Caribbean Comeback

When the guns had been silenced and the smoke had cleared, British Admiral Sir George Rodney had an armchair brought up to the deck of his flagship, HMS Formidable. There, in the words of historian Barbara Tuchman, he “sat in the moonlight contemplating his colossal prize and expressing from time to time murmurs of self-appreciation of his success.”

He had won, she wrote, “the most significant sea combat prior to Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar.”

Against prevailing naval practice and the proscriptions of the Fighting Instructions of the Royal Navy, in April 1782 Rodney had broken from the British battle line and sailed through a gap in the French formation risking censure from the Admiralty—or even a firing squad such as the one that had executed Admiral John Byng 25 years earlier. (See “The Sad Fate of Admiral Byng,” August 2019, pp. 42–45.) But Rodney’s attack had turned the battle in Britain’s favor. The British had captured four French ships, including the French flagship, the 104-gun Ville de Paris, the “colossal prize,” and sank a fifth, the 74-gun Diadême.

Sitting in the moonlight, Rodney knew his victory had saved him from censure.

But he also knew that the British victory at the Battle of the Saintes—as that day’s fighting came to be known (the Bataille de la Dominique to the French)—had helped restore British naval mastery of the Caribbean after its losses in the American colonies, and it had burnished Britian’s sinking prestige worldwide.

British Naval Pride at a Low Ebb

Shortly after sunrise on 8 April 1782, a message had arrived for Rodney on board the Formidable, which was anchored in Gros Islet Bay at the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. The message from the scouting frigate HMS Andromache reported that the French West Indian fleet had left its base at Fort Royal, Martinique, some 30 miles to the north. By noon that day Rodney’s ships had left St. Lucia in pursuit

Globally, British prestige was then at a low point. Britain had lost face with its failure against the rebellious American colonies, particularly the recent losses at the Battles of the Chesapeake and at Yorktown—losses that came largely thanks to French intervention. (See “Great Britain’s Great Blunder,” October 2022, pp. 12–19.) But while Britain had suffered defeat in North America, the larger Anglo-French War was still being fought in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean. British possessions at Gibraltar had been under siege by France and Spain since 1789, and even British control of the English Channel was threatened.

While Britian’s attention and efforts had been focused on the American colonies, the French had been free to sail among the many islands of the Caribbean. There, France was planning, with Spain, to overrun the British-held island of Jamacia—and the sugar plantations there were vital to the British economy. (The same area would see action again between 1798 and 1800 during the undeclared Quasi-War between the United States and France.)

In April 1782, seven months after the French victory at the Battle of the Chesapeake had all but ensured American independence, the victorious French fleet of 35 ships-of-the-line under the command of 60-year-old Admiral François Joseph Paul, Comte de Grasse, sailed south to confront the British in the West Indies. The “courtly and gallant” de Grasse had been born into an old, aristocratic French family in 1722 and entered the French Navy in 1739. He was first put in command of his own ship in 1754 after fighting in the War of the Austrian Succession, during which he was wounded and captured by the British. He later fought in the Seven Years’ War and was promoted to rear admiral in 1779, then to full admiral in 1781. He was an experienced commander and was considered “an honorable man.”

Opposing de Grasse was Rodney—who many then considered the best admiral in the Royal Navy—and the 36 men-of-war of the British West Indies Fleet. Rodney was a strict disciplinarian, a serious a student of naval warfare, and a commander who recently had defeated a Spanish force in a night battle off Cape St. Vincent, Portugal. Rodney had been born in London in 1717 or 1718, the second son of Henry Rodney, a captain of marines, and he may have been a godson of King George I. Entering the Navy in 1733, he made captain in 1742, rear admiral in 1759, and admiral in 1778.

On the morning of 10 April 1782, de Grasse and Rodney skirmished at long range without serious damage to either side, though Captain William Bayne of HMS Alfred was killed by a chain shot, and a gun exploded on the French ship Caton with 80 casualties. During the night, two of de Grasse’s ships, the Zélé and Jason, collided and were damaged near the coast of Guadeloupe. Slowed by the damaged ships, de Grasse turned at dawn on 12 April to end the British pursuit and face the English fleet. De Grasse’s ships were spread out over more than ten miles to the northeast off Les Saintes—the group of small islands in the southeast corner of Caribbean Sea that were to give the ensuing fight its name.

Ship-of-the-Line Warfare and Its Limitations

By 0700, in what has been called “foggy conditions,” the 36 British ships formed in line to meet the enemy as mandated by the Royal Navy’s venerated Fighting Instructions.

