THE BATTLE OF THE SAINTS’ PASSAGE

1782

In the days when fleets in action relied upon the oar, all fighting was at close quarters, and, as we have seen in our study of typical battles of this period, naval engagements fought out at close quarters gave very definite results, the fleet that was defeated being practically destroyed.

When battles began to be fought under sail, with the gun as the chief weapon, a new method had to be evolved. The more the fire of broadside batteries was relied upon, the greater was the tendency to fight at short artillery range, without closing to hand-to-hand distance, and when the sailors and sea-fighters of the seventeenth century adopted line ahead as the normal formation for making the most of broadside fire, battles had a marked tendency to degenerate into inconclusive artillery duels.

In both the English and the French navies the two powers that after the naval decline of Spain and Holland disputed the command of the sea the tactics of the battle in line ahead soon crystallized into a pedantic system. For a hundred years the methods of English admirals were kept in rigid uniformity by a code of “Fighting Instructions for the Navy,” drawn up under the direction of the Duke of York (afterwards James II), when he was still Lord High Admiral of England in his brother’s reign. These instructions were a well-meant attempt to provide a “sealed pattern” for naval engagements. They contemplated set, formal battles with both fleets in line ahead, sailing on parallel courses, or passing and repassing each other on opposite tacks, exchanging broadsides as the guns bore. The French adopted similar methods. If the English had any advantage in their tactics, it was in their ideas of gunnery. The French aimed at masts and rigging, in the hope of crippling an adversary in her sail power and forcing her to fall out of the moving line. The English believed in making the hull their target, aiming “between wind and water” to start dangerous leaks, or sending their shot into the crowded gun-decks to put the enemy’s batteries out of action.

Under such methods battles became formal duels, in which, as often as not, there was no great result, and both sides claimed the victory. The story of many of the naval campaigns of the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century is weary reading. It was in the last quarter of the century that English admirals learned to fight again at close quarters, and to strike crushing blows at an enemy. The new period of energetic, decisive fighting began with a famous battle in West Indian waters in 1782, and culminated in the world-renowned victories of Nelson, who was a young captain on the North American station “when Rodney beat the Comte de Grasse” in the battle of the Saints’ Passage.

Born when George I was King, Rodney was a veteran of many wars when he won his West Indian triumph. He had fought the French under Hawke, and was with Boscawen at the taking of Louisburg. In 1759 he bombarded Havre, and burned the transport flotilla collected at the mouth of the Seine for a raid on England. Three years later, as commander-in-chief on the Leeward Islands station, he captured Martinique, St. Lucia, and Grenada, and learned the ways of the West Indian seas. Then came years of political disfavour, half-pay and financial embarrassment, until in an hour of darkness for England, with the American colonies in successful revolt and Frenchman and Spaniard besieging Gibraltar by land and sea, the veteran admiral was recalled to active service, and found and seized the great opportunities of his life. Sailing south with a relieving fleet, he fell in with and captured a Spanish convoy off Finisterre, and then surprised and destroyed Lungara’s Spanish squadron, taking seven ships out of eleven, and chasing the rest into Cadiz. The appearance of his fleet before Gibraltar saved the fortress, and then in February, 1780, he sailed across the Atlantic to try conclusions with De Guichen, whose powerful fleet based on Martinique was threatening all the English possessions in the West Indies. So far numbers and opportunity had been on his side. He had now to depend more on skill than fortune, and meet a more equal opponent.

At his head-quarters at St. Lucia in April, 1780, Rodney heard that the French fleet under De Guichen had sailed from Martinique. On the 17th he fought an indecisive action with the enemy, an action notable for what Rodney attempted, not for what he accomplished. Twice again on later days Rodney met De Guichen, but none of the three battles did more than inflict mutual loss on the combatants, without producing any decisive result. The campaign was, like so many others in the West Indies, a struggle for the temporary possession of this or that port or island, De Guichen’s whole strategy being based on the idea of avoiding the risks of a close engagement that might imperil his fleet, and trying to snatch local advantages when he could elude his enemy.

