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

by Willis, Sam

  The rendezvous was also going to be difficult and dangerous to achieve. When combined, the Bourbon fleet would outnumber the British Channel Fleet, but until that point each of the three Bourbon squadrons would be inferior to the British fleet. The British Channel Fleet, of at least thirty ships of the line and eight frigates, manned by 26,544 men and armed with 3,260 guns, was already united and alert. It was out of the question to assume that the immense preparations required for an allied Bourbon invasion of Britain would go undetected, and it was more than likely that the Channel Fleet would be waiting for them, patrolling to windward of the English Channel in the western approaches, from where it could swoop on its enemy. If the British had enough ships spare and enough advance warning, there was every reason to suspect that one, two or all three of the Bourbon dockyards in question would actually be blockaded by the British. It was certainly possible that each of the Bourbon squadrons would actually have to fight for its freedom before it could even attempt to rendezvous with the others.

  Assuming that the rendezvous was somehow achieved and that there was still sufficient time to undertake an operation that season, the allied fleets would then have to train together. They would have to decide how the command structure between the two navies would work; they would have to agree on shared command and signalling systems, which would require careful translation; they would have to develop some kind of shared command culture within a few short weeks of exercises. As a rule, the larger a fleet, the more difficult it was to command. A fleet of thirty was considered extremely cumbersome, but this combined fleet would consist of around sixty ships.

  The identity of the two navies is also important to consider here. Yes, the French and Spanish shared a royal house and were now allied with each other, but they also loathed each other. ‘I foresee a fatal outcome’, wrote one perceptive Frenchman. ‘France and Spain, having neither affection nor esteem for each other, are going to ruin this business by mutual suspicion and recriminations.’1

  Once the training had been satisfactorily completed, the allies would boldly head towards the Channel, take control of it by defeating the British, and then launch the invasion. To prevent this from happening, all the British had to do was to keep their fleet in one piece and operational. As long as the British fleet existed in some reasonable strength, the allies would be unable to risk unloading their men on the beaches. This, perhaps, was the biggest problem because, as had been so clearly demonstrated at the battle of Ushant, forcing one fleet to action when it didn’t want to fight was the single most difficult thing to achieve in fleet warfare in the age of sail.

  If, miraculously, all this was achieved, the final piece of the jigsaw was for the Bourbons to capture a significant portion of British territory, ideally Portsmouth. This, it was believed, would lead to an immediate run on the banks and the British government suing for peace. Time here was crucial: if this surrender did not happen quickly, the invading force would be vulnerable to blockade by British ships, cut off and forced to surrender.

  There were, in short, so many ways that this operation could fail that it will come as no surprise to learn that it did. The French saw much of it coming. Vergennes had highlighted the ‘innumerable chances [that] might ruin the enterprise’2 but had been so anxious to secure the Spanish alliance that he had feared the dangers of pointing out logistical difficulty. The French ambassador to Madrid, the comte de Montmorin, explained the bind that they were in:

  I tread very warily when it is a matter of pointing out the difficulties in the way of any enterprise proposed by M de Florida Blanc; I fear that if I showed them as they really are I would … give him occasion to reproach us … for wanting to wage only a cold and lifeless war.3

  Throughout the spring and early summer of 1779, therefore, the plans moved forward when they should have been forced to stand still.

  This is what happened next.

  * * *

  The French and Spanish planned to meet in a large but specific area of sea just north of the Sisargas Islands, off the coast of Galicia, no later than 15 May. This did not happen. The French left Brest later than intended and even then they were not fully ready. They sailed with insufficient and poor-quality victuals, and insufficient surgeons and medical supplies, particularly those used to treat scurvy. Their ships were also undermanned, the shallow pool of available, skilled sailors having been savagely depleted by an epidemic during the winter. The despairing Vergennes described all those who had convinced him that the navy would be ready by 1 May as ‘windbags’.4

  The result of all this was that the gleaming, well-trained and eager French fleet of 1778 had entirely vanished. It now contained large numbers of inexperienced sailors, ‘weaklings’, convalescents and the outright sick who promptly infected everyone else. Still impressive in terms of its physical size, the fleet’s muscle had withered. The excellent d’Orvilliers, at least, was still in command.

