Coastal Defences of the British Empire in the Revolutionary & Napoleonic Eras

Daniel S. MacCannell

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526753458
• eBook ISBN: 9781526753465
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

Far more than an architecture book, Coastal Defences of the British Empire, 1775–1815 is a sweeping reinterpretation of the Martello towers, Grand Redoubts, Royal Military Canal and other new defence infrastructure of the Napoleonic War. Lavishly illustrated with period maps, views, portraits, cartoons and newly commissioned color photographs, it includes not only these structures' forerunners, and plans that were never executed, but also the grand strategy that informed them. At its best, this saw Britain's position as a vast land battle, with the deadly threat of the French-held Antwerp navy yards on its own 'left wing', and Lisbon as the enemy's 'weak left' to be 'turned'. The book also takes in the astonishingly inventive, bold and bloody small-boat wars that raged from the Baltic and Channel coast to Chesapeake Bay and Lake Ontario, and provides vivid pen-sketches of the now-obscure and sometimes deeply flawed strategic visionaries, engineers, inventors, and fighting men who held the line as – even after Trafalgar – the forces of an ever more powerful French empire circled like sharks. Along the way, it traces a fundamental change in the nature of war and society: from a ponderous game of fortresses and colonies played by rulers, to murderous 'foot by foot' defence of the whole territory of the nation by 'both sexes and every social type'.

1

DEFENCE AGAINST WHAT?

The outbreak of war between Britain and thirteen of her American colonies in April 1775 created, among other things, a formidable pool of new enemy privateers who, up to that moment, would have counted as British in any war against another maritime power. Some 36,000 American colonists had served aboard these fast, state-licensed but de facto pirate vessels during the War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740s, during which the British side had captured 3,434 merchant ships, or some 200 more than it had lost in the same fashion to the chiefly French and Spanish enemy. Of the British tally, one-fourth of all captures, worth £7.5 million (£15.7 billion at today’s prices), had been taken by Americans.1

Many eighteenth-century privateers boasted top speeds of 12 knots, comparable to that of the fastest ship in the Royal Navy (the forty-gun fifth-rate HMS Endymion) and considerably faster than second-rate ships of the line mounting ninety to ninety-eight guns. This loose modern interpretation of a 1799 Bermuda-built Royal Navy ‘advice boat’ for rapid ship-to-shore communication gives a sense of the size, sharply raked mast(s), and extraordinarily long bowsprit of a typical Bermudian or Virginian privateer.

As compared to their western Atlantic counterparts, French privateers could be very large indeed. The thirty-two-gun fifth-rate HMS Arethusa, which carried a crew of 270, began life in Le Havre as a purpose-built privateer called the Pèlerine.

Individual rebelled colonies were quick off the mark, licensing as many as 1,151 privateer voyages on their own authority, but it took the Continental Congress nearly a year to launch its privateer war. In the spring of 1776, it enacted that American skippers

may, by Force of Arms, attack, subdue, and take all Ships and other Vessels belonging to the Inhabitants of Great Britain, on the high seas, or between high-water and low-water Marks, except Ships and Vessels bringing Persons who intend to settle and reside in the United Colonies, or bringing Arms, Ammunition or Warlike Stores to the said Colonies, for the Use of such Inhabitants thereof as are Friends to the American Cause[.]2

Privateers’ activity, the naval equivalent of commission-only sales work, was funded almost entirely by the sale of captured ships and goods, sometimes supplemented by ransom payments. ‘[E]mbedded in a broader political economy of violence which needed and actively promoted “private” violence in a broader pursuit of power’,3 privateering was so efficient economically that, by its existence, it may actually have increased the frequency with which wars were fought.4 And as well as the gratification of seeing their enemies’ seaborne communications cut and economies damaged, the licensing government received a cut of each prize-ship and prize-cargo sold, via taxation of between 10 and 40 per cent.5 After 1693, English privateers were even able to claim half the value of English ships as prize money, provided that such vessels had first been captured and held by the enemy for at least four days.6 More than 50,000 Americans would take up privateering on one side or the other in the War of Independence, which would last well into the 1780s, and rebel privateering vessels of warship-like sizes outnumbered those of George Washington’s official navy by at least 4:1.7

Crucially, because privateers of all nations roamed as far and wide as the merchant fleets they preyed on, their attacks were not limited to active war zones. They also often occurred within sight of shore – as the Continental Congress’s reference to ‘high-water and low-water Marks’ implied; and when the opportunity arose, they could develop into amphibious hit-and-run attacks on British colonial and even British mainland towns. In part, it was this extreme geographic range, with its inbuilt element of surprise, that made privateer-licensing such an ‘effective means of waging war’, analogous to the submarine warfare of the early twentieth century, and a ‘militarily efficient means of projecting national power [… that] reduced the demand for a standing national navy’.8

In the colonies that remained loyal to Britain in and after 1775, privateer raids on settlements began immediately. There was a spectacular one at Fort Frederick (on the site of Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada) in August of that year, leading to the burning of the fort and the capture of a British supply ship, three soldiers, three civilian adults, and five children. A hundred tons of livestock destined for the British garrison of Boston, 400 miles to the southwest, were also taken. In the same month, the Philadelphian ship Lady Catherine deprived Bermuda, then undefended, of around 90 per cent of its stock of gunpowder.9 The next year, an American privateer even managed to capture a troop transport carrying half a battalion of Fraser’s Highlanders.10 Moreover, such attacks continued even after the war had effectively come to an end. Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia was temporarily seized in August 1781 by the crews of two Yankee privateer schooners, who ‘proceeded to plunder every house, store and shop of what goods, provisions, furniture, plate, bedding, cloathing, &c., were to be found […] taking even their wearing apparel, so as not to leave them a second shirt, and the buckles out of the ladies’ shoes’.11 Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, was similarly invaded by the crews of four American privateers in July 1782, more than eight months after the Yorktown campaign had effectively ended British hopes of victory in the Western Hemisphere.

