Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World, 1788-1851
Peter Padfield. Woodstock and New York: The Overlook Press, 2005. 451 pp. Maps. Photos. Notes. Bib. Index. $35.00.
Reviewed by Jack Sweetman
Between 1979 and 1982 Peter Padfield, a noted British naval historian, published the first two volumes of what was to be a four-volume work entitled Tide of Empires: Decisive Naval Campaigns in the Rise of the West. Together, the two cover the years from 1481 to 1763-that is, from the accession of King John Il of Portugal, who supported the voyages of discovery, to the close of the Seven Years' War-and they are simply superb. Having read them at the time of their publication, for years thereafter I awaited-with diminishing expectations because the longer a series languishes, the less the likelihood that it will ever be completed-the appearance of succeeding volumes. Now with many intervening books under his belt, Padfield has returned to the subject, not to finish Tide of Empires, but to supercede it with a new series that begins with the Battle of the Spanish Armada. The first volume, Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modem World, 1588-1782, appeared in 1999. This is the second.
No one writes naval history better than Peter Padfield, and the period under consideration, embracing as it does the climatic conflicts of the Age of Sail, gives him ample scope to exercise his skills. His battle narratives-and from the GIorious First of June to Trafalgar, he has six great battles to narrate-could serve as models of their kind. He provides exemplary explanations of the advances in signaling that contributed to the Royal Navy's naval mastery, as well as of its better-known excellence in gunnery. American readers will be pleased with Padfield's even-handed treatment of the War of 1812, even if they would wish to see a few more American titles in his almost exclusively British bibliography. Readers of all nationalities will enjoy his deft portraits of his leading characters. Nelson above all.
The immeasurable advantages the British derived from command of the sea are also clearly set out. Not only did the Royal Navy's supremacy shield them from invasion, it allowed them to maintain Wellington's army on the Iberian Peninsula; it permitted them to conduct the trade that, together with a sophisticated financial system, provided the means to subsidize one anti-French coalition after the other; and it enabled them to blockade the continent of Europe. This last provoked Napoleon into instituting a counterblockade, the Continental System, that undermined the Franco-Russian entente achieved at Tilsit and ultimately to undertake his disastrous Russian campaign.
But Padfield's view of the influence of sea power extends far beyond its more or less direct military benefits. He argues that it gave rise to the liberal, democratic values of the Western World. Historically, he notes, great sea powers have developed decentralized governments run by and for merchants selfishly committed to keeping the executive power in check. The economic freedom thereby secured fostered the growth of political and intellectual freedoms as well. In contrast, land powers, compelled to maintain standing armies to defend their frontiers, developed authoritarian governments supported by centralized administrations that stifled initiative, innovation, and change. The merchant's pursuit of private gain, upon which, paradoxically, the prosperity of the whole depended, was incompatible with the martial virtues such societies esteemed.
This expansive interpretation is not unprecedented. Other historians, beginning with Alfred Thayer Mahan, have touched upon it, but none has advanced it so boldly or articulated it at such length. Indeed, close to a third of the book, which opens, somewhat disconcertingly, with chapters on the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, is devoted to the exposition of this theme, and numerous historical figures and phenomena not often encountered in naval histories-from Jeremy Bentham and Nathan Rothschild to the English novel and the origins of the movements for the prevention of cruelty to animals-are invoked to illustrate or exemplify it.
All of this is infused with a spirit of what used to be called Whig history. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 is credited with creating the political precondition for Britain's maritime mastery, in that it subordinated the crown to parliament-i.e., the merchant interest. By the same token, the French Revolution was a bad thing: "prototype and herald of the nationalist, totalitarian upheavals that disfigured the twentieth century," and Napoleon was a bad man: "fb]y any objective standard. . . the ultimate French disaster."
Every work of this magnitude seems fated to include a smattering of error; Maritime Power proves no exception. On two occasions the shade of Louis XV stands in for Louis XVI, and HMS Guerriere, the British ship captured by the USS Constitution in the first frigate action of the War of 1812, consistently cross-dresses as HMS Guerrier. Slips of this nature may be picayune, but more substantial mistakes occur in reference to Napoleon's land campaigns, most notably on the five pages devoted to the Battle of Waterloo. Limitations of space prohibit a review of these instances, but one in particular seems worthy of note. Padfield states that after mauling Marshal Blucher's Prussians at Ligny on 16 June, Napoleon simply "disregarded" them when he moved to attack Wellington's polyglot army at Waterloo. This is incorrect. Far from discounting the Prussians, on the 17th, Napoleon detached a full third of his army, 33,000 troops under Marshal Grouchy, to harry their retreat and keep them from interfering while he dealt with Wellington. Unfortunately for the emperor, the Prussians outsmarted Grouchy the next day, leaving one corps to keep him occupied at Wavre while the other three hurried to Waterloo, where Wellington was praying for Bliicher or night. Both Napoleon and Marshal Ney, his frontline commander, made serious mistakes at Waterloo, but, more than anything else, it was Grouchy's failure to carry out his mission or at least, as a subordinate implored him, to march to the sound of the guns that doomed the French to defeat. Padfield never mentions him.