  There were also problems with the Spanish fleet. The quality of the Spanish ships was irreproachable but that of their leading officers was suspect. The admiral of the Cádiz fleet, Don Luis de Córdova, was seventy-three and his immediate subordinates were easily criticized: Don Antonio Ulloa for his scholarly bearing; Don Caudron Cantin for his talent at intrigue and nothing else; and Don Miguel Gaston for his bullishness. The Ferrol fleet was commanded by Don Antonio d’Arce, who detested the French to a degree that affected his thinking and behaviour.5

  The Spanish were also delayed. Unwilling to save time by initiating the operation before a formal declaration of war had been made,* they had also been delayed by Floridablanca’s obsessive secrecy. He had made it a condition of the alliance that only a handful of people were allowed knowledge of the plans being made and, remarkably, none of them were experienced naval planners. When knowledgeable naval men were finally initiated, they had insufficient time to make the necessary preparations.6 There was no time at all for a conference between the allied chiefs of staff to discuss things like signalling.7

  Córdova did not even leave Cádiz until 22 June – that is, twenty days after the French had arrived at the rendezvous. They were then immediately caught in predictable northerly winds off the coast of Portugal, which further delayed their progress. By the time they arrived at the rendezvous the French had already been waiting for six weeks, enough time at sea to weaken even a healthy squadron. Their food was already starting to run out.

  The combined fleet was seriously impressive in terms of size, at least. Sixty-six ships of the line strong, it was twice the size of the combined Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar. They spent a single week practising manoeuvres. Effective communication was always critical in a fleet but particularly so in this one because the main force consisted of three divisions of ships, with every division consisting of ships from both countries.* The Spanish officers, however, did not understand the French signals when suddenly presented with them at the rendezvous point because the French instruction books that were supposed to have been sent never arrived. Even if they had arrived, the Spanish officers might very well have been bewildered to a point of incapacity or blinded by theory. We know from a surviving copy of the signal book they were using on the campaign that three-quarters of the book contained no fewer than seventy-six evolutions (fleet manoeuvres), all of which ignored the existence of an enemy.8

  The British Channel Fleet was already at sea, now under the command of Charles Hardy, who had been chosen to replace Keppel on grounds of seniority and political neutrality, rather than experience or skill. At the instigation of the king, he was given the brilliant Richard Kempenfelt, a man with a wealth of experience, knowledge and respect throughout the service, who would serve as ‘captain of the fleet’ – a precursor to a modern admiral’s chief of staff.

  Hardy was cruising twenty miles or so south-west of the Scilly Isles when the allied fleet sneaked past and headed for Plymouth, where – inducing utter consternation – it was sighted from Maker’s Point on the Rame Peninsula, at 1.00 p.m. on 16 A
ugust. First six, then eight more, and then all sixty-six of the allied ships appeared ‘like a wood on the water’.9 One British ship, the Ardent, was captured and another, the Marlborough, made her escape. As soon as he could make it to shore, her first lieutenant leapt on a horse and rode with a racing heart to Sandwich’s house in London with the shocking news.