In 1781 Rodney was compelled by ill-health temporarily to give up the West Indian command and return to England. In the spring of 1782 he was again sent to the West Indies, at a moment when the situation of affairs was most menacing for British power beyond the Atlantic. Cornwallis had been forced to surrender at Yorktown, and the success of the revolted American colonies was now assured. The French fleet in the West Indies had been joined by reinforcements under the Comte de Grasse, who had gone out as commander-in-chief, taking with him a considerable military force that was to combine with an expedition from the Spanish American colonies, not for the capture of some small islands in the Antilles, but for the conquest of Jamaica, the centre of British power and British trade in the West Indian seas.

Kempenfeldt, a good sailor (now remembered chiefly as the admiral who “went down with twice three hundred men,” when the “Royal George” sank at Spithead), dispersed and destroyed at the mouth of the Channel a large French convoy of supplies for De Grasse, and drove the squadron that protected it into Brest. With his task thus lightened, Rodney put to sea with four ships of the line, and after a stormy passage reached Barbadoes on 19 February, 1782. Sailing thence to Antigua, he formed a junction with and took command of the West Indian fleet, which Hood had commanded during his absence in England. From Antigua he took the fleet to St. Lucia, where he established his head-quarters in Gros Islet Bay. St. Lucia was the favourite base of operations of our West Indian fleets in the old wars, and the scene of much desperate fighting by land and sea. The year before De Grasse had failed in an attempt to seize it.

The fleet of the Comte de Grasse was only some forty miles away to the northward. It lay at Martinique, in the bay of Fort Royal (now Fort de France). Though it has nothing to do with the fortunes of Rodney and De Grasse, it is interesting to note that in a convent school looking out on the bay there was just then a little schoolgirl named Josephine de la Pagerie, daughter of an artillery lieutenant in the garrison, who was to live to be Empress of the French, when France was the mistress of Europe.

During the month of March both fleets were busy preparing for sea. Rodney was reinforced from England, and a small squadron from Brest joined De Grasse. The reinforcements received during March had given Rodney the advantage of numbers. He had thirty-six sail of the line to oppose the thirty that were with De Grasse at Martinique. In the English fleet there were five great three-deckers, three of them carrying 98 and two of them 90 guns. There were twenty-one 74’s, a 70-gun ship, and nine 64’s. In the French fleet there was one of the largest war vessels then afloat, De Grasse’s flagship, the “Ville de Paris,” of 104 guns. There were five ships of 80 guns, twenty of 74, one of 70, and three of 64. This enumeration gives Rodney an advantage of six ships and more than two hundred guns. It is quite true that the ships of the same rating in the French service were generally larger than the English, but even apart from numbers, the latter had advantages in armament that were more important than any trifling difference in size. The English guns were mostly mounted on an improved system that gave a larger arc of training fore and aft, the practical result being that as ships passed each other the Frenchman was kept longer under fire than the Englishman. Further, the English ships mounted, besides the guns counted in their armament, a number of carronades, mounted on the upper decks, short guns of large calibre, throwing a heavy shot when the fighting was carried on at close quarters, a weapon not yet introduced in the French navy. Thanks to these improvements in the armament of his ships, Rodney had an advantage in gun-power beyond the mere superiority in numbers of ships and guns. He had a further advantage in the fact that a larger number of his ships were copper-sheathed. This meant less fouling while the ships were waiting at their anchorage, and therefore better speed for the English when they put to sea.

De Grasse was encumbered with a large convoy of merchantmen and storeships, and many of his ships were overcrowded with the troops destined for the descent on Jamaica. It was expected that when he sailed it would be to form, in the first instance, a junction with the Spanish part of the expedition off San Domingo. Rodney kept his fleet at St. Lucia, ready to weigh anchor on the shortest notice, and a smart frigate, the “Andromache” (commanded by Captain Byron, grandfather of the poet), cruised off Martinique, watching the Frenchman.

