The British Navy in the Mediterranean 9781783272310, 1783272317

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JOHN D. GRAINGER is the author of numerous books for a variety of publishers, including seven previously published books for Boydell & Brewer, including The British Navy in the Baltic, Dictionary of British Naval Battles and The First Pacific War: Britain and Russia, 1854-56.

The British Navy

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the activities of the British navy in the Mediterranean Sea from the earliest times until the twentieth century. It traces developments from Anglo-Saxon times, through the Crusades, and to the seventeenth century, when the Barbary corsairs became a major problem. It outlines Britain's involvement in the wars of the long eighteenth century, when Britain obtained bases at Gibraltar, Minorca and Malta and repeatedly defeated the French and Spanish navies. It examines the navy's activities during the First and Second World Wars, when the Mediterranean was again of crucial strategic significance and a major theatre of war, and goes on to consider Britain's withdrawal from the Mediterranean in the later twentieth century. Throughout, the book relates naval activity to patterns of trade, including the rise and decline of the Levant Company, and to wider international politics.

Cover illustration: HMS Illustrious, Corfu, 1902, by Ian H. Marshall, Past President and Fellow/ASMA.

GRAINGER

The

British Navy JOHN D. GRAINGER

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

John D. Grainger

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© John D. Grainger 2017 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of John D. Grainger to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2017 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978 1 78327 231 0

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mount Hope Ave, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

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Contents Abbreviationsvii Introduction: The Sea and its Parts, and the Royal Navy Prologue: The Crusades and After, 1095–c.1550

xiii 1

1.

 he Levant Company and the Assaults on Cadiz, T c.1550–c.16005

2.

Corsairs and Civil War, c.1600–166018

3.

Tangier and Corsairs, 1660–169041

4.

French Wars I, 1688–171361

5.

Conflicts with Spain, 1713–174482

6.

French Wars II, 1744–1763101

7.

Two Sieges: Minorca and Gibraltar, 1763–1783124

8.

French Wars III, 1783–1815140

9.

Dominance, 1815–1856166

10. Ottoman Problems, 1856–1905188 11. Great War, 1905–1923206 12. Retrenchment and a Greater War, 1923–1945228 13. Supersession, from 1945259 Conclusion273 Bibliography277 Index291

Abbreviations BL

British Library, London

British Naval Documents John B. Hattendorf, R. J. N. Knight, A. W. H. Pearsall, N. A. M. Rodger and Geoffrey Hill (eds), British Naval Documents 1204–1960, NRS 1993 Clowes, Royal Navy William Laird Clowes, The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to 1900, 7 vols, London 1897–1903 Corbett, Mediterranean  Julian Corbett, England in the Mediterranean: A Study of the Rise and Influence of British Power within the Straits, 1603–1714, 2 vols, London 1917 Hakluyt Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, Glasgow 1903 James, Naval History William James, Naval History of Great Britain, 6 vols, London 1902 MM

The Mariner’s Mirror

NRS

Navy Records Society

Naval Chron.  The Naval Chronicle, ed. Nicholas Tracy, 5 vols, London 1999 ODNB  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Purchas Samuel Purchas (ed.), Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his pilgrims, Glasgow 1905–1907 TNA

The National Archives, Kew

Key to the Maps The maps, by noting the major battles and landings by British forces, are intended to demonstrate the range of British activity in the Mediterranean. They also, by their geographical distribution, suggest the location of particular strategic concerns. Numbers indicate the locations of major battles involving British forces; letters indicate the same for landings on enemy shores. Omitted are the convoy battles of 1940–1942, which stretch for most of the way from Alexandria to Gibraltar. Places used as British naval bases are underlined.

Map 1 The Sea-entrance

Map 2 The Western Basin

Map 3 The Eastern Basin

Introduction The Sea and its Parts, and the Royal Navy

The Mediterranean is one of those seas which is instantly familiar to every European who has had any sort of education or has been on holiday. Its shape, its weather, its food, its waters, its beaches, are all as familiar to any European as his and her own homeland. Not only that, but it has long been one of the most important strategic regions of the world, a region of warfare from its earliest mention in history. Control of the Mediterranean has long been one of the keys to world power – as it still is; and that was one of the keys to the development and maintenance of the British Empire. This sea is the scene of this book, but there are certain additional points which must be made at the start. The instrument of power used by the British in the Mediterranean was always the Royal Navy. For a century and a half from the defeat of Napoleon that force dominated the sea, and for three centuries before that English, then British, sea power was an intermittent intruder into the complex conflicts and relationships of the sea’s other powers. The purpose of this account is therefore to consider the extent, the purpose, and the vicissitudes of British naval power in the Mediterranean. But it is first necessary to understand some of the geography of the sea and to modify to some extent the general understanding of that geography. The geography of the Mediterranean is complex and intricate; it is an area of bays and gulfs, islands and peninsulas and subordinate seas, narrow passages and straits. It is well over 2000 miles long from west to east, but from north to south it varies from 600 miles between the heel of Italy and the Libyan coast of the Gulf of Sirte, to only sixty miles between eastern Sicily and Cape Bon. It is also much subdivided into distinct sections. Starting from the east there is the Eastern Basin, an open sea with only one island – Cyprus – which stretches from Syria and Egypt to the Sicilian Narrows, where Sicily and Malta and Tunisia compete for strategic importance and to control those narrows. There are gulfs leading off this main sea, all to the north: the island-busy Aegean Sea behind Crete, and then the Straits – the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosporos

xiv

Introduction

– leading into the Black Sea and giving access to Eastern Europe and the steppes of Ukraine; the Adriatic Sea, a long, narrow, islandstrewn sea stretching northwards into Central Europe, as far as the unique, yet also archetypal Mediterranean, city of Venice. The Black Sea, the Aegean, and the Adriatic are, of course, distinct seas in themselves as well as being parts of the Mediterranean system. West of Sicily there is the Western Basin, defined by Italy-and-Sicily, the South of France, Eastern Spain, and North Africa; substantial islands separate off two sections – the triangular Tyrrhenian Sea and the Gulf of Lions – while the main part of the Western Basin stretches from Sardinia to Spain, with the coast of North Africa the border to the south and the Balearic Islands on the north. This basin narrows towards the west, forming a long gulf between Spain and Morocco, sometimes called the Alboran Sea. This leads to the only natural outlet of the sea into the wider ocean, the Strait of Gibraltar.1 In the east, the Suez Canal is an artificial outlet to the Indian Ocean, only available in the past century and a half, so that the Red Sea became an adjunct of the Mediterranean. In theory, the Strait of Gibraltar marks the geographical western boundary of the Mediterranean, and the sea to the west is technically part of the Atlantic Ocean. But in historical terms the ocean beyond Gibraltar is really a further extension of the Mediterranean, for there the lands and their associated islands form another partially enclosed sea which only eventually becomes part of the ‘real’ Atlantic. This region is bounded by the coasts of Iberia and Morocco from Lisbon in the north to Cape Bojador on the south, and by a discontinuous circle of islands – the Canaries, Madeira, Porto Santo, and some smaller islets – which enclose this part of the ocean to the south and west. In historical and strategic terms, this region is an extension of the inland sea; it has been the scene of many conflicts whose general aims were to prevent or force access to the Mediterranean proper. It does not seem to have been given a name. Part is referred to as the Gulf of Cadiz, but it seems to me too large to be a mere gulf; possibly the ‘Moroccan Sea’ might serve, but here I shall call it the ‘Sea-entrance’ in recognition of its strategic importance. This is not, of course, the usual definition of the Mediterranean, which is normally described only in geographical terms as having Western and Eastern Basins, though it is worth noting that Spain and Portugal are generally considered to be ‘Mediterranean’ countries, as is Morocco, and one glance at any of the towns in the Canary Islands or at Funchal in Madeira shows that these are typically Mediterranean 1

This is often given in the plural – Straits of Gibraltar – but since it is a single passageway I have chosen the singular version, Strait.

Introduction

xv

in appearance, lifestyle, language, food, and climate. Strategically, this wide entrance gulf is an obvious geographical preliminary to the great sea itself. In naval terms control of this region provides a naval power with access to the whole Mediterranean. This is clearly essential for any major sea power, and the region contains a number of major naval bases and ports which have long dominated the region, even back to Roman and pre-Roman times – Cadiz, Lisbon, Gibraltar, Tangier, Rota. Both shores have long been controlled by states with coasts on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar – Spain on the north, with the Canary Islands, Morocco on the south, and Portugal on the northwest with Madeira (and for a time much of the Moroccan coast). A long series of naval battles in this entrance region – Cadiz, Trafalgar, Cape St Vincent, Lagos, Algeciras, Gibraltar, Cape Spartel, Santa Cruz, Operation Torch, and more – testify to its importance in strategic terms. The area of the British naval command described as ‘Mediterranean’ normally extended ‘out’ as far as Lisbon, which was often the supply base for the ships inside the sea, and south along the Moroccan coast; Blake and Nelson both fought at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, while several battles were conducted in this entrance region during the great siege of Gibraltar (1779–1783). So in this account, the Mediterranean will be taken to extend out into the Atlantic as far as Lisbon and the Canaries and Madeira. This far western area may thus be counted as the third Mediterranean basin. The Mediterranean, as a clearly defined sea, has been the subject of a number of studies, particularly since the ground-breaking work of Fernand Braudel in 1949, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Braudel was, of course concerned above all with the lands around the sea, rather than the sea itself, though much of his text inevitably has reference to the sea as well. (He also produced a less satisfactory The Mediterranean in the Ancient World – only published after his death – covering the history of the sea from prehistory.) Recently David Abulafia’s The Great Sea covers the same ground, but aiming to work, so to speak, more explicitly from the water’s perspective. Some studies of the ancient sea have also been recently produced, such as The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History by Philip Hordern and Nicholas Purcell, and the survey of the archaeology by Cyprian Broodbank.2 2

Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. S. Reynolds, London 1972–1973; id., The Mediterranean in the Ancient World, ed. R de Ayala and P. Braudel, trans. S. Reynolds, 2 vols, London 2001; David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, London 2011; Philip Hordern and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, Oxford 2000; Cyprian

xvi

Introduction

None of these accounts deal seriously or at any length with the subject of this study, which is the exercise of power in the Mediterranean by the Royal Navy on behalf of the British government from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. There are studies of particular periods of such power – by Sir Julian Corbett for the seventeenth century, for example – or particular wars, such as that by Piers Mackesy on the period 1803–1810,3 and others will be referred to in the course of this account. There is, however, no study covering the whole of the period of British maritime interest in the sea. This ‘gap’ is what this book hopes to rectify.

Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World, London 2013. 3 Julian Corbett, England in the Mediterranean: A Study of the Rise and Influence of British Power within the Straits, 1603–1714, 2 vols, London 1917; Piers Mackesy, The War in the Mediterranean, 1803–1810, Cambridge MA 1957.

Prologue The Crusades and After 1095–c.1550

Had events in 1066 turned out differently, Edgar the Aetheling would have been King Edgar II of the English. He was a grandson of King Edmund II Ironside and was briefly proclaimed King of the English between the death of King Harald II Godwinesson at the battle of Hastings and the arrival of Duke William the Bastard of Normandy in London, but William simply brushed him aside. Oddly for such a ruthless man, William did not kill his competitor, and Edgar – only a teenager at the time – faded into an existence as an occasional rebel leader, a minor landowner in Hertfordshire and an habitué of royal courts. In the reign of William II Rufus, he was a friend of Robert of Normandy, the Conqueror’s eldest son, who was twice excluded from the throne by his younger brothers. Edgar was employed on several tasks of a diplomatic or military nature, including an expedition into Scotland to sort out the Scottish succession (his sister was Queen Margaret, the wife of Malcolm Canmore), in all of which he performed quite competently; any political ambitions he might have entertained in England had clearly expired. One of the tasks he took on was to command a fleet of ships manned by Englishmen which took part in the First Crusade.1 Edgar joined the fleet at Constantinople. Its men were probably part of the Byzantine imperial guard of the Emperor Alexios I, which by this date was largely manned by English exiles – the emperor was anxious to ensure that the lands he had been promised by the crusaders were actually delivered, and the only way to make this happen was to have a force on the spot. Edgar’s participation illustrates his ambivalent situation, for the exiles were men who had left England because of the Norman conquest and its brutal rule, while Edgar himself was a 1

Domesday Book: Hertfordshire; Frank Barlow, William Rufus, London 1983, passim; Nicholas Hooper, ‘Edgar the Aetheling, Anglo-Saxon Prince, Rebel, and Crusader’ , Anglo-Saxon England 14, 1985, 197–214 (and in ODNB); Hooper does not accept the crusader story.

2

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

good friend of one of the Crusade’s leaders, Robert of Normandy; the fleet was also carrying Italian pilgrims, many of them from the south of Italy, where Normans ruled (and where Edgar had led a Norman expedition several years before).2 It also, more usefully from the point of view of the crusaders, carried a consignment of siege materials supplied by the Emperor Alexios in Constantinople. These materials were of considerable assistance in the capture of Antioch, where the long crusader siege was making little headway before these materials arrived. The fleet went on to capture Lattakia from a crusader force in the name of the Byzantine emperor, thus fulfilling at least part of the emperor’s purpose.3 Edgar then disappears, presumably to return with the ships to Constantinople and himself to England (by way of a visit to the German Emperor, who was his cousin). (He lived on for at least thirty years more; had he remained king from 1066, and survived, his would have been the longest English reign until that of the present queen.) Once a semblance of order had been imposed in conquered Palestine, it became common for prominent men to travel to the region, partly as pilgrims, partly as warriors, often in both roles. The voyage from Britain to Syria was difficult, and most crusaders travelled by land, taking ship in Italy for the last stage of the journey. A romantic account of the journey of Earl Rognvald Kali of Orkney to Palestine includes fighting in Galicia and in the Strait of Gibraltar, a romance at Narbonne in southern France, and more fighting near Sardinia.4 In 1147, as part of the Second Crusade, a fleet carried English, Fleming, Frisian, and German crusaders as far as Lisbon, where they helped the Count of Portugal to capture the city from the local Arabs; many of the crusaders decided that this achievement fulfilled their vow, and they thereupon settled in Portugal at the invitation of the count – he clearly needed military-trained reinforcements; others helped in the capture of Faro on the Algarve coast; only some went on to Palestine, so making the whole voyage.5 2

One of the crucial battles in the pre-Crusade period was at Durazzo in Albania, where the Normans of South Italy defeated the Byzantine guard (composed mainly of English exiles), in 1081. 3 Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 1, The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Cambridge 1951, 227–228 and 255; John France, ‘The First Crusade as a Maritime Enterprise’ , MM 83, 1987, 389–397. 4 Orkneyinga Saga, 86–89; Barbara E Crawford, The Northern Earldoms: Orkney and Caithness, A.D. 870 to 1470, Edinburgh 2013, 214–217. 5 Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 2, The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East 1100–1187, Cambridge 1951, 258–259; Jonathan Philips, The Second Crusade, London 2007, ch. 8; Matthew Bennet, ‘Military Aspects of the Conquest of Lisbon 1147’ , in Jonathan Philips and Martin

Prologue: The Crusades and After

3

But the greatest English effort came with King Richard I Coeur-deLeon. While Richard collected his army in France, his fleet sailed round Spain to meet him at Marseilles, so repeating in parts the voyages of Earl Rognvald and the Second Crusaders. The fleet stopped in Portugal to assist the locals in repelling a Moroccan invasion, apparently the only interruption to the fleet’s voyage. It was thus intact for operations in the Mediterranean, where it was involved in fighting in Sicily, then in the conquest of Cyprus – both Christian countries – and at last in the partial recovery of Palestine from the Saracen conquest achieved under Saladin’s command.6 It seems unlikely that any of the ships returned to England, and probably most of the men did not return either. Certainly Richard himself went home by way of the Adriatic (and imprisonment for a year in Germany), and sent his sister and his queen home by way of Marseilles. These intermittent adventures were not, of course, serious exercises in English sea power in the Mediterranean, though King Richard did show some appreciation of the available opportunities. Sailing from the British Isles to the Mediterranean was a major and perilous undertaking, costly in men and ships, and was particularly dangerous in having to sail for a considerable distance along Muslim-controlled coastlands. Once the Third Crusade was concluded, there were no obvious English interests in the Mediterranean which required the attention of an English government. The difficulty and expense of the voyage was deterrent enough, and later crusaders usually travelled by land – as did Prince Edward (later King Edward I) in 1270–1274. At the same time, the sea powers of the Mediterranean developed their great trading galleys, which were swift and powerful and seaworthy enough to reach the English Channel from Venice and Genoa. This pre-empted any English need to send ships to trade in the Mediterranean. After 1200, therefore, British interest at sea reverted to the waters about Britain, and this remained the case for the next three centuries. On the other hand, knowledge of the Mediterranean and its surrounding lands among English and Scots was always extensive. Italy, especially Rome, and Palestine were constant destinations of bishops and priests and pilgrims, and had been since early Anglo-Saxon times – King Alfred and King Knut were only the most eminent visitors to Rome, though, once again, such journeys were mainly made by land. These visitors mainly returned home, and so

Hoch (eds), The Second Crusade: Scope and Consequences, Manchester 2001, 71–89. 6 Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 3, The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades, Cambridge 1951, 36–47, 74.

4

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

conditions in the Mediterranean regions were thus generally familiar to large numbers of people at first hand, and to many more at second hand through stories and descriptions; in many cases the details were probably hazy and partial and inaccurate, but there was always a substratum of fact; the Hereford map of the thirteenth century, for example, shows a good outline of the sea. The kings of England had no strategic interests in the Mediterranean before the late sixteenth century, and still less did the kings of Scotland. Their countries’ trade was well catered for by the imports of eastern goods by the Venetians and by their own exports of wool and cloth and raw materials – their market in these goods was mainly in the nearby European continent. The English taxation system was relatively efficient, so allowing the kings to collect substantial monetary resources and then to waste those resources on extravagances such as the French and Scottish (‘Hundred Years’) wars; these wars invariably rebounded on the country, which dissolved into defeat and uncertainty and civil war in the fifteenth century. Such extravagances revived under the second Tudor king, Henry VIII, who pathetically invaded France more than once, disrupted English society with his religious policy, lost international friends, and left his country wide open to disaster. But when this came, it was not from war but from a collapse of trade. Fortunately, some in England had the imagination to seize the moment to strike out in new trading directions: the Mediterranean thus becomes at last a prime English interest.

Chapter 1 The Levant Company and the Assaults on Cadiz c.1550–c.1600

Direct English and Scottish interest in Mediterranean affairs began with the possibilities of trade and profit. The territorial advances of the Ottoman Empire in the Eastern Basin caused great disruption to the Italian cities’ trading systems, at first particularly that of Genoa, later of Venice, as the cities found themselves on the wrong side at various times in the frequent Ottoman wars. In the 1450s (about the time the Turks finally captured Constantinople) one British merchant, Robert Sturmy of Bristol, had attempted to trade there, carrying wool, cloth, tin, and wheat to Italy and the Levant, and purchasing spices and silk, and alum, in exchange – in effect copying the Venetian system in reverse. However, his two ventures both ended in disaster. In the first, his ship, having delivered 200 pilgrims to Jaffa in Palestine, was wrecked on the Greek coast on the return voyage; in the other, his ship was intercepted and looted by Genoese ships who disliked the competition; Sturmy was killed in the fighting.1 This seems to have deterred other ventures, but also pointed up the possibilities. By the end of the fifteenth century voyages by English merchants to Italy and the Eastern Basin – to Crete and the Levant – were frequent enough for a consul to be appointed to Pisa by King Henry VII. This was a port city subject to Florence, and so it was outside the range of hostility from Genoa and Venice; there were English merchants in several other Mediterranean ports at this time also.2 1

E. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Adventurers, London 1967, 67– 71; Stuart Jenks (ed.), Robert Sturmy’s Commercial Expedition to the Mediterranean, Bristol Record Society 58, 2006; Sturmy’s partner collected legal depositions of what had happened, returned to England, and sued Genoese merchants there for complicity – Genoa had established a monopoly of alum which Sturmy was breaking. The Genoese merchants were punished, expelled, and fined. 2 David Loades, England’s Maritime Empire, Seapower, Commerce and Policy, 1490–1690, Harlow 2000, 30–31.

6

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

The voyage to the Mediterranean lay past Portugal and Spain, and in both countries there was a longstanding English political and mercantile connection. An alliance of sorts between England and Portugal had existed since 1398, but the connection went back to the Second Crusade centuries earlier; in Spain there was a fluctuating presence of English merchants, particularly in the Andalusian area, since the fourteenth century, centred on Seville, its outport of San Lucar, and at Cadiz. There, they knew of the discovery and settlement of the Canary Islands from the 1390s. English traders were familiar with the islands, where some settled and bought estates, and with Madeira, which was settled from Portugal in the mid-fifteenth century, eventually to be the source of sugar and a much-appreciated wine.3 All this indicates some English merchants’ familiarity with the whole of the Mediterranean’s sections from Madeira to Palestine by the end of the fifteenth century. These various ventures, never very numerous, productive, or determined, began to crumble from 1530, when relations between England and Spain began an erratic downward political spiral which eventually led to the long Anglo-Spanish War between 1585 and 1604. The merchants in Andalusia attempted to protect themselves by setting up the Spanish Company, but this was not very successful in the face of the Spanish political and religious suspicions; the merchants were also divided among themselves, into a Catholic group, a Protestant group, and a few who were Catholic in Spain and Protestant in England.4 The trade of English men and ships into the Mediterranean therefore faltered in the middle of the sixteenth century. The sea had become increasingly dangerous for all merchant ships with the long war between Spain and the Ottomans in the second half of the century, but the wider reason was the general breakdown of European political and economic affairs of which the Ottoman and English and Dutch wars were a part. The concentration of English exports in the hands of the Merchant Adventurers, who operated through London and Antwerp, was unable to cope with the rising violence in the Low Countries; shifting the trading staple to other centres was not a successful move. So, at the same time that the Spanish trade was failing, and the Mediterranean was becoming increasingly dangerous, the main English export trade in wool became disrupted. The result 3

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic 1229–1492, London 1987, 171–217, and id., The Canary Islands after the Conquest, Oxford 1982, 168–169; G. V. Scammell, ‘The English in the Atlantic Islands, c.1450–1650’ , MM 72, 1986, 295–317. 4 Pauline Croft, The Spanish Company, London Record Society, 1977.

The Levant Company and the Assaults on Cadiz

7

was a severe economic depression; in addition, between 1540 and 1570 the English government went through several regimes, each of which was heavily preoccupied with religious matters, and was also frequently in weak hands; it was consequently scarcely able to help its merchants. Those merchants, however, or some of them at least, were resilient. Alternative markets were found. The voyages to the White Sea which opened up contact with Russia and led to the formation of the Muscovy Company are the most famous, but other voyages penetrated into the Baltic, and to the south there were merchants and sailors who had already reached Brazil. In 1551 or thereabouts contact was made with Morocco, where two of the ports controlled by the Portuguese had been conquered by the sultan, and trade was thereby opened up to other European merchants; a useful trade developed with England, principally in sugar.5 Not long after, trade along the West African coast further south developed, in which the English merchants in the Canaries participated. Both of these trades were developed in response to the difficulties the English found in Spain and later Portugal. These trades had been the source of many Mediterranean products for English merchants; the difficulties induced some merchants to explore other areas of the Sea-entrance; other merchants began to by-pass the Iberian Peninsula and go directly to the source for those products within the Mediterranean. The arrival, or return, of English and Dutch merchant ships in the sea was noted by Fernand Braudel and dated to the early 1570s, though his term for it, ‘Northern Invasion’ , is an exaggeration and distortion of what actually happened.6 One of the by-products of the new trade with Russia, organised as the Muscovy Company, was a series of attempts to open up a trade with Persia. The goods being sought were mainly silk, in raw form, or as cloth or as yarn. The main explorations were by Anthony Jenkinson, who conducted the earliest attempts. The trade was never very satisfactory: the journey was long and dangerous; the trading opportunities were uncertain and intermittent, and always subject to changing political conditions in Russia and Persia. The trade was only undertaken because no other source of silk was available, since 5

Hakluyt IV, 32–35; T. S. Willan, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade, Manchester 1959, 92–106. 6 Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, 621–624; Ralph Davis, ‘England in the Mediterranean, 1570–1670’ , in E. J. Fisher (ed.), Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England, Cambridge 1961, 117–137; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550– 1653, Princeton NJ 1991, 12–13, 15–18.

8

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

access to the eastern trade was blocked at the time by Ottoman hostility, and it was a definitive Ottoman blockage on the Persian– Russian trade from 1580 which compelled the London merchants to seek another source of supply.7 Eventually, of course, the East India Company’s voyages to the Indian Ocean opened up the trade in eastern goods, not just in silk, but first a much easier alternative was to tap into the silk and spices trade at ports on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, the Levant; for this, however, Ottoman agreement would be needed. The Levant is usually considered to be the coast of Syria, but it also could refer more diffusely to the whole of the Mediterranean coast from Constantinople and western Asia Minor to Egypt, and even including Greece. (Its counterpart, the Ponent, is the eastern coast of Spain.) There were several major sources of eastern goods available at major ports in the region: Alexandria in Egypt or Smyrna in Turkey, for example, as well as the Syrian ports, such as Alexandretta (‘Scanderoon’), Lattakia, or Jaffa. Smyrna in particular developed as a major source in the seventeenth century, but for the English traders in the sixteenth century the main trading city was Aleppo in north Syria. This was the city at which the trade by way of the Persian Gulf and from Persia itself reached the Mediterranean region. The city was comfortably inland, away from sea-borne molestation, and it was well placed as an entrepôt from which goods could be despatched in several directions. The ships could also tap into the trade at the ports of (Syrian) Tripoli and Lattakia, or at Skanderoon, the main port for Aleppo. The trade which had developed in the early sixteenth century was at first directed more at the eastern colonies of Venice or Genoa – the Ionian Islands, particularly Zante, Chios, Crete, Cyprus – than at the Turkish mainland. The original suppliers of eastern goods to England had been the Venetian galley fleets, but they effectively ceased to be sent with any regularity after 1509 (though the voyages intermittently revived for another thirty years or so); the obvious reply to their absence was for English ships to go to Venice and its colonies rather than wait to have Venetians come to England. But even this commerce failed from about 1535, except for the occasional ship; this was another contributory factor to the subsequent economic depression.8

7

The journeys are recorded in Hakluyt I, 397 398, 408–418, 438–463, and II, 9–53, and summarised by Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, Cambridge 1984, ch. 3. 8 Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company, Oxford 1935, 1– 2.

The Levant Company and the Assaults on Cadiz

9

This disruption of the western markets in the mid-sixteenth century provided the incentive for merchants and sailors to return to the Mediterranean, just as it propelled adventurers to sail to Morocco and Muscovy and West Africa. But by the time they arrived in the sea conditions had changed. The conquering career of the Ottoman Sultans Selim the Grim and Suleiman the Magnificent between 1512 and 1573 extended Ottoman power throughout the Levant and Egypt, and well into the western basin along the North African coast, and then an increasingly serious quarrel with Spain preoccupied the English government. The Ottoman advance was checked at Malta in 1565 and the battle of Lepanto in 1571, but in 1566 the Genoese Aegean island of Chios (from where the alum monopoly was administered, and whence had come the Genoese ships which intercepted Sturmy) was taken by the Turks, and from 1570 to 1573 Venice and the Ottomans fought each other for Cyprus, a war which resulted in the Turkish conquest of the island, and caused great damage to Venetian trade.9 English ships by this time were once again active in the Mediterranean, trading at Livorno (‘Leghorn’) in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The place was developed by the Grand Duke into a free port, tolerant of all religions. The English also traded at Civitavecchia (ironically in the Papal States) for alum, a source of which had been found nearby. They sold woollens, especially kerseys, wheat, fish, tin, and lead, very much the same goods as had been purveyed by Sturmy. Woollens were especially prized in the Ottoman Empire, particularly those dyed red or purple.10 Spain and the Ottomans were mutually hostile, and once the Spanish market began to close to the English, the obvious ploy for excluded merchants was to by-pass Spain and contact the Turks directly, with a view to opening trade in the now-Ottoman east. Such contact had been made in the 1530s by France, when it was also fighting Spain, and French merchants from the southern ports had developed a profitable trade with the Ottoman ports; the rest of Europe had professed to be scandalised by the hospitality given to the Turkish fleet when it over-wintered at Marseilles in the 1530s, but it had proved both economically and politically helpful to France, though the arrogance of the Turks was distinctly unwelcome in the region. The ploy by the English was less blatant and less obvious, partly because of the distances involved, and partly because, while Queen Elizabeth was publicly hostile to the idea of contacting the Turks, privately she was quite willing to consider it, and even to encourage it; she went so far as to provide finance to help things 9 F. C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic, 10 Davis, ‘England in the Mediterranean’.

Baltimore 1973, 369–374.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

along, which for such a parsimonious lady was a sign of the issue’s great importance. Her more subtle approach brought much less opprobrium than that on the French king. The contact was initiated by London merchants who were interested in developing a Levantine trade, but who had to determine first if the Turks would permit it; they carefully sounded out the English government’s attitude first. Two widely experienced London merchants, Sir Francis Osborne and Richard Staper, sent agents to Constantinople to negotiate the terms under which English merchants could trade. This was followed by the despatch of William Harborne to conclude a more permanent and more official agreement which laid down the rights of English merchants. The sultan was not happy that he was discussing the matter with a mere merchant, and the initial agreement was revoked, partly as a result of French pressure – the French merchants did not relish the idea of competition, and the French government did not like the prospect of a friendly relationship between England and the Ottomans. One can see why the London merchants involved Queen Elizabeth from the start – Harborne’s expenses, for example, were paid by the queen. In England the revocation of the first agreement caused a reconsideration of the whole issue. The merchants involved and the government decided to form a new merchant company, the Turkey Company, to regulate the merchants and the trade, with an official charter. This provided the merchants with the necessary official standing in the new negotiations with the sultan at Constantinople, and left the individual traders less open to pressure and intimidation; it would also provide the Ottomans with a single organisation with which to deal rather than many individuals. So the Turkey Company was organised, and Harborne was sent out again, this time with an official appointment as an ambassador, though the queen now insisted that this time the Company pay all his expenses – only reasonable since the Company, the driving force in establishing contacts with the Turks, would be the main beneficiary.11 The men who founded the Company were a group of wealthy merchants, mainly of London, a mixture of Muscovy Company members, who were interested in opening up the trade with Persia which Jenkinson had explored, and Spanish Company men who had found themselves increasingly shut out of their chosen trade by Spanish hostility – though many of the men were members of both companies.12 They were wealthy men who were prepared to incur 11 The

charter of 1581 is discussed in M. Epstein, The Early History of the Levant Company, London 1908, as are its successors; also Wood, Levant Company, 11. 12 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 17–19.

The Levant Company and the Assaults on Cadiz

11

the large start-up costs on the assumption that they would reap a rich reward. Their attention to detail and their insistence on English government assistance and participation, even if tendered with a long spoon, were testimony to both the attractions and the perceived dangers of the trade. This curious, perhaps typically Elizabethan, process is not seriously misleading in implying both private and state participation. The Levant Company (as the Turkey Company became in 1592 when it united with the briefly active Venice Company) was both an independent organisation of merchants and an agent of the English state – the ambassadors at Constantinople and the consuls in the Turkish provinces were paid by the Company, an obvious indication of this joint element, and most of the work involved protecting the merchants and the Company against other Europeans’ intrigues with the Turkish state, and against the depredations of Turkish officials. It was by no means the first such Company to be organised, for it is in a sense a version of the medieval Merchant Adventurers and Merchants of the Staple, and the participation of many of its early members in other similar companies brought the ethos of those organisations into the new one. To the Turks the Company was a convenient organisation since such a group of foreign merchants would be at the Turkish state’s mercy; at the same time, it was also a fragment of the English state, and so a useful diplomatic presence from London’s point of view. It combined for the Turks a diplomatic contact with England (a known enemy by now of Spain), and an organisation which recognised the authority of the Turkish sultanate without demanding some sort of equality, which the sultan would never countenance. It was also a useful foil to the influence of France, whose ambassador had complained long and loud about the new agreement, to such an extent that the Turks became all the keener to conclude it.13 The capitulations, as the agreements were officially called, contained plenty of privileges for the Company’s merchants, but these were only of use if the Company could get them accepted and enforced by the agents of the Turkish state, above all those in the provinces. The Company had to be assertive, appointing consuls at some places, including Smyrna, Aleppo, Alexandria, and Algiers – and an ambassador at Constantinople – and it had to display power, that is, naval power. This was something with which the English had

13 For all this, see Wood, Levant Company, ch. 1; Andrews, Trade, Plunder, 89–95;

Harborne is the subject of studies in S. Skilliter (ed.), Sir William Harborne and the Trade with Turkey, 1578–1582, Oxford 1977; the basis of all these discussions is Hakluyt’s documents: III, 52–72, 85–113.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

become increasingly familiar in the previous half-century, and their success against the Spanish Armada during the development of the Turkish negotiations was a mark of their new prowess, duly noted by the Turks. At the same time, one of the main English weapons in the Spanish war had been privateers, raiding Spanish colonies and seizing Spanish ships – and increasingly the ships of anyone else as well. The ending of the Spanish war in 1604 left these men unemployed and, when the continued their raids, outside any English law. Privateering had been financed by the same group of men who had formed the Turkey Company and its successors; unlike the common sailors, they had become rich on the proceeds; now they looked to new opportunities to use and increase that wealth, but unlike the common sailors again, their wealth allowed them to operate within the law, more or less.14 The Levant Company was clear from the start that its ships would need to be able to do two things: carry substantial quantities of rich cargo, and defend themselves against attack. Also from the start it was clear that within the Ottoman Empire the capitulations granted by the sultan would take a long time to be accepted in the provincial ports, and even then the local Turkish authorities were fertile at improvising penalties and fines on the merchants (not just the English, but all Franks – every European ambassador was kept busy), and these could most easily be evaded by bribes (thus ensuring, of course, that the impositions and threats would be repeated). The Company was subject to heavy costs at Constantinople, where it was necessary for the ambassadors to be ever alert to resist pressure from a variety of sources, and to be able to offer gifts to high officials – the higher the official the more expensive the required gift. Further, the Company was regarded by the English government as a tax-cow, and in both its original charter (of 1581) and the new charter (of 1592) the requirement of paying regular and substantial contributions to the exchequer was included, not to mention that the individual cargoes were subject to heavy customs duties. The Company therefore aimed to use the largest types of ship from the beginning and to put plenty of guns on board them, so that each voyage was made by a fleet of ships, and resembled a naval expedition more than a trading voyage. Each voyage was a projection of English state power into the Mediterranean – and so for the first time since the Crusades. A series of lists of ships reproduced in one modern account of the Company’s origins shows that it used a 14 K.

R. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering: English Privateering during the Spanish War, 1585–1604, Cambridge 1964, ch. 10; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 19.

The Levant Company and the Assaults on Cadiz

13

mixture of large and medium-sized ships, partly depending on their destinations.15 In 1581 they sent fourteen ships to Zante, which was a main source of currants and a useful rendezvous point for the ships on their return voyages, and to Crete, a source of malmsey wine. These ships ranged in size from the Royal Merchant of 350 tons to the Thomas Bonaventure of 100 tons; three of the fourteen listed were 300 tons or more, but most of the rest were 200 tons or less; all were well armed. Each voyage included some of the largest ships for defence, but the generality of English shipping at the time consisted of vessels of less than 200 tons, and this was what the Company also used. (One result was that its ships were regularly conscripted into the naval forces when war arrived.16) The cargoes the ships carried were rich and profitable enough to permit the seeming extravagance of large ships and plenty of guns, and the Company’s reward was to see that its ships were rarely even menaced, never mind captured. The real problem was the Ottoman provincial officials, at least at first. One of the Company ships, the Jesus (100 tons, and a crew of 25 men), visited (Libyan) Tripoli in 1583, right at the start of the Company’s activities, and was there seized by the local governor, the cargo was confiscated, and the crew was enslaved. It took two years for Ambassador Harborne to get the men and the ship released.17 Hakluyt’s collection of documents includes a whole series of letters and instructions from the sultan to various provincial authorities requiring full attention to the privileges of the English Company, letters which could be flourished in the faces of recalcitrant officials. It is an indication of the difficulty which the sultan, ‘the lord of the world’, had in enforcing his own authority.18 One of the Company’s captains was probably James Lancaster, who later commanded the earliest voyages of the East India Company to the east. He is not directly recorded as voyaging for the Company in the Mediterranean, but between 1595 and 1589 he was occupied as a merchant and a navigator, and captained several of the Company’s ships which were taken up for naval expeditions – in Drake’s Cadiz raid in 1587, in the Armada campaign, and in the retaliatory attack on Lisbon in 1589 – and it seems reasonable to conclude that he was in the Company’s employ on these occasions and therefore

15 Ralph

Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the 17th and 18th Centuries, Newton Abbot 1971; Epstein, Early History, appendix V. 16 The ships were thus not, at least at this stage, unusually large, though they were at the higher end of those available; later the Company certainly used ships of 500 or 600 tons. 17 Hakluyt III, 139–159. 18 Hakluyt III, 119–139.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

also earlier; in 1591 it was a group of Levant Company merchants who financed his first voyage to the Indian Ocean.19 The formal outbreak of war with Spain in 1585 increased the hazards of the Levant voyages. A small fleet of five ships was already in the Mediterranean when the war began with the sudden Spanish seizure of all English ships and merchants in Spanish ports. It is not clear if the ships’ captains knew of the war when on their return voyage off Sicily in November 1585, but they clearly prepared for trouble. The ships had separated to trade, the Edward Bonaventure and the Susan (or Suzanne) went to Venice, the Tobie to Constantinople, and the Royal Merchant and the William and John to Tripoli in Syria. They appointed a rendezvous for their return voyage, agreeing to meet at Zante in the Ionian Islands and then sail home as a fleet. (This may, of course, have been the usual procedure, but details are sparse.) Sure enough, when they re-gathered they knew that two Spanish galley fleets awaited them, one lying south of Sicily, the other in the Strait of Gibraltar. They organised themselves into a fighting fleet, appointed an admiral (Captain Edward Wilkinson of Royal Merchant) and a vice-admiral (Tobie) and set off. They met a fleet of thirteen Spanish and Maltese galleys commanded by Don Pedro de Leiva near Pantelleria in the Sicilian Narrows on 13 July 1586. There was much discussion between the two admirals, in which the Spanish case was that the English ships were within Spanish waters (the state of war was not apparently mentioned); when the Englishmen rejected this proposition, the galleys attacked. In theory the galleys with their speed and their manoeuvrability had the advantage of the ships which depended on the wind. In fact, it was firepower which was decisive, at least where there was no flat calm, and even then determined resistance meant that the ships were usually successful. In their attacks on the high-sided, wellarmed, English ships, the galleys made little impression. Only two men were wounded in the English ships, though what damage was done to the ships is not known; at least three of the galleys, including Don Pedro’s flagship, were so damaged as to be close to sinking. The galleys withdrew; the English ships sailed on.20 The Spaniards had a good case for attacking this little fleet, since war with England had already begun, but they failed to make this point, at least according to the account included in Hakluyt’s collection, no doubt hoping for a capture without fighting or without suffering (or inflicting) damage. Already preparations were being 19 Michael

Franks, The Basingstoke Admiral: A Life of Sir James Lancaster, Salisbury 2006, 43–45. 20 Hakluyt III, 359–368.

The Levant Company and the Assaults on Cadiz

15

made to constitute a great armed Spanish fleet, an Armada, to attack the English in their home waters and their homeland. The following year these preparations were disrupted by an English pre-emptive attack; Levant Company ships were involved. The crucial ports for gathering the Armada were Lisbon and Cadiz, the main naval and mercantile ports at the entrance to the Mediterranean. Both were capacious anchorages, well defended by forts and garrisons, and both were major reception ports for goods and treasure from America (at Cadiz) and the east (at Lisbon). Portugal and Spain were united under the same king at this time, though they remained separate states. Supplies and vessels were gradually accumulated at these two ports during 1586–1587, much of both being brought from the Mediterranean. The English seaborne attack in 1587, led by Sir Francis Drake, avoided Lisbon after a menacing brief presence off the port, but made a successful raid into Cadiz harbour, where perhaps thirty ships were burned. Drake’s personal defiance of King Philip II had now morphed into a full-scale war between his homeland and Philip’s Spain. Drake used privateering tactics at Cadiz, where he led a ship-charge into the harbour, without any preparation. It was partly his sense of the needs of the Armada for supplies which had led him then to land on the Algarve coast of Portugal and intercept and destroy the small ships which were carrying supplies towards Lisbon. Although Drake hardly thought of it in such terms, this adventure demonstrated that even temporary control of the Sea-entrance to the Mediterranean, which is what he had achieved briefly, could paralyse much of the local traffic, but a permanent presence was required for real power in the area. Until that was achieved the Spaniards at Cadiz would always have the long-term control.21 The Strait of Gibraltar was, of course, the easiest point at which to control the traffic, though the narrowness of the gap – the ‘Gut’ as the sailors called it – produced some difficult sea conditions. There was a constant current from west to east as Atlantic water flowed in to replace evaporated Mediterranean water, while the narrow channel funnelled the winds in either direction and increased their force, making sailing through the gap difficult, and sometimes impossible. It was not unknown for whole fleets to be blown through, or for ships to be becalmed as wind and current exerted equal force in opposite 21 For

good descriptions of Drake’s raid, see Hugh Bicheno, Elizabeth’s Sea Dogs, London 2012, 212–228, James A. Williamson, The Age of Drake, Cleveland OH 1965, 294–303, K. R. Andrews, Drake’s Voyages, London 1967, 128–144, and Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, London 1959, 99–145, probably the best, and certainly the most entertaining, account; every biography of Drake and of Elizabeth I includes an account, generally brief, of the raid.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

directions. This was an ideal situation for galleys, and the Spanish bases in the area, from Cadiz to Gibraltar and on to Malaga and Cartagena to the east, provided Spain with the permanent control of the Strait and the Alboran Sea which Drake’s raid had briefly interrupted for a couple of weeks. In 1590 this was the scene of a second well-recorded encounter between English ships and Spanish galleys. A fleet of ten English ships sailing back to England were attacked by a dozen galleys.22 The report on the encounter emphasises that the galleys were full of men - 200 or 300 per galley, according to the English account. Their preferred means of attack was to approach at speed, fire their heavy bow guns, then come close alongside and board. The English ships therefore kept their distance, putting their four strongest ships in the rear of their formation, where they would be the first to be attacked. The first shots were fired by the rearmost Englishman, Salomon, and scored a direct hit on the leading galley, holing it ‘as that she was ready to sink’ , and killing and wounding many of the men on board. The fight went on for six hours, until the galleys withdrew to their base at Gibraltar. The English heard later that at least two of the galleys were almost sinking, and all the rest had sustained serious damage; all the exhortations of the governor of Gibraltar could not persuade the galleys to mount a new attack even though the English ships were becalmed close to Gibraltar for three more days.23 After the fights between galleys and sailing ships the victorious English ships had gone into a North African port to make repairs and collect supplies. The five in 1586 used Algiers, and the ten in 1590 Tetuan. In both cases they were welcomed and feted by the local Muslims for their defeat of the common enemy. This was before these places became corsair bases. These fights – there was another, in 1591, between a single English ship, the Centurion of 200 tons, probably a Levant Company ship, and five Spanish galleys, again in the Strait of Gibraltar, which Centurion won24 – make it obvious that the decision of the Levant Company to use the biggest ships and to arm them well was the correct one. (Centurion had agreed to sail with a group of smaller ships, which in the event failed to support it, and some of them were taken.) The Levant Company was to be damaged in its reputation by the activities of English privateers and by the later careers of some of them as 22 The

ships are said to be returning from the Levant, but seem to be an ad hoc group; the most powerful ship, called Salomon by Hakluyt, may be a Levant Company ship – it had a Solomon in 1590; it would be unusual, however, for a Company ship to be sailing alone, which seems to be the case here. 23 Hakluyt IV, 360–383. 24 Hakluyt IV, 383–386.

The Levant Company and the Assaults on Cadiz

17

corsairs, but not in its profits, which were substantial. As an arm of the English state in all but name, its ships and exploits were such as to enhance considerably the English reputation in the Mediterranean. Some lessons could be learned from these events. The superiority of a resolute defence by sailing ships over attacking galleys was clear, though it was much less obvious that sailing ships could be effective in attack, where the galleys’ greater manoeuvrability allowed them to evade the ships’ clumsier moves. Less obvious was the lesson provided by the English attack on Cadiz. Drake had destroyed ships and their cargoes at Cadiz, and had paralysed local Spanish seaborne traffic for a time by camping in the Algarve, but this was a purely temporary interruption; had he waited much longer he would probably have been pushed away by a land attack. The object of that raid, and of another led by the Earl of Essex in 1596, which was a failure, was not to control the area but simply to damage Spain’s shipping, and as such they were fairly minor events with few permanent effects. The actions in the Strait in 1586 and the 1590s showed that galleys could be defeated by a sailing ship’s defence, if it was sufficiently well conducted and the ship was large and well-armed, but other ships had been taken; Spanish control of the entrance to the Mediterranean had not been seriously damaged, nor even seriously challenged. The danger points at the Sicilian Narrows and the Strait of Gibraltar were emphasised. Despite all this the riches of the Eastern Basin trade would continue to attract English ships for the foreseeable future. Another thing to be noted is that, despite the war with Spain from 1585, the number of English ships in the Mediterranean was clearly substantial. Both Salomon and Centurion had gathered a tail of several smaller English ships to go through the Gut as a body, and the successful defence conducted by most of them showed the good sense of such a convoy. Numbers are impossible to calculate, but such gatherings at the Strait suggest that English ships were probably ubiquitous, at least in the Western Basin, if perhaps thinly spread. The Levant Company was always complaining of ‘interlopers’ – English non-Company ships trading in its supposedly exclusive area – which further implies that English shipping had collectively penetrated to all parts of the Mediterranean during the last third of the sixteenth century.