These rules of engagement traditionally are attributed to British General at Sea Robert Blake, who wrote the Sailing and Fighting Instructions of 1653. Modern historians have noted these Fighting Instructions were “valuable and based on sound principles but they limited the opportunities for tactical skills and prevented concentration [of fire].”

Before Blake’s Fighting Instructions, naval warfare had been little more than confused melees with individual ship-to-ship actions, but, as one historian wrote, the Instructions “marked a final break with the tactics of galley warfare, in which individual ships sought each other out to engage in single combat by means of ramming, boarding, and so on.”

These rules of naval warfare covered conventional British naval strategy in the late 18th century and mandated that British ships form in line parallel to the enemy but facing in a different direction and spaced 100 to 200 yards apart, what was called “ship-of-the-line warfare.” The two lines then sailed toward each other in opposite directions but side to side, with the leading ship in each line firing broadsides. Then the leading ship of each line would meet the second in line of the enemy and fire at it, so that four ships were exchanging broadsides, and then six, and then eight, and so on until—like two passenger trains passing—the entirety of one line was blasting away at the entirety of the other in a welter of smoke, fire, and screams.

The Royal Navy’s Samuel Leech, who would fight in the famous battle between HMS Macedonian and the frigate United States during the War of 1812, later wrote a biography that provides some sense of what Age-of-Sail fighting was like for the common seaman:

As writer and naval historian C. S. Forester once observed, “It called for a stout heart to run such a gauntlet.”

The Fighting Instructions strategy allowed for an unobstructed field of fire to both sides, but it also required that a ship-of-the-line trade broadsides with the ship opposite it regardless of that ship’s size or strength. The British line at the Battle of the Saintes was led by the 70-gun Princessa, commanded by a man with a legendary name: Rear Admiral Sir Francis Drake, a descendant of the famous Elizabethan sailor. Approaching the British, Drake led the line of British ships to within 100 yards of the French ships, bringing the British marines on board to within musket range.

The French suffered more heavily than the British during these early-engagement broadsides. The French fleet had larger crews, as well as a 5,500-man army on board under the command of François Claude Amour, the Marquis de Bouillé. A greater number of targets meant a greater number of casualties. In addition, the British had two technical advantages. The gun mountings and gun ports of the British ships had been improved in such a way as to allow the British guns to bear through a larger angle fore and aft, which meant the British ships could have the French ships under fire for a longer period while passing. Also, most of the British ships carried what would become known as carronades, also called “smashers,” powerful short-range weapons lacking on the French ships.

The British and French battle lines were each ten miles long, and it was more than two hours before the two lines were fully opposite one another, the lead British ship facing and firing alongside the last ship in the French line—two hours of shattering noise, fire and fear, of smoke and the screams of wounded and dying men. But by then, Rodney could see the French flagship Ville de Paris off his starboard bow.

Suddenly, what has been called “a freakish wind” forced the Ville de Paris to veer toward the British line—and open a hole in the French line.

At that point, Sir Charles Douglas, fleet captain on board the Formidable, approached Rodney and urged him to run through the opening in the French line.

But Rodney refused. As Barbara Tuchman observed, “With no previously arranged plan and unsure whether his captains would follow him leaving him to be isolated in battle . . . Rodney refused to order the helm to come about.” The fate of Admiral John Byng may have held him back as well. Byng had failed to relieve the British naval base at Minorca during a French siege in 1755, an action that unleashed public outrage and governmental wrath. Byng was court-martialed under the then-recently revised Articles of War, found guilty, and executed by firing squad in 1757.

British commanders were expected to engage—and defeat—the enemy. Article XII of the 1749 Articles of War, under which Byng had been tried and executed, read, “Every Person in the Fleet . . . who shall not to do his utmost to take or destroy every Ship which it shall be his Duty to engage, and to assist and relieve all and every of his Majesty’s Ships, or those of his Allies, which it shall be his Duty to assist and relieve . . . being convicted thereof the Sentence of a Court-martial, shall suffer Death.”

Was leaving formation such a capital offense?

Rodney already had tried a variant of breaking the line at the 1780 Battle of Martinique, where he threw several ships at the rear of the French line. In that instance, the maneuver had failed largely because his instructions to his captains were unclear and confused.

Dare he try again?

Captain Douglas continued urging, and Rodney gambled.

A ‘Serendipitous Opportunity’

Rodney ordered the “line ahead” signal run down and the “close action” signal hoisted. And “as the bows of the Formidable slowly swung to starboard, midshipmen scurried to warn gunners to be ready to fire from the outer side,” wrote Tuchman. “As Rodney watched in suspense to the stern, he saw the next five ships in his line follow him clearly through the gap in the French line.”