At dawn on 8 April Byron saw that the French were coming out, and he hastened to St. Lucia under press of sail with the news. Off the port he flew the signal that told Rodney that De Grasse was at sea. Anchors came up and sails were shaken out, and Rodney set off in pursuit, knowing that De Grasse had a very few hours’ start of him.

The few hours did not count for much, provided the English admiral could once get on the Frenchman’s track. The danger of missing him could only arise from making at the outset a wrong judgment as to the course on which the enemy would sail. It was De Grasse’s business to avoid a battle until he had safely taken his huge convoy to San Domingo and joined hands with his Spanish allies. Rodney judged that he would most likely follow the long curve of the chain of islands that fringe the Caribbean Sea, steering by Puerto Rico for San Domingo. In the night of the 8th the English fleet passed Martinique. Next morning it was off the west coast of Dominica, making good speed, and away to the northward a far-spreading crowd of sails showed that Rodney had guessed rightly. The French fleet and convoy were in sight.

Dominica is a mass of volcanic ridges, falling to the seaward in precipitous cliffs, rising landward tier above tier and shooting up into rocky spires that culminate in the towering peak of the Morne Diablotin, five thousand feet high. Under the shelter of this rugged island, while the prevailing trade wind blows steadily from the eastward, there are sudden calms, or irregular flaws of wind blowing now from one point, now from another, diverted by the irregular ridges of the high land. This April morning the sun had hardly risen when the wind fell, and the two fleets drifted slowly, with loose-hanging sails. Near the north end of the island lay the convoy. A little to the southward De Grasse’s thirty battleships straggled in a long line over some six miles of sunlit sea. Off the centre and south of the island Rodney’s larger fleet was stretched out in line ahead. It was formed in three divisions. Hood, in the 90-gun “Barfleur,” commanded the van. Rodney, with his flag flying in a tall three-decker, the “Formidable,” of 98 guns, was in the centre. The rear was commanded by Rear-Admiral Samuel Drake, a namesake and descendant of that other Drake whose name had been the terror of the West Indian seas in Elizabethan days.

Suddenly there came a flaw of wind sweeping from the south round the end of the island, so narrow that most of the English fleet hardly felt it. It filled the sails of Hood’s ships in the van, and they steered for two French battleships that dropped astern of their consorts. One of the Frenchmen passed close under the tiers of guns in the leading English ship, but not a shot was fired at her as she swept by and rejoined her consorts. Rodney had not yet flown the signal for battle, and these were still the days when personal enterprise and decision were not encouraged among the captains of a fleet.

As the breeze filled the sails of the Frenchmen, Grasse signalled to the convoy to bear away before it to the north-westward, while he with his fighting-ships set his course for the channel between Dominica and Guadeloupe. He rightly judged that Rodney would follow the warships, and thus the convoy would have a good start. The channel towards which the French fleet was heading is known as the Saints’ Passage, “not on the surmise that it leads to Heaven," but because along its northern waters stretches a line of rocky islets known to the French as “les Iles des Saintes.” The nine ships of Hood forming the English van had gone far ahead of the rest of the fleet. If De Grasse had not had his mind so centred on the idea of avoiding a battle, there is little doubt that he might have brought an overwhelming force to bear on them. Luckily for Rodney, he contented himself with sending his second in command, Vaudreuil, to skirmish with them, passing and repassing Hood’s division at long range and firing at masts and rigging in the hope of disabling them for further pursuit. Hood returned the fire, doing as much damage as he suffered, and towards midday the rest of the English had worked up to him by taking advantage of every breath of wind that blew over the ridges of Dominica. Then the wind fell again, and all through the night and the following day (10 April) the fleets lay in sight of each other beyond even distant cannon shot, Vaudreuil’s and Hood’s crews busying themselves with repairing rigging and replacing damaged spars.

