The Santissima Trinidad, first launched as 120(guns) in 1769 at Havana and had a displacement of 4500 Tons. She was as rebuilt after Cape St Vincent battle as a 132 gun vessel by adding carronades. Her displacement was at this time of 5000 Tons. She was fitted with 4 more carronades (thus 136 guns) for the Trafalgar campaign, but even with this formal fourth deck of gun, she had still less heavier broadside than a French 118.
Strategic Considerations
Until after the defeat of the French invasion attempt of 1759, no British government was altogether sure how much internal Jacobite support would rally to a French or Spanish landing in such force, nor at the end of the Eighteenth-Century could anyone be sure of Irish reaction if such a force landed there. The year’s events of 1796, showed moreover, that in particular weather conditions even the Royal Navy could not be a certain protection against such landings.
French colonial trade grew in value from an average 35.2 million livres per annum in 1715-20 to 137.9 million livres 1749-55. The size and value of French overseas commerce continued to expand until 1790. Its share of world trade grew from 8% in 1720 to 12% in 1780, and its merchant fleet from 150,000 tons in 1730 to 574,000 in 1785. This obliged the French to send out their Navy to defend that trade and empire, which exposed it to defeat as in 1747, and it enabled Britain to fight effectively on its strengths at sea and overseas, rather than on France’s strength on the Continent-provided Britain could shut off France’s ability to dispatch that naval strength overseas. By contrast Britain and her dominions had 16,079 merchant ships in 1792, amounting to 1 ½ million tons of shipping, employing 118,286 men during that year of peace. By 1800 there was 1.8 million tons of merchant shipping, this expansion despite the warfare and privateering waged upon the oceans. This expansion demonstrates and underpins Britain’s fundamental economic strength and effective naval strategic advantages.
In 1759 the decisive crippling of French naval strength, was triumphantly achieved by the Western Squadron, which simultaneously defended Britain from invasion and protected British attacks on the French Empire in Canada and the West Indies against interception from France.
The invasion threat was finally smashed by Boscawen and Hawke in 1759. During 1740-60 the combined fleets of Spain and France would have stretched the Royal Navy considerably. This was also assisted by Austria (Britain’s ally of the 1740’s, during the War of Austrian Succession) delaying the breaking of Spain’s neutrality till 1762. Thus the Royal Navy could concentrate on destruction of the French Navy and therefore the French overseas empire. The Royal Navy expanded from 173 ships (100,000 tons) in 1688 to 755 ships (over 500,000 tons) in sea service in 1809.
Infrastructure
One policy that the Royal Navy developed far ahead of its French rival was the establishment of naval bases overseas: Minorca in 1709, English Harbour, Antigua, and Port Royal, Jamaica, in the 1730s, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, between 1757 and 1759. Careening, naval stores, supply, victualling and hospital facilities were established at these bases, thus enabling the Navy to maintain an all round presence in permanent stations as opposed to the French practice of sending out squadrons from Europe for short periods each year. Two naval yards in the Caribbean, where France had none, enabled Britain to establish local superiority for most of the mid-eighteenth-century wars, while the establishment of a permanent naval presence at Halifax in 1757 was a vital part of the throttling of the French supply line to Canada which in turn led to French Canada’s final surrender in 1760. During the wars against Revolutionary and later Napoleonic France the main overseas bases had increased to Cape of Good Hope, Malta and Bermuda, with store depots at Barbados, Minorca, Martinique, Lisbon and San Domingo. Also temporary bases had been established at one time or another at Ajacco and Alexandria during this time. Even the island of Heligoland, taken from the Danes in 1807, had a British naval harbourmaster appointed to control naval affairs. The East India Company’s Bombay and Madras ports were also supporting the British Navy. Indeed a dry-dock was established at Bombay as early as 1750, several more built over the years following. One enabling the dry-docking of a ship-of-the line as large as a 74 being partly completed in 1806 followed by another in 1810.
