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The Naval Defence of British North America 1739–1763

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

G. S. Graham
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Extract

UNTIL the eighteenth century, British naval operations rarely strayed outside the strictly European theatre. Engagements in North American waters were isolated enterprises, having little connection with the decisive area of battle which lay off the west coast of Europe in the vicinity of the British Isles. This concentration of forces in home waters was deter-mined as much by structural, technical and hygienic deficiencies as by strategic doctrine. Disease and gales were always the worst enemies, and in the manner bf continental armies, the ships of the Royal Navy sought winter quarters in or after November. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, improvements in naval architecture and the technique of navigation, as well as methods of preserving food and protecting health (slight as they may appear to this age), enabled ships to keep at sea for longer periods, and at greater distances from their home ports.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 30 , December 1948 , pp. 95 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1948

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References

page 95 note 1 A ship-of-the-line in the eighteenth century possessed a certain degree of self-sufficiency, since it was sometimes possible to stay at sea for as long as five months. At the same time long trips from home quickly exhausted consumable stores, while ‘three hours of battle or thirty of tempest’ made resort to a dockyard imperative. See Callender, G., The Naval Side of British History, (1924), p. 134Google Scholar.

page 95 note 2 See D'Outre-Seille, F. P. Renaut, ‘L'Evolution du probleme des bases navales‘, La Revue Maritime, cxlvi (1932), p. 172Google Scholar.

page 96 note 1 Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series (ed. Grant, W. L. and Munro, James), ii. 504Google Scholar.

page 96 note 2 Ibid., pp. 514–15.

page 96 note 3 See Admiral SirRichmond, Herbert, The Navy in the War of 1739–48, iii. App. B. 268Google Scholar; and Pares, Richard, War and Trade in the West Indies (Oxford, 1936), pp. 277–82Google Scholar. Before the outbreak of war with France in 1743, the Leeward Islands, like Barbados, had, only stationed ships, but the growing importance of the general area as a potential theatre of operations led in that year to the formation of a Leeward Islands, squadron, based on Antigua. In 1812 the Jamaica and Leeward Islands'; squadrons along with the Halifax squadron were placed under a single commander-in-chief. Yearly dispositions of the stationed squadrons in North American waters are contained in Admiralty In-Letters, Public Record Office, London (subsequently referred, to as Ad. I). Transcripts of these documents are to be. found in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

page 97 note 1 On 1 January 1744/5 Rear-Admiral Peter Warren was appointed Commarider-in-Chief of His Majesty's Ships and Vessels Employed or to be Employed in North America to the Northward of Carolina. His successor, Vice-Admiral Townsend, held a similar command, but during the Seven Years War Commodore Richard Spry's territory also embraced the Bahama Islands (see Ad. 1, vol. 480).

page 97 note 2 Report of Committee of the Privy Council on Newfoundland, 1675 (in Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series, i. 622; see also ‘Memorandum of Captain Phillip Patton to Sir Charles Middleton, 1794’, contained in Letters and Papers of Charles Middleton; Lord Barham, ed. Laughtpn, Sir John Knox (Navy Records Society, xxxviii, 1911), ii. 398Google Scholar.

page 98 note 1 Wolfe, to Germaine, Lord George, 24 05 1758: Historical Manuscripts Commission, Sachvitte MSS., ii. 260Google Scholar.

page 98 note 2 Lord Colville to Philip Stephens (Secretary of the Admiralty), 27 November 1764: Ad. 1, vol. 482, sec. iii.

page 98 note 3 Colville to Clevland Halifax, 10 April 1761: Ad. 1, vol. 482, sec. ii. See also Commodore Chas. Douglas to PhilipStephens, 28 December 1783: Ad. 1, vol. 491.

page 99 note 1 See Boscawen, Vice-Admiral to Commodore Spry, Halifax, 19 10 1755: Ad. 1, vol. 481Google Scholar; and Spry to Clevland, 16 February 1756 and 18 April 1756: Ad. 1, vol. 480.

page 99 note 2 Ibid.; see also Admiral Gambier to Philip Stephens, February 1771, Ad. 1, 483, sec. ii.

page 99 note 3 ‘Proposals for the better Employing His Majesty's Ships Station'd on the Coast of North America, 19 March 1741’; P.R.O., Captains’ Letters, Ad. 1, vol. 2653.

page 100 note 1 “…we are always decreasing’, wrote Commodore Spry from Halifax, ‘and no Possibility of procuring any [men] here unless the station'd Ships bring us some in the Spring’(to John Clevland, Secretary of the Admiralty, 22 November 1755: Ad. 1, vol. 480).

page 100 note 2 Hood to Philip Stephens, 20 December 1767: Ad. 1, vol. 483, sec. i.

page 100 note 3 Same to same, 30 November 1767; ibid.

page 100 note 4 See ‘State and condition of Ships and Vessels under command of Richard Spry Esq., Captain of Fougueux in Halifax Harbour’, 8 December 1755: Ad. 1, vol. 480.

