Admiral Collingwood
Page 11
At the point of firing a gun the energy contained in the charge was distributed in three ways. The shot itself was projected from the muzzle, perhaps as far as two thousand yards, or through the two-foot oak sheathing of a ship a dozen yards away. The gun recoiled with tremendous power, brought up with a terrific twang by the gun- and breeching-tackles (if they held), and then kept taut inboard by the crew hauling the training-tackles tight (a ship at sea is always pitching and rolling, an almost incidental hazard). The third recipient of energy was the metal of the gun. It grew very hot after repeated firing, and the structure of the iron altered, eventually becoming honeycombed. A hot gun recoiled with real venom, trying to leap vertically off the deck as well as recoil. In the worst case the shot might be a little too large for the barrel, and a disproportionate amount of energy would be transferred to the gun, causing it to explode with consequences that are barely imaginable. Add to these dangers the necessity of crew members getting out of the way of the recoil, and their all-too close neighbours on either side, and it is easier to understand the need for a very high standard of training.
When Collingwood and Bowyer joined Prince in the early months of 1793, Britain was in the middle of her largest naval mobilisation for thirty years. There were simply not enough men to go round, as Collingwood was forced to admit to the Admiralty:
SIR, – I beg to represent to you that there are at present on board H.M. ship St Albans 30 or more volunteers who entered for H.M. ship Prince and on board the Royal William 10 or more. Ever since their Lordships did me the honour to appoint me to the command of this ship, I have exerted all my industry to raise men for her Complement and being particularly connected at Newcastle I engaged my friends there to use their influence with the seamen which they did so effectually that near 50 men were entered on the assurance given them by those Gentlemen that they were to serve in the Prince. Only three of the Number have yet joined the ship …12
Ties of obligation and patronage went both ways. In the natural sense of justice that prevailed in the navy, those men had just as much right to their captain as he had to them. Collingwood went so far as to copy to the Admiralty a letter written to him by the men themselves, from the St Albans:
SIR, – Have made bold to rite to you to Acquaint you that there is now 30 volunteers or upwards on board of the ship St Albans for the Prince. From certain appearances it seems as if they mean to put us on board other ships and as we have entered for you, could wish to be there as soon as possible; we have already been on Board of five Different ships since we came from Newcastle. I am, Sir, your most obedient humble servant, THOS. HUNTLEY.
P.S. Tis by desire of the Rest of the Volunteers I trouble you with these lines.13
These two letters alone reveal more about the informal code of naval justice and propriety than a dozen statistical theses could. They show the strength of the bond of trust between a commander and his men, and the desire of that commander not to compromise that bond. Collingwood, it is true, was an exceptional leader of men, but it is hard to see how the Royal Navy could mobilise so effectively in wartime unless those bonds were at least common through the greater part of the fleet. The effect on the Admiralty in this case is not known, but the fact that Collingwood enclosed the men’s letter suggests he felt his case was unanswerable. The Admiralty, if it was to rely on the zeal and enterprise of its best captains, could not afford to ignore such niceties. Many of the Board’s members probably sympathised from personal experience. At any rate, by August Prince had sufficient men to sail. This group of fifty or so Geordie seamen may have formed the core of Collingwood’s ‘Tars of the Tyne’ with whom he stopped to talk at their guns on the morning of Trafalgar, saying, ‘Let us do something today which the world will talk of hereafter.’
Manning was not the only problem facing the fleet in 1793. The rapid mobilisation was frustrated by inefficiency, inexperience and all the rustiness that might be expected in a great machine recommissioned. Collingwood mounted one of his favourite hobbyhorses, blaming excesses of political ‘interest’:
Lord Howe cou’d not get down the Channel in fine weather and the middle of summer without an accident; two ships ran foul of each other and the Bellerophon has lost her foremast and bowsprit and gone to Portsmouth a cripple. This was not the fault of the ship nor the weather, but must ever be the case when young men are made officers who have neither skill nor attention, and there is scarce a ship in the Navy that has not an instance that political interest is a better argument for promotion than any skill.14
No doubt he was right, but there is also a sense that his pomposity, evident as it was in his days as a midshipman, was magnified by the dignity of being Admiral Bowyer’s flag captain. His nerves were also frayed in anticipation of another birth at home. He had sent some ‘cyder’ by a collier to Sunderland for the expectant mother, and by August had been rewarded with another daughter, Mary Patience. He was delighted. If he was disappointed, as many eighteenth-century men might have been, in not having a son, he never showed it.
