To suppose that Sandwich wished to produce his own utter ruin by causing the defeat of the Western Squadron, would be to put ourselves on the moral and intellectual level of Keppel, his sycophants in the fleet, and his friends of the opposition. But the First Lord was as pure an intriguer as many of them. There can be little doubt that he encouraged, and none that he allowed, Palliser to bring his chief to a court martial on charges of mismanagement of the fleet in the battle. Keppel had shown the poorest commonplace of the dull tactics of the time, but he had been orthodox in a brainless way. The hope, no doubt, was that public opinion would be turned against the Whig. The exact contrary result followed. First a body of admirals headed by the veteran Lord Hawke, now nearly at the end of his honourable life, protested against the decision of the Admiralty to allow an inferior to accuse a superior. It is a necessary consequence of the respect which all disciplined men have for authority, that the higher ranks must always be protected from being proved to be in the wrong by the lower, lest the indispensable spirit of subordination should suffer. That the chief is in error is to be deplored, but not demonstrated. Then the far from ignoble sympathy of the mass of Englishmen for a supposed victim was aroused on behalf of Keppel. His court martial, which lasted from the 7th January to the 11th February 1779, ended inevitably in his acquittal. His friends made much of his sufferings from persecution, but they were allowed to make his poor health the excuse for a private bill to exempt him from the necessity of being tried on the flagship in Portsmouth. His triumph took place in the more comfortable surroundings of the governor’s house. The London mob, always ready for riot in the 18th century, celebrated the finding of the Court by rabbling the houses of Palliser and Lord North, and burning the gates of the Admiralty in Whitehall, under the leadership of the Duke of Ancaster and, as it is said, of the youthful William Pitt.
Palliser resigned and demanded a court martial. Though Keppel still refused to appear as accuser, the trial was held on the flagship between the 12th April and 3rd May. It ended in an acquittal with the qualification that Palliser ought to have made the admiral acquainted with the condition of the Formidable. Sir Hugh retired to the Governorship of Greenwich Hospital. Keppel was so popular that the Admiralty did not dare to remove him. But he was now in love with his parts of martyr and factious politician. He began to wrangle over orders, and to find offence where none was. At last he was allowed to haul down his flag at his own request. In his place in Parliament he was not ashamed to sneer at a brother officer, who, in the course of 1779, had to retire up Channel in face of an enemy twice his strength, and to insinuate that he himself would have been bolder in such a pass than he was with the equal fleet of D’Orvilliers, and the coast of Brest under his lee in July 1778. For a time he, with the help unhappily of Howe, an incomparably better man, set the disgraceful example of refusing to serve because what they were pleased to call their honour was not safe with Sandwich. His tar barrel popularity was clamorous for a space, and he succeeded Vernon on many tavern signboards, but by 1783 Rodney and Hood had arisen, and the patriot hero of 1779 had become the “Cautious Leeshore.”
While the battle of Ushant was being half fought, and the subsequent quarrel was dragging its slow length along, a brilliant campaign was being conducted on the coasts of America. D’Estaign, it will be remembered, had cleared the Straits of Gibraltar on the 16th May. His squadron consisted of the Languedoc, 80 (Flagship), Tonnant, 80, César, 74, Zélé, 74, Hector, 74, Marseilles, 74, Protecteur, 74, Guerrier, 74, Vaillant, 64, Provence, 64, Fantasque, 64, and Sagittaire, 64, with the frigates Chimère, Engageante, Alcmène and Aimable. Some of them were bad sailers, and as the crews had been completed by drafting soldiers, they were awkward. The neglect of the past weighed on the French fleet, and the nerve of the Admiral. D’Estaign spent much time in practising his raw crews, a wise precaution no doubt, but one which was fatal to rapidity of movement. He added gratuitously to the causes of delay by turning aside to chase prizes. On the 8th July he reached the Delaware, and landed M. Gérard de Rayneval, the French Minister to Congress, whom he had brought with him. Even then he would not make haste to begin his attack on the British squadron. On his way north to New York, and on the 10th July, he actually lost sight of his fleet because he employed his mighty flagship, the Languedoc, in chasing a trumpery British vessel named the York, of 10 guns and 60 men. These were not the methods to employ against the wary, resolute, and thorough antagonist he was about to encounter.
