by Willis, Sam
This, the ‘Moonlight Battle’ of 1780, has never received the attention from historians that it deserves. The first major British fleet victory of the war, it was won by a fleet tested by both enemy skill and hideous weather conditions, at night and in January. Six ships were eventually captured and the British were then forced to fight for their lives as the westerly wind and high swell remorselessly drove them towards the Portuguese coast. In a night of the highest drama two of the six prizes were lost on the rocks. Such a storm in the aftermath of battle has close parallels with the hurricane that struck the shattered fleets after the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. One can only imagine the pain in the sailors’ fingers. Rodney was certain that the poor weather and the fact that the battle happened at night prevented them from capturing every ship in the squadron,59 but the fact that they captured any at all, and that none of the damaged British ships were wrecked, is remarkable in itself. The reward that Rodney received was equally exceptional and was specifically tailored to his well-known debts. He received £1,000 a year for life, to be continued after his death, with £500 going to Lady Rodney and £500 to their children.60 The Royal Navy could be a good employer if it chose.
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News of the battle, that ‘Great Britain was Mistress of the Straits’,61 filtered through to the garrison at Gibraltar who had been teased by a rumour from the Spanish camp that they had actually won the battle.62 Life in Gibraltar was transformed by the real news when it came. ‘The Garrison are all on the wing’, one witness wrote, ‘the sound of the fleet is all that is to be heard and every rock and hill re-echoes the blissful tidings.’63 Indeed, just the anticipation of the arrival of the British fleet was so influential that it drove down the exorbitant price of flour:
This morning flour sold for six-pence per pound, which was some time past two shillings, and a great favour to obtain it at that price; the shops that were shut up, are now opened, and adorned with bread, biscuit, rusk &c. The garrison appears in an entire state of joyful commotion, and the people are so busy purchasing eatables, that it brings to my remembrance the festive fairs in Britain.64
Rodney’s fleet was sighted in another dramatic night-time seascape, the ships’ yards and masts only visible in the flashes of lightning that lit the sky.65 They approached the Rock and then shot past it, caught by the westerly wind and current – exactly the same trap into which the blockading Spanish squadron had fallen the preceding summer.* It was nine full days before the British fleet was able to force its way back to the Rock and weigh anchor under a 21-gun salute. They appeared in such strength that Barceló’s squadron, terrified of attack, darted behind the boom in Algeciras. Over the next few days the Spanish ships were dragged ashore and their guns mounted in land batteries to protect the ships.66
On the other side of the bay, cranes were quickly built on the various moles and harbours, and goods piled high on the now bustling quays. The British took particular pleasure in unloading those supply ships that Rodney had captured from the Spanish before the main fleet battle: who could miss the irony that, thanks to British sea power, Gibraltar had been relieved by Spanish stores?67 British gunners also had great fun testing the captured Spanish gunpowder, which proved greatly inferior to British and was surely a significant factor in the British victory at the Moonlight Battle.68 A particular bonus for the garrison was that Rodney sent all his surgeons’ mates ashore to help in the overflowing hospital.69
Lángara was carried ashore in a chair and the rumour went around, no doubt to the music of British sniggering, that he had been shot in the balls.70 Through his haze of pain Lángara had been impressed with British seamanship and with their treatment of their prisoners, and also with the fact that one of the midshipmen in Rodney’s fleet was none other than the king’s son, Prince William Henry. Lángara is often quoted as having said, ‘Well does Great Britain merit the empire of the sea, when the humblest stations in her Navy are supported by Princes of the Blood.’71 Perhaps William was particularly polite to the captured admiral, but what Lángara had failed to notice was that everyone else thought that William was a royal pain in the arse. He went on to have a dangerously disruptive career in the Royal Navy that nearly ruined the careers of several talented seamen, including Nelson.