During the 11th De Grasse tried to get his fleet through the Saints’ Passage, working by short tacks to windward, and baffled and delayed by sudden calms. In the afternoon several of his ships were still to the westward of the strait, and Rodney, who had been getting gradually to the northward, despite the frequent failure of the wind under the lee of Dominica, was at last near enough seriously to threaten these laggards. In order to save them from being overwhelmed by the whole English fleet, De Grasse gave up the advantage of weary hours of hard work and came back before the wind out of the strait. At sunset the two fleets lay to the westward of the Saints’ Passage, and there was no probability that De Grasse would attempt to tack through it during the hours of darkness. In the night Rodney manoeuvred to get to windward of the enemy, and at daylight on the 12th the two fleets were within striking distance, De Grasse to the leeward, his fleet in a straggling line over some nine miles of sea. Rodney had his opportunity of forcing on a decisive battle at last.

At some distance from the French line a partly dismasted line-of-battle ship, the “Zele,” was seen in tow of a frigate. She had been in collision with the flagship during the night, and had been so badly damaged that De Grasse was sending her away to Guadeloupe. Rodney’s ships had lost their order of battle somewhat in the darkness, and while he was reforming his line he detached a couple of ships to threaten the disabled “Zele.” This had the effect he intended. It removed De Grasse’s last hesitation about fighting. The French line was soon seen bearing down on the port tack, the rearward ships crowding sail to close up. Rodney’s battle line, in reversed order, led by Drake and the rear division, was already on a course that would bring the two fleets sweeping past each other, and the leading ship, the “Marlborough,” was steered so as to make the passage a close one. Rodney had hoisted the signal to engage the enemy to leeward. While the fleets were closing he sat in an arm-chair on his quarterdeck, for he was older than his sixty-four years, broken by long illness and only sustained by his dogged spirit. One of his captains, Savage of the “Hercules,” also went into battle seated in an arm-chair beside the bulwarks of his ship. He was lame with gout and unable to stand or walk without help. When the firing began, and the ships were passing each other amid a thunder of broadsides and a hail of shot and bullets, Captain Savage gravely raised his cocked hat to salute each enemy as she ranged up abreast of the “Hercules.” What would those old sailors have thought of the naval commander of to-day peeping through the slits in the steel walls of a conning tower? But it is only fair to ask also what they would have thought of shells weighing half a ton bursting in fiery destruction.

The “Marlborough,” approaching on a converging course, came to close quarters with the “Brave,” the sixth ship in De Grasse’s line, and then, shifting her helm to bring her course parallel to that of the enemy, exchanged broadsides with the Frenchman. Ship after ship came into action in the same way. The speed was nearer three than four knots, and the lines some six miles long, so it was more than an hour before the leading English battleship was abreast of and engaged with the rearmost Frenchman. As ship passed ship there was a thunder of artillery, a rattle of small arms. Then a brief lull till the guns of two more opponents bore on each other. But in this cannonade the English had the advantage of the heavy blows struck by their large-bore carronades at close range, and the fact that their gun-mountings enabled them to keep a passing ship longer under fire than was possible for the French gunners. In De Grasse’s ships, crowded with troops, the slaughter was terrible. As the fight went on and the French ships came under the crushing fire of adversary after adversary, it was seen that it was only with difficulty the officers kept the men at the guns. In this first hour of the fight the French began to throw the dead overboard to clear their encumbered decks, and a strange horror was added to the scene, for shoals of sharks that had followed the fleets to pick up anything thrown overboard now swarmed around them, lashing the water into foam as they struggled for their human prey.

