A Short History of the Royal Navy, 1217-1815. Volume II, 1689-1815

by David Hannay

The contemporary operations in the Mediterranean began by a success which seemed to promise a speedy end of the war. By the middle of July Hood was on the coast of Provence with twenty-one sail of the line. He met the Spanish fleet at sea near to Iviça on the 6th, and found it in a miserably inefficient state. But the French fleet at Toulon was in a still worse condition than the Brest fleet. It had not dared to tackle even the feeble Spaniards. When orders were given to go to sea, the crews refused, saying that they were to be sold by treason, and would not sail in order to reach a foreign prison. The Admiral Trogoff de Kerlessi was a Royalist, whom his poverty alone had prevented from following other officers of his opinions into the emigration. The Royalists were strong in the south of France, though divided among themselves into those who wished the king to govern with the constitution of 1791, and those who aimed at the restoration of the absolute monarchy. The country was in open opposition to the Jacobin Government at Paris, and was bubbling with intrigue. Hood established a communication with the Toulonese Royalists through a Lieutenant Cooke, who was sent in on the pretext that he came to arrange an exchange of prisoners. Cooke, who has been erroneously described as a son of the discoverer, was afterwards killed as captain of the Sybille in her action with the Forte. On the 28th August the Toulonese were terrified by hearing that the Jacobin army which had just destroyed Lyons had occupied Marseilles, and was about to march on their own town. In the panic which the news caused, the Royalists combined to surrender the town, with dockyard and ships, to the English admiral, who was in co-operation with the Spanish fleet of Don Juan de Lángara, the officer who had been defeated and taken prisoner by Rodney in the relief of Gibraltar in 1780. In the course of the 28th and 29th they took possession. The sailors from Brest who were Jacobin in sympathy and the Jacobins in the town were over-awed.

The occupation of Toulon seemed to promise a speedy counter revolution in at any rate the south of France, or failing that, then the entire ruin of the French naval power in the Mediterranean by the permanent retention of the port. Both hopes were disappointed. Political causes which must be passed over here weakened the allies and their French friends. Toulon is a difficult town to defend on the land side. No sufficient force for the purpose could be collected by the allies. The Austrians would send no soldiers. The Spaniards who were sent proved untrustworthy. The Neapolitans, who came in some numbers, were worthless. The only solid elements in the garrison, the Piedmontese and the English soldiers, were too few. When, therefore, the Jacobin army was put under the command of Dugommier, an excellent officer, and its artillery was directed by Napoleon Bonaparte, who here first came conspicuously forward, it soon gained command of high ground from which it could bombard the harbour and render the anchorage untenable. On the 19th December Toulon was evacuated. The evacuation, which was complicated by the necessity for bringing away thousands of French refugees, was a scene of horror, and the preliminary to other scenes of horror when the Jacobins gained possession and took vengeance on their countrymen. Hood brought away as many of the French ships and as much of the naval stores as he could, and endeavoured to destroy the rest by fire. The task of destruction was entrusted to Captain Sidney Smith, who had joined the fleet as a volunteer in a small vessel purchased and armed by himself in the Levant. Smith, a very vapouring, but also a very stirring and quick-witted man, did his best, and made the most of what he did in his reports. The ill-will of the Spaniards, who perhaps wished to preserve a French naval force as a counterbalance to the English, and the rapid advance of the French, prevented the destruction from being thorough. Yet the allies carried off four sail of the line and burnt nine. They burnt fifteen frigates and carried off five. The English troops who might have prevented the retaking of Toulon were in Flanders under the Duke of York, or were about to sail to the West Indies in the expedition convoyed by Jervis, and commanded by Sir Charles Grey.

The war in the West Indies is one of the most instructive and interesting parts of the great revolutionary struggle. It was only begun by the capture of Martinique in 1794, and will be most conveniently dealt with as a whole, and together with the ancillary services of the navy. For the present I think it most convenient only to note that in April Santa Lucia and Guadaloupe, together with some smaller posts, were occupied. In June the arrival of French reinforcements at Guadaloupe gave an entirely new character to the war in this region. Only a few days before this expedition intervened, there had been fought in European waters the great battle which was to decide whether England was or was not to be free to continue her conquests in distant seas.

