The Struggle for Sea Power E-Book

Sam Willis

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

LONGLISTED FOR THE HESSELL TILTMAN PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE MEDIA MARITIME AWARDS SHORTLISTED FOR THE MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD With a cast of swaggering swashbuckling characters, The Struggle for Sea Power charts the greatest war in the age of sail. For the first time, Sam Willis offers a fascinating naval perspective to one of the greatest of all historical conundrums: How did thirteen isolated colonies, who, in 1775 began a war with Britain without a navy or an army, win their independence from the greatest naval and military power on earth? The American Revolution was a naval war of immense scope and variety, including no fewer than twenty-two navies fighting on five oceans - to say nothing of rivers and lakes. In no other war were so many large-scale fleet battles fought, one of which was the most strategically significant naval battle in all of British, French and American history. Simultaneous naval campaigns were fought in the English Channel, the North and Mid-Atlantic, the Mediterranean, off South Africa, in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the North Sea and, of course, off the eastern seaboard of America. Not until the Second World War would any nation actively fight in so many different theatres. In The Struggle for Sea Power, Sam Willis traces every key military event in the path to American Independence from a naval perspective and he also brings this important viewpoint to bear on economic, political and social developments that were fundamental to the success of the Revolution. In doing so Willis offers valuable new insights to American, British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Russian history. The result is a far more profound understanding of the influence of sea power upon history, of the American path to independence and of the rise and fall of the British Empire.

Leseprobe

The Struggle for Sea Power

Also by Sam Willis

In the Hour of Victory: The Royal Navy at War in theAge of Nelson

*   *   *

THE HEARTS OF OAK TRILOGY

Fighting Temeraire: Legend of TrafalgarThe Admiral Benbow: The Life and Times of a Naval LegendThe Glorious First of June: Fleet Battle in the Reign of Terror

*   *   *

THE FIGHTING SHIPS SERIES

Fighting Ships: From the Ancient World to 1750Fighting Ships: 1750–1850Fighting Ships: 1850–1950

*   *   *

Shipwreck: A History of Disasters at SeaFighting at Sea in the Eighteenth Century: The Art of SailingWarfare

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books, an imprintof Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Sam Willis, 2015

The moral right of Sam Willis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 84887 8 464E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 7 403Paperback ISBN: 978 1 84887 8 471

Printed in Great Britain

Map artwork by Jamie Whyte

Endpaper image: Detail from Attack of the rebels upon Fort Penobscot …, 1785 (Map image courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library/Richard H. Brown collection)

Frontispiece image: Detail from Campagne du Vice-Amiral [sic] Cte. d’Estaing en Amêrique … by Pierre Ozanne (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Atlantic BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Tors

‘With an undiscribable pleasure I have seen near a score of years roll over our Heads, with an affection heightned and improved by time.’*

* Abigail Adams to John Adams, 12 December 1782

‘To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.’

Herman Melville

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

List of Charts

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

PART 1 American Revolution, 1773–1775

1

British Pyre

2

American Origins

3

European Gunpowder

4

Canadian Invasion

5

Colonial Sea Power

6

British Evacuation

PART 2 Civil War, 1776–1777

7

British Attack

8

Freshwater Fleets

9

American Riposte

10

British Surrender

11

American Sea Power

PART 3 World War, 1778–1780

1778

12

Bourbon Alliance

13

French Firepower

14

British Survival

15

Caribbean Sea

16

Indian Empire

1779

17

Spanish Patience

18

Bourbon Invasion

19

British Resourcefulness

20

Caribbean Crisis

21

French Incompetence

22

American Destruction

1780

23

British Dominance

24

Allied Recommitment

25

Spanish Skill

26

Russian Meddling

PART 4 American Independence, 1781

27

Dutch Disaster

28

British Obsession

29

French Escapes

30

Allied Success

Epilogue

Glossary of Nautical Terms

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Colour section

1.

View of the Narrows between Long Island & Staaten Island … by Archibald Robertson, 1776 (Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library)

2.

Forcing the Boom on the Hudson River by Dominic Serres the Elder, 1779 (Melford Hall, The Firebrace Collection/National Trust)

3.

The British landing at Kip’s Bay, New York Island by Robert Cleverley, 1777 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

4.

The landing of the British forces in the Jerseys … by Thomas Davies, 1776 (The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library)

5.

New England Armed Vessels in Valcure Bay, Lake Champlain… by Charles Randle, 1776 (Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1996-82-2)

6.

Washington Crossing the Delaware River by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, 1851 (oil on canvas, copy of an original painted in 1848) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA/Bridgeman Images)

7.

Sketch of Fort Ticonderoga, 1777 (Courtesy of The Fort Ticonderoga Museum)

8.

Sketch by Hector McNeill from Naval Documents of The American Revolution, vol. 9 (United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1986)

9.

Barrington’s Action at St Lucia by Dominic Serres, 1780 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Greenwich Hospital Collection)

10.

