The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire 1793-1812, Vol II

The nearness of the prey, the character of the seas, and the ease of making shelter either on the French or English shore in case of bad weather, modified very greatly the necessity for size and perfect sea-worthiness in the vessels thus used; and also, from the shortness of the run necessary to reach the cruising ground, each one placed on this line of coast was easily equal to ten starting for the same object from a more remote base of operations. Privateers sailing at sundown with a fair wind from St. Malo, or Dieppe, or Dunkirk to cruise in the Channel, would reach their cruising ground before morning of the long winter nights of that latitude. The length of stay would be determined by their good fortune in making prizes, if unmolested by a British cruiser. They ventured over close to the English side; they were seen at times from the shore seizing their prizes. 251 At Dover, in the latter part of 1810, "signals were out almost every day, on account of enemy's privateers appearing in sight." 252 Innocent-looking fishing-boats, showing only their half-dozen men busy at their work, lay at anchor upon, or within, the lines joining headland to headland of the enemy's coast, watching the character and appearance of passing vessels. When night or other favorable opportunity offered, they pulled quickly alongside the unsuspecting merchantman, which, under-manned and unwatchful, from the scarcity of seamen, was often first awakened to the danger by a volley of musketry, followed by the clambering of the enemy to the decks. The crews, few in number, poor in quality, and not paid for fighting, offered usually but slight resistance to the overpowering assault. Boarding was the corsair's game, because he carried many men.

It seems extraordinary that even the comparative impunity enjoyed by the privateers—for that it was only comparative is shown by the fact that an average of fifty were yearly captured—should have been attained in the face of the immense navy of Great Britain, and the large number of cruisers assigned to the protection of the coasts and the Channel. There were, however, many reasons for it. The privateering spirit is essentially that of the gambler and the lottery, and at no time was that spirit more widely diffused in France than in the period before us. The odds are not only great, but they are not easy to calculate. The element of chance enters very unduly, and when, as in the present case, the gain may be very great, while the immediate risk to the owner, who does not accompany his ship, is comparatively small, the disposition to push venture after venture becomes irresistible. The seaman, who risks his liberty, is readily tempted by high wages and the same hope of sudden profits that moves the owner; and this was more especially true at a time when the laying up of the fleets, and the disappearance of the merchant shipping, threw seafaring men wholly upon the coasting trade or privateering. The number of ships and men so engaged is thus accounted for; but among them and among the owners there was a certain proportion who pursued the occupation with a thoughtfulness and method which would distinguish a more regular business, and which, while diminishing the risk of this, very much increased the returns. Vessels were selected, or built, with special reference to speed and handiness; captains were chosen in whom seamanlike qualities were joined to particular knowledge of the British coast and the routes of British trade; the conditions of wind and weather were studied; the long winter nights were preferred because of the cover they afforded; they knew and reckoned upon the habits of the enemy's ships-of-war; account was kept of the times of sailing and arrival of the large convoys. 253 On the British side, a considerable deduction must be made from the efficiency indicated by the mere number of the coast cruisers. Many of them were poor sailers, quite unable to overtake the better and more dangerous class of privateers. The inducements to exertion were not great; for the privateer meant little money at best, and the abuses that gathered round the proceedings of the Admiralty Courts often swallowed up that little in costs. The command of the small vessels thus employed fell largely into the hands of men who had dropped hopelessly out of the race of life, while their more fortunate competitors were scattered on distant seas, and in better ships. To such, the slight chance of a bootless prize was but a poor inducement to exposure and activity, on the blustering nights and in the dangerous spots where the nimble privateer, looking for rich plunder, was wont to be found. It was worth more money to recapture a British merchantman than to take a French cruiser.

