The Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), page 8
But ships were of little use without crews, and the Royal Navy was to experience chronic manpower shortages as the fleet was enlarged and the rigours of war took their toll. Although Parliament voted for progressive increases in the number of marines and mariners – the theoretical strength of the Royal Navy expanding from 100 000 men in 1804 to 145 000 by 1810 – sufficient recruits were not forthcoming and the service invariably suffered from a shortfall of between 3000 and 16 000 personnel. Life aboard Britain’s ‘wooden walls’ was scarcely appealing. Protracted periods at sea on tedious, unglamorous blockade or convoy duties added boredom to the omnipresent ills of Draconian disciplinary codes, cramped and insanitary living conditions, low pay and poor rations.13 Such tribulations had spawned mutinies within the fleet in 1797. However, during the Napoleonic conflict manpower shortages were as much a product of competition as they were of unenticing employment conditions. Many sailors elected to serve with the privateers in the profitable guerre de course, while others worked aboard coasters and merchantmen where their remuneration was up to five times that enjoyed by Royal Navy seamen and life was generally much more agreeable.14
It is little wonder in view of all of this that, despite the inhumane practice of impressment15 and the extensive recruitment of foreigners, many British warships were left with either insufficient crewmen or none at all. Thus, in October 1805, Barham was to grumble about numerous vessels ‘lying inactive in Port’ for want of sailors,16 while HMS Victory fought at Trafalgar with 134 men missing from her official complement of 837 officers and ratings.17 Nor, once found, were sailors easy to retain. Although great progress was made in improving the health of ships’ crews, the old curses of smallpox and scurvy being gradually eradicated by means of inoculation and lemon juice respectively,18 desertion remained a serious problem, with many seamen seeing service in the New World especially as an ideal chance to start afresh. Not only did life there seem to offer all manner of exciting opportunities for material enrichment, but also the USA’s contrasting political order inevitably appealed to the many disaffected and discontented Britons who had been pushed or dragged into His Majesty’s service. Indeed, the Royal Navy’s attempts to counter this menace by combing American vessels for alleged deserters was one of the issues which was to lead to the Anglo-American War of 1812.
Aspects of that conflict will be dealt with in more detail elsewhere. It should be noted here, however, that it formed one of the few opportunities Britain had after Trafalgar to use her maritime might in an offensive mode. That encounter, though perhaps the most celebrated naval clash in history, was the only major sea battle of the lengthy war against Napoleon and, thereafter, the British had to rely primarily on more indirect means of dissipating his nautical strength. Apart from a handful of comparatively minor engagements between small flotillas and individual squadrons, there were to be no more occasions on which the opposing fleets locked horns with one another.
This situation must have proved rather frustrating for the many enterprising commanders within the Royal Navy during our period. As Napoleon adopted a minatory posture by keeping his flotillas in their ports and adding to their size through various shipbuilding programmes, the British navy was largely reduced to mounting an interminable blockade of the enemy’s bases. The equally unexciting work of enforcing the Orders-in-Council – London’s response to the Continental System – was the other major task that fell to the fleet. Such duties, though essential, afforded little scope for the Royal Navy to perform the mission at which it excelled and instinctively preferred: the destruction of an adversary’s warships in open battle. Although British vessels were, on the whole, slower and often inferior in design, better signalling systems and superior discipline and seamanship made them formidable opponents once they engaged the enemy. In the hands of astute commanders such as Cornwallis, Collingwood, Keith and, of course, Nelson, British squadrons exploited their capacity for precise, rapid and bold manœuvre to the full, penetrating the enemy’s formations to rake his ships from close range with rapid and accurate broadsides. The carronade, a highly manœuvrable gun which fired large projectiles from close quarters, was an important innovation in this regard, since it encouraged Royal Navy captains to thrust into the hostile fleet, suppressing the guns on opposing vessels with superior firepower. Once they had edged alongside the enemy ships, the British would complete their victory by boarding them.