Chapter 2 Corsairs and Civil War c.1600–1660

The North African coast became the source of a particular set of sea raiders at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Ottoman authority over the provinces of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers established the region as part of the Ottoman Empire by the 1560s, but this scarcely lasted to the end of the century in anything like an effective form. Instead local rulers emerged from the local military/ naval garrisons, with Ottoman pashas appointed to supervise, not always with much effect. These places had been bases for part of the Ottoman naval forces in the sixteenth century, but as the Ottoman imperial presence faded, naval activity in the region emerged as an official piracy. The raiders were called corsairs.1 It took rather more than official neglect to drive the development of corsair activity. For one thing the Ottoman naval power was based on galleys, which were, as the Levant Company ships (and others) had by now demonstrated, vulnerable to well-armed sailing ships – and the biggest ships were the biggest prizes. But a new ingredient arrived at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the form of European pirates and privateers who had been infesting Atlantic and Mediterranean waters during the wars with Spain. These were from most of the lands north of Spain – France, the Netherlands, England, even Scotland and Scandinavia – and they were men who had found the privateering life congenial and satisfying, and were keen to continue in it. They had found that peace was not conducive to their activities, 1

John B. Wolf, The Barbary Coast: Algeria under the Turks, New York 1979, is probably the best book on this subject from the point of view of the corsairs and their cities, but is geographically limited; Christopher Lloyd, English Corsairs on the Barbary Coast, London 1981, and Adrian Tinniswood, Pirates of Barbary, London 2010, are limited in other ways; Alan G. Jamieson, Lords of the Sea, London 2012, covers the whole region; Peter Earle, The Pirate Wars, London 2003, concentrates on the naval aspect; note also the briefer treatment, though with reference to the archives of Tunis and Algiers, from the corsair point of view, by John de Courcy Ireland, ‘The Corsairs of North Africa’ , MM 62, 1976, 271–283.

Corsairs and Civil War

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and as peace spread over Western Europe – the Franco-Spanish treaty ended one war in 1599, the Anglo-Spanish treaty brought peace in 1604, and the Dutch–Spanish armistice ended their fighting in 1609 – they had to find a new base, not being welcome any more to operate from their homelands. The one war which did not end was that between Spain and the Ottoman Empire. A combination of the slackening of Ottoman authority in North Africa, unemployed European pirates, and vulnerable merchant ships now led to the development of corsairs and corsair states. The English had been trading with Morocco for half a century, and had even organised the Barbary Company to regulate the trade for a time. The Company, in many ways more a vehicle of power for courtiers such as the Earls of Warwick and Leicester rather than a trade-promoting entity, only lasted for a dozen years from 1585 to 1597, and its failure reopened the Moroccan trade to other merchants, not that they had usually paid much heed to the Company’s monopoly.2 One of its justifications had been that the voyage to Morocco lay past Spain (which included Portugal at this point) and individual merchant ships were therefore liable to capture. With the end of the war this issue ceased to count; the end of the Company well before the arrival of peace suggests it was always a less than compelling problem. The Moroccan state had gone through difficult times, but during the latter part of the sixteenth century it was a united sultanate with access to supplies of gold and slaves in interior West Africa.3 European merchants hoped to tap into the supplies of gold, though it does not seem that they were very successful. Nevertheless, a minor and profitable trade grew, mainly in sugar, once the Company was removed. The Moroccans, other than some fishermen, had no maritime capability, though their coasts had several small towns with harbours. One of these towns, Sallee, became a notable corsair base; the sultan became a silent partner with the corsairs. Within the Mediterranean the privateers had never discriminated much between Muslim and Christian shipping, nor did their victims much discriminate between the various European origins of the privateers. Some of the English privateering raids reached into the Greek archipelago, close to Constantinople, and this reflected badly on the Levant Company, whose trade with Italy also suffered. Their activities in the Adriatic have been blamed in part for the commercial

2 3

T. S. Willan, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade, Manchester 1959. Dahou Yahya, Morocco in the Sixteenth Century, Atlantic Highlands NJ 1981.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

difficulties of Venice from the late sixteenth century.4 The English were, of course, not the only privateers/pirates/ corsairs in the sea, nor necessarily the worst, but they were numerous. The Levant Company, however, did succeed very largely in sailing through the troubles the privateers caused and coming home with profit.5 The mixture of peace in the north, privateers, and continuing Spanish–Ottoman hostility was combustible material. It burst into a powerful threat to commerce with the actions of the Spanish government in the early 1600s in expelling all its Morsicos, Muslims who had been forcibly christianised, but who largely retained their Muslim faith in secret, and their Muslim practices. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people were expelled from Spain, driven out from their ancestral homes, their goods confiscated (or stolen) and they themselves often mistreated. They took refuge in the ports of North Africa, and their treatment injected a strong sense of grievance into the continuing local hostility between the Muslim south and the Christian north.6 With sturdy European ships and guns, the sailing and privateering skills of the European sailors, and the manpower and vengefulness of the North Africans, their ships powered by slaves, often Christian captives, the new power of the Barbary corsairs became established in several ports from Morocco to Libya. They practised a form of predatory capitalism. The victims were European ships, and above all their crews. The sale of captives was one of the main sources of income for the Barbary rulers, with the result that it was almost impossible to stop the raiding. Some nests of pirates who were operating outside the local governing systems of North Africa could be attacked and destroyed by the victim states, particularly if they had already annoyed some local ruler, but the men themselves often survived to reconstitute their activities from a different base, or to pass on their skills to others in North Africa. Those operating as part of the state system, however, could not be eliminated by any means other than the conquest of the whole country. The one limitation which could be imposed was for one victim-country to make its enmity to the corsairs and their actions so effective that a treaty was negotiated which removed its ships from the possibility of being attacked. As with the Levant Company’s treaty with the Ottoman Sultan, such an agreement had to be constantly enforced, 4

Alberto Tenenti, Piracy and the Decline of Venice, trans. Brian Pullan, Berkeley CA 1967, ch. 4, ‘The English’ . 5 Wood, Levant Company, 25–26. 6 David Abulafia, The Great Sea, London 2014, 470–476; L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500–1641, Chicago IL 2005; M. Carr, Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain, 1492–1684, London 2009.

Corsairs and Civil War

21

for individual corsair captains might at any point decide to ignore it, as might the ruler – and the rulers were constantly subject to removal, for the mode of government change, at least at Algiers, was by coup d’état and assassination. The North African coastal states were not the only corsair entities in the Mediterranean. The Knights of St John of the Hospital, a crusading order of militant monks, had been given Malta as their base by the king of Spain in 1530 and they were as active in raiding, slaving, and intercepting ships as any Muslim corsair.7 Indeed it might be said that the Hospitallers provided the Muslims with a pattern to follow, though it would probably be better to regard both as developing their methods in tandem. The Knights viewed themselves as at war with Islam, and the North Africans and Ottomans reciprocated. Similarly, though for a time less intensely, the Spanish monarchy had the same crusading attitude, the prolongation into and across the sea of the reconquista, the centuries-long war by Christian kings to conquer the Muslim part of Spain. Sicily and Naples and Sardinia were Spanish territories and were, like Malta, in the front line of the continuing conflict. In addition, for the Knights and the Sicilians, Christian ships from Protestant countries were as likely to be targets as any Muslim vessel, as de Leiva’s galleys at Pantelleria had shown. The corsair states were at war, above all, with Spain, and this enmity was constantly reinforced by the arrival of refugees from Spanish persecution with tales of violence, intolerance, and robbery. In 1609– 1614 the final expulsion of the last Moriscos brought a great reinforcement to the North African states; all the victims, ill-treated and robbed and driven from their homes, arrived with a visceral hatred of Christian Spain, and by extension of all Christian states. This was the final ingredient in the corsair mix. The corsairs, having acquired better ships and the maritime skills of the Europeans, were able to range beyond the western Mediterranean; the peace with Spain made by other Europeans meant that, to the corsairs, the ships of these Europeans were now ‘legitimate’ targets. A notorious example in England was an attack on the Dolphin by five ‘Turkish’ ships near Sardinia in January 1617. The corsairs attacked singly, which allowed Dolphin’s master, Edward Nichols, who was clearly well prepared, to fight them off singly. Twice at least his ship was boarded, but the crew drove off the enemy by means of ‘murderers’ , guns loaded with langrage, vicious bits of metal which spread widely when fired and successfully cleared the decks. (This 7

A useful essay on these matters is by Salvatore Bona, ‘Naval Conflicts and Privateering’, in Victor Mallia-Milanes (ed.), Hospitaller Malta 1530–1798, Msida, Malta 1993.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

was a typical weapon of privateers, which makes one wonder at the earlier career of Captain Nichols.8) This case was just one of a series of increasingly annoyed complaints about corsair activities from merchants, sailors, and even towns and cities in the southwest of England directed towards the government of James I. The records show that his government was concerned about it as early as 1609 or 1610,9 but it took a good deal of pressure to compel James’ government (or that of any other European kingdom for that matter) to do something. An attempt was made to mount a joint Anglo-Dutch-Spanish expedition, but it never got started.10 The basic problem was the mutual antipathy of these states, but for the English government another problem was the cost. The Levant Company was leaned on and contributed £20,000 to the expenses of a naval expedition, and James revived a medieval tax, ship money, which was imposed on many of the ports, to secure more; London was assessed at £40,000 out of a tax total for all England of £48,500.11 Stories were circulating of a Spanish expedition in preparation, but its target was not known – Venice was fearful, the Dutch concerned, no doubt the corsairs were worried – and the English thought it might be directed at them. James, announcing that he assumed that it was the corsairs who were the chosen Spanish enemy, offered his new naval force as an ally in such an endeavour. This was a cunning move, for if the Spaniards were intending to attack the corsairs they would probably welcome English help, but if they were aiming to attack England, they had now been warned that a strong English force was in existence to oppose them. In the event the Spanish expedition did not go anywhere, and may have been no more than a rumour. The English expedition went out alone. The king contributed six large ships from the Royal Navy, and a dozen well-armed merchant ships were volunteered – or conscripted – to take part, including several Levant Company ships.12 The Admiral was Sir Thomas Mansell, in Lion, with Sir Richard Hawkins and Sir Thomas Button as Vice- and Rear-Admirals. The king’s ships were all of 500 to 600 tons and armed with up to forty guns; the merchant ships ranged from 100 to 300 tons, generally half the tonnage of the Royal Navy ships, and with half or less their number and size of

8

Tinniswood, Pirates, 88–94, referring to Anon., A Fight at Sea, Famously Fought by the Dolphin of London, 1617; Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.50, refers to an account by Nichols, which may be that document; another is in Purchas, 6.150. 9 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1603–1610, 469. 10 David D. Webb, Piracy and the English Government 1616–1642, chs 3–4. 11 Corbett, Mediterranean, 1.101–105; Webb, Piracy, ch. 2. 12 Contributions are listed by Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.51, note 3.

Corsairs and Civil War

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guns. Altogether it was a formidable force for the time and place, and far more powerful than any corsair fleet it might encounter.13 Mansell’s instructions, as such documents always had to be in times of slow and uncertain communications, envisaged several possible actions on his part, and did not mention several other possibilities, which were clearly to be understood.14 The attitude of Spain was wholly uncertain, though given its enmity to the corsairs it was not unwilling that Mansell should use Spanish ports for resupply and as refuges in adversity. The situation was dangerous for Spain. The corsairs were Spain’s most inveterate enemy, but the Dutch– Spanish armistice had only a few months to run (expiring in 1621), and it was as certain as anything could be in international affairs that fighting would restart; in the meantime Spain could not afford to become involved in a campaign in North Africa. The English fleet might succeed at Algiers in one of two ways: it might destroy the Algerine naval capability, which would effectively stop its corsair activities for a time, and which would be something the Spaniards would clearly welcome; or it might conclude a truce or a treaty which would leave the corsair state intact and English merchant ships free of the fear of being attacked. Such a virtual alliance of England and Algiers would clearly hurt Spain; the Dutch were already known to have made some sort of agreement with Algiers in advance of the renewed fighting with Spain. If the English were to follow them, Spain might find itself ringed by enemies, open or veiled. So the Spanish government had a good excuse for not participating in the Algerine expedition, but it was certainly prepared to facilitate it, since any success against Algiers – or indeed any continuing hostilities between England and Algiers – could only benefit Spain, among others. Mansell sailed south close to the Portuguese coast to collect any messages from Sir Walter Aston, the English ambassador at Madrid, but received none. He reached Gibraltar and arranged with the Spanish vice-admiral there that they should each cruise in a part of the sea, searching for pirates. He was allocated Malaga as his base, and was able to use Alicante as well, and later Majorca.15 The fleet searched for corsairs and found none. Mansell brought his ships to anchor off Algiers and sent in messages with royal letters, demanding the restoration of all English captives, the return of English ships, and compensation for lost goods and ships. After 13 Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.52; Corbett, Mediterranean, 1.114. 14 BL Add Mss 36445, Aston Papers 22. 15 The main source for the events is TNA SP 14/122/106,

a report by RearAdmiral Button; Webb, Piracy, ch. 5, is the most complete modern account – but see next note.

24

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

several days of waiting and meetings and negotiations he collected eighteen freed captives, but nothing else. He should not have been surprised at this. Mansell’s instructions had been to negotiate and he was specifically forbidden to attack the city. So bound, he could do nothing to force the hand of the pasha, who in turn was also bound to some extent by his council; both men knew the value of delay and procrastination in such dealings. Mansell took his fleet away, partly out of frustration, and partly in search of supplies. The pasha could be well satisfied. While the English fleet had been negotiating, a squadron of Spanish ships had arrived off the city, ostensibly in pursuit of some corsairs; they had fired into the city, whose guns fired back, but the ships had stayed far enough from the shore so that no-one on land or sea was hit. The Spaniards’ arrival was possibly aimed at finding out what the English were doing; successful negotiations between English and Algerines were not what the Spaniards wanted. The false bombardment – for it is obvious that neither side was serious - was perhaps a strong hint that this was what they expected the English to do, or perhaps it was a spoiler for the English negotiations; the message to the Algerines might have been that Spain and England were allied in this endeavour. Mansell received no further instructions, possibly because the English government had become fixated on the war which had developed in central Europe, where the king’s daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband, the Elector Palatine and briefly king of Bohemia, had been driven into exile. Evidently Mansell decided to activate a second part of his instructions, which called on him to destroy the pirate ships in Algiers harbour. He prepared three fireships and returned to Algiers. He had to wait several days for a suitable wind, but on 24 May 1621, despite a sudden shift in the wind, the three vessels made their attack. The Algerines, according to an escaping captive who swam out to the flagship, simply did not believe the English would attack, no doubt remembering the same waiting game of the year before. So, despite the delay, when the attack was sent in, it came as a surprise. However, the fireships failed to ignite any of the ships in the harbour, though a couple were damaged, and when some fires were set crowds ran out along the mole and set about extinguishing them, helped by an opportune shower of rain. At last, after months of waiting and negotiating and failing to catch any pirates – on the only occasion they met a group of corsair ships they proved to be faster sailers and got away – Mansell went home. His ships were foul, the news from Europe was unpleasant, the Spaniards had become very suspicious and all his ploys had failed. He arrived at the Downs in October, his ships badly worn, his

Corsairs and Civil War

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crews much reduced through sickness, and having only failure to report.16 He was, of course, blamed, and blame has continued to be heaped on him ever since. This was assisted by the absence for a long time of any copy of his instructions from the king who, of course, had no intention of accepting any of the blame, and by the intemperate criticism of Sir William Monson, a naval pamphleteer who had wanted to be given the command and had been ignored.17 Historians have generally treated Mansell with acid criticism and contempt, assuming too readily that he should have sailed right into Algiers harbour and started destroying ships and city.18 But neither his instructions nor common sense would allow that. The Spaniards by their bombardment had demonstrated that the city – which in any case he had been expressly forbidden to attack – was well defended. Sailing directly into the harbour would simply expose his ships to bombardment from the city’s guns. Later historians have generally been somewhat more sympathetic to Mansell’s problems, but have had to admit that, apart from the few captives he rescued, the expedition had been a failure, at least in the immediate term.19 On the other hand, the sequel suggests otherwise. The English ambassador at Constantinople, Sir Thomas Roe, negotiated a peace treaty between King James and the Pasha of Algiers the following year (1622). The state of war imposed by Mansell’s expedition was thus ended, but it was succeeded by a series of disputes brought on by the unwillingness of both the corsairs and the undisciplined English merchants to abide by the peace terms. The English merchants were all too willing to trade in captured Muslims just as the corsairs enslaved Christians of all countries. The treaty of 1622 demonstrated that Algiers was effectively an independent state, with little but nominal allegiance to the sultan in Constantinople, and gradually other European states came to the same conclusion – as the Dutch already had. The advantage of this realisation was that Algiers could be directly treated with and included in the diplomatic process: consuls were appointed (the Levant Company had sent a consul to Algiers back in the 1580s), and this provided a useful conduit for

16 Corbett, Mediterranean, 1.112–132; Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.51–54; Tinniswood,

Pirates, 109–123; Wolf, Barbary Coast, 186–187. Oppenheim (ed.), Monson Tracts, NRS 1896, 251; he advocated a joint Dutch–Spanish–English expedition, which was ludicrously impossible at the time. 18 E.g., Clowes, Royal Navy, 2; and Lloyd, English Corsairs, 68–71. 19 E.g., Corbett, Mediterranean, 1.132–133. 17 M.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

both legitimate trade and the ransoming and exchange of captives.20 In that case the result of Mansell’s expedition looks much less than a failure, rather it was the start of the accommodation of the corsair states as legitimate powers, if with some unpleasant habits. The main naval lessons of Mansell’s expedition were quietly absorbed in England, despite annoyance at its failure. The city of Algiers was clearly invulnerable to an attack from the sea. The alternative of a landing by an army expedition was impossible to contemplate at such a distance from England. The failure of another expedition against Cadiz in 1625 only emphasised these difficulties.21 The corsair ships had been adapted ingeniously for greater speed, so that Mansell’s heavier vessels had been unable to catch them; at one point a group of corsair ships had sailed right through the English fleet and away. The lessons were to avoid an attack on the city, nor to attack or chase the ships. Subtler methods needed to be employed. The treaty with Algiers may have officially made peace, but it did not stop corsair raiding, for Algiers was only one of several corsair bases and states. Large numbers of Moriscos had taken refuge in Morocco, which had collapsed into a new dynastic civil war from 1603. The exiles took their revenge on Spain by taking to the sea, based mainly at the port of Sallee on the Moroccan Atlantic coast, though not only there. Needless to say, the corsairs did not confine their activities to Spanish targets, while corsairs from Tunis and Tripoli (Libya) were also active. Between Sallee and Tripoli almost any port could be a corsair base, and most were. Tunisian participation was restricted in 1609 when an expedition from Sicily destroyed thirty ships in the harbour22 – this was possible because, unlike Algiers, the city was several kilometres from the harbour, which was therefore less well defended. The Tripolitans tended to operate in the eastern basin of the sea, just as the Algerines operated in the west; both the Algerines and the Sallee corsairs operated in the Atlantic, as far away as Iceland.23 They intercepted the Newfoundland fishing fleet,24 and in 1631 raided and sacked the town of Baltimore in southern Ireland.25 It was these activities which in part

20 Webb,

Piracy, ch. 8; Wolf, Barbary Coast, 187–188 is the only other historian to note Roe’s treaty and to bring out its wider significance. 21 Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.60–64. 22 Corbett, Mediterranean, 1.18–19. 23 Kari Smari Hreinsson and Adam Nichols (eds and trans), The Travels of Reverend Olafur Egilsson, Keflavik 2011. This is one of many ‘captive narratives’, which have been exploited by Linda Colley, Captives, London 2002; all historians of the corsairs use them as well. (Egilsson was kidnapped in 1627.) 24 TNA SP 14/90/24; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1611–1618, ‘vol. XC’ . 25 Tinniswood, Pirates, ch. 8.

Corsairs and Civil War

27

provoked Charles I to begin developing the Royal Navy, during which process he took up his father’s revival of ship money, and ingeniously extended it to a tax on the whole country rather than just the ports.26 Concentration on the activities of the corsairs partly hides and partly emphasises the fact that English commerce with the Mediterranean ports had in fact continued and even increased despite corsair activity. The peace with Algiers in 1622 may not have been altogether effective, but it certainly reduced the threat to English ships, and it seems that apart from the Levant Company ships, individual voyages were made in increasing numbers particularly to the ports of the Western Basin. Once in the sea they tended to become part of the local network, collecting cargoes here and there for any port. An example is the voyage of the Prudence of London in 1628– 1630, which took cargo from London and Dover to Livorno, and then was hired out by its London owners to take a cargo to Constantinople, then to Zante, back to Livorno, and then into the Aegean once more and on to Syria and Cyprus, and back to Zante before returning to England.27 At no point does the ship appear to have been bothered by pirates of any sort, though it did get held up for some time at Livorno, apparently involved in a legal dispute. At much the same time Sir Kenelm Digby, made an expedition – an adventure, really – into the Mediterranean in his own ship, during which he called at Algiers and stayed there for some time. He met some of the important men, inspected the city and its naval capabilities, then sailed on, all without being hindered or threatened in any way. He found quite a number of Englishmen living and working in the city while he was there, not as slaves, but as workmen. It is clear that, despite its corsairing sideline, Algiers was a generally typical Mediterranean city of the time.28 Digby operated almost as a corsair himself, his journey culminating in a battle at Scanderoon, when he pitted his frigate against three Venetians and three French ships, and won. The English naval problem therefore was complex. It was impossible to protect any ships once they were in the Mediterranean, and it does not appear that this was ever contemplated as a possibility. The real corsair threat was to the coasts of the British Isles, and the problem there was that the ships which were built in the ship money 26 Webb, 27 Colin

Piracy, ch. 10. Heywood, ‘The English in the Mediterranean: A Post-Braudelian Perspective on the “Northern Invasion” ’ , in Maria Fusaro et al. (eds), Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Mediterranean: Braudel’s Maritime Legacy, London 2010, 23–44. 28 A recent description of Digby’s voyage is in Joe Moshensko, A Stain in the Blood: The Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby, London 2016.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

programme were designed more for European naval warfare than for chasing the nimble corsair ships. Meanwhile the raids extended to Cornwall and Devon, where unarmed fishing boats and merchant ships were being seized close to the coasts, to such an extent that there was panic on land at the appearance of a corsair ship, and traffic at sea was becoming paralysed. Once again it took a loud and persistent clamour of complaint to make the royal government do something.29 The new ship money fleet could not chase the corsair ships, and, as any halfway competent naval strategist could point out, chasing corsair ships was not the way to suppress their activities. That could only be done by attacking them in their bases. In 1637 an expedition was sent against Sallee. It was commanded by William Rainborowe, an experienced and pragmatic sea captain. He had sailed as a merchant ship’s captain throughout the Mediterranean, including working for the Levant Company; in 1628 he defeated an attack by four Maltese galleys against his ship Sampson;30 he had also commanded the flagship of the royal fleet in the Channel in 1636; this mixture of employments is a typical maritime career of the time, if rather higher flying than most, as he moved easily between ‘civilian’ and ‘naval’ appointments. Rainborowe took a relatively small force of six ships on the Sallee expedition. He only had three, Leopard, Antelope, and Mary, at the start, all from the royal fleet; he expected two cutters, Expedition and Providence, especially adapted for speed and inshore work, to join him; the sixth ship, an armed merchantman, Hercules, put into Lisbon for repairs on the voyage out. He did not wait for the laggards, for an early arrival at Sallee was essential if he was to catch the corsair ships in harbour. Sure enough, his arrival was just in time. He blockaded the harbour with his three big ships, and learned from escaped captives that the corsairs had been about to sail. So his first task, confining the ships in the harbour, had been accomplished. He was also fortunate to arrive in the midst of a violent dispute between the inhabitants of Old Sallee, on the north side of the estuary of the Bou Regreg River, and those of the new city founded by the Moriscos south of the river, who formed the corsair community.31 This was an ideal situation which Rainborowe exploited with skill. He allied with the Old City, landing some of his big guns to bombard both the walls of the New City and the corsair ships in its harbour. 29 Surveyed in Tinniswood, Pirates, 149–153. 30 Michael Strachan, ‘Sampson’s Fight with the

Maltese Galleys, 1628’ , MM 55, 1969, 287. 31 John Dunton, A True Journey of the Sallee Fleet, 1637, is the basic source; modern accounts are in Tinniswood, Pirates, ch. 9; Lloyd, English Corsairs, 95–97; Peter Earle, The Pirate Wars, London 2004, 76–77; Webb, Piracy, ch. 11.

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(The harbour was essentially the estuary of the river.) In June the two cutters arrived and the blockade was tightened even further, so that ships attempting to escape were driven on shore. Under this pressure, there were coups inside the New City, and the Sultan Mohammed V al-Asghar at Marrakesh became involved, scenting an opportunity to extend his authority. Finally at the end of July the sultan intervened with some deft and successful diplomacy, and all the Christian captives in the New City were released unconditionally. Further discussions brokered by Robert Blake, an English merchant in the country, resulted in the despatch of the sultan’s ambassador to London. A dozen corsair ships had been destroyed, while over 400 captives had been released. Rainborowe was thus successful in his expedition, at a cost of minimal casualties on his ships. But the corsairs of Sallee survived, and soon resumed their activities. All they needed to do in the new situation was to pay taxes to the sultan, and he was happy enough for them to go on with their work. So, not only was catching the corsairs at sea an ineffective method of suppression, but destroying them in their bases was only a short-term solution. Neither Mansell nor Rainborowe made any serious dent in the corsair power, though the menace of corsairs in English waters seems to have receded. Or perhaps it was the complete preoccupation of the English with their internal disputes which distracted them from the corsair menace. One of the effects of the English Civil Wars of the 1640s was an increased belligerence and capability in the navy, which had mainly joined the Parliamentary side in the conflict. This, as well as the warfare on land, might well have been enough to deter the corsairs. The forty or fifty years since the regular activities of the Levant Company began had familiarised many Englishmen with the Mediterranean and its conditions. Levant Company men were scattered at numerous ports from Lisbon to Smyrna and Scanderoon and Alexandria. Other Englishmen were living as corsairs or merchants or slaves in North African cities from Tripoli to Sallee. Every port on the northern coast had been visited, traded in, and in several places had received groups of mercantile Englishmen as residents. There were consuls and ambassadors in several cities, often directly connected with the Levant Company. An example is the city of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik), which was host to a small group of English Levant Company men for much of the seventeenth century, which faded away only as the city itself (and the Company) faded.32 32 Josip Leutic, ‘English Merchants and Ships in Seventeenth Century Dubrovnik’ ,

MM 64, 1978, 276–284; Robin Harris, Dubrovik: A History, London 2003, 169–170.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

In the 1640s, with the fighting at home, the Mediterranean was only a trading area for English ships, including the Levant Company, and no naval vessels could be spared for it. The Company struggled to survive during the Civil Wars, since its monopoly, granted by royal charters, was anathema to the Parliamentary side. It also found it difficult to maintain its trade when production in England was widely disrupted by the conflicts. The end of the first Civil War scarcely improved matters because by then competitors, Dutch and French, had seized much of the trade. The execution of the king in January 1649 brought widespread European hostility, and a near-official privateering campaign by French ships. Both the Dutch and the French targeted the Company’s ships, eight of which were taken or sunk by French privateers in the Strait of Gibraltar.33 The heightened nationalism of the English Republic soon dictated that English warships return to the sea in much greater force than before, though this return was actually inadvertent. The navy had split into two groups in the Second Civil War of 1648, and in part it was taken over by Prince Rupert, who aimed to use it for restoration purposes. He was, however, opposed by the larger part of the fleet, which was still loyal to Parliament. This part was commanded by a series of generals-at-sea, of whom the most capable was Robert Blake (no relation to the Moroccan merchant). Rupert’s ships were driven from the English Channel, then driven from Ireland, and took refuge in Lisbon, where Blake’s fleet blockaded them.34 Blake had a fleet of twelve ships of from 30 to 50 guns, with four ketches and fireships; Rupert’s fleet varied in number, but only four were warships, the rest being armed prizes. Rupert was able to get supplies in Lisbon, where the Portuguese king was anxious to acquire any international friends of any sort, having led his country into independence from Spain ten years before. Spain’s hostility to Portugal, therefore, meant that Blake, despite his puritanism and his republicanism, was able to get supplies in Spanish ports, mainly San Lucar and Cadiz, but also at Vigo, though all were uncomfortably distant from Lisbon. He was reinforced by a small squadron under General-at-Sea Edward Popham, but was subject to occasional interference by French ships, continuing their harassing sea campaign against the new republic; a part of Blake’s instructions directed him to oppose the French, though he had to deal with Rupert first. The 33 Wood, Levant Company, 54–55. 34 Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.118–122.

J. R. Powell, Robert Blake, General-at-Sea, London 1972, ch. 6; R. C. Anderson produced a series of articles dealing with ‘Royalists at Sea’ , in MM 14, 1928 (for 1649), 17, 1931 (for 1650) and 21, 1935 (for 1651–1652); Alan Barrett, Cromwell’s Wars at Sea, Barnsley 2006, 50–65; Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, Oxford 1989, 63–66.

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simple chase after the royalist ships had become a complicated international crisis. The stalemate at Lisbon was broken in September 1650 when the Portuguese fleet from Brazil arrived and was attacked by Blake, who took or destroyed seven of the ships. This rendered Rupert much less welcome in Lisbon. Blake took his whole fleet off to Cadiz for supplies, and Rupert was able to come out at last, being virtually expelled.35 Both English fleets were now much smaller. Rupert had just six ships, being unable to man more than that; Blake sent back to England four of his ships in the worst condition; Popham also returned to England, and a squadron under Richard Badiley escorted an English convoy home; Blake was left with just seven ships. The opposing small fleets were thus roughly equal, but they behaved in opposite ways: Rupert preyed on any English ships he could find, and indulged in actions little short of piracy towards ships of other European states; Blake by contrast protected English ships and provided escorts for them. The difference did not go unnoticed, and Rupert, when he sailed into the Mediterranean, was regarded as behaving like an Algerine corsair. His force was also weak enough to become a plaything of local powers. Blake was at Cadiz when Rupert’s fleet passed him and went through the Strait. Blake followed, capturing a French ship off Gibraltar, and got news of Rupert at Velez Malaga, where he had destroyed two English merchant ships in the harbour. Rupert himself, with two ships, had gone in chase of another large English merchant ship, the Marmaduke, which he eventually captured and recommissioned as the Revenge of Whitehall. Blake followed the rest of the Royalists, capturing Roebuck on 3 November and Black Prince next day; the rest, four ships, took refuge in Cartagena Bay. Blake followed them in; he may have driven them ashore, or they were beached by a storm, or they deliberately beached themselves (stories differ); possibly one ship was captured. In captured papers Blake discovered that Rupert’s rendezvous was the Balearic Islands, but the Royalists had gone when he moved there; he sailed on as far as Sardinia, then heard that the Royalists were under French protection in Toulon; they were safe there for the moment.36 Blake was recalled, not before time, for his ships were by now well worn. Rupert and his brother, Prince Maurice, were still at large, and were able to receive succour from the French in Toulon; by arming and manning prizes (including Marmaduke) he built his squadron up to five ships again. The Council of State in London sent a new squadron 35 For the complex interplay 36 Ibid, 1.218–222.

at Cadiz, see Corbett, Mediterranean, 1.204–214.

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under General-at-Sea William Penn to the Azores in hopes of intercepting some Portuguese ships from Brazil, which did not appear; Penn was then to go into the Mediterranean. He passed through the Gut on 29 March, and searched for Rupert at the Balearics and off Corsica. He heard at Livorno that Rupert intended to sail east to the Archipelago (that is, the Aegean), but this was deliberate misinformation to distract him. He fell for it, and sped off eastwards to take up station off western Sicily for a month. At Messina he received letters from the English consul at Livorno reporting that Rupert had actually sailed west, and he finally realised he had been gulled; Rupert was now well out into the Atlantic. Penn heard he had been off Cadiz but, of course, he was long gone when Penn arrived. Rupert went to the Azores, Portuguese territory, but he was no longer welcome, and in a storm he lost his flagship, the Constant Reformation, and over three hundred men; the former Marmaduke was retaken by the original English crew and taken home to Plymouth. Rupert was almost finished. One aspect of Penn’s cruise was that he was concerned not just with Rupert but to protect the Levant convoy, which had an escort commanded by Captain Edward Hall. It would be a fine, rich prize for Rupert, and there were French privateers operating off Sardinia, not to mention the North African corsairs who were menaces as well. Neither the Royalists nor Penn were ever actually threatened by the corsairs, who understood well enough that they were outgunned, but at the same time they refused to sell supplies to either of them. They knew that the English Commonwealth was beleaguered by enemies in Europe and this would make them all the more willing to attack English merchantmen – hence the convoys. But Captain Hall, calling at Livorno, seized a French ship in the harbour, which angered the Grand Duke, who operated a free port there, and wished to protect all who called. Penn, once he realised that the Royalists had sailed west, took up station at the Strait of Gibraltar in order to prevent them from returning, and to snap up any French ships. A Dutch force was nearby and might act to protect the French, but Penn avoided a quarrel, despite knowing that tension between England and the Netherlands was rising. Another English convoy, with the escort commanded by Captain Henry Appleton, passed into the Mediterranean. At Livorno Appleton’s conduct displeased the Grand Duke even more than had Hall’s; it began to seem that English naval arrogance would eliminate the few friends the republic had. Captain Richard Badiley brought another convoy through in December 1651.37

37 Ibid,

1.228–237.

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The Dutch War began in July next year. In the Mediterranean the disappearance of Rupert’s ships caused the Council of State to bring back to England Penn’s and Hall’s squadrons. Badiley’s small force was all that were left, with that of Appleton, but these two were separated, Badiley supervising the Levant Company convoy at Cephallonia, and Appleton at Livorno. The latter was quickly blockaded by a much stronger Dutch squadron; Badiley came north to assist, but was intercepted off Elba and defeated by a Dutch force twice his strength, losing one ship, the Phoenix, to capture. (He was escorting four Levant Company ships who declined to involve themselves.) The Dutch squadron was badly damaged in the fight, and when Admiral van Galen found that the Spanish garrison at Porto Longone in Elba, where Badiley had taken refuge, was adamant on insisting on defending its guests, he took his ships away. This eventually allowed Badiley to leave with his three remaining ships. Appleton was still under blockade at Livorno. The Dutch refitted and careened the Phoenix, but the ship was recaptured in a surprise night attack by Appleton’s men. The Grand Duke was annoyed at this, again, and Appleton, who had organised the surprise, was removed for a time, so that Badiley took command of all the English ships. A second battle on 4 March 1653 resulted in the destruction of the reinstated Appleton’s squadron after a complicated battle plan went awry. Badiley ended up in command of the remaining five ships of the two squadrons; he knew this was too few to be effective against the more numerous Dutch and so sailed for England, leaving the Mediterranean to the Dutch.38 Not for the last time the British navy (no longer ‘Royal’ at this point, but now since the conquest of Scotland and Ireland by the English Republicans, ‘British’) abandoned the Mediterranean. Just how serious this withdrawal was for English shipping is not obvious, not that the various squadrons had bothered much with protecting English merchantmen other than Levant Company convoys. English ships had made considerable inroads into the Mediterranean trading system in the previous half century or so, inserting themselves into, and becoming an integral part of, the internal trade of the sea. Their ships were comparatively well armed, which in the Mediterranean was an essential precaution, and their Dutch competitors had also found that they had to carry plenty of ordnance, so the competitive advantage they enjoyed in northern waters by reducing armament and crew numbers was absent. (Once they had a treaty with 38 Ibid,

1.244–254; Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.175–177; R. C. Anderson, ‘The First Dutch War in the Mediterranean’ , MM 49, 1963, 241–265, utilised sources not available earlier.

34

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

Algiers, the Dutch, as the Levant Company pointed out in 1649, had been able to use lighter and less-armed ships in the Mediterranean, but this advantage probably did not last long, especially with open English hostility to face.) The English ships’ captains who operated in the sea, despite the constant threat of the corsairs, would hardly stop their trading activities because the Dutch provided a similar threat. Indeed the Dutch squadron which had driven the English navy out of the Mediterranean in 1653 was mainly concerned to protect their own convoys involved in the Italian and Levant trades, and anyway their squadron was soon recalled home as English naval pressure intensified in their home waters. The Council of State in London tried to organise a new squadron for the Mediterranean – a squadron of twelve ships had been voted by the Rump Parliament - but the generals-at-sea insisted that the Dutch in the North Sea should be dealt with first, and that detaching sections of the fleet for small expeditions was the way to defeat in detail. The argument was still going on when the authority of the Council and Parliament was overthrown by Oliver Cromwell’s coup d’état on 20 April 1653.39 The immediate problem of the Mediterranean was then shelved until the Dutch war ended a year later, in spring 1654. One of the Protector’s first decisions after the peace was to appoint Blake to command a substantial fleet to go into the Mediterranean in order to exert English power. The international situation was such that a squadron in the sea would allow Cromwell to face down the corsairs, and to exert pressure on both Spain and France, who were at war with each other. His target was particularly France, which had been waging a sea war against English ships for years. The Dutch were, at least temporarily, also out of the Mediterranean, after their squadron had been recalled. But French attacks on English ships intensified. In fact Cromwell had decided on his ‘Western Design’ , an attack on Spanish territories in the West Indies. He assumed that this would not ignite a European conflict between the home countries, while the Mediterranean squadron would combat the French depredations at sea, with a side order of dealing also with the North African corsairs. Blake’s fleet of 22 ships came under his command on 10 August, though it was not until 8 October that he was able to get clear of the Channel and its weather. He called at Lisbon and then at Cadiz. It was known that the French were contemplating a campaign in the Mediterranean, probably into southern Italy with the aim of conquering Naples (Spanish territory), and that their western fleet, based at Brest and commanded by the duc de Nieuchese, was intended to sail to join 39 Corbett,

Mediterranean, 1.269–270.

Corsairs and Civil War

35

the Mediterranean fleet, which was commanded by the duc de Guise, and was based at Toulon. Blake was already between the two French fleets at Lisbon and Cadiz, and moved on to the Strait of Gibraltar to make certain – perhaps recalling that Rupert had passed him while he resupplied at Cadiz in 1650. A rumour that the Brest fleet had already passed into the sea was soon known to be false, and in fact Nieuchese simply put in at Lisbon and stayed there, making no attempt to pass Blake or to enter the Mediterranean even after Blake had moved on. The Toulon fleet wandered about for a time before making a landing near Naples, but Guise was prevented from doing anything serious by competent Spanish resistance, and he withdrew after a couple of weeks. Blake’s occupation of the Strait had thus been decisive in preventing Nieuchese from joining Guise; had he done so and imparted some intelligence into that duke’s empty head, the French might well have conquered southern Italy.40 Blake moved on towards Naples after he heard that Nieuchese was stuck at Lisbon, but by then Guise had run for home. Blake followed as far as Livorno, but there learned that the French ships were well ahead of him. He took his ships back to Naples. In both Livorno and Naples his ships had been greeted enthusiastically, which was probably a mixture of pleasure at the retreat of the French and relief that he had shown himself both polite and accommodating, making a change from Appleton. No written instructions for Blake on this expedition have been found, and it seems probable that he received only oral versions. Yet his actions demonstrate clearly enough that he had received some directions, whether written or oral, from the Protector personally: he was to oppose French activities in the Mediterranean and to complete unfinished business with the corsairs. He explained in March 1655 that he did not have the authority to do more than blockade the corsairs for a few days, though his tasks must have included permission to fight any corsair ships foolhardy enough to come close; nor did this absence of written authority stop him from making a direct attack; in effect Blake was able to decide for himself what he should do. The corsair fleets of Tunis and Algiers, and perhaps Tripoli, were rumoured to have gathered at Tunis in order to sail east to assist the Ottoman sultan in his war to conquer Crete, a Venetian island. The war had been going on for some time, and the Venetians had hired several English ships, among others, to supplement their own sea 40 Ibid,

1.274–293; Powell, Robert Blake, 253–256; Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, 93–94.

36

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

strength. The Venetians had also been very obliging towards Badiley in 1653 and had released eight ships which were to go to his assistance in the stalemate at Livorno, though they did not reach him before his decisive defeat. Blake’s vice-admiral was Badiley, who could provide details on this, but it is probable that the story of the corsair gathering at Tunis would have attracted Blake’s attention even if an obligation towards Venice did not already exist. The prospective gathering was too tempting a target to ignore, for the corsair fleets’ destruction would accomplish much of the work he had been sent to the Mediterranean to do – make the seas safe, or at least safer, for English ships, and exert English power. He had orders to oppose the corsairs, and while attacking them in Tunis harbour was probably exceeding whatever instructions he had been given, it remained an ideal opportunity and target. Blake was sufficiently sure of himself and of Cromwell’s aims to seize the moment without reservation. He ordered a rendezvous for Trapani in Sicily (Spanish territory) and collected all but five of his ships there in January 1655. Four of the others were sent to the Balearic Islands to watch for and intercept any French privateers out of Marseilles and Toulon - Blake knew that they had been released by Guise. The fleet sailed to Tunis, where Blake found that there was no corsair fleet. He attempted to persuade the bey of Tunis to give up an English ship, the Princess, which had been captured, and to release any English captives he held. The bey refused. Blake established a blockade, but the nine warships in the harbour of Porto Farina had been hauled close inshore and an armed camp had been established to protect them; a strong castle stood beside this formidable armament. Blake’s fleet was short of supplies, having set off early and suddenly in hopes of catching the bigger fleet, so he left six ships to maintain the blockade – the ships in the harbour were dismasted, so could barely move - and took the rest to Cagliari in Sardinia for water and bread. He returned a month later (the supplies had been difficult to obtain) and tried once more to negotiate the release of the English ships and the captives. The bey refused more firmly than before. Blake left once again, this time going to Trapani for water. The bey seems, not unnaturally, to have believed – shades of Mansell at Algiers – that his firmness had succeeded in driving the English off without a fight. Not so. Blake returned once more and organised an attack by his whole fleet. The armed camp was overwhelmed by the weight of fire from the ships’ guns. Boats were sent to set the beached ships on fire. The Tunisian soldiers took refuge in the castle of Porto Farina which overlooked the harbour. This therefore became the English target, to

Corsairs and Civil War

37

such an extent that Tunisian fire was suppressed. In effect the fleet had conquered a castle, a feat not previously thought possible.41 After this, and with nothing more to lose, the bey was even more determined that Blake would not achieve his restated aims. Eventually Blake gave up and sailed away, revictualled at Cagliari again, and then visited Algiers. The object here was to renew a treaty negotiated a decade earlier which gave immunity to English ships against attack by the Algerines, and Blake attempted to ransom the English captives in the city. The pasha was very accommodating, an obvious effect of the fight at Porto Farina – Algiers city would be much more vulnerable to Blake’s guns than inland Tunis, though its defences were better. The treaty was renewed, and extended to other English subjects in Ireland and Scotland, and all the English captives were ransomed, as were some Dutchmen.42 The four frigates Blake had left at the Balearic Islands had meanwhile captured two French ships and had driven one on shore (where it was bought by the governor). Blake went to Formentera from Algiers, in search of more supplies, and was evidently intending to go on to menace the French in their harbours at Marseilles and Toulon, but he received new instructions from Cromwell. The enemy was now Spain, not France, and the target was the next Spanish treasure fleet. Blake managed to collect the guns which had been salvaged from Rupert’s ships at Alicante and Cartagena, and dealt with a minor dispute at Malaga before the Spaniards realised that a new war with England was upon them. By late May the fleet was anchored blatantly off Cadiz replenishing from ships sent out from England. Blake waited all summer and autumn, but the treasure fleet did not arrive. By October Blake himself was in such poor health that he asked to go home; Cromwell, who was delighted with all that he had done, gave him permission at once.43 The new war with Spain required an English fleet to be in the Mediterranean, and this time the ships were able to gain supplies from France, which was also at war with Spain. Blake was sent back, though his health was still poor, with Edward Mountagu as his colleague. The aim, once more, was to intercept the treasure fleet, but the English ships were too late in sailing and the treasure was brought in safely. The fleet which finally sailed at the end of March 41 J.

R. Powell (ed.), The Letters of Robert Blake, NRS 1937; id., ‘The Journal of John Weale, 1654–1656’ , Naval Miscellany, NRS 1952; Corbett, Mediterranean, 1.298–310; Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.210–212; Powell, Robert Blake, 258–264; Tinniswood, Pirates, 223–226;, Cromwell’s Navy, 98; Barrett, Cromwell’s Wars at Sea, 158–160. 42 Wolf, Barbary Coast, 219–222; Corbett, Mediterranean, 1.311. 43 Corbett, Mediterranean, 1.311–317.

