The stench of a ship wafted by an inshore breeze could often tell of its approach before it reached port. Reports of the bad tempers and quarrels of captains and admirals—with the exception of Nelson—are repetitious. John Paul Jones, apart from killing a mutineer who may have deserved death, carried on a furious vendetta with a captain of one of his ships—Landais of the Alliance—whom he accused of betrayal in combat. “His fault finding, nagging and perfectionism coupled with his unpredictable temper made him disliked by many shipmates” is the verdict of his biographer, Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison. Admiral Hyde Parker, commander at Barbados who served on several occasions with Rodney, had a “bitter choleric temper” and was called “Old Vinegar” on account of his harsh manner and speech. Richard Lestock, whose recriminations against his commanding officer, Admiral Mathews, became public after the Battle of Toulon had historic result, was “on malevolent terms” with Mathews from the start. Mathews, who had served at the court of Sardinia, was nicknamed Il Furibondo by the Italians because of his violent temper. Among the French it was the same. Count d’Estaing, active against the British in American waters and against Rodney in the West Indies, is called “brusque and autocratic” and not liked by officers and men, while Admiral de Grasse, the most important of all to the history of America, summoned his captains on deck to administer the “sharpest reproaches” to express his dissatisfaction for their failure to chase and engage the enemy in an encounter off Martinique. He would rather lay down his command, he said, unless they showed better conduct in obeying signals and fulfilling their duties. Rodney’s own notorious outbreak of anger at the errors and failure by his captains in the blundered battle off Martinique in 1780—expressed in his public statement to the Admiralty, the “British flag was not properly supported”—will appear in due time. If that was irascible, it was clearly not a matter of personal temperament. “There is no set of men who understand these matters so ill as sea officers,” lamented Lord Sandwich, suffering from his experience as First Lord of the Admiralty. “For it scarcely ever happens that after an action they do not call the whole world to hear what complaints they have to each other.” Irascibility in the navy was a recognized phenomenon, as attested in the journal of a French officer who, in describing a case of naval non-cooperation, refers casually to “the charming maritime ill-temper.”
More damaging than irascibility to effective management of a warship was the raging political partisanship that divided officers, and obstructed the collective will to win. The furious quarrel of Whig Admiral Keppel and Tory Admiral Palliser, over claims by Palliser of failure in battle by Keppel, carried over into an explosive court-martial that tore the body politic apart, brought angry pro-Keppel mobs in assault on the Admiralty and left permanent animosities in the navy so deep that officers believed each other capable (and perhaps they were) of deliberate errors or failures in combat on purpose to injure a fellow-admiral of the opposite party. These animosities lasted throughout the period of the American war when the administration’s belief in crushing the rebellion by force was the object of the Opposition’s deepest scorn.
Rodney entered the navy at twelve, taken from school at Harrow, where he had his only allotment of formal education. Though he became an ornament of the sophisticated world, known for pleasing conversation, he must have learned the manner spontaneously or from association with other sophisticates. The early removal from school of future officers of Britain’s sea power, leaving them unacquainted with the subject matter and ideas of the distant and recent past, may account for the incapacity of military thinking in a world that devoted itself to military action. With little thought of strategy, no study or theory of war or of planned objective, war’s “glorious art” may have been glorious but, with individual exceptions, it was more or less mindless. Native intelligence in the Royal Navy was no doubt as good as that of any other nation, but for achieving desired ends in an exacting profession it was not always enough. Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, father and pontiff of the theory of naval warfare, was to write that England’s failure to obtain the expected results from her naval superiority taught a lesson of the necessity of having minds of officers “prepared and stocked by a study of the conditions of war in their own time.” But what stock of knowledge has an adolescent officer acquired by the time he stops learning at the age of twelve?
