Victory at Yorktown (24 page)

*   *   *

THE UNHAPPY TALE
of the joint effort to take Savannah in 1779 is quickly told. It began in the spring of 1778 when His Majesty George III, who spent a good many waking hours doing his best to micromanage the war in America, looked at the map, realized how remote the Carolinas and Georgia were from the rest of the states, and decreed that General Clinton's strategy should include an attack “upon the southern colonies with a view to the conquest … of Georgia and South Carolina.” Once in British hands, those territories would revert to royal colonies and serve as stepping-stones to North Carolina, the Chesapeake, and Virginia. The king decided that two thousand men would be enough to seize and retain Savannah, and, taking another step, he laid out a plan by which Georgia's most important port should be reduced in an operation in which “large numbers of the inhabitants would flock to the King's standard.…” Clinton was also instructed to dispatch 3,500 men under Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell to meet General Augustin Prevost, who would bring a detachment from the British garrison at St. Augustine plus a number of Indians. The two of them would converge on Savannah, and Savannah would be in British hands.

In the waning days of December Campbell, without waiting for Prevost because the number of Americans protecting Savannah was fewer than a thousand men, had an aged slave guide part of his force through the swamps while another approached from the other side. Taken by surprise in front and rear, the Americans lost more than five hundred dead, wounded, and missing, and the few survivors headed for South Carolina.

In the meantime General Benjamin Lincoln, an obese Massachusetts militia officer with an undistinguished record, who was reckoned by Washington to be an “active, spirited, sensible man,” had been named commander of the southern department and reached Charleston early in December. Lincoln had some eight hundred Continentals in Charleston, and he and John Rutledge, the South Carolina governor, had written to Admiral d'Estaing urging him to join them in an operation to retrieve Savannah from the British. Suddenly, early in September 1779, they received word that d'Estaing was actually off the coast of Georgia with four thousand men and could stay no longer than two weeks, since the hurricane season would soon be upon them. Lincoln collected every soldier within reach, sent out a call for South Carolina and Georgia militia, and took off through the piney woods to Georgia, arriving there to join d'Estaing on the 16th of the month. It turned out that the count—without waiting for Lincoln—had told Prevost to surrender but then, instead of storming the city with his superior forces, had done nothing. The Briton took advantage of the lapse by increasing his numbers with the garrison from Beaufort and strengthening his defenses so that by the time the allies had their batteries ready to lay siege to the town, the British were ready for them.

When days and nights of cannonading the town proved fruitless, although almost every dwelling was damaged, d'Estaing and Lincoln were bickering over just about everything (including the quality of meals at the latter's table), and the Frenchman was increasingly anxious about heavy weather in the offing. At his insistence, they made a direct assault on the enemy's works. It was the worst decision that could have been made; within an hour the British ditch “was filled with dead” from the allies' army, “many hung dead and wounded on the abatis,” and beyond the defense perimeter “the plain was strewed with mangled bodies,” according to an Englishman. D'Estaing himself was badly wounded, and the American and French casualties were more than eight hundred to the enemy's loss of fifty-seven.

D'Estaing, with his crews dying from scurvy and fever, and his ships threatened by the onset of hurricane weather, was determined to leave at once despite the pleas of the Americans, and a badly disappointed Lincoln reluctantly led his shattered army beyond the Savannah River as the French disappeared over the horizon. The cost of this failure was enormous. Their successful defense of the town had given the British a vital foothold from which they could move north, just as George III had in mind, with the strong possibility of reducing the Americans' hold on all the southern states. Thanks to the failure of allied arms, the enemy had an entirely new and promising field of operations.

*   *   *

EARLY IN
1780 the inept, hapless d'Estaing returned to France, where he was influential in persuading the government to send Rochambeau with an army to America,
*
but regrettably, the sour taste of the admiral's failures had so poisoned the attitude of the rebels that news of yet another French fleet on its way was greeted with little enthusiasm by the general public.