A major factor extending the parameters of British naval power were the number of dockyards which facilitated the major overhaul of warships, with twenty-three home dry docks in 1793-6 as against eight in French and eight in Spanish yards, the Royal Navy could turn around more ships at a faster rate than its rivals. Britain’s private shipbuilding capacity enabled her to free her naval dockyards to concentrate on the operational maintenance of the fleet.
Private yards built 29% of SOL in 1688-1755
52% of SOL in 1756-1815
This was a resource which the French were acutely conscious that they lacked.
Manpower Problems
During this period Britain’s had built a vast merchant marine. In 1785 it equaled: 2 times France’s 4 times Holland’s and 10 times Spain’s. It was difficult to recruit merchant seaman into the Royal Navy as to not devastate Britain’s trade by taking too many merchant seamen. The comparison of the personnel available from the merchant marine and the Royal navy’s peacetime establishment is as follows:
1793: Britain’s merchant seamen 118,000
1792: Naval peacetime level 17,000
By comparison in 1793 there were 60,000 French merchant seamen, so the French naval recruitment base was about half that available to the British.
The Royal Navy’s expansion to meet wartime manning levels is indicated below.
War Establishment Manpower:
War of Austrian Succession 44,861 in 1748
Seven Years War 84,797 in 1762
American War of Independence 107,446 in 1783
Napoleonic Wars 142,098 in 1810
Manpower – particularly vital skills; which would take at least two years of sea-going experience to acquire; was a significant factor in the efficiency and the backbone of any Navy. This elite group of petty officers and able seamen who could work the sails aloft constituted only a fifth of a ships of the line’s company, but without them the ship could not be sailed.
This important point serves to highlight an often unappreciated factor behind British success in its two most successful naval wars of the period, the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic War, in that by catching so much French shipping at sea by an unexpected attack before the declaration of war (1756) or by a surprise declaration of war (1803), the Royal Navy was able to inflict an initial crippling blow on its French counterpart by capturing large numbers of these skilled and indispensable French petty officers and able seamen. By May 1757 over 14,406 French seamen lay in British prisons, including 4,703 petty officers and ables – sufficient to work up to thirty ships of the line. The British were also loathe to give these skilled French seamen up, exchanging on a ‘man for man’ basis only the unskilled or invalid prisoners, thus ensuring the a manpower experience superiority. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars relations between the British and French governments was at a nadir. This lack of civil communication meant that prisoners of war of both nations had to endure long periods of debilitating confinement. As there was a great disparity of seamen/officer prisoners in favour of the British, this created difficulties in such rare prisoner exchanges as occurred. The British insisting on parity of exchange in rank and numbers. It became increasingly difficult for the French to find enough prisoners of suitable rank, leading to British retention of the greater bulk of their prisoners of war. Only 12,000 British naval prisoners were held in French prisons between 1803 and 1815.
Recent research has re-established the qualitative differences between service in the Navy and in the merchant marine, and has overthrown previous assumptions by showing a balance of advantages by no means unfavourable to the Navy. It shows how, in these circumstances, personal relationships which encouraged volunteering could play an important part in naval recruitment, either by professional acquaintance to secure the ables, or by local connection to secure the landsmen and ordinary seamen necessary to haul on ropes and man the guns. The admiralty’s replacement of this personal recruitment system by increasing use of the Impress Service in the later eighteenth-century broke that bond and heightened problems of recruitment, retention and relations or board ships.
Was the Impress necessary due to the demand of the personnel establishment? The Navy was always short of crew. Desertion was endemic in the wartime Navy: probably some 40,000 of the 185,000 enlistments in the Seven Years War. The figures for the American War of Independence and the French Revolutionary War being 42,000 for both. It was drain, but its impact can be exaggerated. The desertion rate in the Seven Years War was contained at a replaceable seven per cent per annum. Higher pay would always be bettered by the merchant marine, so that better treatment in the Navy, greater attention and care by officers for their crews, was the necessary remedy.