The fact that this expedition had sailed from Rochefort on the 25th April, unseen by British look-out ships, and had reached the West Indies before warning was given to Sir John Jervis, would seem to indicate some want of vigilance in the English blockading squadrons and look-out ships. The question whether the watch maintained on the French ports in the early stages of the war was well conducted has been much debated. Every reader of naval controversy has heard of the respective merits of the kind of blockade preferred by Howe, and the course followed by Jervis when he had become Earl St. Vincent and was in command in the Channel. Under St. Vincent the blockading fleet was expected to remain outside the enemy’s port in all seasons, save when the westerly gales drove the heavy ships to take refuge at Torquay, from whence they could return rapidly to their station when the wind shifted. During the absence of the heavy ships an inshore squadron of picked vessels remained at anchor on the French coast just outside of the range of French guns. Howe preferred to keep his ships at anchor in English ports, leaving frigates to watch the enemy, and report if they came to sea. The method of St. Vincent, which had been adopted before him by Hawke, imposed a very severe strain on both men and ships. Howe’s course was the milder, the more endurable to officers and crews. But it was open to the criticism that it allowed the enemy too good a chance of getting to sea unobserved, when it naturally followed that there was a difficulty in discovering what course he had taken, and in bringing him to action. On that ground alone St. Vincent’s blockade must be judged to be superior, and it had the further advantage that it tended to keep the fleet in better training though at a cruel cost to humanity. Yet we need not forget that even when St. Vincent’s rules were most strictly enforced, individual French ships and small squadrons did get to sea, while the torpor of their main fleet was deliberately enforced by the Government which had renounced the policy of meeting the English fleets in battle, and fitted out its own with no more aspiring ambition than the wish to impose a burden on England by forcing her to keep up trying blockades. It would be rash to assert that such a French expedition as that of 1794 would not have sailed successfully at any stage of the war.

The course of events in European waters during that year can hardly be quoted as a case in point against Howe’s method. It is true that he wintered in home ports, and did not sail from St. Helens till the 2nd May; but he was off Brest before the main French fleet was at sea, and if he did not remain outside that port the reason must be sought in the nature of the task set him. The French harvest of 1793 had been very bad, and this failure of the home supply of food was aggravated by the disorder of the country, which hampered industry. France was in serious danger of famine, and the Government had directed its diplomatic agent in the United States, M. Genêt, to purchase foodstuffs, hire American vessels, and send them to Europe in a convoy. On the 24th December 1793, Rear-Admiral Vanstabel sailed from Brest to act as escort to the trading-ships, with two sail of the line and four frigates. The French Government had given its cruisers an order to impound all food on its way to England in neutral vessels, and the British Government had retaliated by declaring all food designed for the use of Frenchmen to be contraband of war. When, therefore, Lord Howe sailed from St. Helens, his orders were to intercept the convoy. The French, who were aware that the British fleet would if possible stop the grain-ships, had sent Rear-Admiral Nielly to meet them with five sail of the line, 300 miles to the west of Belleisle. Nielly left Brest on the 10th April, the day before Vanstabel left the Chesapeake with his hundred and twenty grain-ships.

It is self-evidently true that if Howe had been outside Brest by the beginning of April, Nielly could not have sailed. But the British Government was in some anxiety for its own trade, and Howe was ordered to take with him nearly a hundred merchant-ships, which could not be collected sooner, and to see them clear of the Channel. The whole swarm of vessels which left the Isle of Wight with him amounted to 148 sail, of which 49 were men-of-war, and 34 were ships of the line. Howe took the convoy to the Lizard, and then sent the merchant-ships on under the protection of eight ships of the line. Six of these, under the command of Rear-Admiral Montagu, were ordered to accompany the convoy to Cape Finisterre, and then cruise between Cape Ortegal and Belleisle till the 20th, when they were to join the flag off Ushant. Two were to accompany the merchant-ships to their destination. Howe with twenty-six sail of the line and seven frigates steered for Brest to discover whether the main French fleet had put to sea. It was discovered at anchor.