38

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

(1656) was much larger than Blake’s earlier command, well over forty ships.44 Missing the treasure fleet, however, rather left the English fleet at a loose end, no-one knowing what to do with it; it settled to a new blockade of Cadiz; an attack was contemplated but abandoned when intelligence of the strength of the Spanish defences was obtained. Mountagu, probably with Blake’s concurrence, spent some time investigating the area of the Strait to see if a base could be secured; Gibraltar was one possibility, though it was not thought good enough (Cromwell is said to have contemplated cutting a channel across the sandy isthmus to make the Rock into an island); a place called Bezuma (perhaps the island of Albuscema) was another, but was judged unsuitable; in 1657 it was decided to establish a factor at Tetuan on the Moroccan coast (a Morisco city), who would organise local supplies. In the absence of Spanish prey, the fleet busied itself with other matters: Blake took the fleet to Lisbon and used its menace to insist that the king ratify a commercial treaty over which he had been procrastinating; a squadron was sent to attempt to recover a ship interned at Vigo; ships in Malaga harbour, where a pirate made his base, were bombarded; a blockade of Sallee was mounted to extract any captives, and to conclude a treaty of immunity.45 All this activity was a sign of the usefulness of a naval station in the area. In September, part of the fleet was resupplying at Lisbon, and the remainder was on blockade off Cadiz, commanded by Captain Richard Stayner. He intercepted the second treasure fleet of the year (with the Peru treasure). Only two of the seven Spanish ships and one Portuguese prize in the convoy escaped Stayner’s attack, two were captured, one sank and one burned, the others were driven ashore. Almost the whole of the treasure was lost to Spain, and estimates of the value of the loot for the English range up to £3 million, though in reality it was much less than this.46 Cromwell’s war with Spain, however, was now concentrated on the capture of Dunkirk, and the fleet off Cadiz was reduced. The largest ships were ordered home with Mountagu, escorting the captured treasure; Blake remained on the Spanish–Portuguese station, with twenty smaller ships to maintain the blockade of Cadiz through the winter. In April Captain Stayner returned with the news that the 44 Powell,

Robert Blake, 277–278, provides a list of ships in the fleet, though others had failed to find one; Powell’s list is clearly only approximate. 45 Ibid, 278–287; Corbett, Mediterranean, 1.323–332. 46 Powell, Robert Blake, 287–289; Corbett, Mediterranean, 1.332–333; Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.213–214, quoting Stayner’s despatch. Much of the treasure was looted by the sailors; the government received about a quarter of million pounds’ worth, Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, 95–99.

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next Spanish treasure fleet had reached Tenerife in the Canaries. Blake at once sailed. The Spanish fleet was drawn up in Santa Cruz harbour in two lines, with the castle on one flank, but the first line, of six galleons, masked the fire of the remaining ten, a factor Blake noticed. Skilfully taking advantage of this Spanish error, and of the weather conditions and the state of the tide, Blake made an attack on the castle with part of the fleet, and sent Stayner and most of the ships to attack the galleons. He captured them all, but then the castle turned its fire on the galleons, and Blake ordered them to be burned. The ebb tide, assisted by an unexpected land breeze, then brought the English ships out. The silver the Spanish ships had been carrying had been landed much earlier, but it was effectively useless to the Spaniards until the war ended, for they could not move it to Spain while the English fleet was in occupation of Cadiz Bay.47 Blake died on the way back to England (and Badiley died four days later). Captain John Stoakes, who had been captain of Blake’s flagship, remained off Cadiz in command of a squadron of ten ships; in Cadiz the Spanish ships had been preparing to sail for a year, but all their preparations stopped when one of the ships burned accidentally. Stoakes was then able to leave the Cadiz blockade and at last take his ships into the Mediterranean. He took six of his ships to Livorno, but found that the Grand Duke had reverted to hostility, a change attributed, reasonably enough, to Spanish pressure; the other four ships, under Captain Thomas Whetstone, a nephew of Cromwell’s, cruised in the Ionian Sea, based at the Venetian island of Zante. But Stoakes’ primary mission was to finish Blake’s work on the corsairs. He went to Tunis, and found that the bey was now cooperative; the British captives were released on payment of a very low ransom, and a treaty giving British ships immunity was agreed. The bey’s attitude was the result of his restored naval power: the castle at Porto Farina had been strengthened, and he had a squadron of eight warships in his harbour; Stoakes with just six ships was not a serious threat, so the bey could afford to make a treaty.48 There were schemes emanating from Cardinal Mazarin, the French regent, for a combined Franco-British naval expedition somewhere in the Mediterranean, and Whetstone’s ships were sent to Toulon to participate, but the plans, if such they were, came to nothing, especially when Mazarin realised that Spain was more or less ready to make peace. Stoakes went off to Tripoli (Libya) where a treaty and 47 Powell, Robert Blake, 296–305; Barratt, 48 Corbett, Mediterranean, 1.334–336; for

Cromwell’s Wars at Sea, 171–176. the arrogant behaviour of Whetstone, see M. L. Baumber, ‘The Protector’s Nephew; An Account of the Conduct of Captain Thomas Whetstone in the Mediterranean, 1657–1659’ , MM 52, 1966, 233–246.

40

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

the release of captives was swiftly secured, clearly the result of the threat of a joint expedition together with the after-effects of Blake’s work at Tunis.49 The alliance with France allowed Stoakes to use Toulon as a base, just as Blake had used Lisbon and Cadiz at times, while Tetuan at the Strait was now operating as a victualling base. In the remaining months of the Spanish war Stoakes was able to range over the Western Basin capturing Spanish vessels and effectively severing communications between Spain and its Italian territories (Sardinia, Sicily, Naples). The peace agreement between France and Spain was signed in June 1659, and brought Stoakes’ ability to act to an end, for though England and Spain were still at war, he no longer had a base: the French at Toulon turned uncooperative and insulting. In addition, political turmoil had returned to England; he was recalled at the end of June 1659.50 The presence of the English fleet off Cadiz had demonstrated the usefulness of that position, a factor well understood in Spain. The fleet had been able to affect matters from Lisbon to Malaga to Sallee to Tenerife, without relaxing its grip on the Cadiz blockade. Mountagu had complained at seeing that the neutral ships from northern Europe (Dutch, Hamburgers, Scandinavians) taking supplies into Cadiz, but in doing so he missed the point, for if Cromwell’s government had wished they could easily have stopped such traffic. Stoakes in the western Mediterranean was only able to continue his activities so long as he had a viable base, while Blake at Tunis had been bedevilled by supply difficulties. For five years Cromwell had been able to juggle the situation in the Mediterranean, first getting Spain to provide bases, then France, but once it was clear that neither would do so, and Livorno was no longer available, the English fleet had to pull out. The lesson was surely clear, that a base under direct English control was needed if English power was to be exerted in the Mediterranean.

49 Corbett, Mediterranean, 50 Ibid, 1.339–341.

1.337–339.

Chapter 3 Tangier and Corsairs 1660–1690

The Restoration of the British monarchy in 1660 in the person of the bachelor Charles II produced a Europe-wide intrigue to provide him with a wife. In fact, almost from the beginning the Portuguese Princess Catharine of Braganza was the likely bride, and the international competition simply enabled Charles to increase his terms in the treaty of betrothal. From the first the English wanted the Portuguese North African port of Tangier as part of those terms. Situated on the northwest corner of Africa, Tangier was a walled town and port, and had been Portuguese since 1471. It was not very strongly defended, and would probably have fallen to the local Moroccans in a few years if the Portuguese had kept it; nor was its port either commodious or particularly safe, being too shallow for larger ships. But its location, on the southern lip of the mouth of the Mediterranean, made it particularly attractive to fighting seamen in the light of experience gained in the previous decade. Edward Mountagu, now Earl of Sandwich, and Admiral Sir John Lawson, two eminent commanders who had been instrumental in bringing Charles across the North Sea to London, and both former officers of the republican navy, were enthusiastic advocates; unlike the king, they had actually seen the place, so their opinions carried some weight. There were numerous other terms in the dowry in the betrothal treaty, including the transfer of Bombay, a reasonably large cash payment (never completely paid) and a military and naval alliance, intended to defend Portugal against Spanish attack, and which led to the presence of a considerable English military force in the country for the next ten years. But from the point of view of this book, it is Tangier which is the most interesting item.1

1

The details of the negotiations for the marriage are expounded in Keith Feiling, British Foreign Policy, 1660–1672, London 1930, 29–39 and 45–52.

42

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

The extent of the crisis which the prospect of the marriage produced is indicated by the fact that Lawson, in command of a fleet, having returned from Algiers, took up station in the Strait to deter any Dutch or Spanish interference in the transfer, and a defeat of the Portuguese in Tangier by the Moors precipitated a preliminary, precautionary occupation of the town by a force of English sailors to prevent a Moorish conquest. This was followed (even before the princess had set sail for England) by the landing of an English army of 3000 soldiers. The Moors were thus foiled, for the moment, and so were the Spaniards and the Dutch.2 One of the terms of the Portuguese treaty was that the English fleet would contribute to the defence of Portuguese interests against the corsairs of Algiers. Sandwich, who was in command of the whole process, did venture through the Strait into the Western Basin to attempt negotiations with the pasha, but these failed; having had his ships damaged by Algerine gunfire, and deciding that the city could not be attacked, he withdrew.3 Supervision, even suppression, of corsair activities had been one of the perceived advantages of possessing Tangier, but Sandwich’s brief visit suggested this might be more difficult than had been imagined. Perhaps more practical was the possibility of a continuous blockade of Sallee, further south along the Moroccan Atlantic coast, using a group of half a dozen frigates which could alternately blockade Sallee and careen and resupply at Tangier. The assumption was that Tangier would be a supply base for naval vessels, and a place which could produce its own supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables. But from the moment English sailors were landed to save the town from Moorish attack, it was necessary to man the defences in some strength, and the town was kept under close blockade by the Moroccans for the next twenty years.4 Further, the port turned out to be, as any sailor must have understood after a short acquaintance with it, an open bay, subject to a variety of weather dangers. (This implies that Sandwich and Lawson, though they had visited the place, had not paid much attention to its disadvantages.) It was not a suitable place for ships to be based unless the weather was kind, and the harbour was too shallow for larger ships. Indeed, during the two decades that the place was held by the English, it was only used as a calling port by the naval ships,

2 3

E. Routh, Tangier: England’s Lost Atlantic Outpost, London 1912, 56. Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.433; Wolf, Barbary Coast, 230; Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.318. 4 Tinniswood, Pirates, 204–205, quoting Lawson’s opinion, and Sir Henry Sheres, A Discourse touching Tangier, 1680, 16.

Tangier and Corsairs

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while as a naval base it was never to be sufficient. Merchantmen were not keen to use it. On the other hand, a major attempt was made to improve the harbour. Under the persistent and enthusiastic direction of Sir Hugh Cholmley, a mole was designed to enclose the harbour; over much of the period of the English occupation (1662–1684) it was slowly, and expensively, built. Cholmley had some experience of such a construction, at Whitby in Yorkshire, but sailors familiar with the Mediterranean would know of similar constructions, notably the mole at Algiers, a hook-shaped wall used as a defence of the harbour, a shelter for the ships, and a loading base, and other similar constructions at Genoa and Livorno. The mole of Tangier was intended to serve the same set of purposes.5 The main difficulty, besides the continual expense of the base and the mole, was that the hostility of the local Moors was inveterate. This meant that a place that had been acquired as a naval station became an active army garrison instead. The troops transported there had to be kept up to strength, and their supplies had to come from England or Spain rather than being produced or purchased locally, since no local market existed, and it proved difficult and dangerous to cultivate the nearby land. Supplies could be procured in Spain in times of peace, but the small ships which brought them to Tangier proved to be very vulnerable to capture by the corsairs. And the navy always required specialised supplies - wood, rope, sails, and so on - which were rarely obtainable except from England. Combined with the great expense of the mole (a total cost of about £2 million, spread over twenty years), the army garrison eventually pushed the cost of holding the place to unacceptable levels – and all for a place whose attraction as a naval base had failed.6 Despite the colony-port’s shortcomings, the Mediterranean was an arena of continuous English naval activity while Tangier was held. The corsairs were a standing threat, and it took a long series of naval campaigns to establish English supremacy over them, a supremacy which was never wholly secure. In addition, the period between 1660 and 1713 was one of almost continuous war between the European states. For the English (British from 1707) there were two Dutch wars (1664–1667, 1672–1674) and three French wars (1678–1679, 1689–1697, 1702–1713): 27 years of warfare out of 48. Because of the constant antipathy of France and Austria, rivals for Italy, the

5 6

Routh, Tangier. For a brief account of Tangier’s wars, A. J. Smithers, The Tangier Campaign: The Birth of the British Army, Stroud 2003.

44

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

Mediterranean was always liable to be one of the major theatres of those wars. This meant that the British navy was given two main tasks in the Mediterranean. The merchant ships which traded into and through the sea either sailed from England to a series of ports in Spain and Italy, or went more or less directly to the Levant, which here must include any port from Constantinople round to Alexandria, but especially Smyrna and Scanderoon (for Aleppo). These two trades – in the Western and Eastern Basins, more or less – were also supplemented by the participation of English ships in much of the internal Mediterranean traffic, a factor which had been growing throughout the previous century. The goods supplied to Spain and Italy in the west had to be sold to earn the cash to pay for goods to be bought in the eastern ports, where English goods did not sell easily. The Mediterranean goods for which there was a market in England were usually found at Zante (for currants) or southern Italy (for olive oil). So the trading system involved ships calling at a series of ports from Cadiz to Livorno and Naples, where English goods, almost always cloth or raw materials, were sold; the ships then sailed on to load up with goods for England from further to the south and west, as far as Zante or the Aegean. The eastern trade was separate, and it was that which the Levant Company conducted: English cloth, tin, lead, and wheat were sold, while silk in various states, spices, and other such exotic goods were acquired; the Company was generally self-reliant in this, but there were plenty of interlopers unconnected with the Company who breached its increasingly porous monopoly.7 An added complication was the new presence of Scottish ships in the Mediterranean. Until about 1650 Scottish shipping had concentrated almost entirely in the Scottish seas, trading to the Baltic and the Netherlands and Ireland. Union with England from 1650 opened further possibilities, but it took time to gather sufficient wealth in Scotland to finance the construction of ships big enough to make a Mediterranean voyage worthwhile. United within a single monarchy from 1603, though still separate states, the Scots could also shelter under English naval power, which left the English naval authorities somewhat flummoxed. In 1667, for example, three Scots ships from the Forth voyaged as far as Tangier, and by then Scottish voyages to Spain and Portugal had ceased to be remarkable. Yet they were now

7

Ralph Davis, ‘England’s Foreign Trade’ , English Historical Review 6, 1954, 78–98; also S. R. Hornstein, The Restoration Navy and English Foreign Trade, Aldershot 1991, ch. 2.

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vulnerable to corsair attack, against which the English Royal Navy did not need protect them.8 The navy’s role in this trading system was to protect these trades, and the method was convoy. This did not necessarily need many escort ships, and those involved tended to be at the smaller end of naval power – frigates and smaller ships – but several convoys might be operating at any one time. The western trade called at a series of ports in Portugal, Spain and Italy, at any of which individual merchantmen might detach from the convoy, or others choose to join. The naval ships were instructed not to stay in any one port longer than two days (except at Cadiz, a major entrepôt), partly in order to prevent the captains from becoming too involved in local affairs and trading on their own behalf, so ignoring their duties. The convoys therefore constantly changed in composition, and many English ships, besides being involved in the major trades, were able to participate in intra-port trade within the sea, taking advantage of the convoy system when they could.9 There were therefore two main convoy routes: from the Strait of Gibraltar through to the Eastern Basin, and around the northern coast of the Western Basin. The Eastern Basin was less of a concern to the navy since its convoys were organised from London, and partly consisted of Levant Company ships, large, well-armed, and fully capable of defending themselves. In addition to the convoys within the sea, there were other convoys which escorted ships from English ports to the Atlantic ports of Spain and Portugal and on to Madeira and the Canary Islands – the ‘Sea-entrance’ . The convoy system therefore could protect ships all the way from London to Livorno or to Smyrna and Scanderoon – but only if the ships chose to join; many did not, or did so only for short distances. The corsair threat had altered since Blake’s temporary successes at Tunis and Algiers. There were still four major corsair centres: Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Sallee – and each constituted a different problem. The Tripolitans, naturally from their geographical position, were particularly active in the Eastern Basin; the Levant Company ships, and the interlopers in their trade, were thus the Englishmen most concerned. Tunis was less active in corsair activity than the others, in part because it was less in need of the product: it had a rich agricultural hinterland which produced much of what its citizens needed. Algiers, by contrast, was the main centre of corsair activity, in

8 9

Eric J. Graham, A Maritime History of Scotland 1650–1790, East Linton 2002. This was not dissimilar to the equivalent convoy system operated by Venice in the later Middle Ages: see the map of Venetian routes in F. C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic, Baltimore 1976, 341.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

large part because of its geographical situation. It had a mountainous hinterland, inhabited by hostile Kabyle tribesmen, who disliked the deys and the pashas and their regime as much as did the European sailors and merchants – the two groups could find themselves chained to the same galley bench, both being the objects of slave raiding. Sallee was to a degree under official Moroccan protection and this restricted its corsair actions, though the town tended to escape into independence whenever the central government of Morocco broke down, as it did periodically; the people pursued their corsair ways under either regime, the monarchy taking its cut when it could, but was liable to decree political restrictions on corsair targets. The town had a productive hinterland, like Tunis, on which to fall back in hard times. This geographical spread meant that the corsairs were a threat to English (and other European) trade from the Canaries and Madeira all the way to Syria. It followed that the only way to contest their ambitions, extermination not being possible since others would soon take the places of the dead corsairs, was to persuade the corsair rulers to desist. For the generation after the monarchic Restoration in Britain, the background to the operations of the main English fleet, behind the more eye-catching business of battles in the waters round Britain, was the constant work of convoying the merchant ships through the Mediterranean. Combatting the country’s enemies was as essential as the convoys – indeed the two were part of the same problem - though the greater importance of convoys is demonstrated by the standing orders to fleet commanders that the convoy escorts were to be reinforced when necessary. Algiers, being the largest of the four corsair cities, was always the main problem; its government was especially unstable in the 1660s, with the agha of the soldiers precariously presiding over the divan, while bouts of violence and assassination repeatedly upset things. Sandwich’s brief and unsuccessful visit in 1661 was followed by a more effective visit by Admiral Lawson. He persuaded the agha to surrender some English slaves, but was refused anything more, and then had to return to Lisbon to rejoin Sandwich. The result, as it had been with the bey of Tunis when Blake retired, was to encourage the Algerines to greater activity. Lawson returned the following year (1662) and succeeded in having the treaties negotiated by Blake and Stoakes renewed, with minor changes, the main one being the institution of a system of passes and authentications aimed at relieving both sides of anxiety. One of the reasons for the agha’s change of heart seems to have been that the bombardment of the city by Sandwich’s ships had been more destructive of buildings and men than was realised at the time – this was reported to Lawson by a French visitor. Equally, or

Tangier and Corsairs

47

perhaps more, persuasive was a great storm which struck the city and destroyed much of the Algerine navy. A bout of plague completed a trio of disasters. It was a repetition of the effect of Blake’s bombardment of Porto Farina. Lawson, like Blake, went on to renew the Tunis treaty, and that with Tripoli as well. It was apparent that, if Algiers could be intimidated, the other corsair centres would probably follow.10 Lawson had to leave the Mediterranean when the Anglo-Dutch crisis which had been developing for several years headed towards open war. Vice-Admiral Thomas Allin completed the Algiers treaty negotiations, though it soon became clear that a great deal more work would need to be done to ensure compliance. As Robert Browne, the English consul in Algiers, pointed out, the corsair commanders were often not informed of the treaty conditions by the agha, and even if they were, they were adept at finding ways to ignore or dispute them - including being unable to read, or at least unable to read European script.11 The Tangier base was supposed to allow a closer supervision of corsair actions, but Tangier became one of the easier victims of the corsair interpretation of the treaties. Tangier purchased supplies from Spain, which were carried by a series of small Spanish ships, manned by Spanish crews, though the ships themselves were technically English. Algerine (and other) corsairs, at constant war with Spain, regarded these as Spanish, despite English protests.12 The reliance of Tangier on Spanish supplies was already a serious strategic weakness, and the vulnerability of this supply line aggravated that weakness. With the need for a constant military defence, and the expense of the mole, this meant that Tangier had to spend most of its energy merely maintaining itself; there was little strength left for any wider action. The (Second) Anglo-Dutch War began in 1664. Lawson had spent much of the previous year shadowing a Dutch squadron commanded by Admiral de Ruyter in the western Mediterranean, and being watched in his turn. De Ruyter was supposedly in the area to attend, like Lawson, to Algiers, but also aimed to safeguard the arrival of the Spanish plate fleet, Spain and the Netherlands being allies of a sort at the time. Allin was left to hold the position in the Strait when de Ruyter’s squadron was ordered to West Africa to counter the (prewar) raid on the Dutch posts by Captain Robert Holmes. Lawson had realised, from de Ruyter’s evasions when they met, that war was

10 Wolf,

Barbary Coast, 230–231; Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.326; Tinniswood, Pirates, 229–234. 11 Quoted by Wolf, Barbary Coast, 232–233, but without attribution. 12 Ibid, 232.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

about to begin, and Allin had been left with instructions to intercept the Dutch convoy coming from Smyrna. He suffered a shipwreck on the Spanish coast near Gibraltar, losing two of his nine ships, just before the convoy arrived, but managed to intercept and attack the convoy. Two of its merchant ships were sunk, and two or three others captured; the rest, including the three warships forming the escort, got safely into Cadiz.13 Allin was recalled to England, in compliance with the strategy of concentrating English naval power in the North Sea. Tangier was left to fend for itself, which its forces competently did. The Dutch in the Strait began a loose blockade, but the English convoys, though protected only rather lightly, were still able to get into its harbour. One convoy, of seventeen merchantmen, escorted only by a small yacht, Merlin (14 guns, Captain Charles Haward), was attacked by five Dutch warships off Cadiz in October 1665 as it approached Tangier. Thanks to Haward’s vigorous defence, though Merlin itself was eventually captured, the convoy suffered the loss of only four ships captured, and the rest reached Tangier and then went on to their destinations.14 The entry of France into the war on the Dutch side in 1666 upset English calculations, and forced a change in this naval disposition. But the French now discovered what was to be their main and continuing problem in any war with England, or later Britain – that their fleet was divided between their Atlantic and Mediterranean ports, and that each section was too weak to challenge the main English fleet in the Channel. (This French difficulty had emerged earlier, of course, in Blake’s time.) The first element of any French naval strategy had therefore to be to unite their two fleets. The plan this time was to have a fleet from the Atlantic and one from Toulon approach the Strait from either side; together they would then occupy that position, unite their forces, and then the joint force would move north to the Channel. But the English reacted first, since their ships were already mobilised; a squadron under Admiral Sir Jeremy Smyth escorted the Levant convoy into the Mediterranean, then occupied the Strait to wait for the returning convoy. At Toulon the French, under the command of the duc de Beaufort, slowly built up a force of thirty warships, plus a dozen galleys and several fireships. On their voyage they were to be accompanied by eight Dutch warships which had gone into Toulon when Smyth arrived. Smyth had just fifteen frigates, but in any battle he would 13 Corbett,

Mediterranean, 2.339–340, with reference to Allin’s letters; Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.423–424. 14 Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.425–426.

Tangier and Corsairs

49

clearly be able to inflict sufficient damage on the French and Dutch to force the joint fleet to stop for repairs. The Toulon fleet, composed of many, and many different, vessels, moved slowly, and by the time Beaufort had reached the Strait, Smyth and his ships had been recalled to English waters. Beaufort moved on to Lisbon, where he remained for rather too long under restrictive orders; eventually he reached Brest, but by that time the fighting in the North Sea had finished.15 The delay in his voyage was partly due to his difficulty in getting organised (he was very short of sailors) and partly the awkward orders; Smyth at the Straits was obviously a problem, but a relatively minor one compared with the other difficulties he faced. Tangier had been thought to be threatened by the French move, but no attack developed. Instead, it now became a privateer base; so, to its victims, it became another species of corsair base. The town began to develop a useful local trade with Moroccan ports nearby, though not with the Moroccan interior, which remained hostile. The following year (1668), when Louis XIV attacked Spain, and Spanish ports were closed to the French, Tangier became a base for a group of French merchants who had to leave Cadiz and other Spanish territory. By this time the triple disasters which had laid Algiers low had been overcome; a new Algerine fleet was in existence, and their ships, in part encouraged by the French, began again to ambush and seize English ships. They probably needed very little prodding to do this, for they had by this time made treaties with the French, the Dutch, and the English, the three major sea trading nations; without continuing supplies of loot and slaves and captured ships the Algerine economy would fail; one of the three Europeans had to become a victim. The Dutch and French seemed too strong; the English were distant and had not shown an armed presence inside the Mediterranean for some time; they became the Algerines’ victims of choice. The interference with the Spain–Tangier traffic continued, and now increasing numbers of ships were being seized elsewhere. In London the onset of peace in western Europe in 1667–1668 allowed the corsair problem to return to the top of the naval agenda (as it did also in France, and later in Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands, all of whom operated to suppress Algerine raids in the next years). Admiral Sir Thomas Allin was sent out again in 1668 to deal with the problem. He had only a small squadron, and the Algerines were not impressed; they presented a list of their own complaints against English activities when Allin arrived, which Allin treated with contempt. An agreement to return to the 1662 treaty was made, and was immediately 15 Corbett,

Mediterranean, 2.343–344, 346–348; specific accounts of the Dutch wars pay little or no attention to events in the Mediterranean.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

broken by the Algerines. Allin was sent in again next year, reinforced to a strength of twenty-three ships, each of 30 to 50 guns. Several Algerine ships were found at sea and fought; another was driven on shore and burnt; a squadron of seven was defeated in a fight by a single English ship defending a convoy; another squadron of seven ships attacked a convoy, but were driven off by the two escorts. These fights ranged from Cape de Gata in Spain to the Moroccan Atlantic coast.16 Allin was replaced in 1670 by Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Spragge, who continued the work of fighting Algerines where he could find them. The Algerines were very willing to fight and were doing their best to disrupt the English convoys. One of the keys to dealing with the problem was the presence from the start of an English squadron in the region which could intercept Algerine ships. The Algerines were hampered by their traditions and their intentions, for their ships aimed to capture the enemy merchantmen and enslave the crews for their own profit; this made them vulnerable to enemy warships which were intent only on fighting, as were the convoy escorts; a damaged, still worse a sunk corsair ship was not a profitable venture, so it was better to withdraw from a fight and search for easier prey. The well-armed European ships were not so easy to take; perhaps a dozen Algerine vessels were captured or destroyed in these intercepts. It was in this period of warfare that the balance shifted; from now on the Algerines and other corsairs were much less of a threat.17 The Algerines’ ships were largely new, after the disasters of the early 1660s, but they were limited by the difficulty of replacing lost ships quickly. Seven of their ships were sunk or burnt in a fight with a joint English and Dutch force off Cape Spartel, near Tangier, in September 1669; Allin had the satisfaction of taking the news to Algiers personally. When Spragge returned the following year he found a squadron of seven more Algerine ships at anchor in Bougie Bay. Two young lieutenants broke the protecting boom and Spragge sent in a fireship: all seven of the Algerines were burnt; they included three new ships. In Algiers the news brought about a coup d’état; the

16 Wolf, Barbary Coast, 232–235; Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.437–438. 17 Nabil Matar, ‘The Maghribia and the Sea: Maritime Decline in

North Africa in the Early Modern Period’ , in Maria Fusaro et al. (eds), Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel’s Maritime Legacy, London 2010, 117–137, points out that the corsairs were at a technological disadvantage being short of wood for shipbuilding, and in warfare it was corsair ports which were attacked and damaged, and not those of the European powers.

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new regime’s first action was to begin negotiations with Spragge for a new treaty.18 This conflict was not just a ‘corsair war’. It was a formal war between two sovereign states which was waged on both sides by substantial squadrons of well-armed naval vessels. By referring to the Algerines always as ‘corsairs’ and the inaccurate term ‘pirates’, this tends to be obscured. The single corsair ships which now sailed on increasingly perilous raids were a local version of the European privateers, licensed by their home government, some of which were operating out of Tangier, and others from French and Spanish ports. European privateers operated under clear restrictions as to who they could attack; similarly the Algerine corsairs were restricted by the treaties with European states; neither privateers nor corsairs were particularly reliable in keeping to these restrictions, and both groups’ actions easily shaded off into mere piracy. The main difference between the two was that the Algerines were actively seeking captives to enslave and put to work in their galleys. From the English point of view, the aim of the war was not conquest, nor necessarily the destruction of Algerine naval power – though this was, as it turned out, the only way to bring the Algerine rulers to negotiations. Instead, the English aim was to compel the government of Algiers to respect and enforce the treaty it had already signed, and to ensure that its corsairs respected the passes given to English ships. It was only when this attitude prevailed in Algiers that conditions in the Mediterranean would approximate to those in other European seas. The overthrow of the Algiers regime in 1671 finally broke the connection with the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople (though this had been tenuous for some time, and it was almost twenty years before this became certain, when the sultan’s appointed representative, the pasha, was refused permission to land). The ruling group since the earlier crisis in 1659 had been the soldiers, technically Ottoman janissaries, men who had been recruited mainly in the Levant from the most discontented and alienated elements of the population, together with young men who had been kidnapped in Italy and Spain, and who easily became Muslim if the prospect of a more comfortable life than that of a slave in North Africa (or indeed, a peasant at home) thereby beckoned. It was these men who constituted the governing group between 1659 and 1671, but they were scarcely trained or adapted for such a role, nor were they in any way competent at it. The result was constant disorder in the city 18 Clowes,

Royal Navy, 2.440–441; Wolf, Barbary Coast, 88, 235; Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.359.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

and repeated assassinations of the aghas of the soldiers. And when the war with England came, they suffered defeat and the progressive destruction of the Algerine navy. Sea-warfare was the foundation of the Algerine economy, so the soldiers’ regime lost all credibility. When the victorious Admiral Spragge began negotiations after the revolution in Algiers it was thus with a new government. The old regime had gone down to destruction, most of the divan (the council) had been executed, including the latest agha of the soldiers. The new regime was headed by a retired corsair captain, Hadj Mohammed, who insisted on being given the power to govern with absolute authority. The old divan was demoted to a formal and powerless role, and ministers – ‘powers’ – were appointed to various newly defined departments. Hadj Mohammed was thus technically the first of the deys of independent Algiers, and his system lasted until the French conquest in the 1830s – not that the regime was any more stable than its predecessors. Hadj Mohammed, in fact, had the luck to be establishing his regime while Europe was preoccupied with another series of wars, and he had an able son-in-law to do much of the work.19 Spragge’s negotiations for a new treaty were interrupted by his recall to England in preparation for the next Anglo-Dutch war. The new consul, John Ward, completed the process, which in effect reaffirmed the former treaty with a few additional promises by the dey to enforce the terms. The new Anglo-Dutch War – the Third, 1672–1674, with England and France allied for a time – was scarcely fought in the Mediterranean, though Mediterranean convoys were objects of attack when they approached their home ports; indeed, the first action of the war was an attack by a squadron under Admiral Sir Robert Holmes on the Dutch Smyrna convoy as it passed the Isle of Wight, and the next action was off Portugal, where an English convoy from the Mediterranean brushed up against a Dutch squadron. These convoys continued to travel throughout the war, escorted by heavier forces than usual. The Dutch, allied with Spain, were able to use Cadiz as a base close to the Strait of Gibraltar, but this was where Tangier at last came into its own. An experiment of stationing an English galley there was unsuccessful, but later a pair of half-galleys, or galley-frigates, Charles Galley and James Galley, were more useful.20 The Dutch largely controlled the Strait during the war, a condition disputed occasionally from Tangier, but they could never

19 Wolf,

Barbary Coast, 88–90; it may be pointed out that Algiers was in the forefront of political modernity in undergoing a military regime (an incompetent military regime), followed by a dictatorship, only a decade after England. 20 Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.363–365.

Tangier and Corsairs

53

hope to place a large enough squadron there to interrupt the passage of English convoys, given that their homeland was beset by both land and sea. Tangier had been the base, as had been postulated when it was being taken over, for an attempt to suppress corsairs operating out of Sallee. First Allin, then Spragge, spared a pair of ships to attend to it. Several Sallee ships were captured or destroyed until it was said that there was only one ship left.21 Sallee also found itself under pressure from the landward side (rather like Tangier), which may have been as effective as the English naval attacks in reducing its activity. Yet the suppression of the corsairs could only be temporary. The range of action possible for ships based at Tangier was becoming clearer: south to Sallee, north to Cadiz and the Spanish and Portuguese coasts, and east for a short distance through the Strait into the Mediterranean, but not as far as Algiers – that took a more determined effort, by a fleet; it was also used as a stopover for ships heading further into the Mediterranean. But this hardly made it the great naval base which had been hoped for. England pulled out of the Dutch war in 1674, by which time it had turned into a much greater European war, with France facing a gradually increasing coalition of enemies. Charles II had no wish either to destroy the Dutch, which had been the French aim, or to assist Louis XIV to even greater power. Neutrality was the better option. The wider war continued, and in the Mediterranean the French expanded their ambitions and their power, occupying part of Sicily and defeating a joint Dutch–Spanish fleet. The corsairs found this very frustrating, as they saw the European privateers prospering, while they themselves were unable to reach for victims while all the Western Basin states were so well armed and well prepared. At the same time the neutral English prospered mightily while every other mercantile state was locked in conflict and its vessels were liable to privateering capture or were herded in convoys.22 The corsairs, inevitably in the circumstances, and despite the treaty, began to attack English ships. The loot and slaves from their victims – and the ships themselves – were fundamental to the economy of the several corsair states, though above all to Algiers, and if English ships were the only ones which were at sea, even if they had the protection of passes, then English ships would be attacked. But England was at peace in Europe, and so could gather an adequate squadron which, for once, would not be distracted by European enemies. Sir John Narbrough was appointed to command, 21 Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.437, 439. 22 Davis, ‘English Foreign Trade’; Hornstein,

Restoration Navy, 47–52.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

with the approximate situation of a commodore. His first move was to tackle Tripoli, several of whose ships he destroyed at sea or near the entrance to the harbour, and a raid right into the harbour destroyed four more. He landed a force near the city and destroyed whatever could be found. The dey of Tripoli proved obdurate, particularly in the face of Narbrough’s demand for reparations for past losses; the price of peace was his probable assassination. Narbrough needed a reliable base from which to operate, and where he could rest and resupply. He tried Livorno, but several fleets, French, Dutch, and Spanish, were using it as a base while fighting in Sicily, and so it was expensive, as well as distant from the action. He tried Malta, which was convenient since it was closer to Tripoli than any other possible base, and since the English were fighting the Maltese enemies they were welcome; but supplies of naval stores were difficult to obtain; nevertheless Malta became his preferred base for some months.23 Finally in February 1676 Narborough caught up with the last four Tripolitan warships; he had only two of his ships with him, but the Tripolitans were defeated, losing several hundred men, and were forced back into the harbour in a ruinous condition. At last the dey made peace, giving up all his English captives and slaves, and paying a large indemnity. Then it became clear why the dey had been so obdurate. A riot in the city against the terms of the treaty brought his assassination; this, of course, was the same reaction as had happened at Algiers after a similar defeat. Narbrough had to return and threaten a bombardment of the city to force the new dey to accept the same treaty as that agreed by his predecessor.24 The prestige of Narbrough was such that when he stopped at Tangier on his return voyage, he was able to receive Sallee’s submission without even visiting the town, though this proved to be only temporary, as usual. On the other hand, when he returned to the Mediterranean the following year, he could do nothing with Algiers, where the plague raged. His ships fought several Algerine vessels, gradually reducing the dey’s navy, though the dey himself, conscious that the prestige of the new regime required a determined defence and continued corsair activity, resisted any thought of a treaty. By the end of 1678 a good third of the Algerine navy had been destroyed or captured. Tangier acted as the naval base in this conflict, but it was now coming under more sustained pressure from land attacks than before. 23 Hornstein,

Restoration Navy, 160–166; M. S. Anderson, ‘Great Britain and Malta before 1798’ , MM 40, 1954, 128–140. 24 Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.382.

Tangier and Corsairs

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Narbrough was provided with a substantial fleet, rising to thirty-five major warships at one point, but he was given no real instructions other than that he had to protect English shipping and try to get a new Algerine treaty. He did generally protect the convoys, though the Algerines captured a large number of English merchant ships which ignored the convoy system and sailed alone. He completely failed to secure any response from Algiers other than a blank refusal to talk. His large squadron was all too often distributed in small numbers on various tasks, and the one place where he might have intercepted plenty of Algerines, the Strait, he tended to hold with only a couple of ships. He was constantly under the necessity of cleaning and supplying his ships, which could normally only be done at Livorno, which was far from his target, so that of the thirty or so ships he usually commanded only half were normally available at any one time.25 Narbrough’s presence in the Mediterranean has been credited with compelling the French to evacuate Messina in Sicily. They had seized the city, which was in rebellion against the Spanish rulers of Sicily, and were beginning the process of conquering the rest of the island. The theory that the arrival of the English fleet pushed the French into abandoning the campaign is that of Sir Julian Corbett,26 but on examination, and adopting a less nationalistic viewpoint, it is unconvincing. Narbrough certainly had instructions from the Admiralty about the French, but they seem to have been received only in June 1678 - they were either not mandatory or he chose to ignore them - while the French had already pulled out of Messina in February. There is thus no obvious connection between the two events. The French had been aiming to conquer Sicily in the last months of 1677, and Louis XIV sent Marshal d’Aubuisson, duc de Feuillade, to take command, but the sudden alliance of Charles II with the Dutch stadhouder, William of Orange, signed on New Year’s Day 1678, increased the military pressure on French forces in the north. This is a better explanation for the evacuation of French forces from Sicily back to France than the arrival of Narbrough’s fleet in the Mediterranean. Instead Narbrough concentrated on protecting English trade and on Algiers, which were his priority tasks.27 Narbrough was called back to England early in 1679 to participate in that northern war, but this time he left a small squadron at Tangier to continue the anti-Algerine fight. The new naval commander was Arthur Herbert, Narbrough’s second-in-command and now Vice-Admiral and Commander-in-Chief. He had sixteen ships at first, but 25 Hornstein, Restoration Navy, 109–133; 26 Corbett, Mediterranean, ch. 23. 27 Hornstein, Restoration Navy, 116.

Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.453–454.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

these were soon reduced to half that. He also had unusually rigid instructions from the Admiralty, restricting him to the defence of Tangier, the domination of the Strait, and, if possible, menacing Algiers in quest of a treaty.28 By now, Tangier had come under renewed attack by the Moors, and Herbert’s sailors were repeatedly called on to assist the city’s defence. He was able to deal some serious blows at the corsairs of Sallee, now under the control of the reunited Moroccan sultanate – which was also the source of the new pressure on Tangier. But the Moorish pressure on Tangier was unrelenting, modified by intermittent truces. It was assumed that the Moors were being egged on by the French.29 Herbert’s restrictive instructions were successful in that he was compelled to concentrate his vessels into a small area, comprising at first Tangier and the western mouth of the Sea-entrance, between Cape Spartel and Cape Trafalgar, and between Ceuta and Gibraltar (the narrowest part of the Strait) – in contrast to Narbrough’s wider and more diffuse responsibilities. Herbert was able to intercept most of the Algerine ships which ventured his way, including Algerine naval vessels which clearly came to the area in hopes of driving him off station. He took into English naval service the Algerine warships he captured: three fourth rates, three fifths, and two sixths.30 He was helped by not having to worry about the convoys, other than occasionally: the Admiralty took responsibility for protecting the major convoys with ships from England – the Levant traffic, the Newfoundland fishing fleet, and the Spain and Italy traffic - together with those to Portugal and the Canaries.31 The outbreak of the French war had chilled the enthusiasm of many merchants for trading in the Mediterranean now that they were liable to attack not only by Algerine corsairs but also by French privateers. Many foreign ships had taken to flying the English flag in order to deter Algerine attacks, but this ploy no longer worked. As a result Herbert had fewer ships to worry about – and the Algerines had fewer targets. Herbert was not helped by bright ideas emanating from London. In 1679 there arrived at Tangier four former Algerine captives who had escaped and had gained access to King Charles. They had persuaded him that they had a workable scheme to burn the Algerine fleet as it lay in Algiers harbour. Herbert was wholly sceptical of the scheme

28 TNA ADM 2/1726, 46, Admiralty instructions to Herbert, 1 August 1679. 29 Hornstein, Restoration Navy, 137–138. 30 MS Carte 48, 208 (Bodleian Library); ADM 8/1; Hornstein, Restoration Navy,

138, 146.

31 Hornstein,

Restoration Navy, 134.

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and the men, but allocated ships for the attempt, as ordered; it predictably failed.32 Herbert’s ships steadily chipped away at Algerine naval strength. A list of those ships had been compiled by the consul in Algiers, Samuel Martin, when Narbrough first took up the command;33 Narborough had accounted for twelve of them, and Herbert captured or destroyed another sixteen. If the consul’s list was anything near accurate, the Algerines had only half a dozen ships left by 1682. After the conclusion of the European peace in 1679 there were suddenly many more French ships at sea. The Algerines could not fight both England and France, but if they made peace with England, then turned to the French traffic, they would be able to make a swift killing before the French could react. When Herbert came along to Algiers in 1682 (for the second time), he therefore found the dey suddenly willing to make peace.34 This treaty proved to be the definitive version, though it was essentially the same as the earlier ones, and came to be more or less respected by the corsairs, though this was less because they had developed a new respect for the agreement, and more because the Royal Navy came to dominate the local sea, and was too powerful to tackle.35 When Herbert was recalled to England in 1682, having achieved the treaty he and Narbrough had sought for the previous six years, he left the ships at Tangier under the command of Captain Cloudisley Shovell. Shovell was just one of several capable naval commanders who, in effect, learned their complicated trade in the Mediterranean; it was complicated not just for its technical content, but because a naval captain was always in part a politician and a diplomat as well as a sailor. Herbert was another, as were John Leake, John Kempthorne, George Rooke, and Francis Wheler; almost every English naval commander in the generation after 1684 had served at Tangier, and many had served under Herbert. The navy which reached its first great period of victory and expertise in the French wars which began in 1689 had received its main training in the Mediterranean in the previous fifteen years of relative peace in Europe (at least for England), and the most distinguished and expert commanders had emerged in that time and in that fleet.36

32 Peter

Le Fevre, ‘ “It will be a charge to the king to no effect”: The Failed Attempt to burn the Algerine Fleet in 1679’, MM 89, 2003, 272–279. 33 TNA, SP 71/2, 137. 34 Wolf, Barbary Coast, 243. 35 Ibid, 241–242. 36 Peter Le Fevre, ‘Tangier, the Navy, and its Connection with the Glorious Revolution of 1688’ , MM 73, 1987, 187–190; Herbert, of course, was the man

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However, they could not save Tangier. The Moorish land assaults had gradually worn down the fortifications and the garrison’s strength.37 The only way the city could be held was by a very large reinforcement of troops and a major naval expedition – and the continuation of a large garrison and a continuous stream of supplies from England. England was at peace, but the diplomatic situation was by no means calm: the power of Louis XIV was threatening; there was a crisis in the Baltic; the Ottoman army besieged Vienna in 1683 and raided west into southern Germany, more than halfway between Constantinople and the English Channel; the sickly king of Spain might die at any moment, setting off a crisis even greater than that of 1672, when England and France had combined to attack the Dutch. At home there were a succession of political crises involving the king, his brother James, and religion – and one victim of that conflict was the refusal of parliamentary supply for Tangier. That is, this was no time for a major part of the English army (never very large at any time) and a large section of its fleet to be bogged down in a war in North Africa to which no end could be envisaged. Especially so with no guarantee of a victory, and with the certainty of a long and difficult campaign. In other words, the city and port of Tangier had become too expensive to be retained. It probably always had been. Only by building the mole - effectively abandoned unfinished in 1678 – could it have become a worthwhile naval station. It had also needed the full paraphernalia of storehouses, wharfs, and supplies to be properly usable, and these had not been built or provided – both Narbrough and Herbert had complained of the lack of such facilities.38 It did acquire a complex of land defences, but the provision of these lines and forts had absorbed great quantities of money.39 Supplies for both army and navy had to come from England, and did so only intermittently, and shiploads of naval supplies were sometimes seized for the army’s use. Money was always scarce, so supplementing English supplies from local commerce – meaning from Spain – had not always been possible. As a base of operations the port, even with an unfinished mole, had certainly been useful. From Tangier the navy could deal effectively with Sallee whenever the corsair activity there became too menacing; as Herbert with his fewer ships had shown, it was a good base from which to patrol the entrance to the Mediterranean, on both sides who carried the invitation of the Seven to William of Orange to intervene in England. 37 Routh, Tangier; Smithers, Tangier Campaign. 38 Hornstein, Restoration Navy, 205–208. 39 Smithers, Tangier Campaign, 113, reproduces a plan of the town and its fortifications.

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of the Gut. It was, however, of little value for more distant operations, and when Narbrough acted against Tripoli or Algiers he had had to use other places – Malta, Livorno, Port Mahon, Alicante – as his supply and careening bases. Herbert had mainly used Cadiz at first, but had been especially enthusiastic about Gibraltar as a base, which he used in the last year or so of his command.40 In London the decision was made, in view of the refusal of supply by Parliament, to evacuate the base. The House of Commons had tacked on to the Supply Bill a clause aiming to exclude Catholics, meaning the duke of York, from the royal succession, assuming that the king would not give up Tangier after all the expense he had incurred, but they were wrong. Charles called the Commons’ bluff and chose his brother over his empire; he vetoed the bill.41 In August 1683, therefore, only a year after the conclusion of the Algiers treaty, a new fleet, commanded by Admiral Lord Dartmouth, sailed to extinguish the Tangier colony. The Moors understood what was happening, but sensibly allowed the English to leave without a final pointless fight, though they kept up their menaces, just in case the English changed their minds. The mole was progressively damaged by explosives, though much of it remained for the sea to destroy, and the fortifications were extensively mined so as they could be destroyed. (Nothing of any military or naval value was to be left – it was not going to be used as a corsair base.42) The civilian population was evacuated to wherever they wanted to go, and at last in January 1684 the soldiers declared the mines ready to be blown, and the navy declared the mole wrecked and unusable, and the senior men compiled their reasons why the place should not be held – the usual ex post facto reasoning by bureaucrats. (The ultimate bureaucrat, Samuel Pepys, was there to supervise compensations, make complaints about poor record-keeping, and compile yet another set of reasons for the abandonment.43) One calculation claimed that it would cost about £5 million over the next twelve years to fortify, defend, and garrison the city, and that the garrison would need to be 2000 cavalry and 8000 infantry, plus gunners. Like all 40 Hornstein, Restoration Navy, 210; D. W. Donaldson, ‘Port Mahon: The Preferred

Naval Base for the English Fleet in the Mediterranean in the Seventeenth Century’ , MM 88, 2002, 423–436, provides a list of the bases used, thereby partly negating the claim in the title; see also the map in J. A. Davies, ‘A Permanent National Maritime Fighting Force, 1642–1689’ in J. R. Hill (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy, Oxford 1995, 76, though Tetuan and Marseilles might have been included. 41 Maurice Ashley, Charles II, London 1971, 269–270. 42 As a tourist attraction, the Moroccan authorities have reconditioned a fort by the harbour as an ‘English fort’ . 43 Edwin Chappell (ed.), The Tangier Papers of Samuel Pepys, NRS 1935.