In the autumn Lord Howe (nearly seventy years of age), Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic squadron, took the fleet out on a cruise to look for the French. Lord Howe is recognised as perhaps the finest fleet admiral of his day, a master of manoeuvring large numbers of ships in complicated formation. His bravery was famous: as a captain he had led the line at Quiberon Bay in 1759, and was known to hold his fire until the very last moment, preferably until he was within pistol-shot of the enemy. He was particularly interested in reforming the signalling system, its messages composed using a number of rectangular and triangular flags of distinctive design. These were strung in various combinations from signal halyards, repeated from one ship to the next all along the battle line.
In 1790 Howe had introduced the idea of numerical flags, designed to reduce confusion in passing orders in difficult conditions, and to allow greater subtlety of expression. But the system that allowed a signal such as ‘England expects every man will do his D.U.T.Y’ to be hoisted (and even that was a compromise: the words ‘Nelson’ and ‘confides’, originally intended, not being in the book) was not available until Sir Home Popham invented his telegraphic signal system just in time for the Trafalgar campaign more than ten years later.15 By 1793 groups of Howe’s numerical flags were assigned to messages which the Admiralty considered would be necessary. Signal number one was ‘enemy in sight’; there were 260 or so others.
Although Howe’s fleet covered as large an area of the Atlantic as possible (a line perhaps one hundred miles long, sailing at an average of seven or eight knots), he did not find the French fleet – the Atlantic is, after all, some 10 million square miles in extent – and on his return to port was vilified (unfairly, Collingwood thought) for having failed to bring news of a decisive victory. The fact that Howe did not know where the French fleet was can be put down to the prevailing strategy of the Atlantic fleet, which was to stay in port until news came (from frigates cruising off the coast of France, or intelligence from smugglers, merchantmen and spies) that they were out. Then the fleet would chase them and hope to catch them. It was a defensive strategy, designed to save wear on ships. Within three years British naval philosophy would radically adopt the tactics developed by Jervis, Nelson and Collingwood, which relied on permanent close blockade and constant battle readiness. The primary impetus for this change came in June 1794, when Howe’s fleet did finally catch the French. But before that, the country’s attention was drawn to dramatic events in the Mediterranean.
The intellectual reforming zeal which fuelled the revolution in France had mutated into the Terrors of 1793. Suppression of all dissent was swift and brutal. Self-justification became Orwellian self-parody: in the words of Saint-Just, ‘What constitutes the Republic is the destruction of everything opposed to it.’16 Church property was confiscated and conscription introduced, while moderates and royalists either fled or planned counter-revolution. That year the French harvest failed. War against Austria and the United P
rovinces combined with blockade by Britain led to riots and insurgency in the Vendée, Brittany, and the mercantile cities of the south-east: Marseille, Lyon, Toulon.
Admiral Hood’s Mediterranean fleet of twenty-one ships of the line, including Nelson in Agamemnon, arrived off Toulon in July. The harbour (in fact two harbours: the Grande Rade and the Petite Rade) had always been one of France’s most important naval bases, as it still is today. It was protected by numerous batteries, and lookout posts on the hills behind allowed its defenders to see a blockading squadron many miles out to sea. In the late summer of 1793 a huge fleet was assembled there: thirty-one ships of the line, thirteen frigates and fourteen corvettes.17 Of the line ships, seventeen were ready for sea, four were refitting, nine were under repair and one was still being built.18 The French navy was in a terrible state. It was ill-equipped for war and its officer cadre, by tradition an exclusively aristocratic one, had been devastated by revolutionary purges. It would take many years to rebuild its expertise from scratch.