  The Franco-Spanish fleet anchored and sent a cutter in to sound the approaches to Plymouth where, because of incompetent scouting, they thought Hardy was sheltering. Civilians in coastal areas moved inland while the militia was raised, the dockyard workers were armed, and tin-miners marched from Cornwall in their thousands. Orders were sent to British naval anchorages at the Downs and the Nore to block the eastern end of the Channel. Navigational aids were removed and all horses were removed from coastal areas – a decision that reflects British knowledge of the difficulty of transporting horses by sea. From his surviving correspondence you can almost see Vice-Admiral Molyneux Shuldham, the commander-in-chief at Plymouth, wringing his hands. ‘At this important crisis and in my situation, I think I should fail in my duty if I suffered a day to pass without writing to you’, he wrote to the Admiralty, with no more news to share. Naval officers were stationed in the tower of Maker Church in Cornwall to observe the enemy. The church tower stills stands today and is a haunting location to consider the threat pulsing ashore from the hostile fleet.10 Meanwhile, the headline news, that the enemy were off Plymouth, filtered through to Hardy, who was still cruising off the Isles of Scilly. He immediately set sail, hoping to close the door on the allied fleet – to force them up the Channel, where they could be driven to their own destruction like the Spanish Armada* – but he was held back by rare easterly winds.

  The allies, meanwhile, had achieved nothing. They had no idea where the British fleet was because they had not sent out any cruisers, nor, in a striking oversight, did they have any pilots with local knowledge of the south coast of England. They were forced to navigate ‘by guess and by God’, a mistake that has clear parallels with d’Estaing’s ignorance of the American coast in the summer of 1778.11

  The sickness that had tainted the French crews had, by now, turned into a full-blown and hideous epidemic, which the British knew about from a British sailor who had been captured, taken aboard a French 64-gunner and then released.12 Thousands of sailors, both French and Spanish – though the latter seem to have suffered particularly badly – fell sick.13 D’Orvilliers’s only son died in the epidemic and the admiral himself had been weakened in his own way by a total absence of orders from Paris. Supplies of food were very low; some ships had no water at all.

  On 29 August he finally gave up and headed for home. Hardy, reinforced with extra ships and winning his battle against the easterly winds, very briefly sighted his enemy. D’Orvilliers decided to offer battle but the poor condition of his fleet had reached the crucial tipping point at which it severely affected performance. The ships straggled and struggled to keep station; the Spanish ships were particularly bad. One French officer later said that they could ‘overtake nothing and run away from nothing’.14 They had no hope of getting anywhere near the British fleet. As a fighting force, the allied fleet was useless and now terribly vulnerable. Every day it grew weaker, and by the time it reached port at least 8,000 French and Spanish sailors and soldiers were either sick or dead – though ultimately the deaths were a low percentage of those disabled, a strong suggestion that the epidemic was not typhus.15 The sickness in the Bourbon fleet allowed the British to dig up one of their favourite myths of failed enemy invasion: the sea, apparently, was so full of French and Spanish corpses that the inhabitants of Devon and Cornwall all stopped eating fish for a month.16

  Hardy patrolled for a few days before returning to Spithead because his men were also starting to fall sick at a frightening rate – the result of a manning system that kept both pressed men and volunteers crammed together in unhealthy guardships before they were assigned to their naval ships.* The Canada and Intrepid were ‘so sickly as to be almost useless’; the crew of the Shrewsbury were ‘falling down with fever so fast as to deter me from sending any men on board her’; the Monarch was in a similar state; and the Blenheim was too badly manned to stay at sea for long. He was also running out of food and drink, though this is hardly surprising when one considers that the British Channel Fleet was consuming 150 tons of beer† per day.17

  The summer campaign season thus closed and the British Isles were safe, for now. A contemporary article included the memorable quote: ‘Never had perhaps so great a naval force been assembled on the seas. Never any by which less was done.’18 As always, however, the impact of sea power must be measured in more ways than one. The allies had failed to invade, but by parading their fleet off Plymouth they had caused panic all over the south coast of Britain, which allowed the seed of fear that had been sown at the battle of Ushant to germinate. ‘I think we have more reason to trust in Providence than in our Admirals’, wrote Germain.19 Shelburne and Richmond, leading politicians in the Opposition, described the crisis as the most awful the country had ever faced, comparable with the Armada.20 Others looked back to that great Tudor confrontation in an attempt to come to terms with their situation. Among these was the evangelist John Wesley who, as a good Protestant, felt deeply threatened by the beast of Catholicism. He wrote to Samuel Bradburn, a friend and fellow preacher:

