by Willis, Sam
Elphinstone and his men had, in effect, played the part that John Glover’s Marblehead mariners had played with such success when attached to Washington’s army in the New York and New Jersey campaigns of 1776. An important lesson of this war was that armies functioned in America with far greater success if they comprised a large group of professional sailors led by an experienced and high-ranking officer. In this, Elphinstone was a crucial unifier between army and navy – exactly what had been lacking in Burgoyne and Carleton’s campaigns in Lake Champlain and the Hudson Highlands in 1776–7.29
The navy also contributed in another significant way. To make up for the loss of Clinton’s siege-train on the voyage south, Arbuthnot lent, albeit grudgingly,30 heavy guns from his ships to arm the British batteries ashore, a logistical feat that the British seem to have experienced no trouble with at all. Those guns had to be hauled out of the gun-decks, lowered into boats, rowed ashore and then dragged into position – a job that would normally have been done by horses. Because all the British horses had died on the voyage down, however, this job was done by sailors, 120 of them, harnessed to the guns by special rope harnesses made, of course, by the sailors.31
When it came to the actual siege, the sailors again played a key part with 450 men, three captains and a lieutenant from each ship on duty on shore.32 Comparison with the French siege at Savannah could not be starker. Their landings had been disastrous and their siege operations had been both delayed and then crippled by the French being forced to use naval guns in their land batteries and to man them with their zombie sailors.
With the army in position, the British were temporarily stalled by Whipple’s clever defensive position. The American sailors had defended their ships well with a large and deep boom and their anchorage was covered by crossfire from shore positions.
There matters stood for several weeks until a reinforcement from New York allowed Clinton to send men around the north of the city to cut off the American escape by land. At the same time Elphinstone dragged a large boat on rollers overland from the Ashley to the Cooper River where he could police the rebel boat movements to and from the city.33 The British envelopment of Charleston was thus complete, and it stands in such marked contrast to the New York campaign of 1776 that had been designed to drive the Americans from the city. Here, army and navy worked together brilliantly with the single, focused intention of trapping and capturing Lincoln’s army. It worked like a dream and is a powerful reminder of what might have been had the Howes adopted a similar strategy at New York right at the very start of the war.
Lincoln had waited for too long. There had been ships and sailors aplenty to take his army and any civilians who wished to go with them to safety but, pressured by civilian officials and Congress’ blind desire not to abandon Charleston without a fight, he sacrificed his army.* He surrendered on 12 May 1780, the largest American defeat of the war. Some 2,571 Continental soldiers surrendered, but it was also a major naval defeat. Nearly 1,000 seamen surrendered, including Abraham Whipple, one of the Continental Navy’s ablest commanders. Three of the largest remaining Continental warships – Providence, Boston and Ranger – were taken into British service, leaving only four of any significant size in the entire Continental Navy.34 All but one of the ships of the South Carolina Navy were destroyed,† including the Bricole, a ship pierced for 60 guns and purchased from the French, the largest vessel to serve in any of the state navies during the war.35 It was the worst defeat inflicted upon an American military force until 1862, when 10,700 Union troops surrendered to Stonewall Jackson at Harper’s Ferry. Lincoln limped out at the head of the ‘most ragged Rabble I ever beheld’.36
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Although much focus tends to be thrown on the loss of Lincoln’s army, the disaster at Charleston also needs to be considered in the context of the systematic British destruction of American shipping and shipbuilding that began in 1777 and peaked with Collier’s raids and the victory at Penobscot in 1779. The loss of the American ships at Charleston had an impact that outweighed any of these previous losses: it is as if a threshold of disappointment had finally been reached. The American economy, sent into a tailspin by d’Estaing’s defeat at Savannah, nosedived. John Adams, who was then in Holland desperately negotiating a loan with the Dutch, believed American affairs had been sent into a ‘violent crisis’ by the loss of Charleston,37 and was now forced to argue that the defeat there should not be allowed to affect American credit. It is telling that Adams, a brilliant man, a wordsmith and a trained lawyer, sounded entirely unconvincing and desperate:
But why were these four or five frigates of so much more importance than several times that number that we had lost before. We lost several frigates with Philadelphia and shipping to a much greater value than at Charlestown. We lost frigates with New York: but above all we lost at Penobscot armed vessels, to five times a greater amount than at Charlestown.38
Charleston was the final, catastrophic fault in the dam of artificial confidence that had been built by the American rebels since 1775. Lexington; Bunker Hill; a navy in the lakes; a Continental Navy; state navies; privateers; Trenton; the defence of the Delaware; Saratoga: all had played their part in demonstrating commitment, resolve and resourcefulness in the rebellion. Washington’s army still survived, yet so much of the confidence that had been generated was weakened by the failure of d’Estaing at New York, Newport and Savannah, by the destruction of the state navies and the Continental Navy and, finally, by the capture of Charleston.