The successor to d'Estaing was another count—François-Joseph-Paul, Comte de Grasse, a giant of a man, six feet two inches tall, heavyset, extremely handsome, and a member of one of France's oldest aristocratic families. Now fifty-nine years old, he had attended naval school at the age of eleven, served in several campaigns against the Turks, and fought in the War of Jenkins's Ear in 1740, when he was taken prisoner by the British. Held for three months, he profited from the experience by making a number of English friends and collecting invaluable information about their navy. After serving in the Indian Ocean, West Indies, and Mediterranean, he took command of the seventy-four-gun
Intrépide
in 1778, the same year he became a commodore. Subsequently, he served with d'Estaing in the West Indies and was present at the action at Savannah. After a spell of bad health when he remained in France, he was promoted to rear admiral and sailed from Brest with twenty ships of the line—all carrying seventy-four guns or more—three frigates, two cutters, several heavy freighters, and a convoy of 150 vessels for the West Indies. At the same time he was given the rank of lieutenant general, which made him senior to all the other French general officers (including Barras, who accepted reality and served under his orders until the War for Independence ended).

De Grasse's flotilla set sail on March 22, 1781, with a favorable wind that continued until they were south of Madeira nine days later. On the 25th of the month they reached the area of the trade winds, and finally sighted the island of Martinique in the Lesser Antilles at dawn on April 28. From the governor general of the Leeward Islands they learned that an English fleet of eighteen ships of the line, under Admiral Sir Samuel Hood, had blockaded the entrance to Fort Royal, the capital of Martinique, for almost two months and was still waiting for the French to appear. At daybreak the following day, de Grasse deployed his fleet in line of battle and, keeping to windward, sailed off to meet the British, sighting the enemy about eight o'clock.

When the two fleets met, it was clear that the British ships were better sailers, and those vessels maintained excellent order, while the French center and rear squadrons were badly scattered. The skirmish continued through the day until ten o'clock at night, with the French
Vaillant
the principal casualty after being shelled continuously by four enemy ships for almost two hours.

The next day was spent with the two fleets attempting to outmaneuver each other. On May 1 de Grasse discovered that Hood was withdrawing and tried to overtake him, but only one frigate had enough speed, and after sending two broadsides through the English admiral's cabin windows, the frigate and the rest of the French ships retired and headed for Martinique. Anchoring there on May 6, de Grasse summoned all his captains and “with the sharpest reproaches” let them know how dissatisfied he was with the performance of some of them, especially in obeying signals and acting accordingly.

*   *   *

ONE OF THE
men who sailed with de Grasse was a young Swedish naval officer, Carl Gustaf Tornquist, who was filled with enthusiasm for the American cause. Tornquist had obtained leave to travel to Paris, where he volunteered for service, and was accepted and assigned to the ship of the line
Vaillant
in the admiral's fleet. Like so many European visitors to the new world, he was fascinated by what he saw. Martinique, he discovered, had one of the best harbors in the West Indies, situated to the lee of the island and from twenty to fifty fathoms deep. It was large enough to accommodate sixty warships plus merchant vessels, while the repair wharf there was suitable for the largest ships of the line. One of the best features of the harbor was that ships were safe during hurricane season—between the end of July and the beginning of October—when the storms struck “with such violence that no ship can possibly keep to the sea, much less lay at anchor.”

Fort Royal, with its abundant source of freshwater from two rivers, looked more like a village with many small stone houses, dominated by Government House and the large hospitals. St.-Pierre, the second city on the island, he described as “one of the prettiest, adorned with beautiful houses and orchards.” That, too, had a large open roadstead and a splendid freshwater supply, which was piped out to ships in the harbor. The inhabitants, he went on, were generally well-to-do, thanks in large part to the intensive trade in sugar, cotton, coffee, tobacco, and Martinique liqueur, which Tornquist declared “the best in the whole world.”

