THE WEST INDIES
After touching at Barbadoes on his way, Rodney reached Santa Lucia on
March 28th, and fought his first battle in those waters on April 17th. A
variety of causes--some political, some physical--made the West Indies
the great scene of naval fighting in the American War. France had been
induced to help the insurgent colonists, partly from a desire for
revenge, partly in the hope that she would be able to compensate herself
for the losses imposed at the Peace of Fontainebleau by the conquest of
the Lesser Antilles. Spain again had, not without reluctance, for it ill
suited her to encourage the rebellion of colonists in America, been
induced to join the alliance in the hope of recovering Jamaica and
Florida, as well as of driving the English garrisons from Gibraltar and
Minorca. Our possessions in the West Indies were therefore naturally an
object of attack. The most effectual method of extorting both her
Mediterranean outposts and her West Indian Islands would have been to
attack England vigorously at home. As the allies were able to collect a
fleet of over sixty sail at the mouth of the Channel in 1779, some such
attack might, it would seem, have been made. The only force we could
then oppose to them was about thirty line-of-battle. They had, in fact,
what Napoleon longed for--the command of the Channel, and that not for
twenty-four hours but for weeks; yet the capture of a stray sixty-four
was all they could effect.
Why France, which has so often threatened to invade us before and since,
made no attempt to do so when the enterprise had been feasible, and even
easy, is a curious question. The failure of their purely naval
operations is easily explained. The Spaniards, who formed nearly half
the great fleet, were wretchedly inefficient; short of provisions, as
ignorant of the navigation of the English Channel as they had been when
Medina Sidonia blundered into it and out of it, they were, moreover,
miserably sickly. They communicated the plague to their French friends,
who lost four thousand men by it. Apart, however, from this particular
reason for failure, there was a permanent one which weighed on our
enemy. France possessed at that time no port of war on the Channel.
Brest looks on to the ocean. As the prevailing winds of the Channel are
from west and south-west, it behoved a fleet in the old sailing days to
beware how it trusted itself inside of Portland Bill; for if it were
crippled either by storm or battle it might not be able to get out. In
that case there would be nothing for it but to follow the fatal route of
the Armada--to steer for home round the north of Scotland and to the
west of Ireland. The sea, as M. Michelet pathetically observes, hates
France. It has worn her coast flat and provided England with two noble
harbours right over against her, at Portsmouth and Plymouth. Looking at
these unfavourable conditions, the French, from La Hogue downwards,
have generally kept their fleets out of the Channel. Not being able to
attack our heart, they have attacked our extremities. In the American
War the particular extremity they selected was the West Indies.
To understand a general’s fighting it is necessary to get some idea of
his field of battle. The lay historian commonly remembers this well
enough when he is dealing with battles on shore, but whether because he
does not understand them, or discourteously thinks his reader cannot, he
takes no account of the conditions in sea-fights; yet they are every
whit as important and as intelligible. What the hill, the river, and the
wood were to Napoleon or Wellington, the wind, the current, and the lie
of the land were to Rodney or Nelson. They were obstacles to be avoided
or advantages to be used. Rodney’s field of battle lay in the Lesser
Antilles, the long string of small islands stretching over six degrees
of latitude from south to north which form the eastern division of the
West Indies. The Antilles, great and less, are a vast broken reef which
shuts in the gigantic lagoon called the Caribbean Sea. The eastern
division, which reaches north to the Virgin Islands, has been broken
small by the pressure of the ocean. From the Virgin Islands the reef
turns sharp west, and its fragments become few and large--first Porto
Rico is big, then San Domingo is bigger, then Cuba is the biggest. South
of Cuba and in the Caribbean Sea is Jamaica. In 1780 Cuba and Porto Rico
belonged to Spain, as they still do. She shared San Domingo with France,
and longed to recover Jamaica from the hands of England. The Lesser
Antilles were divided among England, France, and Holland. To them
considerations, physical and political, limited the area of the war.
All through the year, except in the immediate neighbourhood of the land
or when the hurricane is raging over them, the Antilles are swept by the
easterly trade wind. According to the season of the year, or the hour of
the day, the trade blows from north or south of east, but it always
blows from the ocean over the Lesser Antilles and along the Greater.