Barrington’s action at St Lucia: the squadron at anchor off the Cul de Sac after the action by Dominic Serres, 1780 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Acquired with the assistance of The Art Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund)

11.

Detail from Attack of the rebels upon Fort Penobscot …, 1785 (Map image courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library/Richard H. Brown collection)

12.

A colour woodblock print of the Grand Union Flag (Private Collection/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images)

13.

The Moonlight Battle off Cape St Vincent by Francis Holman, 1780 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Caird Collection)

14.

Painting of the Baltick of Salem, 1765 (© 2013 Peabody Essex Museum. Photograph by Walter Silver)

15.

Hunter House front entrance (Gavin Ashworth, photo courtesy of The Preservation Society of Newport County)

16.

Coin commemorating the capture of St Eustatius, 1781 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

Black & white illustrations

Coiffure à la Belle-Poule, 1778 (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Drawing of ‘Bushnell’s submarine boat’ by Francis Morgan Barber, 1875 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Illustration of chevaux de frise from Pictorial Field Book of the Revolution, vol. II by Benson J. Lossing (1850)

Sketch of the Hudson River chain from Obstructions to the navigation of Hudson’s River by E. M. Ruttenber (1860)

Politeness by James Gillray, 1778 (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

Who’s in fault? (Nobody) A view off Ushant, 1779 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

L’escadre françoise sortant de la Méditerranée le 16 Mai 1778 by Pierre Ozanne (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

L’escadre françoise entrant dans la Delaware et chassant la frégate la Mermaid by Pierre Ozanne (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Illustration showing the French and British positions at Sandy Hook, from Rear-Admiral Charles Ekins’s Naval Battles (1824) (Courtesy of The Devon and Exeter Institution)

L’escadre françoise mouillée devant New-york … by Pierre Ozanne (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Campagne du Vice-Amiral [sic] Cte. d’Estaing en Amêrique … by Pierre Ozanne (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Moment de l’après midi du 11 Aoust 1778 by Pierre Ozanne (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Le vaisseau le Languedoc dématé par le coup de vent … by Pierre Ozanne (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Le vaisseau le Languedoc rematé en pleine mer ainsi que le Marseillois … by Pierre Ozanne (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Illustration showing Barrington’s position at St Lucia from Ekins’ Naval Battles (Courtesy of The Devon and Exeter Institution)

Drawing of a ‘Depressing Carriage’ by Lieutenant George Frederick Koehler, 1782 (Courtesy of the Royal Artillery Historical Trust)

L’armée françoise Mouillée auprès de l’Ance Molenieu dans l’isle de la Greanade by Pierre Ozanne (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

L’armée françoise combattant l’armée Angloise à bord opposé troisieme position by Pierre Ozanne (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

L’armée françoise allant reconnoitre à St. Cristophe … by Pierre Ozanne (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Illustration showing Parker’s operation at St Lucia, from Ekins’ Naval Battles (Courtesy of The Devon and Exeter Institution)

Cartoon depicting the plunder of St Eustatius, 1782 (Atlas Van Stolk, Rotterdam)

Detail from a map showing York River, 1782 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division)

Cartoon depicting the British surrender at Yorktown, 1781 (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)

The Bum-bardment of Gibralter, or f-t-g against thunder, 1782 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

CHARTS

America Before the War

Rhode Island

Boston

New York to Quebec, Part 1: New York and the Lower Hudson

New York to Quebec, Part 2: Hudson Highlands and Lake Champlain

New York to Quebec, Part 3: St Jean to Quebec

Northern Europe

The Caribbean

The Red Sea and India

The Gulf Coast

The Chesapeake Bay

Gibraltar

The Invasion of Canada

The Pennsylvania Campaign

Philadelphia

Savannah

Penobscot

Charleston

AMERICA BEFORE THE WAR

RHODE ISLAND

BOSTON

NEW YORK TO QUEBEC, PART 1: NEW YORK AND THE LOWER HUDSON

NEW YORK TO QUEBEC, PART 2: HUDSON HIGHLANDS AND LAKE CHAMPLAIN

NEW YORK TO QUEBEC, PART 3: ST JEAN TO QUEBEC

NORTHERN EUROPE

THE CARIBBEAN

THE RED SEA AND INDIA

THE GULF COAST

THE CHESAPEAKE BAY

GIBRALTAR

FOREWORD

This book has been a joy to write. It has taken more than five years and I have travelled far and wide in my research. I have visited countless new places and met countless new faces. The faces made the places enjoyable. As a maritime historian, I believe it is essential not only to visit the locations where history unfolded, but also to get out on the water and experience them. I can now say that, in the process of researching this book, I have sailed, rowed and sometimes even swum up and down the Delaware and Hudson rivers, where I trembled at the currents where the rivers meet the sea; around Long Island Sound and the Chesapeake Bay, where I marvelled at the blue-shelled crabs and sniffed nervously for sand-banks; up and down the James and York rivers in Virginia; and to and from New York, Boston and Newport, Rhode Island, where I was bewildered by the density of the summer fog. I have explored by sea numerous coastal villages in both Massachusetts and Connecticut, and I have even been lucky enough to portage a replica eighteenth-century bateau from Lake Champlain to Lake George and then sail it down that most beautiful stretch of sparkling crystal water, the first time that this has been done for 200 years. I have marvelled at the challenge of waging naval war in the heat, trade winds and relentless ocean currents off Antigua, Barbados, St Lucia and Martinique. I have been foxed by the fog off Brest, by the swells off La Corunna, and by the currents in the Bay of Gibraltar. I have both been becalmed and nearly sunk in the English Channel. I have studied books, enjoyed letters, pored over maps and hefted artefacts in dozens of libraries, archives and museums from London to New York, from Paris to Antigua.

The helpers have a special place in my heart. First I must thank the Society for Nautical Research whose generosity funded a crucial part of my research in America. I must also thank the American National Maritime Historical Society and Burchie Green, who welcomed me with such open arms. I have relied heavily on a rowdy crew of scholars who are all so generous with their knowledge and time. Michael Duffy, Roger Knight, Jonathan Dull, John Hattendorf, Nicholas Rodger, Andrew Lambert, Richard Harding, John Tilley, Olivier Chaline, Michael Crawford, Alan Jamieson, Robert Bellamy, David Manthey, Steven Park, Carl Borick, Jim Johnson, Gareth Cole and Arthur Lefkowitz all offered invaluable historical help. Others helped with their company during my research or by opening doors for me. I am indebted to Carol Bundy, Edward and Jane Handler, Simon and Laura Tucker, and Jonathon Band. Andrew Bond has been a constant presence in the last decade of my writing and Nicholas Blake an invaluable sounding board as a naval historian and wordsmith. Thank you all.

SWTrafalgar Place, November 2014

‘Is it possible that a people without arms, ammunition, money, or navy, should dare to brave a nation, dreaded and respected by all the powers on earth?’

Extract from a letter published in the New York Gazetteer, 29 December 1774

‘In any operation, and under all circumstances, a decisive naval superiority is to be considered as a fundamental principle, and the basis upon which every hope of success must ultimately depend.’

George Washington to Count Rochambeau, 15 July 1780

PREFACE

Once I heard an American boatman, with his boat trapped hard against rocks by a raging current, and with the boat’s stern-line hard as iron, scream for more slack as she began to grate and grind against sharp granite. You could see that he felt every blow as if he were receiving the wound himself. The boat was being subjected to gross moral indignity as much as to actual physical injury. With her hull exposed and her motions awkward, the tableau felt unnatural, it felt wrong. The boatman’s eyes bulged, his chest swelled and he bellowed an order.

Now, in this situation, a British seaman would shout ‘Ease!’ or ‘Slack!’, referring directly to the stern rope that was bar-tight, the tether that was holding the boat back from the safety of the open water. But Americans have another word, and theirs refers to the boat rather than to the lines by which she is held. As this particular situation worsened from accident to crisis, with the boat shuddering with every blow, the boatman set his shoulders back and roared at me – for it was I who held that stern-line – ‘Liberty!’

The problem was not that the stern-line was too tight, but that his precious boat, which encapsulated his livelihood, was trapped, pinned, restrained, imprisoned. The problem was not with the line but with the person who was holding the line, the person who was denying that ship her liberty. The problem was with me.

I was immediately enchanted by the way that the word ‘liberty’ survives in American but not in British maritime language. In a split second I began to write this paragraph in my head; in another, to the soundtrack of more splintering wood and American thundering, I began to write this book about how thirteen British colonies in America won their independence – in their eyes, their liberty – from Britain between 1775 and 1783.

Five years later I have completed it, and it is time for me to say sorry. So I’m sorry, Fred. I’m sorry that I wasn’t paying attention and that your precious boat was damaged. On the banks of that river we had our own mini maritime revolution, and when I finally started to pay attention and eased off that line, your beautiful boat won her liberty.

INTRODUCTION

How do you begin a naval history of the greatest war of the age of sail? Consider the scale of the problem. From first gasp to final whimper, the American War of Independence lasted a decade and was the longest war in American history until Vietnam two centuries later. It involved no fewer than twenty-two separate navies and was fought in five different oceans, as well as on land-locked lakes, majestic rivers, barely navigable streams and ankle-deep swamps. It involved more fleet battles than any other naval war, one of which was the most strategically significant naval battle in all of British, American or French history. Those battles were fought by some of the largest fleets of sailing warships ever to set sail, and some of them by the strangest and most eclectic fleets in history, including one that was taken to pieces, dragged twelve miles overland, and then rebuilt and launched on a lake.

The war bursts with tales of heroism and cowardice, loyalty and treachery, political blood-letting, military ingenuity, medical innovation and stunning incompetence. It encompassed tidal waves, three of the worst Atlantic storms on record, the gravest invasion threat faced by Britain since the Spanish Armada in 1588, shipwrecks, smuggling, riots, mutinies, convict labour, treasure ships, slavery, financial collapse. There were nervous breakdowns, epic feats of survival and endurance, as well as love stories, epidemics, miserable evacuations and narrow escapes. There were unstoppable invasions, unprecedented shipbuilding programmes, one of the longest sieges in history and one of the most outrageous examples of military treason in history, horrifying and systematic cruelty, a ‘floating’ town, spies, the world’s first military submarine and a native Indian tribe descended from shipwrecked slaves.

Starring in this spectacular were historical figures of the highest distinction, from George Washington and George III of England to Louis XVI of France, Charles III of Spain and Catherine the Great of Russia. While naval officers of great fame such as John Paul Jones, Abraham Whipple, John Manley, George Rodney, Samuel Hood, Horatio Nelson, the comte de Grasse and the bailli de Suffren navigated the oceans, Titans of political and diplomatic history, including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, George Germain, the Earl of Sandwich, Lord North, the comte de Vergennes and the conde de Floridablanca, navigated the labyrinthine corridors of power. Countless unsung heroes, meanwhile, made their mark on history in a myriad ways, and all of this happened in a conflict that dramatically shaped the modern world.

So how do you begin? The answer, you might be surprised to hear, lies with a woman precariously balancing a model of a fully rigged sailing warship on her head.

In the summer of 1778 a new and bizarre fashion swept Paris as ladies began to wear their hair in a style known as à la Belle Poule. The Paris salons and society balls were transformed as dozens of ships sailed by on elaborately coiffured heaving swells of curled and powdered hair. What on earth was going on?

A perfect historical puzzle, it encapsulates everything I love about history. Sufficiently bizarre to seem ever so human, it also hints at far deeper historical themes and questions than the tastes of Parisian women and the techniques of Parisian hairdressers in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Sailing warships, after all, were the tools of war and empire. They were used to protect trade, fight battles, transport troops and blockade enemy fleets. They represented staggering investment on a scale that, if mismanaged, could bankrupt nations. Those ships were engineering achievements of the very highest calibre that have been compared with the construction of medieval cathedrals, and the dockyards that maintained them were the largest industrial sites that then existed.

A contemporary cartoon of a fashionable French lady wearing her hair ‘à la Belle Poule’.

Sailing warships were thus the very opposite of fashionable whimsy. Clearly, something quite remarkable must have happened, perhaps thousands of miles from Paris, to have had such an influence on urban society as to affect fashion in such a profound and remarkable way. This is what I discovered.

On 17 June 1778 a British frigate, HMS Arethusa, in company with a smaller armed naval ship, was patrolling off Cornwall when she came across a French frigate, the Belle Poule. The two frigates hove to within firing distance of each other, and the British ordered the French to return with them to the bosom of the main British fleet for inspection.

The French had long been covertly assisting the Americans with their rebellion, but Britain and France were not yet at war. In Paris, however, the moment for the declaration had finally arrived and a message had already been sent to Brest, ordering the Belle Poule’s captain to engineer a confrontation that could provide a pretext for war. He therefore refused to follow the British and opened fire. The ferocity of the subsequent engagement surprised the Arethusa, and though neither ship was taken, the British ship was severely damaged and her captain forced to break off the action.

The French crowed over their success. Anticipation of this exact moment had been rising for three full years and had reached fever pitch. Horrified by their humiliation in the previous Anglo-French conflict, the Seven Years’ War (1754–63), the French had rebuilt their navy. The American rebellion had given them the excuse they needed to join a conflict that could return French diplomatic prestige to its accustomed level, and the Belle Poule action was interpreted as evidence that the dream could come true. At the same time it was the most visible evidence possible to the Americans, whose rebellion was then wilting after a year of unexpected bloom, that the French really were coming to their assistance and that they would bring with them the one thing that the Americans lacked and yet desperately needed if they were ever going to win this war: a navy that could contest control of the seas with the British.

These themes had already been popularized in Parisian society, chiefly through the efforts of one man, Benjamin Franklin. The canny Franklin had spent a year and a half in France acting as a commissioner from the American Continental Congress. His role, and that of his two colleagues Arthur Lee and Silas Deane, was to nurture friendship between the two nations and secure both political and military aid. He was a revelation. He knew his way round the minefields of French eccentricities, having visited before the war as a scientist promoting his convincing theories about electricity and lightning. The French loved him, and Franklin’s major triumph was to make the American cause not just politically and diplomatically appealing but fashionable.

Thus, in the summer of 1778, both French society and the French government were primed for something dramatic and the Belle Poule action provided the spark. France officially declared war and French ladies began to appear with their coiffure à la Belle Poule. Viewed in a crowded room, the ships would constantly appear and disappear, rise and fall, pitch and roll in an extraordinary and involuntary theatrical display. What at first sight seems entirely absurd was, in fact, a rather clever piece of performance art, way before its time, that thrived on the contrasts that it exposed and delighted in. It brought all things maritime and naval – which is to say all things tough, hard, frightening, dangerous, wet, outdoors and masculine – deep into the perfumed, feminine warmth and cosy chatter of a high-class indoor party. Unsurprisingly, the French absolutely loved it.