When news reached Paris, Fillipo Mazzei, an American agent, wrote to his friend Thomas Jefferson:
Bad news have long legs … I never was afflicted in Virginia by our bad events as I am now … we are really dejected … It is amazing the impression such an event makes in Europe. The greater the distance, the more it will be magnified in men’s own imaginations.
Like Adams, he was forced to argue, entirely unconvincingly, that ‘such a loss would not materially affect our operations, and that it is trifling in comparison to the unshaken constancy of the Americans’.39
The view from America really was far less rosy than that which both Adams and Mazzei were trying to paint. British concerns and fears had been soothed by the news just as those of the Americans had been piqued. The timing of Charleston’s surrender simply could not have been any better: London was then in the grip of the Gordon Riots, the worst riots of the century;* the Opposition had finally begun to work together and had established some significant momentum, and North’s government, though still with a good majority, was shaken. News of Charleston acted like an injection of political propane, allowing North to call and win a snap election.
The Americans knew that, without more significant foreign help, the war would soon be over, but their position was now far weaker than it had been in 1778 when they had first formally acquired such help. They now needed another, massive, commitment, from both France and Spain, if they were to stand any chance of victory, but this time both allies had even more reasons to leave the Americans to their own devices. D’Estaing had returned to France in tatters, having achieved nothing at all; the French had lost all their possessions in India; both navies had been ravaged by the horrific experience of the 1779 Channel operation; and the Spanish navy was about to suffer the misfortune of meeting a true British naval tornado, Admiral George Bridges Rodney, who would give them a proper beating.
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In the winter of 1779 the fate of the Gibraltar garrison was on a bayonet’s edge. A relief was planned but the operation was fraught with danger. Several large fleets lay between Britain and Gibraltar: there was an allied force in Brest and Spanish squadrons in Ferrol, Cádiz and Gibraltar itself. Whoever was chosen to relieve Gibraltar would have to run the gauntlet of one, or perhaps all, of these fleets. The relief of Gibraltar was therefore a major naval commitment; so large, in fact, that it could only be provided by two British naval fleets combined. One fleet, ultimately bound for the Caribbean, would be diverted to sail the fi
rst leg of its journey via Gibraltar, and the other would consist of the most powerful ships in the Channel Fleet. The two would sail together as a massive naval escort but would then divide at Gibraltar, one sailing on to the Caribbean and the other sailing back to the Channel. Such an operation was only possible now because of the failure of the 1779 Bourbon Channel invasion campaign. In November 1779 the French invasion army on the north coast of Brittany had struck camp, allowing the British to look to their distant possessions once more.