Hygene and Medical Welfare
The British seem to have made greater efforts in hygiene and medical welfare than their maritime rivals, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth-century. On the two occasions when the French established control of the home waters, in 1690 and 1779, it was the violent impact of disease which drove them back to port rather than the effort of the Royal Navy. Typhus and above all scurvy were the main scourges. The former was containable through better hygiene, the later through regular revictualling with fresh meat and vegetables. Sir Gilbert Blane and Dr Thomas Trotter, both medical men, should be given greatest credit, as they were instrumental in having fruits and juice made available on a permanent basis. That combined with better education and awareness among captains and admirals, meant that by 1795 the British Navy had far less incidences of scurvy, the main killer disease of ships’ personnel. However the regularity of supply had to be painstakingly and expensively constructed; and it was always precarious. When in the American War of Independence it broke down, of 175,993 men raised between 1776 and 1780, 18,545 died of disease, compared to 1,243 killed in action.
Bibliography
1. British Privateering Enterprises in the Eighteenth Century
David J. Sharkey 359.000941 1990 BRI
2. Parameters of British Naval Power 1650-1850
Edited by Michael Duffy 359.941 1992 PAR
3. Nelson’s Navy: The Ships, Men and Organization 1793-1815
Brian Lavery ISBN 0 85177 521 7 Revised Edition 1990
The author wishes to thank Albert C.E. Parker for the invaluable additional information and his insightful suggestions.
Appendix One
Impressment and the British merchant service
An explanation to the discussion of the potential effects of the Impress on the skilled labor force of the British merchant marine.
The ‘Prest’ was originally a small sum of money given to seamen on recruitment, however this word was corrupted into ‘to press’ and became the popular notion of the ‘press gang’, nasty groups of seamen, more often with an experienced officer, grabbing innocent victims from the streets and forcing them into the evils of navy service.
All trained British seamen were liable to impressment (and nobody else, contrary to popular myth–an officer on press duty could be sued for damages if he impressed anyone who was not at least an ordinary seaman), so in theory British merchant ships could be left with no crews at all besides their officers (who were also exempt). Indeed, most non-seamen caught up in the Impress were soon released on proving their identity, with some still being sent to ships. Ships’ captains needed skilled seamen not unskilled landsmen, there is no doubt that the great majority of pressed men were seamen, usually from the merchant marine.
The reason that this did not paralyze the country’s overseas trade, was that British merchant companies were expected to hire foreign seamen in the stead of their pressed British crew. Seamen from any neutral nation could be engaged. Quoting Adam Smith in the volume I of Wealth of Nations 1853: ‘In time of war, when forty or fifty thousand sailors are forced from the merchant service into that of the King, the demand for sailors to merchant ships necessarily rises with their scarcity, and their wages commonly rise from a guinea and 27s to 40s and 3 pound per month.’ Thus there was a considerable incentive for seamen from other nations to serve in the British merchant marine.
The British merchants would, of course, have to outbid ship-owners in the neutral countries, and it would take a little time for the foreign seamen to get to England. A possible explanation however, is that word of a new press would be carried quickly to Denmark, the Netherlands (when neutral, as in the Seven Years War and the first years of the War of American Independence), and the German states on the North Sea coast, such as the independent cities of Hamburg and Bremen. We can also conjecture, that seamen of allies could be hired, as well. To our knowledge the British Navy never required the entire body of British deep-sea sailors, especially all at one time. The worst problem would have been during the Napoleonic Wars, when neutrals were in short supply. In theory, U.S. sailors could have been hired, but of course we know that officers of the Royal Navy were quite willing to press them, so hiring them would have provided no security to British merchants that their services could be retained, and they would have been foolish to undertake the hazard. No present analysis is available, but it is possible that American seamen hired on to British merchant ships when the American overseas merchant marine was shut down by President Jefferson’s embargo in 1807-09.