Indeed, by the late 1790s the British naval dominance that was to be confirmed during the Napoleonic Wars was already emerging. At the Battle of the Nile on 1 August 1798, Nelson, relying on the polished seamanship of his crews, sailed into shallow, unchartered waters, actually enveloping the French fleet by passing some of his ships along the leeward edge of the enemy’s anchorage. The Royal Navy’s superior manoeuvrability, gunnery, training and morale did the rest: of the 16 French ships of the line and four frigates, 11 of the former and two of the latter were lost, together with some 4000 personnel who were killed, wounded or captured.19
Whereas Nelson and his colleagues were to implement a similarly daring and aggressive plan at Copenhagen in April 1801,20 the French naval commanders of the period never exhibited such tactical flair. Throughout the eighteenth century French maritime doctrine had suppressed initiative and emphasized the husbanding of resources rather than the pressing home of attacks to achieve the annihilation of an opponent’s fleet. More generally, too, the navy that Napoleon was to inherit was no match for its British counterpart, and the latter’s overall strategy was to help ensure it stayed that way.
When hostilities resumed between Britain and France after the abortive Peace of Amiens, the French Navy was dispersed among its principal bases – Rochefort, Brest, Lorient and Toulon – and was scarcely ready for action. Its dockyards were on the verge of being improved, as was its fleet: to facilitate communications between the naval bases and Paris, the erection of aerial telegraph systems devised by Claude Chappe had already commenced,21 while new warships, often superior in their design and construction to those of the British, were being commissioned.
The cardinal defects of the French Navy, however, lay in its personnel rather than in its vessels and supporting infrastructure. Demoralized by repeated defeats and weakened by purges during the Revolutionary period, its officer corps was in the midst of regenerating itself and had yet to adjust fully to the style of maritime warfare pioneered by the British in recent years.22 Besides a shortage of competent commanders, the training of the ratings in basic skills like gunnery was also markedly inferior to that found in the Royal Navy, while, given the constraints imposed by the latter’s blockade, there were few opportunities for the French to improve their seamanship or to practise the manoeuvring of substantial numbers of ships. The exception to this general rule appears to have been the Toulon flotilla, which, after being severely mauled at Trafalgar, was refitted and enlarged with newly constructed vessels until it amounted to 24 men-of-war. Unable to maintain a tight blockade of Toulon because of its comparative remoteness from their bases and the prevailing wind’s direction, the British were haunted by the fear that the squadrons here might slip past them and strike a blow somewhere in the spacious Mediterranean. This had already occurred in 1798, when Admiral Brueys’s fleet had not only escorted the convoy taking the French expeditionary force to Egypt but had also captured Malta into the bargain.23 Similarly, in 1808, a sortie from Toulon came close to jeopardizing Britain’s hold on Sicily, her nodal base in the Mediterranean. Admiral Ganteaume’s ships were to have embarked 9000 soldiers at Naples and land them near Messina, while other Imperial troops crossed the straits from Calabria. In the event, however, Ganteaume was diverted into resupplying Corfu’s garrison, and the invasion of Sicily was set aside.24 It was to be September 1810 before the French Army in Calabria felt strong enough to be able to contemplate the venture again. Napoleon himself doubted whether, without naval support and adequate transport vessels, such an amphibious operation was likely to succeed.25 In fact, the 3000 Neapolitan troops who did manage to land on the island proved quite insufficient for its conquest and had to beat a hasty retreat.26 But this abortive attempt again underscored the potential danger posed to Britain’s position in the Mediterranean by the Toulon fleet.27 In the face of this, the retention of Sicily alone imposed an appreciable drain on London’s resources. The island’s governing regime, the fugitive Neapolitan Bourbons, was neither the most dependable of allies nor the most popular of rulers. The British, fearing that internal strife or secret negotiations between the Bourbons and Napoleon constituted as much of a threat to their grip on the island as did the prospect of a French invasion, sought to safeguard Sicily with a large garrison, a naval presence and generous subsidies. Nevertheless, it remained vulnerable to a French coup de main.28