Long before Mahan, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the great voyager Hakluyt spoke of the need for education of sailors. In his classic work The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, and Discoveries of the English Nation, he pointed out in his dedication to the Lord High Admiral of England that the late Emperor Charles V with “great foresight established a Pilot Major for the examination of such as sought to take charge of ships” and also “founded a notable lecture of the Art of Navigation which is read to this day … at Seville.” Hakluyt was thinking of seamanship, not strategy, much less the study of history and politics. His idea of education for seafarers was not thought to apply to the quarterdeck except in France, in its academies for training officers. Whether it would have made a difference to the inept British management of the war of the American Revolution no one can assert. It was America’s good fortune at this moment in her history to produce all at once, as everyone knows, a group of exceptionally capable and politically gifted men, while it has been less remarked that it was Britain’s ill fortune at the same time to have just the opposite. George III, Sandwich, Germain and the successive Commanders-in-Chief in the field, Sir William Howe and Sir Henry Clinton, both men without energy, were not the best Britain has produced in a crisis to conduct and win a war.
Through the influence of his patrons, Rodney entered the navy as a “King’s Letter Boy,” meaning with a letter of introduction from the King, which opened a place initially as no more than a captain’s servant, even lower than a midshipman, but highly desirable because it guaranteed officer’s status on the quarterdeck when the candidate had climbed enough rungs on the ladder of advancement. It was peacetime in England in 1730, the year of Rodney’s entry, when England and France, unable to afford the further expenses of war, were each endeavoring to stay quiet under the careful guidance of their respective ministers, Sir Robert Walpole and Cardinal Fleury, and this unaggressive condition offered an ambitious young apprentice no chance of action to start him on his climb. Peace, however, was not likely to, and did not, last long. War with Spain over control of the right to trade in Spain’s West Indies broke out in 1739, precipitated by public excitement at the grievance of a merchant captain named Jenkins, who had suffered the severance of his ear in a clash with a Spanish revenue officer. This War of Jenkins’ Ear, engaging France as an ally of Spain in the Bourbon Family Compact, began the period of colonial and continental conflict between France and England that was to last intermittently through Rodney’s lifetime, creating the opportunities for combat that made his career.
The war had old roots. By virtue of Columbus’ discoveries claimed in the name of Spain, followed by a Spanish Pope’s (Alexander VI) division, in 1493, of the New World between Spain and Portugal, with the larger part to Spain, the stage was set for Europe’s overseas conflicts. Needless to say, Spain after her conquest of Portugal in 1580 absorbed the whole, thus acquiring exclusive control of trade and empire from Brazil to Cuba. English smuggling into this region with the aim of breaking into the trade of the Spanish-American colonies provoked the insult to Jenkins’ anatomy.
Prize money to be divided among officers and crew was a motor power for navies as important as wind, and simple booty rather than strategic purpose was a more immediate object of the sea battles in the War of Jenkins’ Ear, as it was in most combats of the time. Without a clearly conceived strategic aim for dominance of the sea-lanes or land base for control of the Colonies, battle was engaged mainly for the money it would pay to the captains, who took their share in prize money, and to the state, which took a voracious bite out of the opponent’s commerce. In the spectacular convoy battle off Cape Finisterre
, Spain, in May, 1747, against the French East India trade, the English under Admiral Anson, annihilating the French escort, took six French warships and, out of the convoy’s 40 ships, five armed East Indiamen and six or seven other merchantmen. The remainder escaped to Canada. Even so, the English haul included about £300,000 in treasure and stores, in addition to the captured ships. In a heroic defense by the French, the small 40-gun Gloire fought on until nightfall against three English ships of the line, until its captain was decapitated by a cannonball, 75 of the crew lay dead on the deck, masts and sails were in ruins, ammunition was reduced to the last cartridge and the hold was filling with water before the flag was struck in surrender. The obdurate refusal to yield may have owed something to the presence of an ensign of the Gloire, the twenty-five-year-old François de Grasse, a provincial nobleman known ever since he was a cadet for his energy and force. When the Gloire was captured, he was taken prisoner and held at Winchester in England for three months. Money and goods were loaded into twenty wagons at Portsmouth to be paraded through the streets to the cheers of the populace before the proceeds were deposited in the Bank of England. In a second encounter in June off Brest (often confused with Cape Finisterre because it lies in the department of the French Finistère), against a large French convoy bringing home the rich West Indian trade, an English squadron, including Rodney in the Eagle, captured 48 prizes loaded with valuable cargo. Although more than that number of French merchantmen escaped, Rodney and his fellow commanders gained a wealth of prize money. In the Seven Years’ War, 1756–63, the central conflict of the era, from which the English emerged sovereign of the seas, they took in the single year 1755, before even a formal declaration of war, 300 French merchantmen for an estimated total of $6 million.