Rodney gloated over his victory as only he could gloat. He wrote to Sandwich a letter full of grovelling praise and flattery. It is so full of effluvia that Rodney can only have been drunk when he wrote it. ‘I hope your enemies will now be confounded and that you may long continue at the head of that Board you so ably direct’, he wrote. ‘I am and ever will be grateful for the favors and friendship you honored me with in my youthful days, nor shall age or change of fortune ever make me deviate from my fixed resolution of ever proving myself a true and faithful friend to your Lordship.’72 ‘Spain in all her provinces severely feels the blow she has received’, trumpeted Rodney. ‘Despair, terror, fear and consternation prevails in every part.’73 An impressive list of symptoms to have been caused by British sea power; a key one missing from the list is wrath. Lángara was apoplectic with the French. He believed, correctly, that the French had known that Rodney was at sea but had done nothing to warn him. He felt betrayed and deceived. Not only did he refuse to fight with the French again, but actually offered to fight with the British against them.74 The allies were never going to help the Americans win the war if such distrust became endemic.
Another interesting result of the relief of Gibraltar was that the situation in the bay was suddenly turned on its head. Roads inland from Gibraltar were appalling and the Spanish relied as heavily upon maritime resupply as the British. Rodney’s cruisers now patrolled the Gut providing protection for British merchant ships and trying to capture Spanish ones. It is no coincidence that, soon after the arrival of Rodney’s fleet, a British Newfoundland ship, which was not part of the original resupply convoy, arrived with 500,000 pounds of salt cod.75 Rodney’s presence also allowed the sultan of Morocco to deliberately insult the Spanish at Ceuta.76 The condition of the Spanish ‘besiegers’ quickly became miserable.
For some on the Rock itself, however, the arrival of the British fleet was a desperate affair because Rodney and Eliott used the opportunity presented by so many British ships to rid the Rock of what Eliott described as ‘useless mouths’. They did this by initiating an enforced evacuation of women and children whose husbands or fathers were unable to demonstrate a sufficient quantity of stored food – an order that tore families apart.77
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On 13 February 1780 Rodney was ready to set sail, no doubt with children and women weeping for their fathers and husbands who waved from ashore. High on his own success, and against all orders, Rodney left behind one of his ships of the line, an incongruous disregard for the value of a warship. Sandwich was incensed, not only because it was a stupid thing to have done, but also because – in anticipation of such behaviour – Rodney had received specific instructions not to do so.78 The victory seems to have allowed a little of the real Rodney to bleed through his hitherto perfect, even fawning behaviour. It was not a good sign for the future.
His success, however, gave him some leeway, especially because it continued. He escaped European shores unmolested by Córdova, who lurked in Cádiz with fifty ships. Then, on his way to the Caribbean, Rodney detached a homeward-bound squadron which soon fell in with, and captured, a coppered French 64-gunner, stored for four years and with £60,000 in cash on board. Four merchant ships in her convoy were also taken.79
It was a fitting end to an operation of quite startling success. Finally the navy was doing what it was supposed to do. British expectations of sea power were, for the first time in this war, being met, though it only created a thirst for more. ‘You cannot conceive the expectations we all have here from the great beginning you have made’, purred Sandwich,80 and the MP Lord Hobart declared, ‘I beg you would go on beating the enemy … as unanimity will be the consequence of it.’81 ‘The eyes of Europe are upon you’, he continued, ‘an
d I have no doubt that you will treat France there [the Caribbean] as you have done Spain in Europe and force them once more to ask [for] peace.’82
America, surely, was within Britain’s grasp. However, the fact that Rodney sailed from Gibraltar directly to the Caribbean presented unwary, uninformed or over-eager observers with a trap, into which many historians have since fallen. Most of the coppered ships that Rodney had used to such great effect at the Moonlight Battle had been borrowed from the Channel Fleet whence they now returned,* and he took with him to the Caribbean a force designed to boost, rather than replace, the existing Caribbean squadron. The name of Rodney was common to both theatres, therefore, but the overwhelming numerical superiority and quality of the ships that he had enjoyed in his Gibraltar campaign were not.