While it was largely counterbalanced through Napoleon’s dramatic conquests by land, the Royal Navy’s dominance of the waves contained, if it did not eliminate, the threat posed by his battlefleets and amphibious forces. The danger of a French landing in Ireland, England or the Mediterranean receded, while the overseas possessions of Napoleon and his vassals were, once cut off from their motherlands, progressively subdued. This latter process was significant not only because of the virtual monopoly it conferred on Britain in the production and distribution of colonial goods, but also because it deprived her enemies of distant havens. Acknowledging their inability to challenge the Royal Navy in fleet-to-fleet confrontations, its opponents steadily resorted to commerce-raiding as a maritime strategy. Although Alfred Thayer Mahan, the nineteenth century’s ‘evangelist of sea power’,29 was to be rather scornful of the impact that this guerre de course had on the course of the Napoleonic conflict,30 it was, as Paul Kennedy has observed, more successful in terms of its effect on British seaborne trade than any since the War of the Spanish Succession.31 With thousands of continental mariners rendered idle by the decline of their own countries’ battle and merchant fleets, the privateers were not short of willing crewmen. Nor were they lacking talented leaders who knew how to prey efficaciously on Britain’s global trade web.32 Although, among other countermeasures, the Royal Navy organized escorted convoys and patrolled its home waters with ‘Q-ships’, armed vessels disguised as innocuous merchantmen, protecting the multitude of potential targets which, at any one time, were plying between Great Britain and her trading partners, especially the more distant ones, was palpably impossible. Ineluctably, substantial numbers of ships were lost to the privateers, marine insurance rates rose commensurately33 and, in conjunction with the Continental System, Napoleon’s guerre de course had a significant effect on international trade, the bedrock of Britain’s prosperity.34 Nevertheless, the Royal Navy managed to limit the damage sufficiently and, by means of blows against commerce-raiders based in such diverse places as San Domingo (1806), Cape Town (1806), Mauritius (1810) and Java (1811), went a long way towards eradicating the threat posed by these licensed pirates.35
We should not forget that, in addition to the dangers arising from enemy action, all mariners faced a formidable common foe, the sea itself. Although he knew from bitter experience how much weather conditions could affect the prosecution of war by land, Napoleon never seems to have fully appreciated the extent to which maritime operations in the days of sail were governed by the elements. (In one notorious incident in 1804, for example, he insisted that a flotilla based at Boulogne put to sea for a review, despite an imminent gale. A number of gunboats were capsized and several hundred men drowned.36) Indeed, the winds and tides could plunge even the best-planned operations into turmoil. An adverse, little or no wind could delay movements, while a tempest might scatter or even destroy a fleet. As ship-to-ship communications were effectively limited to, at most, the range of the human eye, once dispatched, vessels were difficult to recall or redirect if circumstances altered. Thus, protracted voyages were eschewed as far as possible, with the emphasis being placed instead on sudden coups against vulnerable targets not too remote from friendly waters. Similarly, logistical problems tended to circumscribe naval campaigns. Replenishment at sea was as hazardous as it was difficult to arrange, and so ships had to be as self-sufficient as possible and remain within comfortable range of friendly ports. The need for adequate supplies of fresh water was but one constraint among many. Moreover, when, as often happened, warships doubled as transport vessels, logistical difficulties increased correspondingly. Not only might men-of-war be expected to accommodate dozens of infantrymen alongside their crews, but uncomprehending draught and cavalry horses were occasionally squeezed aboard, too. Clearly, given their needs, these poor creatures were far less able to adapt to such an environment than their human masters. To curtail mortality rates, the duration of voyages had to be kept to a minimum. This, as we shall see elsewhere, helped to curb the scope and size of amphibious operations.
