by Sam Willis
And there were more setbacks and they were significant. Only eight days after St Vincent, the French actually managed to land 1,500 men on British soil at Fishguard in Wales. Although the ‘army’ was a ragged bunch of men and the threat posed minimal, the panic they caused was real and widespread. There was even a run on the banks and the government was forced to come off the Gold Standard. The naval victory off southern Spain had done nothing to prevent an economic crisis that, as things stood in the spring of 1797, could have forced Britain out of the war. Then Austria, Britain’s most significant European ally, chose this moment to withdraw from the war. Yet again, while a British fleet had won a great victory over one of its most powerful rivals, control of the sea remained a distant dream and the future of the war a bleak nightmare.
Camperdown
Camperduin
11 October 1797
‘My attention was so much taken up by finding we were in 9 fathoms water … that I was not able to distinguish the number of Ships captured’
Admiral Adam Duncan, 13 October 1797
AT A GLANCE
DATE:
11 October 1797
NAVIES INVOLVED:
British and Batavian Republic
COMMANDING OFFICERS:
Admiral Adam Duncan and Vice-Admiral Jan de Winter
FLEET SIZES:
British, 14 ships of the line and 2 50-gunners; Dutch 11 ships of the line and 4 50-gunners
TIME OF DAY:
11.30 – 16.30
LOCATION:
Off Camperduin, Holland. 52°45´N 4°12´E
WEATHER:
North-northwesterly winds, squally, occasional rain
RESULT:
7 Dutch ships of the line, 2 Fifth Rates and 2 frigates captured
CASUALTIES:
British 823; Dutch 1,160
BRITISH COURT MARTIALS:
Captain Jon Williamson of the Agincourt demoted to bottom of captains’ list, never employed again
DISPATCHES CARRIED HOME BY:
Captain William Fairfax, Duncan’s flag captain
The Replica
I am in Rotterdam. I have come to look at a ship under construction, a ship that will become one of the largest and most authentic 18th-century warship replicas in the world.
The Nieuwe Maas River stretches from left to right in front of me, swept by the north-westerly winds that race up the delta from the North Sea. River tramps, tankers and tourist boats flow past on the tides of the modern global maritime economy, but I feel detached from that world. I am standing deep in the chest cavity of a Dutch warship that is being built by hand to the exact measurements of the 56-gun Delft, originally built in Delfshaven in 1782.
The physical sensation of being in a shipyard is overpowering. To my left is the bow, to my right the stern. I am standing on the keel. The completed, twisted frames tower above me, marking out that distinctive, wine-glass shape of a sailing warship. The aroma of freshly sawn oak is everywhere. Oak sawdust flies thick through the air and gets in my eyes. I am downwind of a shipwright sanding a ‘knee’, a vast piece of timber, the trunk of an oak, that has a lower branch coming off it at just the correct angle to reinforce vertically the ship’s side and also take the horizontal weight of a deck. It is nature’s very own shelf support.
Perhaps only half of the ship’s frames are now in place but, although the hull is by no means finished, it has reached its finished height. Even unfinished it is awesome. Historians often compare a ship in this state to the skeleton of a giant whale but that is nonsense; the scale is wrong by too many factors. The only way to get any sense of the size is to imagine a large church or cathedral and its timber roof turned upside down. Now delete the walls in your mind and stand on the ground, in the middle of the roof. The effect would be similar. Indeed, ancient timber roofs are as close as you will now get to gaining some sense of what the hull of an ancient ship would look like from the inside. The ship is made of hundreds of trees, each mature and massively thick. It is that intrinsic strength, the sheer density of this ship, that captures, and boggles, the mind.
The scale of the investment of time is also so clear because the trunks are so immense. Some of the oaks used to build the new Delft have come from Northern France. It has taken a century for them to reach the requisite size; so long, in fact, that many of the trunks, once sawn in half, show the scars of fire damage inflicted in the ravaged landscape of the First World War. The massive frames are, in turn, supported by unsawn trunks to stop the ship from toppling over. These supports and the age of her timbers make her look curiously old and young at the same time: young because of the freshly sawn frames at this embryonic stage of construction; old because the frames are gnarled with age and their supports look like the crutches of a wounded naval veteran. She is fascinating, at once helpless and potent, young and old, weak and strong.
At her bow is a magnificent roaring-lion figurehead but otherwise the ship has yet to acquire any real character, any real personality. That will come much later in the construction process, when the bulkheads and companionways, the stern galleries and cabins are fitted and, crucially, when her masts are stepped and her yards swayed aloft and she can fly her ensign.
We do, at least, know what that ensign is going to look like. She will fly the ensign that the original Delft flew in 1797, when she fought against the British at the Battle of Camperdown and when she subsequently sank to the bottom of the North Sea.5 She will fly the ensign of the Batavian Republic.
Depicted on her ensign and seated in a posture that suggests both repose and vigilance will be the unmistakable revolutionary figure of Liberty. In her left hand she will grasp a Liberty Pole adorned with a hat, both powerful symbols of the pursuit of liberty. Liberty herself will wear a helmet, or perhaps a Phrygian Cap, with magnificent plumage in the red, white and blue of the tricolour of the French Republic. Gripped in her right hand will be a shield that depicts the fasces, the bundle of sticks with an axe’s blade emerging from the centre that deliberately recalls the ancient Roman republic which first used it as a symbol of power. Lower to her left and deliberately ‘at her feet’ will be the lion of the Netherlands which will grasp the Liberty Pole as it roars.
This motif of the Batavian Republic drips with iconography and symbolism. A splendid example survives at the National Maritime Museum in London (fig. 8). At the foot of this fragment of flag is a dash of red. If one did not know that it came from the top left-hand corner of a flag with red, white and blue horizontal stripes, one would be forgiven for assuming it fitted into the top right-hand corner of the French Tricolour with its blue, white and red vertical stripes. The flag shouts ‘France’ at us as much as it does ‘Netherlands’ and in that confused symbolism lies the confused identity of the enemy that faced the British fleet in the North Sea in October 1797.
The Invasion
French Revolutionary ideology and French armies reached the Netherlands in the New Year of 1795. In January a 70,000 strong French army crossed the Waal, the southern branch of the Rhine Delta, and began to occupy the country. The Princess of Orange fled on 15 January with the younger members of her family and a great deal of treasure. Utrecht surrendered on 16 January, Rotterdam on 18 January and Dort on 19 January, the same day that William V, Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, fled his country for England. Landing in Harwich he made his way to London and thence to Hampton Court, where he whored himself into oblivion. On 20 January Amsterdam fell to General Pichegru and the rest of the country followed in its wake. The French now controlled the Dutch navy of 28 ships of the line and had unrestricted access to the North Sea.
Many of the Dutch welcomed the French and their new ideology with loud acclamation. Revolutionary clubs and committees sprang up all over the Netherlands fêting the French as liberators. This was a boon to the overstretched and exhausted French armies. French politics had changed in the aftermath of the Thermidorian Coup, which had ended the reign of Robespierre and the Jacobins. France was now led by th
e Directory, with far less focus and aggression. The conquered powers now enjoyed an easier relationship with France and the Dutch show of support was rewarded with nominal independence. The Netherlands were permitted to retain their own identity as the ‘Batavian Republic’ if a number of terms were met, not least of which was an indemnity of 100,000,000 florins and open support for the war against Britain.
The Dutch were openly encouraged in their own revolution by the French, but its nature was significantly different from the French revolution, as were the popular and political aspirations in its aftermath. The Batavian Republic was heavily influenced by France and French ideas but one of the central issues that dominated its politics was the question of continuing independence from France, albeit in the new conditions imposed by its conqueror. The Dutch navy, in particular, was far more than an instrument of French warfare and could be used by the Batavian Republic for its own ends, either to make political points or to impose military pressure. In spite of the recent French conquest, the political machinations that led to the Dutch navy being sent to sea in October 1797 were Dutch, not French.
By October 1797 the Batavian Republic had enough good reasons of its own to fight Britain. One of William V’s first actions in exile had been to encourage his allies to fight for his crown. He therefore sanctioned the British occupation of several significant Dutch colonies, including the Cape of Good Hope and others in the East and West Indies. In August 1796 a Dutch attempt to retake the Cape failed spectacularly when they surrendered nine ships to Vice-Admiral George Elphinstone without a fight at Saldanha Bay north west of modern day Cape Town. Not only were the British therefore unmistakably the enemy, but the Dutch navy had every reason to want to fight and to fight well. They needed to erase the shame of the surrender at Saldanha Bay in exactly the same way that the French in June 1794 had wanted to erase the shame of their own fleet surrender at Toulon in 1793. With the British now in control of valuable Dutch colonies, even William’s own supporters began to see the necessity of a naval war, or at the very least a show of naval strength, against Britain. How else could those colonies be reclaimed? Even if they could not be won back by force, force could certainly lay the foundation for political reconciliation.
One further ingredient of this mix was the confusion surrounding the new Dutch national identity. Throughout the 17th century the Dutch, in their military and mercantile heyday, had, in part, identified themselves through maritime hostility directed towards Britain. Now, faced with a period of great uncertainty, they looked to their past where they found naval heroes such as Maarten Trompe and Michiel de Ruyter, men who defined themselves and their nation in terms of naval victory over the British. War with Britain was therefore viewed as politically expedient from both ends of the Dutch political spectrum, from the perspective both of those who supported the Batavian Republic and those who prayed for its demise. Without this consensus, the decision to send the Dutch fleet to sea in the autumn of 1797 would be entirely baffling.
The Battle of Camperdown is unlike almost any other naval battle ever fought and certainly unlike all others in this period because there is no apparent strategic motivation. There was no merchant convoy to protect as at The Glorious First of June; no treasure ships to shepherd as at St Vincent; no army to protect and supply as at the Nile; no strategic advantage to win as at Copenhagen; no army to reinforce as at Trafalgar; and no enemy merchant ships to raid as at San Domingo.
If the battle had been fought three or four months earlier, however, everything would have made sense. Then the Dutch fleet had been crammed with French and Dutch soldiers intent on an invasion of the vulnerable east coast of England. The invading force had been under the command of the vigorous proselyte General Herman Daendels and his astute adjutant Wolfe Tone, an Irish nationalist who had sided with the French in his war against Britain. Moreover, the British fleet had been crippled by mutinies at Spithead and the Nore. All had been ready and the timing auspicious for the longed-for strike against Britain. But the weather had been horrendous. The Dutch sailors had practised repeatedly at their cannon and muskets but the wind never relented. On 18 July Wolfe Tone erupted, ‘The wind is as foul as possible this morning; it cannot be worse. Hell! Hell! Hell! Allah! Allah! I am in a most devouring rage.’ Eight days later and he wrote again, ‘I am today eighteen days on board and we have not had eighteen minutes of fair wind.’1
As time passed, so opportunity faded. The British resolved the mutinies through a mixture of understanding and brutality. The French commander, Lazare Hoche, was summoned back to Paris for political reasons and died very suddenly shortly afterwards. Rumours of poison were never proven, though the sudden death of one of the revolution’s finest generals remains suspicious. The invasion force ran out of food and became sick and, by the beginning of October, the threat of invasion had vanished and even a Dutch sortie was no longer anticipated by the British.
The commander of the Dutch fleet, Willem de Winter, dreaded the prospect of such a sortie just as much as the British had fretted about a possible invasion. Like the French before it, the Dutch navy suffered in the aftermath of revolution. Many Orangist sympathisers fled, leaving a great dearth of trained men that could only be filled by rapid promotion. The resultant shortage of experienced crew was acute and de Winter himself, at only 36 years old, had never commanded a fleet before. Despite that inexperience, however, he had the eye of a seaman and quickly came to realise that his fleet would be no match for the British. There were few high-quality men to crew the ships, fewer officers to lead them in battle, no recent, shared fighting experience to calm nerves and encourage confidence and no weight of expectation from recent victory.