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such predictions, it would have been proved wrong, and was anyway unnecessary since the decision had already been made in London. The soldiers were evacuated, the Moors finally gave up their captives, and the mines were blown. The place the Moors occupied was no use as a corsair base.44 Tangier had become a liability when its retention intersected with English religious politics, but it was abandoned also because it was not suitable for its intended use as a naval base. For most of Charles II’s reign other places in the Mediterranean had been more useful as temporary English naval bases, and by 1684 there was no obvious need for such a base so far from England. (The other acquisition from the Portuguese as part of the royal marriage, Bombay, had also been surrendered, to the East India Company.) If the threat of the corsairs really diminished as a result of the treaties, then there would be no need for a naval base anywhere near them. That is, the focus of English naval policy in the Mediterranean remained the corsair threat, which was under control. It would take a new but different threat to bring the ships back. At the same time, it is striking how many of the future naval bases of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean had been used in the previous generation – Gibraltar, Port Mahon, Malta – but it is just as striking how many places had been used which were never taken up – Cadiz, Alicante, Formentera, Livorno, Cagliari, Trapani. It is certain that the Admiralty had become much more familiar with potential bases since Blake’s expeditions, but there is no indication that any of them had been in any way picked out as potential bases. The navy was as gratified as the army to be out of Tangier; only later historians bemoaned its loss, as a supposed precursor for Gibraltar.

44 Corbett,

Mediterranean, ch. 25; Smithers, Tangier Campaign, ch. 11 (refreshingly unimpressed by Pepys).

Chapter 4 French Wars I 1688–1713

The repeated campaigns against Algiers and the other Barbary states by English (and other) naval forces had been, above all else, a defence of their merchant ships trading in the Mediterranean. For states with Mediterranean coasts there was also the even nastier issue of the kidnapping and enslavement of their people who lived along those coasts. This was also an issue, if a lesser one, for the English and Scots, whose citizens were taken from the captured ships and enslaved; freeing such captives by raising cash ransoms became a major charity activity in both countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1 The treaty with Algiers agreed by Admiral Herbert meant that the English had now no intention of establishing a permanent English naval presence in the sea, despite English rule in Tangier. With the evacuation of Tangier in 1684, there was no requirement for an English naval presence; no English warships sailed that sea until 1690. In the year the new war began, 1688, the French demonstrated very clearly their naval power in the sea. Their Mediterranean fleet, annoyed at the Algerine depredations in previous years (while the English and Dutch treaties were in force) turned their bomb vessels on the city, destroying much of it; a dozen Frenchmen who were in the city at the time, including the consul, were executed in revenge, by being fired from the Algerine guns. It was all pointless, for, as Louis XIV became involved in the European war (using a similar policy of frightfulness, such as the ravaging of the Palatinate, which simply angered his victims and horrified others), he sent a secret envoy to Algiers to make peace, and the dey successfully extracted very favourable terms. Algiers was at war with its Barbary neighbours in Tunis and Morocco at the time, and any defeat tended to mean the 1

Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850, London 2002, 43–98; there was an equivalent organisation in Scotland: Eric J. Graham, A Maritime History of Scotland, 1650–1790, East Linton 2002.

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deposition and probable execution of the ruling dey – including the man who made the French peace. The real result was a powerful and continuing hatred of France by the Algerines.2 An English naval squadron returned to the Mediterranean in 1690 because of the new French war, the Nine Years’ War (or War of English Succession, or War of the League of Augsburg). The issue, as far as the English were concerned, was who was to be their king (hence the name War of English Succession); other participants in the coalition had other interests and priorities, but what held them together was the power and threat of Louis XIV and the French kingdom. The succession problem in Britain developed into a British civil war between the adherents of James VII and II and those of William III, and much of the navy was required to help with the Irish campaign or to guard the English Channel against the threat of a French invasion aimed at restoring James VII and II. But this last also required attention to the French naval dispositions, and in particular to the specific issue which had emerged in the last, brief, Anglo-French war in 1678–1679: that the French navy was divided between the Mediterranean based at Toulon (the fleet which had recently been in action against Algiers), and the Channel fleet, which was now usually based at Brest. On 12 January 1689 at a meeting of Prince William of Orange (not yet king of England and Scotland), with the Secretary of the Admiralty, Samuel Pepys, and Admirals Arthur Herbert and Edward Russell, it was decided that a squadron of twelve third- and fourthrate ships, plus three fireships, should be sent to the Mediterranean. This seemingly small force was in fact almost half the Royal Navy’s bigger ships; during the winter the squadron was made up to thirty ships (out of sixty-five – the same proportion as in the original plan). The tasks of this force were essentially what had been those of the squadrons of Narbrough and Herbert, and before them, Blake and Mansell: to guard the trade and to occupy the Strait of Gibraltar to keep the French fleets apart, though the enemy this time was the French and not the Algerines.3 It failed at the latter task; the Toulon fleet joined with the Brest fleet in summer 1690 to defeat the Anglo-Dutch fleet off Beachy Head. Nevertheless, an escorted Levant convoy set out in September, and Vice-Admiral Henry Killigrew brought back a convoy from the

2 3

Wolf, Barbary Coast, 265–267. John Ehrman, The Navy in the War of William III, Cambridge 1953, 249; the issue is also discussed by Edward B. Powley, The Naval Side of King William’s War, which deals with the brief period 1688–1690, ch. 4: ‘Mediterranean or Channel and Irish Strategy?, London 1972, 52–87.

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Levant about the same time.4 This was repeated the following year, though the French attempted an interception with their Brest fleet under Admiral Comte de Tourville, without success. The following year Tourville faced challenge from the reinforced Anglo-Dutch fleet and was defeated at the Battle of Barfleur, losing a third of his fleet; the Toulon fleet, which had been supposed to join him, had failed to get through due to adverse weather. Even if Admiral Comte d’Estrees had got his fleet to the Channel, however, the joint French fleets would still have been heavily outnumbered, and the French disaster may well have been that much greater. It had been intended for an Allied fleet to go to the Mediterranean for the winter of 1691–1692, but the plan failed. As a result the convoys for that sea were delayed and in 1693 a great fleet of 400 merchant ships had collected awaiting an escort. Finally the huge convoy and its escort sailed at the end of May 1693. This is usually referred to as the ‘Smyrna fleet’ , since some of the ships were destined for that port, but it was more than that. First, the merchant ships were, of course, mainly English and Dutch, but they also included German, Danish, and Swedish ships, and doubtless others. Second, these ships were bound for almost every possible Mediterranean port, though Italy and the Levant predominated – the Levant Company was sending an especially rich contingent. This was a company of merchant ships carrying two years’ worth or more of goods for one of Europe’s richest markets. The escort was, of course, commensurate in size with the wealth involved, at least at first. The escort commanders thought the French fleet was still in port at Brest – though they did not check – and most of the escort turned back when the mass of ships was south of Ushant. However, Tourville had already sailed to try again to intercept the great convoy, which he knew all about; he lay in wait in Lagos Bay on the south coast of Portugal, in the Sea-entrance to the Mediterranean. The remaining Anglo-Dutch escort, twenty-one line-of-battle ships under Vice-Admiral Sir George Rooke and Rear-Admiral P. van der Goes, sailed on. Tourville had seventy warships, the escort only forty, many of them relatively small vessels. The convoy was attacked as it passed Lagos Bay, losing up to a quarter of the merchant ships (precise numbers are not clear) and some of the escort, despite a determined fighting retreat, above all by the Dutch ships of the escort. The surviving merchant ships scattered and took refuge in Cadiz,

4

Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.332–333.

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Gibraltar, and Malaga, and no doubt other ports, and then had to stay there for several months since they now had no escort.5 Rooke pulled back the surviving escort ships to Madeira, his rendezvous, and Tourville went on through the Strait to join d’Estrees in a campaign along the Spanish eastern coast. Some of the refugee merchant ships in Malaga were attacked, and d’Estrees assisted the besiegers of the Spanish frontier fortress of Rosas. But Tourville could do little to affect matters on land with his great fleet, and soon he returned north to Brest; the dockyard facilities at Toulon could not cope with both French fleets at the same time.6 The ambush created a great noise in England, especially in Parliament, but it did not have greater consequences, though the formal monetary losses were severe. A new convoy set off in late November under the escort of a squadron of sixteen ships commanded by Admiral Sir Francis Wheler. He was instructed to wait at Cadiz for a month then go on, but when he did so (just before a message recalling him arrived) his ships were caught in a storm in the Gut: six of the squadron and six of the merchant ships (some of them of the Levant Company again) were lost.7 One result was that a French fleet from Brest was able to pass through into the Mediterranean without opposition in May. In effect the French had naval control of the Western Basin and the Sea-entrance. Two months later, late in April 1694, another fleet was sent out, a major force under the Admiral of the Fleet Edward Russell, which was to go through the Strait and relieve the pressure on the Spaniards at and about Barcelona. As he arrived in the Mediterranean the French fleet, which had dominated the eastern coast of Spain since the war began, withdrew to Toulon, and stood behind its fortifications, as if the English would assault it. Its purpose was presumably to wait, then re-emerge as soon as the English fleet returned to England for the winter. Having arrived, Russell soon found that new orders for him had been sent out, instructing him to remain in Spanish waters for the coming winter, an unprecedented development for such a large force; King William had long had ambitions for a permanent Mediterranean naval presence, and the concentration of French forces at Toulon provided a good opportunity to institute it. Grumbling, Russell stayed off the coast of southeast Spain, and so within easy reach of the still threatened Barcelona, until early October. Then he received 5

Ibid, 2.357–359; Ehrman, Navy, 500–502; Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.422–424; the account of events by Capt. Edward Littleton, master of the Smyrna Factor, is in British Naval Documents, no. 133. 6 Ehrman, Navy, 502. 7 Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.361–362.

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reliable intelligence that the French in Toulon were laying up their ships for the winter; he moved to Cadiz (though a rumour that the French were out sent him to sea again for a month), and then spent the winter months refitting and resupplying. In order that the maintenance should take place with efficiency, virtually all his supplies, of victuals and naval stores, as well as skilled workmen, were sent from England. The result was that ‘the nucleus of an English dockyard [was] set up at short notice, 1100 miles from England and in a foreign state’. 8 This enabled Russell’s fleet to return to the Mediterranean much earlier in the next year (1695) than usual. It was not constituted as the same fleet as the year before. Several ships had been sent to England either as convoy escorts or because they were in a bad condition; but Russell received in exchange some bomb vessels; these had been used in the Channel in bombarding St Malo and Le Havre (and the French had used such vessels several years earlier in bombarding Algiers, of course). Russell hoped to use them to attack French ports along the Mediterranean coast. He also received a reinforcement of over 3000 men, to replace those lost through sickness. The very presence of the English fleet had altered the balance of forces in the Mediterranean. The convoys were reinstated, with a rich one from the Levant getting through unscathed during 1695. Russell was a diplomatic star, with Spaniards and the dey of Algiers paying him compliments and sending him presents as though he was an independent power. (The dey, of course, was only too pleased to see the French being humiliated.) For the new campaign Russell proposed to do what the French had feared the previous year, namely to attack Toulon; Marseilles was added to his targets. He hoped that the duke of Savoy would join him in attacking Toulon, though as it turned out the duke’s priority was the French fortress of Casale, which he took during the year, an achievement which satisfied him for the time being. Russell took the fleet out of Cadiz at the start of May. A squadron was detached to escort a Spanish troop convoy from northern Italy to Catalonia to help the Spanish defences there, and he looked in at Toulon. The fleet was then struck by a storm which drove the ships away to the south; then the ships needed to water (in Sardinia), and then the Levant convoy required escorting through the Western Basin. These multifarious, successive, and overlapping tasks occupied Russell for two months. It was thus not until the end of June that he could again consider an attack on Toulon, but the Spanish viceroy of Catalonia then 8

Ibid, 2.363; Ehrman, Navy, ch. 12; Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.429–449.

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needed his help in the siege of Palamos; the viceroy promised to lend Russell his galleys, which would be useful in an attack on Toulon (as would the bomb vessels), but only after the siege of Palamos was successful. Many of the men sent as reinforcements from England had been marines or soldiers, so they were very useful in the siege, though that had hardly been the intention when they were sent. A rumour arrived that the French fleet, said to be sixty ships strong, was ready to come out; Russell went to Toulon to check, and found the rumour was incorrect. By this time it was September.9 Russell had said he wanted to return to England in June or July, but had been told to stay until September. Grumbling again, he acquiesced, and then took his worst ships away to England before his replacement, Rooke, arrived. He had to leave because the Dutch squadron with him had decided to return home before its home ports iced up. Rooke arrived at Cadiz in mid-October with just thirty ships, a force which was sufficient to hold the Strait, block raiders and privateers, and provide escorts for the English convoys, but not enough to fight the Toulon fleet if it came out. Rooke also had a workforce capable of maintaining his ships in Cadiz harbour; he was staying the winter. Rooke was ordered back to England in January (1696), and arrived there in April, with the result that the way was open for the Toulon fleet to reach Brest.10 Yet by now both naval forces, English and French, were in no condition to fight, short of men, short of victual, short of everything they needed. Neither accomplished anything but the occasional cruise, though the English had the easier task in that they needed only to stand on the defensive – Rooke, in command of the Channel fleet, took station in Torbay. The French intention was to mount an invasion, a much more difficult task, which proved impossible. At the Strait, a new commander, Vice-Admiral John Neville, was appointed and sailed in November for his post, with a convoy escorted by his squadron of fifteen ships, English and Dutch. This was an even smaller force than Rooke’s had been earlier in the year, but the main French Toulon fleet had already moved to Brest, so if they could avoid Neville, their way was probably clear. Nevertheless a French squadron was known to be about to sail to the West Indies, and to be heading for the Strait. Neville was ordered to make a rendezvous at Madeira with extra ships brought out by Captain George Meese. The object was to intercept the French ships, under Rear-Admiral Baron 9

Ehrman, Navy 546–553; Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.363; Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.450–454. 10 Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.454–455; Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.363–364.

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de Pointis, but storms scattered the Allies’ ships, and de Pointis’ squadron got through the Strait and past them. Neville and Meese followed the French fleet to the West Indies. As a result no guard was left, again, at the Strait.11 The following year, such was the exhaustion of the Admiralty’s administrative system that the squadron designated for the Mediterranean could not be supplied with victuals, and was still in port without supplies in August. In September the treaty of peace was agreed at Ryswick, and in 1698 only a small squadron was organised for the Mediterranean. The strategic lessons for England from the Nine Years’ War were by no means clear. It had been possible to base the English fleet at Cadiz, and therefore for it to extend its operations as far as northern Italy and Sardinia and Sicily much earlier in the year than if it had been based in England. With such a base it could also remain in the Mediterranean over the winter. This, however, was not really any different from the situation as it had been under Blake or Herbert. The base at Cadiz, as both admirals could attest, was better than Tangier, though even less reliable, being in a major foreign city all too likely to become hostile, and the English were not liked by the people of Cadiz, even as allies. Establishing an English dockyard at Cadiz had been a clever move and the English workforce was more reliable than the Spaniards. But this had been enormously expensive, so much so that this must bear a good deal of the blame for the later inability of the Admiralty to function effectively. Further, at the end of the war, the fleet was at once withdrawn from the Mediterranean. The one helpful condition was the apparent quiescence of the Barbary states, which had hardly been the result of the English fleet’s presence, but more the result of the ferocious French bombardment of Algiers in 1688. It was therefore clear that the predominant naval power in the Mediterranean in the 1690s remained France. The only way this position could be challenged, given the inability of Spain to operate well as a naval power in these years, was if the English fleet could be based in the Sea-entrance. Tangier had been only partly a success in this; Cadiz was a successful experiment, but could not be relied on except when Spain was an ally; even the English dockyard’s presence there had caused friction with the Spanish authorities, not to mention the Spanish population. The major strategic lesson was therefore that the navy, in the event of a new French war, would need a base close to the Strait of Gibraltar if it was to be effective. Keeping

11 Clowes,

Royal Navy, 2.492–493.

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the two French fleets apart was the best guarantee that no invasion of the English homeland could take place. The next war, of the Spanish Succession, crept up on Europe slowly and almost hesitantly, for all that it had been expected for a generation. For a year the French and the Austrians fought an undeclared war in northern Italy, each seeking to control (Spanish) Milan, but at the same time the French and Spanish authorities – the new king of Spain, Felipe V, was a grandson of Louis XIV – established their control over the whole of their joint coasts, from Flanders to the Adriatic; and when Portugal became a French ally, the potential for excluding the English and Dutch trades from the whole Mediterranean became all too obvious. The French even sent a squadron into the Adriatic to call the bluff of Venice as the controller of that sea. These widespread activities annoyed others besides the English and Dutch; the Austrians were already fighting in Italy; the German states had several times already felt the power and brutality of Louis XIV’s military fist, even when he was simultaneously at war with Spain, so with Spain as an ally he looked even more menacing now. The delay in reacting to Carlos II’s death and the inheritance by Felipe V by almost everyone but the emperor, was largely due to the legality of his accession. Austria’s early military reaction could be put down to sour grapes, for the alternative to Felipe as king of Spain was the emperor’s son, the Austrian Archduke Charles. In England the reaction seemed as slow in coming as anywhere, though King William quickly began to weave a diplomatic web around France. It took a series of French insults and provocations to drive the English Parliament to agree to war, by which time William had developed a wide alliance to oppose the Franco-Spanish hegemony.12 One of the crucial elements in the project for an alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor – Archduke Charles’ father - was his demand that an allied fleet should be sent to the Mediterranean. At the time (1701) the sea was entirely dominated by French power, and the potential hostility of every port was a clear deterrent to English intervention: no base was available closer than England itself, and if the fleet had to be supplied from such a distance it could operate in the sea for only a relatively short time and precariously. This became worse in 1701 when Portugal joined the French alliance, for the only possible friendly base near the Mediterranean, Lisbon, was then closed.

12 John

B. Hattendorf, England in the War of the Spanish Succession, New York 1987; the treaty system is the subject of part 1. See also, more generally, Henry Kamen, The War of Succession in Spain, London 1969, and James Falkner, The War of the Spanish Succession 1702–1713, Barnsley 2015.

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When the open war began, therefore, the priority of the navy was to acquire a base from which it would be able to enter the Mediterranean. Operating on memories of the previous war, Cadiz became the base of choice, and a fleet was sent under Admiral Rooke, carrying a substantial military force, to attack that port. It failed, the troops landing so far from the city that it was well alerted to the attack, and the commanders were unable to control the forces, whose behaviour alienated the local people.13 One of the extra tasks Rooke had been given was to watch for, and if possible seize, the Spanish treasure flota, which was convoying the year’s harvest of silver from America. He failed in that as well, for the ships got into Vigo harbour in northwest Spain while he was busy failing to capture Cadiz. The expedition was heading for complete failure until it was decided to make an attack on Vigo in order to grab the silver. In an audacious assault the boom was broken and the whole of the French and Spanish warships were either captured or burnt (five were recommissioned as English warships after their capture). Most of the silver had already been landed and removed into the Spanish interior, but the spectacle of the destruction of a major portion of the enemy sea power within one of the enemies’ naval bases was invigorating.14 The effects resonated through Europe. The Grand Alliance firmed up noticeably; the Franco-Portuguese alliance frayed rapidly, for if the Royal Navy could force its way into Vigo, it could do the same at Lisbon. The following year, in May 1703, skilful diplomatic work by the English ambassador John Methuen secured a treaty of alliance with Portugal (which was supplemented by a long-lasting commercial treaty six months later) in exchange for a promise of military help when (not if) Spain attacked Portugal. And Lisbon was now available as a naval base.15 In 1703, therefore, Admiral Sir Cloudisley Shovell, in command of a large part of England’s naval power, and with an attached Dutch squadron, entered the Mediterranean. His instructions were elaborate, detailed, and quite impossible to carry out in full. He was to attend to the French in the Adriatic, help the Emperor gain Naples, persuade the Barbary states to declare war on France, firm up the neutrality of the grand duke of Tuscany, persuade the duke of Savoy to change sides and join the Grand Alliance, attack Toulon, assist the people of the Cevennes in their rebellion against Louis XIV, and 13 Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.482–483; Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.377–380. 14 Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.381–386. 15 D. B. Horn, Great Britain and Europe in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford

1967, 278–279; H. E. S. Fisher, ‘Anglo-Portuguese Trade, 1700–1770’ , Economic History Review 16, 1963, 219–233.

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ensure that Portugal was safeguarded – and almost as an afterthought, for the intelligence only arrived late – he was to prevent the French Toulon fleet from passing the Strait; and he was to return to England before the winter. To make this programme even more difficult he was delayed in sailing until 1 July, though he was also promised a reinforcement. He had a fleet of twenty major vessels, and the reinforcement would add eight more; the Dutch were to provide their own squadron to reinforce him, though it was their slowness in coming forward with their ships that had imposed the delay on Shovell’s departure. But as a saving grace to this impossible series of tasks, Shovell was given a covering letter which in effect gave him freedom to act as he saw fit, the only binding elements being that he should escort the Levant convoy through the Western Basin, and collect the returning convoy in September.16 The contradiction of his detailed instructions and the permissiveness of the covering letter was apparent, not real. In effect Shovell had been given a list of possible tasks to fulfil, and the freedom to pick and choose which he tackled. The result was far less, of course, than had been hoped for, but Shovell’s work did clear the air. Neither Naples nor the Adriatic could be visited, but the grand duke’s port of Livorno was utilised as a useful refreshment port, and he was partly persuaded by Shovell’s presence that neutrality would be his best policy. The duke of Savoy had meanwhile come to the conclusion that his alliance with France was doing him more harm than good: his capital was under French occupation, and part of his army had been forcibly disarmed by the French. He changed sides during 1703, before Shovell arrived, thereby boosting the Austrian effort in northern Italy. The hope in London had been that an alliance with Savoy would lead to a joint attack on Toulon by the Savoyard army and the allied fleet, but the fleet turned up too late for this to happen. Shovell, however, was able to detach two groups of ships for particular tasks. Rear-Admiral George Byng went to the Barbary states seeking their alliance against France and Spain, though they were too wary to become involved. This was eminently sensible of them, given that the allied fleet had only just turned up and was intending to leave again almost at once. Algiers was also involved in a dispute with Tunis, and then made an attack on the Spanish port of Oran, persisting in a siege which lasted until 1708; the Spanish involvement in the European war prevented any reaction to the assault; the siege also, of course, prevented Algiers getting more directly involved in the wider war.17 A 16 Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.495–496. 17 Wolf, Barbary Coast, 280–284.

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second detachment of Shovell’s fleet went to Narbonne, in hopes of being able to contact the Cevennois, but there was no response to the agreed signals.18 The most interesting response to the presence of the allied fleet in the Western Basin, however, was that of the French fleet at Toulon – it stayed resolutely in port. The intention that it should sail for the Atlantic had been thwarted. Nor did it come out after Shovell left, after he collected the returning Levant convoy in September. The failure to accomplish the many tasks he had been set has tended to result in Shovell’s cruise being regarded as a failure, but if we look at what he did do rather than what the planners in London all too optimistically hoped for, it was a moderate success. The French fleet had been bottled up in its base, thoroughly intimidated; contacts had been made with the duke of Savoy; Tuscany had been returned to a useful neutrality; the Barbary states were not prepared to go to war with the French but at least they were still neutral, if hostile to Spain, and the presence of a great allied fleet was quite enough to ensure that they kept to their treaty agreements. Admiral Rooke was given the Mediterranean command for the following year (1704). His first task was to transport the Archduke Charles to Portugal, together with soldiers: he was to invade Spain to gain the Spanish throne, to which he had as good a claim as the French Felipe. Rooke was then, once he was in southern waters, given new assignments and a much larger fleet. There was a threat that the French would attack Nice, the duke of Savoy’s only port, and that was to be prevented; the Savoyard army and the allied fleet were to attack Toulon, a plan revived from the previous year; other tasks included operating on the coast of eastern Spain and in Sicily, and finally, but overriding all else, Rooke was to prevent the French fleet from leaving the Mediterranean, and if it did get through the Strait he was to follow it and bring it to battle.19 This was as impossible a compendium of tasks as Shovell had been given the year before – covering, be it noted, the whole Western Basin and the Sea-entrance, from Lisbon to Sicily and north to Nice and Toulon. It was contradictory in its priorities, each of which – Lisbon, Nice, Toulon, the French fleet – could be described as the most important. And the final decision was left to Rooke’s council of flag-officers, which was usually a guarantee of undertaking only the 18 This

cruise of Shovell’s is generally dismissed as of little or no account – e.g., by Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.501–502, Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.397–388, and Hattendorf, England in the War, 107–109, but it was a very useful display of allied naval power, and pinned down the French Toulon fleet by its mere presence. 19 Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.503–506.

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most timid of possible actions. It has been interpreted as a grand design, to be conducted in the same time frame as Marlborough’s Blenheim campaign, but this interpretation is unconvincing. Rooke and Marlborough could not possibly communicate in any speedy way, and the hazards and uncertainties of a sea campaign were even greater than those on land. After Shovell’s experience the year before this should have been obvious, and surely it was to the seamen and the Admiralty. On the other hand, it was a series of tasks which was certainly designed to plant in the minds of Mediterranean rulers that the English fleet was, whenever it turned up, a major force which had to be respected. Rooke’s instructions were out of date almost as soon as he sailed. He delivered the Archduke Charles to Lisbon, then spread his force before Cadiz hoping to intercept a Spanish convoy from Buenos Aires. Several French forces were at sea, none of which he encountered, but all of which he had to watch for. He sailed along the coast of Catalonia, and briefly bombarded Barcelona with no result other than to annoy the Catalans, a factor he quickly recognised. Then there came word from a scout that a French fleet was heading for Toulon, but he was unable to catch it. It was, in fact, the French fleet from Brest, of thirty-one major warships.20 Meanwhile the duke of Savoy had delayed a decision on a joint attack on Toulon, until it was clear that Nice was no longer under threat. But the French transferred the force originally intended to attack Nice to join their forces in Italy, which meant Savoy was still under threat, and so the duke could not contemplate taking his army away from his duchy to invade France. Rooke therefore had no need to go to Nice, and he turned away from Toulon, which could not be assaulted solely from the sea. By now much of his instructions were no longer valid. He returned to the Strait, where he was joined by Shovell with a further force. The joint fleet (Rooke’s and Shovell’s ships, and the Dutch squadron) had been told that Cadiz would be a suitable target for them – again - but they did not have the soldiers to make it worth their while to make an attack, so they moved through the Strait to water at Malaga. The junction of the Brest and Toulon fleets made it obvious that a major French action was to be expected, and, at least to the English, the destruction of the allied Mediterranean fleet was the most obvious target for the French. On the way to Malaga, the council of war of the fleet met and decided to seize Gibraltar in place of the inaccessible Cadiz. Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt was given command of the marines of the fleet and landed on the 20 Clowes,

Royal Navy, 2.290–291; Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.511–516.

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isthmus; the fleet then, rather extravagantly, bombarded the port and the town from the bay; this joint pressure brought the Spanish governor to surrender (to the prince), handing the place over to the representative of ‘King Charles III’ (that is, the Archduke Charles).21 So, almost inadvertently, was acquired the fortress which became the basis for English/British naval power in the Mediterranean for the next two and a half centuries. It is worth noting that the value of Gibraltar as a possible supply base had been understood by many English sea commanders since Blake, and yet none of them had seriously considered taking possession of it, though it had been used, like Cadiz, as a base when Spain was an ally. When it was actually seized it was as part of the campaign to seat a usurper on the Spanish throne. It would take several years of warfare for the longerterm value of the place to become evident in England. It only did so because, this time, Spain was hostile and so the resupply facilities at Cadiz and other places by English commanders since Blake were unavailable. It was, at least at first, a quite inadequate substitute for Cadiz. Meanwhile the French fleet at Toulon had sailed. The Brest fleet which Rooke had failed to catch joined with that already at Toulon, and the joint force, commanded by Admiral Comte de Toulouse, sailed to prevent Rooke from attacking Barcelona. The French seem to have assumed that this was Rooke’s priority. When the French fleet reached the city Toulouse was told of the capture of Gibraltar and determined to reverse that exploit. He had arrived in the Mediterranean through the Strait and presumably fully understood the strategic advantage its possession gave the Allies. Rooke had been apprehensive of a French sortie from Toulon from the time he realised that the Brest fleet had arrived, and now he assumed, correctly, that an attempt would be made to retake Gibraltar. So when the two fleets met, after considerable fumbling and searching on both sides, both sides intended to fight a battle. They met just off Malaga, two fleets of about equal strength, about fifty major warships each. Tactics were minimal, imagination absent; the two sets of ships simply formed lines and fired away at each other for several hours; damage to the ships on both sides was extensive and casualties were heavy, but only one ship was sunk. Not surprisingly the battle was indecisive; both sides claimed the victory. But, like Jutland two centuries later, it was in the strategic aftermath that

21 Clowes,

Royal Navy, 2.391–396; Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.518–523; Sir William Jackson, The Rock of the Gibraltarians, Gibraltar 2001, 94–99; G. M. Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne: Blenheim, paperback ed., London 1965, 421–427.

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the real result was revealed: the allies kept control of Gibraltar and their fleet patrolled and controlled the Strait; the French retired to Toulon. Since the object of the French had been to clear the Strait and recapture Gibraltar, the victory clearly went to the Allies.22 The situation after the battle, however, was by no means easy. Gibraltar might become a base eventually, but in the aftermath of its capture it was no more than a vulnerable, semi-fortified, poorly garrisoned, outpost. The French fleet was still largely intact, though damaged, and the allied fleet needed to be refitted and resupplied, particularly with powder and shot. Rooke took his fleet back to Gibraltar, made essential repairs, landed supplies and reinforcements for the garrison, then took two-thirds of the English ships away to England, leaving Vice-Admiral Sir John Leake in command of the remainder, sixteen ships and a fireship. Leake and his ships were to assist the defence of the new conquest, and were to provide support during the winter. Prince George was given two bomb vessels, sixty guns, gunners, and a collection of workmen, in addition to his marines; it was fully understood that the Rock was likely to be attacked from the land side by Spanish forces. The Spanish reaction was fairly tardy, but when it did arrive their troops outnumbered the garrison many times over. The winter was spent by both sides in the siege, with alternate French and allied naval interventions. In the end the decisive move came when the French squadron under Admiral de Pointis occupied Gibraltar Bay but were menaced by the arrival of Leake’s ships, which had wintered and repaired at Lisbon. De Pointis’ ships were struck by a storm in the bay, and he sent most of his ships away, but five ships were trapped in the bay. They were either captured or destroyed by Leake’s attack; then Leake brought in a convoy of reinforcements and supplies for the garrison. The besiegers gave up.23 The French navy lost in these operations five line-of-battle ships, three smaller warships, and half a dozen other vessels; the allies lost one bomb vessel. The French forces were thus considerably reduced; the survivors returned to Toulon once more for repairs and resupply. It was a long retreat, but this was the only place where they could get such attention. One of the reasons the siege was a failure was that most of the Spanish inhabitants had moved out of the town after its original capture, in part encouraged by the unpleasant behaviour of the English soldiers, but also of their own volition. They assumed, rightly, that it would be attacked by their Spanish compatriots, and 22 Corbett, Mediterranean, 23 Jackson, Gibraltarians,

2.523–535; Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.396–403. 104–112; Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.404–407; Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.537–543.

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they had no wish to be involved in a siege; they further assumed, not without cause, that they would be able to return to their homes fairly soon, once the place had been recaptured. But their absence meant that the garrison did not have to worry about them, or have to feed them. (They spread out through much of southern Spain, but settled mainly at Algeciras and San Roque.24) As the garrison continued to hold out against the siege which followed, Rooke in England worked to get supplies and reinforcements sent out, and the concept of holding on to the place slowly took hold; above all, Queen Anne seems to have been determined from the start that the Rock should be held, displaying a greater strategic sense than many of her sailors. The garrison from the beginning was mainly English, though with Dutch and later Portuguese troops participating, and there were Dutch ships with Rooke at Malaga and with Leake in the relief.25 The longer the place was held, however, the more it became regarded as an English conquest by those in England. In the end its formal transfer into British possession became one of the articles of the peace treaty which ended the war. (Had the Allies succeeded in imposing the Archduke Charles as king, however, presumably the Rock would have been returned to Spain.) The defeat of Pointis’ fleet effectively deterred the French and Spanish forces from further interventions. In effect, Leake had defended the allied control of the Strait, even though based at Lisbon for his supplies, and he could only do that because he could use Gibraltar as his advance post. The situation was thus very similar to that which had operated at Tangier, with supplies having to arrive from elsewhere. The Malaga fight is regularly disparaged as an uninteresting battle, by Admiral Mahan above all,26 but to concentrate on naval tactics in the battle is to miss the bigger picture. Malaga, like the contemporary battle of Blenheim on land, was in fact a strategic victory for the English and was more decisive for the control of the Mediterranean than any battle afterwards, for those later battles depended for their very occurrence on the result of Malaga. It opened the way for the Royal Navy’s domination of the Mediterranean, prefigured in the previous fifty years, above all during the Nine Years’ War, which lasted until 1943. For 1705 the project of a joint attack on Toulon involving Savoyard troops was revived, and Shovell with a substantial fleet had been 24 Jackson, Gibraltarians, 101. 25 George Hills, Rock of Contention, 26 Alfred T. Mahan, The Influence of

London 1974, chs 14–16. Sea Power on History, paperback ed., London 1965, 211: he claims it is ‘of no military interest’; Brian Tunstall, Naval Warfare in the Age of Sail, ed. Nicholas Tracy, London 1990, 66, discusses the tactics of the battle, but ignores the overall result.

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given the command of the seaborne part of the attack. But the duke of Savoy was besieged in his capital and, although the siege was relieved by an Austrian army, the French forces were still nearby; it was clearly out of the question for a land attack to take place. Shovell had with him a considerable force of soldiers (12,000 men) but he and his joint commander Lord Peterborough decided that they could not use them to intervene in Italy. The only place they could be useful in Italy was in Savoy, and supplying their forces through the mountains and in the face of the French forces, which could easily outnumber them, would only lead to disaster. The commanders reverted to Rooke’s project of the previous year of an attack into Catalonia. Shovell was also carrying King Charles III in the fleet, and as Catalonia was already discontented with Bourbon rule, when the troops were landed they met with quick success, with Barcelona falling to King Charles in September.27 This allied coup thus replicated on a larger scale the capture of Gibraltar. The seizure of Barcelona was challenged by a French expedition and by King Felipe’s forces. Jointly they besieged the city, and were assisted by the French fleet out of Toulon, much more potent Franco-Spanish forces than had threatened Gibraltar. Leake had once again remained on winter stand-by at Lisbon, while Shovell took the main fleet to England. In March Leake moved forward from his winter supply base at Lisbon to Gibraltar, so reducing by half the distance he was from the target. Then, joined by successive sets of reinforcements from England, he arrived off Barcelona in April 1706. The French fleet immediately withdrew to Toulon, and the Franco-Spanish land forces at once lifted the siege, a perfect example of the potency of a well-handled timely fleet. The success of Leake’s fleet may be contrasted with Rooke’s earlier failure at the same place; the difference was, of course, that Leake could count on substantial support on land. The fleet’s intervention in the siege was thus less a demonstration of sea power and more the need for land–sea cooperation. Leake went on to land Peterborough and some troops in Valencia, then sailed on to take Cartagena, bombard Alicante into surrender, and finally seize Ibiza and Majorca – all in the name of King Charles, who now had a substantial part of Spain under his rule.28 This time Leake himself took the main fleet home, and left Admiral George Byng at Lisbon with the winter fleet. The new commander-inchief in the Mediterranean for 1707 was Shovell, whose first action on his arrival was to land more troops at Alicante. However, the invaders of Spain were not popular, and Spanish resistance in the name of 27 Clowes, 28 Clowes,

Royal Navy, 2.407–408; Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.543. Royal Navy, 2.408–409; Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.549–550.

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King Felipe stiffened. King Charles’ already precarious position was seriously damaged when in April his army was defeated at Almanza, and at once his whole position in eastern Spain crumbled. Admiral Byng arrived from Lisbon in advance of Shovell’s arrival, and cruised along the east coast collecting refugees and endangered detachments – the reverse of Leake’s victorious cruise the year before, in all senses. Shovell came up to join Byng at Barcelona. In Savoy Prince Eugene had relieved a renewed French siege of Turin, and had manoeuvred the French out of the whole region in a brilliant campaign. He drove the French back through the whole of northern Italy without firing a shot, then defeated their army at Turin while outnumbered two-toone.29 He and the duke were then persuaded to move on to attack Toulon. Shovell was resupplied from Genoese ports, and paced the allied army along the coast. A detachment of several ships under Admiral Sir John Norris sailed up the River Var at Nice to secure the river crossing for the army, a neat operation which much surprised the enemy. The army approached Toulon rather too slowly, however – it is not easy country for moving an army – and the French succeeded in establishing a protective entrenched camp before they arrived. The French sank most of their ships at the base to prevent their possible capture, but were able to hold out vigorously against the land attackers, who withdrew when failure was obvious; an exemplary military–naval cooperation brought out the sick and wounded by sea, together with much of the artillery, and Eugene led the rest of the land army back to Italy.30 The overall hopes had been to create a new war front in the south of France, and reinvigorate the Cevennois’ failing revolt. The failure to defeat the French defenders and to take the naval base prevented that exploitation, and the invaders were surprised at the enthusiastic patriotic resistance of the French; on the other hand, the scuttling of the Toulon fleet was a clear allied gain, even though it had not been likely to have been used again; now it was quite ruined, and it certainly could not be replaced soon. The response of the French to the confinement and then the elimination of their fleets, both in the aftermath of the defeat at Barfleur in 1692 and in the Spanish Succession War, was to license increasing numbers of privateers. The British followed suit. It is customary to speak of ‘swarms’ of such ships ‘infesting’ the seas, and it is quite correct that they captured many ships. But at no time did commerce 29 Nicholas

Henderson, Prince Eugen of Savoy, London 1964, 129–133; Derick McKay, Prince Eugene of Savoy, London 1977, 98–101. 30 Shovell’s report to the duke of Marlborough is printed in British Naval Documents, 230–232; Henderson, Prince Eugen, 140–149; McKay, Prince Eugene, 103–107; Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.410–411.

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stop, and indeed, for the British at least, the number of their merchant ships at sea increased. Privateering was rarely profitable and never produced a serious prospect of victory for either side. In the Mediterranean it was probably no greater a threat to British shipping than the corsairs had been in the previous thirty years.31 After the apparent failure at Toulon, Shovell headed for England, leaving a winter squadron under Admiral Sir Thomas Dilkes, but he died on a visit to Livorno. Admiral Leake came out as the new commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean – Shovell being dead in the wreck of his and several other ships on the Scilly Islands. Leake, as usual, escorted a convoy as far as Lisbon, then sailed with a British and Dutch fleet to Barcelona, escorting a convoy of troop transports, and capturing a French supply convoy on the way. He conferred on affairs with allied leaders at Vado near Savona on the Genoese Riviera, and then took a contingent of Spanish troops to Sardinia, which instantly declared for King Charles. Then he sailed to attack Minorca, which made a serious resistance. Two years before, when he took Majorca and Ibiza, Leake had explained that Minorca was well defended, but since then the island had seen a rising in favour of King Charles, a French landing, and some vigorous repression by the felipista governor. Leake was no more enthusiastic about the island in 1708, but a force under General James Stanhope from Barcelona was on its way when Leake came up to assist. Between them they put a force of over 2000 men on to the island, half of them British; the defenders numbered less than half that, and the population, after the uprising and the subsequent repression, was solidly on the side of King Charles – in whose name the British had invaded. The fighting was concentrated on a siege of the fort. Leake then had to return to England for the winter with half of his fleet. Minorca finally fell in October at about the time Leake arrived as Portsmouth.32 The relative ease with which these conquests were made was the result only in part of British (as it now was since the Act of Union in 1707) naval expertise; it was more an effect of the absence of competing and hostile French naval power. This remained the condition in the 31 There

have been several studies of privateering, but few with any direct reference to the Mediterranean: Patrick Crowhurst, The Defence of British Trade, 1689–1815, Folkestone 1977; G. N. Clark, ‘English and Dutch Privateers under William III’, MM 7, 1921, 209–217; W. R. Meyer, ‘English Privateering in the War of 1688–1697’ , MM 67, 1981, 259–268, and ‘English Privateering in the War of Spanish Succession, 1702–1713’ , MM 69, 1983, 435–446. 32 Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.412–413; Corbett, Mediterranean, 2.556–563; H. T. Dickinson, ‘The Capture of Minorca, 1708’ , MM 51, 1966, 195–204; Janet Sloss, Richard Kane, Tetbury 1995, 138–139; Bruce Laurie, The Life of Richard Kane, London 1994, ch. 4; Desmond Gregory, Minorca: The Illusory Prize, London 1990, ch. 1; an enlightening account from the Minorcan side is by

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Mediterranean for the rest of the war. Louis XIV’s resources were so strained in defending his northern frontier against attacks by Marlborough’s armies that he was unable to contemplate reviving his fleet in the Mediterranean – a rerun, on a much larger scale, of the war of 1678–1679, when French forces were withdrawn from Sicily for the defence of northern France. The French had reacted to this situation by encouraging privateering, and combatting this phenomenon was one of the main activities of the naval commanders-in-chief from 1707 onwards. The Royal Navy was, however, able to affect the continuing war in Spain only marginally. The position of King Charles briefly improved during 1708, in part with the conquest of Minorca, but then steadily deteriorated, until by the end of 1710 he was reduced to holding only parts of the east. In 1709 the British troops in Alicante were evacuated by the navy, and the British Mediterranean fleet, bigger than ever from 1710, patrolled along the Catalonian coast. In that year also Admiral Norris defeated an attempt to recover Sardinia, and briefly captured Cette and Agde on the French coast, hoping in vain to reignite the Cevennois rebellion.33 This activity was all essentially the result of the battle of Malaga and so of the capture of Gibraltar. The retirement of the French fleet after Malaga left the western Mediterranean available for the allied fleet to exploit its control, and this continued after the French self-immolation at Toulon. It was possible to intervene in Spain, Sardinia, the south of France, and Italy, and to conquer Minorca; the Pope abandoned the Bourbon cause merely on the information that the British fleet might attack Civitavecchia. By 1711, if not before, the British government was actively considering making peace.34 Secret talks with the French were begun – kept secret from Britain’s allies, that is. Inevitably the negotiations were slow, difficult, and complex, and none of the war aims of any of the participants was ever likely to be achieved. The trigger for this, and a complication, was the death of Emperor Joseph I early in 1711. His successor would most likely be his brother Charles, who for a time seemed likely to become both ruler of Austria and of Spain and its empire. This combination, a recrudescence of the power of the Emperor Charles V in the sixteenth century, horrified the allies as much as the prospect of a Franco-Spanish union had done; what was more, it horrified Louis XIV as well. In a sense it helped that the

Micaela Mata, Conquests and Reconquests of Menorca, trans. Bruce Laurie, Barcelona 1984, 134–156. 33 Clowes, Royal Navy, 2.414–415. 34 Hattendorf, England in the War, part 3.

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Spaniards were now overwhelmingly hostile to Charles after his invasions and campaigns, so if he was to remain as king he would need massive military assistance to maintain his position, which none of the allies could or would provide. The only alternative therefore was to accept King Felipe as king – but Charles would be ‘compensated’ with the Spanish possessions in the rest of Europe. For Britain the priorities were always its trade and the recognition of the Protestant Succession, rather than extensive annexations. During the discussions with the French the issue of trade became identified in part as the transfer to Britain of the asiento concession (the right to transport a certain number of slaves annually for sale in Spanish America), together with the opportunity to trade in Spanish America; the cession of Port Mahon (Minorca) and Gibraltar as bases in the Mediterranean was also included. From the start General Stanhope, the military commander at Minorca, had been enthusiastic at the idea of the retention of the island, and he had systematically removed Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch troops from its garrison. In Gibraltar, a Dutch contingent remained until the peace in 1713, when they departed reluctantly, the Netherlands government hankering after a joint control, which the British adamantly rejected. Why these places were such a concern for the British is rather less easy to explain. In the previous century, one of the continuing difficulties for the English had been to locate and maintain a base for their ships. It was difficult, expensive, and very time-consuming to send supplies from England, though by the Spanish Succession War this had become much better organised. Every base which had been used had its drawbacks. Tangier was a failure because of local hostility and the inadequacy of its harbour; Livorno was a source of plentiful supplies and was a well-organised port, but its ruler, the grand duke, was all too vulnerable to enemy pressure; Lisbon was capacious and geographically convenient, and was used throughout the Spanish Succession War, but supplies were not always available, and the Portuguese administration was lackadaisical - it always took longer to resupply and refit there than planned; Cadiz had been adequate only when taken over and operated as an English naval base in the previous war. And all these places were ultimately controlled by foreign governments, who might be friendly, but might be awkward, and could easily turn into enemies. The experience of using Cadiz was perhaps the clue to the retention of Gibraltar. The only way the navy could be adequately supplied and maintained was if it had a base which was under its own control and administration. This meant Gibraltar, the only possible place in the sense that it could be taken and held, and was also in a useful strategic position for dominating the traffic of the Mediterranean.