Privateering from the Atlantic, or Biscay, coast of France was necessarily carried on in vessels of a very different class from those which frequented the Channel. There was no inducement for the merchant ships of Great Britain to pass within the line from Ushant to Cape Finisterre; while, on the other hand, her ships-of-war abounded there, for the double purpose of watching the French fleets in the ports, and intercepting both the enemy's cruisers and their prizes, as they attempted to enter. For these reasons, privateers leaving Bordeaux, Bayonne, or Nantes, needed to be large and seaworthy, provisioned and equipped for distant voyages and for a long stay at sea. Their greatest danger was met near their home ports, either going or returning; and their hopes were set, not upon the small and often unprofitable coaster, but upon the richly laden trader from the East or West Indies or the Mediterranean. Out, therefore, beyond the line of the enemy's blockade, upon the deep sea and on one of the great commercial highways converging toward the Channel, was their post; there to remain as long as possible, and not lightly to encounter again the perils of the Bay of Biscay. Moreover, being larger and more valuable, the owner had to think upon their defence; they could not, like the cheap Channel gropers, be thrown away in case of any hostile meeting. While they could not cope with the big frigates of the enemy, there were still his smaller cruisers, and the hosts of his privateers, that might be met; and many a stout battle was fought by those French corsairs. One of these, the "Bordelais," taken in 1799, was said then to be the largest of her kind sailing out of France. She had the keel of a 38-gun frigate, carried twenty-four 12-pounder guns, and a crew of two hundred and twenty men. In four years this ship had captured one hundred and sixty prizes, and was said to have cleared to her owners in Bordeaux a million sterling. 254

A third most important and lucrative field for the enterprise of French privateers was found in the West Indies. The islands of Guadaloupe and Martinique served as excellent bases of operations. The latter indeed was for many years in British possession, but the former remained, practically without interruption, in the hands of France until its capture in 1810. During the many years of close alliance, from 1796 to 1808, between France and Spain, the West Indian ports of the latter served not only to maintain her own privateers, but to give a wide extension to the efforts of her more active partner. The geographical and climatic conditions of this region tended also to modify the character both of the cruisers and of their methods. Along with a very large European trade, carried on by ships of an average burden of two hundred and fifty tons, there was also a considerable traffic from island to island by much smaller vessels. This local trade was not only between the possessions of the same nation or of friendly States, but existed also, by means of neutrals or contraband, between those of powers at war; and through these and her system of free ports, together with liberal modifications of her commercial code wherever an advantage could thereby be gained, Great Britain succeeded in drawing into her own currents, in war as well as in peace, the course of much of the export and import of the whole Caribbean Sea and Spanish Main. From these two kinds of trade—combined with the general good weather prevailing, with the contiguity of the islands to each other, and with the numerous ports and inlets scattered throughout their extent—there arose two kinds of privateering enterprise. The one, carried on mainly by large and fast-sailing schooners or brigs, was found generally suitable for undertakings directed against ships bound to or from Europe; while for the other the various islands abounded with small row-boats or other petty craft, each with its group of plunderers, which lay in wait and usually in profound concealment to issue out upon the passing trader. 255 The uncertain character of the wind in some parts of the day particularly favored an attack, by two or three heavily manned rowing boats, upon a vessel large enough to take them all on board bodily, but fettered by calm and with a small crew. On one occasion a United States sloop-of-war, lying thus motionless with her ports closed, was taken for a merchantman and assailed by several of these marauders, who then paid dearly for the mistake into which they had been led by her seemingly unarmed and helpless condition.

