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

by Willis, Sam

  SAVANNAH

  D’Estaing and Lincoln, who had climbed nearby Brewton’s Hill to observe Savannah, saw the whole ghastly scene unfold, as the British boats stole upriver toward the city uncontested. Furious, d’Estaing blamed the Americans: ‘General Lincoln, who could and should have prevented this misfortune, saw it and fell asleep in an armchair’, he wrote in disgust.* It would be wonderful to know what Lincoln thought of the French in return but, oddly, there is no hint in any of his correspondence of what he thought of his allies. It is not inconceivable that he destroyed any incriminating letters. A balanced assessment criticizes poor co-ordination between the allies.21

  The result of this maritime sleight of hand was that British manpower in Savannah was as strong as it could have been, and was far stronger than the French had ever suspected or were in any way prepared for. They had left Martinique, the only French naval base in the Caribbean capable of providing the necessary supplies for such a large fleet, at the end of June; it was now September.

  The French spent weeks building batteries for a long siege, but every day the condition of their sailors, abandoned on their ships, worsened. One account claims that thirty-five sailors were dying of scurvy every day. They were also severely short of water, which was shared out ‘in a cruel way even to the sick’. The bread, which by now had been stored for nearly two years, was inedible, and there was a general lack of clothing, shoes and linen for bandages. The few sailors who were not in their hammocks ‘were weak, of a livid colour, with the marks of death painted on their faces’.22 The comte de Noailles claimed that, if only ten ships of the line had engaged them, the entire fleet would have been taken,23 a conservative estimate if one considers that most of the fleet’s guns and nearly all of her sailors were ashore and the rest were like zombies.

  What d’Estaing thought of this is unclear. One French officer noted how he ‘appeared to have entirely forgotten his vessels’,24 while Lincoln himself noted how d’Estaing ‘appeared exceedingly anxious about his Fleet’25 – startlingly divergent views. On balance it is likely that d’Estaing was painfully aware of the state of his fleet but was himself suffering from the burden of expectation that had been heaped upon the shoulders of French sea power by both the French and the Americans. With such hopes so far unrealized on the American coast, he knew that this was his last chance to make an impact and perhaps to make amends for his abandonment of Sullivan at Newport. Thus the French remained at Savannah, literally digging themselves an enormous hole.

  More time was lost because the Americans had almost no artillery and the siege guns would have to come from the French ships. The French therefore had to drag their naval guns, with their small wooden wheels designed for smooth gun-decks, overland. They then struggled to master the numerous logistical challenges of mounting naval guns, which were mounted on low carriages, in land batteries, which required them to be mounted on high carriages. To enable the gunners to hit their targets, the naval guns therefore had to be positioned on a raised platform, which exposed the gunners to enemy marksmen. They then had to be protected by a firing pit. These took weeks to build and, once firing began, ultimately slowed the rate of French fire. None of this was aided by the fact that, at the very start of the siege, a ship’s steward mistakenly sent a barrel of rum to the forward batteries, rather than a barrel of beer. From the moment that the order to open fire was given, the gunners were roaring drunk for two days straight.26

  By this stage the French were so desperate for men that the warships were almost completely evacuated.27 In direct contrast to almost all British combined operations in this period, the French soldiers blamed the subsequent poor bombardment on the fact that d’Estaing had entrusted some of the most important batteries to his sailors.28 The fifteen British batteries in Savannah were also armed, almost exclusively, with naval guns and were manned entirely by sailors.29 This stage of the battle of Savannah, therefore, was almost a naval battle, contested between sailors with naval guns, but fought on shore between trenches rather than afloat between warships.