  It is the judgment of many that, since the time of the Invincible Armada, Great Britain and Ireland were never in such danger from foreign enemies as they are at this day. Humanly speaking, we are not able to contend with them either by sea or land. They are watching over us as a leopard over his prey, just ready to spring upon us.21

  The newspapers, far more interested in the threat of invasion than in the conduct of the war elsewhere, joined the party with enthusiasm. ‘Fire your indignation at the thoughts of an invasion by the Monsieurs of France’, urged one editorial.22

  It was a disaster for the British both politically and militarily: politically, because it called into question the handling of the war; militarily, because it affected future operations. To prevent any such recurrence, Sandwich felt obliged to prioritize the Channel Fleet over others and to keep the ships at sea longer than he might otherwise have done, and in that decision lay the seed of defeat elsewhere. In a curious way, therefore, the allied invasion campaign was both an operational failure and, entirely inadvertently, a strategic success. Kempenfelt did his best to remedy the operational failure by innovating obsessively in addressing the problem of how a very large fleet could operate effectively against an even larger fleet. Never in the history of any navy, at any period before or since, have so many signal books and fighting instructions been issued by one man in the space of only twenty-seven months.23 The strategic blunder of prioritizing home waters over foreign, however, had yet to make itself clear and the allies had no idea of the significance that their campaign would have. Before the fleet was even back in port, Vergennes wrote to Spain urging a new strategy. Thereafter Franco-Spanish fleets would assemble in the summer off the south coast of England, not to renew an invasion attempt but to keep British ships abroad outnumbered by threatening those at home. The Spaniards objected to the changed strategy, but Vergennes used Spain’s financial weakness to force them into accepting.24

  * * *

  The Channel invasion, however, was not the only card that the French and Spanish had in play in 1779. The question now was, could they do any better elsewhere? Gibraltar was an isolated British rock that could easily be cut off from land and blockaded by sea. The British had no significant naval squadron at Gibraltar and there was an enormous Spanish naval base nearby at Cádiz. Surely, at least, the garrison there could be blockaded into submission. How could it not?

  * In direct contrast to the French in 1778, who had unleashed d’Estaing before war was made official.

  * Córdova led a ‘reserve’ of sixteen Spanish ships, a huge fleet in its own right.

  * In a curious twist of fa
te the man in charge of the British squadron in the Downs was named Francis Drake.

  * This was not remedied until 1781, when Charles Middleton introduced a system of ‘slop ships’ in home ports, where new recruits were stripped, washed and issued with clean clothes. Jamieson, ‘Leeward Islands’, 79.

  † The equivalent of a quarter of a million pints. Each man was allowed a ration of a gallon of beer (around ten pints) per day, but there is plenty of evidence that in practice the men could drink as much as they liked.

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  BRITISH RESOURCEFULNESS

  Before the outbreak of war the Spanish had offered their neutrality to Britain in return for Gibraltar, an offer that the British had refused. Washington considered that decision ‘more strongly tinctured with insanity’ than any other yet made by Britain in the war,1 but he had failed to consider the strategic problems faced by Britain through the lens of sea power. Gibraltar was nothing less than the key to the British maritime empire. It was used to monitor the Spanish navy in nearby Cádiz in times of peace and to blockade it in times of war; to protect British trade entering and leaving the Mediterranean; to police the Barbary corsairs who sailed from the north coast of Africa; as a wedge to hammer between the French naval bases of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, to keep French sea power weak by keeping it divided; as a stepping stone for British operations heading into the western Mediterranean; and as a launching point for naval squadrons or trade convoys sailing from Europe to the West or East Indies. To lose Gibraltar was to endanger this entire system, the very system by which the British had become safe, rich and strong.