Empire of the Seas by Brian Lavery

Author:Brian Lavery [LAVERY, BRIAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472835598
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

John Montague, 4th Earl of Sandwich. (National Maritime Museum, BHC3009)

Admiral Sir George Rodney was not a very attractive character, though he was affable enough in company. He was a compulsive gambler who had fled to Paris to escape his creditors in peacetime. His habit of appointing favourites to command was far from unusual, but his judgement of character was very poor and he once promoted his immature and incompetent son to captain at the age of 15. Nevertheless he was a good commander in battle, something that was desperately needed. He was appointed to command the fleet on the Leeward Islands Station in 1779. On the way out he paused to relieve Gibraltar from a Spanish siege, fighting at night against the common rules of warfare. When the Dutch declared war he took the opportunity to take the island of St Eustatius, rich from trading with both sides in the war. He became diverted by £3 million worth of plunder and neglected his operational duties. He ignored the laws of war, and the legal implications would dog him for years to come.

There had already been a series of indecisive actions between the British and French fleets in the West Indies. The most notable was off St Kitts, the oldest British colony in the region, in January 1782 when the French captured the island and were besieging Brimstone Hill, the ‘Gibraltar of the Caribbean’. Admiral Samuel Hood’s plans for a surprise attack on the French fleet collapsed and he took up a very clever defensive position in Frigate Bay, with his ships in a chevron formation pointing towards the prevailing wind. The French attack was driven off, but such defensive actions were never going to save the situation.

At last in April 1782, Rodney came up against Admiral De Grasse in the waters between Guadeloupe and Dominica, just off the small islands of the Saintes. There was an indecisive action on the 9th, but on the 12th the two fleets came together in the trade winds, with the French steering roughly south and the British forming up their fleet and heading in the opposite direction. As the fleets passed one another, Rodney’s officers began to notice gaps in the French line just as the wind shifted in their favour. The Admiral, generally a tactical conservative, allowed his ships to break the line, perhaps urged on by his aide Sir Howard Douglas, or perhaps by accident. Admiral Hood did the same with his ships further down the line. The British were able to deploy their gun power in raking the enemy as they passed through and they cut off several sections of the French fleet and isolated a number of ships. They captured five ships of the line, including the great flagship Ville de Paris. The Battle of the Saintes showed that results could be achieved by abandoning the Fighting Instructions and breaking the line. Unlike Quiberon Bay and the two battles off Finisterre, the Saintes was fought against fleets whose formation was still largely intact and it showed the way for the future.

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