The city was in turmoil. In August a delegation was sent from Marseille to petition Hood to ask for aid in the uprising against the National Convention. Hood sent to the authorities in Toulon asking them if they wished him to enter the city and aid them in the face of an advancing army. The French Commander-in-Chief refused, and in response the navy’s petty officers and seamen deserted en masse, opening the city to British forces. Nelson missed all the action, having been sent to Naples to ask for reinforcements from the King of the Two Sicilies. Here he met the Hamiltons for the first time.
At Toulon the British, reinforced by soldiers from a number of allied states including Spain, garrisoned the city. They hoped, it seems, that the revolt would spread outwards from their one bridgehead on the European continent. But everywhere else the revolts were being put down, with shocking force. In Lyon 1,900 people were executed. A similar fate would befall Toulon if the British abandoned it.
The military key to Toulon was the disposition of guns. As it happened, a young follower of revolutionary principles, a twenty-four-year old Corsican artillery major, had just arrived in Toulon. Napoleon Bonaparte persuaded his senior officers to allow him to conduct the crucial attack on British positions, and in December Toulon fell. It was his first serious action, and it precipitated him on the path to military glory and imperial autocracy. Not only did the British fleet have to withdraw in an embarrassing hurry; they failed to complete the destruction of the French fleet in the harbour. For this folly the officer in charge of the mission, Sir Sidney Smith, was never forgiven by many of his colleagues. Collingwood’s fury at the entire debacle was probably typical:
Our miscarriage at Toulon is truly provoking, the more so as gross mismanagement alone cou’d have prevented [the French fleet] being totally destroyed … No preparation was made either for the destruction of ships or arsenal, and at last perhaps it was put into as bad hands as cou’d be found. Sir Sid. Smith, who arrived there a few days before, and had no public situation, either in fleet or army, but was wandering to gratify his curiosity. You know how it was executed. The ships shou’d have been prepared for sinking as soon as he got possession of them, loading them deep with ballast and stones and making a port hole in them near the edge of the water, and then place the ships in those parts of the harbour which wou’d most effectually injure it. If the necessity of sinking them did not arise, the ships wou’d be uninjured; if it did, they might all have been put under water in half an hour.19
As it was, a first-rate, three 80-gun ships and fourteen 74s were left behind, along with fifteen thousand counter-revolutionaries, of whom six thousand were executed. It was not the last time that Sir William Sidney Smith would cut a controversial figure. A man with all Nelson’s dash, but even more impetuous and with less of his genius, he had been knighted by the Swedish King Gustavus III. In 1796 he was captured by the French off Le Havre and confined in the Temple prison in Paris. He escaped, and somewhat recovered his reputation by a brilliant defence of the citadel of St Jean d’Acre in Palestine in 1799 against Napoleon’s army of Egypt. He later joined Collingwood’s Mediterranean squadron and made the Admiral’s life a misery.
Collingwood himself was still at Spithead, frustrated by the lack of action and wounded by the ignominy of Toulon, but at least in a better ship. He and Admiral Bowyer had transferred to Barfleur, another 98-gun second-rate but a better sailer than Prince. He was philosophising on the war:
This war is certainly unlike any former, both in its object and execution. The object is a great and serious one, to resist the machinations of a mad people who, under the mask of freedom, wou’d stamp their tyranny in every country in Europe, and [to] support and defend the happiest constitution that ever wisdom formed for the preserving of order in civil society. The execution is quite mysterious.20
Part of the mystery was that the British knew the Brest fleet, which had suffered a recent mutiny, was in the Atlantic again, in two separate squadrons. They could not be looking for battle. In fact, they had come out to protect a convoy of 127 chartered French and American merchantmen bringing food from America to relieve the famine in France.21 The other part of the mystery was an aspect of warfare which was being invented by the French, and which – odd though it seems to the cynical modern mind – had not occurred to the British. It was the concept of total warfare, in which the destruction of social resilience by starvation through blockade became regarded as a legitimate weapon, and Napoleon its first great exponent. Strategically, the aim of the British must be to capture or destroy the convoy. Militarily, they thought only of beating her navy.