My discovery of that extraordinary image was the principal inspiration for this book, for it was soon clear that ‘The Great Hair Mystery’ was just one piece of a far greater jigsaw. My subsequent research slowly uncovered what I believe to be the most intriguing naval story in history.

*   *   *

It is no longer necessary to entirely bemoan a lack of maritime or naval perspective in our histories of American independence. There are now excellent histories available on numerous aspects of the maritime war, such as the various roles of the Royal Navy, the French navy, the Spanish navy, the American navy, the maritime economy, privateers, fishermen, shipping, logistics and leadership. These focused studies are supported by an ongoing project of astonishing scale to publish significant documents pertaining to the war at sea. Under the aegis of the US Naval History and Heritage Command, the Naval Documents of the American Revolution series has been running since the mid-1960s and has become an important historical document in its own right. It now stands at twelve volumes, each well over 1,000 pages long, with forewords from several generations of American presidents: from Kennedy through Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush to Obama.

Nevertheless, no attempt has yet been made to unite or combine these many themes into a comprehensive narrative naval history of the war. As a result, the role of sea power tends to retain a limited profile in our most general histories of the war. Indeed, it is most commonly restricted to a single example, the battle of the Chesapeake in 1781, when the defeat of a British fleet by the French led to the isolation and subsequent surrender of an entire British army at Yorktown in Virginia. Cornwallis’s capitulation led directly to the fall of the bellicose North government in Britain and its replacement by one committed to ending the war. Thus is the link between sea power and American independence made manifest.

This argument has been well made by many historians and I make no attempt to challenge it here, at least not directly. What I have tried to do, however, is to extend this idea of the influence of sea power to the entire war, rather than to one isolated and very short-lived battle in a single location, whose influence is more debatable and far more complex than many suspect. What I have set out to do, essentially, is to provide the reader with a proper maritime and naval context within which to place the more widely known battle of the Chesapeake. By doing so, I hope to demonstrate that sea power did indeed influence the American war, but not in the way that one might suspect.

Within this broad approach, I have been careful to follow certain rules or themes. The first is that I do not restrict my ‘naval’ history to formal and established navies. It is often not appreciated that sea power can exist without navies – that is, without the formal funding stream, infrastructure, bureaucracy, professional manpower, permanence and warships that the term ‘navy’ suggests: an idea that is particularly true of this war. Twelve of the thirteen rebellious colonies formed their own ‘navies’ without any formal administrative or logistical infrastructure, and even before these were created on paper, some of the colonies already wielded significant sea power. The same can be said of the Continental Navy, which represented the rebellious colonies acting together. Ships fighting on behalf of the Continental Congress exercised sea power long before the Continental Navy actually came into existence.

I have also been careful to include the role of privateers, because the relationship between navies, state formation and privateers is far too complex to be separated. A privateer, after all, cannot be a privateer until he has received a licence to conduct private warfare that has been issued by a state: you cannot have non-state maritime violence if a state does not exist first. Thus the rise of American privateers is an essential, if surprising, part of the story of American independence.

My second rule is to make no distinction between navies operating on rivers and freshwater lakes and those operating on oceans. The contributions made by the former to this war are of equal significance to those by the latter. Naval historians tend to make a false distinction between ‘inland navies’ and those that disputed ‘command of the sea’, but contemporaries saw no difference. They simply talked of ‘command of the water’,1 an excellent phrase that has sadly gone out of use. If you are struggling to see a lake in the same terms as an ocean, I urge you to stand on the shores of Lake Michigan in a storm. You will not want to go out in a boat. Shallow it may be, but that shallowness and the relatively short fetch of the shores make for particularly brutal conditions on the water. And what about rivers? Rivers were to an eighteenth-century army as railways were to armies of the nineteenth century, but these were no passive, gently bubbling streams but evil and treacherous tongues of brown water whose currents could create whirlpools big enough to suck down a fully manned cutter. Figures do not survive, but it is safe to assume that during this war hundreds, perhaps thousands of sailors drowned in rivers, or otherwise died fighting on, in or near them. Most of the riverine warfare I describe in this book, moreover, happened on the lower reaches, where powerful ocean-bound currents met relentless land-bound tides. Operating vessels in such conditions was the ultimate test of seamanship. The slightest misjudgement could endanger the lives of everyone aboard, and with them the success of an entire military operation. Historians have tended to ignore men who fought in these liminal areas between land and sea, but I have the utmost respect for them. Indeed, one should remember that, for all his lack of ‘naval’ experience and understanding, Washington was the son of riverine Virginia and, of necessity, an experienced river boatman.

