The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (92 page)

The English fleet could not be written off thanks to the government’s increased attention to naval affairs and because France’s naval administration and strategic vision were
inadequate for a prolonged naval war. For all their scrupulous care, the preparations laid down by the naval ministers Colbert and his son and successor,
Seignelay, proved unequal to the exigencies of actual hostilities. When war came, there were deficiencies in implementation across the board: manning requirements could not be fulfilled, ships were in disrepair, promised armaments were delayed, and fetid provisions sickened the crews. The English were not without their problems, and they resorted to impressment to fill their ships’ rosters. One ship had a complement of more than 600 men, nearly two-thirds of whom were ordinary seamen (
“inferior
sailors” as distinct from “the more expert and diligent … rated
able
on the navy-books”), and of these, 120 had never been to sea. As Admiral
Edward Russell complained, “
The fighting part is by much the least trouble that an Admiral of the English Fleet meets with.”

Another preoccupation was how to finance the navy’s operations and infrastructure. In the seventeenth century, England and France had constructed or renewed
naval bases, shipyards, and port facilities, and attended to their sailors’ welfare by building hospitals for the wounded and ensuring funds for veterans and widows. Warships in the age of sail were extremely labor-intensive machines and keeping crews at full strength would remain a major problem through the nineteenth century. Financing naval operations and infrastructure proved more susceptible to improvement. The inadequate budgeting that had long hampered England’s naval establishment was alleviated somewhat in 1694 when the Scottish merchant and entrepreneur
William Paterson raised a loan of £1.2 million, the subscribers to which became the Governor and Company of the
Bank of England. This institution became the government’s banker and debt manager, and increased the flexibility with which the state addressed its financial obligations in war and peace. By managing the national debt and guaranteeing the availability of loans, the bank ensured that the government could prosecute wars, either directly or through subsidies to continental allies. The Bank of England was far in advance of any comparable institution in Europe, except the Netherlands—the bank’s policies were known as “Dutch
finance”—and gave the island nation unprecedented diplomatic and military leverage.

A steady stream of revenue and advances in administration enabled the British to maintain a brisker, more sustained operational tempo than any navy had demonstrated previously, and to do so increasingly beyond home waters. The shape of things to come was heralded in the campaign of 1694–95 when rather than return from the Mediterranean to England for layup and repairs, Admiral
Edward Russell put into
Cádiz, the first time a British squadron wintered on foreign station. Such long-range, long-term operations became the norm in the eighteenth century. Other indications of the new orientation of England’s naval ambitions were the completion of the new royal dockyard at Plymouth, on the western English Channel north of Brest, and the conclusion of an alliance with Portugal that allowed English ships to reprovision at
Lisbon.

Four years after the end of the
Nine Years’ War, Charles II of Spain died leaving his throne to
Philip of Anjou—his grandnephew and Louis XIV’s grandson. The specter of the House of Bourbon ruling France and Spain prompted England and the Dutch Republic to declare war. Apart from the political calculus, Dutch and English merchants saw an opportunity to increase their trade to the West Indies at Spain’s expense. In the first engagement of the
War of the Spanish Succession, in July 1702, an Anglo-Dutch force under
George Rooke destroyed a Spanish treasure fleet and its French escorts in the Spanish port of Vigo. The attack came after most of the cargo had been taken ashore, but the loss of ships hobbled Spain’s transatlantic trade, the lion’s share of which fell to French merchants, and opened the West Indies to further encroachment by English and Dutch interlopers. Of greater strategic consequence was the British capture of
Gibraltar and of Port Mahon, on
Minorca. An attack on
Toulon ultimately failed, but not before the French scuttled fifty ships to prevent their capture. With two bases in the western Mediterranean and the French fleet sunk at Toulon, the Royal Navy, as it was now called, could guarantee British merchants access to the lucrative trades of the Mediterranean, harass France’s commerce with the Levant, and keep an eye on North African
corsairs. Although Minorca was lost in the
Seven Years’ War, Gibraltar would prove a springboard for the extension of British power into the eastern Mediterranean, especially Egypt, and until the 1950s it was a vital link in the chain of British ports that led via
Malta and
Suez to the
Red Sea, India,
Hong Kong, and Australia.

