Convoys, The British Struggle against Napoleonic Europe and America - Roger Knight

This week I finished a book I've been reading for the last month, 'Convoys' written by Roger Knight and have now sat down to compose my thoughts about this book.

At the present time I find myself well into a 'deep-dive' into the age of sail with my current 'All at Sea' collection of model ships being added to weekly as I attempt to indulge my passion of exploring as much about this fascinating period of naval history; particularly in the history of Great Britain where the naval heritage and traditions have still left a marked impression on the country in terms of its language, with expressions such as 'flash in the pan', 'nipper' and 'cock up' recalling the great days of sailing warfare, and of of course our street signage such as pubs like the 'Lord Nelson' or 'The Rodney' to even the names of roads and streets with one of our main roads in Exmouth named 'Camperdown Terrace'. 

The big battles and many of the smaller actions are well accounted for in British historical literature and of course in the fictional novels of O'Brian, Forester, Kent and others giving a certain familiarity to anyone interested in the era and having done a modicum of reading on the subject, but I have to say until I read Roger Knight's book my understanding of the complexities of convoy management during this period was sketchy to say the least with much of it based on a picture in my mind built on the fiction and some of the historical actions fought around convoys, but it has to be said focussed more on the ship fighting aspect than the reason for the convoy itself and the tactics used to defend it, let alone many other complexities I had absolutely no knowledge of until reading this book.

End of the action between HMS Arrow 24-guns, and Acheron, and the French frigates Hortense and Incorruptible - Francis Sartorious (NMM).
Arrow was sunk in the Mediterranean on 3-4 February 1805, but the convoy she was escorting escaped, this action being described in Chapter 7 of the book.

So as well as filling a gaping hole in my understanding of naval warfare from this era I also found a book jammed pack with historical accounts and anecdotes of the people involved to accompany the maps and statistics that produced a very readable and enjoyable learning process and fuelling yet another rich seam of possible gaming scenarios built around this fresh understanding.

The first impression this book made on me was the attractive dust jacket it comes with, with a stunning Nicholas Pocock painting, entitled 'Fleet of East Indiamen at Sea', courtesy of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, for which Roger Knight is curator emeritus, and reminds me that I am long overdue for another visit to this very important establishment.

To quote the inside of the dust jacket, 

'The first account of Britain's convoys during the Napoleonic Wars, revealing their vital role in victory.' 

The book begins with a prologue that succinctly describes one of the key problems faced by naval escort captains and merchant ship masters successfully managing to navigate between departure points and final destinations, namely the problem of calculating longitude during cloudy conditions which precluded sightings of the moon to allow a lunar distance calculation to be made.

John Harrison's H1 Marine Timekeeper

The solution to this thorny problem was John Harrison's chronometer, an example of which enabled Captain James Cook to complete his round the world voyage in 1781 and facilitated the successful arrival of the first fleet of the eleven naval and merchant ships to Australia's Botany Bay in 1788.

As an aside and in conjunction with preparing this review I happened to watch an excellent YouTube presentation by Drachinifel looking at the invention of the Harrison Clocks, which is well worth a watch (no pun intended), if you haven't seen it - link below.

Despite this seemingly essential piece of marine equipment being vital for safer navigation, the navy neither required a young officer to know how to make the calculations to use one, nor provided a chronometer to be used anyway, and by 1802, as Knight points out, and the start of the Napoleonic conflict, only seven per cent of British warships had a chronometer on board, and the navy only began to issue them from this date, which would see ships in home waters not receiving them until the 1840's.

This lack of foresight and planning forced commanders to rely on dead reckoning and the use of marine landmarks and depths to confirm their positions, with for example depths taken with the lead on the well charted Grand Banks off Newfoundland to confirm positions, or by following a latitude to a prominent cape, with plenty off nearby deep water, such as that off Lisbon or Cape St Vincent.

He then illustrates how this serious lack could have disastrous consequences, siting a convoy from Cork Harbour bound for the West Indies on the 27th March 1804, with 67 merchantmen, escorted by the 36-gun frigate HMS Apollo and the 32-gun frigate Carysfort, that would see this dead reckoning method of trying to ensure a convoy was well out into the Atlantic in the face of a westerly wind, end up with the Apollo and 27 West India merchant ships striking a shoal off the Portuguese coast near Cape Mondego resulting in 7,000 tons of shipping lost on the night of the 2nd April, together with hundreds of seamen, including 62 officers and men from Apollo's crew, including her commander Captain John Dixon.

The introduction to the book then goes on to define what a convoy is with a legal quote from Chief Justice Lord Mansfield in 1782;

'A convoy is a naval force, under the command of that person, whom government has appointed.'

Knight then provides a more detailed definition;

'Convoys were, and are, temporary gatherings of ships voyaging between friendly ports, keeping together to be protected by escorting warships.'

going on to assert;

'During the days of sail, the timing of convoys were governed by seasonal wind patterns and ocean currents, and in northern latitudes by winter ice. Sailings were also decided by harvest seasons and the quickest route to market.'

Perhaps it is this second description of the weather patterns and commercial decisions based on seasonal harvesting and buying patterns that highlight factors that are not immediately at the forefront of a modern mind used to ships powered by steam turbines such as those convoyed during the Second World War not so affected by wind and currents and with commercial needs playing a much less of a role in the industrial wars of the twentieth century compared to those of the nineteenth, where the national interest trumped that of personal commercial gain.

However it was this commercial gain and the revenue that followed that provided Britain with a war winning strategy that kept the country solvent through twenty five years of war whilst her enemies went bankrupt, enabling her to stay in the fight, although in the end it wasn't money that the country was in want of, but manpower, a problem that meant the war ended just in time, with Britain at the end of her manpower reserves and in urgent need of victory.

Convoy management with sailing ships was anything but dull or routine with the need for constant attention to instructions, reading signals, keeping station and avoiding collisions, particularly at night; and with the anxiety that stormy weather might disperse the convoy, and the need to assist those in trouble or to take in tow slow ships, with these problems only exacerbated by merchantmen when traveling unladen and in poor trim, making their handling qualities even more problematic.

In addition a fast warship might have to constantly trim her sails to avoid speeding off over the horizon, this whilst having the escort constantly on the lookout for hostile privateers or warships. Tension between the convoy commodore and the masters of the ships under his charge was often the rule.

A convoy getting underway, as the frigate escort, heaved to in the centre of the picture, gathers the ships, possibly off Portsmouth. The picture was commissioned by the owner of the Castor, the West Indiaman in the foreground.

Knight makes a very good point that the convoy system was at the heart of British naval strategy, yet is often overlooked by historians as being incidental to the main business of winning a naval war, that is by battle or blockade, and thus trade protection was 'presumed', with many naval officers hardly mentioning their role in this everyday occupation and with only a small minority developing into specialists at leading large convoys and becoming proud to have done so.

HMAS Providence & Capt. Peter Rye

One particular example of such a specialist commander was Captain Peter Rye commanding His Majesty's Armed Ship HMAS Providence a Brig-Sloop armed with fourteen 18-pounder carronades and formerly an ex-collier of 291 tons hired out to the navy by its owner Mr William Clarke Jnr., and raising a civilian crew of forty-three men and three boys, including a master, surgeon, boatswain and carpenter, but no marines, purser or captain's clerk. See the link above for a brief history of HMAS Providence in the North Sea.

Rye would command the Providence for over eight years and develop into a well liked and respected commander on the North Sea - Baltic convoys. In addition being a volunteer crew operating under naval discipline, the 19th century forerunner to the 20th century armed merchant cruisers, they were more highly paid, with an average age of twenty-five and more than half of them married and mostly able-seamen with only five rated ordinary seamen.

Captain Rye's discipline record illustrates a very different ethic aboard than was common on most regular navy ships with a much harsher discipline regime, with no disciplinary proceedings recorded in the log book for more than eight years with Rye allowing his crew freedom to go ashore with plenty of leave, and, with the crew hired and paid for by the owner whilst in service to the navy, they were protected against impressment.

When Rye's informal command operating out of Grimsby for convoy management was ended in 1809, the merchants of Hull responded with a letter to their local MP recommending to their Lordships of the Admiralty, Rye's promotion and their personal appreciation for his services in protecting the trade of Hull. In 1846 Peter Rye retired with the rank of rear-admiral.

The officers and sailors of the Royal Navy spent much of their time at sea convoying merchant ships, troop ships and store ships in European waters and around the world, which when put in the mix with blockade duties and cruising for privateers put a huge strain on British naval resources in ships but most particularly in manpower with, during the years between May 1803 to the end of hostilities in 1815, the loss of 409 British warships of which 250 were wrecked or foundered, principally caused by the need to convoy and blockade in winter, seeing an annual average of ten more warships lost each year than in the preceding French Revolutionary War 1793-1802 and seeing thirteen ships of the line included in those lost of which eight were wrecked and two foundered.

The Harriet government transport, one of hundreds of merchant ships chartered by the Transport Board. These ships were numbered for easy identification and '660' can be seen painted on the hull just under her anchor.

The manpower issues reached a tipping point towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars with the declaration of war by the United States leading to the demands for skilled able seamen outgrowing supply, with the greatest number of seamen in service reached in 1813 with 147,000 men alongside a parallel demand for men by the merchant marine seeing their numbers increase over the preceding years from 54,000 in 1738 to over 91,000 in 1791; and seeing the Admiralty attempt to attract more skilled seamen into the navy by changing the rules of distribution of prize money under the Prize Act of June 1808, with greater shares moved away from senior commissioned officers towards petty officers and able seamen, those men in most demand.

The actual mechanics of policing trade and steering its passage through British controlled shipping and ports posed challenges particularly with neutral shipping using false flags and papers, seeing in 1803 one-hundred French vessels based in Bordeaux register under a foreign flag and over half of them going to America. French cargoes seemingly transported by neutral ships which then broke their voyage in a neutral port, only prevented with the imposition of the Orders-in-Council in May 1806 announcing the blockade of Northern European ports, declaring all ports under French control were blockaded and that any ship entering or leaving them were lawful prize.

With Napoleon's Berlin decree in November, starting the Continental System, neutral shipping was effectively eliminated with enemy and neutral shipping now carrying two sets of papers as they attempted to access licenses to get around the respective blockades, with the British seeking to undermine Napoleon's dictact by welcoming all neutral shipping to join a British convoy provided they accompanied it for the whole voyage to and from a friendly port.

The Convoy Act of 1803 established the framework by which the Admiralty regulated the convoy system, declaring all ships engaged in foreign trade had to sail in convoy, with in theory the power to punish ships' masters from running from a convoy.

From the time of printed and signed instructions by the convoy commodore to each master, the merchant ships were under his orders, and the insurance for a ship and its cargo was invalid if a ship broke convoy and was captured, thus forcing owners to instruct their masters to keep in convoy.

This last injunction in the legislation on masters and owners, re 'running from a convoy', points to the earlier remark about the commercial interests of civil merchantmen in the nineteenth century, seeking to get their cargo to port and effectively market before their competitors, most likely sailing in the same convoy, leading to the previous practice of breaking away from a convoy once close to the arrival port to beat the competition.

Similarly masters of vessels that had insurance were known to willingly let their ships be taken by a privateer on a return voyage sailing empty of cargo, simply to claim the insurance back on a lost ship.

With this commercial need in respect to mercantile trade, Britain and France were keen to regulate trade not prohibit it and thus licences could be granted for the supply of commodities to the enemy, seeing for example, in the autumn of 1809, the Privy Council issuing licences to ships registered in any country except France to import grain, meal or flour into England from ports in France or Holland which Napoleon reciprocated by seeing this as an opportunity to take advantage of poor harvests in Britain by forcing payment to be made in silver, thus reducing Britain's bullion reserves. The returning merchants could then return to France carrying colonial, East India and prize goods. Once the grain shortage in Britain ended the licences were rescinded.

This book very clearly and neatly lays out the situation that regulated British convoys, as highlighted by the points mentioned and then goes on to look at the key areas of trade around the globe and the particular local issues of weather and the countries that operated within that given theatre and British responses to them, together with the important commodities that were traded for and their impact on Britain's war effort, be that prime saltpetre from the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily for the manufacture of gunpowder or timber and hemp from the Baltic to support ship building and maintenance, with specific chapters looking at coastal waters and the Western Approaches, the Mediterranean, East and West Indies, the Baltic and the North Atlantic.

The Battle of Cape St Vincent 1780 and Admiral Luis de Cordova's capture of 55 merchantmen

Winston Churchill commented about his own fears on the ability for Britain to wage war in the Second World War had the Allied anti-U-Boat campaign not succeeded in removing the threat to Allied convoys supplying Britain with food and material and Knight makes a similar point for the Napoleonic Wars recounting the shockwave caused during the American War of Independence when the Spanish fleet under Admiral Luis de Cordova captured 55 merchantmen and troopships from a convoy of 63 ships on their way to relieve Gibraltar, seeing 1,350 seamen, 1,250 troops and their weapons captured and an insurance bill of £1,500,000 falling on Lloyds and the East India Company for the losses, causing many underwriters to fail and with August 1780 still remembered in the history of Lloyds as the 'Black Month'.

The Battle of Pulo Aor, 15th February 1804 - Robert Dodd

The retreat of Rear Admiral Linois's Squadron consisting of the 'Marengo' of 84 guns, the 'Belle Poule' and 'Semillante' of 44 guns each, a corvette of 28 guns and a Batavian brig of 18 guns from a fleet of 16 of the East India Company ships after the action off Pulo Aor in the China Seas on the 15th. February 1804

As Knight points out, if a similar fate had befallen the fabulously rich East India convoy at Pulo Aor in 1804, successfully defended by Commodore Nathanial Dance or a squadron of French warships had managed to sortie from Brest and devastated a convoy taking troops to Wellington in the Peninsula or indeed Danish warships had repeated a success against another large British convoy returning from the Baltic or Napoleon had not been compelled to invade Russia to prevent them breaking his Continental System with illicit trade with Britain and his subsequent defeat in the winter of 1812 then perhaps world history may have been changed dramatically with Britain's likely defeat.

A memorial stone in Mylor churchyard, Cornwall, remembering the 369 casualties of the shipwrecked Queen. On the 13th January 1814 she dragged her single anchor in a gale and struck a rock 40 yards from Trefusis Point in Falmouth harbour. She had nearly 500 passengers returning from the Peninsular War. She broke up very quickly, with the wrecking likely caused by incompetence and even drunkenness, and likely the most avoidable shipwreck of the war.

In the final analysis the greatest threat to Britain's convoys proved to be Nature herself and the vagaries and hazards of navigating the world's oceans. To quote Knight;

'In all, between 1803 and 1815, the navy lost 409 warships - 61 percent wrecked or foundered, 37 per cent due to enemy action. Of this total, 275 were sloops of 18 guns and below, including gun brigs and boats, cutters and luggers. Five thousand seamen were drowned or killed and approximately the same number taken prisoner. The casualty figures were approaching double those sustained during the French Revolutionary War.'

Convoys consists of 375 pages from the Prologue to the Index and consists of the following;

List of Illustrations (21 Colour Plates)

Acknowledgements

Note on Conventions 

Maps:

1. Oceanic Trade: convoy routes and rendezvous

2. Home Waters: convoy routes and rendezvous

3. North Atlantic: war materials and bullion routes

4. The Mediterranean

5. The North Sea and approaches to the Baltic.

6. North Atlantic military expeditions and supply convoys

Prologue

Introduction

1. Convoying before 1803

2. The Admiralty and Trade Protection, 1803-1815

3. Warships and Merchantmen

4. Coastal Waters and the Western Approaches, 1803-1814

5. North Sea Convoys: Two Commanders, 1804-1812

6. Escorting the Troops: Europe and the Overseas Garrisons, 1803-1816

7. The Mediterranean: Fruit, Sulphur and Soldiers, 1803-1814

8. The East and West Indies: Two Sources of National Wealth, 1803-1814

9. The Battle for the Baltic: Timber, Hemp and Wheat, 1807-1812

10. The North Atlantic: War on Two Fronts, 1812-1815

Conclusion

Epilogue: The Second World War

Appendix: 

Losses of Small Warships by Station, 1803-1815

Timeline 1803-1815

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

I picked up my hardcover edition from Amazon for £20 and at the time of writing is also available in paperback for £10.55.

An excellent read, full of detail and dramatic accounts of British convoys in the Napoleonic Wars, 1803-1815 - Recommended.

Next up, I've got seven new models to present, two of which will be on the table taking part in a very big-big game, and here's a sneak preview in the riggers yard this week.

The big-big game in question is Trafalgar fought over two-days at the historic 16th century Llancaiach Fawr Manor with friends from the Devon Wargames Group and the Penarth & District Wargames Society to play a two day refight of the Battle of Trafalgar using Kiss Me Hardy in the grand manner with the 1:700 models.

Visitors to the manor will be welcome to come and see the game.

Llancaiach Fawr Manor

More Anon

JJ