The Jamaica Station, page 31
part #3 of Carlisle & Holbrooke Naval Adventures Series
‘Well, I understand that you’re to be congratulated,’ said Carlisle. He saw Simmonds hovering at the cabin door, waiting to be called to record the change of command. ‘I don’t think you’ll be needed today,’ he said to the clerk.
Carlisle turned back to Holbrooke. ‘The admiral will see you in an hour, and it would be fitting if you saw him as the captain of Medina, rather than as her first lieutenant. We can read me in tomorrow, and I’ll sleep ashore tonight.’
‘That’s very generous of you, sir,’ Holbrooke said with feeling, ‘and I see you’re fully recovered.’ Holbrooke could tell that something was in the wind. His eye briefly caught a glimpse of Kestrel lying at anchor just a cable away as Medina’s stern swung to the light wind. The sloop-of-war was enticingly close, but his rational mind knew that it couldn’t be. While Medina had been keeping her lonely vigil off Cape François, the admiral would have appointed one of his own followers to command the sloop. This was just Carlisle’s way of showing his appreciation for Holbrooke looking after his frigate.
‘Yes, the doctor’s declared that I’m fit for duty. Lady Chiara’s been watching for your return this past month. Apparently I’m a much better husband when I only visit occasionally,’ he grinned. ‘Now, what of your adventures since I saw you? I have a glowing report of Medina’s support for his squadron from Commodore Forrest and a somewhat gruff acknowledgement from Captain Bates of your worth in destroying Outarde, to allow the privateers to do their work.’ He withdrew his pocket watch from his waistcoat, ‘we’ve thirty minutes before you need to be moving,’ he said.
Serviteur offered sherry – he’d been told Captain Carlisle’s preference and was very keen to make an excellent first impression – it was the coldest sherry that could possibly be achieved between the tropic lines. Carlisle looked at the new servant quizzically.
‘Serviteur, sir, your attendant until Smart has recovered from his injury, if you please,’ said Jacques in a strong French accent, bowing low.
‘Well, welcome aboard, Serviteur,’ replied Carlisle, ‘I see there is more to be told, Mister Holbrooke.’
Holbrooke related Medina’s story from the day that they sailed from Port Royal two-and-a-half months before. It was a curious fact of life at sea in a King’s ship, that what seemed at the time to be dull and monotonous, when related to those who weren’t there, appeared full of action and drama. So, the tale of Medina under Holbrooke’s command took on an heroic aspect. The long periods of patrolling between Monte Christi and Cape François were lost in the excitement of the battle, the sailing of the convoy and the destruction of Outarde.
‘A squadron action – it's fast becoming famous, by the way, as Forrest’s Action or some are rather grandly calling it the Battle of Cape François – a French frigate of twice Medina’s force destroyed and a half share in two of the richest prizes to be brought to Port Royal this war. Your name is starting to be known, Mister Holbrooke, and you’ll be able to afford a new coat,’ he said, pointing at the sea-worn garment that was Holbrook’s best. In truth, the coat would have looked far worse, but Serviteur had discovered it the previous day and laboured hard at cleaning away the salt and various stains.
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Jackson steered Medina’s cutter through the anchorage to Cotes’ flagship. Marlborough had left the dock two days before and was already in the high state of polish that was expected of the flagship of the Jamaica Squadron. The two men left Medina bearing curious personas: Captain Carlisle without a ship and Lieutenant Holbrooke, commanding officer of His Majesty’s Frigate Medina. It was a strange relationship and one that made Holbrooke uneasy. He felt that something was being kept from him.
‘Medina!’ replied Jackson with lungs of brass in response to the hail from Marlborough. He wasn’t sure which of the two sea-officers he was referring to, but he was happy to let them sort it out among themselves. The naval protocol would have puzzled even Lord Anson himself. As the senior officer, Carlisle went first through the entry-port but received no pipe. There was then a decent pause until Holbrooke steeped through to the twitter of the salute that was reserved for officers in command. Holbrooke could feel himself blushing, and he feared that he’d stammered his reply to the greeting of the flag captain.