Was the impressment of the majority of merchant seaman necessary, or in fact occur, due to the demand of the personnel establishment?
The statement that the British navy never needed all qualified British merchant sailors is purely speculative. In the discussion of the British Navy’s manning problem in N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986), esp. 148ff. Rodger believes (149) “there may have been as many as 80,000 seamen and fishermen outside the Navy before the [Seven Years'] war, of whom at least 60,000 were needed in wartime.” Initially, he believes, 20,000 or so were also employed in privateers, making the demand for seaman a total of 160,000 or double the available supply of 80,000. Note that it is not possible to measure the number of seamen needed by the navy from the total number of men borne on the ships’ books, even after deducting widows’ men and marines, because a portion of them could be unskilled (from a naval point of view) landsmen. BTW, in looking over this I found the definition of who was liable for impressment (p. 150): “seamen, seafaring men and persons whose occupations or callings are to work in vessels and boats upon rivers.” “It was neither legally nor practically possible to press anyone who did not fit this description, and suggestions to the contrary are quite wrong, at least as relating to the mid-eighteenth century. It is true that pressed landsmen are occasionally found in ships’ musters, but they can be accounted for either as watermen and river boatmen, who were liable for impressment but effectively quite unskilled in seafaring, or as landsmen pressed by constables and magistrates. The importance of the press to the Navy lay not so much in its numerical contribution as in its selective ability to take skilled seamen, the class the Navy stood most in need of.” (ibid.) The use of “landsmen pressed by constables and magistrates” was institutionalized by the Quota Act of 1795, which required every county to furnish a certain number of men to the Navy, including inland counties who would have had no chance to provide qualified seamen from their local populations. {Brian Lavery, Nelson’s Navy: The Ships, Men and Organisation, 1793-1815 ([Annapolis]: Naval Institute Press, 1989), 124-28.} Rodger insists that the Navy did not want and would not accept career felons. Local magistrates used it as means of ridding their jurisdictions of “paupers, idiots, cripples, vagabonds, and petty criminals” even though pressing them was illegal, but the Navy was chary about accepting such types, and “they were very likely to be sent back by the first flag officer who saw them,” although the Marines might take them. “In no part of the Sea Service were criminals ever accepted,…Nothing more quickly destroyed the mutual trust of a happy ship’s company than the presence of a thief among them” (Rodger, Wooden World, 170.)
Appendix Two
The strategic failure of French privateering during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Period
J.M. Thompson in his book THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: “Privateering … was a branch of the service particularly popular amongst sailors who disliked discipline and hoped for private gain. It was encouraged by the ex-privateer Dalabarde, whose regime as minister of marine ran concurrently with that of Bouchotte at the war office, from April ’93 to April ’94. Privateering inflicted heavy losses on our unprotected coastal shipping. Some of the privateers had made as many as sixty prizes before they were themselves captured by the British navy. Ten years later we were losing four hundred ships a year [to privateering].” Yet despite this Britain and her dominions had 16,079 merchant ships in 1792, amounting to 1 ½ million tons of shipping, employing 118,286 men during that year of peace. By 1800 there was 1.8 million tons of merchant shipping, this expansion despite the warfare and privateering waged upon the oceans. In contrast the French merchant marine was almost driven from the high seas. Indeed, if it had not been some merchant coasters that continued to operate by sailing under the protection of shore batteries, such home ports as Brest would have had great difficulty in receiving victuals and materials. Clearly French privateering during the Revolutionary period failed in it’s perceived strategy: to cripple British marine trade.
This is not to say that the French and their allies made poor privateers, or that their efforts were lackadaisical. They did their best: but even their best efforts could not have had sufficient impact on British marine trade. Possibly greater efforts during the Napoleonic navy period for a much-expanded commerce-raiding role, as attempted during WW II by the German Kriegsmarine, for the main fleet ships-of-the-line, could have diverted sufficient resources to the detriment Britain’s wartime objectives.