  The French attack had little effect on the British positions. Exasperated, d’Estaing fell back on his favourite tactic, the good old-fashioned frontal assault – yelling, sword-wielding, musket-blazing. His men had been unable to build effective batteries with naval guns, his sailors were dying, and every day he spent on shore was another day closer to the next, inevitable, storm that could destroy his ships. His fateful decision to attack was thus based entirely on these ingredients of sea power. The difficulties crushed him. One sorry witness wrote:

  he is cruel to himself. We have seen him sick and attacked with scurvy, never desiring to make use of any remedies, working day and night, sleeping only an hour after dinner, his head resting upon his hands, sometimes lying down, but without undressing … There is not a man in his fleet who would believe that he has endured all the fatigue which he has undergone.30

  The subsequent attack was disastrous. A handful of British sailors in well-made and well-positioned redoubts massacred a rampaging army of French and American sailors and soldiers who were not allowed to fire back – on pain of death – until they had taken the dominant British defensive position, the Spring Hill Redoubt. The carnage was almost inconceivable and the French searched for explanation: ‘We know that the British filled their cannon with packets of scrap iron, the blades of knives and scissors, and even chains five and six feet long.’31 The men who took down the French rush with this hail of iron death were British sailors. Arbuthnot subsequently praised them in a letter to the Admiralty.32

  As usual there were attempts to find humour in the horror, and it was now so easy to poke fun at d’Estaing. A contemporary poem included these comic verses, which must rank as the finest produced in the war:

  Push round the brisk glass,

  He’s surely an Ass,

  Who longer past losses does think on,

  Let us drink, laugh and sing,

  We’ve routed d’Estaing,

  And the Yankies fam’d General Lincoln.

  The French Grenadiers,

  With D’Estaing appears

  At the head of them boldly advancing,

  But approaching too nigh,

  A wounded arm and thigh

  Spoilt at once both his fencing and dancing.

  Of our powder the smell,

  They lik’d not so well,

  As they would that of garlick or onions,

  They roared out ‘sacre dieu!’

  Guns we thought they had few,

  But beggar they sprung up like champignons.

  My tale to cut short,

  They abandon’d the fort,

  Many hundreds behind them did stay,

  Tho to give them their due,

  I believe they had fled too,

  But the dead you know can’t run away.33

  Sadly beaten but permitted to return to their ships unchallenged, the French left Savannah in an operation blessed by fine weather. One British officer recorded the wonderful moment that ‘the whole of the enemy’s shipping that were at Tybee sailed over the bar, and left our port open’ – an interesting inversion of the fear that had already been felt on numerous occasions in this war at the arrival of a fleet of warships.34 This was the first time that Americans and Frenchmen had fought together against the British, and it had done nothing to heal the wounds of French and American antagonism suffered at Newport and Boston in 1778.* One Congressman said: ‘Providence by another Striking Instance has … tumbled our Towring Expectations to the ground.’35 Always sensitive to such developments in the war, the Continental currency went into a tailspin.36

  Weak and disoriented, d’Estaing’s fleet split into several separate parts and eventually limped into Brest, Rochefort, L’Orient, Cádiz and Havana. It was frankly a miracle that the British captured none of their twenty-two ships of the line.37 Lincoln wrote to the president of Congress blaming d’Estaing for abandoning him, just as Sullivan had done in 1778. He claimed, completely un
reasonably, that, had the French fleet stayed, ‘nothing could have prevented our success’.38 These are the words of a farmer with no maritime experience who had been lucky enough not to visit any of the French ships. If d’Estaing had stayed any longer, it is far more likely that his ships would have been driven to their own destruction; by leaving when he did, at least he got them home.

  Under the pressure of exercising sea power for so long, so far from significant dedicated naval repair and resupply facilities, and under the command of a soldier, French sea power in the Caribbean and in American waters had completely disintegrated. By the end of 1779 the French had managed to make a hash of their alliances with both the Americans and the Spanish, and the cherished expectations of sea power being a magic wand, shared by each of the allies, had been exposed as naïve.

  It felt as if the tide was turning back in favour of the British. When news of d’Estaing’s defeat reached England, the guns in the Tower of London were fired in victory, a mark of just how desperate the British had been since 1778.39 Could they now keep this momentum going and use the self-destruction of French sea power to drag themselves away from the precipice?

  * Lincoln was very fat and suffered from sleep apnoea.