The man chosen to spearhead this operation was Admiral George Rodney, whose appointment is further evidence of a new mindset in London. Rodney was experienced and he was aggressive. He was also, unfortunately, totally unpredictable, and had been deliberately bypassed for command until now. The primary concern was that he had a proven track record of being deeply and criminally irresponsible with public money. Investigations led by the Navy Board into his pre-war conduct as commander-in-chief at Jamaica led them to stop his pay, an exceptional act for an eighteenth-century administration. Rodney was also an eager – and bad – gambler and, since the start of the war, had actually been living in France to escape his creditors. One modern historian has described Rodney’s behaviour in this troubled time as ‘a staggering display of ill judgement’ by a man who was ‘over-bearing, avaricious and dysfunctional’.40
A true aristocrat, Rodney also had a rigid belief in the natural order of things that was visible in his command style. He had high expectations and no tolerance. His subordinates loathed him and the Admiralty knew that his subordinates loathed him. Rodney revelled in their fear. From the start of the American war, he had bombarded the Admiralty with letters begging for employment, and now he was about to get the answer he so craved. At a time when every officer in the Royal Navy was particularly touchy, Rodney’s employment can be seen as something of a last, desperate, measure. Sandwich was only happy with the appointment once he had made certain that Rodney would be surrounded by carefully selected men with direct links to the Secretary of the Navy, who would control Rodney’s budget.41
Nonetheless, Rodney was competent at certain things. He had an innovative mind that translated an obsession with naval victory and self-enrichment into a mad desire to increase the efficiency of the fleets under his command. Shortly after he had been given command, he began to fire out reams of new instructions and regulations for his fleet detailing expected duty. One of his most inspired decisions was to appoint a man named Gilbert Blane as physician of his fleet. Blane was a man of exceptional vision and skill who went on to become the greatest medical reformer in the history of the Royal Navy.
With safeguards in place, Sandwich was desperate to get Rodney to sea. It took only two months to equip and man Rodney’s fleet, an amazing achievement and a very rare one in this war: the complexity of organizing long-distance resupply meant that most convoys were seriously delayed. When the weather changed on 8 December, Sandwich wrote: ‘For God’s sake go to sea without delay, you cannot conceive of what importance it is to yourself, to me, and to the public that you should not lose this fair wind.’42 When he finally set sail, he led a fleet of around 100 ships, including an East India convoy that also required naval protection at least as far as Ferrol. This massive Armada in the eastern Atlantic matched Arbuthnot and Clinton’s armada, bound for Charleston, which was then at sea in the western Atlantic: from Boxing Day 1779 for nearly a month, almost the entire might of British sea power was on the move.
Rodney’s fleet was particularly well equipped. As a means of reducing the growth of weeds and the impact of the terrible shipworm which bored holes through ships’ hulls, the British had been experimenting with nailing sheets of copper onto the hulls. By the autumn of 1779 its value was adequately proven, though its dangers inadequately understood,* and in a close meeting between Sandwich, the king and the new Comptroller of the Navy and administrative mastermind Charles Middleton, the monumental decision had been made to copper the entire British fleet. A huge financial gamble, it added a full 10 to 15 per cent to the cost of building a ship.43
Rodney was the first beneficiary of this order. He knew that his coppered ships would sail faster, closer to the wind, and manoeuvre with more precision than any un-coppered ship of a similar size, of any nation, and the French and Spanish, unable to match British industrial might, were miles behind in the race to copper their ships. Copper, therefore, would give him a massive tactical advantage in battle as it would confer on him the initiative. Immediately realizing its significance, Rodney issued new instructions to create a hunting pack of coppered ships that he could unleash with a specific signal.44
As always, such a big naval operation as the relief of Gibraltar was impossible to keep secret, though the British made special efforts to obfuscate its ultimate destination, and the ruse seems to have worked. The troops, supplies and pay for the Gibraltar garrison were embarked under orders from the American Department; no officers from the Gibraltar garrison’s regiments were sent with the convoy; and even the coal for the garrison was procured from a source not usually associated with the supply of Gibraltar. Rodney’s open orders were for the Leeward Islands and only sealed orders, to be opened miles offshore, mentioned Gibraltar.45
The French and Spanish thus heard only inexact rumours and they acted inexactly. The most prevalent belief was that any ships bound for Gibraltar would be lightly defended. As a result only a handful of allied ships actually made it to sea. Four hundred miles or so to the west of Rochefort, meanwhile, Rodney was making his way to Gibraltar at the head of a truly enormous battle fleet. On his way he stumbled into a convoy of fifteen Spanish supply ships destined for Spanish naval yards, escorted by several Spanish frigates and the Guipuscoano, a big and beautiful 64-gunner which belonged to the Company of Caracas.* In Rodney’s rather nonchalant words, ‘in a few hours the whole was taken’,46 and the Guipuscoano was renamed Prince William for the king’s young son, Prince William Henry, the future William IV, who was sailing as a midshipman in Rodney’s fleet aboard the Prince George.
