Naval Warfare, 1815-1914

Lawrence Sondhaus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781134609949
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book looks at the transition of wooden sailing fleets to the modern steel navy. It details the technological breakthroughs that brought about this change - steampower, armour, artillery and torpedoes, and looks at their affect on naval strategy and tactics.
Part of the ever-growing and prestigious Warfare and History series, this book is a must for enthusiasts of military history.

CHAPTER ONE

The twilight of sail, 1815–30

Contrary to popular belief, Napoleon Bonaparte’s naval challenge to Britain did not end with Lord Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). Indeed, during the last decade of the Napoleonic Wars, an ambitious French shipbuilding program drove the British to construct unprecedented numbers of ships of the line and frigates in order to maintain a safe margin of superiority. When the fighting ended in 1815, the British and French navies had many more warships than they needed for peacetime, but many had been hastily constructed from unseasoned timbers and would have short service lives. Both countries also had a backlog of warships on the stocks, many of which would remain there for years until being finished or scrapped. Because Napoleon had attempted to mobilize the resources of the shipyards in his satellite kingdoms, beyond Britain and France the maritime countries of postwar Europe inherited a variety of warship projects, built and building, in yards from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the United States – the only naval power beyond Europe – after 1815 proceeded with a naval program begun during the War of 1812 against Britain.

By the time of Trafalgar some of Nelson’s ships of the line (Victory included) had seen forty years of service, reflecting the relative lack of innovation in battleship building during the preceding decades. Throughout the years 1815–30 the wooden sailing ship still ruled the waves, and the wooden ship of the line underwent improvements which prompted the leading navies to consider the traditional third-rate vessel of 74 guns no longer fit for the line of battle. At the same time, most navies acquired their first steamships, and some visionaries prophesied a day in which the capital ships of a fleet would move by steam. The development of the first shell guns likewise led some to question the future viability of wooden ships in close action or against coastal fortifications.

The sailing fleets after 1815

Assessing the numerical strength of any sailing fleet after 1815 is problematic, as different sources provide a variety of figures for each ship type. Even in Britain the navy list included a number of ships so old or in such disrepair that they could not have put to sea under any circumstances. Further confusion arises when the researcher attempts to evaluate the condition of ships ostensibly on the active list, to include or exclude ships in reserve (“in ordinary”) or still on the stocks, or the receiving ships and other vessels disarmed for auxiliary duties. By the most generous estimate, in 1815 the British navy had 218 ships of the line, 309 frigates, and 261 sloops or brigs, but at least one recent source gives figures barely half as high. In 1830, when Britain had 106 ships of the line, only seventy-one were considered “in good order” and fit for service.¹

In the immediate postwar years the British foreign secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, called for the British navy to remain superior to the combined force of the next two naval powers, France and Russia. In addition to the need for vigilance against a possible Franco-Russian alliance, in the dawning era of the Pax Britannica the navy needed forces sufficient to police the world’s oceans in support of the moral and legal positions Britain had taken and was persuading others to take. These included stopping the slave trade, which the British parliament in 1807 had abolished throughout the empire, and keeping commercial sea lanes safe against piracy, which had flourished, especially in Mediterranean waters, during the Napoleonic Wars. Yet the official peacetime standard of the British navy after 1815 did not take into account the strength of any other fleet or the forces needed to pursue any particular policy. It was the same as that of 1792, the last prewar year: 100 ships of the line and 160 frigates. At least on paper, Britain had a navy twice as large as it needed for peacetime service. Hundreds of officers and thousands of seamen were furloughed, while the rapid deterioration of ships hastily built during the war years forced the fleet to shrink dramatically, at a time when relatively few new ships were being launched. By 1820 Britain had 146 ships of the line and 164 frigates. A decade later the force had dwindled to 106 ships of the line and 144 frigates; the latter figure fell significantly below the peacetime standard, despite the fact that some third-rate (74-gun) ships of the line had been cut down and converted to fourth-rate (50-gun) “razee” frigates.²

Between 1815 and 1849, the British navy launched a total of fifty-eight new ships of the line. Eleven were launched in 1815 and 1816 alone; these, and another ten completed by 1828, were under construction when the Napoleonic Wars ended. In the postwar era the 120-gun three-decker and the 84-gun two-decker were the most popular designs. The 74 came to be considered unfit for the line of battle, and Britain launched its last vessel of the type, the Carnatic, in 1832. The postwar construction program, under covered slips and using seasoned, salt-treated lumber, produced ships that lasted a half-century or more without significant dry rot. Years of accelerated wartime construction left British navy timber stocks seriously depleted by 1815, but contrary to a long-accepted myth there remained plenty of oak forests in the British Isles. The needs of civilian shipbuilders and other domestic consumers forced up the price of British oak, however, making foreign timber less expensive for the navy. British shipyards imported Italian oak as well as Indian and African teak, and the East India Company continued its earlier practice of building teak warships for the navy in Indian shipyards. After the Napoleonic era, Indian construction projects included seven ships of the line completed at Bombay and one at Calcutta. The last of the Bombay ships was the 80-gun Meeanee, launched in November 1848 as the last British sailing ship of the line.³

The British navy’s declining numbers of larger warships more than sufficed to keep it ahead of potential rivals. France acknowledged that it had no hopeof mounting a battle fleet challenge against Britain and made no effort to do so. In 1815 France had sixty-nine ships of the line, and, by 1830, just fifty-three. As early as 1819 only thirty-one were considered fit for duty. In case of war the French planned to rely on a commerce raiding guerre de course and challenge the British worldwide with frigates. During the years 1815–30 a program of frigate construction raised the total of that type from thirty-eight to sixty-seven, still barely half the British total. King Louis XVIII attempted to place royalists in charge of the postwar navy, but Napoleonic veterans quickly regained control. An investigation of the stranding of the frigate Méduse on the coast of West Africa in 1816 exposed the incompetence of its captain–a former royalist exile who had not been to sea in a generation–and prompted the dismissal of hundreds like him whose commissions had been recently restored.⁴

Russia emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as the dominant Baltic naval power, with the third-largest battle fleet overall. The Russian navy did not follow the British and French pattern of growing in size after 1800, then declining dramatically after 1815. Instead, the Russian fleet peaked at the turn of the century, at over eighty ships of the line and forty frigates – figures second only to the British – then declined by the end of the war to an active strength of no less than forty-eight ships of the line and twenty-one frigates, a level of strength maintained into the postwar years. In 1830 the Russians had at least forty-seven ships of the line and twenty-six frigates, with roughly two-thirds of each type stationed in the Baltic and the remaining third in the Black Sea.⁵ In contrast to the French, the Russians did not embrace the guerre de course as a strategy in the event of war with Britain. As early as the 1830s, almost a half-century before summer maneuvers became customary for all navies, the Russians mobilized unusually large fleets every summer in both the Baltic and the Black Sea. It was almost as if the navy wished to use its ships before they deteriorated, which happened fast enough to hulls built primarily of fir. Ships of the line and frigates built of fir typically lasted only eight to ten years, although the Russian navy often sought in vain to keep vessels seaworthy long beyond that.⁶

The War of 1812 against Britain instilled a great sense of confidence in the United States and its navy. Victories of the Constitution and other formidable American frigates in ship-to-ship actions against smaller British frigates stirred patriotism and created a new generation of heroes, overshadowing the fact that between 1812 and 1815 the British navy had all but destroyed US overseas trade, attacked or blockaded every important American seaport, landed a force which burned the newly constructed capital city, Washington, and destroyed roughly half of the US navy, including five frigates.⁷ In 1813 the US Congress authorized the construction of six ships of the line. Five had been laid down by March 1815, when word arrived that the Treaty of Ghent (24 December 1814) had ended the war with Britain. Only one, the Independence, was completed before the war ended; it served from the summer of 1814 to the end of the war as a harbor watch in Boston. In 1816 the Congress authorized nine ships of the line to supplement the five laid down during the War of 1812. Of the total of fourteen begun between 1813 and 1822, seven eventually served as warships, three only as receiving or store ships. The remaining four were never completed.⁸