Individual admirals and captains made their fortunes from their share of prize money, which was divided according to prize law of an extreme complexity that testified to its importance in the system. Ships’ captains of a victorious squadron divided ⅜ of the total value of captured ships and cargoes, depending on whether the squadron was under the orders of an admiral, with ⅛ reserved for a captain who was a flag officer if one was on board. Lieutenants, captains of marines, warrant officers, chaplains and lesser officers divided ⅛. Another ⅛ went to midshipmen and sailmakers, and the remaining 2/8, or 25 percent, to seamen, cooks and stewards. Prize law allowed an intricate adjustment based on size and armament to equalize the share of larger and smaller ships, on the theory that the stronger ships did most of the shooting and had more numerous crews. The adjusted rate was worked out by applying to each ship a factor calculated by multiplying the number of the crew by the sum of the caliber of the ship’s cannon. Clearly, prize money received more serious attention than scurvy or signals.
As Captain of the Eagle in the battle off Brest, Rodney’s share was £8,165, which enabled him to buy a country home and laid the basis of his fortune, which he was to gamble away.
From the capture of Havana in 1761, the distribution of prizes amounted to £750,000, of which Admiral Keppel, who was second in command, received £25,000 and his chief, Admiral Pocock, £122,000. Admiral Anson, the leading naval officer of the day, was believed to have made £500,000 in the course of his operations. The lure of such rewards drew young men into the navy despite its dangers and discomforts.
In the War of the Spanish Succession, ending in 1713, England had gained dominance in the Mediterranean by annexation of Gibraltar and Minorca. Colonial rivalry in America added to, even superseded, ancient conflicts in Europe. France, eager for colonial territory, had advanced overland through the American north woods down from Canada and Nova Scotia and down the Ohio to establish settlements that pushed against the English-settled colonies in the effort to block their westward movements. French colonies in India were also conflicting with the English. But France, sucked dry by the land wars of Louis XIV, had let her navy sink into shabby neglect that could not sustain a serious bid for the sea power on which trade and empire depended.
For the next fifty years, 1739–89, from the War of Jenkins’ Ear to the French Revolution, war in the 18th century continued in these terms through various phases and under various names, until the issues were shaken up and rearranged by the Revolution and fighting recommenced under Napoleon. As between France and England, it was basically a maritime war for overseas commerce and colonies in America and India. This was not fundamentally changed by the intrusion of the American Revolution, though it altered war aims politically.
A strange development of the three major maritime powers, Holland, England and France, was that each should have allowed its vehicle of sea power to decay through inadequate funding and indifference and the corruption that drained available funds into the pockets of bureaucrats and dockyard managers. Moreover, the Royal Navy of Britain was halved in effective power by having two functions: offense and defense. Honored by its countrymen as the “wooden walls of England,” it was also the only conveyance by which Britain’s military forces could be deployed against an opponent, whether it be colonial rebels or France. As an island, Britain could use land forces against a foreign enemy only to the degree that sea power allowed. Instead of being polished and fed and kept at the peak of perfection, for instant use upon call, the navy, which had enjoyed appropriations of more than £7 million in 1762, was cut in 1766, after the close of the Seven Years’ War, to £2.8 million, less than half, and cut by half again to a stingy £1.5 million in 1769. Sandwich, though he was not yet First Lord, was held to blame because he was a well-known figure detested by the public for his betrayal of the popular hero John Wilkes.
