Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  In Whitehall the first port of call for incoming despatches was the undersecretary at the Foreign Office, who was responsible for getting them deciphered and preparing the official post for the secretary of state. It was a laborious and frustrating job, dominated by the uneven rhythm of the mails from the Continent. For most of the French Revolutionary War these came via Cuxhaven, on the Elbe Estuary near Hamburg, the centre for much Continental trade and postal traffic. A strong westerly wind would often prevent ships from leaving the port, resulting in a dearth of despatches; then, when the wind changed and the post eventually arrived, it would contain a backlog of accumulated packages. When relations between Canning and Grenville were at a low ebb, as they were for much of Canning’s period as undersecretary between 1796 and 1799, the attention accorded to the pile of despatches could be scant, and some even remained unread.38

  The speed and frequency of information that came by sea were thus wildly unpredictable, with delays of course caused by enemy action as well as by the weather. Contact with the Mediterranean was particularly difficult, since France and its allies lay across the lines of communication. Nevertheless, despatches could sometimes travel at remarkable speeds. The average running time from Spithead to Barbados was just under 39 days, and from Cork 42. The return journey from the Leewards to Spithead averaged 47 days, and from Jamaica, through the passage between Cuba and the North American continent, as many as 75. A large warship could expect to make Gibraltar from Spithead in 30 days, but the average for frigates and larger storeships, with their superior windward ability, was only 18 days.39 Some naval frigates and cutters carried despatches very fast, if they had consistent heavy winter winds blowing from astern. In December 1800 the diplomat Arthur Paget reported from Palermo in Sicily that he had received a message from Admiral Keith at Port Mahon in Minorca in two days, a distance of nearly 500 miles, a speed that averaged out at ten knots. Paget rightly commented that it was ‘an extraordinary passage’.40

  With winds behind them, especially in the winter, even some ships not built for speed managed remarkably fast passages. Keith reported later in December that three ships with troops aboard took only three weeks to reach Malta from England.41 In November 1799 the mast ship Lord Macartney and her escort, the Lynx sloop, reached the Downs from Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 16 days, a 2,000-mile journey; according to The Times, it was ‘the shortest time ever known’. Even with the Gulf Stream pushing them along, the average speed of over five knots was unusual.42 It was comparable with that of two fast, 16-gun sloops, Bonetta and Shark, which did the same journey in 16 and 14 days respectively in 1793.43

  Communications depended even more upon the packet service run by the Post Office. Much depended upon the skill, knowledge and perseverance of the masters of these packets and their crews. Once the war started, constant communication with the Continent was vital for orders and intelligence, for trading merchants, for the transfer of specie and a limited passenger service, as well as the considerable post home from British seamen and soldiers abroad (generated by the Parliamentary Military Postage Concessions Act of 1796, which allowed them to send a letter for a penny, paid when posted).44 The shortest route, from Dover to Calais, naturally had to be abandoned, and as a result no packet route became more important than that across the southern North Sea: the service ran from Harwich to the Dutch ports of Hellevoetsluis and Brill.* After the French invasion of Holland at the end of 1794, it had to shift its base from Harwich to Great Yarmouth, because Yarmouth’s more northerly position required less windward sailing in the prevailing south-west or north-easterly winds.45 Cuxhaven replaced Hellevoetsluis and Brill because landing was possible at all states of the tide.46 Thus, the shortest passage for mail became Great Yarmouth to Cuxhaven, a distance of 240 sea miles. In the Napoleonic War, as we shall see, packets were required to travel much further north, as far as Sweden, as France gained control of more and more of northern Europe.