Whereas Spain’s navy was never to recover fully after Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805,37 France made a determined effort to rebuild hers. In fact, Napoleon was quite sanguine about the eventual course of the war at sea. In 1811, at the height of his power, with most of Europe’s shipyards at his disposal, he was to predict that:
In four years I shall have a fleet. When my squadrons have been three or four years at sea we shall measure swords with England. I know I may lose three or four naval engagements . . . but we are brave . . . we shall succeed. Before ten years are passed. I shall have conquered England.38
While this might appear to be wishful thinking on Napoleon’s part, it was a possibility which the British Admiralty took very seriously. In a memorandum of February 1813, Lord Melville was to point to the French Empire’s capacity for shipbuilding and the implications this would have for the maritime balance of power, warning that, by January 1816, Napoleon would be able to muster ‘a fleet of 108 Sail of the Line’.39 But, overtaken by events elsewhere, nothing ever came of the emperor’s grand plan; as a result of the débâcle in Russia, for instance, he was compelled to transfer 20000 men from the navy to the army in 1813. In the meantime, his maritime ambitions were effectively frustrated by the repercussions of Britain’s blockade. However much the quality of their vessels and dockyards improved, French commanders could not endow their ships’ crews with the degree of professionalism, discipline and proficiency which was found in the Royal Navy. Deprived of essential experience at sea, Napoleon’s fleet would never acquire the dexterity necessary to confront that of the British en masse. Indeed, after Trafalgar, Britannia’s maritime supremacy was to go unchallenged not only for the rest of the conflict with Napoleon but also for 100 years thereafter.
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Notes
1. Quoted in P. M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London, 1983 edition), p. 128.
2. C.D. Hall, British Strategy in the Napoleonic War 1803–15 (Manchester, 1992), p. 29.
3. Hall, British Strategy, p. I.
4. See O. von Pivka, Navies of the Napoleonic Era (London, 1980), pp. 49–51.
5. Hall, British Strategy, p. 47; Pivka, Navies, pp. 239–45.
6. See B.R. Mitchell and P. Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1967 edition), pp. 288–96; P.K. Crimmin, ‘Admiralty Relations with the Treasury’, Mariner’s Mirror, 53 (1967).
7. See R. Morriss, The Royal Dockyards during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Leicester, 1983), pp. 18–25, 44.
8. See A.N. Ryan, ‘The Defence of British Trade with the Baltic, 1808–13’. English Historical Review, 74 (1959).
9. Kennedy, Rise and Fall, p. 131.
10. See P.L.C. Webb, ‘Construction, Repair and Maintenance in the Battlefleet of the Royal Navy, 1793–1815’, in J. Black and P. Woodfine (eds). The British Navy and the Use of Naval Power in the Eighteenth Century (Leicester, 1988); R.G. Albion, Forests and Sea Power (Cambridge, MA., 1926).
11. R.A. Morriss, ‘Labour Relations in the Royal Dockyards, 1801–5’, Mariner’s Mirror, 62/4 (1976).
12. Hall, British Strategy, pp. 30–1.
13. See P. Kemp, The British Sailor: A Social History of the Lower Deck (London, 1970); M. Lewis, A Social History of the Navy, 1793–1815 (London, 1960); C. Lloyd, The British Seaman 1200–1860: A Social Survey (London, 1968).
14. Hall, British Strategy, p. II.
15. See, for instance, J.F. Zimmerman, The Impressment of American Seamen (New York, 1925).
16. Quoted in Hall, British Strategy, pp. 11–12.
17. Hall, British Strategy pp. 11–12.
18. See C. Lloyd and J.L.S. Coulter, Medicine and the Navy (1714–1815), vol. III (Edinburgh and London, 1961); C. Lloyd (ed.), The Health of Seamen (London, 1965); E.H. Turner, ‘The Naval Medical Service, 1793–1815’, Mariner’s Mirror, 46 (1960); P.D.G. Pugh. Nelson and his Surgeons (Edinburgh and London, 1968).
19. C. Lloyd. The Nile Campaign: Nelson and Napoleon in Egypt (New York, 1973).
20. See D. Pope, The Great Gamble: Nelson at Copenhagen (London and New York, 1972).
21. See F.L. Petre, Napoleon and the Archduke Charles (London, 1976 edition), p. 65. For details of the British equivalent, see T. Holmes, The Semaphore: The Story of the Admiralty to Portsmouth Shutter Telegraph and Semaphore Lines, 1797–1847 (Ilfracombe, 1983).
22. See R.V.P. Castex, Les Idées Militaires de la Marine du XVIII Siècle (Paris, 1911).
23. See G. Lacour-Gayet, ‘La Traversée de la Mediterranée en 1798’, Revue des Études Napoléoniennes, 12 (1923).
24. See P. Mackesy, ‘Collingwood and Ganteaume: The French Offensive in the Mediterranean, January to April 1808’, Mariner’s Mirror, 41 (1955).