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Gibraltar’s strategic position at the Strait was also the key to the acquisition of Minorca. That island was seized, like Gibraltar, as part of the general support to King Charles, but it also came to be seen as an advantageous advance post from which to watch the French at Toulon. It was a place with a port, Port Mahon, regarded as one of the best in the Mediterranean, where the smaller ships used to reconnoitre the French base could shelter and be supplied and maintained. (The fact that the French had occupied Port Mahon in 1707 was a signal that it might have become an advance base for the French fleet.) It was also a watchtower over against Spain, two of whose naval bases, at Cartagena and Barcelona, were within easy reach; these could be observed in the same way as Toulon. It was also a useful base, as was Gibraltar, to exercise some control over privateers and corsairs – it had in fact been a pirate base in the past, so their suppression could be included as an added bonus. In other words, the British had now decided that it was necessary for their national interests that they should exercise a powerful and continuing naval influence in the Mediterranean. The accumulation of experience since the arrival of English trading vessels in the sea in Elizabeth’s reign, and the emergence of the valuable Italian and Levant trades, were at the root of this determination. More recently the advantages of blocking the Strait during a French war had become very clear. British priorities in dealing with its successive enemies in the sea had shifted from the Barbary corsairs, first to Spain, then to France, and back to Spain – with the need to protect English/ British trade a constant background factor. The possession of the two bases indicated clearly enough that Britain assumed that there was very likely to be further hostilities with all of these at some point in the future.

Chapter 5 Conflicts with Spain 1713–1744

The great loser in the treaty settlements at the end of the Spanish Succession War was Spain itself. Not only did it lose the Spanish provinces in Italy and Flanders, and found its trade monopoly with the overseas empire opened to British merchants and ships, but it had to cede control over two parts of its metropolitan territory, Gibraltar and Minorca, to Britain. These territorial losses eventually rankled particularly, as did that of Oran, taken by the Algerines in 1708. Spanish resentment at these, and its Italian losses, meant that these matters became the centres of British concern in the Mediterranean in the thirty years after 1713.1 For Spain the enemies were all too numerous: Austria, which held the former Spanish provinces in Italy and Sardinia; Savoy, which held Sicily; Britain, holding Gibraltar and Minorca; Algiers, holding Oran; France, whose king Louis XIV died in 1715 and had cut the Spanish King Felipe V out of the succession to the French kingship and out of the regency for his young successor. Italy and its islands became Spain’s target of choice for recovery. This was in part because of the influence of King Felipe’s second wife, the Italian princess Isabella of the Farnese dynasty of Parma, and his latest chief minister Cardinal Alberoni. The king did not in fact need much wifely persuasion, nor did the Spaniards generally, to work for the recovery of other lost lands. This ambition became one of the dominant international political themes of the next generation. Queen Isabella – referred to as ‘Elizabeth Farnese’ by British historians – was a strong-willed woman married to a man who was liable to devastating fits of depression. As a result she became one of the most effective powers in Spain for much of her husband’s reign. One of her main ambitions was to see that her sons by King Felipe achieved their own kingdoms – he had a son by his first wife, who 1

Jeremy Black, ‘Anglo-Spanish Naval Relations in the Eighteenth Century’ , MM 77, 1991, 235–258 provides a helpful overview.

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eventually succeeded him. The former Spanish provinces in Italy, and her own homeland of Parma, were to her particularly apt targets for her sons. This ambition is treated by historians – almost all male, of course – as a tiresome ambition, upsetting to the smooth processes of European diplomacy, but it was no more upsetting than policies of other countries, and it does seem a quite legitimate ambition, given the contemporary obsession with royal rule, dynasticism, and absolute rule. The fact that she was a woman, of course, is regarded as a matter to be deplored. This Spanish ambition immediately involved Britain, as a signatory of the 1714 Utrecht settlement, the legal instrument by which the various territories lost to Spain were distributed, and because Spanish ambitions in Italy necessarily involved the use of substantial sea strength. Finally, as with any Catholic country in Europe in any quarrel with Britain, Spain was liable to make use of the Jacobite pretenders. Then again, Britain’s possession of Spanish metropolitan territory eventually became the major irritant in Anglo-Spanish relations, though for the first decade after the peace Spanish ambitions were directed firmly at Italy. This antagonised Savoy and Austria; as a result, several opportunities for regaining Gibraltar (if not Minorca) were deliberately spurned by the Spanish government. Minorca was seized because it had an exceptionally good harbour, at Port Mahon on the east of the island, deep and capacious, described, somewhat extravagantly, as the second best harbour in the world, and as one of the best in the Mediterranean, though for sailing ships it is difficult to get out of in some winds. The island itself, however, was scarcely of much value. It was dry, over-populated, and reliant on imported food; even worse from the British point of view, it was populated exclusively by Catholics of a particularly conservative sort. It proved to be a difficult place to govern, in part owing to the passive resistance of the local population, but also to the habitual lethargy, sloth, and inefficiency of the London authorities, who were adept at not making decisions, and even better at not paying out any money. The island’s nominal governors were normally absent, and the ruler and effective governor of the island for 24 years (1712–1736) was Colonel Richard Kane, a Presbyterian Ulsterman who had made a name in military circles for courage, efficiency, and intelligence. He struggled for his whole period in authority (he was made actual governor in 1733, three years before he died) to govern fairly and justly, feed the population, control the disorderly and bored British soldiers in the occupation force, and attempt to improve the lives of the people of the island, against their stubborn resistance. He received very little support from the London government for many years, but once the duke of Newcastle took over as Secretary of State

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for the Southern Department in 1724, his worth was finally appreciated, and one of the usually absent governors, Lord Carpenter, was helpful. The value of the port for the navy was its relative closeness to Toulon and Barcelona and Cartagena, all actual or potential enemy naval bases. The port’s facilities were improved and the navy was able to use it as a resupply and careening base – not something Gibraltar was capable of for many years.2 A hospital was built for the Navy’s use,3 and the port became a base for the much-reduced Mediterranean squadron in peacetime. Its closeness to those enemy bases, however, was also a disadvantage, requiring the island to be strongly held and properly fortified, which cost-conscious British Parliaments and governments were reluctant to finance. In 1717 a Spanish expedition conquered Sardinia. This crisis had begun with the arrest of a Spanish official in Milan (now an Austrian province), but Queen Isabella and Cardinal Alberoni, the senior minister in Madrid, seized on the incident as an excuse to mount the expedition: Sardinia had become Austrian at the treaty of Utrecht, after its conquest by Admiral Leake in the name of ‘King Charles III’, and so it was taken to be a legitimate Spanish target. The expeditionary force had been collected at Barcelona to the mingled surprise and apprehension of the rest of Europe. The target was variously assumed to be Gibraltar, Sardinia, Sicily, the Turks, North Africa, and northern Italy, a general confusion which effectively kept the real destination a secret; Minorca, the closest of the possible targets, was more concerned than most, especially as Governor Kane was absent for discussions in London. The expedition included twelve line-ofbattle ships, seventeen frigates and seven galleys, with transports for 9000 soldiers. They were landed at Cagliari in Sardinia, and centuries of Spanish rule in the island helped to ensure there was little resistance to its campaign. By November, only three months after the expedition sailed from Barcelona, the island was back under Spanish rule.4 War was not declared; the Spaniards clearly hoped that the accomplished fact would be accepted.

2

Desmond Gregory, Minorca: The Illusory Prize, London 1990; Bruce Laurie, The Life of Richard Kane, London 1994; Janet Sloss, Richard Kane, Governor of Minorca, Tetbury 1995; Micaela Mata, Conquests and Reconquests of Minorca, trans. Bruce Laurie, Barcelona 1986, 159–164, is less impressed. 3 Kathleen Harland, ‘The Royal Naval Hospital at Minorca, 1711: An Example of an Admiral’s Involvement in the Expansion of Naval Medical Care’ , MM 94, 2008, 36–47; the building still exists, though dilapidated. 4 Jackson, Gibraltarians, 118; W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, Eighteenth-Century Spain, London 1979, 46–47.

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For a time this looked to be definitive. Neither France nor Britain, the only powers with sufficient sea strength in the Mediterranean to dispute the issue with Spain, were prepared to do anything, and they were quite pleased to see the emperor reduced in power somewhat. But the Spaniards went further, gathered an even bigger fleet (twenty-two line-of-battle ships, and over three hundred transports) and sent a new expeditionary force of 30,000 men to conquer Sicily, which had been given to the duke of Savoy at the peace. More troops joined from Sardinia. They landed in Sicily on 1 July 1718 and soon had conquered the whole island for Spain. The Savoyard squadron retreated to Malta, where the Knights’ government declared neutrality and protected the Savoyard ships. The British reaction was, given the use of sea power by the Spaniards, crucial. No other power had the naval capability to interfere with the Spanish campaigns, the French fleet at Toulon had not yet recovered from its suicide in 1707, the Austrians and the Savoyards had no ships to speak of; for the moment Spain’s navy ruled the western Mediterranean. Lord Stanhope, the captor of Minorca, was now a senior figure in the government in London and was busy attempting to conciliate all those with post-treaty grievances; he succeeded in enlisting the French government into a policy of maintaining the Utrecht settlement. This could only be a brief period of alliance, since France, after Spain, was the power most willing to see the settlement upset. But Felipe V was a claimant to the French throne and any Spanish intrigues would upset the delicate politics of the French regency. In the event this Franco-British entente lasted until 1731. Consequently, with France onside, and Austria and Savoy infuriated (but powerless at sea), the British had plenty of diplomatic cover for a naval expedition into the Mediterranean to defend the Utrecht settlement – not to mention that Britain was bound by treaty to defend Sicily for Savoy. The expedition was commanded by Admiral Sir George Byng, who had years of experience of Mediterranean affairs, and who had no problem with exceeding or creatively interpreting his instructions. He set off from England even before the Spanish invasion of Sicily began, a clear indication that it was the general settlement the British wished to restore. He called at Cadiz and sent messages to the Spanish court that his instructions were to guarantee the neutrality of Italy as part of the Utrecht settlement. Perhaps Alberoni did not believe Byng would use force without a declaration of war - though Spain had done exactly that itself – but in the event he could hardly claim he had not been warned. No-one, be it noted, had yet declared war: the Spaniards were reclaiming what they felt was their rightful provinces, the British were restoring

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the peace settlement. Byng sailed to Sicily and met the Spanish fleet off Messina. It turned southwards and he finally caught up with it off the southern tip of Sicily, Cape Passaro. The battle which followed was probably not expected by the Spaniards, though they are said to have fired the first shot, which only means that Byng had successfully provoked a fight by his harassing tactics. The Spaniards were certainly unprepared, and their fleet was not lined up properly for a battle; it broke up into three separate parts as the battle continued. Eight Spanish line-of-battle ships were captured and five burnt by the Spaniards to prevent their capture.5 The battle is highly regarded by tacticians as Byng’s masterpiece.6 This was, however, only one incident in a larger and longer war. It took another year and a half to defeat the Spanish land forces in Sicily, and they were able to reinforce from Sardinia despite the presence of Byng’s fleet. He was, however, able to assist Austrian forces to cross to the island from the Italian mainland, and eventually to destroy by bombardment the remaining Spanish naval forces at Messina. He had not expected to have to over-winter in the Mediterranean, and Port Mahon in Minorca proved useful as a base for cleaning his ships. Repairing them took longer, and Byng had to go there himself to speed matters along.7 The use of Minorca against them must have hurt Spanish pride even more. The British and French eventually declared war on Spain at the beginning of 1719, and the decisive move in the end was French, by an invasion of northern Spain. Much looting took place and the naval facilities at San Sebastian were severely damaged - the French army had not given up the nastier habits of Louis XIV’s campaigns. Spain had reacted to the British (and French) interventions (and declarations of war) by attempting to send an expedition to support a Jacobite landing in Scotland, but after being caught in a storm it was left too feeble to be effective.8 The eventual result was that Savoy and Austria swapped their islands; Austria had actually reconquered 5

Byng’s report on the battle is reprinted in British Naval Documents, 360–362; Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.30–38; J. L. Cranmer-Byng (ed.), Pattee Byng’s Journal, NRS 1950, 23–24; Brian Tunstall, Naval Warfare in the Age of Sail (ed. Nicholas Tracy), London 1990, 68–69; Sir Herbert Richmond, ‘The Expedition to Sicily 1718 under Sir George Byng’ , Journal of the Royal United Services Institute 53, 1909, 135–152; John B. Hattendorf, ‘Admiral George Byng and the Cape Passaro Incident 1718: A Case Study in the Use of the Royal Navy as a Deterrent’ , Guerres et Paix, 1660–1815, Vincennes 1987, 19–38. 6 See Tunstall, Naval Warfare, 69. 7 Richmond, ‘Expedition to Sicily’; Gregory, Minorca, 210–211. 8 Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, Inglorious Rebellion: The Jacobite Risings of 1708, 1715 and 1719, London 1971, 207–236; Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689–1746, London 1980, 189–195.

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Sicily from the Spaniards, and Sardinia’s possession carried with it the title of king, which lifted the duke of Savoy up a stage socially; Spain ended with no conquests. Stanhope had several times dangled the possibility of recovering Gibraltar before the eyes of the Spanish negotiators and court. With the Spanish court fixated on the larger prize of Italy these offers had been refused or ignored.9 Meanwhile, Gibraltar itself was neglected by the British, and had the Spaniards really wanted it they could have taken it easily. In 1720 a new Spanish expeditionary force assembled at Cadiz, and once more rumours circulated that it was to be directed at Gibraltar. The Rock had only a thousand soldiers in its garrison, commanded by a major, and the governor, Lord Portmore, was in England. Colonel Kane from Minorca was ordered to take command, and he hurried some of his own forces in as reinforcements; Byng brought his fleet back to within easy reach.10 In fact the expedition was directed at the Spanish post of Ceuta, Gibraltar’s counterpart on the African side of the Strait, which was under siege by the Moors. The expedition was successful in beating back the assaulting forces, and in preventing a planned invasion of Andalusia by the Moors.11 Kane reached Gibraltar at the end of October 1720 and reported on the busy activities of the Spaniards – Algeciras and Gibraltar Bay were two of the embarkation points for the Ceuta expedition, and when Ceuta had been secured by the Spanish expedition he pointed out that it would be an ideal place from which to launch an attack on Gibraltar, with a landing at Europa Point, the low-lying southern tip of the Gibraltar peninsula. He was clearly suspicious that the assembly of forces might be too tempting for the Spaniards and reported that ‘the unexpectedness and suddenness of my coming hither from Minorca with a reinforcement of troops was not a little surprising to the Spanish army, which had a camp [on] this side of the bay’; Lord Portmore’s arrival was also startling for the Spaniards. When the governor arrived, Kane returned to Minorca; if Gibraltar was under threat, so was Minorca, but the island was at least adequately garrisoned.12 Gibraltar was thus still not seen as much of an asset by the British. Little was invested in the place, other than some improvements to the fortifications. To the navy there was no practical advantage in using the place, since it was capable only of accommodating a few ships, and it was badly exposed to the weather at times. There 9

Jackson, Gibraltarians, 117–122; George Hills, Rock of Contention, London 1974, 242 and 252–262. 10 Sloss, Richard Kane, 225–227; Laurie, Life, 173. 11 Jackson, Gibraltarians, 121–122. 12 TNA CO 91/4, quoted in Sloss, Richard Kane, 225–227.

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was only a small population, a good half of which were soldiers, and so there was no civilian expertise to assist in maintaining the ships. Its dependence on imported supplies of all sorts made it a liability for the navy, whose ships could not rely on it for resupply. Improbably, however, it had become one of those places to which the British public became sentimentally attached. Even as early as the 1720s it had become politically impossible for British politicians to publicly discuss surrendering it, no matter how prepared they were to consider it privately. On the other hand, the speed with which it had been reinforced and supplied, even if the threat was illusory, should have given the Spaniards pause. Any assault they mounted would need to be sudden, surprising, and almost instantly successful. Long and visible preparations would allow the British plenty of time to make their own preparations to resist. In planning an attack the Spaniards had perhaps no more than a fortnight before British reinforcements arrived, perhaps less for the arrival of warships. Spain made peace with its various adversaries (except the Moors) during 1721. King Felipe demanded the return of Gibraltar; this he was promised by both Stanhope and in a private letter from George I, saving only the consent of Parliament. Probably Felipe did not appreciate that such consent was unlikely to be forthcoming – certainly Queen Isabella did not - nor did he understand that it was an item included just to foil him.13 Shut out of their further ambitions in Italy by defeat, at least for the present, and the Spanish fleet largely destroyed, Gibraltar at last became a major annoyance to the Spanish court. Unable to recover the place by negotiation (and having missed several chances of doing so earlier), force was at last resorted to. In a way the groundwork for the Spanish diplomatic and then military campaigns had been laid by the British occupiers by their general failure to strictly observe the terms of the Utrecht settlement. The administration of the town and the garrison was deeply corrupt. The governor and the lieutenant-governors were busy raking off proceeds from imports and customs duties into their own pockets – they regarded them as their perquisites of office. Lord Portmore, the governor from 1713 to 1730, was more often absent than present; of the lieutenant-governors, Colonel Congreve (1713–1716) was charged with, and dismissed for, maladministration (that is, corruption), and Colonel Cotton (1716–1725) was clearly much more careful, but retired rich. There is no sign that this was seen as seriously

13 Jackson,

Gibraltarians, 122–123; D. B. Horn, Great Britain and Europe in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford 1967, 284–285.

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reprehensible by the British, but the Spaniards had taken due note, and added it all to their charges in demanding the place’s return.14 In 1725 Queen Isabella met the British ambassador and demanded the return of Gibraltar, brandishing George I’s letter in his face. She was told that the king and Parliament must both agree to this, and that the one was in Hanover and the other not in session. Her reply, that Parliament must be summoned and ordered to agree, indicated quite clearly that the Spanish court had no idea of the power and temper of the British Parliament. A conference at Madrid of the leading Spanish generals was all but unanimous that an attack on Gibraltar, unsupported as it must be by control of the nearby seas, would fail, though it was suggested by an engineer that a seaborne attack from the south would be the best method – exactly Kane’s point after the capture of Ceuta. One man disagreed with this assessment, the viceroy of Navarre, the Marquis de las Torres, and he was therefore given the task. He suggested that six weeks would suffice. He was allotted 18,000 men and a hundred guns, which at least indicated that the seriousness of the task he had taken on was fully appreciated. As the threat of a Spanish attack became clearer, especially after Queen Isabella’s outburst, Governor Kane was once again ordered to Gibraltar to organise things. He was by this time fully in the confidence of the London government, and his expertise and sense were well understood. He was given an appointment as lieutenant-governor of Gibraltar, leaving Colonel James Otway as his substitute in Minorca. He arrived with two seasoned regiments from the Minorcan garrison (two raw regiments had just arrived there) to reinforce the garrison of the Rock, but he could see no obvious preparations for an attack on the Spanish side. He made a careful inspection – everything Kane did was done carefully and with full attention to detail – and reported that more troops were needed, but that the fortifications were in good order. Kane was also surprised at the number of ships, principally British, which passed through the Strait. Many, of course, were not actually British, but were wearing British colours to evade corsair attacks. ‘Vast numbers of them being the carriers for Holland, Hamburg and others, inasmuch as it might be a temptation for all the coast of Barbary to break with us’15 – the very tactic the Algerines had used in the past as a means of gaining a swift and easy and sudden increment of their wealth.

14 Jackson, Gibraltarians, 125–126. 15 TNA CO 175/14, 240, quoted by Sloss,

Richard Kane, 237.

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Kane was a welcoming and cheerful host at Gibraltar, laying a good table. He entertained the officers of the garrison and the ships’ captains who were in the bay, but also, perhaps especially in the circumstances, the Spanish officers of their nearby forces. He also developed a network of spies and informants along the Spanish coast, and the British consuls in Cadiz and Malaga and Alicante were informative. As a result he understood well enough the condition of affairs. He was concerned at the number of Spanish citizens living in the town, and ordered 400 to be expelled, and had to restrict the number of Jews and Moors who were coming from Tetuan, apparently refugees. (The presence of Jews and Moors in Gibraltar had been prohibited in the Treaty of Utrecht, and this was another Spanish grievance.) After a further, more detailed, inspection Kane suggested a number of improvements to the fortifications, which were quickly authorised: there was nothing like a clear threat to galvanise the British government, but the respect with which Kane was now regarded had just as much to do with it. But, once more, if Gibraltar was threatened, so was Minorca. In February 1727 a new lieutenant-governor for Gibraltar, Colonel Jasper Clayton, was sent out, and Kane returned to Minorca. (He found that Colonel Otway had misappropriated the pay of his soldiers in order to build himself a new house; such corruption was thus not confined to the officers in Gibraltar.16) The basic Spanish problem in mounting an attack was that their preparations were visible and slow. The roads leading to Gibraltar from the rest of Spain were bad, and their surfaces, such as they were, collapsed under the weight of the guns. Any Spanish movements and concentrations were easily visible from the Rock, so surprise was impossible. The British ambassador in Madrid, who was fully aware of the Spanish government’s decisions, had time enough to make all their preparations known to London. Further, the Spanish government had drawn up a list of complaints by which they justified their intended attack. These were that the British had extended the fortifications outside the limits already agreed, that Jews and Moors were being permitted to live in the town, that the Catholic religion was not being ‘protected’ , and that the British authorities were allowing smuggling, which hurt Spanish customs revenues.17 These items were all arguable. The fortifications were ill-defined, but the two sides were separated by a neutral zone, which had been tacitly agreed by the officers on the ground, in the interest of a quiet 16 Sloss,

Richard Kane, 236–245; Laurie, Life, 178–172; Hills, Rock of Contention, 264. 17 Horn, Great Britain and Europe, 225–226; Jackson, Gibraltarians, 124–127.

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life. Jews and Moors were certainly living in the town, and this was forbidden by the Utrecht treaty, but so were a whole series of other groups, and in fact orders for the expulsion of both Jews and Moors had been regularly issued, but never implemented, partly owing to the endemic laziness of the military officers, and partly because the lieutenant-governors could extract a fee for not expelling them. There were 137 Jews and five Moors in Gibraltar according to a 1725 census.18 They were, in fact, especially valuable, for, having arrived from North Africa, they had maintained commercial contacts there, and Gibraltar could rely on imports of food from Morocco (just as, in reverse, Tangier had relied on Spanish supplies.) The census also showed Genoese, Spaniards, French, and Dutch living in the town, whose population was a little over 1100; these were obviously merchants and sailors. As to the question of religion, the local Catholics chose their own priests, since none were provided from Spain, and had no complaints. Smuggling no doubt took place, but it was up to the Spanish authorities to stop it, not the British. Of course, it was fully recognised on both sides that these complaints were actually excuses for starting a new siege. Britain had earlier acted to maintain the Utrecht settlement, and could now be portrayed to European opinion as itself breaking its terms. Spanish belligerent intentions were very evident, and neither side was interested in proving or disproving Spanish contentions. The real answer to Spain came from the meeting of Parliament in January 1727: both Houses passed resolutions to maintain Gibraltar as a British possession, and the Commons voted funds to pay for the anticipated war.19 The Spanish generals were right, and Torres was wrong. The decisive element in the siege was the British fleet. The British had already sent a squadron to the Mediterranean, nine line-of-battle ships commanded by Admiral Sir John Jennings, which arrived in early August of 1726. Jennings returned to Portsmouth in October, but left Rear-Admiral Edward Hopsonn on patrol near Gibraltar over the winter, with five line-of-battle ships, a galley and a bomb vessel – later joined by another bomb vessel. Meanwhile Kane had expelled the Spanish inhabitants, both as potential fifth columnists and as consumers of valuable supplies. The garrison of Gibraltar in January 1727 consisted of four regiments of foot, but the crucial element was the artillery. It was obvious 18 TNA

CO 91/1; Steven Constantine, Community and Identity: The Making of Modern Gibraltar since 1704, Manchester 2009, discussing the size and make-up of the population in ch. 1; Hills, Rock of Contention, 234; Jackson, Gibraltarians, 126; the census was one of the measures taken by Kane when he was lieutenant-governor. 19 Jackson, Gibraltarians, 127.

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that the Spanish method of attack would be a siege, with guns battering at the British fortifications and gun batteries. Once the way was opened by the guns, the infantry assault could come. They had clearly no intention of making a surprise attack, and the presence of the British ships meant that a surprise invasion from Ceuta was too dangerous, and that starving out the garrison was not an option either. The British infantry would have to be used as labourers and auxiliary artillerists, apart from mounting regular guards, since it would only be at the very end of the siege, after the defending guns had been dismounted and breaches made in the fortifications, that any direct Spanish infantry attack could be made. Hopsonn was joined in February by Vice-Admiral Sir Charles Wager with six more line-of-battle ships and four more foot regiments. Four of the line-of-battle ships, plus Hopsonn, were soon detached to the West Indies, leaving Wager with seven others, plus the smaller ships – quite sufficient in the absence of any Spanish naval challenge. The importance of the naval element is shown by the arrival of these reinforcements from Britain on 2 February, whereas the Spanish assault, for all their hard work and preparations, did not begin until the 22nd.20 It was easier to send relief and reinforcement forces from Britain than it was to gather a besieging force by land. That is, Spain had lost the battle before it even began. The actual siege consisted mainly of artillery duels. The Spaniards began their bombardment in February, attempting to suppress the counter-fire of the British guns, and at the same time began a systematic process of sapping forward in trenches towards the British lines with a view to mounting a final infantry assault - the classic processes of an eighteenth-century siege. The British guns replied, aiming both to destroy the trenches (and the diggers of the trenches), and to dismount the Spanish guns. This all took a long time, and the Spanish side incurred plenty of casualties. Eventually, in April a sustained Spanish bombardment began, but by mid-May it was clearly slackening because the Spanish supplies of powder and shot were falling short, and too many of their guns were bursting, becoming unserviceable or distorted by overheating. On the British side the ships in the bay were generally too distant to participate in the firing – they were quickly driven off by the Spanish artillery when they attempted to intervene directly by enfilading the Spanish positions on the isthmus. They were useful as sources of supply for the guns on land, and the sailors had artillery experience which could be useful. The weather, which is somewhat unpredictable 20 Clowes,

Royal Navy, 3.42–43, 46; Jackson, Gibraltarians, 127–132, and Appendix C; Hills, Rock of Contention, ch. 22.

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in the Gibraltar area, consistently favoured the British: the wind blew sand into the Spanish trenches, filling them up, blinding the diggers; rain made the Spaniards in their trenches miserable, flooding their trenches and generally hindering their work. However, it was the supply problem which became the most serious issue for the Spaniards. Their great bombardment in April and May did dismantle many of the British guns in their batteries, but it used up Spanish supplies at a greater rate than they could be replenished. In reply, the British, with plenty of manpower sheltering in the fortifications and the buildings of the town, and using the infantry and the civilian population as labourers, were in much the better condition. The Rock’s resupply was close by in the British ships, which had access to supplies from Morocco; and they were able to prevent seaborne supplies reaching the Spaniards.21 Two more regiments of foot and 480 men from Minorca arrived on 7 April and two further regiments came in with Lord Portmore on 1 May; by then the British had at least 5000 men on shore. Meanwhile the Spaniards lost men heavily, killed, wounded, and deserters. The dismounted British guns could often be remounted, and could always be resupplied. Casualties were disproportionate: the British suffered 332, including 107 men killed; the Spaniards suffered about 2800, including about 700 men killed, and 875 deserters. Finally on 24 June the Spaniards called a halt and asked for a truce. This did not lead to a peace, and Queen Isabella continued to demand the place’s return. Inspired by this attitude from the top the truce terms were exploited by both sides, and each charged the other with breaches of the agreement. For a time Spain and France were joined in a faux-alliance, and their joint fleets – thirty-one line-ofbattle ships – were concentrated at Cadiz, to Admiral Wager’s alarm.22 In reply Britain commissioned more and more ships. A major international conference at Soissons in France failed in the end to resolve the many problems of Europe, and the French found they had to choose between Britain and Spain. They sensibly chose to remain friends with the more powerful of these potential partners, at least for a time. At last the Spanish government in Madrid – that is, King Felipe, egged on by Queen Isabella – agreed to withdraw many of the troops which were still menacing Gibraltar. The British ships thereupon returned to England, leaving just two in the bay. Both sides now understood clearly once again what had been clear from the start of the siege: any attempt or threat by Spain against Gibraltar would

21 Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.46–47. 22 Jackson, Gibraltarians, 135.

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bring British naval and military forces within little more than a fortnight, much more speedily than any Spanish moves could take place. The net effect in Britain of the Spanish siege had been to implant in the minds of government, Parliament, and people the usefulness of Gibraltar. It had thus become politically impossible for the British to surrender it – ‘parting with that place would be sufficient to put the whole nation in a flame’ , Lord Townshend commented in his instructions to his negotiators at Soissons.23 Parliament, finding the Spaniards obdurate, passed even more pointed resolutions demanding Gibraltar’s retention. Finally, the Treaty of Seville in 1729, resorted to by the British to avoid the blockage which the Soissons conference had become, brought the war to an end, even though no Spanish repudiation of their claim to the Rock could be obtained. The attitudes of Spain and Britain have pointedly preserved their conflicting demands and claims ever after.24 The British presence in the Mediterranean was now no longer primarily concerned with the countries of the corsairs. This did not mean that the Algerines and Sallee men were no longer problems. During the recent European wars the preoccupation of the Algerines with their own wars in North Africa and against Spain’s North African outposts led them to leave most European shipping alone. Ships were being guarded against enemy privateers, and this similarly deterred corsairs; the presence of British warships at Gibraltar and Minorca after the war was enough to continue to deter most attacks on British vessels. But not all. For much of the eighteenth century collections continued to be organised in British churches to pay the ransoms of British prisoners,25 but there were no great Algerine fleets to fight. There were several collisions of British naval ships with those of Sallee in the years after the Utrecht settlement but that threat also subsided for a time.26 From Minorca, Colonel Kane established relatively cordial relations with the Barbary states, and Vice-Admiral Sir John Baker in 1716 secured an agreement that ships of Minorca would be accepted by the corsairs as British and so protected from their attacks. Kane officially informed the deys of Algiers and Tripoli and the bey of Tunis that the island had become British, and with these essential details settled and accepted he was able to use Algiers and Tunis as sources of food, both for his soldiers and for the island’s population.27 Within the island Kane, after being 23 Quoted by Jackson, Gibraltarians, 131. 24 Horn, Great Britain and Europe, 288–289. 25 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and

2002, 75–81. 26 Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.258. 27 Sloss, Richard Kane, 207, 256.

the World, 1600–1850, London

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in office for several years, was in the position of a benevolent despot, his conduct supervised only from a distance. His long continuation in office made him widely recognised as a considerable diplomatic player in the Mediterranean system. For Spain, however, the states of North Africa were enemies with whom there could be no peace, scarcely even a truce; and this attitude was reciprocated by the Muslims. The rescue of Ceuta from the Moorish siege in 1721 was one episode, but the loss of Oran to the Algerines in 1708 was the issue which hurt most. In 1732 a large expedition easily recovered the place from the Algerines (and Mers el-Kebir next door as well) and then defeated a Muslim attempt at recovery; Spanish naval raiding patrols spread along the African coast. Other Mediterranean naval powers – Naples (especially after don Carlos of Spain became king in 1734) and the Hospitaller Knights in Malta – were also assiduous in such patrols, raiding the Algerine villages and towns within reach of the sea so repeatedly that the inhabitants were either kidnapped or driven inland. (This sensibly weakened the Algerine state, since its most fertile lands were principally those along the coast, a narrow coastal fringe backed by hills which were particularly valuable for orchards and pastures, but not for arable farming.) So the Muslim lands were visited with the same treatment they had meted out to the Christians of the northern coasts of the Mediterranean in the past. It was these patrols as much as any menacing British fleet which kept the corsairs at home in the next century.28 The majority of maritime European states had agreements with the Algerines and the other corsair states by the early eighteenth century. Mostly they paid protection money (or ‘tribute’), and intermittent ‘presents’ to the rulers, to have their ships left alone; the British were the only ones who claimed they did not pay this blackmail, but relied on their treaty and on force, though the consuls found it as necessary as everyone else to provide presents to the deys. But the decline in corsair activity had brought the Barbary states closer to what Europeans would regard as a normal political and diplomatic condition, and commerce with them could develop. Gibraltar relied for its food supplies on imports mainly from Morocco; Minorca dealt mainly with Algiers and Tunis. Under normal circumstances Spain and France would have been the automatic sources for supplies, but Spanish hostility was almost constant, and Spain had no wish to nourish the British in either Minorca or Gibraltar, or the Algerines at home, and after 1740 France was also repeatedly hostile to Britain for years at

28 Wolf,

Barbary Coast, 299–301.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

a time. Ironically, North Africa and the Mediterranean islands thus became the more reliable sources for supplies. The Seville treaty of 1729 was technically an alliance of Britain, France, and Spain (later joined by the Netherlands), but relations between Britain and Spain continued afterwards to veer between awkward and actively hostile. One of the elements in the war of 1727–1729 had been an ebb and flow of bickering between them in the West Indies, becoming more serious from 1737. In the Mediterranean British policy was generally conciliatory. The status of Gibraltar had not been resolved in the Seville treaty; Britain continued to hold it and Spain to claim it, which was an effective victory for the British. They could thus afford to be conciliatory, though nothing they could do would persuade (or compel) Spain to accept anything less than its return. This left the issue in continuing doubt, and it closed off the Spanish mainland to the Gibraltarians, while compelling the British to maintain a substantial garrison there. A line of fortifications was built by the Spaniards at a distance two cannon shots from the British line, and this isolated Gibraltar even more. An agreement with the sultan of Morocco in the same year as the Seville treaty, however, assured British access to that country for supplies.29 The British Mediterranean fleet helped to convoy a Spanish force to Livorno in 1731 so that Queen Isabella’s son don Carlos could take possession of the duchy of Parma, awarded him by treaty – this had been one of the queen’s longstanding ambitions, to see her son a ruling prince, since he was not likely to inherit in Spain – the heir was don Fernando, the son of King Felipe by his first wife.30 (Carlos successfully conquered Naples three years later, then his brother Philip took over at Parma - which was Isabella’s original home.) But this was almost the only friendly diplomatic contact Britain and Spain contrived during the 1730s. Much more typical was the British use of the fleet in 1735 to support Portugal in a quarrel with Spain, when it seemed that Spain might invade. The fleet under Admiral Sir John Norris appeared off Lisbon within two weeks of leaving Spithead, and the threat of a Spanish invasion faded. This was not entirely British altruism. Portugal was a British ally, but the annual Portuguese fleet bringing the wealth of Brazil to Lisbon was due to arrive, and much of that wealth would flow to the considerable British merchant colony installed at Lisbon and on then to Britain, to lubricate Portuguese trade with both Britain and the Mediterranean countries.31

29 Jackson, Gibraltarians, 140. 30 Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.48–49; Hargreaves-Mawdslay, Spain, 87. 31 Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.49–50; H. E. S. Fisher, ‘Lisbon, its English

Merchant Community and the Mediterranean in the Eighteenth Century’ , in P. L. Cottrell

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The disputes over the minor but annoying maritime conflicts in the West Indies developed into full war late in 1739 (the ‘War of Jenkins’ Ear’), and from its origin it is not surprising that it was largely fought initially in the Caribbean. In the Mediterranean, Vice-Admiral Nicholas Haddock had been based at Gibraltar since 1737, and had been exerting pressure on Spain by his presence; in fact it was British reneging on a promise to withdraw Haddock’s squadron which provided one of the final annoyances which brought on the war.32 Once the war began, Haddock set about blockading Cadiz, but then was ordered to intercept two Spanish treasure ships, though he could not do so. Then he had to go to Minorca, which was thought to be under threat and was regarded as the more important of the British naval bases; Port Mahon was by this time much better equipped than Gibraltar, though it was short of supplies after some neglect during the years of peace.33 As a result of this Spanish deception the Spanish ships at Cadiz which Haddock had blockaded came out, the merchant ships heading for their American ports, and the warships joined another Spanish fleet at Ferrol.34 Haddock been given too many tasks, or too few ships. He had been lured to Minorca by the successful Spanish deception, but the British government had also been sure that Minorca was threatened. He had another major problem in that he was uncertain about the ambitions and intentions of France, and repeatedly sent a ship to survey the Toulon fleet’s state of readiness. By May much of it was ready for sea, and in July a squadron sailed for the West Indies to join other French squadrons there. The following year a Spanish squadron came out of Cadiz and sailed through the Strait to join the French Toulon fleet; together they then escorted a troop convoy from Barcelona to Orbetello in Italy. Haddock brought his fleet north, and sighted the move, but he could not interfere: he was greatly outnumbered by the joint fleet, and he did not know if he should be fighting the French; if he

and D. H. Aldcroft (eds), Shipping, Trade and Commerce: Essays in Memory of Ralph Davis, Leicester 1981, 23–44. 32 For the development of the crisis which produced the war, see: Philip Woodfine, Britannia’s Glories, Woodbridge 1998; Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763, Cambridge 1936; Hargreaves-Mawdslay, Spain, 74–76; Horn, Great Britain and Europe, 290–291; Sir Herbert Richmond, The Navy in the War of 1739–48, Cambridge 1920, 1.11–13; Richard Harding, The Emergence of Britain’s Global Naval Supremacy, Woodbridge 2010, ch. 1, emphasises British domestic politics as a cause. 33 Gregory, Minorca, 163; Woodfine, Britannia’s Glories, 175. 34 Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.65–67; full details in Richmond, Navy, 1.60–66; Harding, Emergence 65–71.

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did fight, it might trigger a French declaration of war, which would certainly bring the wrath of the government down on him.35 There was a deal of inefficiency in the Mediterranean squadron in all this. Despite leaving scouts before Cadiz, Haddock at Gibraltar was not able to intercept the Spanish squadron which sailed through the Strait to join the French. (The French squadron which had gone the other way earlier could not, of course, be intercepted.) He was refitting at Gibraltar at the time, but it seems that the scouts were unable, or failed, to warn him. He never had enough ships to perform adequately the tasks he was given, the main British naval strength having been directed to the West Indies, or retained in home waters just in case an invasion came. If he blockaded Cadiz he could spare only a few ships to escort the trade convoys; if he provided adequate escorts he could do no more than merely watch the Spanish naval bases, not to mention Toulon; he had been told that his first responsibility was to guard Minorca. Seriously outnumbered as he was by the Franco-Spanish joint fleet he could not risk his own fleet in an encounter. Other squadrons had equal difficulties. Vice-Admiral Sir John Balchen took a squadron to intercept the incoming flota in April 1740, but the Spaniards evaded him by sailing north and the ships reached Spain at Santander; Balchen’s consolation was the capture of the Spanish 70-gun ship Princesa. In June 1741 Captain Curtis Barnett in the Dragon (60), with the Faversham and Folkestone (both 44s), was sent by Haddock to cruise in and about the Strait of Gibraltar; the only ships he met were French, but he thought they might be Spanish and fired on them – the French were nothing loth, and busily returned fire. (This was not the only incident of this kind; the tension between Britain and France was the root cause.36) Haddock was reinforced by more ships under Rear-Admiral Richard Lestock in early 1742. Fighting was spreading in Europe, and the ambiguous attitude of France had persuaded all the European powers involved in the West Indies to recall many of their ships into European waters. Haddock resigned as commander-in-chief, on grounds of illness, leaving Lestock briefly in command; he was then superseded in May by Vice-Admiral Thomas Mathews. Lestock was an impossible man to get on with; he was intemperate and irascible with his subordinates when acting as commander-in-chief, he

35 Richmond, Navy, 1.169–171; Harding, Emergence, 129–130. 36 Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.65–66, 270–271; Richmond, Navy, 1.160–163.

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quarrelled with Mathews as soon as the latter arrived to take over;37 Mathews sent home a negative report on him.38 Mathews had brought out another reinforcement, and now had enough strength – twenty-one line-of-battle ships and twenty-two smaller ships – to begin a blockade of the Spanish ships at Toulon, basing himself at Villafranca in the Savoyard territory of the king of Savoy/Sardinia. He had oral instructions to attack French ships in Toulon so long as the Spaniards were there, and to attack any other French ships heading into a Spanish port; the same applied to Neapolitan vessels.39 This was obviously legitimate because the Spanish squadron originally from Cadiz had gone in to the French base. Lestock commanded the advance force closest to Toulon, based in Hyeres Bay, which kept the two admirals usefully apart. When five Spanish galleys came out of Toulon in June 1742 laden with military supplies for the Spanish forces in Italy and moved east close to the shore, they were forced to take refuge in St Tropez Bay by a detachment under Captain Harry Norris. They were in neutral waters, but one of the galleys fired on Norris’ ships, and so he sent in the fireship Duke and all five were burned.40 Mathews was able to send other detachments to search for and intercept other Spanish ships. A squadron commanded by Commodore William Martin was sent to Naples in July 1742 to dissuade King Charles (ex-don Carlos) from sending reinforcements to those same Spanish forces in northern Italy. Martin had instructions to bombard Naples city if the king did not declare his neutrality instantly. Faced with such an ultimatum Carlos had no alternative but to give in, but he neither forgave nor forgot the humiliation. Martin was in command of three line-of-battle ships and a galley, but the real threat lay in his three bomb vessels – the same weapon which had been used so devastatingly half a century before against Algiers, and by the British in earlier French wars to bombard French Channel ports.41 Neutrality was clearly a very flexible concept in this war. The Spanish squadron from Cadiz used neutral Toulon as its base; King Charles of the Two Sicilies was prepared to assist Spanish forces but tried to maintain a façade of neutrality; Captain Norris was fired on by Spanish ships sheltering in neutral waters, and then did not hesitate to invade those waters and destroy the galleys. And now Admiral Mathews sent Martin off once more to destroy a set of stores at Alassio in Genoese territory – neutral again - which were destined 37 Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.80–83; Harding, 38 Richmond, Navy, 1.177–178 and 197. 39 Ibid, 1.198–199. 40 Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.86. 41 Ibid, 3.84–85.

Emergence, 131–134.

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for Spanish troops.42 And, of course, Mathews and Lestock were busy blockading the neutral French port of Toulon. In 1743 the connection between Spain and France became closer. They formed an alliance, the Family Compact, directed against both Austria and Britain. One of the items in the agreement was that France should assist Spain in recovering Minorca and Gibraltar, and that no peace would be made until these were secured.43 The fact that Britain had been at war with Spain for four years and Spain had done nothing at all to recover these posts in that time is a measure once again of the priorities Queen Isabella had imposed on Spanish foreign policy: Italy first, Minorca and Gibraltar a long way behind; France was to fight for Gibraltar, not for its own interests, or so the Spaniards were claiming. At last, after several years of bickering and quarrelling, Britain and France were about to go to war once more.

42 Ibid, 3.83. 43 Jackson, Gibraltarians,

141.

Chapter 6 French Wars II 1744–1763

In 1744, Britain and France finally went to war officially. They had been sparring ever since the War of Jenkins’ Ear began in 1739, and more seriously since the outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession in Europe in 1740. An accumulation of events such as the brief fire-fight between Captain Curtis Barnett’s squadron and several French ships near Gibraltar, and the British blockade of Toulon – technically a blockade of the Spanish warships which had taken refuge there - had finally brought both countries to a decision for open war. Even so, it was only after a failed French attempt to invade Britain (in peacetime) and a full-scale naval battle between their fleets (also in peacetime) that a final declaration of war was made. That the declaration came from France is scarcely relevant; nor, after all the sniping and hostility of the previous five years, is the actual moment of the declaration of war important. But it was the battle of Toulon which was the real start of their war. The War of Jenkins’ Ear was only one of a series of separate wars, involving in the end most of Europe, which finally coalesced in 1744 into the general European war. In 1740 Prussia invaded Austrian territory and stole Silesia; in 1741 Sweden attacked Russia, and Austria began fighting Bavaria; Bavaria invited France to come to her assistance, and jointly they attacked Austria; later in the year Spanish troops were landed in Italy (see chapter 5), though Commodore Martin’s threat to bombard Naples kept the fighting restricted to the north of the peninsula. Until then the two wars, the AngloSpanish and the Austro-Prussian, were more or less separate, with most participants fighting each other but not formally at war – a British army fought a French army at Dettingen in in the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) in 1743, getting away with it by being classified as a German army. But the link was finally made early in 1744 when a French invasion of Britain across the Strait of Dover was planned and almost carried out. In March France declared war on

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Britain and Hanover, in May on Austria; the two wars had at last become one.1 The instructions to Admiral Mathews, commanding in the Mediterranean, laid most emphasis on preventing the Franco-Spanish alliance (the ‘Family Compact’ of 1743) from invading Italy. It was partly for this reason that he was using the king of Sardinia’s port of Villafranca as his base, where he would be able to intercept any enemy ships moving by sea towards Italy. Nice (a Savoyard city) was high on his list of places to be defended; it was so close to Villafranca that its capture by the French would render Villafranca vulnerable; he developed plans to rescue the Piedmontese forces garrisoning Villafranca by sea, just in case. Mathews was therefore to be prepared to oppose both French and Spanish attempts to reach Italy, despite Britain not being formally at war with France. In January 1744, if not earlier, it became clear that the two fleets were preparing to come out of Toulon together. The ships moved closer to the harbour exit, their masts and sails and rigging were hoisted and prepared, and on 12 or 13 January the two admirals, Court and Navarro, were spotted examining the British blockaders who had occupied Hyeres Bay. This was a sheltered anchorage somewhat to the east of Toulon which had been Lestock’s anchorage when on blockade, and where Mathews with the rest of the fleet joined him at the end of December. The two men met, but Mathews did not divulge his plans, despite Lestock being his second-in-command. It seems that the allied admirals’ calculations of British numbers reassured them, but other British ships were on their way to join Mathews from Gibraltar and Minorca, so that the twenty-one line-of-battle ships the admirals counted in mid-January had grown to twenty-seven when the two fleets came out (and even more ships arrived in the days of the battle).2 The allies had the advantage of being able to come out of Toulon when they chose, whereas the British had to wait on allied moves to react; they also had clean ships while the British ships, at sea for months, were foul and sailed appreciably slower. The British also had to pass through a difficult passage from Hyeres Bay into the open sea, and in the process became much confused. So when the allies came out they were able to form a neat line, the French first, the Spaniards forming the rear squadron, fully in accordance with the 1

M. S. Anderson, The War of the Austrian Succession, London 1995, chs 4–6; Walter L. Dorn, Competition for Empire, New York 1963, 122–147; Jeremy Black, A System of Ambition? British Foreign Policy, 1660–1793, Stroud 2000, 189–198; Richard Lodge, Studies in Eighteenth Century Diplomacy, 1740– 1748, London 1930, chs 1-3; Horn, Great Britain and Europe, 291. 2 Richmond, Navy, 2.5–8.