Narrow strips of water are shut out from it by mountains, and
conflicting temperatures cause an alternation of sea breezes by day and
land breezes by night in the neighbourhood of the larger islands. But
the trade is the “true breeze,” the steady uniform force which in the
days of sailing ships gave the law to war and to commerce. It even
affected language, for in the West Indies men did not say east and west,
but windward and leeward. The unceasing pressure of the wind on the
water has established a surface current which flows to the west. Wind
and wave together have worn the windward or easterly side of the Lesser
Antilles bare. All the harbours are on the leeward or western side,
looking into the Caribbean Sea. Thus wind and current alike tend to
force all ships navigating the Antilles to the westward. When this
pressure from the east is taken off it is by a force which suspends all
his labours, whether of peace or war, and sends man crouching into the
first place of safety he can find. From the end of July to the end of
September are the hurricane months. While they last no sailing fleets
cared to keep the sea. They lay in harbour or went elsewhere.
These physical conditions made the Lesser Antilles the gates of the
West Indies. Whoever held them could run down whenever he chose on the
Western Islands, but ships coming from the west must work up into the
wind by weary tacking, or by hugging the coasts of the islands to avail
themselves of every varying puff of land and sea breeze, of every reset
of the currents from the headlands. Whoever was to windward had the
option of attack and the choice of his course. After a little reading of
the accounts of old sea-fights, one can realise how appropriate is the
use of the words “up” and “down” as applied to the leeward or windward
position. He who was to leeward had literally to struggle up to his
enemy as a man toils up a hill. He who was to windward could stand
watching the foe till some such disorder in his line as is very likely
to occur among a number of ships manœuvring together, or some fault
in the course taken, gave him an opportunity to rush down and charge
home. Then, too, the road to and from Europe lay through the Lesser
Antilles. The heartbreaking shallows, reefs, and keys of the Bahamas
make the approach to the West Indies from the north dangerous now; and
in the eighteenth century, when surveys and lighthouses were not, they
formed an almost impassable barrier. Therefore the conquest of the
Lesser Antilles was looked upon as the necessary preliminary to an
attack on the Greater, and so before the French would risk an attack on
Jamaica, they must first drive us out of the positions of advantage to
windward.
When Rodney reached Santa Lucia in March the adversaries in the coming
duel were fairly equal in force and advantage of position. M. de Guichen
had arrived at Martinique a few days before with reinforcements, which
gave the French a slight numerical superiority. As the possession of the
islands was divided there was no marked advantage on either side. The
French held Guadaloupe and Martinique, which had been restored to them
at the close of the former war. They had lately captured Dominica, which
lies between the two. They had also snapped up Grenada far away to the
south, under the very nose of Admiral Byron. On the other hand
Barrington had seized Santa Lucia and had held it in defiance of
D’Estaing. This was a satisfactory offset to the loss of Dominica and
Grenada. Santa Lucia lies to the south of Martinique, and a little to
windward of it. At the north-west end it possesses the admirable harbour
of Gros Islet Bay. From this place the French naval headquarters at Fort
Royal in Martinique could be easily watched. Santa Lucia was therefore a
much better station for our ships than Antigua, far to the north, which
they had hitherto used, or Barbadoes, which lies out in the ocean to the
east. When Rodney and Guichen began their struggle they were, as
duellists should be, on fairly equal terms as to ground and sun.
How far they were equally well supplied with weapons is a question not
so easy to settle. In that respect Rodney ought, if our rather
complacent belief in the natural superiority of the British navy is well
grounded, to have had an overwhelming advantage. As a matter of fact,
however, the superiority of our fleet was by no means what it became
later on, and was to remain all through the next war. The French navy
was at its best, and that best was very good. On all modern principles
it should have been by far the better of the two. It was much the more
carefully organised and schooled. From just before the end of the Seven
Years’ War till the beginning of this, the French Government had worked
very hard at its fleet, and with very creditable results. The material
strength of its navy was considerable. When in alliance with the
Spanish, the combined force exceeded our own in mere number of available
ships and guns. The education of the French naval officers was very
thorough. They themselves were, for the most part, _cadets de famille_,
younger sons of noble houses--gentlemen, in short, with the traditional
gallantry of their class. Many of them belonged to families which had
served “on the ships of the King” from father to son since Louis XIV
established the _gardes de la marine_. Chateaubriand, in his _Mémoires
d’Outre-Tombe_, has left a striking picture of the class from which the
French naval officers were mainly drawn, the provincial nobles, who had
kept all the pride of birth, but had not been corrupted by the Court.