The Brest squadrons, one of five ships, the other of twenty-one, should not have been difficult to beat. None of the captains had anything like the experience of any of the English captains; some were masters of merchantmen, others were no more than lieutenants. However, the Commander-in-Chief was one of the old cadre, a brilliant tactician and severe disciplinarian, Louis-Thomas Villaret-Joyeuse, whose skill and diplomacy had literally saved him from the chop. Even he did not have a free hand. He was accompanied to sea by a political commissar, Jeanbon, who threatened to have any captain executed for failing his duty – a macabre fulfilment of Voltaire’s analysis of the execution of Byng.22 Villaret-Joyeuse had no thoughts of beating the British, only of getting the convoy through. It was the battle of the Atlantic, fought 120 years before the U-boat.
By the beginning of May Howe had got wind of the convoy, so the fleet set sail from Spithead and stationed itself off Ushant. Reconnaissance showed that the bulk of the Brest fleet was in harbour, but preparing for departure. Howe’s fleet sailed west to look for the convoy, and to get far out into the Atlantic to wait for the French fleet. He unsurprisingly neither saw nor heard anything of the convoy, and on 19 May returned to his station off Ushant, only to find that the French were out and had got past him, three days before.
Out into the Atlantic again. This time, fortunately, some merchantmen had intelligence of the French fleet, and on 28 May the British finally came up with them, 350 miles west of Ushant. It was little Sarah’s second birthday. It is absolutely clear from Collingwood’s accounts of the battle in his letters home that he, at least, was unaware throughout the action of the significance of the convoy. Is it conceivable that Howe, knowing of it, kept that information from Admiral Bowyer, or that Bowyer kept it from Collingwood? We do know that despite his reputation for tactical genius, Howe was an improbably poor communicator, prone to ambiguously worded orders and obfuscating language. He did not do what he should have done: send a detachment off to find the convoy. If he had, he would then have realised that all Villaret-Joyeuse’s tactics were designed to draw the British away from it by offering them battle – or the appearance of it. He should then have gone after the convoy. What he actually seems to have thought is that he would defeat the French fleet, and then go after the convoy in the sure knowledge of his complete control of the Atlantic. It is easy to judge. A major factor in what followed was the weather,
which after the initial days of contact kept the two fleets shrouded in fog, delaying the final action. Those who fought in the battle, which would become known as the Glorious First of June, thought they had done pretty well, even if history judges the victory to have been pyrrhic.
Villaret-Joyeuse was a clever man. When the two fleets sighted each other he was heading north, with the wind from the south. Howe’s fleet were to the east, so the French had the advantage of the wind: they could attack or retreat as they chose. If Villaret-Joyeuse had turned immediately in his tracks, Howe might have guessed that the convoy was ahead and chased it. Too simple. So Villaret-Joyeuse trailed his coat,23 turning west and allowing the British fleet to close. He waited until they were almost up with him before turning south-east, allowing his rear ships to come under fire, knowing that Howe was hooked. It was late in the day. Somewhere to the north, out of sight, the grain convoy was sailing east. The vanguard of the British fleet got close enough in the failing summer light to catch and cripple the 110-gun Révolutionnaire, who struck her colours but later managed to get a tow home. Her principal attacker, Audacious, herself limped back to port an almost total wreck.
On the 29th the chase continued, away from the convoy, towards the south-east with the French still to windward. Howe ordered the fleet to tack to the west to intercept the rear of the French line; the French line turned on its heels and followed, keen to ensure that the British remained interested. Traditionally, two parallel lines of battle would then have formed, with each ship firing at medium range against an opponent, and the two lines steadily drawing together. These tactics had been developed over a hundred years, and were essentially defensive: they rarely led to the sort of decisive victory Howe was after. The new thinking in the navy was to break the enemy line, mix it up, and produce a general mêlée. Rodney’s battle off the Saintes in 1782 had shown that a better trained force, which the British knew they enjoyed, would very likely win in a mêlée, especially if they had superior gunnery. So Howe, in Queen Charlotte, now signalled for the fleet to cut the French line (signal number thirty-four) and engage the enemy from the windward side. In steep seas and a rising wind there was confusion, and part of the British van got too far ahead, but the effect was a close engagement and the British came off best before both fleets retired towards the end of the day. Three French ships had been crippled. Collingwood in Barfleur had been at the rear of the British line, but: