to seaward of the Hook, ‘in the form of an exact half-moon’,20 using the time to make contact with Washington, to water their ships and to sound the approaches to the Hook. In a week of the highest tension, these fleets of warships were only a mile or two apart, separated by the dunes of Sandy Hook – a memorable and arresting moment captured by the French artist Pierre Ozanne, who had sailed with d’Estaing.

  An illustration of the French and British positions at Sandy Hook, taken from Rear-Admiral Charles Ekins’s Naval Battles (1824), one of the most detailed studies of naval tactics of the era and a pioneering English language study of naval tactics. Ekins joined the navy in March 1781, fought against the Dutch at the battle of the Dogger Bank in 1781 and relieved Gibraltar with Howe in 1782. He went on to enjoy a varied, long and successful career.

  The French fleet anchored before New York, blockading the English fleet and intercepting the shipping trying to enter, 12 July 1778.

  Rumour that d’Estaing was off New York flashed across the Atlantic to France, where everyone held their breath in full of anticipation of success. In the words of John Bondfield, an American merchant in Bordeaux deeply committed to the war, there was ‘no doubt of the entire of the [sic] English Forces would fall into the hands of the United Allied Forces’.21

  The climax was reached on 22 July when there was thirty feet of water over the bar. The tension was intense and yet the British, just like the French, had high expectations. One of Howe’s officers acknowledged that ‘we … expected the hottest day that had ever been fought between the two nations … Yet, under Heaven, we had not the least doubt of our success.’22 To the ‘great surprise’ of the British,23 however, nothing happened. Concerned that his deep warships would get stuck on the notorious sand-bar that guarded the entrance to the Narrows and worried about the orientation of the channel running past the Hook, d’Estaing made no move at all.24 One ship had already grounded at the mouth of the Delaware, and it was becoming rather clear that, without accurate, up-to-date hydrographical knowledge of the coast that they were attacking, French naval capability was severely restricted. It is remarkable that they had not anticipated this problem, and one strongly suspects that a seaman such as d’Orvilliers or a commander more willing to listen to his knowledgeable officers than d’Estaing would not have made such an error. The contrast with the way in which the British force was positioned and commanded by Howe could not have been starker.

  Outfoxed for now,
d’Estaing sailed, but the game was by no means up. He left New York with a very valuable piece of information – a key fact that would elude many other fleet commanders during the war and that would regularly affect its course: d’Estaing now knew where his enemy’s fleet was, and therefore he knew where his enemy’s fleet wasn’t.

  * * *

  Howe was impotent for fear that d’Estaing was merely trying to lure him away before doubling back and striking again at New York. Until he had received concrete intelligence of d’Estaing’s movements or Byron arrived with more ships, the British were immobilized by the presence of French sea power.

  Nevertheless, Howe played his cards well in the given situation and found the loyalist population of New York more than willing to help. With the threat of the traditional enemy at hand, volunteers from the British transports in New York had flooded to his undermanned ships ‘almost to a man’,25 and fishermen had offered to take their shallops to sea to look out for Byron and to bring him safely and as quickly as possible to New York.26 Howe had acted decisively and with great skill, but in truth it had been a lucky escape for the British: if only d’Estaing had been able to make his crossing of the Atlantic in anything approaching a normal time frame, he would have found the British in a vulnerable, perhaps even hopeless state, in the process of evacuating Philadelphia.27 Washington was keenly aware of how close they had come to such easy pickings. He was convinced that, had d’Estaing arrived sooner, Clinton’s army in Philadelphia would have shared the same fate as Burgoyne’s at Saratoga.28 There was, however, more than a single British army at stake here. If Howe’s fleet had been intercepted or bottled up at Philadelphia, then New York itself would also have been defenceless. Little did he know it, but when d’Estaing was in mid-Atlantic, the war had been hanging on another spider silk.

  Rear-Admiral John Byron, meanwhile, had been rushing as fast as he could to join Howe but was finding the going heavy. At least one of his ships had been rigged with weak masts that split and snapped, killing and wounding several of his crew – the poor state of his rigging a direct result of the pressure that had already been applied to British naval infrastructure and stores by the war in America.29 Byron was also renowned for encountering storms and had been named for it by his crew. ‘Foul Weather Jack’ now lived up to his reputation. On 30 June he encountered a ferocious storm, perhaps the result of an unusual northwards course, which thrashed his ships until they were bedraggled shadows of the force they were supposed to be. In a matter of hours his ‘reinforcement’ squadron had become one that could barely cling to life, let alone offer a threat. The ships were shattered and scattered. One went home, two made it to St John’s in Newfoundland, another sailed to Lisbon for repairs. The rest limped into New York, their rigs ruined and their crews in a desperate condition, ravaged both by the storm and also by an epidemic.30 When Byron arrived, therefore, his ships had little practical impact on the balance of sea power in America. Howe would still have to make do with his rag-tag fleet.

  Howe moved as soon as he heard from his ever-efficient network of frigates that d’Estaing was heading for Newport, Rhode Island, the key deep-water harbour captured by the British in 1776 and now held by a force of some 5,000 soldiers. It was a sensible move by the French. By now d’Estaing’s fleet had been at sea for three-and-a-half months, and the only fresh provisions they had been able to acquire were those rowed out to the fleet when at anchor off Sandy Hook. They now desperately needed water and the crews were beginning to suffer from scurvy. The operational capability of the squadron was beginning to diminish rapidly.