This fleet, now commanded by Villaret-Joyeuse, a member of the old Royal Navy, and a comparatively young man, was within one of the same strength as the English—twenty-five sail of the line. Great exertions had been made by the French Government to fit it out thoroughly. Sailors had been brought from Toulon, and the crews were filled up by levies of landsmen. Every effort had been made to rouse the patriotism of the crews and confirm their confidence by eloquent appeals to their emotions. As a security that the officers would be kept up to the mark, and also as a precaution against the recurrence of the mutinous disorders which had disturbed the fleet of Morard de Galle, the Government had sent down two delegates with large powers of reward and punishment—Jean Bon Saint André, and Prieur de la Marne. The name of Jean Bon was freely used by wits in England as a Turk’s Head, or chopping-block for satire. They expatiated at large in prose and verse on his absurdities and cowardice. But Jean Bon was by no means an absurd man. He had been a sailor in his youth, before he became a Protestant preacher in his native town, Montauban. In the Convention he had been distinguished by Jacobin zeal and a great command of the windy rhetoric of the time. But he was neither fool nor coward. At a later period he did good service for Napoleon as Prefect at Mayence, and left the reputation of an honest and able official. His influence in the fleet was exercised on the side of energy, and his absurdities were superficial. If he dictated to the admiral, he had begun by making the crews understand that mutiny would no longer be tolerated. That Villaret-Joyeuse was better obeyed than Morard de Galle had been was mainly due to the presence of a representative of the dreaded Committee of Public Safety and to the decision of Jean Bon. The Republican fleet which lay at Brest in 1794 was in truth a better force than France was able to send to sea later in the war, when the spirit of the crews had been damped by defeat, when they had ceased to believe in the possibility of victory, and when long periods of stagnation in port had rendered them awkward and timid. It was indeed far from being efficient. Most of its captains and officers were merchant seamen who had no experience of naval military work. Its crews were largely landsmen. The Government was well aware of its want of training, for they instructed Villaret-Joyeuse to take the opportunity, afforded by his cruise for the protection of the convoy, to drill his men. They were to be taught the rudiments of their business at the very moment when they were about to meet an enemy. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that the English officers had not yet reached the level of skill they attained later. Howe had to complain of the awkwardness of some of his captains. The proportion of men who were at sea for the first time in their lives was large in his fleet also. The “prime seamen,” impressed for the fleet in 1793, had been largely sent to the Mediterranean or West Indies. There were vessels under his command which counted but a low proportion of men bred to the sea in their complements. No doubt the level of skill was higher in the English than in the French ships. But the superiority of Howe’s force was not what the superiority of the crews of coming years was to be. It was based less on training than on a better spirit of discipline, and the quality of its cadastre of officers—commissioned, warrant, and petty. Defoe’s maxim that “good officers presently make a good army,” holds true of fleets, though, no doubt, more time is required to make a man useful in a ship than to drill a soldier.

When Howe saw the French at anchor on the 5th May he might have judged it wiser to remain off Brest, so as to prevent them from getting out to cover the arrival of the convoy. But he could have no security that the convoy would make for Brest, and if it had reached the French ports to the south while he was blockading Villaret-Joyeuse, the main purpose of his cruise would have been lost. He therefore stood to sea to seek for Vanstabel and his charge on and near the 47th degree of latitude—the course which would naturally be followed by merchant ships on their way to Europe. He remained sweeping the trade route without seeing a sail, till he came off Brest again on the 19th, to which he returned since he had ordered Admiral Montagu to meet him off Ushant on the 20th. The weather had been foggy, so foggy that on the 17th the French fleet, on its way out, had passed Howe’s ships close enough to let the Frenchmen hear the fog signals struck in the English fleet. The watch bell was tolled on the starboard, and a drum beaten on the port, tack. The English fleet did not detect the neighbourhood of the enemy, and on the 18th the fleets were out of sight of one another. Villaret-Joyeuse had left Brest on the 16th, and after so narrowly avoiding a collision, he steered for the west to meet Nielly at his rendezvous, three hundred miles west of Belleisle. Howe, on the 18th, was returning to the east, and on the 19th his frigates reconnoitred the anchorage and discovered that Villaret-Joyeuse was at sea. On the same day the Venus frigate joined him with important news from Montagu. On the 15th the rear-admiral had fallen in with and captured the French corvette, Maire Guiton, and several merchant vessels. They belonged to an English Newfoundland convoy protected by Captain Thomas Troubridge in the Castor frigate. The Castor and the vessels she was convoying had all fallen into the hands of Nielly, who had sent them off as prizes. Montagu learnt from the Englishmen in the crews of the recaptured ships, that Nielly was waiting to join Vanstabel. As their united force would have outnumbered his, he informed the admiral, and asked for reinforcements. Howe, who also knew that Villaret-Joyeuse was at sea, realised the danger that his detached squadron might be overwhelmed, and at once steered to the south-west to afford it protection. On the 21st he fell in with a number of Dutch merchant vessels, just captured by Villaret-Joyeuse, and retook them. From the men on board and the logs of the ships he learnt that the French admiral was steering to the west to meet Nielly, and in a direction which would carry him away from Montagu, who was therefore in no danger. The main English fleet went in search of the Frenchman. Montagu, for his part, came to the rendezvous off Ushant on the 20th, and, not finding Howe there, returned in a few days to the Channel, an act of weakness which he and his apologists endeavoured to justify, but which had no valid excuse. It was an oversight on the part of Lord Howe that he did not take measures to call Montagu’s six line-of-battle ships to his flag. If they had been with him in the coming battles the result could not well have failed to be more decisive.