  * Lincoln had been particularly angry that d’Estaing had summoned the British to surrender ‘to the arms of the King of France’, Mattern, Benjamin Lincoln, 82.

  22

  AMERICAN DESTRUCTION

  With d’Estaing’s departure from American shores the war at sea reverted to one fought between the British and the trident of American sea power: the Continental Navy, the various state navies and American privateers.

  There were certainly some bright points for American forces at sea. A Scot with good maritime experience, who had settled in Virginia and had made sufficiently influential friends to secure a commission in the Continental Navy, wholeheartedly, if regretfully, took up the American cause. In his own words he had chosen to abandon the sea in the early 1770s in favour of ‘calm contemplation and poetic ease’, where he could appreciate ‘the softer Affectations of the Heart and my prospects of Domestic Happiness’, this being his ‘favourite scheme for life’.1 This all makes him sound like a monk and is more than a little disingenuous. When it came to war, this man was one of the most aggressive and single-minded officers in the Continental Navy, and his achievements would cause a sensation throughout Europe and America. His name was John Paul Jones.

  In 1776 Jones had tasted success on Esek Hopkins’s raid on the Bahamas, and he had subsequently been given his first command, the sloop Providence, in which he had made no fewer than sixteen captures in a cruise off the coast of Nova Scotia. He followed that up with even more success in the ship Alfred, which captured a British supply ship full of uniforms for Burgoyne’s army. With a strange knack of being in the right place at the right time, Jones was operating off the coast of France when the Treaty of Alliance was formally declared in 1778, and his new ship, Ranger, was the first American warship to be saluted by a French warship – a hugely symbolic moment in the history of the revolution, as this was the occasion when the prickly French finally and openly accepted an American warship as representative of an independent nation. If behaving as if they were independent was one side of the coin of American independence, having that behaviour accepted was the other: it gave the American cause value, turning a counterfeit currency into the real thing.

  Jones then headed for Whitehaven, a port on the Irish Sea that had grown wealthy through the export of coal. It may seem a strange choice, but Whitehaven lies on the Solway Firth directly opposite a little Scottish village called Kirkudbright – Jones’s birthplace. Jones, therefore, was deliberately heading to waters he knew, where he could make his local knowledge count. He attacked Whitehaven, burned some shipping and then led a raid into Scotland, where he attempted, and failed, to kidnap a minor Scottish earl, the idea being that he could ransom the earl in exchange for American maritime prisoners held in British gaols. Although he never captured the earl, by raiding a British port he became the first enemy to set foot on English soil and cause significant damage for more than a century.*

  Jones then had more success across the Irish Sea, near Carrickfergus, where he captured a British warship, HMS Drake.2 Until now, the poster boys of American naval power in European waters had been Lambert Wickes, who had captured nine British ships in the Channel in January 1777 and then eighteen more in the Irish Sea in May, and Gustavus Conyngham, who had terrorized British merchant shipping in the Channel; but news of Jones’s exploits, which reached America shortly after news of the alliance with France, transformed him into a personality whose adventures utterly dominated naval gossip, even though he had not yet fought the battle that would cement his name in naval legend.

  That battle took place off Flamborough Head on 24 September 1779.* Jones, leading a small squadron in the 40-gun Bonhomme Richard,† caught up with a British convoy on its way to the Baltic, which was escorted by a powerful 44-gun British ship, HMS Serapis. Captain Richard Pearson of the Serapis had been aware of Jones’s presence for three full days and was fully prepared for him when they met.3

  The two ships fell on each other, the Americans lashing theirs to the British in a display of seamanship and gallantry that was only possible once the fluke of the American anchor had become tangled up with the Serapis’s quarter. They were then so close that the muzzles of the American guns were touching the British hull.4 The Serapis, with far superior guns and healthier, better-trained gunners, fired her guns constantly until, ‘during the last hour of combat the shot passed through both sides of the Bonhomme Richard, meeting little or no resistance’.5