  Autumn or winter conditions in the North Sea can be imagined: hard gales (usually from the south-west though sometimes from the north-east), when it would be cold and icy, fog or poor visibility, sluicing tides, and always the punishing, short, steep, grey seas when the vessel had to beat to windward. Neither coast was marked by much high ground to guide the master or pilot: shallow, dangerous sandbanks existed well out of sight of land. The master was required to measure his vessel’s leeward drift when going to windward over a long period, and was without landmarks to fix a position. The amount of leeway would be unique to each vessel, so it was fortunate that the packets were very often owned by the masters, who were contracted to the Post Office. In fact, the knowledge of the masters and mates of the characteristics of their vessels and constantly sailed routes made their packets safer when crossing the North Sea than warships. Four of such larger naval ships were lost during the operations at Den Helder in 1799, the most famous being the 932-ton, 36-gun frigate Lutine, lost in November with all hands bar two on the Terschelling Sands, together with £140,000 in coin to pay the troops.47*

  In spite of the considerable safety record of the packets, risks were manifold. There could be little heaving to under reduced sail in hard gales, for the post had to get through: sails had to be heavily reefed and the packet sailed hard. Ice across the Elbe was often so thick as to be impenetrable; dropping the mail at the island of Heligoland for later delivery by fishing boats was sometimes the only option. Capture by enemy privateers was the real danger, although during the French Revolutionary War this was more likely on the packet routes from Falmouth to Lisbon or Falmouth to the West Indies. The North Sea packets were generally manned by seventeen men, and the Post Office was urged to arm the vessels to defend themselves against privateers. John Bennett Bennot, the inspector of packets, was concerned about the expense, as well as the weight, which would ‘retard them from getting away from the Enemy’. However, in 1797 he did request the postmaster-generals to obtain lighter carronades to arm the packets.48 Sometimes cruising British frigates kept the enemy privateers off and, in the event, only five East Coast packets were captured in nearly ten years of operating in wartime before the Peace of Amiens.49

  The log of His Majesty’s packet Prince of Wales, one of the six vessels stationed at Yarmouth, reveals the details of life and navigation aboard a packet in the North Sea. For the year from September 1800, to take a sample, she made fourteen round trips from Yarmouth to Cuxhaven, with little variation in the course taken. Although she once made the passage eastwards from Yarmouth in a day, she averaged slightly over two days during the year; in September 1801, however, she took as long as five days against a north-east gale. Over three and a half days was the average for her return voyage, and she generally stayed about a week in Cuxhaven, waiting for mails from the agent or for favourable winds, during which her crew would undoubtedly have spent the time maintaining the vessel. If a King’s Messenger arrived with an express despatch, the vessel would depart immediately, leaving the general post for the next vessel. In the year leading to the peace preliminaries of the Treaty of Amiens there was a noticeable increase in passages taken by King’s Messengers, five being recorded in the log.50 In August 1802, during the Peace of Amiens, she picked up the Danish negotiator Count Bernstorff and his suite in England, transferred him to an armed schooner on the far side of the North Sea and returned immediately. On 16 March 1801 the master, Anthony Deane, saw a vessel, ‘and hearing several guns supposed she might be in some distress’. The sparse language of the log reflects his dilemma. He turned his vessel towards her, ‘but coming on thick and blowing hard soon lost sight of her. At 4pm not knowing which way she laid with her head, night coming on & having the mails on board thought it most prudent to bear & continue our course.’51 The wrecked ship was the 74-gun Invincible, which, soon after leaving Yarmouth, had struck the sands of Hammond’s Knoll, off Happisburgh, at ten knots. Four hundred men were drowned.

  For the individual passenger, journeys could be long and conditions gruelling, particularly if it was ne
cessary to travel in winter. Tom Grenville, the brother of the foreign secretary, was appointed to a diplomatic mission to Berlin in November 1798. Even though a powerful frigate was assigned to convey him, the 24-gun Champion, over five times the size of a packet, he did not escape extreme discomfort. On his arrival at Yarmouth on 18 December 1798, a thick fog prevented his embarkation, and then an easterly wind prevented the frigate from sailing. When it reached the Elbe Estuary, the ship was damaged by the ice, and turned back, with the ice in her rigging making her almost unmanageable. On 29 December, Grenville was back in Yarmouth, considerably shaken. Five weeks after his first attempt he tried again, this time with the frigate Proserpine. She called for a pilot at Heligoland, where she was discouraged from making the attempt, but Grenville urged the man to press on. In the Elbe, ice had obscured the navigation marks, and a thick covering of snow the landmarks: the ship turned for home, then struck a sandbank. On the landward side of the ship the ice was solid, so she was abandoned by crew and passengers. In the intense cold, twelve men died and Grenville at one point found himself hauled from the icy water by the handle of a boarding pike. But his papers were intact. Eight miles away from Cuxhaven, and on dry land, he set off across the tidal sands, but his guides had miscalculated: the tide raced in and Grenville’s party were up to their waists in water, a blizzard blowing in their faces. They finally reached Cuxhaven in a state of exhaustion.* Sadly, Grenville’s exceptionally dangerous journey had been made in vain, because his diplomatic mission in Berlin failed to bring the alliance between Austria and Prussia which he had been sent to achieve.52