Their names read like a roll of those who defended the bastions of the
_langues_ of France or Auvergnes at Rhodes or Valetta. Indeed, they are
often the same, for the connection between the order of Malta and the
French navy was close. Service in the caravans of “the Religion” counted
as service in the King’s ships. The nobles of Provence, who recruited
the order largely, were numerous in the navy, and some of them served in
both--the Bailli de Souffren, for instance, who was by far the ablest of
the French officers who appeared in this war, was a Knight of St. John.
So there is a ring of romance about their names which is somewhat
lacking to our own sober Bowens, Cornishes, Thompsons, and Barbers, all
of which sound but flat alongside of Buor de la Charoulière, Le Gardeur
de Tilly, Visdelou de Liscouel, Carcaredec, Assas-Mondardier, or Tredern
de Lengerec. Among these gallant gentlemen were some of the best
officers who ever served any king. They had studied their profession
hard, and had thought much more of the military part of it than English
naval officers. It is a fact which the reader may think creditable or
not, that the technical treatises, whether on seamanship or tactics,
used by English officers were mostly translated from the French. The
crews of the French ships were formed either of carefully drilled
landsmen, or of the fishermen who were swept into the navy by the
_inscription maritime_. At the beginning of the war they were very well
drilled and efficient.
There were, however, several weak points in this force, one or two of
them of a very fatal kind. The fact that the officers of the regular
corps were all nobles had in some respects a bad effect. It limited
their number for one thing, so that when the whole navy had in modern
phrase to be mobilised, it was necessary to employ supplementary
officers who did not belong to the _gardes de la marine_ and were known
as _officiers blues_. The France of the eighteenth century would not
have been what it was if these intruders had not been regarded with a
certain amount of contempt and jealousy by the nobles. This led to one
kind of dispute. Then again there were jealousies in the privileged
corps itself between the port of Toulon and the port of Brest, between
the division of the Mediterranean and that of the ocean--or, to put it
in other words, between the nobles of Provence and those of Normandy and
Brittany. All these men too were so conscious that they were nobles as
to somewhat forget the fact that they were officers. They thought little
of their rank as compared with their common nobility. They all messed
together, they thee’d and thou’d one another in the friendly second
person singular. This easy good-fellowship must have been socially more
pleasant than the stern subordination of an English ship, on which the
captain lived apart in solitary grandeur, and the midshipmen looked up
with awe to the lieutenants. But of the two, ours was the better system
for discipline. In the French navy the midshipman of sixteen quarterings
made no scruple of giving his opinion to his brother noble the captain,
and the lieutenant who was as good a gentleman as either differed from
both. There was a great deal of discussion in their ships when in an
English vessel an order would have been given and obeyed.
A defect of this kind could have been amended. It would not have been
equally possible to make good the poverty of the maritime population of
France. That weakness was fatal, and beyond remedy. By taking immense
care to drill men in peace, and by sweeping the mass of its merchant
sailors into its war-ships, the French Government was able to start with
an excellently appointed fleet; but it had no reserve. As the war went
on, and men fell by battle or disease, they could not be replaced. It is
notorious that the French navy could never make good the loss of the
four thousand well-trained men carried off by the plague during the
cruise of the combined fleets in 1779. Thus there was a steady loss of
efficiency in their ships which grew in proportion as the number of
vessels in commission increased. It was not possible to find good men
to man them or trained officers to command them. To take a single
instance. At the very close of the war, Sir John Jervis, then captain of
the _Foudroyant_, eighty, took a French seventy-four, the _Pegase_,
after a very feeble resistance. It was found that the French crew were
mostly landsmen collected by hook and by crook, while she was so short
of officers that an _enseigne de vaisseau_--a mate as we should have
said then, a sub-lieutenant according to our present scale of ranks--a
lad of nineteen, was the only officer on her first battery. And this was
only an exceptionally bad example of what was going on all through the
French navy. In the meantime the English navy, drawing its men from a
vast maritime population, and entirely unlimited in its choice of
officers, was steadily getting more efficient. Taken as usual somewhat
unprepared at the beginning of the war, it gradually collected the
flower of our seamen from merchant ships in all parts of the world. Its
officers came to it in thousands, mostly from the middle class, and no
consideration of birth stopped the promotion of competent men when they
could be secured. Under the government of vigorous admirals the fleet
was welded and trained into a ten times better force than it was when
the first shot was fired. This was, however, but the natural result of
the profound difference of kind which distinguished the navies. When the
French King wished to have a powerful naval force, it grew because a
resolute and intelligent administration built it laboriously up. A
high-spirited and alert people supplied brave crews and gallant,
ingenious gentlemen to command them. But the force had no native life of
its own. It was what the State made it and no more. The English navy
was a living force fed by the vitality of the nation. It was ever ahead
of its rulers, and never passively submissive to the impulse from them.