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accepted doctrine for fighting a battle, whereas the British spent the first day of the fighting sorting themselves out; yet of this confusion the allies took no advantage. The instructions of the French commander, Admiral Court, ordered him to fight the British fleet, but insisted that the Spanish ships must initiate the battle – for the French were as hamstrung by their officially non-belligerent status with regard to Britain as the British were; the idea appears to have been for the French to ‘intervene’ to ‘protect’ the Spanish fleet. It was necessary that the British fleet be driven away if any of the Franco-Spanish plans were to become possible, including their intention to move a large army from the South of France to central Italy by sea, which would clearly be opposed by Mathews’ fleet. Admiral Court had therefore to wait until the Spanish ships began to fire, and had to defer to Spanish wishes, while being assured that he was in command of the whole joint fleet. It is these contradictions which must explain the apparently odd conduct of the battle on the allied side – the French ships, in short, were supposed to fight only in support of the Spanish, though as it turned out, such a distinction was ignored, and anyway the British did not know of it.3 In fact, because the French were leading, the allies made no serious attempt to fight until part of the British fleet actually attacked. Mathews made no distinction between French and Spanish ships, though he did put his flagship, the 90-gun Namur, to fight the Spanish flagship, Real Felipe (114 guns: the largest ship afloat at the time); Admiral William Rowley, in command of the British van in Barfleur (90 guns), attacked the French flagship Terrible (74). The battle lasted for most of 10 February and into the next day, with considerable casualties on both sides. One Spanish ship, Poder, was captured, recaptured, then burned, and the British Marlborough was sufficiently damaged as to be wholly put out of the reckoning. But damage of varying intensity was suffered by most of the other ships which were engaged, above all the Real Felipe, which was largely dismasted. After the battle the allied fleets withdrew westwards, separating into their national squadrons. The Spanish ships headed determinedly for Cartagena for shelter and repairs, while the French, whose instructions were to return to Toulon after any battle, made their own emergency repairs in Alicante Bay.4 Mathews made no serious attempt to pursue the allies, and for a time did not even know where they were; for this he was criticised.

3 4

A translation of Court’s instructions is in Richmond, Navy, 2.257–260. Richmond, Navy, 2.8–46, is by far the best and most complete description of the battle; all others, including this one, are mere summaries; see also Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.92–101, Mahan, Influence of Sea Power, 264–267; Tunstall,

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The battle can only be described as a draw, but to call it indecisive is inaccurate: the aim of the allies was to cover the transport of an army to Italy, which the battle prevented; further, the allied squadrons stayed in port thereafter. Like the battle of Malaga forty years before, it proved to be unnecessary to win the battle decisively in order to achieve wider strategic results, a factor generally ignored by both historians and contemporaries. Admiral Mathews knew that the French Brest squadron had sailed in January, and he had to assume that it would be heading for the Mediterranean. The junction of the two allied Mediterranean squadrons, even damaged and separated as they were, with the Brest squadron would face him with an overwhelming enemy force. He was burdened also by his instructions, which, although paying ritual attention to the need to destroy the enemy fleet (which at the time the instructions were issued meant the Spanish fleet), had laid even greater emphasis on supporting the British allies, Savoy and Austria, in the war in Italy. His absence from Villafranca had therefore left the coast road from Toulon to Genoa unsupervised. This partly explains his decision, along with the need to repair the damage to his ships, not to pursue the allied squadrons to see to their destruction – which was certainly possible once they had separated. (But, once again, only the Spanish fleet was a declared, active, and formal enemy at the time.) It may well have been better, certainly for him, had he gone in pursuit, but he was burdened with a wide geographical command, instructions which were not always clear, and a group of subordinate admirals and captains who were balky in the extreme. He was neither the first nor the last British admiral in the Mediterranean to suffer from these problems. In the battle Mathews had found that his Vice-Admiral, Lestock, had failed to join the fight. He did not refuse to do so in so many words, but his actions and the orders he had given his captains amounted to a refusal to engage. Several other captains stood on the letter of their orders or instructions and had also avoided fighting. It was known that Mathews and Lestock did not get along, but few would have thought that Lestock, who had a good fighting record, but was ill with gout, would so obviously hold back in a major battle. A long series of courts martial followed, immensely disrupting to the navy, with surprising and ridiculous results: Lestock, clearly guilty, was acquitted, probably for political reasons; Mathews, with good, even compelling, reasons for his actions, was convicted of not pursuing the enemy to cause his destruction; of the eleven captains Naval Warfare, 83–88; Harding, Britain’s Global Naval Supremacy, says little about the battle.

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accused, most were cashiered and then quickly reinstated. As a process of cleansing the naval stables, this was extraordinarily messy – and unsuccessful.5 Quite apart from Lestock’s curious behaviour, Mathews’ conduct of the battle was clearly faulty. He was, of course, like Lestock, unwell, which hardly helped. He left signals flying which confused his captains, possibly because his captain in Namur, Captain John Russel, was disabled early in the battle, and Mathews took over direct command of the ship, even at one point lending a hand in loading a gun; also, he was hardly able to conduct a battle while fighting a fierce contest with the giant Spanish flagship. Clearly Mathews’ priorities were different from those normally expected of an admiral in battle. More widely, the courts martial were partly intended to set out such priorities, but because of the large numbers of accused, and the admixture of personal and political factors, the lessons were enveloped in continued confusion. The eventual final victim of the process was to be Admiral John Byng a dozen years later.6 Mathews’ apprehensions concerning Italy were, in fact, largely borne out. The French and Spanish forces in Provence took advantage of his absence from the coast – which was prolonged by a series of gales, the need to land his wounded, and to make repairs at Port Mahon – to advance along the coast road towards Villafranca. Three of his ships managed to interrupt an attempt to transport troops by ship for an attack on Villafranca, but the soldiers continued by land. By the time Mathews and the rest of his ships returned to the Genoese Riviera the Franco-Spanish forces had captured Nice and were menacing Villafranca, which was garrisoned by Piedmontese troops. But the gale which blew him from Port Mahon to San Remo also blew the French fleet under Court from Alicante back to Toulon, though without the Spanish ships the French were now badly outnumbered. At Villafranca Mathews attempted to assist the defence, but it was outnumbered and outfought. On 10 April he evacuated most of the Piedmontese troops, leaving just a few hundred to continue to hold on, successfully, to two particularly strong forts. The evacuees were landed further east at Oneglia, where they continued to resist the advance of the Franco-Spanish army. The French finally declared war on Britain (and Hanover) in March, so that Mathews had to be even more vigilant than before over the activities of the fleet in Toulon. (It arrived in that harbour on 10 April; Mathews did not learn of the declaration of war until the 5

See British Naval Documents, 325, 370–374; several documents are quoted in Richmond, Navy, appendices 1–4, pp 254–271. 6 Richmond, Navy, 2.54–56 and 260–271.

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18th, though had he been able he would have no doubt attacked the French.) His fleet was now very short of provisions and stores. Four victuallers had reached Lisbon, where Mathews was to send ships to escort them onwards. But the Spanish squadron he had fought at Toulon was athwart his communications at Cartagena, and there were other Spanish forces at Cadiz. To overawe, or if necessary defeat, the Spanish ships Mathews would have to detach so many of his ships that the French at Toulon would be able to break out again. And he was being asked for further help in Italy. Mathews’ answer was to hold on to the essential position, the blockade of Toulon. He now knew that the Brest squadron had not sailed for the Mediterranean but for the Strait of Dover (where it was virtually destroyed in a great gale), but his problem was not eased much by this knowledge. He shifted his fleet back to Hyeres Bay when he heard that the French fleet at Toulon seemed ready to sail, leaving a small group of ships off Oneglia to help the defence. He detached several ships to help an Austrian invasion of Naples which had stalled near Rome, and he sent four of his big ships to collect the victuallers at Lisbon; all this while still holding the central position at Toulon. Then he heard that the victuallers and his four ships at Lisbon were held immobile by a much larger Franco-Spanish blockading force. His theatre of operations therefore stretched from Lisbon to Naples. The Austrians in Italy had concocted a scheme whereby they would send a force in transports escorted by three British ships, under Captain Robert Long as commodore, to be landed at Naples; an insurrection was presumed to be sparked thereby. But the Austrians were beaten in a battle at Velletri by the Neapolitan–Spanish army before they could set out, and the Sardinians having come under attack in Piedmont, the Austrian campaign against Naples was abandoned to save Savoy and Austrian Milan. At this point, as winter approached and the armies went into winter quarters, Mathews activated the permission he had been given to resign his command. Handing over to his second-in-command, Admiral William Rowley, he left the Mediterranean.7 Before he left Mathews knew that the French had abandoned the tactic of maintaining their Mediterranean fleet at Toulon as a standing threat. Instead it had been divided into three squadrons, each consisting of four major ships and one smaller, and each was given a specific task. One was to hover west of Cape Spartel, in the Sea-entrance, with the object of intercepting British convoys; the second was to cruise in the waters about Malta, hoping to find the 7

Ibid, 2.120–138, 144.

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British detached squadron off Naples or the British Levant trade, then go to Cadiz to escort the French trade to Marseilles; the third squadron was to escort the French Levant trade home to French ports. They were to sail at monthly intervals, the first in July under Admiral Piosin. A fourth detached group, one large ship and two smaller, was also sent out, into Levantine waters, sailing in July.8 This plan was produced by the Minister of Marine in Paris, and proved to be merely preliminary. It is significant that two of the small squadrons were to go to the Sea-entrance, off Cape Spartel and to Cadiz. The threat both to British trade through the Gut, and perhaps to Gibraltar, was clear. The possibility clearly existed that these movements were intended to produce a great concentration of enemy ships in this vulnerable spot. The general notion is reminiscent of the Marshal de Saxe’s planning for his armies on land, as at the siege of Maastricht, and, later, of Bonaparte’s plan for a Channel crossing, thwarted by Barham and Nelson; it is, that is, a plan by a landlubber, signifying a clear ignorance of conditions at sea. Soon after taking over the command, therefore, Admiral Rowley heard that enemy movements suggested that their ships, numbering over forty line-of-battle ships, might be gathering into a great fleet in the Strait. In reply he began to concentrate his own ships at Port Mahon, where there were also over twenty merchant ships waiting for convoy towards Britain, a sign that the French movements had already been effective in interrupting British trade. Rowley decided to fight his way through, but before he sailed he heard that a fleet from Britain under Admiral Sir John Balchen had been sent to extract the victuallers and their escort from the Tagus, and then that Balchen had driven the enemy ships into Cadiz and had blockaded them there; the victuallers had reached Gibraltar. Balchen raised the blockade of Cadiz after only a few days in order to return to Britain. (His ship, Victory, was wrecked on the way, with the loss of a thousand lives.) Meanwhile still more merchantmen arrived at Mahon looking for escort. Rowley’s scouts discovered that the Spanish fleet from Cartagena, which had been thought to be at sea, was actually still in harbour, not nearly ready to sail. He was therefore able to escort the merchantmen – now forty in number, including five richly laden Levant Company ships – to Gibraltar. There he was joined by the four ships under Captain Henry Osborn which had been sent to escort the victuallers, together with the victuallers themselves. He moved back to Mahon and sent Osborn with thirteen ships to call at Vado on the Genoese coast and then cruise near Malta hoping to catch the French Levant convoy. Meanwhile 8

Ibid, 2.139.

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the rest of his ships were undergoing repairs, careening and refitting at Port Mahon, using the victuallers’ stores. The drastic reduction of the French presence and strength in the Mediterranean by their squadrons’ dispersals, together with the quiescence of the Spaniards at Cartagena, allowed him to do all this division and refitting. The French naval moves had handed command of the Mediterranean to the British. While Rowley was at Gibraltar, nine French ships got out of Cadiz and slipped back into the Mediterranean from their station in the Sea-entrance. They reached Toulon, but other French squadrons were being sent towards Portugal and then to the West Indies. (Their threat to British Mediterranean shipping thus lasted no more than two or three months, not nearly long enough to have a serious effect.) The enemy forces in northern Italy had divided, the Spaniards continuing their advance along the Genoese coast, the French pulling back into France to prepare an invasion of Savoy by the Alpine passes. The Spaniards infiltrated troops and supplies into Genoese territory from both Spain and Naples during the winter of 1744/1745, using small coastwise ships and galleys. Some of these were captured by the British ships, but most of them got through. In the spring of 1745 Rowley, with his repaired and revitalised ships, took the greater part of his fleet to the Strait of Gibraltar, hoping to intercept a Spanish treasure fleet which was being escorted to Spain by fifteen French and Spanish line-of-battle ships. Rowley was suspected of being especially keen to acquire prize money – hence, it was assumed, the order to Osborn to intercept the Levant ships - though he was hardly alone in that, and interception had been part of the government’s intention. In this case his preferences would have served well, if he could have both defeated the allied escort and captured the treasure. But the ships went into the Biscay ports; the British preference for ambushing such fleets in the entrance to the Mediterranean had been well noted.9 The situation in Italy worsened when Genoa publicly joined the Franco-Spanish alliance in June 1745. Rowley returned and spread his forces to cope with the multiple threats caused by the distribution of the enemy forces. Twelve of his line-of-battle ships patrolled along the Genoese coast, fifteen under Admiral Henry Medley watched both Cadiz and Cartagena, based at Gibraltar – though Cadiz was his priority, since it was assumed that the fleet at Cartagena would not move. Five other ships were escorting the trade to Britain. Medley’s force was in fact stationed to block the Strait since the greater part

9

Ibid, 2.239–241.

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of French naval strength was now in the Atlantic ports of France or in the West Indies.10 Rowley’s force off Genoa arrived too late to affect matters on land. The allies had moved their forces north into Piedmont and the French had settled into winter quarters by early September; the Spanish forces, however, had moved on, defeated the Savoyard-Austrian army at Bassignana and occupied Parma and Piacenza (destined by Queen Isabella for her second son Philip, who was in nominal command of these forces) and even Milan, where Philip enjoyed himself as ‘king of Lombardy’ for several months.11 Rowley’s ships bombarded Genoa, Savona, and San Remo to little effect, and a detached force failed to catch the French Levant convoy; meanwhile the Spaniards and the Neapolitans continued to move men, supplies, artillery, and ammunition into these Genoese ports.12 Rowley was recalled in October, in part because of the conduct of a court martial on Captain Richard Norris, another consequence of the debacle of the battle of Toulon. The court was judged to have been conducted with great partiality towards the captain, and when the pressure increased for a ‘better’ result, Norris disappeared; Rowley was blamed, at least in part, for the court’s conduct.13 He had in fact conducted his command with a reasonable degree of competence, but without any assistance from the enemy, which had either slipped out of his reach or stayed in harbour; he was thus denied the opportunity for notable achievements. Rowley was succeeded in the Mediterranean command by his second, Admiral Medley; the commander changed but the problems stayed the same. The command extended from Lisbon and Cadiz to the Adriatic and even the Levant, with enemy forces in Cadiz, Cartagena, and Toulon, and the need also to watch Barcelona, the Genoese coast, and Naples. For a time, an insurrection in Corsica had to be attended to, the fleet had to assist in the transportation of troops and supplies across the northern Adriatic, and to intercept troops and supplies being moved along both the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian coasts of Italy, and the protection of merchant ships. Medley also found that, with the reduction in the enemy’s maritime strength in the Mediterranean, his fleet was drawn on to reinforce the Channel fleet and the squadrons in both the West and East Indies. The sideshow of Corsica, which Medley had protested was a useless diversion of his exiguous resources, was abandoned as soon as the 10 Ibid, 2.247–248. 11 Reed Browning, The

War of the Austrian Succession, London 1995, 231–234, 238–240. 12 Richmond, Navy, 2.251; Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.116. 13 Richmond, Navy, 2.253.

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Franco-Spanish forces began to recover from their defeat in northern Italy. They had been pushed back by Austrian reinforcements which had been released by the Austro-Prussian peace in Germany, and the Austrians went on to capture Genoa.14 Medley divided his ships into two squadrons, the main ships being based at Gibraltar. Cadiz and Cartagena were watched by his cruisers and the whole British force periodically paraded past one or other of them as a reminder that the ships in the ports were truly under blockade. The small ships in Medley’s command were on the Genoese and French coasts under the command of Captain the Hon. George Townshend. They could approach close to the coast to intercept the vessels being used to transport enemy supplies. The Austrians moved along the Genoese coast and into southern France, and Townshend’s ships were useful in assisting them. The Lerins Islands, near Cannes, were taken, the Hyeres Islands were bombarded, but Antibes was stubbornly defended by the French garrison.15 The to-and-fro of the northern Italian campaign continued. The Austrian invasion of France was sabotaged by an angry insurrection by the Genoese, Austrian bad behaviour having provoked a riot in which the Austrian forces, to their mortified surprise, were driven from the city. Then in the summer of 1747 a French invasion of Savoy was stopped dead at the sanguinary battle of Assietta, where the French army incurred over 5000 casualties to the Savoyards’ 250; the shock was deeply felt in France. By this time all sides were war-weary.16 This all came on top of the death of Felipe V of Spain the year before; his son and successor, Fernando VI, was unenthusiastic about the war and about the French alliance, and stopped sending supplies to the army in Italy. This had its effect on Medley’s activities since the Spanish fleet at Cartagena was now even less likely than before to come out.17 Felipe V by the time of his death had despaired of French assistance in an attack on Gibraltar, still less on Minorca, and had begun preparations for his own siege of the Rock. His death stopped that, and Fernando did not renew them. Spain was slowly retiring from the war. Medley died in August 1747, and his successor, Admiral John Byng, simply continued his policies, necessarily concentrating on the coast between Toulon and Genoa. The centre of naval attention had been slowly moving away from the Mediterranean since the Toulon

14 Browning, Austrian Succession, 15 Richmond, Navy, 3.162–166. 16 Browning, Austrian Succession, 17 Ibid, 277–278.

286–288; Richmond, Navy, 3.161. 310–313.

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battle, and now it shifted decisively away, partly owing to the inactivity of the Spaniards, but more because of the steady removal of French ships from Toulon towards the Atlantic ports (notably Cadiz and Brest) and to the West Indies; this induced the British to reduce Byng’s forces as well. In September 1747 Byng had just sixteen lineof-battle ships of 50 guns and more under his command, facing eight in Toulon and fifteen at Cartagena, though few of these were ready for sea. In view of this Byng spread his force in small groups and single ships from Lisbon to Genoa and as far as Crete, his tasks now being mainly the protection of British trade and the interception of enemy seaborne supplies.18 It could be claimed that the British now controlled the western Mediterranean, but it would not take a great deal to upset that dominance; had the Spanish fleet come out from Cartagena, matters would have suddenly been very different. The peace which ended the war, the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, took most of 1748 to negotiate, and left all the participants unhappy in one way or another. What had begun as a separate set of wars had become a contest above all between Britain and France, with France also fighting Austria in Italy and Flanders, and no real decision had been reached. The French derived from this war the lesson that it was necessary to maintain or develop a formidable naval power in readiness for the next contest – which they were sure would come. The Admiralty laid up its large fleet so as to be able to launch a powerful naval force quickly when the next conflict began, but continued to build; by 1755 the British had 117 line-of-battle ships and seventy-four cruisers; by 1755 France had fifty-seven and Spain thirty-nine line-of-battle ships, but they had only twenty-one and five cruisers respectively.19 Within the Mediterranean Britain maintained no more than a minimal naval presence after 1748, but it was nonetheless there, based at Gibraltar and Minorca, and the squadron’s work was directly relevant to the possibility of a new war. The small naval presence was nevertheless forceful. In 1751 a small squadron was sent to negotiate with the dey of Algiers, at that time Mohammed II. Commanded by Captain the Hon. Augustus Keppel, the meeting began badly, in part it seems because the dey took exception to being confronted by a ‘beardless youth’ , though it seems unlikely that Keppel replied by suggesting that the dey had expected a bearded goat, as an anecdote suggests. The captain was only 26 years old, so the dey had some excuse; however, it was customary for a dey, when confronted with a European negotiator, to 18 Listed by Richmond, Navy, 3.174. 19 N. A. M. Rodger, The Command

606–609.

of the Ocean, London 2004, appendix II,

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begin proceedings with insults, thus satisfying his personal feelings – deys’ thrones were extremely unstable, and arrogance was a defence mechanism. Quite possibly he was hoping to provoke a quarrel from which he might profit. In the end, no doubt with the dey appreciating the extent of the real power which lay behind this young man (who had been a captain since 1744, at age 19), made a conciliatory gesture and agreed to send an ambassador to London.20 The method of ensuring that ships were not attacked by Algerine corsairs was to provide them with passes, issued by one of several British authorities. Gibraltar was one of the sources of these documents (as were London and Minorca, among other places). Needless to say, these passes were valuable and so became saleable items – if a ship was sold, for instance, its pass tended to be sold separately. The form of passes was changed irregularly, in part to deal with this problem, and with that of forgery. The old problem of Spaniards armed with British passes yet enslaved by corsairs, which had bedevilled the supply route from Spain to Tangier, continued because considerable numbers of Gibraltarians were originally Spanish; this problem also affected Minorcans. Nevertheless the passes – called the ‘Settee Cut’ in Gibraltar – allowed British merchantmen to sail the Mediterranean with relatively few difficulties, using ships which might be significantly less well armed than their competitors’, required fewer crew members, and could therefore carry larger cargoes. By contrast the Dutch, who relied on paying tribute at Algiers to keep their ships safe, had over forty ships taken (and over 4000 sailors enslaved) at Algiers in the first half of the eighteenth century.21 Scots merchants were sending their ships into the Mediterranean and slowly increasing numbers by now, protected by the longstanding efforts of the Royal Navy to establish a supremacy over the corsairs.22 The lightness of touch required as a result of peace with both the European and the Barbary states is illustrated by the case of the frigate Minerva. This was one of two frigates (the other was Pallas) which were employed between 1771 and 1774 as convoy escorts between the western Mediterranean and Smyrna. (The case is known in detail because the ship’s career ended in a series of courts martial where the detail is laid out.) In the first voyage Minerva sailed from Gibraltar to Smyrna by way of Malta and Milo (Melos) in the Aegean; 20 Clowes,

Royal Navy, 3.288 (repeating the story even though he evidently did not believe it; David Syrett, ‘Keppel in Algiers: Diplomacy and the Limitations of Naval Power’, MM 93, 2001, 13–23. 21 T. Benaby, ‘The Settee Cut: Mediterranean Passes Issued at Gibraltar’, MM 87, 2002, 281–296; Wolf, Barbary Coast, ch. 13. 22 Eric J. Graham, A Maritime History of Scotland 1650–1790, East Linton 2002, 153–154.

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on other voyages it called at Mytilene in Lesbos, at Tunis, or Port Mahon. It was paired with Pallas; as one of the ships sailed to the east the other returned with a westerly convoy. In the four years these ships operated in the Mediterranean they had no trouble with corsairs, and they were the only escorts employed. As an escort they were hardly a deterrent should the corsairs attack in groups of ships as they had in the previous century; the agreements therefore clearly held. (The courts martial were held on the Minerva’s return to Plymouth on several of the officers, whose behaviour was, to say the least, curious; the captain seems to have run a loose ship.23) The normal Mediterranean squadron in the periods of peace was one 50-gun line-of-battle ship - in 1748 this was Deptford - and three or four frigates and/or sloops. This squadron in addition provided convoy escorts (as with Minerva and Pallas), though they could be used in other capacities if necessary, the escorts coming under the command of the senior squadron commander as required. The squadron’s function, apart from convoy escort, was generally to protect the British trade and British subjects and interests, a wide remit which might cover any activity anywhere. For the Admiralty the ships were also to supply regular intelligence reports on the numbers and condition of French ships at Toulon and Spanish ships at Cadiz and Cartagena. Their bases were thus Gibraltar and Port Mahon, and no doubt their repeated appearances off the ‘enemy’ bases were intensely irritating to the French and Spanish commanding admirals, all of whom would be aware that a full British fleet could arrive in the Mediterranean within two or three weeks. The geographical extent of the squadron’s patrolling region reached west to Lisbon and east to Toulon; the Italian region seems to have been of little concern to the Admiralty after the peace of 1748.24 The use made of Port Mahon in the interval of peace between the end of war in 1748 and the beginning of the next war in 1756 was presumably one of the main reasons for the French attack on that port at the beginning of the war. This new war, called nowadays the Seven Years’ War (at least in Britain), crept up on the participants slowly, even indirectly, just as had the earlier conflicts since 1688. Occasional but increasing disputes in North America were the beginning. The fighting spread to the sea, where French ships were being captured by British privateers and British fleets were on the lookout for French convoys long before war was actually declared. The prospect of fighting had also

23 For

fuller detail, see W. E. May, ‘The Minerva in the Mediterranean’ , MM 52, 1966, 181–198. 24 David Syrett, ‘A Study of Peacetime Operations: The Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, 1752–1755’ , MM 90, 2004, 42–50.

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stimulated diplomatic activity in Europe: an alliance was formed between France and Austria; the Dutch and Spain resolved on neutrality; Britain and Prussia formed a new alliance – altogether this is regarded as a ‘diplomatic revolution’ . The duc de Belleisle was placed in command of the whole of the French Atlantic coast, with a plan to organise an invasion of Britain – in fact three invasions, of Ireland, of Scotland, and of England, though two of these were to be feints. In addition a plan was developed which might be another feint, to land a French force on Minorca. The British government knew all about these plans by early February 1756, though such was their enmeshment in intrigue, spying, and deception that they were uncertain just what to believe. An early warning from the consul in Genoa of an intention to attack Minorca was ignored since it was not clear how he could have known of it. But it was soon understood that the armed camps in Normandy and Brittany really were filling up with soldiers, and boats were being collected in the harbours, so it was certain that the invasion of Britain was intended. Ships were spread along those coasts to gather information and, if the boats came out, to intercept them.25 An attack on Minorca was actually planned as well, and the appointment of the marquis de la Galissoniere as the naval commander should have alerted the British to the seriousness of the French intention, for Galissoniere was then the senior and most accomplished sailor in the French naval service. For the previous two years he had been in command of the Toulon squadron, and he had drilled and exercised his ships much in the way Anson and Hawke had eventually done in the Royal Navy in the previous war. So the Toulon squadron, a dozen line-of-battle ships but only a few cruisers, was well-found, well-trained, and highly professional when the plan for Minorca was formed. The idea was to sail suddenly to the island in time of peace, land an army to attack the British garrison, and the Toulon squadron would then stand by to form a naval defence for the expeditionary force, while the British Fort St Philip, beside Mahon, was captured. The intention then was to demolish the forts and the naval installations and evacuate the island, all covered by Galissoniere’s ships. Needless to say, neither the plan nor the ultimate intention worked out. The British at Minorca knew something was up. They had noticed the gathering of ships and soldiers in the French ports, and British privateers had been interrupting French coastwise shipping for a couple of years. What was not understood was the unexpected size 25 Sir

Julian Corbett, The Seven Years’ War, London 1907, 65–68; I have used the slightly amended edition produced by the Folio Society in 2001.

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of the expeditionary force, which in Belleisle’s plan had called for 4000 soldiers but now counted 15,000. Nor was it clear to the British what was to be the target of this force, which seemed too large for Minorca. Captain the Hon. George Edgecumbe, in command of the small Mediterranean squadron, guessed it was Minorca or Corsica, but Gibraltar was also considered a possibility, or even America. Or perhaps the soldiers were part of the grand plan for an invasion of Britain. Certainly Minorca was the closest possible target, and it was a nuisance to the French at Toulon, but there were also bigger and more profitable targets elsewhere.26 The Admiralty in London organised a naval expedition to the Mediterranean with all these possibilities listed in the Admiral’s instructions. The commander was to be Admiral John Byng, who at least was familiar with the region, having commanded in the sea at the end of the previous war. He was given ten line-of-battle ships, and was to be joined by Edgecumbe’s ships (three line-of-battle ships) at Gibraltar or Minorca. He was warned to be ready on 8 March, though he had trouble manning his ships, and received his final instructions on 1 April.27 The squadron sailed on the 8th, having collected a considerable number of army officers who had been on leave in Britain from their regiments in Minorca; they had been warned to return on 4 March but had only been able to get passage on Byng’s ships. All of this had been done before the French made an overt move; the British, at least in London, were not surprised. The French expedition sailed from Toulon on 10 April (two days after Byng sailed). The overall command was given to the duc de Richelieu, who was decorative rather than efficient, and he had a large and expensive staff. Galissoniere commanded the fleet. The force landed at Ciudadella on the west end of the island on the 18th (eight days to sail 220 miles – but Byng was no faster) and rapidly confined the British forces into Fort St Philip. Edgecumbe with his small force could not interfere, but he was able to reconnoitre the French force, and count their ships. He went to Gibraltar, where he linked up with Byng, who arrived on 2 May. On Minorca, to the French surprise, the British forces, commanded by General Lord Blakeney, put up a stubborn and effective resistance from inside the dilapidated Fort St Philip. This dislocated all French plans, and Richelieu immediately sent messages demanding 26 British

Naval Documents, 327–329; Desmond Gregory, Minorca: The Illusory Prize, London 1990, 168; Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 74–75; Micaela Mata, Conquests and Reconquests of Menorca, trans. Bruce Laurie, Barcelona 1984, 167–173. 27 Byng’s instructions: Herbert Richmond, Papers Relating to the Loss of Minorca, 1756, NRS 1913.

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reinforcements. Since he eventually lost, Blakeney received plenty of criticism, especially in the diaries of less senior officers who felt they knew better. He had been in office as lieutenant-governor since 1748, and probably knew the island and the islanders as well as anyone. He knew full well that the Minorcans were hostile to the British occupation and might be expected to welcome an invasion by fellow Catholics. He was also a soldier, a lieutenant-general, but by 1756 he was physically infirm, over eighty years old, and commanded a garrison of only 3000 men, several hundred of whom were captured in the first French advance.28 At Gibraltar Byng discussed affairs with Lieutenant-General Thomas Fowke, the governor. They both feared that such a large French force was also intended to attack Gibraltar, whose garrison was even smaller than Minorca’s. Byng had brought with him a body of Royal Fusiliers, and he had orders to collect one of Gibraltar’s regiments to reinforce the Minorcan forces. But Fowke would not let it go, though he did provide Byng with sailors to help fill up the crews of his ships. The two men seem to have infected each other with their fears: Byng was always liable to see difficulties before opportunities, and to act accordingly.29 Byng’s squadron reached the Minorcan seas on 17 May, and his and Galissoniere’s fleets manoeuvred for two days for advantage, and at last on 20 May came to a collision. Byng’s tactics have been investigated and praised by some, but the fight, between equal forces, was a draw, and so effectively a French strategic victory. What eventually condemned Byng was his subsequent decision to retreat. This was reinforced by a council of captains and army officers, where Byng asked a series of leading questions whose whole import was that nothing could be done – with which they all dutifully agreed. Byng then took his fleet back to Gibraltar. The obvious alternative - to remain near Minorca and to harass the enemy forces and succour the besieged fort - was never considered.30 Neither fleet had suffered disabling damage, though the British Intrepid needed repairs to its masts and rigging, partly accomplished on the voyage to Gibraltar. Byng there found five more line-of-battle ships which had been sent out under the command of Admiral 28 Gregory, Minorca, 67–70, 170–173. 29 The succeeding events have been

repeatedly examined: see, on the naval aspect, Richmond, Papers; Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 82–94; Brian Tunstall, Admiral Byng and the Loss of Minorca, London 1923; Dudley Pope, At 12 Mr Byng was Shot, London 1968; on the siege, Gregory, Minorca, 170–177. 30 Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 82–94; Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.148–155; Mahan, Influence, 286–288; Tunstall, Naval Warfare, 107–111; the minutes of the council of war are printed in British Naval Documents, 380–381.

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Brodrick to join him when news of the size of the French expeditionary force had reached London. He set about final repairs and prepared to return to Minorca, but before he was ready he was replaced by Admiral Sir Edward Hawke, who then spent almost a month continuing repairs and exercising his ships – he was in no greater hurry to assist the defenders than Byng had been.31 The French meanwhile had brought in the reinforcements Richelieu had demanded. The stubborn resistance of Fort St Philip had already deranged French intentions, and when Richelieu heard that Brodrick’s ships had arrived at Gibraltar he determined on an assault. This was delivered on 27 June, and to Richelieu’s surprise it was highly successful. All the outer works were taken, and the citadel was rendered indefensible. Next day General Blakeney surrendered.32 Richelieu had one final task to perform. He had to remove the greater part of his army from the island and get it back to France. The clamour raised by the siege had produced a public reaction which made it impossible for the French to carry out the original intention of destroying the works and the naval base and then withdrawing; Galissoniere obligingly estimated that it would cost a great deal – a million louis was his eye-catching estimate – to do the destruction. So Richelieu was authorised to leave a strong force to act as the island’s garrison. (It was also, in French hands, a politically useful item to dangle diplomatically before Spanish eyes, who wanted the island back, or the British, if negotiations for peace were undertaken.) By 5 July the French evacuation was complete, leaving a garrison of 6000 men (twice the force the British had used). Hawke arrived off the port a fortnight later. He remained nearby, interrupting French supplies and communications, harassing the forces on the island (he was able to land raiding and supply forces almost at will) for a month; had Byng stayed nearby doing the same the French force on the island would probably have soon begun to suffer privations – and he would probably have saved his own life. Hawke departed in early November, ordered back to Britain. Soon afterwards the Toulon fleet was laid up, the French army in the region was largely removed, though 4000 men were transported to occupy Corsica, ceded by Genoa. The whole affair was irrelevant to the wider war. The forces used to capture Minorca could have been used much more profitably in the putative invasion of Britain. The garrisons of Minorca and Corsica – 10,000 men in total – remained in place, uselessly, for the rest of the war, and were left to rot in isolation. Once the Toulon fleet was laid up the Minorcan position was not of any use to anyone; for the 31 Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 95–97; 32 Mata, Conquests, 179–189.

Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.155–160.

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British it was only worth holding Minorca as a base for their ships to supervise the French at Toulon; with no fleet there, Minorca had no value to them. Hawke, recalled to Britain, left his second, Rear-Admiral Charles Saunders, at Gibraltar with five line-of-battle ships – the smallness of the force is an indication of the low priority of the Mediterranean in this war. The normal routine was to hold the Gibraltar position during the winter, and venture out with the warmer weather. So by starting off early an enemy might spring a surprise. The war in America had developed into a conflict for Louisbourg, and the French began sending reinforcements. One group of four line-of-battle ships under Admiral Revest sailed from Toulon late in March 1757. Saunders brought his ships out on 2 April, and found Revest late on the 5th. But the French were to leeward; only a distant cannonade was possible before dark, and the French got away in the night.33 The British Mediterranean squadron had three main tasks: to protect British trade, deal with French privateers, and block the movements of French warships out of the Mediterranean. This third task was that which was most noted, but it was also the least frequently needed. Hawke had set the general tone when he sent one of his ships, Jersey (60 guns) to Livorno to sort out a dispute between a British privateer captain, Fortunatus Wright, and the local authorities, who had put his ship under arrest. Jersey’s captain, Sir William Bramley, used the threat of force to resolve the dispute, in effect threatening to use the guns of his ships on the port; Wright was freed, and Bramley escorted a convoy of British merchantmen away.34 At Gibraltar, Hawke sent boats to cut out another captured British merchantman from under the guns of Algeciras. The ship had been taken into the (neutral) port by a French privateer, entirely legitimately. Casualties in the attack were heavy (150 dead and wounded); the ship was brought out.35 It is not surprising that both the Tuscans and the Spaniards were fully confirmed in their antiBritish and pro-French sentiments after this treatment. Saunders was superseded in May 1757 by Vice-Admiral Henry Osborn, another commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean who had much experience there from the previous war. Saunders remained as second-in-command, which meant that his five ships had been reinforced by the four brought by Osborn. They patrolled along the French coast, interrupting coastal traffic, and landed raiding parties to cause small but annoying items of damage. The aim was partly to 33 Clowes, Royal Navy, 34 Ibid, 3.292. 35 Ibid, 3.292–293.

3.169–170.

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hamper French preparations at Toulon for another breakout attempt on the lines of Revest’s. The French commander, Admiral de la Clue, finally got his chance when the British ships fell back to Gibraltar for the winter. He sailed on 8 November with six line-of-battle ships, but at the Strait he found Osborn’s ships awaiting him; he turned back and went into (neutral) Cartagena, where Osborn’s cruisers kept watch.36 More ships were being prepared at Toulon, and Clue waited for them. Osborn skilfully kept up his guard at the Strait, varying his position with the changes in the wind, either off Malaga or in the Sea-entrance between Capes Spartel and Trafalgar. He heard in January that the Toulon ships were expected, and decided that it would be best to intercept them before they joined Clue. Clue received two of the ships, but then Osborn heard that three more were expected to come out. Their arrival would bring Clue’s squadron up to eleven ships, too great a force for Osborn to face with hope of success. He therefore intercepted the three, under Marquis Duquesne; two of them were captured, including the 80-gun Foudroyant, which was defeated by the 64-gun Monmouth. The blow to the French was sufficient to persuade Clue at Cartagena to give up; when the seas were clear he sailed back to Toulon, where his expedition was cancelled.37 This French defeat effectively closed down the Mediterranean for the next two years, though it had scarcely been an active area of fighting before that. Osborn and Saunders were called home, and the command was given to Admiral Edward Boscawen, who had distinguished himself in the North American fighting. (Saunders went on to conduct the naval part of the invasion of Canada and the siege of Quebec.) Boscawen arrived with extra ships in April 1759 with orders in the now traditional way to protect the trade and harass the enemy. He established a close blockade of Toulon, where Clue had now gathered a squadron of a dozen line-of-battle ships. Such a force could only be intended to come out at some point, either to head for America, or, as earlier French squadrons had done, to join another French squadron in a European port. The squadron Boscawen commanded included fifteen line-of-battle ships, and he had fourteen smaller vessels, from 8-gun fireships to 40-gun frigates; Clue had only three of the smaller ships. The French were blockaded in Toulon from May onwards; Boscawen cruised along the coast, raiding and threatening. These activities preoccupied at least ten battalions of French infantry, who were kept busy marching back and forth to counter his movements, 36 Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 178–179. 37 Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.189–190; Corbett,

Seven Years’ War, 192–195.

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and a considerable force of artillerymen who manned the defensive batteries which were placed wherever there was a chance of a landing, or a bay in which British ships could anchor. These batteries were in fact very effective. When two French frigates, having failed to get into Toulon, took refuge in a nearby bay, the Anse des Sablettes, three British ships went in to tackle them, but were beaten back by the land batteries; one of the ships, Culloden, had to go to Gibraltar for repairs.38 But, despite such small victories, the French artillery had to stay in place, pinned down by the ships. Eventually, of course, Boscawen had to take ships off the blockade to resupply, and to refit. He could not afford to divide his fleet in the face of the French squadron by leaving some ships on guard, so he took all of them away. It took him a month to reach Gibraltar, and by that time Clue was ready to come out. Boscawen got to Gibraltar on 2 August, leaving two frigates on watch east of the Strait; Clue came out from Toulon on the 5th, and reached the Strait on 17 August; he was spotted by Boscawen’s cruisers. The British fleet was in disarray, barely manned, some ships without sails bent, others undergoing refit and repair, and the admiral was having dinner at San Roque with the local Spanish governor. The frigate Gibraltar (Captain William McCleverty) spotted the French and came into Gibraltar Bay about 7 p.m.; by 10 p.m. the fleet was out of the Bay, manned and rigged and ready, after a great but very impressive scramble to get on board and under weigh. The French squadron had been missed by the other cruising frigate, Lyme, which had been posted off Malaga, because it had sailed westwards along the African coast, out of Lyme’s sight. Gibraltar’s post had been further west, off Ceuta, so Clue was in the Gut before he was seen, taking advantage of a Levanter, an east wind, and thick weather. He was thus through the Strait before Boscawen’s fleet was out of the bay. Clue had intended to go into Cadiz, but changed his mind, though the change of plan was not understood by all his ships. Clue’s purpose was to join the French fleet at Brest, when the two fleets would take part in another attempt to land an invasion force in Britain. It was a revival of Belleisle’s scheme of 1756. Boscawen knew of the French intentions, and if Clue got past him he was to leave a few ships at Gibraltar and bring most of his squadron with him to join Hawke in the blockade of Brest. Clearly the best thing would be to prevent Clue from escaping from the Mediterranean in the first place, but if he did get through the next best thing would be to destroy his force before he could reach Brest.

38 Clowes,

Royal Navy, 3.210–211; Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 383–384.

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So when the French fleet succeeded in passing the Gut before the British got out of Gibraltar, Boscawen had to follow them with the aim of bringing on a battle. During the night half the French ships went into Cadiz in accordance with Clue’s original orders, having misunderstood his new intentions; the rest, with Clue, sailed on towards the open ocean. The divided fleet was now extremely vulnerable. Boscawen’s ships in pursuit were similarly split into two groups, but this was due to the difficulty of getting out of Gibraltar harbour and to the vagaries of the wind, and they all knew what they had to do. Boscawen’s advanced group of seven ships caught up with Clue’s seven and began the fight. Clue had almost got away, but when he discovered that half of his fleet was missing he had waited, then mistook Boscawen’s ships coming up for the laggards, so allowing the British to catch him off the Algarve coast. The second British group eventually came up and participated in the last stages of the fighting, but the real damage to the French had been done by the first British group. In a straight fight of seven ships against seven, three of the French ships were burnt when they went aground, including the flagship, and two were captured even though they had taken refuge under Portuguese batteries; two ships escaped, one taking refuge in the Canaries, the other reaching Rochefort.39 Boscawen took half of his ships north to join Hawke; Admiral Thomas Brodrick stayed at Gibraltar with the rest. He quickly discovered that the missing French ships were at Cadiz and settled down to blockade them. When in December his ships were battered by a series of gales and had to go into Gibraltar for repairs, the French came out. They got through the Gut again, and back into the Mediterranean without being seen. But they merely went to Toulon and were there paid off. Brodrick was ordered home with all his line-ofbattle ships, leaving only his frigates at Gibraltar to act as scouts and trade protection. It was almost a peacetime condition.40 The Mediterranean, however, was too rich a region to be entirely ignored for long. Tension was developing with Spain. King Fernando VI died in 1759, and was succeeded by his half-brother Carlos III, Queen Isabella’s eldest son and the former king of Naples, a man whose experiences at the hands of British sea power on several occasions in Italy had rendered him very liable to look towards France. He was not, however, prepared to join the war without inducements, specifically the prospect of regaining Minorca and Gibraltar. So Brodrick’s withdrawal of the line-of-battle ships from the Gibraltar 39 Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 384–388; Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.211–215; Tunstall,

Naval Warfare, 113–115; Mahan, Influence, 298–300. Seven Years’ War, 425–426.

40 Corbett,

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station proved to be only temporary. In April 1761 Vice-Admiral Charles Saunders returned as commander-in-chief with thirteen line-of-battle ships and a full complement of smaller ships. His purposes were to watch the French, and to impress, and perhaps to deter, Spain. A month later Spain and France concluded an alliance; Spanish diplomats began seeking for ways of either securing peace or discovering grounds for war. Toulon was the prime target for the British ships, as ever, and Saunders’ blockade was tight. His cruisers were especially active in capturing French merchant ships, so that French trade was throttled. Saunders’ force was large enough to pin down the French in Toulon, but not big enough to keep Spain out of the war. At the end of 1761 Spain declared war, seizing the opportunity to detain all the British ships in its harbours. Saunders was reinforced to seventeen line-of-battle ships, and took up his station at Gibraltar with the aim of keeping the Toulon fleet inside the Mediterranean so that it could not join the other enemy fleets – though linking with that at Cartagena remained possible. This position allowed him to blockade Cadiz for a short time, but he was soon back at Gibraltar. A scheme of the French to push Spain into war with Portugal in order to distract Britain was also landed in Saunders’ lap. He sent three of his line-of-battle ships to Lisbon to support the Portuguese government until a decision was made in London to send troops to assist. As the troop transports approached he heard that the ships at Cartagena had come out, then that the ships at Toulon were out; the rumour was that the joint intention was to launch an attack on Gibraltar. Ignoring all this, Saunders blockaded Cadiz in case the ships there came to interfere with the troop transports. They did not; the Toulon fleet’s purpose turned out to be to reinforce Minorca.41 Saunders’ actions demonstrated quite clearly that control of the Gibraltar position, in the hands of a commander with sufficient force at his disposal, and the common sense to see the essentials, also conferred control of the Sea-entrance as far north as Lisbon, and of the Western Basin. The cruise of the Toulon squadron as far as Minorca was a useless exercise, just as the French garrisons on Minorca and Corsica were effectively marooned for the duration of the war. The menace of the British ships at Gibraltar (and their active cruisers off the French coast) therefore pinned down a substantial quantity of French troops and ships. The Spanish entry into the war led to a series of Spanish disasters. Apart from seeing the Spanish territories in the Philippines and Cuba conquered with minimum effort by the British, two of Saunders’ 41 Ibid,

584–585, 590–595.