‘Let’s go straight to the admiral,’ said Faulknor. ‘Perhaps you’d join us, Carlisle. He’s expecting you.’
Admiral Cotes was in good humour. The convoy may have slipped through his fingers but, like Holbrooke and all the sea-officers, he recognised a brave piece of work when he saw it. Forrest’s action would be hailed as a great victory by the British people who were starved of good news and starting to doubt the ability of the navy to protect their interests. Medina’s part was a footnote to history, nothing more than the sort of action that his cruisers were engaged in week-by-week. And yet, Medina’s battle against the convoy had something a little extra. There was a single-ship fight to be celebrated, and they didn’t come along every day, particularly when a twenty-eight-gun frigate utterly destroyed one of forty-four-guns. And of course, Cotes appreciated the one-eighth share of the frigate’s half of the prizes that would come to him. He’d been visited by the owner of Two Brothers, a planter with political power in the island, who expressed his appreciation of Medina’s co-operation with his privateer in the most handsome terms.
Holbrooke delivered his report and verbally related the happenings of the past few months. When he described the end of Outarde, the admiral nodded appreciatively.
‘You say that the convoy and escorts held their course and didn’t turn back to help? I expect the two frigates from Cape François will call at Little Inagua Island when they’ve seen the merchantmen on their way, but I’ll send a sloop to look at the wreckage in any case.’
‘May I bring to your notice, sir, the acting first lieutenant? Mister Lynton has performed to my greatest satisfaction.’
‘You may, Mister Holbrooke,’ he replied. ‘Make a note, would you?’ he said to his secretary. ‘But what about you, Mister Holbrooke? What should be your reward?’
Holbrooke couldn’t speak, he just stared stupidly at the admiral.
‘You must have been disappointed when I gave Kestrel to Lieutenant Swift. He was a man with important friends and fully deserving of the step. But he’s gone, and now I can more specifically reward merit.’
Time stood still while Holbrooke held his breath.
‘I have the greatest pleasure in appointing you to command His Majesty’s Sloop-of-War Kestrel in the rank of Master and Commander. You are to take command tomorrow and complete her establishment for a two-month cruise. Here’s your commission, Captain Holbrooke,’ he said handing over an envelope of stiff, cream-coloured paper, ‘and given your conduct and the report that I shall make, I’ve every expectation that their Lordships will confirm by the first packet.’
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Holbrooke was in a daze as he was rowed with Carlisle across to Kingston, where Chiara was waiting with a celebratory supper; it appeared that everyone had known except him. But he didn’t care. He was a commander with a sleek, fast sixteen-gun ship-rigged sloop, and not yet twenty years of age! And with a sloop of this size, with at least a hundred men, he’d be entitled to a lieutenant and a sailing master, just like a frigate.
They passed Medina. The news must have reached Lynton only a few minutes before because he was furiously arranging the hands to cheer ship. It should have been an orderly affair, with every seaman appointed to a place on the masts, the yards or on deck, but the speed with which it had to be accomplished reduced it to a mad scramble as the hands ran up the masts to the first vantage point that they could find. But the cheer was heartfelt all the same.
Jackson brought the boat right into the heart of the busy Kingston commercial wharf and nosed into an improbable gap between two dirty local island boats, busy offloading their cargoes of sugar and indigo to the warehouses, ready for the next convoy. Carlisle stepped ashore first, and Holbrooke followed him but hesitated just a few yards from the boat.
‘Excuse me, sir. I haven’t given Jackson any instructions to pick me up, and I feel they’re owed a few coins for refreshment.’
‘Quite right, Holbrooke, you wouldn’t want to ignore the traditions.’
Holbrooke turned back just in time to catch the boat before it shoved off.
‘Jackson!’ he called. ‘Share this among the boat’s crew, will you? Be back here at eight o’clock.’
