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

by Willis, Sam

  Surprisingly, given their desperate performance so far in this war, the men who would show that this did not have to be the case were Spanish.

  * Other examples are Howe at New York and Barrington at St Lucia, both in 1778.

  * By June the allies combined had thirty-five ships of the line; Rodney had eighteen. Jamieson, ‘Leeward Islands’, 219.

  * One of the first French officers to travel to America, Lafayette had already served in the American army from June 1777–January 1779 when he returned to Paris on leave.

  * An oil derived from the herb of St John’s wort, still used as a traditional remedy for a variety of illnesses.

  25

  SPANISH SKILL

  Control of the area around the Mississippi was a key Spanish war aim and it had been achieved by 1780. This territory, in the words of the Spanish Minister of the Indies, was to be ‘the bulwark of the vast empire of New Spain’.1 Bernardo de Gálvez, the governor of New Orleans who had already demonstrated considerable diplomatic skill in his handling of the Willing raid, had taken to military operations like a duck to water.

  Gálvez had received news of the Spanish declaration of war long before any British forces in the area and had prepared a little fleet to raid up the Mississippi. His ships, apart from a single frigate, were then destroyed by a hurricane, but the determined and resourceful Gálvez went back to work and created another little fleet out of thin air by raising some wrecks from the seabed and sending troops far and wide to strip the Gulf Coast around New Orleans of every available craft. Once ready, his new fleet carried a jumble of men: Spanish veterans, Mexican recruits, Canary Islanders, carabiniers, militiamen, free blacks, mulattos and Indians.2 The fleet was shadowed on the banks of the Mississippi by those soldiers who could not fit on the boats.

  On 7 September this eclectic maritime force surprised the British at Manchac, thus securing the first Spanish victory of the war. The key strategic location of Baton Rouge fell soon after, and then Fort Panmure at Natchez. Also, and perhaps more importantly, they captured eight British vessels in the river and adjacent lakes, including one troop transport on its way to Manchac, which was taken by a Spanish crew that was five times smaller than that of its prize.3 Not only had the Spanish taken control of the key British forts on the river, therefore, but they had also acquired a small fleet with which they could police the river and link their new possessions together. In total Gálvez and his men captured three forts, 550 soldiers, eight vessels and 430 leagues of the best land on the Mississippi. Quite a prize.

  In the summer of 1780, therefore, the Hudson, the Mississippi and the mighty harbour of Newport were in American, Spanish and French hands: a three-way transnational allied claw on the American colonies that held them fast against British threats from north, south and east and provided a strong foundation from which to build. The French presence in Newport paralysed the Royal Navy at New York and Solano’s massive fleet at Havana paralysed the British fleet at Jamaica. There were no significant British naval forces in the Floridas, Georgia or South Carolina at all, and Gálvez seized the opportunity.

  He set about preparing for a strike against Mobile, the closest British base to New Orleans and a crucial harbour. Mobile Bay is like a tooth knocked out of the face of the Gulf of Mexico. Thirty miles long, six wide and protected by sandbanks, it was a fine anchorage. Some 1,200 men were readied in fourteen ships, but Gálvez’s preparations were undone by another storm, this one so fierce that 400 Spanish sailors and soldiers drowned.4 Yet again Gálvez was forced to resuscitate a fleet, and yet again he succeeded where many would have failed. For Gálvez the struggle for sea power was, more than anything else, a struggle against the elements.

  When his fleet finally arrived at Mobile, things again went wrong. Six ships ran aground, one was wrecked, and the whole process of unloading troops and supplies, trying at the best of times, became almost farcical in the tempestuous weather. Gálvez lost so many supplies that he seriously considered retreating overland to New Orleans.5 Ten days after his arrival, however, reinforcements arrived from Havana and the siege was on. The Spanish immediately began to make scaling ladders from their shattered ships.6 The city was defenceless against such sea power and Fort Charlotte fell on 13 March. The Spanish thus took control of Mobile and with it secured access deep inland via the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers.