At length the leading English ship was abeam of the rearmost of De Grasse’s fleet. Over some six miles of sea the two battle lines extended, every ship ablaze with fire-flashes from her guns and with the dense smoke-clouds drifting around the English vessels and wrapping them in the fog of war. If the battle was now to be fought out on the old traditional method, the fleets would clear each other, wear and tack and repass each other in opposite directions with a second exchange of fire. But now came the event that made the battle of the Saints’ Passage epoch-making in naval history.

What precisely happened is wrapped in a fog of controversy as dense as the smoke-fog that enveloped Rodney’s fleet at the decisive moment. One thing is certain. The old admiral suddenly changed all his plans, and executed a new manoeuvre with the signal he himself was disobeying the order to engage to leeward still flying from his flagship. The act was the sudden seizing of an unexpected opportunity. But some of the merit of the new departure was due to Rodney’s right-hand man, his “Captain of the Fleet,” Sir Charles Douglas. Douglas was one of those whose minds had been influenced by new theories on naval war, which were just then in the air. In Britain a Scotch country gentleman, John Clerk, of Eldin, had been arguing for some time in pamphlets and manuscripts circulated among naval officers against the formal methods that led to indecisive results. His paper plans for destroying an enemy were no doubt open to the criticism that they would work out beautifully if the enemy stuck to the old-fashioned ways and attempted no counter-stroke. But the essence of Clerk’s theories was that parallel orders of battle meant only indecisive cannonading; that to crush an enemy one must break into his line, bring parts of it under a close fire, not on one side, but on both, and decide the fate of the ships thus cut off by superior numbers and superior gun power before the rest could come to their help. His plans might not work out with the mechanical exactitude described in his writings, but they would tend to produce the close melee, where the best men and the steadiest fire would win, and after such an encounter there would not be merely a few masts and spars shot away, and a few holes to be plugged, but the beaten side would be minus a number of ships sunk, burned, or taken, and condemned to hopeless inferiority for the rest of the campaign. Clerk was not the only man who put forward these ideas. A French Jesuit professor of mathematics had worked out plans for securing local advantage of numbers in a sea-fight at close quarters; but while French naval officers laughed at naval battles worked out with a piece of chalk and a blackboard, British sailors were either themselves thinking out similar schemes or were beginning to think there might be something in the Scotch laird’s diagrams.

It was at the critical moment when the two fleets lay side by side in parallel lines on opposite courses, wrapped in the battle-smoke, that Douglas, looking out through a gap in the war-cloud, saw that a sudden flaw of wind blowing steadily from the south-east was flattening the French sails against the masts and checking their speed. The same sudden change of wind was filling the English sails, and the masters were squaring the yards to it, while the Frenchmen to keep any way on their ships had to bring their bows partly round towards the English line. Between the “Glorieux,” the ship immediately opposed to Rodney’s flagship, the “Formidable,” and the next Frenchman in the line, the “Diadème,” a wide gap was opening up. Douglas saw the chance offered to his admiral. Half the English fleet was ahead of the “Formidable,” engaged with the rearward French ships. If the “Formidable” pushed through the gap, leading the rest of the line after her, the French rear would be cut off from the van and brought under a double fire at close quarters, and there would be a fair prospect of destroying it before De Grasse could come back to its support. He rushed to Rodney’s side. Moments were precious. He urged his plan in the briefest words. At first the old admiral rejected it. “No,” he said, “I will not break my line." Douglas insisted, and the two officers stepped to the opening in the bulwarks at the gangway and looked out. The “Formidable” was opposite the tempting gap in the French line. Rodney in a moment changed his mind, and told Douglas that he accepted his plan.

“In all cases of fight with the enemy the commanders of His Majesty’s ships are to keep the fleet in one line, and (as much as may be) to preserve that order of battle, which they have been directed to keep before the time of fight.”