‘Aye. Aye, sir,’ replied Jackson loudly, knuckling his forehead and grinning broadly. There was enough there for a famous run ashore tomorrow. He moved a step closer to Holbrooke. ‘In that sloop of yours, sir,’ he continued in a low voice, pointing at Kestrel, gleaming in the tropical sunshine, ‘you’ll be needing a good bosun, I expect.’
Historical Epilogues:
Maurice Suckling’s Nephew
Forty-eight years after the Battle of Cape François to the very day, on the morning of the twenty-first of October 1805, off Cape Trafalgar, the combined fleets of Spain and France were in sight. Vice Admiral Lord Nelson was heard by Victory's surgeon to remark that, ‘the twenty-first of October was the happiest day in the year among his family,’ and several times in the days before Trafalgar he said to Captain Hardy and Doctor Scott, ‘the twenty-first of October will be our day.’
After Cape François on the twenty-first of October 1757, Maurice Suckling didn’t take part in any more notable actions during his long naval career. If it weren’t for his role in bringing his nephew, Horatio Nelson, to sea, his name would have sunk into obscurity long ago.
Nelson had no important naval connections other than his maternal uncle, of whom the whole family was immensely proud. His family annually feasted the anniversary of the Battle of Cape François, and it’s entirely reasonable to imagine that it was the story of that action that led Nelson to choose the navy. For Nelson chose the navy, he wasn’t pushed into it. More-or-less out of the blue he asked his father to write to Maurice Suckling asking if he would take young Horatio to sea. Suckling famously replied, ‘What has poor Horace done, who is so weak, that he above all the rest should be sent to rough it at sea? But let him come, and the first time that we go into action, a cannon-ball may blow off his head, and provide for him at once.’ Suckling took Nelson as a youngster into his ship Raisonnable, a sixty-four-gun third-rate ship-of-the-line.
Without the Battle of Cape François, Nelson may have chosen the church as a career. It would have been the obvious choice for the third son of a country parson, particularly so as neither of his elder brothers chose the cloth. Instead, he went to sea and achieved immortality at Cape St. Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen and finally at Trafalgar where he lost his life giving his country its greatest naval victory.
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De Kersaint’s Convoy
Capitaine de Vaisseau Guy François de Coëtnempren, Comte de Kersaint, cleared his forty-one-ship convoy from Cape François in November 1757 and with his four ships-of-the-line, escorted it across the Atlantic without any notable incident. It was a great achievement in the face of the Jamaica Squadron and an excellent example of the maintenance of a naval objective. However, fate had a cruel surprise for him. As he approached the coast of Brittany in early January 1758, a winter storm scattered the merchantmen. By February only fifteen of them had reached their destinations, and it would be months before they were all safely in port.
His men-of-war fared even worse. The captain of the sixty-four-gun Opiniatre was wounded at the battle of Cape François and was put ashore as soon as his ship reached the roadstead at Brest. In his absence the weather worsened, the anchors dragged, and Opiniatre drifted onto the rocks and was destroyed. Meanwhile, the captured British fifty-gun ship Greenwich was lost when she ran aground on a small island off the entrance to the roadstead at Brest.
As Holbrooke forecast, the proceeds from the convoy were quickly swallowed by the insatiable French war machine. The naval treasury at Brest had run out of money in early 1758, and although the payment for the cargo in de Kersaint’s convoy provided a brief respite, by August, it was again bare, with not an écu to be found.
De Kersaint went on to command the seventy-four-gun Thésée. In November 1759 at the Battle of Quiberon Bay, he rushed to the aid of the flagship Soleil-Royal as she was assailed by Hawke’s Royal George. His crew omitted to close her lower deck gun-ports, the sea rushed in as the ship heeled and Thésée capsized, killing de Kersaint, two of his sons, and all but twenty-two of his six-hundred-man crew. The gallant De Kersaint deserved better.
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The Seven Years War at the end of 1757
By the end of 1757, Pitt was back in government after his three months in the wilderness following the trial and execution of Admiral Byng, and his grand maritime strategy was starting to take effect.