The British Leeward Islands fleet was now under the temporary command of Rear-Admiral Sir Hyde Parker.* It had been in a desperate state even before the battle of Grenada, but now it was only sixteen strong and really suffering.† Hyde Parker had been willing to take the war to the French but, with insufficient force, limited resources and hundreds of sick men, he had been foiled at every turn, though, given the resources, he avowed that he ‘would have co-operated … with any being but the Devil’ to attack the French.83 The Caribbean command was nothing but a curse, and it had already accounted, both professionally and physically, for the excellent Barrington and the resourceful Byron. Parker was now feeling that pressure. He had proved himself more than capable on numerous occasions in this war, but his eyesight was terrible, he was sick, and he feared for his own competence. His command weighed ‘much too heavy for my shoulders’.84
Such self-doubt alone was a recipe for disaster because of Rodney’s inherent suspicion of his subordinates, which had actually been aggravated, rather than soothed, as one might expect, by the conduct of his fleet at the Moonlight Battle. He railed and cursed at them.85 ‘If the fleet I am going to command’, he wrote, ‘should be as negligent and disobedient as part of that which sailed from England with me, you will hear of dismission, upon dismission, I must, I shall be obey’d.’86 To make matters worse, Rodney now faced a completely different type of enemy from the one he had defeated at the Moonlight Battle. Then, Rodney had surprised a smaller number of slow ships crewed by sick men; now, his enemy was larger, skilled and prepared.
* Another example of the absence of French sea power affecting the war was Sullivan’s 1779 raids on the Iroquois.
* Indigo was the only way that any fabric could be dyed blue until the introduction of a synthetic substitute in the 1870s. In a curious way, therefore, the Royal Navy was about to attack a location that had played a crucial role in establishing its identity: blue sailors’ jackets and officers’ frock-coats were dyed with Charleston indigo.
* Boston, Providence and Queen of France. The others were Trumbull (one of the original thirteen frigates ordered in 1776), Alliance (1777), Deane (purchased 1777) and Confederacy (1778). By then the Americans also had at their disposal the Pallas, lent by France in 1778.
* Before the war Lincoln had been a farmer, deacon and town clerk in a small village in Massachusetts, though he had of course witnessed the horror of d’Estaing’s fleet at Savannah.
* It is possible that his desire to resist was inspired by the huge fall-out which accompanied the loss of Ticonderoga without a fight in 1777.
† The Dutch-built frigate South Carolina, the most heavily armed warship that flew the American flag during the war, escaped destruction or capture because she was at sea at the time. She went on to make a few significant captures in 1781–2 and played a key role in the Spanish capture of the Bahamas in 1782. For histories of the ship, see J. A. Lewis, Neptune’s Militia, 34–50, 65 ff.; Middlebrook, South Carolina, 31–8.
* The riots began over religious issues but were quickly hijacked by others with a variety of grievances, many informed by the war.
* There was a chemical reaction in these early coppered ships between the iron nails that fastened the ships’ hull timbers together and the copper. This ‘galvanic action’ slowly but surely destroyed the ships’ structural integrity – a whisper of tragedy that would be heard as several thousand screams by the end of the war, not least in the wreck of the Royal George, which sank at her moorings at Spithead, with the loss of around 1,200 lives.
* The Company of Caracas was a Spanish trading company with a monopoly on the Venezuelan trade.
* See pp. 299–300.
* Rodney took just four coppered ships with him to the Caribbean.
* Father to the Captain Hyde Parker who had so distinguished himself in that raid up the Hudson in 1776.
† There were three more ships under Peter Parker in Jamaica.
24
ALLIED RECOMMITMENT
The key lesson of 1780 is that the shocking failure of French and Spanish sea power in the first years of their alliance with America did not cause them to lose faith in sea power as a tool or weapon. In fact the opposite seems to have been the case: they still believed in it to the extent that they thought it would win them the war.