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cruisers captured one of the Spanish register ships bringing silver from the River Plate. It was taken within a day’s sail from Cadiz, again highlighting the usefulness of the Gibraltar position. Half a million pounds was distributed in prize money as a result.42 In the peace negotiations, in which the British government’s negotiators were expertly played by the duc de Choiseul, colonies were bandied about. Only Minorca was in play in the Mediterranean, but Britain had shown, ever since the island had been taken, that it wanted it back. The blockades of Toulon by Boscawen and Saunders had been made much more difficult by their not having the use of Port Mahon. Repeatedly the British had suggested exchanging Minorca for some other territory - Gibraltar, Martinique, Florida, Guadeloupe. In the end in the peace treaty the island was in effect exchanged for the French island of Belle Isle, which had been seized, to French annoyance – Choiseul claimed it was upsetting to the negotiations – in 1761. It was nicely ironic that it was the place from which the duc de Belleisle took his title that his schemes of invasion, so repeatedly and vainly attempted, were thwarted. Minorca was reoccupied in 1763 by a squadron under the successor of Saunders as commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, Admiral Sir Piercy Brett. The useless French garrison, whose personnel had angered the Minorcans by their unpleasantness even more than the British troops they had replaced, and which had wasted away by disease and privation, at last went home.43 The Mediterranean had featured in the Seven Years’ War only incidentally. The loss of Minorca had not seriously affected the British war effort, and was reacquired mainly for prestige. But the main reason for the absence of the Mediterranean from the main campaigns was the alliance of France and Austria, which effectively closed down southern Europe, and Italy in particular, as a war zone. This left the small squadron at Gibraltar able to dominate the Mediterranean, and protect British trade throughout the sea, in so far as that was necessary, even when the French had a substantial force at Toulon.

42 Ibid, 43 Ibid,

599–600. 607–608; for the negotiations, see Zebab Esmat Rashed, The Peace of Paris 1763, Liverpool 1951.

Chapter 7 Two Sieges: Minorca and Gibraltar 1763–1783

The return of Minorca to British control in 1763 restored the geopolitical position of Britain in the Mediterranean only superficially. The wide British triumph in the Seven Years’ War stimulated further dislike among its European rivals. Both France and Spain busily developed their navies during the subsequent peace with the clear intention of seeking revenge for defeat,1 the Dutch retreated even more determinedly into neutrality, and other states – Prussia, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Austria – were deeply disturbed by the new power which Britain now appeared to wield. They did not really need to worry, for that power was as fragile as that of any other suddenly prominent state. The military triumph in North America was followed by an assault on long-cherished local autonomies in the British colonies. The dispute began as soon as the war ended with quarrels over taxes on sugar and molasses, and developed through disputes and arguments into riots and overt threats, aggressiveness on both sides and eventually into fighting, beginning at Boston in 1775. The newly expanded British Empire was thus shown to be as hollow as any other – indeed more so than most - and this provided the opportunity for Britain’s European enemies to bring down the sudden giant. The approach to a wider conflict was, as usual, slow and indirect. The fighting in North America – the American Rebellion, or the War of Independence – had been going on for three years before the French made a decisive move into belligerency, though clandestine and not so clandestine help had gone to the American rebels from the start, both officially and privately. That is to say, the war crept up on its future participants in irregular, incremental stages, with neutrality cloaking careful moves to achieve an early advantage. French ships 1

N. A. M. Rodger, Command of the Ocean, London 2004, 606–609; between 1765 and 1775, the British fleet was reduced by twenty-two line-of-battle ships, the French stayed the same, the Spanish increased by twenty-three.

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were at sea, cruising to protect American shipping for a year before France went to formal war. It was therefore no surprise to the British government when formal war finally began in February 1778. As France became increasingly hostile between 1775 and 1778 the usual precautions had to be taken – line-of-battle ship squadrons in the Channel, blockades, reinforcements sent to the Mediterranean. France had prepared. There were a dozen line-of-battle ships ready for sea at Toulon, and when it became known that the Comte d’Estaing had been appointed their commander, it was certain that a naval ploy was being undertaken in the Mediterranean. But the possibilities were, as usual, several – he might go to join the Brest squadron, he might go to North America, or to the Caribbean; he might go into a Spanish base, such as Cadiz, he might attack Minorca or Gibraltar. And what of Spanish intentions?2 Both France and Spain had developed their fleets in the previous fifteen years, so that if combined they outnumbered the Royal Navy. The British navy had spread its cruisers throughout American waters, and many of their line-ofbattle ships were there as well. The French spread the word that a military camp was being established in Normandy, with a view, obviously, to an invasion of southern England – a revival, it seemed, of Belleisle’s project in the last war. In fact, for the moment most of this was pure deception, and no small craft had been gathered to transport the troops. The Admiralty, however, took the threat seriously, and all available lineof-battle ships were concentrated in the Channel fleet so that there were no more available for the Mediterranean. Two frigates, Proserpine and Enterprise, were sent to Gibraltar to watch for d’Estaing and his fleet and to determine where his destination when and if he passed the Gut.3 France declared war on 13 March 1778, and a month later d’Estaing’s fleet of twelve line-of-battle ships and some frigates came out from Toulon, with orders to commence hostilities forty leagues out into the Atlantic – that is, he was not to stop to attack either Minorca or Gibraltar; his destination was the Delaware River, where the British army had occupied Philadelphia for the last year. Proserpine followed the French fleet for ninety leagues, decided its destination was probably America, and then turned to report. It was only confirmation, for within ten days of d’Estaing’s sailing from Toulon the government in London heard the news from an agent in Paris; an equivalent squadron had been prepared in reply, but it only sailed 2 3

Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783, London 1964, 190–193. Ibid, 196–200; T. H. McGuffie, The Siege of Gibraltar, 1779–1783, London 1965, 36–37.

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when Proserpine brought the confirmation of d’Estaing’s direction of sailing.4 D’Estaing had got out of the Mediterranean because there was no British squadron based at Gibraltar or Minorca big enough to challenge him, due to the focus on the possible invasion across the Channel and the demands of the American war. The main British fleet remained in the Channel to deter a French attack, and covered the arrival of a number of valuable convoys, including that from the Mediterranean. In 1779 Spain moved to intervene. King Carlos III had been annoyed that France had gone to war without consulting him, and in the spring of 1779 he offered to mediate an end to the war. His purpose was to gain time to prepare to enter the war – a factor transparently clear to the British – and to receive the annual treasure fleet. He hoped to put the British off their guard. Yet his ‘price’ for conducting the mediation was to be Gibraltar, and one of his suggestions was a truce in America during which the American colonies would be independent. All in all, the real effect of the ‘mediation’ offer was to alert the British to the probability of Spanish belligerency sooner rather than later. The offer of mediation was refused; the reinforcement of Gibraltar was another answer.5 In April a new Family Compact agreement between Spain and France (the Convention of Aranjuez) was agreed, and it included, yet again, the condition that no peace would be made by either party until Gibraltar had been taken.6 The French agreed to this, no doubt with as little intention of honouring it as they had twice before. But it laid a trail of conditions whereby the rebellious colonists were supposed, by the alliance they had made with France, to go on fighting until Spain conquered Gibraltar, which was not something they were willing to do. It is not surprising that Spain did not get what it wished. By July it was clear that Spain would go to war. Gibraltar was shut off from contact with the rest of Spain, and British subjects in the area were pushed into the colony, or sent into Portugal.7 But then, for several months thereafter, hostilities in the south were slight, with only intermittent firing from both sides, and no obvious attempt by the Spaniards to mount an assault. By contrast, the combined Atlantic fleets of France and Spain joined forces in the Channel that summer, but failed to mount an invasion of Britain. The admirals did not share the planners’ optimism, there were delays, shortages, and

4 5 6 7

Mackesy, War for America, 200. George Hills, Rock of Contention, London 1974, 311–312. Ibid; Mackesy, War for America, 212. McGuffie, Siege, 39–40; Hills, Rock of Contention, 314.

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sickness, and all this brought the joint fleets to separate by the end of August, even though they had reached the western Channel and had set off a great panic at Plymouth. The other Spanish object in this war was Minorca, which was in a much more precarious situation than Gibraltar. The threat to the island was made worse by the fact that the attack on Gibraltar began first and so British attention was focused there. In February 1780 a great relief expedition commanded by Admiral Sir George Rodney was sent with reinforcements and supplies for both places; he was then to go on to the West Indies and deliver reinforcements to Jamaica and the islands. It was a typical multi-purpose convoy.8 The convoy-expedition had been originally planned in September, but gathering the ships and the soldiers was slow, and then several second thoughts on its composition and on the size of the escort delayed its departure, as did hostile winds at Spithead when it was ready to sail. It was not until the end of the year that the fleet finally sailed, but at least it was by then a much more formidable force than had been intended at the start – twenty-two line-of-battle ships and thirty-nine victuallers and storeships. The West Indian ships were released on 4 January, and four days later the Gibraltar section met and captured a Spanish convoy: six victuallers were taken on to Gibraltar to increase the Rock’s stores; the rest (sixteen transports) were sent back to England; a captured 54-gun ship was taken into the navy, and renamed Prince William. Sailing south along the Portuguese coast, Rodney spoke to several ships and learned of a Spanish fleet which was said to be waiting off Cape St Vincent. It was discovered on the afternoon of the 16th – eleven line-of-battle ships commanded by Admiral Juan de Langara. He was outnumbered two-to-one, and was attacked by a fleet of coppered ships which were faster and more manoeuvrable than his. The fight went on into the night (it became called the ‘Moonlight Battle’); one Spanish ship blew up, four were captured, and two were driven ashore by the rising gale. At Gibraltar the Spanish squadron maintaining the blockade was driven off, and the supplies and reinforcements and stores were unloaded as fast as possible, while Rodney pulled his warships out of the bay to form a guard. He then himself went on to the West Indies, and Vice-Admiral Digby (in whose ship the king’s son William was serving as a midshipman – hence the name given to the captured ship) returned with most of the line-of-battle ships to Britain. On the voyage he encountered a French convoy from Mauritius and captured several transports and another 64-gun ship. 8

Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.448–452; Mackesy, War for America, 309–313.

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From Gibraltar Rodney sent on seven of the storeships and victuallers to General James Murray at Minorca, but General Augustus Eliott, the governor of Gibraltar, kept the battalion which had been intended to go on with those stores, claiming that Gibraltar was under greater pressure and danger than Minorca. Murray had already sent supplies and men to assist the Gibraltar defences; there is no doubt that in early 1780 Gibraltar was in danger while Minorca had not yet been attacked, but these measures sensibly weakened Minorca still more. The siege of Gibraltar became much more active once it was clear that Spain was unable to land an invasion force in Britain. The early hostilities were mainly artillery bombardments from a fairly long range, but the Spaniards soon began sapping forwards through the sand of the neutral ground. As in the previous siege in the 1720s they were regularly hampered by the weather, and by the fact that from the height of the Rock the British could see almost all they were doing; the British bombardments delayed Spanish progress. The sapping began in September 1779, at about the time that the government in London was beginning the slow process of organising the relief which was brought in by Rodney in February 1780. The garrison was something over 5000 men at the beginning of the siege; the Spanish (and later French) forces facing them were perhaps as high as three or four times that number on occasion, though the relatively narrow approach which had to be used, along the isthmus, meant that numbers were not the problem. The issue was always guns and ships, given that the British had a sufficiency of men in the garrison to conduct both a passive and, as it proved, an active, defence.9 Rodney’s relief was therefore timely. Spain succeeded in persuading the sultan of Morocco to cease sending supplies into Gibraltar, a serious matter since this cut off the best supply of fresh food. However, there were plenty of men - Moroccan, British, and even Spanish with boats and small ships, who were always willing to bring in a cargo in the knowledge that prices on the Rock were high. Scurvy was kept under control most of the time, and on the arrival of any fresh supplies the governor purchased all the fresh fruit for the use of the hospital. Spanish ships based at Algeciras mainly controlled Gibraltar Bay outside the range of the guns of the harbour, except when the great relief fleets were present, but they never succeeded in preventing supplies from getting through.

9

The two best accounts of the siege are by McGuffie, Siege, and Hills, Rock of Contention, 314–343; also Jackson, Gibraltarians, ch. 10.

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Both sides were unusually inventive. The British on the Rock developed new and more accurate artillery methods – precise lengths of fuses in the shells, an early type of shrapnel shell, accurate aiming and more precise charges in the guns; guns were mounted high on the Rock so that their range was extended. The Spaniards’ inventiveness was particularly evident at sea. They made use of fireships in one assault, though as so often these were not effective. They developed a type of gunboat, in which each boat was armed with a heavy long-range cannon, and crewed by a crew of up to seventeen men – a natural development for a navy which still used galleys. These boats were often successful in intercepting blockade runners, and in blockading the town from the sea. The besieged organised their own gunboats in response, and several more were sent out from Britain. The Spanish pressure remained relatively light for some months, possibly owing to an abortive set of peace talks, more likely because of the winter weather. In March 1780, not long after the arrival of Rodney’s relief, they launched their fireship attack, aiming at the blockade-running ships moored near the New Mole, at the southern end of the port area. Again the clear view the British had of Spanish territory allowed them to realise what was intended and to make preparations to meet the attack. Nine fireships were used, of which eight were successfully diverted from their target and were run aground; their remains were salvaged by the garrison as firewood; the ninth drifted out to sea. The gunboats began to be used not long after this, but their attacks were blocked by a pair of hulks moored to protect the seaward approach to the town, by gunfire from the shore (made more difficult because many of the attacks were at night) and eventually by retaliation bombardments directed at the Spanish siege lines whenever a gunboat attack came in. Supposedly these retaliatory bombardments deterred the gunboats, but it seems more likely that, like the fireships, the general lack of success of the boats was more of a deterrent – but the Spaniards did not give up this method of attack. The siege continued, marked as much by boredom as by danger. The town of Gibraltar was comprehensively wrecked by the Spanish bombardment but human casualties were relatively light; the civilian population moved into tents at the southern end of the peninsula. The supply situation became difficult in the winter of 1780/1781, and a second great relief expedition was sent in April 1781 commanded by Vice-Admiral George Darby, whose force consisted of twenty-nine line-of-battle ships. Like Rodney before him, he detached smaller convoys for the West Indies and for India along the way. The Spanish fleet in Cadiz failed to intervene, and Darby was able to bring in

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ninety storeships and victuallers, and to send a dozen more on to supply Minorca.10 The Spanish bombardment increased greatly in intensity at this point, partly in an attempt to disrupt the landing of the new supplies, but which in fact turned the process of unloading into a much faster operation rather than damaging the supplies or the ships. (Darby was able to sail away with the unloaded ships after little more than a week.) But the bombardment did not slacken off after he left, and had now become a serious assault, the main Spanish effort. The excavation of the sapping trenches and the mounting of new batteries closer to the British lines became a much more serious threat. During 1781 a second attempt by the allies to seize control of the English Channel had failed. The fleets of Spain and France arrived in the western Channel at the beginning of August, in overwhelming numbers. But they could not find the British fleet. Admiral Darby with thirty ships put himself into Torbay; the combined fleet with forty-nine ships came no further than the Scilly Isles; not knowing where or how strong the British fleet was, they could go no further. Once again the combined fleet disassembled amid mutual disputes and lack of supplies. The Spanish ships, together with a French contingent, returned to Cadiz, and almost at once, carrying 10,000 soldiers, sailed through the Strait into the Mediterranean. The soldiers were landed on Minorca. This came as an unpleasant surprise to the garrison. General Murray had been inventing reports of possible attacks in order to keep the garrison alert, but the actual arrival was unexpected. The Spanish ships sailed past Fort St Philip in full view of the guns, but were mistaken for a Russian squadron, and so the soldiers were landed without opposition; they were able to capture several groups of soldiers of the garrison living in the town of Mahon or in other parts of the island before the rest of the garrison took refuge in the fort.11 The island’s Minorcan, Spanish–speaking, population had been adamant that they would not assist the defence against a Spanish attack. Several attempts were made to recruit a local militia under its own officers, but various excuses were made, and the volunteers did not appear. Murray had had more success when he licensed a number of privateers to operate from the islands, which provided employment for local sailors, and which brought in much-needed 10 Clowes, Royal Navy, 3.502–503. 11 Desmond Gregory, Minorca: The

Illusory Prize, London 1990, 183–195, for an account of the siege of the fort; Micaela Mata, Conquests and Reconquests of Menorca, trans. Bruce Laurie, Barcelona 1984, describes Spanish preparations (198–204) and the siege (204–213).

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supplies and some wealth for a few of the islanders. The privateers were quite happy seizing Spanish ships despite their apparent loyalty to Spain, but were no more contented with British rule than anyone else.12 Murray cast a wider recruitment net. Some Corsicans in exile enlisted, in the hope that the British would later help to restore them to their French-ruled island (more went to form a small battalion in Gibraltar). Some Albanians were recruited, as were a few Moors, and sailors from ships blocked in the harbour were formed into a useful unit. But the total garrison was never much more than 2000 strong (and reduced by 200 when the Spanish expedition captured those caught outside the fort). Not only that, but the fort they were defending was badly sited for standing a siege, and in poor condition: ‘this rotten, feeble fort’, Murray called it. From the time of the Spanish landing on Minorca (19 August 1781), therefore, there were two active sieges by Spaniards of British possessions in the Mediterranean. Little attention was paid in Britain to that in Minorca, and at one time it was offered to Russia as a bribe. Concentration on Gibraltar was scarcely surprising since this was a sensibly bigger operation, had been going on longer, and was in many ways more spectacular. This confirmed again the failure of Minorca to live up to the expectations of those who advocated its conquest and retention. At Gibraltar, the Spanish trenches had advanced about halfway across the ‘neutral ground’ from their lines towards the British defensive barrier by November 1781. Installing gun batteries in the most advanced sections of those trenches would bring the bombardment close enough to inflict real damage on the British fortifications, partly by the greater force the guns would exert at short range, but mainly because their aim would be much improved. Eventually the Spanish trenches could be used to shelter a strong force of infantry to mount an attack; were they to gain a lodgement inside the fortifications the siege could well be over. The British could not afford to fight an infantry battle hand to hand; they were too heavily outnumbered. On Minorca the Spaniards found it almost impossible to dig trenches in the difficult, stony ground. They restricted themselves to bombardment (from a safe distance) and to blockade. The commander of the besieging force, the duc de Crillon (a French exile in the Spanish service) quickly called for reinforcements, in particular for more guns. He had hoped that the fort, known to be weak and poorly maintained, would fall quickly. When it did not and he met resistance, he was driven to blockade and to his guns.

12 Gregory,

Minorca, 154–155.

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Sending a relief force from Britain was considered, but the impossibility of landing when most of the island was under Spanish control and the population wholly on the Spanish side was fully recognised. General Murray did point out in a letter to London in December that he still controlled a cove beneath the fort, St Stephen’s Cove, but it was small, and the Spaniards could also reach it. Landing supplies there could only be done by small craft, and it was unlikely that any would reach the garrison. So Murray and his soldiers were on their own. They did carry out two sorties in November, captured over eighty Spanish soldiers, but after that they simply had to sit out the siege, endure the bombardment, starve, and hope to survive the diseases. The garrison at Gibraltar also carried out a sortie in November. This was a much larger, more professionally organised, affair, but with similarly minor and short-term results. It was organised by General Eliott, the governor and the heart of the resistance. Using a good half of the garrison, in a carefully planned move he took out an expedition to destroy the most advanced trenches. The troops were moved out to seize control of the trenches, and a covering force was posted in case the Spaniards made a serious response. Groups of (unarmed) demolition parties filled in the trenches, spiked the guns, burned the wooden supports, and blew up the magazines. The Spaniards scarcely interfered with the operation in any way, and the besieged greatly enjoyed watching the confusion which resulted in the Spanish camp during the following days. It was a week before any attempt began to repair the damage, and more weeks before the Spanish position was restored. The replacement work was much stronger in construction, and so took much longer to build; it was all time gained by the besieged; the boost to British morale and the resulting Spanish depression were even greater effects. Such an operation was not possible on Minorca, partly because the garrison was too small to produce a large enough raiding party. Any sorties would have to be directed at the batteries, which were better guarded and more distant than the Gibraltar trenches. Not only that but the Spanish blockade had fairly quickly had a serious effect on the health of much of the garrison; scurvy had laid low many hundreds of the men, and typhus was also present. The number of men fit for some sort of duty by 1 January 1782 had been reduced to between 600 and 700, with as many incapacitated by illness. The besiegers by this time numbered 15,000, though they were also suffering from sickness. Minorca could not last out much longer. Murray’s authority was being undermined by his lieutenant-governor Colonel Sir William Draper, who intrigued against him with the other officers (and

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eventually forced him to a court martial after the siege). The question of asking for an armistice was actively discussed throughout January, but by the end of the month the question was not if, but when, to surrender. On 4 February (1782) Murray did surrender, when he had only 400 men left fit for duty, and twice that number in the hospital. Crillon, with relief, accepted the surrender with generosity, and he had his men were astonished at the fewness and the sickly condition of their enemies. The connection between the siege of Fort St Philip and that at Gibraltar was emphasised by the fact that Crillon, the victor at Minorca, was at once placed in overall charge of the Gibraltar operation. This was all the more urgent for the Spaniards since by early 1782 it was clear that the British had given up the fight in North America. Technically the Americans were still fighting as allies of the French, but they were both exhausted by their own war and completely uninterested in fighting outside America. They had happily accepted French help at home, but they were wholly self-centred, and not prepared to assist France in her own war. Still less could they help Spain, whose attitude to the republican and rebellious Americans had always been one of dismissive contempt – and anyway Spain was not an ally of the Americans, but only of France. The war still went on in the West Indies and India, and of course at sea in Europe, above all at Gibraltar. By early 1782 the conquest of Gibraltar had become an urgent matter for Spain, since it would soon be the only area of fighting. France was feeling the strain, and had more than once in the past failed to follow through on its promise to go on fighting until Gibraltar was taken. When Crillon took command at Gibraltar, however, he had a considerable French contingent as well as a much larger Spanish fleet and army under his control - perhaps 24,000 men. One of these was an engineer called Jean Claude le Michaud d’Arcon, who had the idea of constructing a set of mobile sea batteries, whose collective fire, added to that of the land batteries now continually pounding the British positions in Gibraltar, would assuredly bring victory. Despite naval and military scepticism all round, Arcon had the support of the king and so his plan was implemented. (Memories of the royal support for the once-confident Marquis de las Torres in 1727 surely stirred in the minds of the sceptics.) The British watched carefully as the floating batteries were constructed at Algeciras. Ten old Spanish line-of-battle ships were cut down, their solid sides reinforced by extra layers of thick defences, and provided with a minimum of sails. They were given pitched roofs, so that cannon balls and shells would roll off, provided with a water system designed to be used to extinguish fires, and armed with about thirty guns each. They were to be

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moved into position facing the defences of the Gibraltar town, and from there pound those defences to destruction. All this was visible to the British, from the arrival of the ships to the trials. Eliott was able to send a complete and accurate description to London even before they were used in the attack. Needless to say, the preparation of the floating batteries (as the British called them) took time, and was attended by the usual delays and problems associated with any invention and any military operation. Needless to say, also, the high command insisted that they be deployed before their designer was satisfied with them. The attack, signalled well in advance, began on 9 September. The batteries on land began a continuous heavy bombardment, employing 170 guns, with a break only during the regular afternoon siesta, and a slackening of fire during the night. A group of nine Spanish line–of-battle ships sailed along parallel to the Gibraltar shore bombarding the town, then returned the same way and bombarded again. They were too distant to have any effect, nor were they close enough to be damaged by fire from the shore; when red-hot shot was used, however, they retreated rapidly. The Spaniards had collected 300 landing craft, ready for an invasion once the defences had been battered down. The quantity of power and resources being used was staggering, but now all depended on the performance of the floating batteries. On 12 September the combined fleet, forty-nine French and Spanish line-of-battle ships, sailed into the bay, ready to exploit the anticipated destruction of the seaward defences of the fortress. The floating batteries approached on 13 September, taking three hours to be put into position. They were placed in a long line, chained together, about 900 yards from the wall along the shore, facing the three bastions built for defence by the British. At about 10 a.m. they opened fire, over 200 guns firing at virtually point-blank range. The British had developed a counter to this bombardment, the red-hot shot which had driven off the attack of the nine ships. These were cannon balls heated in a grate and fired from normal cannon, in which a well-soaked pad separated the charge from the heated shot. These had been fired at the land batteries, which were partly constructed of wood, and they had proved very successful in setting them on fire; it was hoped, not unreasonably, that firing them at wooden ships would be even more effective; Arcon’s sloping roofs, thickened bulwarks, and the water pumping system in his floating batteries were partly designed to meet this threat. At first the Spanish fire was ineffective, because they were firing too high, but equally the British retaliation was also ineffective, since the thick bulwarks and the sloping roofs prevented their missiles from penetrating, and it was taking a long time to make the cannon balls

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suitably hot. But by noon the Spaniards had adjusted their guns’ elevations to target the defences more accurately, but the British had also got their furnaces at work and had their red-hot shot was at last available. The British fire took time to become effective, just like the Spanish, but at about 2 p.m. two of the ships in the line of batteries took fire, and the Spanish fire began to slacken off. Many of the early heated shot were successfully dealt with, but some became lodged in places where they could not be reached and dowsed, and the waterpumping system was not as helpful as hoped – it was this installation which had not been perfected when the batteries were ordered into action prematurely. The gunners had to turn to deal with problems with the fires as they were started, so slackening the rate of fire still more. Gradually more of the batteries began to burn. British gunboats came out to provide further harassment, systematically battering at the sides of the batteries away from the British fire. By the time night fell the attack had clearly failed, and more and more of the floating batteries were in flames. The British gunboats turned to rescuing the Spanish sailors who were abandoning the burning ships. The fires began reaching the ships’ magazines: four of the batteries blew up, and four more were burnt out. Casualties, never precisely counted, were perhaps 2000 men, about half of the total crews. Crillon cancelled the second phase of the planned attack, the landing which was to be carried out by the landing craft and the lineof-battle ships. The battle-winning weapon was the British red-hot shot; it had driven off the great floating batteries which had been specially fortified in view of that weapon, it had been used successfully against the land batteries; in the face of such a weapon there was no point in exposing unprepared line-of-battle ships and landing craft to the British guns. The British artillerymen’s inventiveness had been more effective than the Franco-Spanish maritime inventiveness. A third grand relief expedition was also on its way from Britain. It had been delayed by a change of ministry in London, then by dithering by the new Cabinet over its several priorities, but as a clear sign that the loss of the North American colonies would now enable British forces to be deployed elsewhere, the supplies collected at Portsmouth for shipping to New York were now switched for Gibraltar, and the ships which had been used in North America were available in the Caribbean or Europe. Admiral Lord Howe was eventually provided with thirty-four lineof-battle ships and a great fleet of victuallers and storeships; it was known that the combined fleet was at Cadiz, and so it was necessary to provide Howe with an even bigger fleet than either Rodney or Darby had needed. He sailed from Spithead on 11 September, but was then held up for some time by foul winds in the Channel; at last

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he got away at the end of September. He had sailed, that is, just as the crisis at Gibraltar was developing, and just when the combined fleet moved from Cadiz into Gibraltar Bay. The delays could have been fatal. Meanwhile negotiations for peace were going ahead, and the Spaniards feared that they would be abandoned by France, just as France was being abandoned by its American allies. Therefore the approach of the relief fleet, even if Crillon and the admirals did not know precisely how large it was or when it would arrive, would be another crucial moment. The launch of the great attack in September came therefore in the knowledge of the threat of the approaching British fleet, and took place even though the floating batteries were not ready: it was almost the last chance of victory for Spain. That is, the relief fleet had contributed to the allies’ defeat even before it left the Channel. On the other hand, if the relief fleet could be defeated, there was still the possibility of taking Gibraltar. The combined fleet, that is, was now the only hope of forcing a British surrender. The last relief had been so long before that the Spaniards believed, correctly, that the garrison must, by late 1782, be close to starvation. But a new relief would allow Gibraltar to hold out for at least another year. Even if it did not get through, Crillon knew from experience at Minorca how long a small and scurvy-ridden garrison could hold out, and it was now obvious that Gibraltar could not be taken by assault from the land. If the combined fleet could prevent Howe from sending in his victuallers, there might still be a hope of eventual conquest, whatever Spain’s partners in the war might do. But the combined fleet was not in a condition fit to fight, the ships were foul and their crews were reduced in numbers and fitness, even though its forty-nine ships greatly outnumbered Howe’s thirty-four. The British fleet was, by contrast, clean and coppered, and, crucially, commanded by a first-class admiral. The weather favoured the British. As Howe approached the Strait on 10 October a gale battered the combined fleet. Howe had already survived a storm off Cape Finisterre, and when off Cape St Vincent on the 8th he had sent on a frigate, Latona, to check on the situation at Gibraltar. Latona brought the news that the fortress was untaken, but also that the combined fleet was in the bay. That day the storm struck both fleets. Howe, at sea, was relatively safe, and was able to keep his ships more or less together; in the bay, with little room for manoeuvre, the storm blew from the southwest directly into the bay, and gave the allied ships a great deal of trouble. They had been preparing to sail, and were caught halfway between safety at anchor and safety at sea. One French ship was wrecked, a Spanish ship, San Miguel, was driven close to Gibraltar and was captured, others were

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disabled, two more were blown into the Mediterranean. The combined fleet was reduced to forty-three ships, many of them damaged. Howe’s relief fleet approached Gibraltar the next day; a comfortable northerly breeze allowed the combined fleet to recover its composure. Howe gave careful instructions to the merchantmen on how to get into the bay, but only four succeeded in doing so; the rest were carried further east by the current. Admiral Cordoba planned that the combined fleet would form up across the entrance to the bay and so block entry, but the French captains declined to follow this course, and so the whole fleet came out. Howe covered the ships which had missed the bay, and formed up his fleet to fight the combined fleet. But it did not approach and passed on out of sight. Howe took advantage of a Levanter, an east wind, to shepherd the merchantmen into the bay, where they were rapidly unloaded. Meanwhile the Levanter carried the two fleets past Gibraltar into the Atlantic, where they squared up to each other near Cape Spartel. It was no part of Howe’s intention to fight a great battle when outnumbered four-to-three, and he still had large numbers of empty victuallers and storeships to protect; the battered combined fleet, even holding the weather gauge, failed to approach close enough to force a battle. There was an exchange of firing which brought death to 120 men and wounded over 500. The combined fleet could have forced a battle but refused to do so; Howe sailed away to Britain. Because of that the allies claimed a victory; in fact Howe had succeeded in his intention, which was to reprovision Gibraltar, and he had clearly deterred the combined fleet.13 The defeat of the grand assault in September, and the success of the new relief a month later made it clear to France and Spain that the conquest of Gibraltar was impossible, especially now that the British were undistracted by the American war. The French resignedly accepted this, but the Spaniards found it difficult to do so. In the peace negotiations it was suggested at one point by the British that the Rock could be given to Spain in return for peace. The Cabinet in London, after a great argument, but well understanding the impossibility of explaining such a concession to the House of Commons or the British public after the sacrifices of the previous four years, refused to allow it. Instead the British offered to cede Florida, Minorca, and some West Indian Islands, all of which had already been captured by the allies. To the relief of both the French and British governments the Spanish negotiator at once agreed, though this was directly against his instructions. France then accepted the terms before the Spanish

13 Clowes,

Royal Navy, 3.540–542.

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king heard about them; Spain once again found that the terms of its binding alliance were not seen as binding by its partner. In Gibraltar desultory mutual bombardments had continued, but the news of peace brought an end on 2 February 1783. Three days later the blockade was lifted; at the end of March the duc de Crillon made a visit to tour the fortress he had failed so decisively to conquer; he was cheered by the garrison, much to his surprise and pleasure but it was obviously British irony at work. The sieges of Gibraltar and of Fort St Philip are normally described as land operations, quite reasonably because most of the action, and almost all the relevant sources, describe them that way. But in truth they were both dominated by, and were functions of, sea power. Gibraltar was secured from conquest by the three great relief expeditions from Britain and the defeat of the Spanish floating batteries; Minorca fell to Spain for the opposite reason: no attempt was made to relieve the garrison. That is, the survival or loss of Gibraltar was due to the deployment of British naval power in support of the garrison; Minorca fell because it was of relatively minor importance to the British, no matter the justifications for holding the island. To be sure, there were other factors involved. The population of Gibraltar was composed very largely of loyal British subjects, and its garrison, its fortifications, and its artillery were fully up to the challenge of the Spanish siege; in Minorca Fort St Philip was in a poor condition, the small garrison quickly succumbed to sickness, the population of the island supported the attackers, and getting relief to the besieged fort was extremely difficult. But Gibraltar only survived by the reliefs brought in by sea; without the interventions of Rodney’s, Darby’s and Howe’s victuallers, the Rock would have fallen to the same combination of bombardment and starvation and sickness which brought down Minorca. Minorca was not valued by the British navy and government as Gibraltar was, a reversal of the priorities which had operated when they had been originally captured. It would have been possible to send a naval expedition to Minorca if the British government had wished. The navy could dominate the Minorcan seas at least long enough to reinforce and succour the garrison in the fort, and could have prevented supplies reaching the island. One attempt was almost made. Admiral Darby, in the second Gibraltar relief was ordered to send seven line-of-battle ships and 700 soldiers to Minorca, but he insisted that the ships were not fit enough for such a task, and the ministers in London decided to try again later, though the fort fell before they could do so. The lack of urgency is palpable. The island fell because the Spaniards controlled the seas around it; Gibraltar did not fall because at the crucial moments, the British

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controlled the nearby seas. No British account mentions this, but Minorca could not supply 14,000 soldiers out of its own production; they had to have been supplied from Spain and France; indeed, the obvious first task for a British relief force would have been to cut the enemy supply lines. It would have required many more than Darby’s seven ships, and this would be another reason to send a serious relief expedition. But the only possible base for such ships would be Gibraltar, which could only just survive itself. Faced with the siege of the Rock, the threat of an invasion of Britain, war in India and the West Indies and North America, and the need to protect convoys, something had to give. The major break was, of course, the loss of North America, but before then Minorca had gone. It went because British naval power, between 1779 and 1783, did not reach beyond Gibraltar; in effect, the Mediterranean was abandoned.

Chapter 8 French Wars III 1783–1815

After 1783 both Britain and France were exhausted yet again, but the British financial and commercial systems were better organised and more robust than those of France, so its recovery was correspondingly quicker and less disruptive. France even by 1787 was incapacitated by increasing internal difficulties, and soon sank into its revolution. One of the casualties of these difficulties was the French navy, an expensive institution. In Britain, by contrast, even though the country had been defeated and was internationally isolated during and after the American War, a mainly stable government and an active diplomacy brought it back into play in the European system fairly quickly. With its power reduced, and chastened by defeat, it did not seem so dangerous. The Royal Navy was one of the elements in the British system which was, for once, well attended-to during the peace. The number of its line-of-battle ships rose from 117 in 1785 to 145 in 1790, and cruisers from 82 to 131, which made it the most powerful single naval force in the world.1 This was largely the result of defeat in the preceding war, no doubt, during which on several occasions enemy fleets had reached the Channel in sufficient strength to force the Channel Fleet to avoid a fight – the ‘fleet-in-being’ option normally despised by British sailors; the need for a fleet to dominate the Channel had thus been demonstrated in the most graphic way. After 1783, however, Britain was also in naval competition with other countries, almost all of whom were busy building up their ship numbers at the same time; together, the fleets of Britain’s most persistent enemies, the allies Spain and France, outnumbered the Royal Navy by 1790. In Europe as a whole the number of line-of-battle ships of the major naval powers, except Britain, increased by well over a

1

N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean, London 2004, 606–609.

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hundred between 1780 and 1790, to which a dozen or more built by minor powers could be added.2 Three crises between 1783 and 1793 signalled the re-emergence of Britain on to the international scene, and at the same time, brought an end to the Franco-Spanish association for a time. In all three crises the British navy was used as a major, if unsubtle, addition to its diplomacy. In the Dutch revolutionary crisis of 1787, the weakness of France was demonstrated when it failed to support its Dutch allies in the face of menaces by the Prussian army and the British fleet. Three years later, in 1790, in the Nootka Sound crisis, the navy was mustered at Spithead as a threat to Spain, which found that France, now in internal convulsions, was unable to support its ally. On the other hand, in the Ochakov affair the following year, the Prime Minister, William Pitt, in a moment of hubris, proposed to use the fleet against Russia, until he was rescued by the refusal of the Empress Catherine to take him seriously, by Parliament which failed to support him, and by the Admiralty whose horrified reaction to the prospect made it clear that the sailors would not consent either.3 This affair indicated limits to British naval authority. Russia had become a Mediterranean power in 1770, when, during a war with the Ottoman Empire, it had been able to send a fleet from the Baltic into the Mediterranean and there defeat the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Chesme. This was partly a result of increased confidence after successes in naval wars in the Baltic, and partly because its fleet was able to call at Portsmouth to refit and resupply on the way. Friendly relations with Britain enabled Empress Catherine II to hire considerable numbers of British unemployed sailors, particularly officers, to man and command those ships. Two Scottish officers, Samuel Greig and John Elphinston, were in effective command of the Russian fleet in the battle.4 The result of the war gave Russia direct access for the first time to the Black Sea. The khanate of the Crimean Tartars was detached from the Ottoman Empire, then seized by Russia, which thereby gained control of the harbour at Sebastopol, which became Russia’s Black Sea fleet base. A new war with the Ottoman Empire followed, but this time Catherine found several European powers, including

2

Ibid; full details are in Jan Glete, Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies and State Building in Europe and America, 1500–1860, 2 vols, Stockholm 1993. 3 For these crises, see Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848, Oxford 1994, 40–41, 70, 79–83; John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, vol. 2, London 1983, 3–41. 4 Norman E. Saul, Russia and the Mediterranean, 1797–1807, Chicago 1970, 5–8; Greig’s tomb is in the cathedral in Tallinn, Estonia.

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Britain, ranged against her, and by 1791 the British government was actively considering war to support the Ottoman Empire.5 The only way the British could attack Russia would be to send part of the fleet into the Baltic to menace St Petersburg and the Baltic coast, and part into the Black Sea. In the latter case it would have needed the support of the Ottoman Turks, who were unwilling to open the passage to the Black Sea to anyone. Both sections of the fleet would have been vulnerable to attack by Russian forces – the Russian navy had fifty-one line-of-battle ships in the Baltic and seven in the Black Sea – while other states might well seize the opportunity to cut the Royal Navy down to size while it was divided and therefore vulnerable; Spain had over seventy line-of-battle ships, a fleet which could threaten the Mediterranean detachment’s lines of communication, and would no doubt be more than pleased to gain revenge for its humiliation over Nootka the year before, and for the defeat at Gibraltar in 1783. All this finally overbore Pitt’s recklessness; in the Black Sea Russia gained more of the northern coast and then vigorously began developing its gains. The deliquescence of France proved less than total, and the attacks launched on it by Prussia and Austria during 1792 were defeated, so further promoting French recovery. Early the following year, however, after the execution of their king, the French took the initiative and declared war on Britain. The French navy was by this time in poor condition, having been neglected, and the internal situation in France invited external intervention. In this case, Britain and Spain were on the same side, and the British fleet in the Mediterranean linked up with the Spanish fleet to occupy Toulon, by invitation of the city’s royalists. Over the early months of 1793 successive reinforcements were sent to the small squadron at Gibraltar;6 eventually the new commanderin-chief, Vice-Admiral Lord Hood, had a fleet of twenty-one or twenty-two line-of-battle ships, a 50-gun ship, and sixteen frigates, with small ships, hospital ships, and storeships. At Toulon the French had nineteen line-of-battle ships ready for sea, and eleven more undergoing refit or repair or construction; this was officered largely by royalists, and the city was largely royalist in sympathy. Hood was able to impose a blockade with little challenge, and as republican forces from the interior began to menace the city, the royalists turned to him for help. After negotiations he was able to occupy the base and 5

M. S. Anderson, ‘Russia and the Mediterranean, 1788–1791: A Little-known Chapter in the History of Naval Warfare and Privateering’ , MM 45, 1959, 25–35. 6 Listed by William James, Naval History of Great Britain, 2nd ed., London 1850, 71–72.

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land forces to defend the city. A Spanish fleet of fifteen line-of battle ships under Admiral Juan de Langara arrived to join the British; Spanish troops and marines reinforced those which Hood had put ashore as the French republican armies advanced on the city.7 Britain, Spain, and the French royalists were later joined by Piedmontese and Neapolitan forces, but the intentions of their governments diverged quite markedly. The French royalists hoped to use the others to overthrow the republican regime, or at least defend the city against republican attack; the British were fixated on the apparent threat of the large French fleet in the harbour, and perhaps they looked for an opportunity to destroy it from the start; Spain was more interested in having Britain and France neutralise each other, with the possible revival of the former Franco-Spanish alliance – Admiral de Langara had fought against the British in the American war. The aim of the French republicans was both to punish the royalists who had wanted to reverse the revolution, and expel the foreigners from French soil; it was their determination and strength, clothed in French patriotism, which was the decisive factor. The partners at Toulon did not have sufficient military (as opposed to naval) force to resist the republicans’ attack. Most of the soldiers who fought were Spanish (7000 men) or Neapolitan (5000), but the approaching republicans were at least double that; the British contingent consisted of the marines from the fleet and two regiments brought up from Gibraltar under the lieutenant-governor, Major-General Charles O’Hara.8 This total was scarcely enough to defend the city against republican forces twice as large, given the divergent aims, and amid a French population who detested all foreigners. When two large republican armies approached the city, and the well-handled French artillery (in part commanded by Captain Napoleon Bonaparte) achieved a commanding position, the port had to be evacuated. The British wanted to steal or destroy the French warships, but neither the royalists nor the Spaniards would agree – the royalists saw the ships as their own, quite rightly, while Admiral de Langara made it quite clear that ‘it might be in the interest of England to burn the French fleet, but it was by no means in the 7

For the events in Toulon, see selections from The Naval Chronicle, ed. Nicolas Tracy, London 1998, 1.19–46; James, Naval History, 1.71–93 (with a valuable contemporary description of Toulon quoted on 69–71); Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.202–211, and Malcolm Crook, Toulon in War and Revolutions, from the Ancien Regime to the Restoration, 1750–1820, Manchester 1991, 126–159. 8 O’Hara was the son of Lord Tyrawley, a former governor of Minorca; he was the officer who had, at Yorktown in 1781, negotiated the terms of surrender of the British army. He was in Gibraltar from 1787, lieutenant-governor 1792–1795, then governor 1792–1802: Jackson, Gibraltarians, 180.

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interest of Spain’ . Captain Sir Sidney Smith was given the task of accomplishing as much destruction as possible but to the British the result was disappointing. Nine French line-of-battle ships were burnt, four were seized and brought out, to be recommissioned as British ships, another eighteen line-of-battle ships, in various states of readiness, were left in the harbour; the British also took away a dozen smaller ships.9 The fleet carried away half the population of the city as well as the ships; the rebellion of the city had produced an order from the hardpressed government in Paris to destroy it; such an order was impossible to carry out, but the vigorous use of the guillotine succeeded in reducing the population even more.10 The naval base survived, and still held fifteen sea-ready line–of-battle ships, though this fleet remained only a latent threat until the republican massacres were succeeded by a sensible naval administration. Lord Hood turned to take possession of (French) Corsica to find a place for the 15,000 refugees and to secure a base near Toulon (other refugees went to Italy and Gibraltar). He spent much of 1794 besieging and capturing small Corsican towns – San Fiorenzo, Bastia, Calvi – held by French republicans. The Corsican population held aloof until it was clear that the British intended to clear out the republicans, then indicated their willingness to accept British suzerainty. A British viceroy, Sir Gilbert Elliott, was installed, but it could hardly be said that the island was an enthusiastic new colony. The aim of the most prominent Corsicans had been, and remained, independence.11 In the midst of this campaign the French fleet at Toulon came out, though with only seven line-of-battle ships; Hood followed them along the coast and cornered them in Gourjean Bay, but there they were safe; they returned to Toulon when Hood took his ships back to Corsica. San Fiorenzo became the base from which the fleet watched Toulon, while single ships patrolled the French and Italian coasts. Hood’s successor, Vice-Admiral Sir William Hotham, moved his base to Livorno; the supervision of Toulon became increasingly distant and decreasingly effective.

9

Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.203; Tom Pocock, A Thirst for Glory: The Life of Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, London 1996, 36–42; lists of the French ships and their fates are in Naval Chron., 1.50–60. 10 The estimates of the casualties in the massacres range as high as 6000: Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.210. 11 Naval Chron., 1.49–50; James, Naval History, 1.93–95, 207–215; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.243–245; biographies of Nelson usually have an account of the Corsican war.

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The French ships came out again in March 1795, fifteen line-ofbattle ships and six frigates, commanded by Rear-Admiral Pierre Martin; the aim was to land a force of 5000 soldiers in Corsica to begin its reconquest; they captured the disabled British line-ofbattle ship Berwick on the way. Hotham brought his fleet out from Livorno on hearing the news. The two fleets encountered each other off Cape Noli, on the Genoese coast, and fought a complex action which resulted in the capture of two French ships, while four of the British ships were severely damaged. Hotham refused to go in pursuit of the apparently retreating French, though urged to do so by Captain Horatio Nelson of Agamemnon, whose aggressiveness had been in large part responsible for the capture of the French ships.12 But Hotham had already lost Berwick; Illustrious, badly damaged in the fighting, was wrecked on the voyage to Hotham’s base. Admiral Martin was reinforced by six line-of-battle ships from Brest early in April and put to sea with a fleet of seventeen ships on 7 June; a week later Hotham, cruising off Minorca on the assumption that Martin would head for the west, was reinforced by nine line-of-battle ships under Rear-Admiral Robert Man (though this brought the number of admirals in the fleet to five). The British fleet, now twenty-three line-of-battle ships, returned to San Fiorenzo to water and refit. Nelson, with Agamemnon, two frigates, and two brigs, was detached to cruise along the coast from Genoa westward. He succeeded in attracting the attention of the whole French fleet, just out from Toulon, which followed him towards San Fiorenzo. Hotham’s ships were unable to sail at once, and the French turned away when they saw the number of British ships. Hotham got out of San Fiorenzo Bay the next morning, and three days later he found the French off the Hyeres Islands. The action which followed was as inconclusive as that off Genoa; one French ship, Alcide, was briefly captured, but it then caught fire and blew up. Hotham called off those ships which had become engaged as both fleets approached the dangerous coast; the French got away into Toulon.13 Hotham’s fleet returned to Corsica, then to Livorno, then came out to investigate Toulon again. Nelson was again detached to raid anchorages along the French and Genoese coast, during which he cut out several small French warships and five transports laden with provisions for the French army. While Hotham was away from Toulon, a French squadron under Rear-Admiral Joseph de Richery

12 Naval

Chron., 1.145–150; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.268–272, a most confusing account; James, Naval History, 1.283–294; Tunstall, Naval Warfare, 212–213. 13 Naval Chron., 1.150–153; James, Naval History, 1.296–302; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.274–277.