  * * *

  Gálvez’s next goal was Pensacola, capital of British West Florida and only fifty miles or so further along the coast. Pensacola, however, was another type of target altogether, a fact which Gálvez knew well, having commissioned a detailed spying operation on the British defences there in the twilight years before official Spanish involvement in the war.7 To take Pensacola would require a far more significant expedition than that which had taken Mobile, and it would rely entirely on Spanish ships: Pensacola was almost completely cut off from the interior by impassable swamps – it was, in effect, an island. Gálvez therefore travelled to Havana to urge Solano in person to let him borrow his fleet. Solano agreed.

  In October nearly 4,000 troops boarded a fleet of seventy-two ships under Solano’s command, left Havana for Pensacola, and immediately sailed into a horrific storm – the third time in three operations that natural forces destroyed Spanish fleets. ‘The day began beautiful, with a clear horizon and a good wind’, wrote one Spaniard, but things started to change, and fast. ‘The wind rose at 9.30; at twelve it became violent; and at 4 there was a furious hurricane.’ Three days later, their masts gave way, and ‘water came in through the heads, the ports, and everywhere’. One ship, the San Ramón, was taking on fifty-eight inches of water every hour.8

  Most surviving accounts of the storm are terse and echo shock and disappointment, rather than detailing the actual struggle with the elements, but one letter written by an educated Spaniard, perhaps an officer and certainly a seaman, offers a glimpse of the shocking destruction that visited the fleet. He reported that, of Gálvez’s seven ships of the line, only one returned unscathed. One was never seen again and the rest were all left dismasted and adrift in the Gulf of Mexico. The fleet was scattered far and wide across the Gulf of Mexico: some survivors came ashore at their intended destination of Pensacola; others reached Mobile, New Orleans, even Campeche on the south-eastern tip of the Gulf of Mexico’s crescent; others still, including Gálvez himself, were able to make it back to Havana. In many instances the sailors had thrown overboard everything that the ocean had not already claimed, simply to stay afloat. For warships the heaviest and most dangerous items in a storm were the cannon; for the horse transports it was the poor horses; for one of the hospital ships it was her entire supply of ‘equipment and materials’. No detailed figures survive, but the British press boasted that over 2,000 Spaniards died.9 The hurricane was so powerful that its existence can be physically demonstrated today in tree-ring isotopes in Georgia.10

  * * *

  This sequence of three storms endured by the Spanish in three separate operations raises the important question of weather forecasting in this period. In this campaign alone Gálvez had been frustrated at every turn, and in the war as a whole the weather repeatedly played a major role, not least in the storm that disrupted the battle between Howe and d’Estaing off Rhode Island in 1778, the storms that delayed and damaged Byron on his way to America and then the Caribbean in 1778, the storm that damaged d’Estaing’s fleet at Savannah in 1779, the storm that nearly destroyed Arbuthnot and Clinton’s expeditionary force to Charleston in 1780, and the major hurricane of October 1780 that would shortly tear apart the Royal Navy in the Caribbean.

  It is important to realize that the men who navigated these ships, entirely dependent on the weather though charged with the fate of empires, actually knew very little about the science of the weather. Professional sailors had a general understanding that certain locations were dangerous at certain times of year, but apart from that their weather forecasting simply relied upon portents in the immediate environment: the behaviour of s
ea-birds; pods of dolphins moving in a certain direction; the appearance and behaviour of ocean swells. The science of meteorology was not unknown, but it was not yet a rigorous science, and instruments were very rare and neither standardized nor accurate. Certain crucial basics had not yet been discovered: atmospheric dynamics and the concepts of revolving storms and moving depressions were all unknown until the nineteenth century.11

  It is all too easy to focus on a warship’s guns and forget that these ships had no weapons at all with which to fight or outwit the weather. If caught out, all that the sailors could do was endure, though it is important to appreciate just how skilled they became at doing exactly that. A practised eighteenth-century crew could swiftly transform a ship set up to squeeze every last knot from a light breeze into one that could be punished by the elements for days at a time. Their repair skills were also exceptional. Wood or canvas could be taken from one part of a ship to be grafted onto another, like a bone transplant. Rudders could become jury-masts; capstan poles could become yards; sails could block breaches in the hull. We only have a dim sense now of just how they did what they did, however, and the question of seamanship during or after storms and battles remains one of the most interesting but least researched topics of naval history.12 Indeed, one of the most fascinating hidden statistics of this period is not how many ships were wrecked by storms but how many were saved by exceptional seamanship and innovation – a type of knowledge that is now largely lost to history.

  * * *

  Gálvez’s men endured this third storm and, eventually, returned with all but one of their ships to Havana, an impressive achievement indeed. Gálvez set about rebuilding the force. In Pensacola knowledge that this extraordinarily resilient man had his eyes set on them weighed heavily on the British, and they began to suffer from the same anxiety that had plagued the citizens and soldiers of New York in 1776, Philadelphia in 1777, and Charleston in 1780. Eyes nervously scanned the horizon for a force that they knew was coming but which they could do nothing to stop. Capture, rot and convoy duty had reduced the British ‘squadron’ at Pensacola to two armed schooners, and the same hurricane that shattered the Spanish fleet at Havana had nearly destroyed the British fleet at Jamaica. Parker was now unable to offer any help at all, even if he had been willing.13

  The lack of British naval presence threw the Pensacolans into ‘a state of disagreeable uncertainty’.14 This was no Gibraltar; they had no expectations of succour at all. With the Spanish threat so clear and so close, the military and civilians of Pensacola fell to pecking at each other, the military claiming that the civilians were ‘selfish and lazy’ while at the same time coming up with plans to hand them all over to Gálvez as soon as he arrived so that they could be kept, for their own ‘safety’, in Spanish ships. Unsurprisingly, the idea appalled the civilians, who considered it ‘unprecedented in any society’.15

  * * *

  The lesson of 1780 was that the worst British fears had come true: they had lost control of the sea. The combined American, French and Spanish threats meant that there were insufficient British warships to protect all their possessions. This had been a problem since the start of the war, but now, with competent men at the helm of the French and Spanish navies, it had become particularly acute. It is no surprise that the allies also began to make significant convoy captures in this period. On one occasion, on 9 August, a Franco-Spanish fleet of thirty-three ships sailed from Cádiz and captured a vast British convoy of over sixty ships, taking prisoner 1,350 seamen and 1,255 troops, and seizing £1.5 million in cargo and stores. It was the worst British convoy disaster in living memory,* and was felt so severely that it led to significant changes in British marine insurance.* Under pressure everywhere, the British had been unable to provide this convoy, which was travelling at a predictable time of year along a predictable course, with any more than a single line-of-battle ship and two frigates as escorts. The Channel Fleet was weak with sickness and the pressure of trying to control home waters with an inadequate force nearly killed Admiral Geary, then commander-in-chief of the home fleet. He appears to have had a complete breakdown and remarkably the doctor’s report still survives. ‘The Admiral’, wrote Dr James Lind, ‘thro’ a constant fatigue and hurry of business added to an over anxiety of mind, seems to have exhausted his strength, and spirits. He is feverish, his pulse weak, has for a violent headache, pain of his Breast, and profuse sweats.’16 He simply had nothing left to give, broken by the challenge of exercising British sea power.

  The British maritime empire was starting to fall apart because its maritime connections could not be guaranteed. This naval weakness, experienced empire-wide, was sensed intensely in Britain, particularly in London, where the pressure of exercising inadequate sea power was crippling its already divided political hierarchy. The sudden outburst of riots in London, the worst riots of the century, is no coincidence. The very last thing that the British now needed was for Spain to open a new front in the Mediterranean; for France to reopen another front thousands of miles away in India; for several more countries, all equipped with their own navies, to flex their maritime muscles against Britain; and for the Spanish and French to ignore the festering wounds of their failed combined operations and to begin to co-operate once more.

  But – quite extraordinarily – that is exactly what happened.

  * Since the Smyrna convoy disaster of 1693.

  * It was a very rare example of British troop transports being taken in this war, the other occurring in June 1776, when four unescorted transports carrying 354 men of the 71st Regiment were captured by American ships off Boston. Syrett, Shipping, 182; Spilsbury, Journal, 21; Petrie, Charles III, 192; Woodman, Britannia’s Realm, 23, 34–5.

