Rodney 27

Rodney 27

For an hour or so our advantage of position was not available. The

thunder of so many guns had beaten down the wind. Conquerors and

conquered lay bound by the calm. A little after mid-day a gentle breeze

arose, and the English streamed down on the enemy. The signal for the

line of battle was hauled down, and we advanced in no order, as needing

none against a foe already shattered. It has always been the weakness of

the French to be enslaved by rules, and to become panic-stricken when

these break down. There was panic among them now. Signal after signal

was hoisted in vain by their admiral. Bougainville, tied by ill-will as

much as by the calm, did nothing; Vaudreuil did little. The English as

they felt the wind--all of them, that is, whose rigging had not been too

severely cut up--pressed upon the enemy, steering, by a natural impulse

and without express orders, to where the mighty bulk of the _Ville de

Paris_ and the flag of Grasse pointed out the great prize. The crippled

_Glorieux_ was the first of the enemy to surrender. A gallant attempt to

save her was made by the French frigate _Richmond_, commanded by Captain

Mortemart, a gentleman, as his name shows, of a good house. He offered

to take the crippled liner in tow, but Trogoff de Kerlessi would not

allow his gallant countryman to sacrifice himself and his ship in vain.

The English were closing round. Trogoff cut the cable, telling Mortemart

to save himself, and then surrendered his shattered vessel, as a brave

man might, without dishonour. There was some honour in defeating enemies

of that stamp. The _César_ hauled down her colours soon after. The

_Hector_ and the _Ardent_ fell next. This last was a most welcome prize.

She had been taken from the English by the great combined fleet of

Frenchmen and Spaniards which cruised at the mouth of the Channel in

1779. She alone had pushed out from among Bougainville’s squadron to the

help of her admiral, and was close to him when she struck. Her captain’s

name was Gouzillon. The last of the French prizes to be taken was the

_Ville de Paris_. The light winds made our movements slow, and our ships

only came up with her when the afternoon was wearing on. They tackled

her to port and to starboard, but the admiral fought as a man fights who

wishes to atone by heroism for all faults. His cartridges were used up,

and it was necessary to hoist powder-barrels out of the hold, and serve

out the powder with the ladle. The solid fog of smoke between decks

choked the lanterns by which the men worked below. Still, until nearly

six he had not surrendered. Then, with the feeling which caused Francis

I. at Pavia to refuse to give up his sword till he could hand it to the

Viceroy of Naples, the _alter ego_ of a sovereign and in some sort his

equal, he looked about for a flag-officer to whom to surrender. At that

moment Samuel Hood bore down on him in the _Barfleur_. She had been long

becalmed, and it had been necessary to get the boats out to tow her into

the breeze. Now she was pressing on to lay alongside the _Ville de

Paris_. Grasse turned towards her, firing a gun of salute. Hood

concluded that his old friend of the fights off Martinique and St. Kitts

wished to surrender to him. He returned the salute, ranged up alongside,

and the two admirals fought a space for honour’s sake. There was no want

of cartridges on board the _Barfleur_. Her guns were cold. Her men were

fresh. Her terrible fire speedily overpowered the languid answer of the

_Ville de Paris_, whose crew, diminished by a half, were fighting

hopelessly in the dark of the smoke with guns which they could only

slowly feed with powder. After a few minutes Grasse concluded that

enough had been done. There were but three unwounded men on his

upper-deck, of whom he was one. More men had been slain in his ship than

in the whole British fleet. There were not two square feet of his upper

works unshattered by shot. His rigging was a wreck. At six o’clock he

hauled down the Fleur de Lys with his own hands. A few minutes later he

stepped into the cutter which shot alongside him from the _Barfleur_,

and was taken a prisoner to Hood. By Hood he was taken to Rodney, and so

ended a career which might have finished with honour if he had not later

disgraced himself by ignoble attempts to throw the blame of defeat on

his captains.

 

The battle was over, and had been over for some time; but in the opinion

of many officers the pursuit should have lasted longer. If we can

believe Thesiger, who wrote a few months later to his brother, Douglas

pressed Rodney to follow the French through the night. Having wedged

ourselves between Vaudreuil and Bougainville, it would seem that we

might have followed and crushed either. The French were certainly broken

into two. Part of them fled in panic to Curaçoa, six hundred miles off;

others to San Domingo. But Rodney thought otherwise. He--so says

Thesiger--silenced Douglas by telling him that he had already spoken too

much. The captain of the fleet was beyond dispute so stung by this, or

some similar, rebuke that he seriously thought of resigning his place to

Fanshawe of the _Ajax_. He thought better of it, and was always

afterwards perfectly loyal to his admiral when busybodies asked him if

enough had been done. “We had a great deal to do, sir, and I think you

will allow we did a great deal,” was his uniform reply. Rodney did

answer the critics by giving his reasons for not pursuing. He alleged

the crippled state of some of his ships, the probability that the French

might reunite, the chance that the prizes might be lost, the necessity

of going on to Jamaica and looking to its safety. These are, frankly,

not reasons which would have satisfied Hawke, or Rodney himself twenty

years before. But he was old, broken by disease, his hour of full

triumph had come late, he had that day had thirteen hours of incessant

strain of work and anxiety. Something must be allowed for human

weakness. The pursuit was stopped and the fleet lay to for the night.