The remoteness of this region from Europe covered very great irregularities, both by the privateers and in the courts. This evil became greater in the French and Spanish islands, when, by the progress of the war, the Sea Power of Great Britain more and more broke off correspondence between them and the mother countries; and when Napoleon's aggression drove the Spaniards into revolution and anarchy, the control of Spain, always inert, became merely nominal. These circumstances, coinciding with the presence of a very large neutral shipping, mainly belonging to the United States, whose geographical nearness made her one of the chief sources of supplies to these colonies, caused the privateering of the Latin and mixed races to degenerate rapidly into piracy, towards which that mode of warfare naturally tends. As early as 1805, an American insurance company complained to the Secretary of State that "property plundered by real or pretended French privateers was uniformly taken into the ports of Cuba, and there, with the connivance of the Spanish government, was sold and distributed, without any form of trial, or pretence for legal condemnation."[1] And the United States consul at Santiago de Cuba reported officially that more than a thousand American seamen had been landed in that port, most of them without clothes or any means of support; and that "the scene of robbery, destruction, evasion, perjury, cruelty, and insult, to which the Americans captured by French pirates, and brought into this and adjacent ports, have been subjected, has perhaps not been equalled in a century past." 256 This lawlessness ended, as is generally known, in an actual prevalence of piracy on an extensive scale, about the south side of Cuba and other unfrequented parts of the archipelago, for some years after the war. From the character of the ground and the slow communications of the day, these desperadoes were finally put down only by the systematic and long continued efforts of the various governments concerned.

The Eastern trade of Great Britain was in the hands of the East India Company; and its ships, which carried on the intercourse between India and Europe, were of a size altogether exceptional in those days. At a time when a small ship-of-the-line measured from fourteen to sixteen hundred tons, and the traders between America and Europe averaged under three hundred, a large proportion of the East Indiamen were of twelve hundred tons burden, exceeding considerably the dimensions of a first-class frigate. 257 Being pierced for numerous guns and carrying many men, both crew and passengers, among whom often figured considerable detachments of troops, they presented a very formidable appearance, and were more than once mistaken for ships of war by French cruisers; so much so that in the year 1804 a body of them in the China seas, by their firm bearing and compact order, imposed upon a hostile squadron of respectable size, commanded by an admiral of cautious temper though of proved courage, making him for a brief period the laughing stock of both hemispheres, and bringing down on his head a scathing letter from the emperor. Their armament, however, was actually feeble, especially in the earlier part of the French Revolution. About the year 1801, it was determined to increase it so that the larger ships should carry thirty-eight 18-pounders; 258 but the change seems to have been but imperfectly effected, and upon the occasion in question the ships which thus "bluffed" Admiral Linois were none of them a match for a medium frigate. It is, indeed, manifestly impossible to combine within the same space the stowage of a rich and bulky cargo and the fighting efficiency of a ship of war of the same tonnage. Still, the batteries, though proportionately weak, were too powerful for ordinary privateers to encounter, unless by a fortunate surprise; and, as the French entertained great, if not exaggerated, ideas of the dependence of Great Britain upon her Indian possessions, considerable efforts were made to carry on commerce-destroying in the Eastern seas by squadrons of heavy frigates, re-enforced occasionally by ships-of-the-line. These were the backbone of the guerre de course, but their efforts were supplemented by those of numerous privateers of less size, that preyed upon the coasting trade and the smaller ships, which, from China to the Red Sea, and throughout the Indian Ocean, whether under British or neutral flags, were carrying goods of British origin.

At the outbreak of the war Great Britain was taken unawares in India, as everywhere; and, as the operations in Europe and in the West Indies called for the first care of the government, the Indian seas were practically abandoned to the enemy for over a year. After the fall of Pondicherry, in September, 1793, Admiral Cornwallis returned to Europe with all his small squadron, leaving but a single sloop-of-war to protect the vast expanse of ocean covered by the commerce of the East India Company. 259 Not till the month of October, 1794, did his successor reach the station. Under these circumstances the losses were inevitably severe, and would have been yet more heavy had not the company itself fitted out several ships to cruise for the protection of trade. 260 An animated warfare, directed solely toward the destruction and protection of commerce, now ensued for several years, and was marked by some exceedingly desperate and well-contested frigate actions; as well as by many brilliant exploits of French privateersmen, among whom the name of Robert Surcouf has attained a lasting celebrity. Depending at first upon the islands of France and Bourbon as their base of operations, the distance of these from the peninsula of Hindoostan, combined with the size of the East India ships, compelled the employment of relatively large vessels, able to keep the sea for long periods and to carry crews which would admit of many detachments to man prizes without unduly weakening the fighting capacity. When, in 1795, the conquest of Holland and flight of the Orange government turned the Dutch from enemies into allies of France, their colonies and ports became accessories of great importance to the cruisers, owing to their nearness to the scene of action and especially to the great trade route between China and Europe. On the other hand the British, long debarred from rewards for their efforts, other than recaptures of their own merchant ships, now found the whole of the Dutch trade thrown open to them, and the returns bear witness both to its numbers and to their activity.

Notwithstanding, however, the unprotected state of British commerce in the early years of the war, and the distinguished activity of the French cruisers, the insurance premiums at no time rose to the sums demanded in 1782, when a concentrated effort to control the sea by a fleet, under Admiral Suffren, was made by France. 261 At that time the premiums were fifteen per cent; between 1798 and 1805 they fluctuated between eight and twelve per cent. In 1805 the chief command in the Indian seas was given to Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Pellew, afterwards Lord Exmouth, and by his skilful arrangements such security was afforded to the trade from Bombay to China, one of the most exposed parts of the Eastern commercial routes, that the premium fell to eight per cent, with a return of three per cent, if sailing with convoy. Under this systematic care the losses by capture amounted to but one per cent on the property insured, being less than those by the dangers of the sea. 262 But during the very period that these happy results were obtained by wisely applying the principle of concentration of effort to the protection of commerce, disaster was overtaking the trade of Calcutta; which lost nineteen vessels in two months through the neglect of its merchants to accept the convoys of the admiral. 263 In fact, as the small proportionate loss inflicted by scattered cruisers appears to indicate the inconclusiveness of that mode of warfare, so the result of the convoy system, in this and other instances, warrants the inference that, when properly systematized and applied, it will have more success as a defensive measure than hunting for individual marauders,—a process which, even when most thoroughly planned, still resembles looking for a needle in a haystack.

Soon after this time the British government reverted most properly to the policy of Pitt, by directing expeditions against the enemies' colonies, the foreign bases of their Sea Power, and, in the absence of great fleets, the only possible support upon which commerce-destroying can depend; with whose fall it must also fall. The islands of Bourbon and of France capitulated in 1810, the same year that saw the surrender of Guadaloupe, the last survivor of the French West India Islands. This was followed in 1811 by the reduction of the Dutch colony of Java. Thus "an end was put to the predatory warfare which had been successfully carried on against the British trade in India for a number of years." 264

While the scattered cruisers of France were thus worrying, by a petty and inconclusive warfare, the commerce of Great Britain and its neutral carriers, the great British fleets, being left in quiet possession of the seas by the avowed purpose of the Directory to limit its efforts to the guerre de course, swept from the ocean every merchant ship wearing a hostile flag, and imposed upon the neutral trade with France the extreme limitations of maritime international law, as held by the British courts. Toward the end of the war, indeed, those principles were given an extension, which the government itself admitted was beyond anything before claimed as reconcilable with recognized law. The precise amount of the injury done, the exact number of the vessels detained, sent in, and finally condemned, in all parts of the world will perhaps never be known; it is certainly not within the power of the present writer to determine them. The frequent, though not complete, returns of British admirals give some idea of the prevailing activity, which will also appear from the occasional details that must be cited in the latter part of this chapter. Into the single port of Plymouth, in the eight years and a half ending September 29, 1801, there were sent 948 vessels of all nations; 265 of which 447 were enemy's property, 156 recaptured British, and the remainder neutrals, belonging mostly to America, Denmark, and Sweden, the three chief neutral maritime states. From Jamaica, the British commander-in-chief reports that, between March 1 and August 3, 1800,—that is, in five months,—203 vessels have been captured, detained, or destroyed.[1] This was in but one part of the West Indian Seas. The admiral at the Leeward Islands reports that in two months of the same year 62 vessels had been sent in.[1] In five months, ending September 3, 1800, Lord Keith reports from the Mediterranean 180 captures. 266 How far these instances may be accepted as a fair example of the usual results of British cruising, it is impossible to say; but it may be remarked that they all occur at a period when the war had been raging for seven years, and that captures are more numerous at the beginning than at the latter end of long hostilities. In war, as in all states of life, people learn to accommodate themselves to their conditions, to minimize risks; and even prize lists become subject to the uniformity of results observed in other statistics.