The Formidable’s main topsail was in shreds, and the 90-gun Prince George that followed her had lost her foremast. At the same time, Rodney’s signal, soaring up over the smoke, called on Drake to tack and close with the French rear and flank de Grasse’s fleet.

“It was the first time after a century of formal naval warfare that such a maneuver had been attempted,” Forester wrote.

Charging through the French line, the Formidable and the ships behind her were able to fire broadsides at the vulnerable bows and sterns of the French ships. Meanwhile, the ships that had been ahead of the Formidable in the British line backed mizzen topsails and kept firing on the French flagship from one side, while Rodney and the ships that had broken the line fired on her from the other. Admiral Sir Samuel Hood swept around from the rear of the British line, and Drake swept around from the front. The French 74-gunner Diadême went down with all hands as French ships vainly attempted to break through the ring of British ships pummeling the Ville de Paris.

“The Ville de Paris’s decks were ablaze; she had lost rigging, sail and rudder,” wrote Tuchman. “After nine and a half hours of battle since the moment when Rodney steered his prow to penetrate the line, de Grasse’s flag fluttered down. Simultaneously, the flag of France came down from the ensign staff. English officers rowed over to accept the surrender.”

When Sir Gilbert Blane, the physician for the British fleet, boarded the Ville de Paris, it “presented a scene of complete horror,” he recalled. “The numbers killed were so great that the surviving, either from want of leisure, or through dismay, had not thrown the bodies of the killed overboard, so that the decks were covered with the blood and mangled limbs of the dead, as well as the wounded and dying.”

With their flagship gone, the remaining French ships were leaderless. They scattered as best they could.

“[I]t was not a victory of annihilation like those Nelson was to gain later,” Forester wrote. “But it was a decided victory, in a stand-up fight between equal forces, decisive in that it made Jamaica safe and permitted the step-by-step reconquest of the other British West Indian possessions, and it was intensely gratifying to the British public.”

Historians, then and now, have argued whether Rodney intended to use the tactic.

According to Tuchman, the idea of breaking the line, as Rodney had just done, originated with a Scottish schoolboy named John Clerk, who had developed an interest in the sea by reading Robinson Crusoe. John began studying harbor winds and experimenting with wind-driven model boats on a pond. While studying the British line approach to naval battle, the boy discovered what he considered a problem: “If the enemy did not offer himself in a comparable line, there could be no fighting under the rules of the Fighting Instructions,” Tuchman noted. The solution, John decided, was to use the full naval power against one section of the enemy line, forcing a gap in that line, and slipping through to flank the enemy ships.

John explained his solution in a small book he wrote titled An Essay on Naval Tactics, which Rodney was known to have had in manuscript and to have tried unsuccessfully at the Battle of Martinque in 1780. Another sign that the maneuver had been under consideration before the battle is that another break in the French line was carried out when another segment of the British line broke the French van. Had the “freakish wind” provided the serendipitous opportunity Rodney had been seeking? His gamble, whether planned or otherwise, had worked. With his victory, he had avoided the fate of Admiral Byng.

De Grasse: Court-Martial. Rodney: Baronetcy

At the Saintes, 5,000 French were dead, wounded, or captured; those captors including none other than the Comte de Grasse. The British lost no ships but suffered 1,000–2,000 dead or wounded. The remnants of the French fleet reassembled at Cape François under the orders of the Marquis de Vaudreuil and joined with the Spanish. Rodney rejoined with the force under Admiral Hood—who later would try the new tactic of breaking the line himself—and sailed for Jamaica with the prizes, some of which, including the Ville de Paris, were lost in a hurricane.

De Grasse was taken to London, where he took part in early negotiations for the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolution. He was released and returned to France in 1784. There he faced a court-martial for his action at the Saintes but was cleared of any wrongdoing. He died in France in 1788.

In the wake of the Battle of the Saintes, British naval prestige was restored. Jamacia was safe, and the British public and its government were pleased again with their fleet. Admiral Rodney must have thought it a good day’s work, indeed. On his return to England, he was granted the title of 1st Baron Rodney and received a £2,000-a-year pension for his victory. He died at London in 1792.

Mr. Lyons is a retired newspaper editor and a freelance writer who has written extensively on historical subjects. His work has appeared in national and international periodicals, and he was the 2008 winner of the Harryman Dorsey Award for “an outstanding article on Colonial American History.”