Nelson's Battles. Nicholas Tracy
enforced on professional sailors. These were still held to have an obligation to provide their services to the Crown in time of war. The Crown enforced this obligation by the rugged means of the impressment service. Popular commanders like Nelson were often able to fill their ships’ crew lists with volunteers from their own districts, but, where dependence had to be placed on the press, recruitment was grossly inefficient. The benchmark provided by the Seven Years War indicated that the British were unlikely to be able to man more than thirty-nine ships of the line at the end of the first year of mobilisation. At the outbreak of war there was a danger that the French, who did have a system of conscription established by Colbert at the end of the seventeenth century, would be able to get their fleet to sea sooner.
Ultimately, if they could avoid defeat in the first months, the British could always keep a significantly larger fleet at sea than could the French. But when France was allied with Spain, as she was for much of the eighteenth century, or when France controlled the fleets of the Netherlands and Italy as she did under Napoleon, the pressure on British naval resources became more demanding. In 1795 there were 512,000 tons of ships in the Royal Navy, 284,000 in the French Marine, and 264,000 in the Spanish navy. The smaller navies totalled 565,000 tons, of which the largest was the Russian navy with 140,000 in the Baltic and 42,000 in the Black Sea. At the time of Trafalgar, the Royal Navy had 569,000 tons of shipping, the French Marine 182,000, the Spanish navy 139,000, and the smaller navies totalled 465,000 tons.
Britain had a greater need for cruisers, which in the eighteenth century was a term used to identify older and smaller warships stationed at focal points in the sea lanes to protect merchant shipping, and to deny the sea to enemy ships and for convoy of trade. Accordingly, the figures for total tonnage are not an adequate measure of the ability of the Royal Navy to contain the Franco-Spanish battlefleet. In 1760 Britain had had a battlefleet 3 per cent larger than that of France and Spain combined, but in the American Revolutionary War France and Spain were able to build up a battlefleet strength nominally 44 per cent larger than that of the British navy, and for a while even dominated the English Channel. In 1790 they still had a 34 per cent combined superiority. Spain was unable to build any more ships of the line after 1797, however, and French construction did not keep up with that in Britain. At the time of Trafalgar the French could put to sea only forty-four ships of the line, and Spain only thirty, provided they could be manned. The 135 ships of the line Britain was then able to put to sea outnumbered the combined battlefleet to such an extent that the chance that the Franco-Spanish commanders would be able to defeat an isolated British squadron was small. For that matter, Nelson expressed his belief that the British must inevitably win such an encounter strategically, even if they lost it tactically, because they could afford to take much heavier losses.
The surprise declaration of war the British Government made in 1803, putting an end to the brief and hostile Peace of Amiens, was important to the relative naval strength Britain was able to command in the following years because British cruisers were able to sweep up the French merchant marine. An important part of the pool of French seamen was denied to the French navy. Because the relative weakness of the French navy made it necessary to avoid encounters with the British except under ideal conditions, it could not give the inexperienced replacement men enough sea time to develop their skills. In comparison with the French, however, Spanish ships were far worse off for skilled seamen. The Spanish mercantile marine employed less that 6,000 seamen on seagoing vessels, but the navy needed in the order of 90,000 men.41 The ships of which the complements ranged from 606 to 1,113 men were only able to put to sea with crews of landsmen and soldiers stiffened by sixty or at most eighty experienced seamen.
The French and Spanish navies had different loyalties and different strategic objectives. The extent of the Spanish empire meant that her alliance was nearly as much a liability as it was an asset for France, apart from the money that Spain was able to contribute to the common cause, and the diversion of British energies which occurred when campaigns were launched to seize Spanish resources.42 It was the Spanish strategic objective of keeping the scene of naval conflict well away from their empire that led to the 1779 Franco-Spanish deployment to the Channel, where they heavily outnumbered the British but were so poorly co-ordinated that they were more a danger to themselves than to Britain. The people of Devon and Cornwall stopped eating fish because of the number of dead bodies that were thrown overboard from the combined fleet.
In 1803, Admiral Don Frederico Gravina, who was then ambassador to Paris, made it clear to Napoleon that the Spanish navy did not want to become locked up in Brest as it had between 1799 and the Peace of Amiens. His secret instructions were based on the need to have forces available to protect the Spanish coast, and on the cold fact that it was not in the interest of Spain that England should be invaded.43 Napoleon did not allow his plans to be affected by Gravina’s representations, but two years later Gravina commanded the Spanish forces in the campaign leading to Trafalgar. His influence over the French commander, Admiral Villeneuve, may have been important in ensuring that, in fact, the combined fleet did not sail for Brest.
The principal incentive for the British to seek decisive battles with the French and Spanish fleets was that, ultimately, they did have to be able to defeat at sea any invasion attempt escorted by a battlefleet. The British army was too small to defeat an invasion in force once it was ashore. That which might have to be faced in the end might as well be faced at the onset.
The other strategic motive for seeking battle was that Britain’s capacity to influence events on the continent depended largely upon the effectiveness of their fleet, both in the defence of trade and in the capacity to provide support for allies. If British forces were contained by Franco-Spanish squadrons maintaining fleets-in-being in defended harbours, few resources would be available for more offensive pursuit of British foreign policy.
Britain’s Naval Strategy
The most important reason for Britain maintaining a navy was to prevent invasion from the continent. The Trafalgar campaign, which ended in Nelson’s last and greatest battle, had started as a classic effort at power projection. Napoleon was frustrated in his conquest of Europe by the continued resistance of Britain and determined to take it off the map by invasion. To do so, he concentrated soldiers in the northern departments of France, built landing craft, and attempted to deploy French, Spanish and Dutch naval forces so that they could support a crossing of the short sea route to southern England. The British Government constructed coastal defences, notably the famous Martello Towers, to make it difficult for the soldiers to get ashore, but the principal defence against invasion was recognised to be the effective counteraction of the Royal Navy.
Chart of the Strait and Bay of Gibraltar. ‘Gibraltar, the Calpe of the Ancients, is situated in the province of Andalusia in Spain, and is the strongest fortification in Europe. It has been in the possession of the English since the year 1704’. From The Naval Chronicle.
Next in importance to the defence of British shores, was the defence of Britain’s allies. The inability of the small British economy to support an army on the scale of that of France, Spain or Austria meant that alliances with one or more continental military powers were an essential defensive requirement. It was necessary to ensure that the French could not concentrate their efforts upon building naval forces. The classic expression of this concern, that ‘France will outdo us at sea, when they have nothing to fear by land’, had been made by the Duke of Newcastle in 1749.44 The armies of her allies were important to Britain’s naval defences.
Over the course of the century it had been learnt that the best way for London to acquire influence in central and eastern Europe, in order to construct alliances which could preoccupy French military planners, was by acquiring a dominant position in the naval affairs of the Mediterranean. In the Mediterranean area, where roads were long and difficult, or non-existant, naval forces possessed the greatest influence through their capacity to convoy troop ships. The acquisition of Gibraltar in 1704 gave the fleet a forward base that made possible year-round deployment into the Mediterranean. The mobility this provided for the small British army, and for the armies of the smaller Mediterranean states with which Britain might be allied, put a significant political