page 100 note 5 Admiral Sir Charles Hardy to Clevland, Halifax, 22 March 1758: Ad. 1, vol. 481; Boscawen to Clevland, Halifax, 10 May 1758: ibid.; and Commodore Spry to Clevland, 28 October 1762: Ad. 1, vol. 480. For a good many years the Halifax squadron consisted of six vessels including one ship-of-the-line.

page 101 note 1 To Governor Fletcher, February, 1697: Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1696–97 (London, 1904), p. 343Google Scholar. As a consequence of merchant agitation, a House of Commons committee of inquiry was responsible for the introduction of a new Convoys and Cruisers bill, which was fortunately rejected in the spring of 1742 by the House of Lords. Had it passed it would have tied the stationed ships closely to local defence and made liberty of action dependent on governors’ consent. See Richmond, , op. cit., iii. 270–1Google Scholar; Pares, , op. cit., p. 304Google Scholar.

page 101 note 2 See Select Naval Documents, ed. Hodges, H. W. and Hughes, E. A. (Cambridge, 1922), p. 139Google Scholar.

page 102 note 1 Pares, , op. cit., p. 284Google Scholar. It has been argued that British squadrons in the Mediterranean offered examples of dispersed imperial power, viz. local squadrons whose primary aim was the defence of the road to India. See Mackinder, H. J., Britain and the British Seas (New York, 1902), p. 349Google Scholar. There was, however, one significant distinction, between Mediterranean detachments and those in the West Indies and on the Atlantic coast. In maintaining in later days British ships based on Malta and Gibraltar, British governments never succumbed to the fallacy that dispersal was the best means of defending trade. Small British units did defend the trade route to India, but the main object was collectively to guard the Channel from the bottleneck at Gibraltar, thus containing within the Mediterranean concentrations of French ships which otherwise might have been assembled in northern waters.

page 103 note 1 See ‘An Act for Constituting Commissioners for Ordering and Managing the Affairs of the Admiralty and Navy’ (31 May 1659) contained in Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, ed. Firth, C. H. and Rait, R. S. (1911), ii. 1282Google Scholar. See also Colomb, P. H., ‘Convoys: are they any longer possible?’ Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, xxxi (1887), p. 300Google Scholar.

page 103 note 2 See W. W. Pole, Secretary of the Admiralty; to Messrs. Inglis, Ellice & Co., Admiralty Office, 2 March 1809; P.R.O., S.T.I., vol. 45; also in this connection, Fayle, C. E., ‘Economic Pressure in the War of 1739–48’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, lxviii (1923), p. 435Google Scholar.

page 103 note 3 This problem, which presented itself during every war, is well illustrated by ‘convoy orders’of 1 August 1689, directed to masters of Newfoundland fishing vessels who left in advance of the convoy or departed from it during the voyage in order to forestall competitors in the markets of south-west Europe. They were told that ‘no seaman of such a vessell, if taken by the Turks, shall be released by virtue of a public treaty or exchanged for Turkish prisoners, and that frigates other than the convoy be not charged with any care of such single ships as may come into their company’ (Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series, ed. Grant, W. L. and Munro, James, ii. 139)Google Scholar.

page 104 note 1 Lacour-Gayet, G., La Marine militaire de, la France sous le rigne it Louis XV, 2nd ed. (1910), p. 381Google Scholar.

page 105 note 1 An acute analysis of this issue is contained in Rosinski, Herbert, ‘Command of the Sea’, Brassey's Naval Annual (1939), p. 89Google Scholar.

page 105 note 2 Although ‘blockade’ has become the common term, used by Mahan, Colomb and other naval historians to describe the kind of task undertaken by Nelson, it is not strictly correct. Technically, blockade means the prevention of ingress or egress, or in the words of an Admiralty declaration of 1756 ‘a detention of the enemy's strength in their ports’.

page 105 note 3 Journal of the Royal United Service Institution (1895), p. 1061.

page 106 note 1 Mahan, A. T., Types of Naval Officers (Boston, 1901), p. 180Google Scholar.

page 107 note 1 See Castex, Admiral R., Theories StraUgiques, iii. (1931), p. 223Google Scholar.

page 107 note 2 Richmond, , Navy in the War of 1739–48, iii. 78Google Scholar.

page 108 note 1 Quoted in Richmond, , National Policy and Naval Strength, p. 346Google Scholar.

page 108 note 2 It is possible to find a precedent as early as 1673, when Charles II stationed cruisers to protect the trade passing through the Channel, and in the latter days of William III and during Anne's reign it was customary to earmark ships to cruise as a Western or Soundings squadron in defence of trade. See Bryant, Arthur, Samuel Pepys, ii. 103Google Scholar, and Owen, John, War at Sta under Queen Anne, 1702–1708 (Cambridge, 1938), pp. 68–9Google Scholar.

page 109 note 1 See The Byng Papers, ed. Tunstall, B. (Navy Records Society, 1930–1933), pp. ii, xviiiGoogle Scholar. On occasion, as in 1759; when the Mediterranean made no drastic calls on British strength, the main fleet became for all intents and purposes the Western Squadron.