From the 21st to the 28th of May, Howe was diligently seeking the French between the 47th and 48th parallels of latitude. On the morning of the 28th they were seen directly to the south of him, and to windward in the brisk south-westerly wind then blowing. Villaret-Joyeuse, who had been joined by the Patriote, 74, from the squadron of Nielly, had now exactly the same number of ships as Howe. When the English topsails were first seen by the French they were supposed to be perhaps the convoy or the ships of Nielly’s squadron. He therefore bore down till he was near enough to recognise the English fleet, which he did when it was separated from him by a space of ten miles. The first duty of the French admiral was to manœuvre to secure the safety of the convoy. The more effectual course would have been to force on a close battle and drive Howe away. Villaret-Joyeuse was far too painfully conscious of the defects of his command to take the bold line which would have commended itself to his old chief, Suffren, with whom he had served in the East Indies, but was contrary to the general tradition of the French Navy. Therefore, like the plover, which endeavours to draw the intruder away from the place where its nest is, the French admiral manœuvred to tempt his opponent away from the route of the grain-ships. There was in truth little risk that he would not be followed, to say nothing of the fact that it was impossible to know exactly where Vanstabel would be at a given moment. The wholesome tradition of our navy was to destroy the fighting force of the enemy. When his opponent was in front Howe fixed upon him. The operations of the following five days were performed in the space of the Atlantic stretching around the point 47° 34′ N. and 13° 39′ W., and to 47° 48′ N. and 18° 30′ W. A line drawn west from Belleisle, and another drawn south from Lion’s Bank in the North Atlantic, meet on the field of the operation of the 28th and 29th of May and the 1st of June.

When he knew that Howe was to leeward of him the French admiral ordered his fleet to come to the wind on the port tack, and stood to the westward, in the south-westerly wind. But the inexperience of his captains and crews prevented the quick formation of a good line. Some of his vessels fell behind and to leeward. A little after one o’clock he tacked his ships in succession—one after the other, each tacking where her leader tacked—came back to pick up and cover the isolated vessels, and then stood to south-east. When the French were seen the English fleet pressed to windward, and at a quarter to ten the signal was made to prepare for action. As it had to work to windward its approach was naturally slow, and the whole day might have passed without an encounter but for the bad handling of some of the French ships. As it was, the first shot was not fired till about half-past two. To tack a fleet of the size of the French, in succession, was an operation requiring some two hours for its due performance. The last of the line had not reached the turning point when the first of the English came within striking distance. At that moment the French were to the south-east and the windward of the English, and all, except the ships which had not returned, were heading to the east-south-east. Howe had told off a squadron of his best sailing ships to harass the enemy’s rear, seize hold of his skirt, as it were, and stop his attempt to get away. This squadron consisted of Rear-Admiral Pasley’s flagship, the Bellerophon, 74, Captain William Hope; the Russell, 74, Captain John Willet Payne; the Marlborough, 74, Captain the Hon. G. Cranfield Berkeley; and the Thunderer, 74, Captain Albemarle Bertie. Though the average speed of a French fleet was commonly better than our own, the quickest English ships sailed better than the slowest of the French. As Villaret-Joyeuse was compelled to keep his ships together he had to regulate his speed by that of the worst sailer among them. Admiral Pasley’s squadron would probably have overtaken him even if his evolution had been completed by half-past two. At the moment of the first intact the English fleet was heading to the westward towards the French rear. At about three o’clock, as the enemy completed his evolution, it also began to tack in succession, and to follow, still heading for the rear of Villaret-Joyeuse’s line, and still to leeward, in pursuit of the opponent who was slipping away to the eastward. The Russell, Marlborough, and Thunderer, with the frigates, held on longer than the others to get into the wake of the French, and then turned. Both fleets now stood eastward, the French ahead, while the leading English ships kept up a bickering fire with the end of their line. At about five o’clock the Revolutionnaire, 110, fell back from her place in the line and took post at the rear. Her great bulk and solidity fitted her to stand battering. Her captain, Vandongen, fought her stoutly and was killed in the action. As the darkness came on the Revolutionnaire fell behind and put before the wind. She was engaged by the Bellerophon, the Russell, the Thunderer, the Marlborough, the Leviathan, 94, Captain Lord Hugh Seymour, and the Audacious, 94, Captain William Parker. She suffered severely, and it was believed in the English fleet that she had surrendered. It is probable that she would have been taken if Howe, who did not trust all his captains sufficiently to welcome a night action, had not recalled the ships engaged at about eight o’clock. She continued to be engaged on the Audacious till nearly ten. Captain Vandongen fell at nine-thirty. His first and second lieutenants had been killed or disabled. The third lieutenant, Renaudeau, was wounded immediately after taking over the command. The Revolutionnaire staggered out of action a wreck, under her fourth lieutenant, Dorré. But she had put her mark on most of the ships which engaged her, having damaged the Bellerophon severely, and shattered the rigging of the Audacious so thoroughly that the English 74 was compelled to put before the wind and return to Plymouth. The Revolutionnaire reached Brest (where her officers and crew were sent to prison on a charge of treason) under the escort of the Audacieux, 74, from Nielly’s squadron, which joined Villaret-Joyeuse on the 29th but was detached to help her.