Previous to the Revolution the local parlements of France had different prize laws for different ports. The French Revolutionary governments, especially early on in this period, often simply confiscated prize goods and ships, whereas in the British prize system the government would purchase at a value arrived at by the adjudication of the Admiralty Court(s). Whereas the incentive was largely reduced for French Revolutionary naval officers, the British system encouraged the taking of prizes to the point that it actually encouraged the taking of merchant shipping and rich cargo over warships as the latter fought back and had much less value after their capture. The British government tried to introduce measures to encourage the taking of warships by tying honours and promotions to the capture of enemy vessels. ‘Head money’ was paid, at 5 pounds for each crew member of the enemy ship, for both privateers and warships. Parliament often voted sums of money to victorious fleets, to be distributed among the fleet in the same way as prize money. However such measures did little to reduce the lust for prize money among many British naval officers.
Despite French the use of privateers against British commerce since 1690, it is doubtful if it was ever more than a nuisance against a determined British State. Legend suggests that it was highly profitable, however analysis shows us, that, on average, privateering barely broke even.
The premier corsair port St. Malo in Britanny sent out 28 ships, which captured 38 vessels during 1796. Nine of the privateers were captured by the British. Nantes fitted out 16 privateers in 1793. The whole effort declined over the period. Between 1803 and 1814, 178 privateers were active from St. Malo. The British navy captured 77, almost half fitted out. Only 19 privateer vessels were sent out in 1809, of these only nine displaced more than 100 tons. In 1810, France had 195 corsairs operating with a complement of 9,923 men. Less than half of these were still active by 1812.
Napoleon’s post-Trafalgar strategy was essentially that of the earlier French Revolutionary governments, albeit more intense and methodical: to wage a naval war of attrition against England by destruction of its trade through means of commerce raiding, and so force it to terms. The British certainly took it seriously enough. The French actions at sea eventually doubled the Lloyd’s of London insurance rate for British cargo, from 2.5% of the value of the voyage to 5%! Still, during the same period the French merchant marine was virtually swept from the seas with no real hope of return. Neutral shipping was so harried by the British that their own insurance rates for French-bound voyages were in the 20%-30% range. Occasionally this jumped as high as 50%, a crippling burden that discouraged trade with Napoleon’s empire and reduced many continental Europeans to poverty.
The British titled their collective fiat upon neutral shipping the “Orders in Council”. Their purpose was twofold: to embarrass France and Napoleon by the prohibition of direct import and export trade (which for them could only be carried on by neutrals), and at the same time to force into the Continent all the British-borne products that it could absorb. The expenses incurred by neutrally-flagged vessels forced to stop at British ports, both coming and going, as well as by British tariffs and sundry inconveniences, were passed on to the continental consumer in the form of ever higher prices.
Napoleon’s response to the Orders in Council were a series of decrees, the most important being the “Berlin Decree” of 1806 and the “Milan Decree” of 1807. Collectively, they prohibited the import of all British goods into the Continent, with any violator of this form of blockade liable to seizure by French ships at sea (mainly privateers) or by Imperial port authorities. French vassal states and allies, the most important being Russia at the time, were forced (or persuaded) to go along.
But Napoleon’s policy proved a poor one. It actually weakened French privateering efforts, for instead of be-deviling the enemy on distant, under-defended sea lanes, many now boarded ships near French-controlled ports, seizing the cargo and often the vessels themselves on the flimsiest pretexts that they carried British goods – even small smuggled items belonging to the common seamen being taken into account. In effect, they were pirates operating in European waters. After surviving or avoiding an outrage of this kind, neutral ship captains then faced additional danger from opportunistic port officials. Small wonder that beleaguered neutrals found British trade much safer. In large part, Napoleon’s own heavy-handed commercial policies isolated his empire and hastened its decline.