  At the start of the action, the British ship had enjoyed a marginal advantage in firepower over the American, but shortly after firing began, one of Jones’s 18-pounders exploded (and some accounts suggest two), causing massive damage to the lower deck and leading him to order the remaining 18-pounders not to be used.6 The discrepancy in firepower thus became overwhelming. The American rudder was shattered, and only an odd timber here and there kept the poop from crashing down onto the gun-deck.7

  The Serapis, however, was also in a terrible state, having suffered gravely at the hands of American sailors throwing grenades and other combustibles into the ship. The British had been on fire ‘not less than ten or twelve times in different parts of the ship and it was with the greatest difficulty & exertion imaginable at times that we were able to get it extinguished’, and then, finally, they lost the fight and the flames took hold of a cartridge of gunpowder. A catastrophic explosion followed and ‘blew up the whole of the people and officers that were quartered abaft the main mast, from which unfortunate circumstance all those guns were rendered useless for the remainder of the action’.8 Ears ringing, skin scorched, with the mainmast on the verge of falling and with another ship in Jones’s squadron, the frigate Alliance, still entirely undamaged, having skirted the action, Pearson surrendered his ship.9

  There is no contemporary evidence at all that, moments before this, and with his own ship ruined, Jones rejected a British suggestion that he surrender by claiming ‘I have not yet begun to fight.’10 Nonetheless, Herman Melville and countless authors since have revelled in this clash, which, according to a rather overexcited Melville, was ‘For obstinacy, mutual hatred, and courage … without precedent or subsequent in the story of the ocean’.11 More certain is that the battle ranks as one of the most hard-fought and bloody single-ship actions in British and American naval history, in which one witness recalled how they fought with ‘the blood over one’s shoes’.12 Pearson was horrified by the state of the Bonhomme Richard when he went on board to hand over his sword: ‘her quarter and counter on the lower deck entirely drove in, and the whole of her lower deck guns dismounted, she was also on fire in two places and six or seven foot of water in her hold.’13 She sank two days later, which makes this one of those surprisingly rare occurrences when a sailing warship actually sank as the result of battle, and
perhaps the only example when it was the victorious ship that actually sank.14 George III knighted Pearson for his defence of the Serapis and, in his defence of that ship, the defence of the entire Baltic convoy which escaped unharmed.

  * * *

  Unfortunately for the American ships in North American waters, meanwhile, on 4 April 1779 Captain Sir George Collier had been placed in temporary command at New York after the detested and incompetent Gambier had been recalled. Energy came off Collier like sparks off a grindstone. He left behind an excellent diary that survives at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. If there is one word that leaps repeatedly off the pages in his lively prose, it is ‘indignation’. The Americans really got under Collier’s skin. While other British and Jäger servicemen wondered at the natural world of this remarkable continent, Collier’s first recorded thought was, ‘I see with indignation & concern the rebel colours insolently waving on the batterys of New York.’15 He proved an unpleasant, barbed thorn in the American side. In July 1777 he had made the first capture at sea of an American frigate when he chased and took the Hancock.16 In August he had ravaged the coast around Machias in Maine, where he had destroyed around thirty American vessels that had been gathered to invade British-held Nova Scotia.17 He was insatiable.

  Unusually for any British naval commander in New York, Collier got on very well with the usually intolerant Henry Clinton, who had taken over from William Howe after the latter’s resignation had been accepted in May 1778. In the spring of 1779 Collier suggested a series of raids on rebel maritime strong points in the Chesapeake Bay, particularly around the area of Portsmouth and Hampton Roads. The Chesapeake was a focus of rebel shipbuilding, privateering and trade, all of which were instrumental in sustaining the rebel war effort. Clinton gave his consent.

  For a fortnight in May 1779 Collier and his squadron rained shocking violence upon the rebels there, destroying or capturing no fewer than 137 vessels and stores worth at least £1 million. His troops were landed in beautifully conducted amphibious operations, in which flatboats were covered by galleys and gunboats, forming ‘the most beautiful regatta in the world’.18 The climax came on 24 May when Fort Nelson on the Elizabeth River was destroyed: