i'm cooking the veggies and valuing myself! (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
themeletor) wrote2005-02-28 09:09 pm
themeletor) wrote2005-02-28 09:09 pm
f*ck yes.
More than 24 hours of straight-up writing / researching, one full pot of black tea, a can of Diet Coke with Lime, and 8 BILLION sea shanties later...
Illusory Triumphs: A Fact-Driven Look at the American-English Civil War
Jack Coggins wrote of the American Revolution that it "was fought mainly on land and won mainly on the water" . On a more cursory level, this is the manner in which many textbooks treat the naval interactions in the American War for Independence, giving a nod to the most exciting ship-to-ship skirmishes and praising a few well-romanticized names (John Paul Jones for one), but settling attention mostly on land fighting. Though one cannot deny the strong central role that infantry marches and classic stand-up kneel-down warfare held in the revolution, Britain's backbone was still her navy. As an island nation keeping reign over far distant colonies, Britain needed a strong naval force more than anything else, and to her great fortune she had one. Since victory in the Anglo-Dutch wars in the 1690s, the Royal Navy had been enjoying its privileged place in the eyes of the people, along with its well-feared reputation across the globe. A successful end to the Seven Years' War left the Navy 365 ships strong and attending to new territories from the Mediterranean to the Far East to the Floridas. Only twelve years after that prowess was shown, a fifty-four-ship Continental Navy managed to defeat this ages-old leviathan of the seas. It would appear at first to be an absurd and mysterious fluke, or perhaps a clear sign of dirty cheating. But the Royal Navy was too well experienced to suffer a fluke, and out on flat, open, glassy seas there are few options for dirty cheating. There was more to this pup of a navy than the numbers at first told – more than the handful of brigs, assortment of sloops, and grab-bag of other vessels that sailed under the flag(s) of the Continental Navy. America had, beyond that one commissioned navy, dizzying state navies, undeniable international support, and more than a thousand dauntless privateers . Those were what drew the British into a full-fledged war across the seas, a war that Britain nonetheless won, but a war that, sectioned into a smaller War of Independence, gave America the illusion of defeating the great British lion with a mouse of a haphazard navy.
The Continental Navy itself had, by the end of the war, seven brigs, eleven ships, nineteen frigates, seven sloops, two brigantines, two schooners, three cutters, two xebecs, one lugger, and a single ship of the line, the 74-gun America (the distinctions between these vessels will be explained shortly). The British Navy clearly dwarfed those proud claims, with the simplest example being five grand first-rates, three-decker hundred-gun ships almost two hundred feet long with a more than twenty foot draught (the depth of a ship, from the deck to the keel. One might also note that three gundecks within twenty-two feet does not make for much comfortable headroom.) and a tonnage, or cannon firepower, of over two thousand pounds. This also meant that the majority of these ships' guns were 18- and 24-pounders, common cannon that could do a lot of damage, especially when set against the Americans' 12- or even 9-pounders , which were the heaviest guns a frigate tended to carry.
Before continuing any further in this exploration into the naval construction of the various fleets, it would be well to suffer a simple explanation of the different vessels involved. The first rates, royalty amongst ships, have already been introduced; they carried 100 to 120 guns on three decks. Second rates boasted anywhere from 84 to 98 guns, again often on three decks, slightly more than 175 feet long and 50 feet across. Third rates tended almost entirely towards the two-deckers, as they carried 80, 74, or 64 guns. Fourth rates, again two-deckers, had 60 and 50 guns. Frigates made up the fifth rates, generally with a single gundeck and 30 to 44 guns. Only one ship in the Continental Navy exceeded this rank, and that was the America, the already mentioned 74. Frigates also extended into the sixth rate, with gun numbers as low as 24. Any ship with fewer than 20 guns was 'unrated', and from there it was named after its type or employment. These unrated vessels included brigs, cutters, transports, and more. In the Continental Navy more often than the Royal Navy, one would also find several galleys, small oared warships with an 18pdr in the bow and four3pdr anti-personnel guns, called howitzers, along the sides.
These galleys dominated state navies especially. The Pennsylvania State Navy, largest of them, counted thirteen galleys amongst the number of the fleet: the Experiment, Bulldog, Franklin, Congress, Effingham, Ranger, Burke, Chatham, Dickinson, Hancock, Gen. Washington, Warren, and Camden . These thirteen galleys held a much stronger battery than the usual galley class, with one 32-pounder, four 24-pounders, and eight 18-pounders . (Interestingly, this makes for a tonnage of 272. The average American galley's was 123, with 10 guns .) These ships and the rest of the Pennsylvania Navy, though dismantled and sunk under Washington's orders in April 1778 , saw plenty of action in the few years of their lives. In 1776 they came up against the British reconnaissance frigates Roebuck and Liverpool, of 44 and 28 guns respectively, and chased the frigates downstream past Newcastle . And even after Washington's decree the Pennsylvania Navy was tenacious, keeping the brig Convention (A brig was square-rigged, not ship-rigged, with two masts instead of three. This meant a smaller crew requirement without sacrificing speed, and was ideal for privateering) and fitting her out to be a privateer, then later purchasing the General Greene and with her taking five prizes, and not until 1781 was the Pennsylvania Navy finally disbanded to Washington's satisfaction .
Pennsylvania was far from alone in its individual work against the British; each state, with the exceptions of Delaware and New Jersey, built its own navy, mostly of merchant vessels (or modified merchantmen) for combat against merchant vessels. As a grand total, these navies included some 190 vessels , more than triple the commissioned Continental Navy, and state navies had already been out and in action for months before the Continental Congress decided even to build a singular central one. Though these vivacious little rebels might not have made much of a direct dent in British naval strength, they did startle and surprise the British, who were hardly expecting forces with even the most basic organization. They had ruffled the peacock's royal feathers, and for them that was enough. International grudges would do the rest.
When America called for aid from across the ocean, it was not hard to gain. Europe had recently come out of the Seven Years' War, leaving France and Spain thoroughly defeated by and vengeful against the British, and even before that the Anglo-Dutch wars had sealed an animosity between Britain and Holland. Since "[f]rom the beginning of the Revolution the eyes of America and of France were directed towards one another across the sea" , the French Navy was only too willing to assist the colonists in their cause. They began with gifts of military supplies and of one million francs (soon followed another million from Spain, as is to be expected) , and by 1777 were sailing their men and papers under American captains as a crafty way to dodge the British charges of piracy against them. Upon capture by the British, all the crew would speak French and show French papers, and the British could treat them only as French privateers and, in compliance with the Treaty of Ushant, could not bring charges. The Crown generally considered American vessels to be pirates, for lack of Letter of Marque from a sovereign power (specifically Britain; the Continental Congress was hardly sovereign), but when the American vessels were by all proofs French-commissioned they were not pirates.
In 1778 the French gave up the ghost of Franco-British diplomacy and officially entered the war on America's side with an action against England off Ushant. Thirty-two French ships of the line, with the weather gauge (windward advantage), against thirty British. The wind changed, and it became a tactical victory for the French for they suffered more casualties , but a victory all the same, and it set the two greatest naval powers against each other once again. It also meant, among other things, that there were now one hundred ships of the line added to the American force, with six first rates, two second rates, eighty-two third rates and ten fourth rates . An estimated combined tonnage of 165,000, not to mention ships that could afford to face the best of the British fleet for the sake of the French and the sake of the Americans.
Where the French allied, the Spanish were doubtless swift to follow, and in June of 1779 Spain declared war against England as well. That August a 67-ship set of fleets made for Plymouth, redirected by French order to Cornwall, and rather ignored the nominal rebel cause. But thus was the nature of their alliance of convenience – "They were both bent on doing as much damage to Britain as they could, providing that such efforts worked to their own advantage" . Unfortunately, in this military moment, efforts did not work to either advantage, the fleets fell victim to disease, could find no safe anchorage, and were in the end blown out of the Channel altogether by an unkindly gale. Spain decided she had more pressing tasks than to launch an invasion on Britain, and turned her focus toward Gibraltar and Minorca, for both were under constant pressure from the Royal Navy . Spanish naval force was, in a count purely made of ships of the line, two first rates, two second rates, seventy-one third rates, and two fourth rates . In all, approximately 5,360 guns. This is not much against the full force of Britain's roughly 9,600, but the Royal Navy, as all navies, was split amongst different oppositions and territories, and in this case the split and pull was key to America's success.
The fourth navy in this war, the last one to join forces against the British, was the navy of Holland. The Dutch navy had nothing of the strength to defeat the Royal Navy, but they were tenacious and unforgiving fighters, as both navies made clear in the Anglo-Dutch wars and in battle at Dogger Bank in 1781. In that encounter the Dutch fought without pretense or maneuver, heading their convoy straight for Britain's, and fighting until one of the two could make it through. The Royal Navy sailed it in the end – the Dutch convoy did not; one of their ships even foundered in the aftermath, but it was the most damage the British navy had taken, or would take, in any one conflict throughout the rest of the war . Such is an example of the doggedly determined Dutch, who could at least then occupy British attention if not vanquish British naval excellence. Dutch power was mostly an issue in the West Indies, where they had grand centers of trade on three little islands. Upon declaration of war, Britain was glad to send a fleet or two out after these isles, and in January of 1781 the orders were to seize all Dutch possessions, and Admirals Rodney and Hood were quick to comply. St. Eustatius fell to British hands, as did Saba and St.-Martin, and the Royal Navy now had control of what had been a major trade point for the Americans .
But while the British navy was spread between efforts against France, Spain, and Holland as well as the revolting colonists, while the bigger names in naval warfare bettered it out on their grand international scale where America was just one of the several (though perhaps of slightly more intrigue than the others) territories that hung in the balance, while all the non-neutral world of nautical presence fought the British under the guise of supporting America, the colonists were not idle. Their Continental Navy was certainly superfluous, in most cases, but America's strength lay, on the sea as on land, in the less conventional facets of warfare. In the naval theatre of war, this meant piracy, plain and simple.
American-commissioned privateers vastly outnumbered anything else to come from American dockyards, for obvious reasons, the greatest of which being the incredibly higher pay, and along with that the relative ease of seaboard life as opposed to that in the Continental Navy. Privateersmen received between twelve and sixteen dollars a month while a navy man could expect little more than eight, and privateers fought only when it was completely unavoidable and preferably when a win was certain and after the victory each seaman received a higher percentage of the prize money than a sailor of the Continental Navy would . It is not difficult to see why American privateers numbered well into the thousands, with successes against the British approaching 2,300 in captured and destroyed British merchantmen and privateers, with just more than half as many losses on the American side . This constant molestation of British trade may not have battered her navy, but it did leave her seafolk in general haggard and weary. As Secretary of the Navy John Paul Jones later said in a circular to all captains in 1813, the Americans had "the means of creating a powerful diversion, and of turning the scale of annoyance against the enemy" . Though he addressed this to captains of the Continental Navy, the same cry could just as well have gone out to the scads of privateers throughout the American War for Independence, so well did they follow it.
The British considered American privateering, in fact, not privateering at all, but rather piracy. They did not see the Continental Congress, being a rebellious faction still technically under the rule of the Crown, as having the sovereignty to commission letters of marque, so by all laws and agreements these swarming American privateersmen were as much gallows-birds as the self-serving pirates still cruising the waters. By the letter of the law, the British government would have been completely justified to hang the crew of any American 'privateer' to prey on British commerce ships. A point of luck for the Americans, though, was that the British, though considering and declaring them as pirates, did not, in fact, hang arrested privateersmen, and in a show of relative mercy simply treated them terribly as prisoners . So the American confidence grew, and British exasperation as well, for while her navy fought valiantly as it could her commerce was dwindling.
Privateer ships varied in size and tonnage, as they were most often modified merchant ships, but by the end of the war America was so dedicated to the noble cause of the privateer that many ships were built and designed specifically as privateer vessels, with as many as twenty-four guns and crews of more than 150 . If it came to be necessary, these high-order privateers could even go up against a sloop or low-grade frigate of the Royal Navy, which became a great merit when Britain began employing more and bigger convoys to protect her merchant ships. In those cases the privateers could have, in actuality, a direct hit to the Royal Navy, even though it were a small one . And the more of a threat the privateers presented, the more naval ships would be sent to convoy, and the less would be available to take decisive action (most likely a vast blockade and bombardment) against the rebels.
It was really all a matter of diversion, well-choreographed by the hands of fate, national and international unrest, and perhaps in a small part the rebellious Americans, that allowed the colonies to come out of their revolution a nation. The Royal Navy was busy enough fighting more important threats to her power, and in the end had to let go of the colonies in the New World so that it could take on the great European navies. In the end, the British navy lost a string of battles when outgunned, the British army lost a war that was more of a national united touch-and-run, and the colonies were by name an independent nation. This was overall ineffectual, and in fact
"the balance of international naval power seemed much as before. Britain was still indisputably the premiere naval power in the world. Single-handed, the British had fought the combined might of four navies to a standstill. The French were still firmly in second place. The Spanish had again demonstrated their capacity for gallant failure. The Dutch had, if nothing else, proven that the tenacious spirit of their great 17th century admirals had not disappeared. The American Navy – a new presence on the military scene – had ceased to exist" .
And the lion had gotten the chance to sharpen its claws – 478 ships in the Royal Navy in 1783 – before the real fight would begin, the fight that would once and for all time know itself as the British Royal Navy's glory days, with Britain's favorite son, Viscount Horatio Nelson, leading the way to triumph aboard his own spectacular Victory.
But such is an account for another time.
Works Cited:
Preston, Anthony, David Lyon, and John H. Batchelor. Navies of the American Revolution. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1975.
Lavery, Brian. Jack Aubrey Commands. London: Conway Maritime Press, 2003.
Coggins, Jack. Ships and Seamen of the American Revolution. Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books, 1969.
Lavery, Brian. Nelson's Navy. Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1989.
Gardiner, Robert, ed. The Line of Battle: The Sailing Warship 1650-1840. London: Conway Maritime Press, 1992.
Tuchman, Barbara W. The First Salute. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.
Allen, Gardner W. A Naval History of the American Revolution. Boston: Houghton, 1913.
This has no footnotes. They did not transfer. Bill Gates wants my soul, but he can't have it.
And now that we've done with that...
Threesome. On the way.
Mm-hm.
Jack Coggins wrote of the American Revolution that it "was fought mainly on land and won mainly on the water" . On a more cursory level, this is the manner in which many textbooks treat the naval interactions in the American War for Independence, giving a nod to the most exciting ship-to-ship skirmishes and praising a few well-romanticized names (John Paul Jones for one), but settling attention mostly on land fighting. Though one cannot deny the strong central role that infantry marches and classic stand-up kneel-down warfare held in the revolution, Britain's backbone was still her navy. As an island nation keeping reign over far distant colonies, Britain needed a strong naval force more than anything else, and to her great fortune she had one. Since victory in the Anglo-Dutch wars in the 1690s, the Royal Navy had been enjoying its privileged place in the eyes of the people, along with its well-feared reputation across the globe. A successful end to the Seven Years' War left the Navy 365 ships strong and attending to new territories from the Mediterranean to the Far East to the Floridas. Only twelve years after that prowess was shown, a fifty-four-ship Continental Navy managed to defeat this ages-old leviathan of the seas. It would appear at first to be an absurd and mysterious fluke, or perhaps a clear sign of dirty cheating. But the Royal Navy was too well experienced to suffer a fluke, and out on flat, open, glassy seas there are few options for dirty cheating. There was more to this pup of a navy than the numbers at first told – more than the handful of brigs, assortment of sloops, and grab-bag of other vessels that sailed under the flag(s) of the Continental Navy. America had, beyond that one commissioned navy, dizzying state navies, undeniable international support, and more than a thousand dauntless privateers . Those were what drew the British into a full-fledged war across the seas, a war that Britain nonetheless won, but a war that, sectioned into a smaller War of Independence, gave America the illusion of defeating the great British lion with a mouse of a haphazard navy.
The Continental Navy itself had, by the end of the war, seven brigs, eleven ships, nineteen frigates, seven sloops, two brigantines, two schooners, three cutters, two xebecs, one lugger, and a single ship of the line, the 74-gun America (the distinctions between these vessels will be explained shortly). The British Navy clearly dwarfed those proud claims, with the simplest example being five grand first-rates, three-decker hundred-gun ships almost two hundred feet long with a more than twenty foot draught (the depth of a ship, from the deck to the keel. One might also note that three gundecks within twenty-two feet does not make for much comfortable headroom.) and a tonnage, or cannon firepower, of over two thousand pounds. This also meant that the majority of these ships' guns were 18- and 24-pounders, common cannon that could do a lot of damage, especially when set against the Americans' 12- or even 9-pounders , which were the heaviest guns a frigate tended to carry.
Before continuing any further in this exploration into the naval construction of the various fleets, it would be well to suffer a simple explanation of the different vessels involved. The first rates, royalty amongst ships, have already been introduced; they carried 100 to 120 guns on three decks. Second rates boasted anywhere from 84 to 98 guns, again often on three decks, slightly more than 175 feet long and 50 feet across. Third rates tended almost entirely towards the two-deckers, as they carried 80, 74, or 64 guns. Fourth rates, again two-deckers, had 60 and 50 guns. Frigates made up the fifth rates, generally with a single gundeck and 30 to 44 guns. Only one ship in the Continental Navy exceeded this rank, and that was the America, the already mentioned 74. Frigates also extended into the sixth rate, with gun numbers as low as 24. Any ship with fewer than 20 guns was 'unrated', and from there it was named after its type or employment. These unrated vessels included brigs, cutters, transports, and more. In the Continental Navy more often than the Royal Navy, one would also find several galleys, small oared warships with an 18pdr in the bow and four3pdr anti-personnel guns, called howitzers, along the sides.
These galleys dominated state navies especially. The Pennsylvania State Navy, largest of them, counted thirteen galleys amongst the number of the fleet: the Experiment, Bulldog, Franklin, Congress, Effingham, Ranger, Burke, Chatham, Dickinson, Hancock, Gen. Washington, Warren, and Camden . These thirteen galleys held a much stronger battery than the usual galley class, with one 32-pounder, four 24-pounders, and eight 18-pounders . (Interestingly, this makes for a tonnage of 272. The average American galley's was 123, with 10 guns .) These ships and the rest of the Pennsylvania Navy, though dismantled and sunk under Washington's orders in April 1778 , saw plenty of action in the few years of their lives. In 1776 they came up against the British reconnaissance frigates Roebuck and Liverpool, of 44 and 28 guns respectively, and chased the frigates downstream past Newcastle . And even after Washington's decree the Pennsylvania Navy was tenacious, keeping the brig Convention (A brig was square-rigged, not ship-rigged, with two masts instead of three. This meant a smaller crew requirement without sacrificing speed, and was ideal for privateering) and fitting her out to be a privateer, then later purchasing the General Greene and with her taking five prizes, and not until 1781 was the Pennsylvania Navy finally disbanded to Washington's satisfaction .
Pennsylvania was far from alone in its individual work against the British; each state, with the exceptions of Delaware and New Jersey, built its own navy, mostly of merchant vessels (or modified merchantmen) for combat against merchant vessels. As a grand total, these navies included some 190 vessels , more than triple the commissioned Continental Navy, and state navies had already been out and in action for months before the Continental Congress decided even to build a singular central one. Though these vivacious little rebels might not have made much of a direct dent in British naval strength, they did startle and surprise the British, who were hardly expecting forces with even the most basic organization. They had ruffled the peacock's royal feathers, and for them that was enough. International grudges would do the rest.
When America called for aid from across the ocean, it was not hard to gain. Europe had recently come out of the Seven Years' War, leaving France and Spain thoroughly defeated by and vengeful against the British, and even before that the Anglo-Dutch wars had sealed an animosity between Britain and Holland. Since "[f]rom the beginning of the Revolution the eyes of America and of France were directed towards one another across the sea" , the French Navy was only too willing to assist the colonists in their cause. They began with gifts of military supplies and of one million francs (soon followed another million from Spain, as is to be expected) , and by 1777 were sailing their men and papers under American captains as a crafty way to dodge the British charges of piracy against them. Upon capture by the British, all the crew would speak French and show French papers, and the British could treat them only as French privateers and, in compliance with the Treaty of Ushant, could not bring charges. The Crown generally considered American vessels to be pirates, for lack of Letter of Marque from a sovereign power (specifically Britain; the Continental Congress was hardly sovereign), but when the American vessels were by all proofs French-commissioned they were not pirates.
In 1778 the French gave up the ghost of Franco-British diplomacy and officially entered the war on America's side with an action against England off Ushant. Thirty-two French ships of the line, with the weather gauge (windward advantage), against thirty British. The wind changed, and it became a tactical victory for the French for they suffered more casualties , but a victory all the same, and it set the two greatest naval powers against each other once again. It also meant, among other things, that there were now one hundred ships of the line added to the American force, with six first rates, two second rates, eighty-two third rates and ten fourth rates . An estimated combined tonnage of 165,000, not to mention ships that could afford to face the best of the British fleet for the sake of the French and the sake of the Americans.
Where the French allied, the Spanish were doubtless swift to follow, and in June of 1779 Spain declared war against England as well. That August a 67-ship set of fleets made for Plymouth, redirected by French order to Cornwall, and rather ignored the nominal rebel cause. But thus was the nature of their alliance of convenience – "They were both bent on doing as much damage to Britain as they could, providing that such efforts worked to their own advantage" . Unfortunately, in this military moment, efforts did not work to either advantage, the fleets fell victim to disease, could find no safe anchorage, and were in the end blown out of the Channel altogether by an unkindly gale. Spain decided she had more pressing tasks than to launch an invasion on Britain, and turned her focus toward Gibraltar and Minorca, for both were under constant pressure from the Royal Navy . Spanish naval force was, in a count purely made of ships of the line, two first rates, two second rates, seventy-one third rates, and two fourth rates . In all, approximately 5,360 guns. This is not much against the full force of Britain's roughly 9,600, but the Royal Navy, as all navies, was split amongst different oppositions and territories, and in this case the split and pull was key to America's success.
The fourth navy in this war, the last one to join forces against the British, was the navy of Holland. The Dutch navy had nothing of the strength to defeat the Royal Navy, but they were tenacious and unforgiving fighters, as both navies made clear in the Anglo-Dutch wars and in battle at Dogger Bank in 1781. In that encounter the Dutch fought without pretense or maneuver, heading their convoy straight for Britain's, and fighting until one of the two could make it through. The Royal Navy sailed it in the end – the Dutch convoy did not; one of their ships even foundered in the aftermath, but it was the most damage the British navy had taken, or would take, in any one conflict throughout the rest of the war . Such is an example of the doggedly determined Dutch, who could at least then occupy British attention if not vanquish British naval excellence. Dutch power was mostly an issue in the West Indies, where they had grand centers of trade on three little islands. Upon declaration of war, Britain was glad to send a fleet or two out after these isles, and in January of 1781 the orders were to seize all Dutch possessions, and Admirals Rodney and Hood were quick to comply. St. Eustatius fell to British hands, as did Saba and St.-Martin, and the Royal Navy now had control of what had been a major trade point for the Americans .
But while the British navy was spread between efforts against France, Spain, and Holland as well as the revolting colonists, while the bigger names in naval warfare bettered it out on their grand international scale where America was just one of the several (though perhaps of slightly more intrigue than the others) territories that hung in the balance, while all the non-neutral world of nautical presence fought the British under the guise of supporting America, the colonists were not idle. Their Continental Navy was certainly superfluous, in most cases, but America's strength lay, on the sea as on land, in the less conventional facets of warfare. In the naval theatre of war, this meant piracy, plain and simple.
