by Sam Willis
Meanwhile our maritime Mercury will race as never before to London, perhaps on horseback, perhaps in a post-chaise pulled by a team of stamping, blowing beasts. If he landed at Falmouth, the westernmost of all English ports, his journey will take him more than 270 miles up winding river valleys and across wild moorland. Plymouth, though significantly farther up Channel, will still require several days of hard riding. If he lands at Portsmouth the journey will be much quicker though just as spectacular, through the Portsdown hills, past the Devil’s Punch Bowl and along the great Hog’s Back in the North Downs of Surrey. And if he brings news from the North Sea, he will ride from Great Yarmouth or Ipswich across the windswept flatlands of Suffolk and Essex.
He will arrive in the courtyard of the great Admiralty building, behind the masonry screen that protects it from Whitehall. If it is night time he will knock up the porter who will scurry off to raise the Secretary of the Admiralty. Perhaps the Secretary is asleep but, more likely, he is working through a mound of papers in the dim gleam of candlelight. The Secretary will be the first to break the seals, the first to read the dispatches. He will then rouse the First Lord from his chambers upstairs and find clerks to copy the letters and messengers to dispatch them. The news must reach the King at Windsor, the Prime Minister at Downing Street, the Government at Westminster and the Lord Mayor in the City who will pass the news on to the shipping interests at Lloyds Coffee House.
And then our Mercury’s job is done. He finally rests, fuddled with the exhaustion and pain that come from his battle-bruises as much as from the shattering experience of several days in the saddle after a year or more at sea. He creeps to a sofa or bed, his legs bowed, his feet shuffling. Finally he sleeps while London goes mad. Mobs prowl the streets cheering, shouting and fighting for joy. Lamps are lit all over town. Guns are fired from the Tower as rumour becomes fact, as the whisper of victory becomes a cheer and as the elusive dream of national security moves closer to reality.
The Forgetting
The National Archives in leafy Kew house the written records of the Royal Navy in boxes of dusty letters on miles of shelves, meticulously organised and filed by generations of administrators. Here are thousands of logs from the navy’s ships, hundreds of thousands of letters, reports, orders and instructions, intelligence, ship plans, weapons patents and crew lists. Together they describe the story of the Royal Navy from its earliest days as a permanent fighting force under Henry VIII to the present day. The archive, however, is missing some very important documents: the original dispatches sent to London after the most significant fleet victories of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that were fought between 1793 and 1815. Copies of a handful of the letters survive in the relevant sections of the naval records in Kew, but the original dispatches, those actually sent to the Admiralty in the aftermath of those battles, have all been removed. There is no note saying so and no clue that the archives are missing some of the most significant documents in world history. If you searched for the original dispatches here, you would leave empty-handed, safe in the belief that they simply no longer existed.
Their absence dates back to 1821, the year that Napoleon died in exile and the naval-minded Prince of Wales was crowned King George IV. It was then that the Lords of the Admiralty ordered that all of the original dispatches, and even the envelopes that they came in, be gathered together. Nearly 40 years later, in 1859, a new generation of Lords of the Admiralty decided to use the dispatches to create a magnificent display of naval heritage. They ordered the letters to be bound in an immense volume, covered in the most exquisite royal blue velvet and decorated with elaborate silver-gilt onlays. Portraits of the victorious admirals were to be carefully interspersed between the original documents. Each letter would be mounted in the centre of a much larger page of heavy-gauge gilt-edged paper so that it could be read without being touched; their preservation was as much a priority as their display. The completed volume was presented to the nation to be admired as a jewel of British history. As a permanent reminder of the sacrifices and successes of our naval ancestors it would provide incontrovertible evidence of the seapower that formed the foundation of the growth and longevity of the British Empire.