The last incident of the battle was the loss of the _César_--a

foreshadowing of what was to follow, for none of our prizes lived to

reach England. After the surrender the French crew broke into disorder,

and one of them, entering her spirit-room with a naked light, set fire

to an unheaded cask of ratafia. The flames spread, and the _César_

burned to the water’s edge. The English prize-crew perished in her, the

lieutenant in command being seen in the stern-walk fighting the fire to

the last. No boat dared approach: the sharks were swarming under the

counter; and he stayed to die in the flames, at his post.

 

Such, as far as I have been able to realise it, was the great battle

sometimes called by us “of the Saints,” but most commonly “of April

12th,” and by the French termed the battle off Dominica. The failure to

pursue was a blot; but after all, as Sir Charles Douglas was wont to

say, “a great deal _had_ been done.” If we had not twenty prizes instead

of five, we had destroyed at a blow the laboriously-built-up prestige of

the French fleets in the New World, which was something. We had

restored our own nerve and shaken the enemy’s. This result was fully

shown some months later when Howe sailed on the final relief of

Gibraltar. On that occasion the combined French and Spanish fleets

shrank timidly from measuring themselves with a greatly inferior English

force. The immediate effect of the battles was to break up the French

fleet in the West Indies and to save Jamaica. Vaudreuil, who fled to San

Domingo, waited only to collect as many ships as he could, and then

sailed for the coast of North America. The French ships which had taken

refuge at Curaçoa made no further attempt to keep the sea. It is true

that during the remainder of the war, which dragged on till the

beginning of 1783, the allies collected considerable fleets and

continued to talk of renewing the attack on the West Indies. English

Ministers, when called upon to defend the peace then made, pointed to

the size of these fleets as reasons why we should accept less good terms

than the nation thought we had a right to demand. But in truth the

allies made no real use of those forces, and they were only quoted by

English Ministers as an excuse for doing what they felt to be made

necessary by the financial burden imposed by the war, and the fatigue

caused by five years of fighting. Essentially the peace was a good one.

We were, indeed, compelled to acknowledge the independence of the United

States, and we restored Minorca and Florida to Spain; but we kept

Gibraltar, we fixed our grip for ever on India, and we settled on equal

terms with France. Our position was in reality intact and our spirit

unbroken. That this was so was largely due to the victory of April 12th.

It is therefore right that this day, and the man who commanded on it,

should be remembered among the great days and the great men of the

Empire.

 

The battle has a place all its own in the history of our navy. 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. Perhaps a little too much has been made of the

manœuvre of “breaking the line.” The value of a manœuvre in war is

apt to depend on the value of the men who make it. The history of our

own navy contains a convincing example of that truth. In 1811 Sir

William Hoste fought an action off Lissa with a squadron of frigates

against a French frigate squadron under Dubourdieu. The Frenchman

deliberately imitated Nelson’s plan of attack at Trafalgar. Yet he was

completely beaten, and fell in the defeat. It would seem, therefore,

that something more goes to the gaining of victories than manœuvres.

In truth, the English fleet won because it was infinitely superior to

the French--a hundred years ahead of it, as the prisoners acknowledged.

If it had not so won before, it was because it had been tied down by

pedantic rules. When Rodney broke from them he gave the real superiority

of our ships a chance to exert itself. That superiority he himself had

helped to create. No Sir Charles Douglas, no Edmund Affleck, no Hood

even, can take that glory away. For the rest, are we the poorer because

we had a splendid force as well as a great commander?

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER XIII

 

THE END

 

 

When Rodney issued the order to cease action on the evening of April

12th, his active life had practically come to an end. He proceeded with

his fleet and his prizes to Jamaica, after despatching Hood, somewhat

tardily, in pursuit of the scattered French. Hood picked up two liners

and a few smaller craft in the Mona Channel between Porto Rico and San

Domingo. At Jamaica, Rodney was received with natural and well-deserved

enthusiasm by the people whom he had saved from a great danger. He

remained at Port Royal till the end of July. The work of refitting the

squadron occupied him much, and was not made lighter by the condition of

the dockyard, which had fallen into bad order since he had himself been

on the station in 1774. He looked forward to exercising his command for

some time longer--even to the end of the war. In a letter to his wife he

begs her to contradict all reports that he was coming home. If he had

wished to return after his victory, he might have done so with credit,

for his work was done and his health had again broken down. At Port

Royal he was so ill as to be compelled to hand over the command for a

time to his second. He still, however, clung to his great office, and

in the circumstances he cannot be blamed for being loath to retire in

the presence of the enemy.

 

Had he known what was passing in England while he was breaking up the

French fleet it is possible that a request to be relieved might have