  When they eventually reached the Continent, those involved in conveying intelligence often found that their problems were only just starting. The roads in certain parts were extremely poor. One possible route for intelligence across Spain, from Barcelona via Madrid to Ferrol, was reported by John Hunter, the British consul in Madrid, to be 214 leagues distance, and could be covered by relays of mules in about twenty-five days, and costing 240 Spanish dollars, but the duration of the journey was dependent upon weather and the availability of straw and barley for the mules.53 Another way to avoid France was through the mountainous parts of Austria, the path of diplomats and King’s Messengers – an extraordinarily expensive route. A travel claim survives for Thomas Masterman Hardy, at that time a young captain returning to London from service in the Mediterranean in 1799, who travelled home from Leghorn via Vienna, Cuxhaven and Yarmouth. He purchased a post-chaise at Leghorn, sharing expenses with a King’s Messenger, but the rough roads wrecked the carriage, and he was able to sell it for only £4 in Vienna. With ‘expenses on the road’ and the hire of post horses, he claimed the very substantial sum of £201 in expenses, but, according to the Navy Board’s scale of expenses based upon rank, he was due just £145.54

  In Britain, by contrast, the speed of communication by roads was steadily getting better, a development that was as important for the efficiency and costs of government and commerce as it was for ordinary people. Widespread road improvements had been achieved by turnpike trusts in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, a process that was continued during the war years, especially in the north of England. By the mid 1830s about 22,000 miles, a fifth of all the roads in the country, had been turnpiked or improved by other means.55 Better roads were also, of course, useful for moving troops and artillery around the country, as well as for the carriage of valuable equipment for the war – such as the naval copper bolts manufactured in the north – whenever the reliability and speed of delivery were more important considerations than the cost, for coastal transport was far cheaper.

  The government had a further method of moving information swiftly. Designed, built and manned by the navy in the mid 1790s, a system of shutter telegraphs radiated out from the top of the Admiralty building in Whitehall, putting ministers in touch with the commanders-in-chief at the Downs, Portsmouth or Plymouth in minutes. The first superintendent of telegraphs, a surveyor named George Roebuck, was able to build the first line of towers from the Admiralty to Deal in only four months. Such speed of construction was achieved because of the knowledge of the topography available from the accurate triangulation of the Ordnance Survey.56 The optical telegraphs quickly became a new element affecting the timeliness of intelligence, for they were capable of sending rapid, detailed messages. The French had invented the system: by 1794 a line of telegraphs connected Paris to Lille. Information on the French system, including an alphabetical code found on a French prisoner of war, was shown to the commander-in-chief, the duke of York. An alternative system was quickly developed from the French model by the Reverend John Gamble, though the design adopted by the Admiralty was the invention of the Reverend Lord Murray.57 Their operation involved the use of six shutters, which were turned rapidly; a distant observer would make note of each set of shutter positions, which represented a coded letter.