Despite these lofty ambitions, at some stage in its life, this luxurious tome was removed from the British Museum, put into a coffin-like, satin-lined box with a clasped lid and stored in the bowels of the British Library. Only a handful of people know of its existence and only six scholars have referred to it in published work in the past 51 years.1 It has, in effect, been hidden from the passing eyes of those for whom it was conceived. This is a tragedy for many aspects of naval history, not least because there are few more direct routes into the state of mind of a naval commander than through what he wrote in the immediate aftermath of a great battle. Howe, for example, collapsed after The Glorious First of June because he had not slept properly for more than a week; Nelson believed he was going to die from a severe head wound only hours before he wrote his Nile dispatch; and Collingwood stood catatonic in the aftermath of Trafalgar and his fellow sailors feared for his sanity. Edward Codrington, captain of the Orion at Trafalgar, made the telling point in his memoirs that ‘The battle after all, as I warned my officers, is nothing compared with the fatigue, the anxiety, the distress of mind which succeeds.’2 It was in exactly these moments of intense stress that admirals composed their letters. Character simply bled onto the paper, the authors’ souls laid bare.
The dates that the dispatches were first gathered together and then bound are themselves significant. The year when they were first collated, 1821, was one of retrospection in the face of technological advance. It was the year in which a steam engine was adopted by the Royal Navy for the very first time in the paddle ship HMS Comet. The Atlantic had been first crossed by steamship only two years earlier and, just a year before, the exploding shell had first come into use. Naval warfare, and the shape of seapower, was unmistakably changing. It was also the year that George IV commissioned Joseph Turner to paint a companion piece to Philippe de Loutherbourg’s magnificent 1794 canvas, The Glorious First of June, a composition which captures so beautifully the heroic splendour of the age of sail. Turner chose as his subject the moment of Nelson’s death at Trafalgar in 1805 and the resultant painting was a fitting companion and comparable achievement to Loutherbourg’s.
The year the dispatches were bound together in their magnificent velvet volume, 1859, was another significant date. A new generation of warships was now in the offing. That November, the French navy had launched La Gloire, the first iron-clad battleship, and generated wide-eyed panic in Britain. Were the French planning to invade? Could the Royal Navy cope with the threat posed by this new breed of fighting ship? In a political attempt to assuage such fears, the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, instigated a Royal Commission on the defence of the country. It reported in 1860 and argued strongly that Britain’s maritime defences were wholly inadequate.
The British had been unable to match the speed of French technological innovation and in 1859 the Royal Navy had nothing in service to challenge La Gloire. In that year, however, the Admiralty ordered the construction of HMS Warrior, the Royal Navy’s first iron-hulled and armour-plated warship. She mounted rifled, breech-loading guns and was powered by a steam engine that could drive her through the water at more than 14 knots. She was unlike anything anyone, anywhere, had ever seen. Everything about her was extraordinary and unsettling for a generation which had known an age without steam engines, iron hulls or exploding shells. Charles Dickens described her as ‘A black vicious ugly customer as ever I saw, whale-like in size, and with as terrible a row of incisor teeth as ever closed on a French frigate.’
It was unclear what the future would hold but, in 1859, what was clear was that the age of wooden warships, driven by sail alone and firing solid shot, was over. Some believed that this transition also heralded the end of the supremacy of British seapower and naturally turned to the past for guidance. Those Lords o
f the Admiralty who recognised the value of these dispatches as an educational and inspirational tool for their own and for future generations must have long been turning in their graves. They had the generosity to look forward; we have not had the grace to look back.
The Content
The 1859 volume contains the original dispatches of the Battles of The Glorious First of June (1794), Groix (1795), St Vincent (1797), Camperdown (1797), The Nile (1798), Copenhagen (1801), Trafalgar (1805) and San Domingo (1806). They represent a period of military dominance that equals any in history. In the 22 years between the start of the wars with France in 1793 and their end in 1815, the British lost five 74-gun ships, one 54-gunner, another 50-gunner and 17 frigates. Not one British three-decked ship, the most prestigious type built for the navy, was captured or sunk. Her enemies, by contrast, lost 139 ships of the line, including nine three-decked First Rates and 229 frigates. These figures include all types of naval warfare, from single-ship actions to cutting-out operations. In fleet battles alone, Howe took or destroyed seven ships of the line at The Glorious First of June, even though he let several more defeated enemy ships escape; Alexander Hood, in the smallest of these victories, took three at L’Orient; Jervis, heavily outnumbered, took four at St Vincent; Duncan 11 at Camperdown; Nelson 13 at the Nile; Hyde Parker and Nelson 15 at Copenhagen; Nelson and Collingwood 22 at Trafalgar; and Duckworth five at San Domingo.1 At none of those battles did the British lose a single ship of any description to the enemy.