Within sight of Britain itself, privateer actions were commonplace after 1778, not least because the rebels’ roughly 2,700 letters of marque included ones ‘issued by Benjamin Franklin in Paris to mostly Irishmen who plied the waters around the British Isles’.12 Three of these ships licensed by Franklin took 114 prizes during a fifteen-month period in 1779–80.13 But even regular forces were well known to indulge in privateer-like escapades by both land and sea. In September 1778, for instance, an amphibious force under British Maj.-Gen. Charles Grey took more than 10,000 sheep, cattle, and pigs and £950 in cash from the civilian population of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, which was undefended at the time.14

Dunkirk was the traditional nerve centre of enemy privateering efforts, but French corsair captains also had full access to Norwegian ports including Bergen, Egersund, and Stavanger, among other places around Europe, at this time. Nor were privateers alone in mounting coastal raids on the British Isles, of various intensities. In April 1778, the northwest English port of Whitehaven was raided by a landing party of US Navy sailors and marines, its fort captured and its shore battery of long-range 32-pounder guns ‘spiked’ to render them inoperable before an attempt was made to burn all 200 or so ships at anchor there.15 This could easily have resulted in mass civilian casualties, given that most of these vessels – and the warehouses close beside them – were loaded with a smorgasbord of inflammables: ‘coal for Dublin […] rum, sugar and tobacco’.16 Thankfully, one of the raiders named David Freeman, a secret loyalist to Britain or perhaps just a humanitarian, alerted the local fire brigade and populace in time. The town and most of its merchant fleet were saved, and at least one of the spiked cannon was apparently returned to working order before the disappointed Americans had even fled the harbour.17 Nevertheless, the incident sent ‘shock waves’ across the British Isles, ‘completely out of proportion with the mere few hundred pounds’ worth of damage actually caused [… and] awakened everyone to the threat of invasion’,18 France and the rebels having concluded a commercial and defensive alliance two months earlier. Anyone seeking to understand the coastal defence of British territory in the Georgian era should bear in mind that privateer and ‘privateer-like’ raids,19 rather than invasions in strength, had long been seen as the primary threat, at least in the sense that their occurrence was inevitable rather than merely possible.

Canadian hooked rug depicting the burning of the blockhouse at Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, by the Americans in July 1782, the last major privateer attack of the War of Independence.

Early in King George III’s reign, the relative informality of the privateering profession was matched by that of British arrangements to defend against it. The ‘principle that local defence should be financed by local efforts’ was so strong that, when Sunderland failed to raise sufficient funds for gunpowder, the government reclaimed the guns and shot it had provided to the town in 1778.20 An eight-gun battery was erected in Banff on the northern coast of Scotland because the Massachusetts privateer Tartar had taken two British prizes within sight of the town; yet, despite being made mostly of turf, this fortification was completed only four years after the fact. The Meikle Battery in the major fishing port of Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, was remembered in the 1850s as having contained seven brass cannon recovered from a wrecked ship of the 1588 Spanish Armada,21 though it seems unlikely that such weapons would have been retained when the battery was comprehensively rebuilt in 1780 ‘in response to the threat of privateer raids during the American War of Independence […] in the form of a half moon surrounded by a palisade, with a guard house’.22 Irrespective of their age and whether they had been recovered from the sea, however, Scottish seaports’ shore-defence weapons were served almost exclusively by civilians, albeit ‘sometimes directed by retired sailors’.23 And as in Scotland, so in the south of England, where numerous shore batteries ‘were demanded, paid for, and manned, by the townships concerned’, with only the guns, projectiles, and requisite loading equipment such as sponges and rammers being supplied by the government’s powerful and notoriously stingy Board of Ordnance.24 Not for nothing did the second half of Lt John Ardesoif RN’s popular Introduction to Marine Fortifications and Gunnery (1772) aim to explain ‘Ev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Defence against what?
• 2 The role of forts in coastal defence to 1783
• 3 ‘Making provision […] against a future war’, 1784–93
• 4 Theory and practice of amphibious operations in the eighteenth century
• 5 Powder and shot
• 6 From Mortella to Minorca, 1794–98
• 7 Low treason
• 8 Invasion and counter-invasion craft of the 1790s
• 9 ‘My troops and my other armed subjects’
• 10 Fathers of the Martello
• 11 ‘An all-encompassing attack’
• 12 Signed, sealed and delivered: The south coast towers
• 13 Peak danger
• 14 Endgame
• Notes
• Image Credits