  By January 1796 the first line of shutter telegraphs was operational. Charles Abbot noted in his diary on 4 February 1796: ‘The telegraph at the Admiralty was finished this week, and signals conveyed to Deal in seven minutes by the medium of thirteen intervening telegraphs.’58 Within a year the line to Portsmouth was complete and communication could be achieved in fifteen minutes. The Portsmouth–London line was to be immediately useful during the Spithead mutiny: a message to Pitt of 13 May 1797 survives in his papers: ‘20 minutes before noon. Admiral gone to the Royal William to receive Lord Howe. His Lordship going off. 16 boats coming from St Helens.’59 By 1801 the telegraphs were working so well that British warships off the French coast were able to signal directly to the Admiralty, via anchored signal ships and the flagship at the Nore.60 When Nelson was bombarding Boulogne in August 1801, Thomas Troubridge at the Admiralty wrote to him: ‘The telegraph tells us you are playing away at the Miscreants.’61 This was the equivalent of modern-day ‘real-time’ intelligence.

  A print of the hut erected on the roof of the Admiralty, with the code for each letter around the edge. A fixed telescope can be seen trained on the next station. So much concentration was needed to make out distant signals that the ‘glassmen’ took turns of only five minutes.

  The shutter telegraphs were complemented by another system started by the Admiralty in 1794, when it ordered the building of signalling stations around the coasts. Between five to seven miles apart, these stretched westward from the Solent to Land’s End; and, in the following year, eastward from the Solent to the North Foreland.62 The stations, of timber, were constructed very swiftly and completed about a month after the initial orders.63 They were much less complicated than the shutter telegraphs, consisting of a single flagstaff, and could be used to send only short, prescribed messages, such as the sighting of a potentially hostile warship or privateer. Admiralty printed instructions to the naval lieutenants in command of each station were simple:

  You will find upon your arrival at the Station a temporary building or signal House, with two rooms, one for the accommodation of yourself, and the other for your two assistants … also a Telescope, one Red Flag, one Blue Pendant, and four Signal Balls.64

  Once these two signalling systems were operational, the risk of a surprise landing by the French was very much reduced.

  The coastal signal stations were intended primarily for sightings of enemy privateers, which constantly preyed on small merchant ships on coastal voyages. The most frequently used signals were those to ships off the coast, requesting a secret password so that ships could be identified as friendly. If anything suspicious was seen, a message was passed down the line of stations to the commanders-in-chief at Plymouth, Portsmouth or the Downs. There was much to report: attacks from smaller French privateers, rigged as luggers and very fast, especially to windward, were frequent. Within a month of the declaration of war in 1793, a British 16-gun sloop, the Nautilus, was chased into Plymouth Sound by two French 28-gun privateers; on the same day another privateer came within three miles of several large warships anchored there.65 Incidents involving Fre
nch privateers slowly increased until they peaked in 1797–8, though the danger of such attacks remained high until 1802.66 The southern North Sea between Hull and London in the late 1790s was the scene of furious actions. Ships carrying butter, cheese and other agricultural products to London were captured in the winter of 1796, and the Cheesemonger’s Company successfully lobbied the Admiralty for a warship escort.67 In November 1799 the Marquis of Granby from Sunderland was captured by a French lugger (though she was retaken by her master, who had been set adrift in the ship’s boat, once the privateer had gone off in chase of another English prize).68 In the same month one of the ships managed by the coal merchant Michael Henley was captured off the North Foreland. The owner wrote to Henley: ‘I must request therefore your assistance in procuring the Insurance of the vessel from Government.’69 The danger of merchant ship losses to enemy privateers off the British coast was to be present until 1815.

  At no point in the war did the importance of efficient communication and intelligence matter more than at its beginning, when there was a race to get the news of the declaration of war out to distant parts of the empire, ahead of the French. Those combatants who received the news first were given the advantage of surprise. The French had the edge when it came to communications with the West Indies, as they could start their voyage from Brest or from ports further south much more advantageously than the British, who had further to sail against the prevalent south-westerlies. Spread out across the Mediterranean, the French usually also had the advantage when getting news to India. However, the British position was improving. By 1798 Lord Mornington, governor-general of India, expected a monthly despatch overland, despite its expense (a single despatch cost nearly £800). Even more critical was the speed of intelligence in May 1803 when news of the renewal of war was transmitted. The British consul in Alexandria, George Baldwin (whose salary was paid by the East India Company), ensured that it was sped on its way down the Red Sea to Bombay; and the British were able to march into the French enclave in Pondicherry before the enemy knew that war had been declared.70