My third rule is not to restrict my narrative to the fates of Britain and America. Readers already familiar with the war will know of the major roles played by the French and Spanish fleets but may be less familiar with the roles played by those belonging to the Dutch, the Russians, the Danes, the Swedes, the native American Indians and by the East India Company’s navy, the Bombay Marine.

My fourth aim is to try to bring together what is conventionally kept apart by emphasizing the links between these apparently separate navies and the seemingly separate theatres in which they operated. This is a major departure from previous approaches.2 Trade ran from Britain and America to Newfoundland, Africa, South America, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Indian Ocean and beyond, and where trade went, navies followed. The transient presence of foreign-bound trade convoys in home waters always carried significant historical significance, especially if they were captured. Each theatre, moreover, was affected by what was happening elsewhere in the world. If, for example, a major naval threat was posed to Britain in the English Channel, then one, or perhaps all, of the British forces in American, Caribbean, Mediterranean and Indian waters would be weakened to strengthen the Channel Fleet.

Such connections had a profound impact on the outcome of the war. The situation at Gibraltar, that lump of rock at the entrance to the Mediterranean, repeatedly set the war in America on a different course, while the situation in the Caribbean constantly affected everything on both sides of the Atlantic. One contemporary put it simply: the war in America ‘has and ever must be determined in the West Indies’.3 There are even direct links between the construction of a canal system in northern France and American independence.4 The way that these theatres interacted is both a fascinating intellectual puzzle and the key to understanding how the war developed. Exploring these unexpected links has been one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing this book, and the strength of them is most eloquently described by a single, captivating fact: a warship in the Pennsylvania State Navy was named Hyder Ali, after the warlord then fighting against the British 5,000 miles away in India.5 If you need any more convincing, consider this: everyone knows that the first shot of this war was fired between soldiers on Lexington Common in 1775, but did you know that the last was fired between warships at the battle of Cuddalore in the Bay of Bengal on 20 June 1783?

The fifth rule is that I have tried to emphasize the various different ways that sea power affected the war and the nations in question. The obvious military narratives concern fleet battles, invasion and blockade, but such a traditional view misses a great deal. There are numerous strands to this narrative – the effect of sea power on strategy, internal politics, diplomacy, economics (and of course hairdressing) – but consider for now the arrival of the British fleet off New York in 1776, because it makes a significant point that transcends all of these themes. Before it fired a single shot or unloaded a single soldier, its mere presence dramatically altered the situation in New York. It terrified the rebels, gave hope to the loyalists, triggered a massive civilian evacuation causing untold misery to thousands, and affected the economy. Time and again the presence, or even just the anticipated presence, of a naval fleet had such an effect, and the war was particularly sensitive to it. In 1778 and 1780 just the rumour that the French were sending a major fleet to America dramatically changed the war. To understand the impact of sea power on the war, therefore, one must first realize that military commanders and civilians reacted not only to the reality of enemy sea power – measured in soldiers landed or cannon-balls fired – but also to its promise, and sometimes even to its ghost: the effects of sea power often lingered long after the fleets themselves had vanished.

This may be a naval history, but it is a history more of people than of ships, and I have also been careful to emphasize how navies affected people’s lives in a far more personal way. The American Revolution meant that the sea, in some way, touched many more people than it had before the war. Throughout this war, an unknown number of people, but measured easily in the thousands, took to the sea in military operations or civilian evacuations and thereby experienced the world in a new way. A charming feature of the period resulting from this is that so many diaries are filled with awe at the majesty of nature. Here are narwhals, flying fish and icebergs, even islands covered in so many birds that, if startled, they would darken the sky.6 Those same diaries are also filled with shock at the unique life of the sailor – the smell, the cramped conditions, the hot, the cold, the damp, the noise, seasickness. All of these goggle-eyed innocents were baptized in sea power by the war. For them the scale and potential of the world expanded during this period, their horizons broadened. This war was nothing less than a vital moment in the history of the human race reconnecting with itself, and with our world, by sea.

An interesting offshoot of this approach is that I have taken care to emphasize the reverse image – the intriguing paradox of sailors operating and fighting ashore – and this soon became a dominant theme. Almost every major military operation had a significant maritime component, for it was impossible to move any meaningful distance around colonial America without quickly finding oneself confronted by a river, estuary or lake which was impassable without significant maritime resources and skills. One of the most important parts of Washington’s army – and, on several occasions, the most important part – was a regiment of mariners from Marblehead, Massachusetts. On more than one occasion land-battles were contested entirely by sailors on both sides firing naval guns from land-batteries. The presence and, perhaps even more so, the absence of sailors at critical moments in crucial theatres sent this war hurtling off in unexpected directions.

Another significant approach I have adopted has been to explore the little or completely unknown maritime aspects of otherwise well-known campaigns. Consider the famous battles of Lexington and Concord. Known most widely for the skirmishing on Lexington Common and in the woods on the way back to Boston, there were key naval aspects to the operation at both its beginning and end that directly affected its outcome. Then, the way that the battle was interpreted in Britain, which turned on the key question of who fired first, was directly influenced by a trans-Atlantic maritime race for intelligence. Consider also Benedict Arnold’s ‘march’ through the Maine wilderness to Quebec in 1775, one of the best-known military campaigns of the period. This was actually an amphibious operation from start to finish. Arnold’s troops first sailed from Newburyport in Massachusetts to the Kennebec River in Maine in a fleet of eleven ships and then headed into the wilderness with a fleet of 220 bateaux, which brought them down to the banks of the St Lawrence, but on the wrong side of the river to Quebec. Even the final act of the ‘march’, therefore, was a voyage. And what of Washington crossing the Delaware in 1777, sparking a hugely significant revival of American fortunes? Now that maritime operation is famous, one of the most famous maritime operations of the war, but did you know that Washington actually crossed the Delaware four times? Its popular title is actually misleading: ‘Washington’s Crossings’ would be far more accurate. Finally, at least for now, what of the most famous naval event of the war, the battle of the Chesapeake and Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown? Intriguingly, Cornwallis was not as isolated in Yorktown as we might think, helplessly stranded and waiting for naval rescue; in fact he had nearly 1,000 sailors embedded with his army and a fleet of sixty-eight ships to hand. Sixty-eight!

Above all, however, I have tried to emphasize just how difficult it was to wage naval war of any type in this period and the different ways that difficulty could be experienced. Naval warfare, for example, raised unique problems simply because of the slowness of communication. It would usually take at least a month for a message to travel across the Atlantic and, of course, twice as long to receive a reply. Key decision-makers, therefore, were working not with real-time information but with historical documents; in a curious link across the centuries, military commanders had to analyse information as historians.

The idea of a naval ‘strategy’ as we might conceive it was also rudimentary. The word did not even exist. That is not to say that planning or strategic thought was not attempted, but that war planners had only a loose understanding of exactly how one theatre of war would affect another, while capability was so limited and unpredictable that, when combined with the slowness of communication, any real planning was far more likely to fail than succeed. Sea power was hardly a surgical instrument of war, and this was not an era of men leaning over huge chart tables moving little model ships around: so many here to meet this threat; so many there to put pressure on that government; so many here to defend trade or blockade the enemy. Indeed, if there is one prominent theme to emerge from the operations described in this book, it is that, with only a handful of exceptions, none of them worked out as planned. The weather also played an immense part. Naval warfare in the age of sail was always influenced by the weather, but its impact seems to have been particularly severe in this war.

At the level of tactics, naval operations were confounded by limitations in signalling and by the fact that there was no shared inter-service doctrine. In essence, this meant that a fleet under one commander in one part of the world would operate with different signals, tactics and doctrine from another fleet, though from the same nation, elsewhere in the world. It is, in fact, more helpful to think of a navy not as one navy but as numerous different navies that worked in different ways. This did not make for reliable performance. Fleets working in international alliances suffered particularly severely from this type of problem. It was almost impossible to get different fleets within a single navy to co-operate with each other, let alone different fleets from different navies.

From the point of view of the economist and administrator, navies were enormously expensive to run and very difficult to maintain at any level of strength. Men had to be found to man the ships, and those men then had to be fed, clothed and kept healthy. In some theatres, such as the Caribbean, this was a herculean task and one at which everyone failed, but then, as we shall also see, every naval administration failed at this task even in the comfort of home waters. The occasional examples of success in this war within a war, when fleets were well manned and healthy, become fascinating exceptions.

All navies faced similar problems, but both old and new navies also had their own unique challenges. While the British, for example, were struggling with the problem of getting 5,000 sailors into a fleet without infecting one another with typhus, and the French with how to source sufficient nails to secure sheets of copper to their ships’ hulls, the Americans grappled with problems specific to fledgling navies. What rules and regulations should the men abide by at sea? How were prizes to be distributed and administered? Even the most basic questions took up time and mental effort. Who was going to design the uniform? And what was it going to look like?

This struggle with sea power is one of the most important themes of this book. Yes, it describes the struggle for sea power that was fought between various nations, but it also explains how the difficulty of wielding sea power shaped the modern world. True, the battle of the Chesapeake turned the tide towards America and her allies at a crucial moment and can therefore be seen as an example of how sea power affected the war; but, in many respects, it is the exception that has been used to prove the rule. Time and again, it is held aloft as an example of how the magic wand of sea power could be waved to bring nations and empires to their knees, but nothing could actually be further from the truth. The war by then had become a maze without any exits, not because of the potency of sea power, but because of the difficulty of wielding it.

And yet with every dead end met, with every failure and disappointment suffered, the expectation of the success that could be achieved with navies remained curiously unaffected. It was almost as if the enormous investment expended on sea power gave it the right, like a spoiled child, to get away with anything, preventing any significant critical analysis by those who had borne it. In every country, in spite of staggering naval expenditure, it remained the case that politicians who made policy had no detailed knowledge of naval affairs and few expert advisers, and lacked any appreciation of how chance and the weather could ruin everything as easily as bad planning. The concept of a ‘chain’ of events is therefore almost completely unhelpful in this war. Far from being tightly joined by iron links, events were flimsily connected like a house of cards. There was, correspondingly, a constant sense of apprehension and drama from 1774 right up until the Peace of Paris in 1783, and throughout this long period, there was a total absence of any realistic expectation attached to sea power. The promise of sea power remained far more powerful than the reality, so that, in a curious way, this is a story about blind faith – it is a story of faith in the god of sea power.

This difficulty of wielding sea power lies at the heart of the most fascinating question of the age – one of two questions that are central to this book: how did a loose collection of colonies, without any standing army or navy, win its independence from the most powerful country in the world, a country which wielded such sea power that it could block out the sun with its sails and hide the surface of the sea with its ships? Washington himself believed that, in the future, the story of American independence would actually be considered a fiction:

For it will not be believed that such a force as Great Britain has employed for eight years in this Country could be baffled in their plan for Subjugating it by numbers infinitely less, composed of Men oftentimes half starved; always in Rags, without pay, and experiencing, at times, every species of distress which human nature is capable of undergoing.7

The numbers are compelling. At the start of the war, Great Britain, with the largest navy in the world, had committed nearly half of its commissioned ships to America and had successfully transported nearly 50,000 highly trained troops 3,000 miles across the Atlantic. It was an astonishing achievement. There, they faced an army that was no more than 20,000 strong, consisted in large part of hastily trained militia, had few experienced leaders, and was supported at sea by nothing more than a handful of ships without any supportive infrastructure. How on earth did the British lose?

The second question is intimately linked to the first: how and why did the war end with the Americans winning their independence, in spite of the fact that, by then, Britain was in a position of exceptional strength at sea – far stronger, even, than she had been at the start of the war?

On the surface, both questions appear to pose propositions as incongruous as the idea of a fashionable woman, anxious above all else over the way she looks, appearing in public with a ship balanced on her head. But as we have already seen, this was an extraordinary period of history in which the inconceivable was conceived and the impossible was an article of faith.

This inclination towards disbelief and a consequent acceptance that the independence of America was somehow pre-ordained should not therefore lead us away from historical investigation but towards it, and in this book I will show how a naval and maritime perspective unlocks these mysteries and many more. Not only does a study of sea power in this period help us understand the events that led to American independence, but also it helps us understand sea power itself and the way that it has influenced history, for, ultimately, this was a war at sea that encourages us to think about what a war at sea actually is.

PART 1

AMERICAN REVOLUTION1773–1775

1

BRITISH PYRE

It was surprisingly difficult to destroy a warship in the age of sail. The first problem is that warships were immensely difficult to sink. There are several reasons for this. The first is that, as the water in the hull rose, it became relatively easier for a tired crew to pump the water up onto the weather deck and then out over the side. The second reason is linked to the first: as the hull filled with water, the rate of influx decreased because of the pressure of water that had built up inside the hull; it would soon reach a state of equilibrium in which the water coming in would be balanced by the water being pumped out. This bought time, often far more than sailors expected, and we now suspect that many stricken ships were actually abandoned by their crews far too soon.1 Given sufficient time and material, moreover, wooden ships could easily be repaired from the same material from which they were built. They were, in that respect, essentially organic: you could take a piece from here to mend it there; you could mend a rudder with a spar; a spar with a rudder; a piece of hatch coaming with a hull plank.

This all meant that the only way to destroy a wooden ship utterly was to burn it and that ship-burning carried with it a powerful symbolic element. Decisive, determined and greatly feared, to burn a ship was to kill a ship. Ship-burning was also symbolic because neither the activity nor the remains could be easily concealed. The spectacle created by a burning sailing ship is similar to that created by a burning church, because both create a vast pyramid of fire: the masts and sails of the ship conduct the fire in the same way as the steeple of a church, and the ship’s hull feeds the fire in the same way as the church’s nave. Gun-ports act like windows and allow the fire to breathe. Depending on the size of the hull, the masts of a warship could be anywhere between 50 and 220 feet above sea level, and the flames would burn higher still, 20 or even 30 feet above the top of the mast. The thick black smoke of burning timber and tar would then drift with the breeze for miles. Given the right landscape and atmospheric conditions, such a fire could be seen for 30 miles in any direction. But perhaps most importantly of all, a ship burned in a shallow river would not disappear. Ships’ timbers are too large and too damp to be destroyed completely, and the waters are too shallow to cloak the evidence. Either the entire ribcage of the hull’s beams or a few significant chunky timbers would survive as an enduring reminder of the violence that once destroyed her, as well as the method chosen for that destruction. To burn a ship was therefore to create an enduring spectacle that linked the present with the past across a bridge of maritime violence. It was a statement as much as an action and a symbol as much as a tactic. It was intensely and consciously provocative.

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