The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (93 page)

In 1780, a French fleet brought the
Comte de Rochambeau with an army of six thousand soldiers to support General
George Washington. The following March, the
Comte de Grasse sailed for North America via the West Indies. On August 30, 1781, his fleet of twenty-eight ships of the line reached
Chesapeake Bay where another thirty-three hundred French troops disembarked to join Washington and Rochambeau’s siege of General
Charles Cornwallis, then dug in on the Yorktown peninsula. A few days later the Royal Navy’s Rear Admiral
Thomas Graves sailed from New York to the Chesapeake, arriving on September 5. Rather than attack while de Grasse’s ships were at anchor, Graves formed up in line of battle. The French fleet stood out of the bay in some disorder and Graves attacked, but as a result of mixed signals the rear division barely took part in the
battle of the
Virginia Capes. The French lost about two hundred men, double the British casualties, but they drew the British away from the Chesapeake and prevented a junction of Graves and Cornwallis. Light winds over the next few days prevented a renewal of the battle but by September 10 de Grasse was back in the Chesapeake. Caught between the French fleet and the Continental Army, Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, and the independence declared by the
United States five years before was secure.

War between France and Britain continued in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, where Vice Admiral Pierre André, Bailli de Suffren, led an especially impressive campaign. Suffren had left France at the same time as de Grasse, and after preventing a British takeover of the Dutch
Cape Colony in southern Africa, in February 1782 he succeeded to command of the French naval forces in the Indian Ocean: three 74-gun ships, seven 64s, and two 40s. The British had taken the Sri Lankan port of Trincomalee from the Dutch and were fighting
Hyder Ali,
sultan of Mysore and a French ally in southern India. Despite being outnumbered and having no local base—he was forced to winter in Dutch-held
Aceh on
Sumatra—Suffren captured Trincomalee in August 1782 and the following year prevented the British from taking Cuddalore four days before news of the peace negotiations arrived. En route home, Suffren returned to
Cape Town where the British officers he had just finished fighting readily acknowledged his brilliant conduct of the Indian campaign.
“The
good Dutchmen have received me as their savior,” Suffren wrote, “but among the tributes which have most flattered me, none has given me more pleasure than the esteem and consideration testified by the English who are here.” His success did nothing to alter the balance of power on the subcontinent, and whatever tactical and strategic lessons he imparted to his subordinates would be swept away in the
French Revolution a decade later.

Just as animosity between England and the Dutch Republic survived England’s transition from monarchy to commonwealth and back to monarchy in the seventeenth century, French hatred of perfidious Albion endured the revolution from monarchy to republic to empire from 1789 to 1815. Eight months after France declared war on Britain in 1793, Vice Admiral
Samuel Hood accepted the surrender of
Toulon by French royalists, but in so doing he had diverted resources from the more urgent campaign to seize France’s Caribbean colonies, which accounted for 40 percent of her foreign trade and two-thirds of her blue-water merchant marine. The British took a number of islands, but their initial success was undermined by a combination of presumption toward the French colonists and the loss of about sixty-five thousand men, including roughly twenty thousand sailors, to tropical
disease between 1793 and 1801. Even the tactical victory in the
battle of the Glorious First of June 1794—fought so far out to sea that it could not be associated with a landmark—was a strategic failure because the British failed to prevent a desperately needed grain convoy from reaching France.

Attention turned again to the Mediterranean in 1798, when
Admiral Horatio Nelson was assigned to watch a French fleet mustering at Toulon under François-Paul Brueys d’Aigalliers. “
Exceeding hard Gales” forced Nelson off station just as Brueys sailed for Egypt with an armada of twenty warships, three hundred transports, and more than thirty thousand soldiers under
Napoleon Bonaparte. Initially ignorant of Brueys’s intended destination and lacking ships suitable for scouting the enemy—“
Was I to die this moment,
want of frigates
would be found stamped on my heart!”—Nelson caught up with the French in Egypt just after Napoleon’s army landed. Brueys had anchored his thirteen ships and four frigates off
Aboukir east of
Alexandria, but he made two crucial miscalculations: that Nelson would not attack until morning, and that his own ships did not need to clear for action their shoreward-facing guns because Nelson would be unable to attack from that side. He was disappointed on both counts. Nelson attacked at once and sent five ships between the French line
and the shore to achieve an overwhelming tactical and strategic victory that cost the French eleven ships of the line and two frigates, and stranded their army in Egypt for two years.