The Royal Navy had become a more effective instrument of war than at any time in its history. During the previous conflict, the War of American Independence (1775–83), it fought no less than 16 fleet battles. Of those, the most crushing British victories were achieved at the Saints in 1782, where four enemy ships were captured and two more destroyed in the aftermath, and at the Moonlight Battle in 1780, when four enemy ships were captured and one destroyed. The remaining 14 battles say very little at all about British naval skill in fleet battle. And if one steps back in time again to the Seven Years War fought between 1755 and 1762, only two fleet battles stand out. Four enemy ships were captured or destroyed at the Battle of Lagos in 1759 and seven more were wrested from the enemy at Quiberon Bay in the same year. One can, in fact, continue back ad infinitum without coming across any period that matches the battles fought in the 12 years from 1794 to 1806; it was a veritable golden age of British naval success.
Before we look at the letters in detail it is important to understand exactly what they describe and represent, and what they do not. They are the dispatches sent home after the most significant3 large-scale British naval victories won in the years 1794–1806. The battles included do not span the entire duration of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars; they begin in the second year of the Revolutionary War (1793–1802) and they finish nine years before the end of the Napoleonic War (1803–15). In the middle of this period, in 1802, there was a brief year of peace. These battles, therefore, occupy a period that begins well after the wars began and that ends well before they finished.
British naval failures of all kinds are excluded, as are battles with a more uncertain identity. We do not, for example, read about William Hotham’s lethargy in the Mediterranean in 1795 in what Nelson described as a ‘miserable action’;4 nor about Robert Calder’s lack of conviction in the summer of 1805, which ended his career; nor, again, about Gambier’s neglect at Basque Roads in 1809, another poor performance which ended a commanding officer’s career.5 British naval success in other disciplines including amphibious invasion, frigate action, blockade, coastal bombardment, convoy escort and, most importantly, fleet seizure, is also excluded.
The battles described are impressive victories but other naval operations were more significant successes. At Toulon in 1793, for example, the British inflicted the worst disaster of the entire period on the French navy when they seized the entire Mediterranean fleet without a shot being fired. Twenty-two ships of the line, eight frigates, numerous smaller craft and the whole Toulon arsenal and shipbuilding stores fell into British hands. Similarly, the Royal Navy defeated the Dutch at the Battle of Camperdown in 1797 but the Dutch navy actually suffered far more severely at Saldanha Bay in 1796 when, in the twin fleet surrenders, they lost a complete fleet of nine ships of the line without a shot being fired, and at the Texel in 1799, when they surrendered eight ships of the line, four frigates and a brig.
The same can be said of the Danes. Heavily though they were beaten in fleet battle at Copenhagen in 1801, it was their entire navy that was seized in 1807 after the bombardment of Copenhagen: no less than 18 ships of the line, 11 frigates, two smaller ships, two ship-sloops, seven brig-sloops, two brigs, one schooner and 26 gunboats were taken by the British and five more ships of the line and two more frigates were destroyed. As for the Russians, contact between their warships and the Royal Navy in the early 19th century was sporadic and unsatisfactory. However, when Napoleon retreated from Portugal, he abandoned a Russian fleet of nine ships of the line and a frigate in the Tagus, all of which were captured by the British without a shot being fired.
These blows, all achieved without the type of fleet battles described here, and all without significant damage to British ships or injury to British crews, did far more to alter the balance of European maritime power than any fleet battle. But fleet battles captured the public imagination. They were the bright flashpoints of drama and intensity that became central to the creation of national myths.