At least until the mid-1820s, when the French navy revived sufficiently to attract British attention, the Admiralty considered the US navy its principal future rival. But the American ships of the line, unusually heavily armed, were valued primarily as blockade breakers in case of war with a greater naval power and, as such, spent most of their days in reserve at Boston, New York, and Norfolk. Except for a brief hiatus in 1830–33, at least one was in active service at any given time, yet the seven combined spent just forty-seven years in commission. The largest American ship of the line, the three-decker Pennsylvania, was launched in 1837 after sixteen years on the stocks, spent five years in reserve, then became a receiving ship at Norfolk. The first battleship, the Independence, served continuously from 1814 to 1822, then remained in reserve until 1836, when it was cut down to a 56-gun razee frigate. As such it was far more useful to the US navy, which relied on frigates and sloops to cover its foreign stations. The navy ended the War of 1812 with nine frigates, ranging in displacement from the 2,200-ton¹ Constitution (50 guns) to the prizes Macedonian and Cyane, the latter formerly a British sloop of 540 tons, armed with 32 guns in American service. During the next forty-five years twenty sailing frigates served in the fleet, with no more than eleven being on the navy list at any given time. The old Constitution and United States were repaired repeatedly and kept in service, and starting with the Potomac (launched 1822), new frigates were modeled after them, displacing over 1,700 tons and carrying 50 guns.⁹ Although American leaders were loath to admit it, after 1815 British and American interests usually coincided, and the United States had no complaint with the Pax Britannica. Border disputes in Maine and Oregon ultimately were resolved by treaty in the 1840s, far short of war; meanwhile, the shared values and ideals of the two countries were reflected in their deployment of naval forces against the slave trade and piracy, and in their common front against the reimposition of colonial rule in Latin America. A British overture for a joint declaration on the latter question prompted the United States to issue its own unilateral statement, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which reflected both the American government’s agreement with the British position and the political necessity, in the wake of the War of 1812, to maintain the appearance of a foreign policy independent of Britain’s.

At the beginning of 1815 Spain had the world’s fourth-largest battle fleet with twenty-one ships of the line. The newest of these were four French vessels captured by Spanish loyalists at Cadiz in 1808; Spain had not built a ship of the line of its own since 1798, and still counted in its total three that dated from the 1750s. After 1815 the US navy easily surpassed the Spanish, as Spain went more than a half-century without laying down a ship of the line. In 1818–19 Tsar Alexander I sold five ships of the line and six frigates to Spain for use in the effort to reconquer the rebellious states of Latin America, but their rotten fir hulls made them a poor bargain. All of the battleships were stricken within four years, and only one of the frigates, the 50-gun María Isabel, ever made it to the New World. Counting the Russian purchases, Spain had fifteen ships of the line in 1820, but the number dwindled to four by 1830 and just two a decade later. The number of Spanish frigates fell from fifteen in 1815 to five in 1830.¹⁰

The minor northern European naval powers likewise did not attempt to maintain formidable battle fleets after 1815. The Dutch navy of 1815 included nineteen ships of the line, some inherited from Napoleon’s shipbuilding efforts at Antwerp, but fifteen years later just five remained. The Netherlands had a large merchant marine, a global trading presence, and a colonial empire in the East Indies, and thus maintained a respectable fleet of frigates – fourteen in 1815, seventeen in 1830 – for cruising duties. Sweden had thirteen ships of the line and seven frigates in 1815, eight ships of the line and five frigates in 1830. In the immediate postwar years Denmark still suffered the effects of having had its navy twice destroyed by Britain (in 1801 and again in 1807) during the Napoleonic Wars, but by 1830 the Danish navy had been rebuilt to a strength of three ships of the line and seven frigates.¹¹ Both Sweden and Denmark considered Russia their most likely future adversary and developed elaborate coast defense systems, including dozens of small one- and two-gun boats that could be either rowed or sailed, on the model of the oared gunboats used by Denmark against Britain after the destruction of the Danish battle fleet in 1807. After 1815 King Frederick William III and some of Prussia’s leading military men favored the creation of a Prussian navy, but until the early 1840s the country’s largest armed vessel was a lone schooner employed mostly as a training ship for the merchant marine academy at Danzig.¹²

Among the minor Mediterranean naval powers, the Ottoman empire after 1770 had rebuilt its navy along European lines, with the help of foreign...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates
• Preface
• 1 The twilight of sail, 1815-30
• 2 Continuity and change, 1830-50
• 3 The 1850s
• 4 The ironclad revolution
• 5 The 1870s
• 6 The Jeune École
• 7 The rebirth of the battleship
• 8 The dreadnought and the origins of the First World War
• 9 Reflections on deterrence
• Bibliography
• Index