The immense advance in organisation and tactics, in armament, in
gunnery, and construction, which took place in this war, was the work of
the admirals and captains themselves--thought out by them, urged by them
on their official masters at Whitehall, frequently made effective by
them at their own risk and with their own money. The virtue which
redeemed the many faults of the Admiralty was that it did leave to its
commanders elbow-room and power. Between two such forces, one the mere
work of the artificer, the other the living plant, there could be no
doubt where the victory would ultimately rest.
That it was not decided sooner was due to the principles on which the
French chose, and we were content, to fight. Whoever has taken even a
slight interest in our eighteenth-century wars must have been struck by
the inconclusive character of much of the naval fighting. Except where
there was an overwhelming superiority of force, as in Hawke’s attack on
L’Etenduère, and Rodney’s action with Don Juan de Langara, battles were
mere cannonades at a less or greater distance, followed by the
separation of the fleets without loss to either. At Quiberon, where our
superiority in numbers was not so great, the French were flying before
the storm, and in no order, when Hawke pounced on them. In this same
American war there took place a round score of battles of which as much
might be said. Now this was not due to want of will or spirit, but to
the fact that officers on both sides played the game according to rules
which made effective fighting impossible.
With the French it was a settled thing that battles must not be
decisive. They fought in a half-hearted way, not because they wanted
courage, for braver men than Chadeau de la Clocheterie or D’Albert de
Rions, or a hundred others, never walked a quarter-deck; nor because
they wanted skill in tactics, for more ingenious manœuvrers than Aché
or Guichen, or even Grasse, never hoisted a flag; but because they had
always something other in view than the fighting of a battle. It was
taken for granted among them that they must “fulfil their mission.” The
phrase is incessantly turning up in their histories. What it meant was,
that when an admiral was sent to take this island or relieve that town
he must avoid getting his fleet crippled in a yard-arm to yard-arm
fight. The Government habitually impressed on its admirals the necessity
of keeping their fleets intact, and these officers very naturally so
manœuvred as to avoid a really damaging action. Now this style of
manœuvring, though it may be right in particular instances, is fatal
as a general rule of strategy, because it overlooks the elementary fact
that the most effectual of all ways of succeeding in an ultimate object
is to smash the force which the enemy has collected to defeat you.
Besides, it has this deadly moral consequence, that it induces a timid,
passive state of mind, which leaves you at the mercy of the enterprising
enemy who charges home.
The wish to charge home was strong with our men, and the effort
incessant, but until Rodney showed the way on April 12th, 1782, it was
never effectually done. The explanation of this failure is to be found
in the enduring and almost pathetic devotion of the old admirals to the
“line of battle.” When a ship carries her armament on her sides--in a
broadside, that is to say--she must bring her side to bear on the enemy
in order to use her guns. When several vessels so armed are acting
together, they must follow one another in a line, otherwise they would
be constantly liable to fire into friends. Therefore as early as the
first Dutch war fleets were marshalled in a line, one ship following
another, at a distance sufficient to allow room to manœuvre, and yet
near enough to permit of mutual assistance. This is the line ahead or
line of battle. But the object of all formations is to enable you to get
most effectively at the enemy, to break him up, to throw the whole of
your own force on part of his, or at least to be superior at the point
of attack. To do that it is necessary to get right among his battalions
or his ships. This had been well known to the admirals of the
Commonwealth and of Charles the Second, and therefore their fighting was
furious and effective. But from about the Revolution time till the very
end of the American War it was forgotten. Men fell into the pedant frame
of mind. As Molière’s immortal doctors thought much of doing the proper
professional things and little of the patient, the British admiral
thought first and last of his line. To keep that intact, to engage van
to van, centre to centre, rear to rear, to go at it hammer and tongs
ship to ship, till his gunnery had shattered the enemy and thrown him
into confusion, then to order a general chase and pick up the
prizes--this was what the British admiral dreamt of when he dreamt of
battles. It was a manly vision, but it could only become a reality if
the enemy was prepared to meet him half way--which the French, who did
not want a smashing battle, would never do. So the history of our
battles against equal forces for nearly a century was something like
this:--The British admiral, who is longing to be at them, manœuvres
for the advantage of the wind in order to force on a battle, and gets
it. The French admiral, who wishes to keep his line of retreat open,
accepts battle to leeward, so that he has only to put before the wind
whenever he wants to be off. Under reduced sail he slips slowly along.
