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

by Willis, Sam

  With the main naval forces finally in the Caribbean, the situation, ironically, calmed down because neither side was either willing to take the initiative or capable of doing so. When they were in Boston, the French had taken the opportunity presented by such a lull in proceedings to enrage the Americans, and now they took the opportunity to enrage themselves. D’Estaing’s string of missed opportunities and clear failures was starting to tell. ‘Never will France have such opportunities again as we have had’, lamented one bitter Frenchman; it was a campaign that was ‘mortifying to the last degrees by the folly of our General, on every occasion, he having had the most favourable opportunities of signalizing himself’.50 Like-minded French officers formed anti-d’Estaing cabals and his name became mud in Martinique. He was openly abused in the streets and rumours circulated that he was mentally unstable. It is unclear if they were true, but one thing is quite certain: d’Estaing’s behaviour throughout the campaign of 1778 indicates a man out of his depth both with the strategic situation, as influenced by the practical restrictions of seamanship, and also with the specific seamanship challenges he faced fighting the British.51 He would still have a shot at redemption, however.

  The difficulties of wielding sea power had caused the French to fall out with their American allies and had fractured the relationship between the Commander and his own fleet. It had also caused them to lose St Lucia, a key Caribbean island. Even more worryingly, similar problems had begun to affect the war, and their empire, elsewhere: in fact, by 1778 their entire position in India was under threat.

  * The other four are: Howe evacuating Philadelphia, the French attack at Newport, Hotham leaving New York, and Hotham arriving in the West Indies.

  * A life-long sailor, Barrington’s approach is significantly different from d’Estaing’s, who had carelessly abandoned his anchors when he left Newport.

  † The two paintings have recently been reunited by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, and can now be seen together as always intended.

  * Part of the same epidemic, caused by overcrowded guardships, that ruined Charles Hardy’s fleet in 1779 (see p. 292).

  16

  INDIAN EMPIRE

  It is tempting to view events in India during the maritime wars of the eighteenth century as somehow isolated from events elsewhere, but that would be a mistake. Yes, they were distant, but that distance created strategic problems that affected European navies and hence all waters in European naval control. It took between four and six months to travel by ship from Britain to India. The ancient canals running from Suez to Egypt, which had linked the Nile with the Red Sea, and thus the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean, and thus Europe with India, had long since dried up. To reach India from Europe, therefore, one had to travel south past the Spanish lurking at Cádiz and the British at Gibraltar, then past various European-owned slaving stations on the west coast of Africa, before entering the vastness of the Atlantic, where the British also lurked on the rocky island of St Helena. Then one had to round the Cape of Good Hope, which was in the hands of the Dutch. The Cape was critical for its position mid-voyage, by which time all ships needed to resupply. Once round the Cape, the French lurked to the north and east in the islands of Mauritius and Réunion, then known respectively as Île de France and Île de Bourbon. The main European navies, therefore, could easily contest the route to India from Europe.

  It is also important to realize that the American colonists viewed themselves as part of a broad British imperial jigsaw that transcended the Atlantic world. Yes, American connections with the Caribbean, Europe and Africa were particularly influential and vivid, but so too were the connections between America and Asia: remember, one of the key events which sparked off the revolution was the Boston Tea Party, an intense clash between the eastern and western hemispheres of British interest. Indeed, one of the most thought-provoking artefacts to survive from this period is a small, clear bottle in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Inside it are tea-leaves, harvested in Asia but then harvested again from the shoreline of Boston, near Dorchester Neck, the morning after the Boston Tea Party.

  Tea, moreover, was only one part of this Asian equation: there was also a growing demand for luxury, exotic and military goods, and this demand was generated in America as much as it was in Europe.* The Americans felt a strong connection with India and with the Indians, who were also subject to British control. It is no coincidence that, later in the war, a Pennsylvania privateer was named Hyder Ally after the sultan of Mysore, Hyder Ali, the war-chief who rose up in an attempt to drive the British out of southern India at exactly the same time as the Americans rose up to drive them out of America. The relationship between Britain, India and America is particularly interesting in this period because, just as the British empire in America collapsed between 1775 and 1782, so did it start to grow in India, and the two are intimately connected. Those links were first felt long before the rebellion in America rose in spate. Indeed, an existing war with the Maratha empire in the mid-1770s was one of the key reasons that British politicians were unable and unwilling to give the growing crisis in America the full attention that it deserved.1

  * * *

  The naval set-up in India was unique. The East India Company was the key to British power in India because it was a willing ally of British imperialism. It raised its own troops and had its own mini-navy, the Bombay Marine. Even before the outbreak of war, it had five 20-gun cruisers and eight huge armed gallivats, powered by both oar and sail. It was a bit like a maritime police force. The ships were not designed to engage in warfare with ships from European navies but to protect Company shipping from local raiders and pirates, the ships of the Muscat Arabs, sheikhs in the Persian Gulf and the Maratha chiefs known as the Angrias. The Company also built and maintained its own large trading ships, which were usually armed.