The battles covered in these dispatches represent only a tiny fraction of the astonishing variety of British naval activity, successful or otherwise, in this period. Fleet battle was, in fact, very rare. A sailor in the Royal Navy in 1805 served aboard one of 136 ships of the line or one of 160 cruisers; he was one of 114,012 sailors entered into British ships’ books.6 He could have been stationed in the North Sea, the English Channel, the Western Approaches, the eastern or western Mediterranean, the Windward or Leeward Islands in the Caribbean, the East Indies or somewhere off the coast of North America. He would have been very lucky indeed to witness one battle, let alone more. Officers, especially talented ones, were more likely to do so because they were more likely to be sent to trouble spots, and yet only three senior naval officers, Horatio Nelson, Cuthbert Collingwood and Edward Berry, witnessed as many as three fleet battles. Indeed, the battles featured in this book were all fought in different locations and all under different commanders.
In only one year, 1797, did two battles occur. The largest gap between major victories was from the Battle of Copenhagen in April 1801 to Trafalgar in October 1805,7 a period of four years and six months, while 20 months elapsed between Groix (June 1795) and St Vincent (February 1797), and two years and eight months between the Nile (August 1798) and Copenhagen (April 1801). Contrary to the initial impression given by this collection, British fleet victory was therefore not the ‘norm’ in relation to other British naval activity. Most of the time the ships sat at anchor or patrolled windswept horizons in the constant toil of blockade. Sailors were far more likely to die of disease or shipwreck than they ever were in fleet battle. It has, in fact, been calculated that only 6.3 per cent of British sailors’ deaths in this period were caused by enemy action, compared with 81.5 per cent by disease or accident and 12.2 per cent by shipwreck.8 Life was dull. Sailors cleaned, painted and sewed. From a broad perspective it is possible to view the period as one of intense activity, but in terms of the day-to-day life of a sailor, living in the cold, dark decks of a man of war, these years were long, very long indeed.
When faced with so many magnificent triumphs, with one enemy after another falling like dominoes, it is also particularly important to remember that these victories were not inevitable. Confusion begat chaos; well-laid plans disintegrated; random acts tipped battle one way or another. Such was the nature of sailing warfare. The seascapes were shrouded in so much gunsmoke that, in the midst of battle, visibility beyond a few feet was all but impossible. Incidents of friendly fire wer
e common. Wind, swell, tide and current, light and dark all ruined the best intentions. The ships’ rigs were so vulnerable to damage that a single lucky shot could cripple any man of war. The sudden death or injury of a ship’s officers could bring a crew to a standstill and the sudden death or injury of a large portion of the crew could bring their officers to a standstill: neither could work without the other and both were vulnerable.
Nor were concepts of honour and duty as rigid as we might expect. One of the greatest myths of the period derives from Nelson’s famous signal, hoisted as the British fleet bore down on the French at Trafalgar: ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’. For make no mistake, in these letters, interwoven with the overpowering narrative of British success, are examples of British officers who did not do their duty. Captain Anthony Molloy was court martialled after The Glorious First of June and never employed again; Vice-Admiral Bridport was strongly criticised within the navy for his failure to press his victory at Groix, even if the public saw him as a hero; Jervis was furious with the conduct of Sir Charles Thompson at the Battle of St Vincent; Captain John Williamson was dismissed after the Battle of Camperdown for failing to bring his ship into action; Nelson was deeply unimpressed with the behaviour of Captain Davidge Gould at the Nile, a battle which, more than any other, is so indelibly linked with the idea of a ‘band of brothers’; Admiral Hyde Parker was blacklisted by the Admiralty and never employed again after the Battle of Copenhagen; Captain Edward Berry blazed away ineffectively at both Trafalgar and San Domingo and was quickly retired from the active list; even at Trafalgar several officers, including Nelson’s third in command, Rear-Admiral the Earl of Northesk, performed ‘notoriously ill’; and Vice-Admiral John Duckworth never received the hereditary peerage he expected after the Battle of San Domingo, an action that, if Duckworth had been doing his job, should never even have been fought.