Howe had been informed early in May of the coming intervention of France. Her entry on the scene made it absolutely necessary to withdraw our troops from Philadelphia and concentrate at New York. Of the total force of eleven ships of the line and sixty-eight smaller craft under the admiral’s command, some were at our naval port Halifax, others were at New York, and others in Rhode Island, then held by a body of British troops under General Pigott. Howe called all the ships which could be spared from local duties to his flag, and set about covering the retreat of the army now led by Sir Henry Clinton. Transport to convey the troops by sea were wanting, and it was also thought to be the more dignified course to march through the Jerseys. On the 18th June the army had crossed the Delaware under cover of the squadron, and made its way to Navesink, harassed, but not seriously impeded by Washington. Howe reached Sandy Hook on the 29th June, and waited to cover the entry of Clinton into New York. Here he was informed of the sailing of D’Estaign, and of the reinforcements destined for himself, which had left Plymouth under Byron so late as the 9th June. On the 30th June Clinton’s army appeared on the heights and was passed over to New York by the 5th July. Barely was the passage concluded when Captain Gardner, of the Maidstone frigate, sent a lieutenant with the news that D’Estaign had been seen to enter the Delaware. On the 11th July the Zebra sloop ran in with the news that the Frenchman was close at hand. If D’Estaign had taken less than nearly two months to make the run from Toulon, the concentration of our forces at New York would have been defeated, for Howe was far too weak to give battle, and must have been shut up in the Delaware.
The force actually with Howe consisted of six 64-gun ships, three of 50, two of 40, frigates, and small vessels. The 40-gun ships being wholly unfit to lie in a line of battle, Howe was practically outnumbered in the proportion of two to one by the fine squadron of D’Estaign. Outnumbered as he was, he had no resource but to stand on the defensive, and the anchorage at Sandy Hook happily afforded him an admirable position. Sandy Hook had once been a peninsula, but the sea having broken through the narrow isthmus connecting it with Navesink, it was already an island running due north and south, and so forming a natural mole to the anchorage. Outside it is the Middle Bank, and to the north is the East Bank. There are two entries from the sea to the roadstead—one between the Middle Bank and Sandy Hook, which is too shallow for big ships at the northern end, and the other between the Middle Bank and East Bank, which is rendered uncertain by a bar. Batteries were thrown up at the north end of Sandy Hook. The squadron was then anchored in a line from the extremity of Sandy Hook to the west, in this order. The Leviathan, a store ship turned into a floating battery, Ardent, Nonsuch, Trident, Somerset, Eagle (Flagship), and Isis. Frigates were brought inside to the south, while the Vigilant, Phœnix, and Preston were posted behind the bar between the Middle and East Banks. Fireships and gunboats were placed where they could threaten the flank of the French fleet if it crossed the bar. The ships in the line were anchored with a spring on the cable—that is, with a cable carried out from the stern and fastened to the cable of the anchor so that their broadsides could be worked round to bear on an approaching enemy. If then D’Estaign attacked, every means possible had been provided to crush his ships in detail as they cleared the Middle Bank, and came under the fire of the batteries at the extremity of Sandy Hook and of Howe’s line. Our squadron was short-handed, but the deficiency was promptly made good by the eager zeal of the sailors in the merchant ships and transports. Though they habitually avoided the press when they could, there was no hanging back at this crisis, and the volunteers outnumbered the call made by the admiral. As many of them must have served at one time or another, and all were “sailormen” able to set up rigging and splice ropes, they were not mere raw recruits. The officers and men of Clinton’s army came forward readily to serve as marines.
The hazard before D’Estaign was not trifling. Yet had he attacked at once when he appeared off Sandy Hook on the 12th July, he would have found Howe’s dispositions still incomplete. Even later he ought beyond all question to have stood in. The total destruction of Howe’s squadron would have given so severe a blow to the material strength and the prestige of England that it would have been cheaply purchased by the sacrifice of half D’Estaign’s ships. So would have reasoned his subordinate the captain of the Fantasque, Suffren. But again the past weighed on the unstable mind of D’Estaign. He anchored four miles from Sandy Hook, off Shrewsbury, and remained till the 21st examining the bar, and communicating with the Americans. The risk of grounding on the bar seemed too great to him to be run, and in all probability he asked himself, what would happen if the British reinforcements arrived and found him amid the wreck of Howe’s ships with a crippled squadron? On the 22nd he made a show of falling on, and then sailed away to the south. A small convoy fell into his hands, and he had the satisfaction of blockading a British port for ten days.