The French and Austrians were committed to an invasion of Germany where Frederick of Prussia, backed by vast British subsidies, was forcing them to spend huge sums of money for little gain. As a direct consequence, the French navy was starved of cash and men.
Meanwhile, Hawke’s Western Squadron effectively prevented a French invasion of Britain while at the same time it complicated the French attempts to reinforce their naval deployments in North America. Although men-of-war occasionally escaped the blockade, merchant ships and navy transports found it increasingly difficult. New France starved, and its armies ran short of the necessities of war. This gave the British navy the freedom to reinforce North America, the West Indies and the East Indies.
As always, the key to the British way of making war was to safeguard its own trade while destroying the enemy’s. A convoy system had been instituted early in the war which gave the City of London confidence to invest and kept insurance rates down. Sixth-rates and sloops escorted the merchant ships until they were out of danger, and when they had no convoy to protect, they occupied strategic stations, sometimes far into the Atlantic, where they aggressively suppressed French privateers. In 1757 France lost a total of three hundred and ninety merchant ships to a combination of British navy cruisers and privateers.
In the West Indies, the frigates and sloops of the Leeward Islands and Jamaica squadrons and the ever-present privateers played havoc with the French trade. By the end of 1757 exports to France were dropping towards a quarter of their peacetime volume, while insurance rates rose towards 50 per cent. This exacerbated an already dire situation in the French Royal treasury.
The Toulon squadron had been demobilised after the capture of Minorca and swung impotently at its moorings, leaving the Mediterranean as an operational backwater for the latter part of 1756 and all of 1757.
In the East Indies, where the British navy cooperated extensively with the Honourable East India Company the native Indian rulers were a more significant threat than the French. By early 1757 Calcutta and Fort William had been re-taken from the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies. This success was quickly followed by the taking of Chandernagore, and in June 1757 Clive won the battle of Plassey. All this was made possible by the absence of a significant French force in the East Indies, and by the end of the year, the French Admiral Comte d'Aché still hadn’t arrived in the region.
However, the most important theatre of the war was North America, and here the British found it harder to make progress. The fortress at Louisbourg was the key to New France (Canada). It didn’t block access to the St. Laurence, but if it remained in French hands, it was just too dangerous to commit a fleet to a passage towards Quebec and on to Upper Canada. The first assault on Louisbourg in 1757 was a failure, and the French positions in New France, the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley remained as strong as they had been in 1755. However, the cabinet was working up a strategy for 1758 that exploited Britain’s unique advantage – its sea-power.
As 1757 ended, Pitt and the navy were poised to turn the war in Britain’s favour.
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Nautical Terms
Throughout the centuries, sailors have created their own language to describe the highly technical equipment and processes that they use to live and work at sea. This holds true in the twenty-first century.
When counting the number of nautical terms that I’ve used in this series of novels, it became evident that a printed book wasn’t the best place for them. I’ve therefore created a glossary of nautical terms on my website
https://chris-durbin.com/glossary/
My glossary of nautical terms is limited to those that I’ve used in this series of novels, as they were used in the middle of the eighteenth century. It’s intended as a work of reference to accompany the Carlisle and Holbrooke series of naval adventure novels.
Some of the usages of these terms have changed over the years, so this glossary should be used with caution when referring to periods before 1740 or after 1780.
My online glossary isn’t exhaustive; a more comprehensive list can be found in Falconer’s Universal Dictionary of the Marine, first published in 1769. I haven’t counted the number of terms that Falconer has defined, but he fills 328 pages with English language terms, followed by a further eighty-three pages of French translations. It is a monumental work.
An online version of the 1780 edition of The Universal Dictionary (which unfortunately does not include all the excellent diagrams that are in the print version) can be found on this website:
https://archive.org/details/universaldiction00falc
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Bibliography
The following is a selection of the many books that I consulted in researching The Jamaica Station
Sir Julian Corbett wrote the original, definitive text on the Seven Years War. Most later writers use his work as a stepping stone to launch their own.