  If the French were going to make a significant and long-term difference to the balance of power in American waters, they needed a base where they could recover and from which to operate. Newport was ideal. It was, moreover, a target was well within their grasp. The British force at Newport was geographically isolated because the town lies on the western shore of Aquidneck Island and is vulnerable to being cut off from the mainland. A well-timed and well-organized attack with the French navy working closely with the American army could therefore lead to a swift victory that would change the shape of the war.

  This plan, however, depended entirely on two things: the first was that the French and the Americans could actually work together; the second was that Howe would not interfere.

  * * *

  Washington dispatched Major-General Sullivan, who had led the American withdrawal from Quebec and since then fought at Long Island where he had been captured and subsequently released, from the American camp at White Plains outside New York to prepare a position against Newport, from where he could attack once the French navy had taken control of Narragansett Bay. To some this opportunity to work with French sea power seemed like a dream come true. ‘You are the most happy man in the World’, wrote Nathanael Greene, ‘What a child of fortune.’31

  D’Estaing’s arrival, with 4,000 soldiers in twelve magnificent ships of the line, now cast a shadow over the British in Rhode Island, just as British ships had done in New York in 1776 and Philadelphia in 1777. The British knew that there was little they could do to prevent such a powerful squadron from forcing the main passage and blocking the entrances to Narragansett Bay. But in a bid to make that navigation as difficult as possible – and giving evidence of their desperation – the British sank thirteen of their valuable transports in key strategic locations in the outer harbour, eight of which have since been discovered by marine archaeologists.* They also burned and sank four frigates along the west coast of Aquidneck Island, two corvettes in the outer harbour near the transports, and three smaller armed vessels in the Sakonnet River. This self-inflicted destruction was the most substantial British naval loss of any campaign of the war, and all this destruction was caused by the presence alone of d’Estaing. He had yet to fire a gun.

  With an American pilot on board every ship in his fleet, and with his flagship at the head of the line, d’Estaing forced the main passage into Narragansett Bay on 8 August. The squadron gave a ‘rolling fire at the entire coast’ as they passed.32 The British batteries struck a few blows but were toothless; the progress of the French relentless. Ozanne caught the majestic arrival of the French fleet in a remarkable series of eyewitness sketches.

  Safely in, d’Estaing positioned his ships at every entrance to the bay while Sullivan prepared to attack. At this stage, cooperation between the Americans and the French was impressive. D’Estaing disposed of his ships according to Sullivan’s suggestions and even ordered his ships operating close to shore to follow Sullivan’s orders.33 But then, on the very day that Sullivan planned to advance at the head of a force swollen with thousands of volunteers inspired by the arrival of the French ships, Howe arrived with the British fleet. The French, blinded by a lack of frigates, had been caught unawares.34 The Americans and French were about to discover how their new relationship would bear up under the strain of British sea power.

  Howe’s force was weaker than d’Estaing’s, and significantly so: only eight were ships of the line, and only thirteen were larger than frigates.35 He anchored off Point Judith and waited to see what d’Estaing would do. The French fleet was in a strong position and Howe’s arrival would change nothing if Howe subsequently did nothing. Sullivan would advance and the British garrison in Newport would be captured. Simply by adopting the position that he had, d’Estaing’s fleet was being effective. He did not have to do anything. Inactivity in the face of an enemy was not d’Estaing’s way, however, nor, in his defence, was it part of his orders, which required him to be proactive in finding and fighting the British fleet.

  The French fleet entering Rhode Island. To the right in the distance they are shown under fire from British Batteries on the present-day site of Fort Adams. Note the sunken British transports to the left and one British ship on fire. Between the sunken ships and the French fleet, batteries on Goat Island and Rose Island are firing. D’Estaing leads the fleet in his flagship the 80-gun Languedoc.

  The relative advantage
s of the positions of the forces, moreover, was a matter of perception. Was it the British garrison at Newport that was surrounded by enemies, with Sullivan on one side and d’Estaing on the other? Or was it d’Estaing who was surrounded, with Howe on one side and the British Newport garrison on the other? D’Estaing certainly felt vulnerable. In his words he was ‘blockaded, locked up, and divided’.36 A key part of his concern was a mistaken belief that Byron would shortly join Howe, thus removing the clear and extant superiority that he then had over the British fleet. If d’Estaing was going to engage the British at sea, now was the time to do so.

  Situation in the afternoon of 11 August 1778 when a hurricane disrupted the British and French manoeuvring for battle. Note the black squalls carefully depicted on the horizon.

  On 10 August he made sail. Howe bolted south, buying time for Byron to arrive while contemplating a limited fleet action against d’Estaing’s superior force.

  The French had a brief opportunity to engage which they spurned.37 With detailed knowledge of local conditions and outstanding skills in fleet command, Howe positioned himself so that he could take advantage of a predictable shift of wind – the regular easterlies that blow onshore in the summer evenings off the Rhode Island coast. If there was going to be a battle, Howe thus made certain that he would control it, a crucial advantage between two unevenly matched fleets. To make things easier, he moved from his flagship, the 64-gun Eagle, to the frigate Apollo, a rare example of an admiral in the age of sail choosing to command at a distance, rather than from his flagship, in the heat of the action.