The English line comes down at a more or less acute angle. Then when the
van is within gunshot the helm is put down, and the English ships run
along the enemy’s line, cannonading and cannonaded. Of course this means
that they take the fire of every ship they pass, and as the French fire
high, they get cut up in the rigging. When it appears to the French
admiral that the leading English ships are sufficiently crippled, he
puts before the wind and runs down to leeward. Then the British admiral
has to rearrange his line, and make another shot at his slippery enemy.
So it goes on till dark comes, and the fleets separate without loss of a
ship to either. Sometimes they cross on opposite tacks, and the rest is
as before with unimportant variations. The British admiral boasts he has
made the enemy run. The French admiral boasts he has crippled three or
four English ships and repulsed the attack. Each is quite sure he has
won the battle, whereas in fact there has been no battle at all, but
only an artillery duel, which in all war by sea and land is apt to mean
mere noise and waste of powder and shot.
About 1780, however, there were some both in France and England to whom
it had begun to be clear that with such strategy and tactics as this
nothing effectual would ever be done. Among the French officers Souffren
had become disgusted with the feeble principles adopted in his service,
and was longing for an opportunity to show his countrymen a more
excellent way. That Rodney had thought the subject out, and come to
conclusions of his own, he was to show in the first month of his command
in the Leeward Islands. But that subject of King George to whom the
folly of the old way and the need of a better was most clear was not a
seaman at all, but a Scotch gentleman, who is supposed to have been one
of the originals of Monkbarns. The name of Clerk of Eldin, the father of
Sir Walter Scott’s friend, must needs be mentioned in a life of Rodney.
A considerable controversy has raged over the question, whether he
influenced the Admiral, and if so to what extent. Like most controversy,
it has owed not a little of its vitality to a lax use of terms, and of
its rancour to professional vanity. To this day naval officers hear the
name of Clerk of Eldin with a certain irritation. It is an exasperation
to them that a landsman should have the credit of discovering what
remained hidden for so long to so many famous admirals. Yet that he did
see what they had not seen is certain. His family had crossed his boyish
longing to go to sea, and he consoled himself by making the sea his
hobby. He made short voyages from Leith. He sailed toy fleets on his
pond at Eldin. He carried little models of ships--wild ducks is the
proper name of them--in his pocket, and manœuvred them on the
mahogany whenever host or guest would allow him to mount his hobby.
Like a true Scotchman, he could not be satisfied without worrying out
the principles. At last it became clear to him that, until our admirals
gave up running along the enemy’s line, and took to smashing into it,
there would be no end of battles such as Pocock had fought in the East
Indies and Keppel fought off Ushant. He collected the result of his
inquiries and reflections in one of the most luminous books ever
written. It was so clear, indeed, that Adam Smith, with a respect for
the human intelligence somewhat startling in a philosopher, hesitated to
accept it all because it seemed to him so self-evidently true that he
thought the admirals must have seen it all long ago unless there had
been something against it which was obvious to their professional
knowledge. Their blindness was, however, due to other causes--to such
causes as prevented men of business from seeing those economic truths
which were thought out by Adam Smith himself. In 1780 this book existed
only in fragments printed for private circulation. These fragments were
given by Clerk to a Mr. Aitkinson, a friend of Rodney’s, in January of
1780, on a promise that they should be sent to the Admiral. Whether they
ever reached him we do not know. There is no evidence that they did, and
the evidence that they did not is purely negative. Clerk’s name and the
claims made for him will come up again. For the present, it is enough to
cite him as an example of what was working in men’s minds, and also
because one likes to do a little justice to an ingenious gentleman who
got firm hold of a truth, and has been carped at as a mere amateur by
some members of a profession which had forgotten that same truth, and
needed to be retaught.