By the 1730s, Britain possessed the
most powerful navy in the world, and it was possibly the equal of those of France and Spain combined. In addition to its English bases it had Mediterranean outposts at Gibraltar and Minorca, and Antigua and Jamaica in the Caribbean, as well as ships stationed from
Barbados to Boston, and access to the facilities of the
Bombay Marine, the East India Company’s naval arm since the early seventeenth century. Even so, apart from the
capture of
Portobelo, on the Caribbean coast of
Panama, by a force of only five ships, decisive naval operations in the War of the Austrian Succession were limited to European waters. But the experience of long-range campaigns would prove invaluable for the British, who put the naval conflict’s
hard-won lessons to work in the campaigns of the Seven Years’ War. The scale and scope of naval warfare was completely different, and the stunning blockade and eventual destruction of the Brest fleet was one of only three battles fought in European waters. Between 1757 and 1759, British and French naval squadrons of up to eleven ships of the line
fought in the Indian Ocean in support of their respective East India companies and their allies, and after Spain joined the war Royal Navy ships sailed from India to the
Philippines to capture Manila. However, the most widely dispersed operations were in the Americas. In 1758, twenty ships took part in the capture of the French fortress of Louisbourg in eastern
Nova Scotia. From there the fleet advanced up the St. Lawrence and managed to land troops upstream from Quebec, which enabled them to take the city from the rear, and set the stage for the capture of
Montreal and all
Canada. Extensive though this territory was, its population was a fraction of that of the thirteen
colonies to the south; and in commercial terms, Britain’s North American holdings paled in comparison with its Caribbean plantations.
George III made the case in a letter to the first sea lord at the height of the American Revolution: “
If we lose our sugar islands, it will be impossible to raise money to continue the war; the islands must be defended, even at the risk of an invasion of this island.” Great Britain was never at risk during the American Revolution, and Britain’s Caribbean islands were maintained. But against all odds the thirteen rebellious colonies won their independence.

The proximate
causes of the American Revolution can be traced to crown policies implemented in the wake of the Seven Years’ War, but the roots of the colonists’ self-confidence can be traced to the previous century. All but ignored by king and
Parliament during the
English Civil War of the 1640s,
merchants and
cod fishermen in British North America had carved out a place for themselves in the trade with the West Indies, which, stripped of their forests to make way for sugarcane, depended on North America for much of their food and virtually all of their wood. As a result, the eighteenth century saw an
explosive growth in shipbuilding in British North America, which accounted for about one-third of the ships in the British
merchant marine.
American shipwrights launched about a thousand vessels in the 1600s, the majority of them relatively small by the standards of the day and not competitive with larger, English-built vessels but more than adequate for the trade of the western Atlantic and Caribbean. Colonial seamen and shipwrights benefited from the
Navigation Acts because they were allowed to serve under the British flag and to build ships for British owners. On the whole, however, the colonists deeply resented the prohibitions in the Navigation Acts, the expectations of which were unrealistic for the simple reason that there were not enough ships to serve all of Britain’s far-flung colonies. Moreover, by law European goods imported into the colonies had first to be unloaded and reloaded in England. This re-exportation caused unnecessary delays, drove up handling costs, and resulted in the imposition of double duties on some goods—for import to and export from England. The number of
enumerated goods that could be exported only to England and not to other British colonies, much less to foreign ports, increased steadily. By the 1750s, these included sugar, molasses and rice,
copper and iron ore, tobacco and cotton, and naval stores like
tar, lumber, pitch, and hemp, and as a result, smuggling was rampant.