Sandwich at this time held office as Secretary of State for the so-called Northern Department, actually the department for foreign affairs. Although associated with the Admiralty because of his previous service and supposedly deeply devoted to the navy, he did not exert himself, as Choiseul was doing in France, to rebuild it as a proud and eminent fighting fleet.
Besides being splintered by politics and faction, the navy was administered not by a professional in the service, as was the army, but by a figure of political power chosen from the group known at this time as the King’s Friends. For eleven years, from 1771 to 1782, the First Lord of the Admiralty was the fourth Earl of Sandwich, called by some the most unpopular man in England, known for the venality of his administration and for personal sins, ranging from laziness to debauchery. A peer who inherited his earldom from a grandfather at the age of eleven, he thereafter followed a peer’s normal progress from Eton and Cambridge and the Grand Tour through a succession of government offices assigned for no particular merit other than the right “connections” and an intense loyalty to the King and support of a hard policy toward the Americans. This brought him to a place on the Admiralty Board at the age of twenty-six from which he advanced at the age of thirty to First Lord for a short term in 1748–51, and again for the longer term in the ’70s and early ’80s. His reputation was gained from a scandal of his own making, when he read to the House of Lords in 1768 an obscene verse entitled Essay on Woman, by his friend the notorious John Wilkes, who had already been arrested—illegally, as his partisans charged—for lèse majestè in a libelous critique on the King published in No. 45 of Wilkes’s journal the North Briton. On the obscenity charge he was now expelled as M.P. from the House and declared an outlaw, while his crony Sandwich was ever after known as Jemmy Twitcher, after the treacherous character in The Beggar’s Opera who turns in his friend. Naval appointments under his rule were determined by patronage, which answered to the seventeen votes that Sandwich and his group controlled in the House of Commons, the source of his power. As First Lord, he presided over the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, who were seagoing professionals as well as politicians with seats in the House of Commons.
Spain, nearly two hundred years since the lost Armada of Philip II, was still depressed, with no appetite for maritime battle, and the French Navy was at its lowest point of neglect. It was being renovated by the strenuo
us energies of Choiseul, chief minister of Louis XV and the most able public official to serve France in the 18th century. He established naval academies for the design and construction of ships of war and for the training of officers, ordered an inscription maritime for the regular draft of seamen to fill the crews, instead of relying like the British on impressment of drunks and vagrants and the victims of misery and want picked up from the streets; a corps of 10,000 gunners was rigorously trained for accuracy of fire; dockyards hummed with the building of new ships of larger and better design than Britain’s. In seamanship, the French trained for beauty of maneuvers, practicing so that the parts of a squadron would make their turns in unison or progressively with the precision of a ballet, with their sails billowing or furling in artistic design. Town by town, Choiseul organized a fund-raising campaign for shipbuilding, with each new ship, when launched, being named for the town that had donated the most. The fleet’s giant flagship of 110 guns named the Ville de Paris was the warship that Rodney would one day bring to surrender in his last and greatest battle. A spirit of enterprise prevailed, in contrast to the lethargy of Spain and in contrast, too, to the defensive doctrine of naval warfare that governed French tactics. On going into battle, the guiding principle for a French sea captain was to adopt the lee gauge, a defensive position, and by forcing the enemy to attack, to destroy his ships while keeping his own intact. The theory, in the words of the French Admiral Grivel, was that, of the inferior of two opponents, the “one that has the fewest ships must always avoid doubtful engagements … or, worst, if forced to engage, assure itself of favorable conditions.” In short, “circumspection, economy and defensive war” was the fixed purpose of French policy directed toward reversing the position of inferiority at sea that France had sustained by the defeats of the Seven Years’ War. Logically it would seem that such a course, when consistently followed for years, must affect the spirit and enterprise of the officers imbued with it. Yet if that were true of the average, the outstanding French seaman Admiral de Grasse, in his historic decision that saved America, had little difficulty in subduing the voice of caution and allowing the impulse of bold risk to make up his mind.
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