American-commissioned privateers vastly outnumbered anything else to come from American dockyards, for obvious reasons, the greatest of which being the incredibly higher pay, and along with that the relative ease of seaboard life as opposed to that in the Continental Navy. Privateersmen received between twelve and sixteen dollars a month while a navy man could expect little more than eight, and privateers fought only when it was completely unavoidable and preferably when a win was certain and after the victory each seaman received a higher percentage of the prize money than a sailor of the Continental Navy would . It is not difficult to see why American privateers numbered well into the thousands, with successes against the British approaching 2,300 in captured and destroyed British merchantmen and privateers, with just more than half as many losses on the American side . This constant molestation of British trade may not have battered her navy, but it did leave her seafolk in general haggard and weary. As Secretary of the Navy John Paul Jones later said in a circular to all captains in 1813, the Americans had "the means of creating a powerful diversion, and of turning the scale of annoyance against the enemy" . Though he addressed this to captains of the Continental Navy, the same cry could just as well have gone out to the scads of privateers throughout the American War for Independence, so well did they follow it.
The British considered American privateering, in fact, not privateering at all, but rather piracy. They did not see the Continental Congress, being a rebellious faction still technically under the rule of the Crown, as having the sovereignty to commission letters of marque, so by all laws and agreements these swarming American privateersmen were as much gallows-birds as the self-serving pirates still cruising the waters. By the letter of the law, the British government would have been completely justified to hang the crew of any American 'privateer' to prey on British commerce ships. A point of luck for the Americans, though, was that the British, though considering and declaring them as pirates, did not, in fact, hang arrested privateersmen, and in a show of relative mercy simply treated them terribly as prisoners . So the American confidence grew, and British exasperation as well, for while her navy fought valiantly as it could her commerce was dwindling.
Privateer ships varied in size and tonnage, as they were most often modified merchant ships, but by the end of the war America was so dedicated to the noble cause of the privateer that many ships were built and designed specifically as privateer vessels, with as many as twenty-four guns and crews of more than 150 . If it came to be necessary, these high-order privateers could even go up against a sloop or low-grade frigate of the Royal Navy, which became a great merit when Britain began employing more and bigger convoys to protect her merchant ships. In those cases the privateers could have, in actuality, a direct hit to the Royal Navy, even though it were a small one . And the more of a threat the privateers presented, the more naval ships would be sent to convoy, and the less would be available to take decisive action (most likely a vast blockade and bombardment) against the rebels.
It was really all a matter of diversion, well-choreographed by the hands of fate, national and international unrest, and perhaps in a small part the rebellious Americans, that allowed the colonies to come out of their revolution a nation. The Royal Navy was busy enough fighting more important threats to her power, and in the end had to let go of the colonies in the New World so that it could take on the great European navies. In the end, the British navy lost a string of battles when outgunned, the British army lost a war that was more of a national united touch-and-run, and the colonies were by name an independent nation. This was overall ineffectual, and in fact
"the balance of international naval power seemed much as before. Britain was still indisputably the premiere naval power in the world. Single-handed, the British had fought the combined might of four navies to a standstill. The French were still firmly in second place. The Spanish had again demonstrated their capacity for gallant failure. The Dutch had, if nothing else, proven that the tenacious spirit of their great 17th century admirals had not disappeared. The American Navy – a new presence on the military scene – had ceased to exist" .
And the lion had gotten the chance to sharpen its claws – 478 ships in the Royal Navy in 1783 – before the real fight would begin, the fight that would once and for all time know itself as the British Royal Navy's glory days, with Britain's favorite son, Viscount Horatio Nelson, leading the way to triumph aboard his own spectacular Victory.
But such is an account for another time.
Works Cited:
Preston, Anthony, David Lyon, and John H. Batchelor. Navies of the American Revolution. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1975.
Lavery, Brian. Jack Aubrey Commands. London: Conway Maritime Press, 2003.
Coggins, Jack. Ships and Seamen of the American Revolution. Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books, 1969.
Lavery, Brian. Nelson's Navy. Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1989.
Gardiner, Robert, ed. The Line of Battle: The Sailing Warship 1650-1840. London: Conway Maritime Press, 1992.
Tuchman, Barbara W. The First Salute. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.
Allen, Gardner W. A Naval History of the American Revolution. Boston: Houghton, 1913.
This has no footnotes. They did not transfer. Bill Gates wants my soul, but he can't have it.
And now that we've done with that...
Threesome. On the way.
Mm-hm.