Whatever the particulars of French losses, however, they are all summed up in the unprecedented admission of the Directory, in 1799, that "not a single merchant ship is on the sea carrying the French flag." This was by no means a figure of speech, to express forcibly an extreme depression. It was the statement of a literal fact. "The former sources of our prosperity," wrote M. Arnould, Chef du Bureau du Commerce, as early as 1797, "are either lost or dried up. Our agricultural, manufacturing, and industrial power is almost extinct." And again he says, "The total number of registers issued to French ships from September, 1793, to September, 1796, amounts only to 6028." Of these, 3351 were undecked and of less than thirty tons burden. "The maritime war paralyzes our distant navigation and even diminishes considerably that on our coasts; so that a great number of French ships remain inactive, and perhaps decaying, in our ports. This remark applies principally to ships of over two hundred tons, the number of which, according to the subjoined table, 267 amounts only to 248. Before the revolution the navigation of the seas of Europe and to the French colonies employed more than 2,000 ships."

In the year ending September 20, 1800, according to a report submitted to the consuls, 268 France received directly from Asia, Africa, and America, all together, less than $300,000 worth of goods; while her exports to those three quarters of the world amounted to only $56,000. Whether these small amounts were carried in French or neutral bottoms is immaterial; the annihilation of French shipping is proved by them. The same report shows that the average size of the vessels, which, by hugging closely the coast, avoided British cruisers and maintained the water traffic between France and her neighbors, Holland, Spain, and Italy, was but thirty-six tons. Intercourse by water is always easier and, for a great bulk, quicker than by land; but in those days of wagon carriage and often poor roads it was especially so. In certain districts of France great distress for food was frequently felt in those wars, although grain abounded in other parts; because the surplus could not be distributed rapidly by land, nor freely by water. For the latter conveyance it was necessary to depend upon very small vessels, unfit for distant voyages, but which could take refuge from pursuers in the smallest port, or be readily beached; and which, if captured, would not singly be a serious loss.

Towards the end of 1795, a contemporary British authority states that over three thousand British ships had been captured, and about eight hundred French. 269 This was, however, confessedly only an estimate, and probably, so far as concerns the British losses, a large exaggeration. Ten years later a member of the House of Commons, speaking with a view rather to disparage the earlier administration, gave the British losses for the same years as 1,395. 270 Lloyd's lists give the whole number of British captured, for the years 1793-1800, both inclusive, as 4,344, of which 705 were recaptured; leaving a total loss of 3,639. 271 Assuming, what is only for this purpose admissible, that the average loss each year was nearly the same, these figures would give for the three years, 1793-1795, 1,365 as the number of captures made by hostile cruisers. In the tables appended to Norman's "Corsairs of France" the losses for the same period are given as 1,636. 272

Finally, the number of prizes brought into French ports up to September 16, 1798, was stated by M. Arnould, in the Conseil des Anciens, as being 2,658. The table from which his figures were taken he called "an authentic list, just printed, drawn up in the office of the French Ministry of Marine, of all prizes made since the outbreak of the war." 273 It included vessels of all nationalities, during a period when France had not only been at war with several states, but had made large seizures of neutral vessels upon various pretexts. Of the entire number M. Arnould considered that not more than 2,000 were British. If we accept his estimate, only 900 British ships would have been taken in three years. It is to be observed, however, as tending to reconcile the discrepancy between this and the English accounts, that the tables used by him probably did not give, or at most gave very imperfectly, the French captures made in the East and West Indies; and, furthermore, the aggregate British losses, as given by Lloyd's lists, and by Norman's tables, include captures made by the Dutch and Spaniards as well as by the French. 274