  To build and maintain ships, the Company needed a sound maritime infrastructure in India, and they had it in Bombay: a well-established dockyard including no fewer than three dry docks, two of which were capable of servicing ships as large as 74-gunners. Nearby were excellent facilities for graving several ships at once.* The local resources for cordage were excellent and there was a fine ropewalk. Timber resources were also plentiful. In particular, the forests of Malabar near Bombay were full of teak, one of the finest of all shipbuilding timbers for its resilience to tropical shipworm and rot and the fact that it did not swell in hot climates. There was even a peculiar local gum that was used to seal the seams of ships instead of pitch. The facilities were deeply impressive.2

  Crucially, the East India Company was more than happy to share its facilities with the Royal Navy, but the French navy had nothing of the sort, either of its own or run by a French trading company that it could co-opt into helping project sea power so far from home. In fact the nearest French naval base was on the Île de France (Mauritius), 2,300 miles from the southernmost tip of India. Nonetheless, the French had serious imperial ambitions as well as significant possessions in India. They would soon find out that, in time of war, such imperialism without naval infrastructure was a pipe dream.

  * * *

  The initial exchanges between the British and French in India were horribly one-sided. The British already had an army at their fingertips, raised to fight an existing war with the Marathas. They also had a tiny naval squadron under the command of Edward Vernon,* which was boosted with armed East India Company ships.3 The French had managed to scratch together a squadron of similar force, under Admiral François l’Ollivier de Tronjoly, but they were burdened with the terrible ‘what if’ that hung over all their operations on the Indian coast: what would they do if a large number of their men were injured in battle? Where would they go to repair? How could crews depleted by battle sail damaged ships 2,000 miles back to safety? The idea was too appalling for words.

  The British had one other significant advantage in 1778: in direct contrast to what had happened in the Caribbean that year, in I
ndia they knew that they were at war before the French knew, and the reason for this is particularly interesting.

  A British entrepreneur, George Baldwin, had recently pioneered a route across the seventy-mile stretch of desert from Suez to the Nile, drawing on an earlier attempt to exploit this route by the adventurer James Bruce in 1768. British access to this area had become possible in the 1770s because of changing politics in Egypt, where the Mameluks had finally freed themselves from Turkish suzerainty. This created the opportunity to open new trade routes running from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea via Suez. The practicality of the system took some working out, not least the need for a detailed understanding, by British sailors, of the navigation of the 1,040 mile-long Red Sea. For generations this had been a Muslim lake, protected and cherished for its crucial role in the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, just inland from the Red Sea port of Jeddah.

  In 1773 the Egyptian bey, Mehmed, summoned Baldwin to Cairo and encouraged the British to start using the Suez route, even offering to cut a canal to assist them. Although the canal never materialized, the British immediately increased their activity in the Red Sea and several voyages made by Royal Navy ships resulted in the creation of more detailed charts of the Red Sea than had hitherto existed. This first exploitation and investigation of the Red Sea by British ships is almost completely unstudied by historians. A glut of fabulous material awaits an intrepid scholar.4

  The result of this mixture of diplomacy and exploration was that, at the opening of the war, the British had an entirely new route for communications with India that was very fast, relatively safe and unavailable to the French. The war’s outbreak then provided the publicity-hungry Baldwin with the perfect opportunity to prove both the worth of his system and how clever he was. It worked spectacularly. In his subsequent self-penned hagiography, it only took him seven pages before he congratulated himself:

  I had the satisfaction to convey the first advices of the war in 1778 to the East Indies, by means of which they were enabled, to the astonishment of all England, when the news arrived, to expel the French from India before succours could reach them, and add their possessions to our own.5

  This is a rare example from this war of the British using sea power to great effect to transmit intelligence – something they had been woefully bad at hitherto.

  The day after news of war was received in Madras via the British sloop HMS Cormorant, a decision was taken to attack the French and increase naval protection of British Bengal. The French settlement of Chandernagore, just up the Hughli River from Calcutta, was the first to be attacked and it fell as if made of paper. A major strike was then landed on the large trading post and root of French power in India, Pondicherry. Also chosen as a target for its vulnerability to British sea power, Pondicherry was the only place on the entire coast where a large amphibious landing could be made.6

  The battle for Pondicherry saw a scuffle between the British and French squadrons with no ships taken on either side, but the French suffered many more casualties than the British and the British ships were badly damaged in their rigging.7 Tronjoly then fled the Indian coast altogether for the remote safety of Île de France, the squadron’s disappearance witnessed with horror by the French troops in Pondicherry. His retreat was considered a shameful and criminal act, and there are clear parallels with d’Estaing’s abandonment of Sullivan at Newport, but the lack of French naval infrastructure in India left him with no choice. Pondicherry fell after a siege in which British sailors played a major part both afloat and ashore,8 and within five months so too did all the remaining French posts in India.

  British ships thus dominated the Indian Ocean in 1778, but a storm was brewing and the British certainly felt insecure. Their presence in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta was as reliant on sea power as the army in America, and news of Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga had certainly made some of the Bengal Council jittery.9 This was not just the fear of defeat, but, specifically, the fear of being cut off from the safety and security provided by a navy, the umbilical cord linking such a distant settlement with home.