In the meantime, Napoleon had returned to France and as first consul scored a series of stunning victories over continental armies. Britain subsidized a number of countries to keep them in the war, but they were antagonized by the Royal Navy’s insistence on the right to search their vessels for contraband. At the end of 1800
Russia,
Prussia,
Sweden, and
Denmark declared a policy of armed
neutrality, embargoing British shipping in their ports and denying the Royal Navy the right to search neutral ships. Diplomatic efforts to change Danish policy failed, and in March 1801 Admiral Sir
Hyde Parker and Nelson sailed for the Baltic with thirty-nine ships. A preemptive
attack on
Copenhagen to prevent Denmark from going over to the French compelled the Danes to lift their embargo (Russia and Sweden soon followed suit), and netted the British fifteen Danish ships of the line and as many frigates.

Exhausted by war, Britain and France concluded the
Treaty of Amiens in 1802, but hostilities resumed the next year. When the British got wind of Napoleon’s plans for an invasion of England, Nelson was ordered to contain Vice Admiral
Pierre Villeneuve’s fleet at Toulon. In the spring of 1805, Villeneuve slipped Nelson’s blockade, rendezvoused with the Spanish fleet at
Cádiz, and crossed the Atlantic to
Martinique, all in an effort
to keep the British from massing their ships for the defense of England. Nelson set off in hot pursuit, and when Villeneuve learned that Nelson had reached the Caribbean, he returned to Cádiz almost immediately with Nelson again on his heels. Daunted by the prospect of an engagement with the British fleet, Villeneuve stayed put until he learned that Napoleon was relieving him of command. Early on the morning of October 19, eighteen French and fifteen Spanish ships of the line weighed anchor; within two and a half hours,
signal flags had passed the news to Nelson along a chain of frigates stretching fifty miles to the southwest. The Combined Fleet took two days to straggle out of Cádiz, and at first it seemed as though Villeneuve would make a run for the Mediterranean, but on October 21 he turned back to face the enemy off Cape Trafalgar.

Eleven days before, Nelson had outlined his plan of attack in a memorandum to his officers:

Nelson divided his fleet into two divisions and as the fleets closed he ordered his most famous signal run up: “
England expects that every man will do his duty.” The battle was hard fought from the outset, and Nelson’s
Victory
was in the thick of it, at one point being enfiladed by three French ships. In the early afternoon Nelson was shot as he paced the quarterdeck and three hours later—having been informed of the capture of fifteen of the enemy ships—the hero of
Aboukir, Copenhagen, and now Trafalgar died. His death was not in vain, for with Trafalgar he had destroyed the French battle fleet and the Royal Navy would have no serious rivals for a century.

A total of 43,000 men fought at Trafalgar, and
combined casualties totaled 17 percent; more than 3,100 sailors killed and 4,100 injured, with the Franco-Spanish fleet suffering more than three times as many casualties as the British overall, and ten times as many killed. This disproportion was hardly unusual, and the British usually fared even better against their opponents. By one estimate, in six major fleet engagements between the Glorious First of June and Trafalgar, British fatalities were only one-sixth that of their enemies, and in the course of ten single-ship actions during the
Seven Years’ War the French suffered 855 dead, thirteen times more than the British. There are many reasons for these asymmetrical outcomes, but the English had cultivated a psychological advantage based on a belief that the point of battle was to attack. After the loss of
Minorca during the Seven Years’ War, Admiral
John Byng had been executed not for giving up the island or for cowardice, but “
for failing to do his utmost to take or destroy the enemy’s ships,” a capital crime in the
Articles of War.