None of these errors affects Padfield's naval history or his sea power thesis. Readers will find both entertaining as well as instructive, and even those unconvinced by his more sweeping generalizations will be stimulated by his arguments. One hopes the next volume in the series will be forthcoming soon.
Dr. Sweetman served as company commander in the U.S. Army and a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, He is the author of numerous works of naval history.
To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World
Arthur Herman. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.. 2004. 648 pp. Maps. Notes. Index. $26.95.
Reviewed by Captain Walter Spangenberg, Jr., U.S. Navy (Retired)
The job of the historian, states the author in his introduction, is not just to recount or explain the past but to show how things have come to be what they are. This book shows how things in our modern global system have come to be what they are in three ways: tracing the development of the British Royal Navy from John Hawkins' raid in Panama in 1568 to Sandy Woodward's Falklands Campaign in 1982; extracting pertinent parts of British political and fiscal history over this period; and describing the impact of events in the rest of the world on Britain and the Royal Navy as well as the British influence on the rest of the world.
The ascendancies of the Royal Navy and Great Britain are described in three phases, each occupying a century or so: versus Spain in the 16th century, versus the Netherlands in the 17th century, and versus France in the 18th century. At the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 Britain's foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, drew on the wisdom of Willian Pitt to strive for "security not revenge," and his success led to a century of Pax Britannica.
England was a late entry in the early struggle for world trade and wealth. The Pope's "line" ruling in 1494 had divided the Western world between Spain and Portugal, so the English, the Dutch, and the French had to work around the edges in North America and in the Far East with privateer activities as enterprising captains and opportunity availed. The opportunities were great, and privateers from maritime nations soon created a "war of all against all" with the Spanish treasure ships from America the most lucrative prizes. England at that time had no formal navy, but the English privateers were so successful that Spain's Philip II found it necessary to dispatch his Armada in an attempt to invade and subjugate England in 1588. Francis Drake's victory at sea and the storms that followed thwarted Spain's scheme. There would be later attempts to mount invasions of England culminating in World War II, but the defeat of the Spanish Armada may be considered the beginning of British ambition and power at sea.
Spain and Portugal had concentrated their colonial activities in Central and South America, so England, Holland, and France turned their attention to North America, and also to the search for a northwest passage to the Orient which hopefully would provide a shorter route to the Far East for trade activity than the route around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean. Extensive privateering led Spain to institute a convoy system for its ships bringing silver and gold from America to Spain, and soon there was debate about whether a navy supported trade or trade supported a navy. In view of the fact that both Spain and France far exceeded England in population and wealth, it became clear to some in England that sea power was the key to trade and trade was the key to wealth and power.
After 1588, Spain was more a target than a threat. In the 17th century, the English and Dutch fought a series of naval wars over northern European trade and shipping in the English Channel, as England went through civil war over succession and religion. During this period the Royal Navy became an ad hoc force called up to meet each crisis with whatever resources were available. Its officers were of two groups: those appointed because of family or political connections, and those "tarpaulins" who came up from the world of ships. The sailors came often from merchant ship backgrounds or from untrained country youths.
The wars with France in the 18th century over colonies and political power would lead to commerce and wealth, and they became worldwide in scope, beginning with the Seven Years' War (1756-63) and culminating with the Napoleonic wars leading up to Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna. The Napoleonic wars to a great extent were wars between Napoleon's French land power and Horatio Nelson's British sea power, and Napoleon never understood sea power well enough to know that the greatest army in the world and a second-place navy would not win for him the world hegemony he sought. Adolf Hitler later had the same problem.
The author points out that although French shipbuilding technology was at times more advanced than Britain's, the aggressive ingenuity of British captains at key times and places perhaps resulted from Britain's less structured and less oppressive political and religious environment. More important, the author asserts, this aggressive ingenuity produced a succession of victories and a reputation for invincibility that intimidated opposing naval leaders from Villeneuve at Trafalgar to Scheer at Jutland and the Argentines in the Falklands. The British and their Royal Navy did not always win, but they won at key places and times. Even their significant failure in the Chesapeake in 1781, though it was critical in the loss of the American colonies, also led to a strong American ally in the two World Wars of the 20th century.
On balance this book is well organized, and interesting bits of related information are presented in informative footnotes. Significant battles are well described and, in some cases, diagrammed. The book has extensive source notes following the text, but no separate bibliography or list of references. Infrequent lapses in spelling, grammar, and some errors in technical detail do not adversely affect the book's thrust or meaning.
Captain Spangenherg served as a carrier-based naval aviator in Korea and Vietnam, as a test pilot at Naval Air Test Command, and later as a project manager in the Naval Air Systems Command.