Although Britain’s financial system gave it the flexibility to prosecute wars more easily than its enemies, the conflicts of the eighteenth century were enormously expensive. To allay the cost of servicing the debt, and to pay for the continued defense of the North American colonies—including those won from France in the Seven Years’ War—the government imposed taxes designed to raise revenues and regulate trade; enforced the Navigation Acts more stringently to prevent illicit trade with non-British colonies in the West Indies; and transferred jurisdiction over smuggling cases from the provincial courts, where it was virtually impossible for the government to win a case, to vice admiralty courts. Resistance to these policies took many forms and reached a theatrical climax in the
Boston Tea Party of 1773. That spring, the
East India Company had received permission from Parliament to get a tax drawback on tea exported to
Ireland and North America. This allowed them to set prices that undercut smugglers, but at a cost to the treasury of about £60,000 per year. The focus of the ensuing debate turned on the principle of taxing the colonies. Despite dire predictions from such parliamentarians as
William Dowdeswell—“
I tell the Noble Lord now, if he don’t take off the duty they won’t take the tea”—Prime Minister
Lord North refused to reconsider.

When three East India Company ships reached Boston, citizens demanded that their tea be returned to England. A standoff was resolved when thirty to sixty colonists boarded the ships and dumped their cargoes into the harbor.
In retaliation, Parliament passed the
Intolerable (or Coercive) Acts, which annulled the
Massachusetts Bay Colony charter, closed the port of Boston, allowed legal cases against agents of the crown to be heard in England, and required private citizens to quarter soldiers in their homes. All but the last applied to Massachusetts alone, but in solidarity many of the colonies closed their ports to ships from England, and in the fall of 1774 the First
Continental Congress convened in
Philadelphia. In February 1775, Parliament tightened the noose with the passage of the Restraining Act, which prohibited New England
fishermen from “
carrying on any Fishery … upon the banks of Newfoundland … or any other part of the Coast of North America.” Two months later a British regiment sent to round up rebel leaders in Lexington, Massachusetts, fought the local militia in the opening skirmish of the American Revolution.

The patriots’ prospects were dim. The Royal Navy maintained more than two dozen ships of the line in North American waters; the colonies had none. While the colonies had laid down thousands of merchantmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they had virtually no experience of building warships and they had limited access to
ships’ guns, ammunition, or powder. Few colonists had any naval experience and most coordinated efforts failed, notably two attempts to seize gunpowder on
Bermuda and in the
Bahamas, and a catastrophic
expedition to
Penobscot Bay in which all of thirty-nine ships were lost in a bungled effort to seize a small British fort at Castine,
Maine. What few successes there were at sea invariably resulted from individual initiative, almost always by privateers bearing commissions issued by either the Continental Congress or individual states. American privateers also played a vital role freighting war matériel from sympathetic French and Dutch suppliers, mostly via the Caribbean, though such support was not without risk for all involved. In retaliation,
British privateers and warships seized Dutch shipping and trading stations in the Caribbean,
West Africa, and South Asia.

The French were happy to support an enemy of Britain without actually going to war, but American diplomats lobbied persistently for a more decisive relationship and in February 1778 France signed the
Treaty of Amity and Commerce. This would not have happened without a less heralded success for the Americans’ freshwater fleet at the battle of Valcour Island in
Lake Champlain. The British had hoped to sever New England from the rest of the colonies by
driving down Lake Champlain between New York and Vermont and into the
Hudson River valley. To counter this threat,
Benedict Arnold assembled a small force of soldiers and shipwrights at Skenesborough, New York, and built a fleet of three galleys, one
cutter, and eight flat-bottomed gunboats called
gundalows. In October 1776, Arnold’s fleet fought a four-day
battle against Captain
Thomas Pringle’s five warships, twenty gunboats, and twenty-eight longboats. The battle was a tactical defeat but a strategic victory for Arnold because Pringle was forced to postpone his southward advance until the following spring. In the meantime, the
Continental Army reinforced its position in the Hudson valley and when fighting resumed, the Americans forced the surrender of a British army at Saratoga, New York. It was this success in turn that persuaded the French that
the rebels might win the war.