Even as western European powers vied for dominance in the Atlantic and Mediterranean at the end of the seventeenth century, Russia was fitfully emerging as a maritime power of sorts under Peter the Great. The tsar’s achievement was not the construction of a big fleet or the development of a naval bureaucracy—he managed these, although neither proved especially durable—but securing for Russia saltwater ports on the Baltic and Black Seas and pressing his country’s eastward expansion across Siberia toward the Pacific and North America. In 1683, Peter became the first tsar to visit the
White Sea port of
Archangel and ordered the establishment of its first shipyard. Thirteen years later, and more than two thousand kilometers to the south, he invaded the Ottomans’ Black Sea
stronghold of Azov in a campaign that failed because the
Russians could not prevent the fort’s replenishment by sea. Peter ordered the construction of twenty-five galleys and fourteen hundred river
barges on the Voronezh River, a tributary of the Don, and captured Azov the next year. With the Black Sea proper now in reach, he embarked on a massive shipbuilding campaign, but most of the vessels launched ultimately rotted or were handed over to the
Turks (as was Azov) by treaty in 1713. In the meantime, Peter had made a
yearlong tour of western Europe where he spent considerable time in the Netherlands and England working in shipyards to learn shipbuilding and gaining a mastery of navigation and naval organization. The tsar also recruited shipwrights and faculty for the
Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation, established in 1700 (the
St. Petersburg Naval Academy followed fifteen years later); he prepared the way for Russian shipwrights, seamen, navigators, and engineers to apprentice in the west; and he modeled Russia’s highly detailed
Naval Statute of 1720 on antecedents from France, Britain, the Netherlands,
Denmark, and Sweden.

As much as Russia’s fledgling navy drew on the experience of other maritime powers, it gained practical experience of its own in the
Great Northern War (1700–21) against Sweden and her allies. Progress in the first decade went slowly, except for the capture of a
Neva River fort near
where Peter founded St. Petersburg in 1703. Eight years later the Russians captured Swedish-held cities from the Vistula to the Finnish border, and in 1714 a fleet of galleys ferried sixteen thousand troops to take Helsingfors (Helsinki), which was then Swedish territory. The Swedish fleet of twenty-eight ships (including sixteen of the line) withdrew to the entrance to the
Gulf of Finland, where the Russians defeated them at the
battle of Hangö. Peter’s fleet included eleven
ships of the line, four
frigates, and ninety-nine galleys modeled on a Venetian prototype, some Russian-built and others ordered from the Netherlands and England. The latter development alarmed the Swedes, who complained that the sales contravened Anglo-Swedish treaties. In an anonymous pamphlet entitled “The Northern Crisis or Impartial Reflections on the Policies of the Tsar” (1716), Sweden’s very partial Ambassador Count
Carl Gyllenborg wrote, “
This savage, cruel, and barbarous people design to become masters of the Baltic. The Tsar’s fleet will soon outnumber the Swedish and the Danish put together … and will be the master of the Baltick. We shall wonder then at our blindness that we did not suspect his great designs.” In London, concern about the tsar’s “
seducing artificers in the manufacturers of Great Britain into foreign parts” led to an act of
Parliament intended to curb the recruitment of skilled craftsman by Russia. Yet Peter’s strategy succeeded brilliantly, and by the
Treaty of Nystad, Sweden
ceded
Livonia,
Estonia, Ingermanland, and part of Karelia (near St. Petersburg), thereby reversing several centuries of Russian isolation from the Baltic and establishing it firmly as a major force in European affairs.

Although Russian foreign policy veered sharply under Peter’s successors, hostility to the Ottomans remained a constant. Azov fell again in 1736, but it was not until the reign of
Catherine the Great that the Ottoman monopoly over the Black Sea was finally shattered. At the start of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74, Catherine dispatched fourteen ships of the line and seven frigates from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. Concerned about a Franco-Ottoman rapprochement, the British refurbished the Russian fleet and offered the services of experienced officers. The Ottomans had more ships of the line than the
Russians, but on June 25, 1770, their fleet was almost completely destroyed in a fireship attack in the
Bay of Chesma, on the Aegean coast of Turkey, an epochal event that finally fulfilled Peter’s hopes for the Russian navy. The
Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca gave Russia a number of fortresses on the
Sea of Azov and at the mouth of the Dnieper and opened the Black Sea, the
Bosporus, and the Dardanelles to Russian and other shipping for the first time in two centuries.