The Scotsman
The man who had been trying to deal with the constantly shifting threat posed by the Dutch navy, with or without its cargo of French soldiers, was the Scottish Admiral Adam Duncan. In early October 1797 Duncan left a small force under Sir Henry Trollope to watch the Dutch coast and returned to the fleet base at Yarmouth to revictual and repair his ships and enjoy a rare moment of calm. The summer had been utterly exhausting.
The discord in the British fleet that had begun at Spithead and then spread eastwards along the south coast to the Nore, the fleet anchorage at the mouth of the River Medway, had found its way by June to Yarmouth, the base of Duncan’s North Sea fleet. Mutiny had broken out at the most critical moment possible. As the Dutch fleet, its holds crammed with an invasion army, waited for the briefest of weather windows in which to launch the invasion, just two of Duncan’s ships, his flagship Venerable and the Adamant, were uninfected by mutiny. The British blockade was nothing more than a pretence, maintained by those two ships sailing back and forth within sight of the Dutch coast and signalling to imaginary ships beyond the horizon.
Duncan, meanwhile, had worked feverishly to rid his fleet of mutiny, a feat which he achieved, as the best commanders always did, through a mixture of understanding and aggression. Duncan had both in spades. He was well-loved by his men for his open commitment to improving their health and well-being but he was also fearsome. Very tall for the time, he towered above most of his men. On one occasion he dangled a mutineer over the side of the ship one-handed, roaring his defiance all the while: ‘My lads! Look at this fellow who dares to deprive me of the command of the fleet!’2 A contemporary description certainly makes him sound rather impressive. ‘Imagine a man upwards of six feet four inches in height, with limbs of proportionate frame and strength. His features are nobly beautiful, his forehead high and fair, and his hair as white as snow. His movements are all stately and unaffected, and his manner easy though dignified.’3 The mutineers certainly bore no grudge against Duncan as a commander; their grievance was against the faulty and unfair system of payment that saw British sailors risking their lives for a pittance that never materialised.
To add to his other problems, Duncan had been faced with the troubling prospect of making an alliance with Russia work to his advantage. Catherine the Great had join
ed the First Coalition against Revolutionary France in 1795 and had sent 12 ships of the line and six frigates to the North Sea to assist the British fleet. The Russians continued their naval commitment when, in 1796, Catherine was succeeded by Tsar Paul I, a determined enemy of the Revolution. The Russian presence, however, created a diplomatic nightmare. Both navies bristled. How should they salute each other? Who, exactly, was in charge? How should they communicate? How should Russian sailors caught smuggling gallons of illicit booze into Chatham dockyard be punished?
Duncan proved a natural diplomat, flattering the Russians through gritted teeth while assuming and maintaining control of the combined naval force. He used the sickly Russian squadron of poor ships as best he could in his blockade of the Dutch coast. The battle he longed for never materialised, however. The Dutch stayed safely in the Texel while the British and the Russians struggled to stay at sea. Very little happened. This was not a campaign of constant sniping against frigates dashing around the sandbanks; nor was it a cat-and-mouse game between battlefleets bursting out of the North Sea fog. Duncan, therefore, did not have the opportunity to test any of his numerous tactical ideas or to improve his skill as a commanding officer in battle. And he desperately needed to do both.
While Duncan was undoubtedly competent, his abilities as a commander had never been tested in fleet battle. In fact, he had only ever experienced fleet battle once, at the Moonlight Battle of 1780, when Rodney had chased and defeated a Spanish squadron off the coast of Portugal. That was now 17 years ago. Duncan had certainly enjoyed a lengthy and varied career, but its highlights were the mighty amphibious operations of the Seven Years War (1756–63) and the great relief of Gibraltar in the subsequent War of American Independence (1775–83).