Several days later Rodney came across his real prize, a Spanish squadron of eleven warships under the command of Don Juan de Lángara, which was heading for Cádiz, in the mistaken expectation of meeting up with the Cádiz fleet under Admiral Don Luis de Córdova to face a numerically inferior British fleet.47 Like Lángara, Córdova knew of those plans but, unlike Lángara, he also knew that Rodney was out in force and was currently swooping down on the Spanish coast. Córdova stayed in Cádiz; no one warned Lángara.
Rodney, with a force more than twice the size of Lángara’s, found the Spaniard’s fleet fatally stretched out, ‘at immense distances one from the other’.48 It was midday when the fleets sighted each other and the sea was rising into a winter storm off Portugal: no place to be. Lángara ordered his ships to flee for Cádiz, believing that he could not ‘expose others for his sake, as his vessel was not a good sailer’.49
The British pack lost no time in chasing and attacking. Fillipo Mazzei explains why:
It is undeniable that the extraordinary courage by which the English sailor have been hitherto animated, was chiefly owing to their persuasion of being invincible upon the water. Since the beginning of this war they have experienced the contrary in almost every engagement of equal force with the French, but the Spaniards still continued to be in their opinion incapable of fighting.50
Rodney, struck down with gout, conducted the battle from his bunk through the capable hands of his flag captain, Walter Young. Rodney’s coppered ships chased and came up with the Spaniards as the sun set, overwhelming the rearmost first before sweeping up the rest in a classic chase action. Rodney later explicitly attributed his fleet’s greater speed to their new copper bottoms, the first operational confirmation of the value of coppering and another building block in a growing British psychological superiority at sea.
Engaging at night was fraught with difficulty and danger and was almost entirely unregulated by rules or instructions. Interestingly, ho
wever, and perhaps in anticipation of exactly this type of battle, Rodney had issued specific and detailed instructions for engaging at night shortly after his fleet had left Portsmouth.51 The British would all have been equipped with specially designed night-time telescopes, but scientists had still not solved one crucial problem with their state-of-the-art night-vision technology: the image appeared upside down.52
The Spaniards undoubtedly fought well, their valour ‘great beyond description’,53 particularly that shown by Lángara, who only gave up his ship at two in the morning when it was totally dismasted and he was seriously injured. British accounts describe him fighting until that moment against four British ships.54 Several British ships were severely damaged, a full third of Rodney’s fleet dismasted, and the British struggled in the darkness, high sea and strong wind to send prize crews across to the captured ships. The Spanish flagship was only boarded ‘with infinite hazard’ and a British longboat was lost in the process, overturned when a wave tossed it against the hull of the Spaniard. Miraculously, it seems that no British sailor lost his life in this accident.55 Shockingly, one ship, the Santo Domingo, exploded, an event that appears in nearly every contemporary painting of the battle [see fig. 13]. ‘Had this awful event taken place five minutes later, we most probably would have been partakers of her unhappy fate’, wrote a shaken Captain John MacBride,56 whose ship, the Bienfaisant, was closing in on her kill. The British ship’s forecastle was scattered with debris from the explosion.
In amongst the carnage of the battle and its aftermath was an example of touching humanity. Captain MacBride, who secured the Spanish flagship Fénix, knew that he had an outbreak of smallpox on the Bienfaisant. He chose not to force any of the Fénix’s crew onto his ship as prisoners, the standard practice after a naval surrender. ‘The feelings of a British officer cannot allow him to introduce an infection even amongst his enemies’, he wrote.57 This is just one example of several from this battle and its aftermath in which the British treated their Spanish prisoners with notable compassion – a particularly significant fact for the dark shadow it casts over the stunning harshness with which American maritime prisoners were treated by the British in this war.58