International trade was the lifeblood of the eighteenth century, and the West Indies was at the heart of it, thanks in no small part to the prevailing ocean currents. In the Atlantic, the Canary current off the Azores runs south and southeast along the west coast of Africa, then turns west to become the North Equatorial current that were followed by vessels bound for the Windward and Leeward islands. From here, off Venezuela to the east coast of Florida, what was known as the Spanish Main was the breeding ground of pirates who lurked in bays and inlets, lying in wait for Spanish ships loaded with treasure from Peru or an unsuspecting merchantman or slaver bound for America. From the Leeward Islands the Antilles current flows northwest to the Bahamas and Charleston, where it is picked up by the Gulf Stream and turns northeasterly and then east, heading back to Europe. In this great oval-shaped bowl formed by the Atlantic currents, trade that was absolutely vital to the American revolutionaries was conducted. Since Britain had prevented its colonies from developing the production of weapons or gunpowder and America lacked the raw materials and skills that were essential to their manufacture in large quantities, ammunition shipped from Europe was the Continental Army's sole source of supply, and the essential providers, or middlemen, were the neutral Dutch. Their town of St. Eustatius, or Statia, as it was called, was the wealthiest port in the Caribbean, and its importance is suggested by the fact that it changed hands more than twenty times in a century and a half.

English and French interest focused intensely on the West Indies because of the wealth produced by sugar and its by-products. Supposedly one-third of France's overseas trade came from the islands, and the British islands sent almost three hundred ships to London in most years—revenues in 1776 alone totaling £4.25 million, compared with £1.25 million from the East India Company. Britain did not really need the output of American farms; those simply duplicated the produce of the home islands, whereas the products of the tropical islands were a much better fit for the British economy. In 1778 Lord George Germain had made clear the need for controlling the West Indies: “Having them in possession, instead of cringing to an American Congress for peace, we shall prescribe the terms, and bid America be only what we please.”

*   *   *

SAILING FOR TOBAGO,
de Grasse's fleet soon sighted nine enemy ships of the line, but those vessels were fast sailers and had the advantage of the wind and eluded them. The same afternoon they captured two merchant vessels loaded with slaves, gold dust, ivory tusks, and whale blubber, cargoes estimated to be worth 600,000 livres. Running in to Tobago, which had been taken by France in June, they received word that enemy ships were in sight, which proved to be twenty-two ships of the line commanded by Rodney. The British admiral, Tornquist wrote, “presumably found our fleet in too good order [and] therefore refused to fight.” Whatever the reason, the British sailed away under cover of darkness.

On June 20 de Grasse's fleet anchored off Tobago, where the troops debarked and took on water and food supplies, including the purchase of one hundred oxen for provisions, before beginning to repair all the damaged ships. During the several engagements in the West Indies they had lost 46 dead and 105 wounded, and the latter were taken ashore to a hospital. Two weeks later the fleet hoisted anchor and made for Grenada, Porto Rico, and Santo Domingo, where five ships were detached to look for enemy cruisers. At sunset on July 16 they were in Cap François (later Cape Haitien), a pretty town closed in by high mountain ridges. Here Tornquist was told that in the summer months the land breezes pick up, accompanied by thunder and hard rain during the night, and last until morning, when the weather becomes beautiful—so that ships had to depart before the sea breeze commenced around 9 or 10
A.M
., after which it was impossible to leave. That was only part of the problem; although the harbor was large enough to accommodate 350 sail, only one ship at a time could pass between the shallows and the fort, which was a mere musket shot distant from the channel.

On July 23 the combustibility of a crowded port in hot weather was demonstrated when the ship's clerk of the
Intrépide
began to draw some brandy into a large cask for the crew in the cockpit. The door on a lantern had been left open, and the warm air blowing through it carried the flame and ignited the cask, which burst, and fire spread through the entire after hold. Fortunately, the bulkhead had been laid up with bricks, which gave the captain enough time to have his ship towed away from other vessels and throw overboard as much powder as he could, while pumping water into the powder magazine and cutting holes at the waterline. Even so, the fire spread to the masts and rigging, and the stern of the ship blew up in a huge explosion. Twenty men drowned, and houses in the city were damaged by the blast, with some of the local people injured.