Every nation, it seemed, would forgive sea power anything. In 1778–9 the French had used a fleet to seize a handful of islands in the Caribbean but their balance was clearly in the red: d’Estaing’s fleet had been proven impotent in America; the allied invasion attempt of Britain had failed catastrophically; thousands of French and Spanish sailors had died from epidemics; the Spanish had been unable to blockade Gibraltar and had been defeated by Rodney; millions upon millions of dollars had been spent by both France and Spain to little financial or territorial benefit. Indeed, the only tangible reward was that, thanks in part to the mere presence of French and Spanish warships, the American rebellion persisted, but as long as it persisted, the French and Spanish believed that, by using their sea power, there would be opportunities to further their own interests.
And so French and Spanish politicians and leaders lined more men up to die and heaped more coin to spend, as if they were deliberately testing the limits of their own system against the ‘guarantee’ of sea power. The year 1780 was a key moment. Near the end of the year the French naval minister Sartine fell from power and was replaced by an ally and protégé of Jacques Necker, the financial brain behind France’s immense borrowing. It is very likely that a different political outcome in France at this time would have dramatically changed the direction of the war. Sartine’s replacement, the marquis de Castries, now worked with Necker to sail France’s crippled financial ship into even more distant waters, while logistical problems were solved on an ad hoc basis as they arose. The insatiable demand for labour in the dockyards, for example, was met with ever larger numbers of pressed men and convict labour: an unsustainable model for long-term dockyard efficiency and competence but one which injected enough muscle into the French navy to keep it going for another campaign.1
Earlier, important changes had also been made in terms of command. The previous French Caribbean campaign had failed to maximize its potential for numerous reasons, but chief among these was the maritime incompetence of its leader, the arrogant soldier d’Estaing. The man who would command this new fleet to be sent to America, however, the comte de Guichen, had spent almost his entire life at sea. Significantly, he had been entrusted with command of the fleet during the trials of the new French signalling system in 1775, and had then gone on to lead a division of d’Orvilliers’s fleet at the battle of Ushant, where he had led with clarity, manoeuvred with precision and fought with bravery. Said to be the most accomplished admiral in the French navy, he also had a reputation as ‘a very clever fellow’.2 With this fleet came 16,000 soldiers hell-bent on retaking St Lucia and attacking Barbados. A dominant force on its own, this French fleet, however, was only one part of the opposition that Rodney now faced.
The second was a sizeable Spanish expedition that had amassed at Cádiz before setting out across the Atlantic. This fleet, consisting of 146 merchantmen, 11,000 troops and twelve ships of the line a
nd commanded by Admiral Don Josef Solano, would either unite with the French in the Windward Islands or head to the Spanish city and naval base at Havana in the Leeward Islands. Solano, like de Guichen, was a life-long salt-blooded sailor. He had joined the Spanish navy as a teenager and had commanded his first 100-gun ship at the age of just thirty-six in 1762. The Spanish also made a massive new financial commitment in this period, and Charles III set out to borrow 60 million reals from the Five Greater Guilds of Madrid and a syndicate of other French, Spanish and Dutch financiers. Such borrowing was preferred over raising taxes or defaulting on the wages of public employees:3 just like the French, the Spanish crown funded its support for a revolution in a way best calculated to avoid creating its own revolution at home. The Spanish had been sorely hurt by Lángara’s defeat at the Moonlight Battle but remained committed to the war because there was sufficient evidence that Britain was cracking under pressure: their dreams of easy victories over imminent and lightly escorted British trade convoys seemed perfectly rational.4
This combined Bourbon campaign was designed to change the face of the war by threatening the British at their key power bases in the Caribbean. With the resources that Rodney had to hand, he would do well – very well indeed – if he could merely protect the status quo and see off the combined Bourbon threat that now hung over the British Caribbean like a tropical storm. If he could get to either fleet before they united, however, he would be given a real opportunity to knock either France or Spain out of the war. Both countries had bounced back once from significant disappointments, but now, for political, financial and logistical reasons, it was very unlikely indeed that they would be able to do so again. The British were thus under threat but simultaneously presented with a golden opportunity, and they fully anticipated that a ‘lucky blow’ now would win them the war. For once those expectations appear to have been entirely realistic.5