In the haste to carry it out the signal to fight to leeward of the French was forgotten and left flying. The “Formidable” turned her high bows into the gap, and swept through it with all her hundred guns and her carronades in action, pouring broadside after broadside right and left into the “Glorieux” and the “Diadème.” Six ships in succession swung round and followed in the wake of the flagship, which was now engaged with the French on the windward side. Shattered by successive blasts of well-directed fire, the “Diadème” was drifting a helpless wreck, and the rearward ships, with their way checked, were huddling in confusion behind her, English ships firing into them on both sides. Through another gap in the French line, ahead of De Grasse’s giant “Ville de Paris,” other English ships made their way in the dense cloud of smoke, some of the captains hardly aware of what they were doing. The French van had meanwhile forged ahead, and then, as the wind suddenly fell to a dead calm, it was seen that De Grasse’s fleet was broken into three isolated fragments.

To the southward lay the van ships under De Bougainville becalmed, with no enemy in range of them. The “Ville de Paris,” with several of her consorts of the French centre, formed another group, with the whole of the rearward English division exchanging fire with them at long range. The rear of the French, under Vaudreuil, and the ships of the centre cut off by Rodney’s manoeuvre were huddled together, with Hood’s division and the ships that had followed the “Formidable” through the line shepherding them. The loss of the wind had made it difficult or impossible to keep the broadsides bearing, and for an hour the action died down into a desultory cannonade. When the breeze came again over the ridges of Dominica, De Bougainville’s division, now far to leeward, made no attempt to succour De Grasse. Only one of his ships slowly beat up to the main battle. The French admiral tried to get away to the westward, but Hood clung doggedly to him, while Rodney and Drake completed the defeat of Vaudreuil and the French rear. The “Diadème” soon struck her colours. A frigate tried to tow the dismasted “Glorieux” out of the melee, but the captain of the “Glorieux,” De Kerlessi, saw that the effort would only end in the friendly frigate being also captured, and with his own hand he cut the tow-rope and hauled down his flag. Then the “Cesar” struck her colours, and while the rearward ships were being thus disposed of, in the broken Centre the “Hector” and the “Ardent” surrendered to Hood’s division.

The English attack was now concentrated on the centre, and the battle raged fiercely round the French flagship, distinguished by her huge bulk and her towering masts. One by one these came down, trailing in a tangle of spars, sails, and rigging over her sides. Her crowded decks were a shambles of dead and dying, but still De Grasse fought on for honour, not for victory. His van held aloof, his broken rear was in flight. Five of his ships had struck. Still he kept his guns in action till Hood in his flagship, the “Princesse,” ranged close up alongside of him and poured in a series of destructive broadsides. Then the French flag came down at last, and De Grasse went on board the “Princesse” and gave up his sword to the vice-admiral.

The sun was going down when the French flagship surrendered. The captured “Cesar,” set on fire by her crew, was blazing from stem to stern. The other prizes had been secured. Rodney attempted no pursuit of the scattered French ships that were sailing away to the southward and the north-westward. Enough had been done, he said. It was now his business to refit his fleet and take it to Jamaica. He had shattered the French power in the West Indian seas and made himself the master of the field of operations. A younger and more vigorous man would have perhaps marked down Vaudreuil’s or Bougainville’s fugitive divisions for utter destruction. But Rodney was content with the solid success he had obtained.

The losses of the French fleet had been very heavy. In their crowded decks the English fire had effected something like a massacre. On board the “Ville de Paris” more men had been killed and wounded than in the whole English fleet. Very few officers and men had escaped some kind of wound. Many of the ships that had got away were now very shorthanded, with leaking hulls, and spars and rigging badly cut up.

The effect of the victory was to enable England to obtain much better terms in the treaty that was signed next year. A disastrous war was closed by a brilliant success. But England owed to it more than this temporary advantage. It was a new beginning, the opening event of the period of splendid triumphs on the sea on the reputation of which we are still living. To quote the words of Rodney’s latest biographer, “it marked the beginning of that fierce and headlong yet well-calculated style of sea-fighting which led to Trafalgar, and made England undisputed mistress of the sea.”