  26

  RUSSIAN MEDDLING

  The relationship between Britain, Holland and Russia during the American war was complex. The war had been received with mixed feelings in and around the Baltic and North Sea. American privateers had used Dutch ports as bases and they had been well received by the Dutch populace. On the diplomatic stage, however, their presence in the Baltic had actually acted against the Americans. The response in October 1779 to John Paul Jones’s arrival in the Texel, the deep-water harbour that served Amsterdam, illustrates this well. Jones arrived in Holland with a small squadron including HMS Serapis, the ship he had recently captured from the British in that hard-fought action off Flamborough Head. Jones, however, was now burdened with the baggage of his own success. The Serapis wanted a mainmast, and his 600 prisoners, many injured or unwell, needed accommodation, medicine and victuals. Letters from the British captain reveal that the prisoners were, quite deliberately, treated appallingly by the Americans – an interesting observation that puts into context the better-known horrific treatment of American prisoners by the British in prison hulks off New York.

  Jones’s presence in the Texel was entirely involuntary; in such a weakened state he had wanted to find shelter in a French port, ideally Dunkirk, but had been ordered to Holland by the French, who wanted him to protect a Baltic supply fleet.1 The Dutch public loved him. He was bold and daring, the embodiment of the rebellion. Here was flesh-and-blood proof that the most fascinating story of the age was true, that the American colonists had risen up against the might of the British and had, almost unbelievably, been so successful that they had brought their war across the Atlantic. Jones was quite the hero. ‘Every day’, wrote Jones, ‘those blessed [Dutch] women come to the ships in great numbers – mothers, daughters, even little girls – bringing with them for our wounded all the numberless little comforts of Dutch homes, a tribute that came from the hearts of the people.’2 One Dordrecht brewer was so impressed with Jones that he named a beer after him,3 and children sang rhymes:

  Here comes John Paul Jones

  About him ev’ry Dutchman raves!

  His ship went down ’neath the waves,

  An English ship he boards and owns,

  If we had him here,

  If they had him there,


  There is still no end to all his pluck

  He’s ready again to try his luck.4

  By then his exploits had spread back across the Atlantic, and Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, begging for more information about this ‘adventurous hero’ who was so much ‘the subject of conversation and admiration’.5 Nor was he the only such subject of conversation and admiration. The Massachusetts-born privateer Daniel McNeil had made a similar splash with a number of stunning captures off the Russian port of Archangel in his ship General Mifflin. ‘American Arms may truly be said to extend to the Poles’, wrote John Bondfield.6

  The Dutch politicians were far more circumspect than the public about Jones’s presence in the Texel and, already divided over the war, fell to bickering.7 This binary response to the American privateers is one of the clearest examples from the war that the news of naval success spoke to the masses in a far clearer way than they did to the politicians. One would suspect from Jones’s own account that he was welcomed with open arms by everyone but that was far from the case. In fact the Dutch quickly mobilized a squadron under Vice-Admiral Rhynst – ‘an Englishman at heart’,8 as Jones put it – to force him to leave, and he was forced to leave long before he was ready to go. He only had a single anchor, his rigging and sails were in very poor condition, and he had to abandon his prize and his prisoners. Jones described this as ‘a sacrifice’, with the implication of choice that term carries with it. In reality, however, he had no choice at all and was mercilessly forced to sea by the Dutch naval muscle of Rhynst and his massive squadron of thirteen two-decked warships.

  Jones was thus left to fend for himself in the Channel, bristling with British cruisers and warships, in the autumn, known for its ferocious storms. It was not exactly a death sentence, nor was his capture guaranteed, but both were likely. ‘As I put to sea the odds were a hundred to one* that we would soon have a serious affair with the enemy’, wrote Jones.9 With good luck, however, Jones avoided the British in a madcap dash down the Channel in which he logged some seventy miles in just seven hours, and made it safely to the Atlantic coast of France.10 The diplomatic impact of his presence in Holland, meanwhile, waited to be felt.