  That fear, in turn, was partly informed by developments in Indian sea power. By driving the French out of India they had also provoked Hyder Ali, the sultan of Mysore, a man of immense influence who had promised to protect the French. Ali had his own cherished visions of sea power that are, generally, much neglected by Western historians. The Indians had an impressive tradition of building large ships, influenced by European shipbuilding styles and techniques that had been practised in Indian waters from the 1730s onwards.

  In the 1750s Hyder had built a navy that consisted of thirty warships commanded by renegade European officers and a large number of troop transports. The majority of that navy had been captured or destroyed by the British during the Seven Years’ War (1754–63), but Hyder’s appetite for sea power remained.10 In 1778, with war breaking out between the British and French and with internal conflict sparking tension between the British and Mysore, Hyder began to rebuild his fleet, employing Joze Azelars, a shipwright once in the service of the Dutch East India Company, to oversee its design and construction. The main bases of Mysore naval power were Mangalore and Bhatkal near Onore, which Hyder also strengthened by building a huge mole to protect the fleet.11 We have one very rare description of this fleet, given by a travelling Englishman, in the midst of its construction at Onore:

  Here are two frigates building near the castle; one of thirty-two guns and the other of twenty-four guns. Being desirous to examine their construction, I went in company with two other English gentlemen near to them, without offering to go on board, lest it should give offence. The Governor, being there, overlooking the men at work, observed us walking away, very civilly invited us to go on board and examine them, adding that it would give him great pleasure if we would candidly give our opinions on them. We went on board both of them and were surprised to find the work so well performed, particularly as they were the first ships of great burthen that have been built in Hyder Ally’s country. When finished they will be two complete frigates, being very strong and of a fine mould; they will have a prow and what they call ‘grabs’ and one of them is larger than a Bombay ‘grab’.*

  The final size of Hyder’s fleet is uncertain. Sources survive which claim that his largest ships, perhaps eight in number, were armed with between twenty-eight and forty guns each, and that this force was augmented by smaller, though still very powerful, vessels known as pals. Whatever its actual size, it is certain that the fleet was large enough to be significant for the balance of sea power in India. It could challenge the Bombay Marine, transport troops, raid British trade, blockade small towns, and make life more than uncomfortable for an isolated British warship. With so few European ships in Indian waters before the arrival of the main French and English fleets in 1780, such a small force could easily sway the balance of power at sea and influence broader strategy.

  The route home via Suez, moreover, which had served so well in forewarning the British of war before the French, was far from secure. The initial successes of the British exploitation of this route served only to arouse the suspicion of the Turks, who believed that the increased British activity was merely a forerunner of a massive invasion of Egypt. They particularly feared for the sanctity of the Red Sea route as the key to the pilgrimage to Mecca and, in 1778, issued a decree forbidding all ‘Frankish’ ships from using Suez as a port. After the naval battle at Pondicherry Joseph Ellison, lieutenant of the sloop Cormorant, returned to Suez, where he met with a very rough reception. Seized by the Turks, he was only released when the Cormorant’s captain threatened to turn her guns on the town.12 In spite of the success of British sea power at the end of 1778, therefore, India had suddenly become very distant, and British possessions very isolated.

  Nonetheless, the British in India were now in a far better position than the French, and that development needs to be considered in the context of the other numerous and severe French disappointments of the 1778 campaign in bot
h American and Caribbean waters. Only in European waters had the French showed any muscle and lived up to their self-generated new reputation. The clock, moreover, was ticking. The French navy was a house built on sand. France lacked the bureaucracy to fund a war via taxation, so they had resorted to borrowing vast sums of money, at enormously high interest rates, to fund their navy. A lengthy war was unsustainable for that reason alone, but there were others: the available pool of skilled sailors was limited, and French access to naval stores unreliable.13 If they did nothing, they would soon find themselves outnumbered by the British in ships of the line and 50-gunners by almost 50 per cent.14 If they were to stand any chance of realizing their ambitions for the war, it was quite clear to the French that they needed a game-changer – something that would dramatically alter the balance of power at sea. What they needed, unquestionably, was the Spanish navy.

  * The Indian trade was also the main source of saltpetre, the key ingredient in gunpowder.

  * ‘Graving’ involves grounding a ship to work on her underwater hull at low tide.

  * Edward Vernon (died 1794) was nephew of the more famous admiral of the same name (1684–1787).

  * It is an interesting description for several reasons. The ships that Hyder built were not frigates as the Royal Navy knew them, and the fact that an Englishman has described them as frigates here must only be taken as a reflection of their impressive size and that they were armed on a single deck. The word ‘grab’ is an Anglicization of the Arabic ghurāb, referring to a highly manoeuvrable warship popular with corsairs. The hull of the ghurāb was distinctive for its low and projecting prow, described here, and it was rigged with the traditional triangular lateen sails of the dhow. They were built broadside to a river, in contrast to the European tradition of building ships stern to or bow to a river. Also, unlike the British tradition, these large Indian warships were launched using elephants, which would push them into the river at bow and stern, the ship inching its way down greased timbers. MacDougall, ‘British Seapower’, 304; Low, Indian Navy, I, 182.