Howe at once dispatched frigates to watch the enemy. Observation and rumour led him to believe, rightly, that D’Estaign meant to proceed to co-operate with an American force in an attack on Sir R. Pigott on Rhode Island. But for some days he was too weak to move. On the 26th July the Renown, 50, joined him from the West Indies. She had passed through the French squadron on her way, unmolested and perhaps unobserved. Misled by bad information from home, Howe had been under the impression that Byron was bound for Halifax. He had sent thither for news, and on the 26th his messenger returned with the report that nothing was known there of the reinforcements, but that the Commissioner, Captain Fielding, was sending on the Raisonable, 64, and Centurion, 50, which had refitted. They joined the flag at Sandy Hook safely. On the 30th July the Cornwall, 74, came in from Byron’s squadron with a depressing story.
The admiral had met his accustomed fortune in weather when he was least able to contend with his implacable enemy. He had left Plymouth on the 9th June with one 90-gun ship, eleven 74, one of 64, and a single frigate. If numbers were all in war, while speed and efficiency were little, his squadron had been more than enough to sweep D’Estaign from the coast of America. But Byron sailed late, and his ships were ill provided in all ways. The crews had been made up by drafts of prisoners who brought the jail fever with them. So bad was the condition of the fleet that it was unable to contend with a summer storm which broke on it in the middle of the North Atlantic on the 3rd July. Some of the ships returned home, and all were scattered. Byron himself struggled on alone toward Sandy Hook till the 18th August, when he sighted the French fleet, and turned back to Halifax, where he found one only of his command. Except the Cornwall, none reached Howe’s flag in time to be of service. Those which limped in later, and by degrees, were crippled in rigging, and foul with putrid fevers.
On the 29th July, the day before the Cornwall joined his flag, Howe heard that D’Estaign had been sighted off Rhode Island, to the east of New York. The object of the Frenchman was manifestly to co-operate with the insurgents in attacking the British force then occupying the island, under the command of General Pigott. Howe was the last man in the world to be deterred by mere inferiority of numbers from exerting himself in the king’s service, and outmatched as he still was, he prepared to support General Pigott. Contrary winds detained him at New York till the 6th August. On the 9th he was off the southern end of Rhode Island. Rhode Island is one of several which nearly block up a great oblong bay opening to the south in the coast, which here runs nearly due east and west. It is separated from the mainland on the east by the Sakonnet Channel, and from the island of Conanicut on the west, by the Eastern Passage. The Western Passage divides Conanicut from the mainland, and leads to the land-locked waters of Narragansett Bay. The town of Newport stands nearly at the south-western end of Rhode Island, and here General Pigott had concentrated his troops when the American general, Sullivan, passed over from the mainland to attack him. D’Estaign had anchored within Brenton’s Ledge, at the south-western point of Rhode Island, on the 29th July. He sent two frigates up the Sakonnet Channel and two liners up the Western Passage to Narragansett Bay, and then entered the Eastern Passage on the 8th August, anchoring above the town of Newport, at Goat Island, between Conanicut and Rhode Island. His appearance in overwhelming strength sufficed to gain him a naval success without fighting. A small British flotilla, consisting of the frigates and sloops Orpheus, Lark, Juno, Flora, and Falcon, was caught at hopeless disadvantage, and was burnt by the commanding officer, Captain Brisbane, to prevent it from falling into the hands of the French. The crews were added to the garrison of Newport.
Howe was off Brenton Point on the 9th. He had a difficult game to play, for he was still inferior to his opponent by a third, and he had to take the offensive. Everything depended on precision of movement, and the British admiral transferred his flag to a frigate in order that he might keep his whole squadron always under his eye. The question whether the proper place for an admiral was in the midst of a battle or outside of it was argued in the eighteenth century, and has been debated since. It really resolves itself into the other question, whether the admiral is best employed in setting an example or in directing the operations of which he must needs lose sight from the moment that his flagship is involved in the fire and smoke of battle. Tradition and the point of honour dictated the first course. Sound judgment agrees with them—whenever the example is of more moment than the direction. But there are times when it is not, and the early days of August 1778 off Rhode Island was one of them. Yet only an officer of Howe’s established reputation for cool intrepidity could have afforded to break away from old usage, and it is said that he was so far impressed by the fear of being thought shy that he intended to return to his flagship if a battle had to be fought.