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sailed – six line-of-battle ships and three frigates - but Hotham did not discover this for a week, and not for another two weeks did he send a British squadron to chase the French. This delay proved to be a mistake. Richery’s squadron intercepted half of the British Levant convoy off Cape St Vincent; his big ships attended to the escort while the frigates mopped up the merchantmen: the former French line-of-battle ship Censeur was retaken, and the other escorts, two British 74s, were driven off; the frigates captured thirty out of thirty-one merchantmen. (The other half of the convoy, thirty-two merchantmen escorted by three frigates, reached England safely.) Some blame must attach to Hotham for this disaster; he did not detach the pursuing squadron until 5 October; Richery’s squadron captured the convoy on the 7th. An earlier detachment would have allowed the pursuing British squadron to catch up with the convoy in time to save it, though it must be said that there was no guarantee that it would have found the French force.14 A second French squadron sailed from Toulon, originally to search for that same convoy. Commodore Honore Ganteaume, with one lineof-battle ship and five frigates, sailed into the Aegean. There they drove off the two British cruisers which were blockading two French ships in Smyrna who had seized the British frigate Nemesis in the harbour some time before. Ganteaume then cruised in the region for several weeks, capturing merchantmen. A searching British squadron met only a single detached frigate from Ganteaume’s squadron, which got away.15 Hotham was relieved and command of the fleet was taken over by Admiral Sir John Jervis, who brought a new discipline to the somewhat demoralised Mediterranean fleet. The participation of the Dutch on the French side, the French conquest of the Austrian Netherlands, and the increasing possibility of Spain reverting to its old French alliance, meant that the Mediterranean fleet was very liable to be outnumbered, and could not be reinforced because of the demands of these other areas. Jervis had eighteen line-of-battle ships; there were fifteen French ships at Toulon, seven Spaniards at Cartagena, and a larger Spanish fleet at Cadiz. The British had to guard the English Channel (and Ireland, which was attacked during 1796); a fleet had to watch the Dutch; and many ships were in the West Indies or scattered on other missions. In effect, Jervis and the Mediterranean fleet were, for the moment, on their own. The experience of the past years had shown that the French fleet at Toulon was well commanded and enterprising. In reply Jervis adopted 14 James, 15 James,

Naval History, 1.303–305; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.277–278. Naval History, 1.305–306; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.278–279.

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a newly aggressive approach. He sent his Vice-Admiral, the Hon. William Waldegrave, in Barfleur (98) with four 74s to free Nemesis from detention at Tunis, where it had been taken by its Smyrna captors. The sheer size of Waldegrave’s force persuaded the bey of Tunis and the French ships not to resist.16 (The memory of Blake’s bombardment was perhaps still alive.) Jervis sent Nelson and a small squadron to scour the Genoese and French coasts and blockade Genoa. Nelson interrupted a major supply line of the French army in north Italy, capturing munitions and guns, including much of Bonaparte’s siege train (though it was the spring floods which prevented the French from attacking Mantua, not the lack of cannon.)17 Captain Thomas Fremantle in the Inconstant frigate helped to rescue refugees at Livorno when the French army approached, and escorted thirty-seven merchantmen from the port; the French moved in that afternoon. (Fremantle found a girl among the refugees on his ship, Betsey Wynne, whom he married some time later.) Nelson occupied Elba, pre-empting a French attack.18 These events, in March to July 1796, looked impressive, but the French army under General Bonaparte nevertheless succeeded in conquering northern Italy, and French forces now occupied the coast as far as Livorno; he also concluded an armistice with Naples, and the Neapolitan line-of-battle ships with Jervis were withdrawn. The seizure of Elba had been an attempt by Jervis to secure a base close to the mainland, and an advanced defence for Corsica, but this was unlikely to hold up the French advance for long. A month later, in August, France and Spain concluded an alliance,19 so removing the Spanish ports – Minorca, Alicante, Cartagena, Barcelona – from Jervis’s sources of supply. Even before the alliance was signed, the Spanish fleet at Cadiz escorted Rear-Admiral de Richery’s raiding squadron (which had gone into Cadiz with the prizes from the convoy he had captured) on his way towards America. The British blockading squadron, seven line-of-battle ships under Rear-Admiral Man, was summoned to join Jervis and had left the blockading station, but could have done little in the face of the seven French and twenty Spanish line-of-battle ships which came out.20 The Spanish Cadiz fleet sailed into the Mediterranean. It encountered Man’s squadron returning to Gibraltar for supplies, which 16 James, 17 James,

Naval History, 1.342; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.284. Naval History, 1.343–344; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.284–285; Martin Boycott-Brown, The Road to Rivoli: Napoleon’s First Campaign, London 2001, 368. 18 Anne Fremantle (ed.), The Wynne Diaries, 3 vols, Oxford 1935–1940. 19 Schroeder, Transformation, 162–163. 20 James, Naval History, 1.345–346; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.285–286.

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escaped with the loss of a brig. The Spanish fleet collected the seven line—of-battle ships at Cartagena; with twenty-six line-of-battle ships Admiral Langara looked in at Jervis’s fleet at Corsica, then went to Toulon where there were another twelve (French) ships. Man, meanwhile, had reached Gibraltar and persuaded a council of his captains that the only thing to do was to retreat to England, despite express orders to rejoin Jervis. He was never employed again, but at least he was not shot.21 Jervis had only eighteen ships against thirty-eight. From Cadiz to Sicily the coasts were either hostile or neutral. In Corsica the partisans of France were encouraged; risings broke out. Viceroy Elliott was ordered to evacuate his troops to Elba, with the intention of holding that island. The move was encouraged by a French landing on Corsica, after which the British garrisons were gradually either defeated or withdrawn.22 The only place in the Mediterranean which was left under British control was therefore Elba, which the French could probably ignore. Jervis might use that as his base, but the island could not possibly supply his whole fleet. He brought the fleet to Gibraltar, his crews on half-rations. There were no British warships in the Mediterranean, but Gibraltar was firmly held, and the Spaniards made no attempt to take it. It was a combination of the threat of the joint fleet and shortage of supplies which was the cause of Jervis’ retreat, on top of the earlier inability to suppress French campaigning. For the allies, however, simply holding a large fleet in the Mediterranean without an enemy present was pointless, so, leaving most of the French ships at Toulon, Langara came out with all the Spanish ships and a French squadron of five line–of-battle ships and three frigates under Admiral Villeneuve. The Spaniards went into Cartagena; the French sailed on for Brest, getting past Gibraltar when a storm pinned the British fleet into Gibraltar Bay. A series of accidents removed several ships from Jervis’ fleet – Courageux was wrecked off Algeciras, Gibraltar was damaged, Zealous hit a rock near Tangier, Bombay Castle grounded in the Tagus. He went to Lisbon to await reinforcements, and to bolster Portuguese determination. Nelson was sent back to Elba to evacuate the British forces from the island. By the end of 1796 Jervis in the Tagus estuary had just fourteen line-of-battle ships. In January 1797 he escorted a large Portuguese (and British) convoy on the first stage of its voyage 21 James, 22 James,

Naval History, 1.346; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.286–287. Naval History, 1.347–349; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.287–288; Colin White, 1797: Nelson’s Year of Destiny, Stroud 1998, 16–20.

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towards Brazil, and then returned to find he had received a reinforcement of five ships. An accident removed yet another ship (St George), but he now had fifteen under his direct command. He brought the fleet, against persistent easterly winds (a Levanter) to take station off Cape St Vincent.23 It was now the turn of the Spaniards to experience accidents. Admiral Jose de Cordoba took over from Langara, and sailed with twenty-seven line-of-battle ships from Cartagena with the aim of joining the French at Brest to operate in British waters. He sent in two of his ships to Algeciras. When they came out they met and chased the frigate Minerve which was coming west from Elba bringing Nelson and the ex-viceroy Elliot and troops to Gibraltar after the evacuation of Elba. Minerve got away easily, and Nelson joined Jervis with the news of the Spanish approach. Cordoba was intending to go into Cadiz, but the easterly Levanter pushed the Spanish fleet well past that port towards the Atlantic.24 The two fleets, neither knowing the strength of the other, met on the morning of 14 February. The Spanish ships were in three groups, one of which was a little stronger than the British fleet, but the other two were mainly out of contact. Jervis guided his fleet between the two main sections of the Spanish force and turned to attack the larger part. The Spaniards were well ahead and might have got away, until Jervis signalled the rear division of his fleet to turn to the attack so as to hold up the Spaniards. Only Nelson in Captain saw the signal, and made the turn, supported by Captain Cuthbert Collingwood in Excellent; these two drove into the Spanish fleet. The rest of the British ships therefore had time to join the attack. A melee followed, in which four Spanish ships – San Jose, San Nicolas, Salvador del Mundo, San Ysidro - were captured, and several more were badly damaged, including the enormous four-decker Santissima Trinidad, which at one point was taken, but then recaptured by two Spanish ships.25 Jervis called off the brief pursuit which followed and the surviving Spanish ships got into Cadiz. The strategic result was to prevent the Spanish fleet from joining the French at Brest, and to pin it down in Cadiz as it conducted repairs and as the British imposed a blockade. 23 James,

Naval History, 1.349–354, 2.33–35; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.290, 305–306; White, 1797, 29–34. 24 James, Naval History, 2.35; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.306–307; White, 1797, 34–38. 25 Naval Chron., 1.172–183; James, Naval History, 2.37–52; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.307–318; Tunstall, Naval Warfare, 216–219; White, 1797, 49–71; discussions also by A. H. Taylor, ‘The Battle of Cape St Vincent’ , MM 40, 1954, 228–230, and M. A. J. Palmer, ‘Sir John’s Victory: The Battle of Cape St Vincent Reconsidered’ , MM 77, 1991, 31–46.

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There were still twenty Spanish line-of-battle ships in Cadiz, a fleet which, when repairs were finished, would outnumber the blockaders. Nelson led some dangerous raids on the town and the shore, bombarding the place with mortars and sometimes himself fighting hand to hand amid raiding parties. He had led the storming of two successive Spanish ships in the battle, and now led these raids. (He was also a master publicist, and succeeded in having his exploits well known, and himself acclaimed; this was just after the mutinies at Spithead, the Nore, and Harwich, so that admirals leading raids and an authentic naval hero were necessary items to restore confidence in the fleet, and the fleet’s confidence in itself.) The Cadiz blockade once again drew British attention to the fact that the city was the destination of the Spanish treasure ships. One of these was reported to be waiting at Santa Cruz in Tenerife in the Canary Islands for the opportunity to reach Spain. Nelson was sent with a squadron of three line-of-battle ships, a 50-gun ship, and three frigates to seize the treasure, but this turned out to be impossible in the face of a well-organised Spanish defence. A landing party had to surrender; 140 men died and 100 were wounded, including Nelson himself. The treasure, of course, in accordance with normal Spanish practice, and as should have been understood by Jervis and Nelson, had long been removed from the ships, and was well out of reach of the raiding party.26 The defeat of the major allied naval force in southern Europe and its locking up in the port of Cadiz opened up the possibility for Earl St Vincent (the new title of Sir John Jervis) to recover control of the Mediterranean. It was first necessary to keep the Spanish fleet blockaded in Cadiz, but its condition was not such as to suggest an early emergence. In Britain it was known that the large army which had been gathered across the Channel for the proposed invasion of Britain had been disbanded, in part because of the defeat of the Spanish fleet; but its commander, the rising star General Bonaparte, had adopted a new project. Already, in June 1797, a French force had come out of Toulon to occupy the former Venetian Seven Islands, stretching along the Greek coast from Corfu to Cerigo; Corfu in particular was a useful naval base. The expedition also gained possession of three Venetian line-of-battle ships, three frigates, and a dozen smaller warships.27

26 Naval

Chron., 1.193–200; James, Naval History, 2.62–68; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.321–324; White, 1797, 98–131; J. H. Spinney, ‘Nelson at Santa Cruz’ , MM 45, 1959, 207–223. 27 James, Naval History, 2.70.

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In May 1798 Nelson, now a knight and recovered from his various wounds, returned to Gibraltar with particular orders to reconnoitre the French base at Toulon. This was hardly a surprise to anyone, but it marked the British intention to return to the Mediterranean. St Vincent held the Strait firmly with Gibraltar, the Cadiz blockade, and ships at Lisbon; he could thus keep the French and Spanish ships in the Mediterranean apart from the Spanish fleet at Cadiz. Nelson took three line-of-battle ships and three frigates on 17 May to investigate Toulon. In the port there was a fleet ready for sea; a large number of troops were camped in the area, though their destination was not known. Nelson’s little squadron was driven away by a gale later in the day, and two days later Bonaparte’s expedition set sail, with the fifteen line-of-battle ships, fourteen frigates, forty other warships, and four hundred transports. The naval commander was Vice-Admiral Brueys, but he was dominated by Bonaparte; the army had 36,000 men. More transports were collected from Genoa and a further set later joined from Civitavecchia.28 Nelson’s ships reconnoitred Toulon again on the 31st, finding the French gone. He received a reinforcement of ten line-of-battle ships and a 50-gun ship sent by St Vincent with sensible orders that he should search for the French, leaving him to devise his own plan; St Vincent suggested Naples, Sicily, Portugal or Ireland as possible French targets, which was tantamount to saying Nelson should make up his own mind. Several clues in fact pointed to the south and east. Nelson could be sure that the French exit from the sea was blocked at Gibraltar, so they must still be in the Mediterranean. At Syracuse in Sicily he heard that Malta had been captured by the French, so the eastern Mediterranean was clearly the area to search. Nelson decided that the target was Egypt, partly a deduction, partly intuition. The better sailing qualities of a small squadron of British ships, as against a large lumbering convoy, ensured that Nelson’s ships investigated Alexandria before Bonaparte’s fleet arrived. He returned to Sicily, and the French were able to disembark in Egypt. When Nelson looked again, a month after the French landing, the French fleet was lined up in Aboukir Bay, and he launched an immediate attack unexpectedly late in the day. The British fleet tackled the French line in an inspired improvisation which put the British ships on both sides of each French ship in succession. In one of the most complete victories at sea, only two of the French line-of-battle ships out of thirteen escaped. The rest were either taken or destroyed.29 28 David 29 Naval

Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon, London 1966, 212–215. Chron., 1.240–276; James, Naval History, 2.166–211; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.351–373; Tunstall, Naval Warfare, 224–228; Oliver Warner, Nelson’s

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The result was to maroon Bonaparte’s army in Egypt, unable to receive reinforcements or supplies. The French Mediterranean fleet was drastically depleted; the men killed and captured at the battle of the Nile, as the British called it, were skilled seamen who could not be easily replaced. At once, St Vincent exploited the new conditions, sending Commodore John Duckworth with a force of 3000 soldiers to retake Minorca from Spanish control;30 a second detachment attacked the French forces in Malta, partly by arming the Maltese, who detested the atheistic, greedy French conquerors. On the continent, however, other results followed: the French, ever suspicious of Savoy-Piedmont, quickly secured control of that mainland part of the kingdom of Sardinia; local enthusiasm produced by the naval victory persuaded King Ferdinand IV of Naples to change his allegiance, with the result that he was swiftly driven out of his mainland kingdom and took refuge with Nelson in his flagship. Nelson took him and the court to Sicily where the Royal Navy protected the remains of his kingdom. On the mainland a peasant rising led by a cardinal of the Church overthrew the new French-installed Parthenopean Republic, and Nelson’s arrival confirmed the recovery – but for only a short time.31 For a brief moment a British naval expedition of a couple of barges rowed up the Tiber to occupy Rome ‘and the British flag flew over the Capitol’; the ‘conquest’ lasted no more than a fortnight.32 In a wider context, Russia was encouraged to join Britain in the war, and rather later so did Austria - this became the War of the Second Coalition. The British and French reactions to Nelson’s victory are classic cases of the contrasted capabilities of sea and land powers. The French extended their control over all Italy, which was contiguous to their territory; the British were able to dominate the Mediterranean from just two small islands and Gibraltar. Relatively small British expeditions gained control over several islands from which the continental coasts could be supervised, and the French force in Egypt was isolated. The French moved quickly to seize those parts of Italy

Battles, London 1965, 27–76; see also all biographies of Nelson; for some details, see Michael Duffy, ‘British Naval Intelligence and Bonaparte’s Egyptian Expedition of 1798’ , and Tom Malcomson, ‘An Aid to Nelson’s Victory? A Description of the Harbour of Aboukir, 1798’ , MM 84, 1992, 278–290 and 291–307; a seaman’s account is in British Naval Documents, 421–422. 30 Naval Chron., 1.290–296; Desmond Gregory, Minorca: The Illusory Prize, London 1990, 196–200, as usual ignores the naval aspect of the British conquest; Micaela Mata, Conquests and Reconquests of Menorca, trans. Bruce Laurie, Barcelona 1984, 220–236. 31 Naval Chron., 2.42–46. 32 James, Naval History, 2.317; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.399; the quotation is from both books, who use identical words.

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they required, but it took two years to gain control of Malta, and even longer to destroy the French position in Egypt.33 Bonaparte launched an invasion of Syria from Egypt, threatening to conquer large parts of the Ottoman Empire and so to gain control of even more of the Mediterranean coasts and ports and trade. He was blocked at Acre in Palestine, where the local Ottoman governor, Jezzar Pasha, reinforced by British guns and ships under Sir Sidney Smith, was able to hold the city against a French siege. Once defeated there and beset by opposition inland, Bonaparte gave up the attempt to carve out a French empire in the Near East and returned to France. He was possibly encouraged to do this by Smith, but if so, it was a mistake, for Bonaparte promptly seized power in France, thus inaugurating a long series of wars for the next sixteen years.34 The French reacted to the defeat at the Nile by sending part of their fleet at Brest to the Mediterranean. A large force of twenty-five lineof-battle ships under Vice-Admiral Eustache de Bruix came out of Brest, covered by a fog, and got well away before the British realised it had gone; the British then assumed that Ireland was the target. Bruix’s orders were to bring out the Spanish squadron at Ferrol, sail past Cadiz and Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, break the blockade of the French forces at Malta, then take supplies to the army in Egypt. In the process he might significantly reduce the British fleet in the sea, which was widely scattered on various stations. The recently captured Minorca was also on his list. Bruix achieved none of his aims, though this was not owing to any actions by the British. St Vincent was ill, leaving the command to Admiral Lord Keith, who managed never to find the French. Bruix went straight to Toulon, then passed supplies to Genoa for the French army in Italy (fighting the Russian and Austrian forces), returned to Toulon, then sailed to Cartagena. There the Spanish fleet from Cadiz had arrived, rather battered, to join the Spanish squadron already in the harbour. When Bruix sailed again he had a fleet of forty ships, but went back out of the sea and to Brest. Keith discovered he had gone three weeks later. On the way Bruix collected more ships from Cadiz; Keith followed the combined fleet, and was only a day behind when he was off Brest.35 33 For

the French experience in Egypt, see the account of Joseph-Marie Moiret, Memoirs of Napoleon’s Egyptian Expedition, 1798–1801, trans. and ed. Rosemary Brindle, London 2001. 34 Naval Chron., 2.14–31; James, Naval History, 2.318–336; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.400–405; Chandler, Campaigns, 230–245; Pocock, Thirst for Glory, 85–112; Nathan Schur, Napoleon in the Holy Land, London 1999. 35 Naval Chron., 2.40–42; James, Naval History, 2.292–301; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.380–388.

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Bruix had made no attempt to do what he had been sent to do, though he did achieve a strong concentration of forces at Brest. His basic problem was that he had evidently been instructed to avoid any British force of any strength. He could have attacked the Cadiz blockading squadron, which he outnumbered perhaps two-to-one, which would have seriously damaged British strength in the sea, and would have made it relatively easy to clear all the British ships out of the Mediterranean, but he avoided it, and that meant he was going to be hunted wherever he went. It scarcely mattered that he was never sighted, he was harried simply because he knew that the British could assemble a force strong enough to challenge him, even when he had forty line-of-battle ships – and that they were looking for him. His targets – Minorca, Malta, and Egypt – were so obvious that if he arrived at any of them his whereabouts would be known and he would be instantly vulnerable. When he left the Mediterranean, taking the Spanish squadrons with him, he left the sea wide open to British exploitation. The marooned French army in Egypt became an opportunity to display the effectiveness of British sea power, its control of the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, and the expertise of the newly effective British army. The expedition sent from Britain first attempted an attack on Ferrol where some Spanish ships were sheltered; this failed. The expedition was then supposedly to attack Cadiz, but all the British naval commanders in the area were eloquently against it, and so were the military commanders. Finally, it was decided to use the army being carried in the expedition to attack the French forces in Egypt. By an unusually effective cooperation between Admiral Lord Keith and General Sir Robert Abercromby, the expedition was well supplied, well-trained (after camping for a month on the southern Turkish coast), and highly successful, the British infantry scoring resounding defeats over the French, whose tactics were countered by the steady British foot. The expedition had sailed all the way through the Mediterranean without any French interference. (An attempt to reach Egypt by a French squadron under Admiral Ganteaume was unsuccessful.) In addition, a small expedition had arrived from India to attack the French from the south.36 Ganteaume had been distracted from his original intention of sailing directly to Egypt (like Bruix) by the mendacious information 36 Naval

Chron., 2.198–217; James, Naval History, 2.451–452, 3.68–76, 80–94; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.424–425, 446–458; Piers Mackesy, British Victory in Egypt, London 1995; C. Northcote Parkinson, War in Eastern Seas 1793– 1815, London 1954, 173–179; Hugh Popham, A Damned Cunning Fellow, Tyrwadraeth, Cornwall, 1991.

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supplied by a captured British frigate captain, and went instead into Toulon. He tried again for Egypt in February, but suffered damage in a storm and was sighted by a British squadron under Sir John Borlase Warren (the Cadiz blockading squadron, brought into the sea to hunt for Ganteaume – just as Keith had been brought in to search for Bruix). Ganteaume returned once more to Toulon. Bonaparte was annoyed and sent him out again in April. After calling at Livorno and Brindisi his four line-of-battle ships and two storeships got close to Alexandria by early June. He tried to land his troops at Benghazi, but his reception was hostile, and British ships were spotted nearby, so he again abandoned the attempt and returned westwards. He captured the Swiftsure (74) on the return voyage. He was back in Toulon by late July.37 Ganteaume had left some of his ships at Toulon. They were put under Rear-Admiral Linois and sent to collect a dozen French and Spanish ships at Cadiz. In the Strait he met head winds and went into Algeciras. There he was attacked by part of the Cadiz blockading force under Rear-Admiral Sir James Saumarez. Saumarez’s ships attacked anchored ships which were sheltered by the shore batteries, and the British Hannibal was captured; the rest were driven out, badly damaged. Saumarez brought his ships into Gibraltar for repair. Saumarez’s move had opened Cadiz, and Vice-Admiral Juan de Moreno came out to assist Linois with six Spanish line-of-battle ships. This reversed the numbers of the rival fleets, and Saumarez with five ships now faced nine. The object of the allies was to bring out Linois’ ships from Algeciras; Saumarez wanted revenge for his defeat – such a reckless defeat as he had suffered would bring swift dismissal. When the allied ships sailed, the British followed, and attacked. In a confused running fight two Spanish 112-gun ships fired at each other and both caught fire and blew up; two French ships were captured.38 Saumarez survived. Russia became involved in the Mediterranean again because of an impulse by the Tsar Paul, who manoeuvred his own election as Hospitaller Grand Master when the Knights had been dispersed by the French conquest of Malta.39 Tortuous diplomacy led him to believe that, once captured by the British, the island would become his, and 37 James, 38 James,

Naval History, 3.69–77; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.452–453. Naval History, 3.96–115; Clowes, Royal Navy, 4.458–470; Naval Chron., 2.218–233. 39 Saul, Russia and the Mediterranean, 43–46; Roderick Cavaliero, The Last of the Crusaders, London 1960, reprinted Valetta 2001, 236–242; Roderick E McGee, Paul I of Russia, Oxford 1992, 258–275; William Hardman, A History of Malta during the Period of the French and British Occupation, 1798–1815, London 1909, facsimile edition Valetta 1994, ch. 17.

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the Knights re-established. Part of the Russian Black Sea fleet, with Russia temporarily allied with the Ottoman Empire, came through the Straits. It campaigned to capture the Ionian Seven Islands from the French, and intervened in Naples in alliance with the British.40 Cooperation between Russians and British was difficult and intermittent, and Paul soon came to the conclusion that making peace with Napoleonic France was the better option. Russian aims in this campaign in the Mediterranean were rather larger than merely the tsar’s obsession with Malta.41 The Russian fleet ranged widely, with ships going to Alexandria, north along the Adriatic, and calling at Naples and Palermo in Sicily. The campaign was essentially directed against French threats to the Ottoman Empire, which to Paul seemed to be under threat of disintegration, and which had become, in Russian eyes, part enemy and part insulating defence.42 The evidence of Ottoman weakness was clear with a French army in occupation of Egypt; hence the alliance, equally brief, with Britain. But, like Britain, Russia was pursuing its own aims. The news of the capitulation of the French in Malta to the British brought a swift break with Britain, signalled by the imposition of an embargo on British ships. A new Armed Neutrality of the North was swiftly broken by a British attack on the Danish fleet at Copenhagen. Internal tensions in the Russian court resulted in the murder of Paul.43 His successor, his son Alexander, was intent on disentangling himself from foreign affairs. A convention was made with Britain, a treaty of friendship with France. The Russian fleet in the Mediterranean remained in occupation of the Seven Islands, which were constituted as a theoretically independent Ionian Republic.44 The defeat of the French in Egypt cleared the way for a peace of weariness to be made between Britain and France in 1802.45 Bonaparte did not give up any of the French conquests, but Britain gave up Minorca and Malta, and the British force did eventually disentangle itself from Egypt. Minorca was handed back to Spain; the island was, as had been shown more than once, not nearly so useful a base as it seemed. Britain continued to control Gibraltar, delayed abandoning Malta, and dominated the bigger islands of Sardinia and Sicily by alliances with their rulers; these provided the necessary logistical support for the Mediterranean fleet. 40 Saul, Russia and the Mediterranean, chs 4 and 5. 41 Russian forces were also involved in the invasion

of Holland: Piers Mackesy, The Strategy of Overthrow, 1798–1799, London 1974. 42 Saul, Russia and the Mediterranean, ch. 5. 43 McGrew, Paul I, 1 and 351–353. 44 Saul, Russia and the Mediterranean, 96–101, 165–172. 45 Cf J. D. Grainger, The Amiens Truce, Woodbridge 2004.

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The control of Malta provided one of the main pretexts for the resumption of the war after little more than a year; the British abandonment of the island was never very seriously intended, and was definitively halted when Napoleon extended his control over large parts of Italy and Germany. The insincerity of the peace on both sides was clear all along. War resumed in May 1803. The concentration of both countries was for the first two years on yet another possible invasion of Britain by the French army. This was a French plan which required a naval predominance in the English Channel, which was clearly achievable (as in the American War), but with which the French had repeatedly failed to accomplish anything. Napoleon (to call him by his imperial name following his self-coronation in 1804) developed a plan for the concentration of his naval forces in the Channel which looked good on paper – as with Marshal Bellisle’s in the 1750s - but which failed to take account of weather, admirals, sailors, and ships, all of which were in various ways recalcitrant – the friction of war, in other words, which is even more awkward for planners of sea operations than on land. The plan also failed to take account of the reactions of the enemy, a curious omission by such an intelligent commander. The result was the abandonment of the plan before it got very far, and a smashing naval defeat. The Mediterranean played only a minor role in the eventual crisis, since the British fleet was taken out of the sea by Nelson when the crisis developed, though the Sea-entrance was the scene of the final act. Nelson was appointed commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet as soon as the war restarted, and established a blockade of Toulon. There were only seven French line-of-battle ships fit for sea in the port when the war began, though others were being built or refitted. By August Nelson commanded ten line-of-battle ships and three frigates and was able to detach some ships to other places and remove his own ships elsewhere, leaving only a couple of frigates to keep watch at Toulon.46 Supplies were initially a major problem, but now Malta and Gibraltar were two dependable bases under British control, and there were several other places where supplies could be obtained when the local political conditions were favourable. The distance of Malta and Gibraltar from Toulon (800 and 600 miles respectively), was a drawback, but it was generally possible, at least at first, to acquire supplies, especially of fresh food, at Naples or at Barcelona (the Italian coast as far as Rome was under French control, so Genoa and Livorno were unavailable). In addition, a helpful anchorage had been located in the Maddalena Islands, off the north coast of Sardinia, 46 Clowes,

Royal Navy, 5.52–54.

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where supplies could be accumulated, water obtained, and supplies stored; in decent weather it was only a day’s sail from the blockade station off Toulon. The anchorage, called ‘Agincourt Sound’ by Nelson because it had been ‘discovered’ by H.M.S. Agincourt, became the base from which the Toulon blockade was conducted.47 This system became all the more necessary when Spain and later Naples joined the French side once more. The involvement of Spain was deliberately engineered by Britain, where it was assumed that Spain was only waiting for a favourable moment to declare war. A squadron of four Spanish frigates was bringing the annual treasure from Peru by way of the River Plate. The voyage was slow, and their approach to Cadiz became well known; the Spaniards did not bother to hide it, since they were at peace. But the British government believed that much of the treasure would quickly find its way to the French government, which had made a treaty with Spain to that effect. A squadron of four British frigates intercepted the Spanish ships near Cape Santa Maria on Portugal’s Algarve coast on 8 October 1804, and demanded that they surrender. But the forces were about equal, and the Spanish commander could hardly comply. (A British line-of-battle ship was on its way to the meeting, but did not arrive in time; had it been present, the Spaniards may well have surrendered to force majeure.) In the fight which followed, one of the Spanish frigates blew up; all the Spanish ships were undermanned and encumbered with civilian passengers; three surrendered. The Spanish government, rightly infuriated, declared war in December.48 This brought the Spanish fleet back into the naval balance. During 1804 Nelson’s fleet had played a cat-and-mouse game with the French ships at Toulon, which had repeatedly threatened to come out, and seemed to have been repeatedly deterred. When Spain joined the war, the British fleet had to watch the Spanish squadron at Cartagena (five line-of-battle ships), as well as the French at Toulon, while there were more Spanish ships at Cadiz and Ferrol. At Toulon Admiral Villeneuve got his fleet out in January 1805 but it was scattered in a gale and the ships had to return to port.49 Nelson believed that Villeneuve’s expedition was headed for Egypt again, and missed it completely. While Villeneuve was delayed in harbour Napoleon elaborated his plan now that he had the use of 47 Janet

Macdonald, ‘Two Years off Provence: The Victualling and Health of Nelson’s Fleet in the Mediterranean, 1803–1805’ , MM 92, 2005, 443–454; Michael Barrett, ‘Agincourt Sound Revisited’ , MM 101, 2015, 184–199. 48 Julian de Zulueta, ‘The Battle of Cape Santa Maria, 5 October 1804’ , MM 96, 2010, 197–202; the sunken ship has been located, and the treasure removed; after a court case in Florida, the treasure was adjudged to Spain. 49 Clowes, Royal Navy, 5.88–92.

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Spain’s fleet. Villeneuve was to begin by escaping from Nelson’s supervision, which he managed to do at the end of March. Nelson again assumed that he was aimed for the east, and waited in the vicinity of Sardinia and Sicily. Villeneuve failed to persuade the Spanish admiral at Cartagena to join him, but passed Gibraltar and pushed the British blockading squadron away from Cadiz. (Sir John Orde had five line-of-battle ships, Villeneuve eleven; Orde was blamed for leaving, but he could hardly fight double his numbers; he fell back north to join the Channel Fleet blockading Brest.) Villeneuve this time did bring the Spanish forces, commanded by Admiral Gravina, out of the port, which doubled the fleet he commanded. Nelson finally received exact information and left the Mediterranean in chase of Villeneuve, who went to the West Indies and then returned to Europe. He clashed with a fleet under Sir Robert Calder off Ferrol in October and then sailed south to Cadiz. Napoleon had already abandoned his invasion plans and marched his army east against Austria. Villeneuve was ordered into the Mediterranean in support. When he came out of Cadiz on 21 October, he found Nelson, reinforced to twenty-seven line-of-battle ships, lying in wait. In the subsequent battle, called Trafalgar by the British, Nelson drove two halves of his fleet at the French line, in a parody of French infantry tactics. The French lost, from all causes, nine out of eighteen ships, the Spaniards nine out of fifteen. It was yet another gory battle of Nelsonic annihilation. It is ironic that it is popularly remembered, at least in Britain, as the battle which defeated Napoleon’s invasion plan, whereas that had been abandoned already and the battle was really fought to preserve British control of the Mediterranean. But it did deliver that sea into general British control, once more, as after the Nile battle.50 The command of the Mediterranean, which was ensured by the result of the battle of Trafalgar, remained continuously in British naval hands after 1805, but was rarely wholly secure, and rarely unchallenged. It was still possible, as it had been after the Nile battle, for the French army to campaign, almost invariably successfully, into and

50 There

are numerous accounts of Trafalgar: Naval Chron., 3.153–238; James, Naval History, 3.339–474; Clowes, Royal Navy, 5.94–161; Sir John Corbett, The Campaign of Trafalgar, London 1910, is probably the best account; more recent versions include: David Howarth, Trafalgar: The Nelson Touch, London 1969; Warner, Nelson’s Battles, 148–240; Tim Clayton and Phil Long, Trafalgar: The Men, the Battle, the Storm, London 2004; for the other side, Edward Fraser, The Enemy at Trafalgar, London 1906, reprinted with a new introduction, London 2004; for some peripheral issues, David Cannadine (ed.), Trafalgar in History: A Battle and its Afterlife, London 2006, and several articles in MM, 2005.

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through any territory to which it had access, while its ships were often able to sortie and return to port safely, though they were rarely able to accomplish much. Command of the sea, in such circumstances, meant that the British could only actually exercise control over the islands, and not even all of those, though it became increasingly difficult for French and their satellites to conduct any trade by sea.51 Yet the larger object was to promote the overthrow of the Bonapartist regime in France, without which, it was assumed in Britain, no enduring peace was possible. The constant threat of raids and attacks on the enemy coasts pinned down many thousands of French and Spanish and Italian troops for the next decade. The fleet was a major instrument of power, used partly for these aggressive purposes, but also in diplomacy; the commander-in-chief was a sailor and an admiral and a diplomat, in effect he was the British viceroy in the Mediterranean; this was true above all of Admiral Collingwood, Nelson’s successor as commander-in-chief, though less so of Collingwood’s own successors. Given the uniform hostility of the whole of the Western European coastline from the North Cape of Norway to the borders of Austria in northern Italy (except, of course, Gibraltar and, after a time, Portugal), the Mediterranean command was almost the only area where British naval and military operations against the enemy could be conducted, at least until 1808.52 This development had, in fact, begun even before Villeneuve’s fleet left Toulon. An expedition of 4000 soldiers was sent, under the escort of just two line—of-battle ships, with the intention of improving the defences of Sicily. It took refuge in the Tagus estuary when informed that Villeneuve’s force was out, but eventually reached Gibraltar on 17 May and went on to Malta. It was used at Naples later, though the French reply was overwhelming, and it retired to Sicily along with the king and the royal court. This was another of Sidney Smith’s exploits.53 One of the main results of Trafalgar, therefore, was to position a substantial British military force in the central Mediterranean, and to permit the British navy to range freely over the whole of the sea. In mid-1806 there were almost 25,000 British troops distributed 51 Herve

Contau-Begarie, ‘Seapower in the Mediterranean from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century’ , in John B. Hattendorf (ed.), Naval Policy and Strategy in the Mediterranean, London 2000, 50–47, makes a good case that the British control was much less than complete, and the French were able to send out repeated patrols and expeditions almost at will. 52 The essential account is Piers Mackesy, The War in the Mediterranean, 1803– 1810, London 1957; also Tom Pocock, Stopping Napoleon: War and Intrigue in the Mediterranean, London 2004. 53 Mackesy, War, 53–71, 77–89; Pocock, Thirst for Glory, 182–184.

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between Gibraltar, Malta, and Sicily, and there were twenty line-ofbattle ships and eighteen frigates in the sea, based at those same places. This size of force was maintained or increased for the rest of the war (that is, until 1814).54 At last the British had available a military striking force which could be used to support any ally, or subdue an obstreperous local. (Another Russian fleet reappeared in 1805, sent from the Baltic by way of refitting in Britain, as in Catherine’s time. It accomplished little, other than some raids in the Adriatic, and was left more or less marooned in 1807 when Tsar Alexander made the peace of Tilsit with Napoleon. The British Mediterranean fleet carefully avoided clashing with it, for relations with Russia remained problematic, and the formal condition of war between the two states was never seen as particularly serious. The ships ended up at Portsmouth, unable to go further; the crews were repatriated, and the ships rotted.55) Collingwood was all too successful as commander-in-chief, with the result that he was left in command in the Mediterranean until his death in 1810, pining all the time for his Northumberland home and garden, and his wife and daughters; in those five years he scarcely ever went on shore. It was his achievement to exploit the Trafalgar victory and to plant British power throughout the sea. The Sicilian garrison was used in July 1806 to invade the mainland Neapolitan kingdom, defeating a French army at Maida, but this was only a fleeting success, however important in the military theories of ‘column versus line’. It had no serious effect on Naples, nor did the equally brief achievements of Sidney Smith in the Bay of Naples: the French army was quite capable of recovering Naples and at the same time conquering Prussia. Napoleon’s elder brother Joseph was installed as king of Naples; for a time an invasion of Sicily was threatened. The presence of the fleet prevented this, but the mainland had to be evacuated.56 Events in the following year, 1807, demonstrated the extent of the responsibilities of the Mediterranean fleet. The new British government, the misnamed ‘Ministry of all the Talents’ , finding it impossible to affect events on the continent, adopted a policy of distant and peripheral expeditions. In the Mediterranean, Vice-Admiral Sir John Duckworth was sent on a rather pointless voyage into Turkish waters, to threaten Constantinople with a bombardment. He got through the Dardanelles, defeating a scratch Turkish fleet, and into the Sea of 54 Mackesy, War, appendices I and II. 55 Saul, Russia and the Mediterranean, 191–222. 56 Ibid, 132–153; Richard Hopton, The Battle of

Maida, London 2002; David Chandler, ‘Column versus Line: The Case of Maida, 1806’ , in his On the Napoleonic Wars, London 1998, 130–144.

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Marmara, but the sea and land defences of the city, not to mention the powerful current from the Bosporos and unfavourable winds, frustrated a close approach to the city, as did the desultory negotiations conducted by the British ambassador, Charles Arbuthnot. The city’s defences were being visibly improved even as the fleet was at anchor. When Duckworth came out through the Dardanelles one of his line-of–battle ships, Ajax, was burnt. This expedition was regarded as a failure, and Duckworth was given a large part of the blame, which rightly should have gone to Arbuthnot and the ministers – but the latter were already out of office and into the comfort of opposition by then, and Duckworth merely shrugged off criticism, most of which was thoroughly ill-informed. Part of the anti-Ottoman policy being pursued had involved a new expedition to Egypt, which was defeated by the Turks without much effort; Duckworth’s ships helped to evacuate the hapless British troops.57 The British attack on Ottoman territory coincided with yet another Russian–Ottoman war, and Duckworth operated in the Aegean with the Russian squadron, if at arm’s length. The aftermath of the Treaty of Tilsit shifted Russia into the list of Britain’s enemies, and these Russian ships became yet another concern for Collingwood; no doubt he was pleased not to have anything to do with them; he did not need yet another enemy to fight.58 The adventures into the Eastern Basin ceased. In many areas 1807 had been disastrous for the anti-French cause. Even more of the European coast (and the Asian and African coasts) had become hostile as a result of the war with the Ottoman Empire. The defeat of Russia in Poland, following the defeats of Austria and Prussia, and the subsequent peace between Russia and France, isolated Britain once again. But in many ways this was only a superficial isolation. The two enemies, Britain and France, hit each other with rival trade prohibitions, which stimulated extensive smuggling, which in turn produced deep suspicions. In 1807, for example, a group of Greek merchant ships sailed from Chios to Marseilles with goods which were known to be in short supply in France because of the British blockade. But once there, the French government suspected that the goods they carried were actually originally British, in part because the ships had succeeded in avoiding interception by British blockaders and so collusion was suspected. The French insisted that 57 Mackesy,

War, 166–194; Clowes, Royal Navy, 5.219–231; James, Naval History, 4.215–232; at least by failing Duckworth was not blamed for a bombardment which might well have destroyed Hagia Sofia, the Blue Mosque and the Ottoman imperial palace. 58 Clowes, Royal Navy, 5.231, 233–234; James, Naval History, 4.234–235; Naval Chron., 4.62–65.

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instead of selling their ships in France the ships must be sailed for home, and most of them were snapped up by British cruisers. This sort of occupational hazard was faced by smugglers and sailors of all types by this time, not that they were deterred, but it had become a dangerous business, sailing the Mediterranean in a merchantman.59 These Chiote ships were taken by the blockaders of Toulon, whose activities extended along the French southern coast. The peace between France and Russia had included the transfer of the Seven Islands from Russia back to France, and during 1807 the French in Naples succeeded in sending several thousands of soldiers to occupy these islands. Collingwood reinforced his squadron of small ships in the Adriatic, and instituted a blockade of Corfu, which was the only island of the seven the French held in strength.60 The three ships he sent into the Adriatic had a profitable time seizing local vessels; the blockade extended as far as Venice and Trieste, and when in 1809 the French took over the old Venetian Adriatic coastal province (Dalmatia) from Austria and seized the republic of Ragusa, the blockade was extended as far as the borders of Albania. This finally stimulated the British to attack the Ionian Islands, and all except Corfu were captured without resistance during 1809.61 The French navy fruitlessly attempted to break the British maritime control. In 1808 Admiral Ganteaume sortied from Toulon, sailing as far as Corfu, and seemed about to threaten Sicily. He was not intercepted by any British ships, but then he was moving so fast that they could neither find nor catch him.62 In that year, however, the attention of most of the Mediterranean became focused on Spain, where British and Spanish forces were fighting the French. The opportunities for naval exploits were numerous. Gibraltar now became an aggressive, not just a logistics, base, from which the French ships trapped in Cadiz were seized in cooperation with the local Spaniards, and from which Cadiz itself could be succoured when it came under a long but desultory French siege.63 Most of Portugal was freed from French occupation in 1810, while Madeira was taken over by British forces at the end of 1807.64 Once the Spanish rebellion developed,

59 Elena

Frangakis-Syrett, The Commerce of Smyrna in the Eighteenth Century (1700–1820), Athens 1992, 69–70; for the Aegean background, see Apostolos Delis, ‘From Lateen to Square Rig: The Evolution of the Greek Armed Merchant Fleet and its Ships in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’ , MM 100, 2014, 44–58. 60 Mackesy, War, 219–222. 61 Ibid, 354–355. 62 Ibid, 244–258. 63 Naval Chron., 4.154–156. 64 Ibid, 4.129.

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the whole of the Sea-entrance - Canaries, Gibraltar, Cadiz, Lisbon, Madeira – was under British control or influence. British naval dominance in the Mediterranean’s Western Basin was such that it was possible for a single British ship, such as the frigate Imperieuse, Captain Thomas Cochrane, to move along the French coast raiding, burning and destroying, almost with impunity, and assisting the Spanish forces on shore.65 Cochrane was also active in fighting the French on land, at the siege of Rosas.66 Collingwood’s death in 1810 did not seriously derail British naval policy. The British fleet controlled the whole sea. French attempts to contest that control, as in the Adriatic in 1811, were defeated (battle of Lissa).67 The British seamen had become expert; the French, confined to their ports, were neutered, despite an extensive and expensive shipbuilding programme. Having a large number of ships did not make the French fleet a major threat to British sea-control: the ships were barely manned and were scattered in small groups through every port from Ragusa to Copenhagen. They were largely wasted resources unless they could be concentrated into fleets, manned and trained. But this proved impossible since it would require them to get to sea, where they would be attacked at once by the British blockading squadrons.68 The perceived need by Napoleon to devote large resources to build these ships was another near-invisible contribution of the British fleet to the defeat of the French. The fleet was able to convoy a British force from Sicily to eastern Spain in 1812 in time to assist Wellington’s forces to push the French up against the Pyrenees.69 Captain William Hoste in the Adriatic captured Cattaro (now Kotor) by the ingenious use and manipulation of his guns. The fleet at Toulon was constantly watched; it came out occasionally, but never sailed far. The French did attempt to bring new ships to join the major fleets in their bases, but it was always difficult, they were liable to be intercepted, and they were moving only single ships – such as one from Genoa to Toulon in February 1814. The British blockaders conducted raids on all the coasts from Languedoc to Dalmatia, almost at will; Cochrane’s exploits were only

65 Ibid,

5.405–407; Mackesy, War, 283–285; Donald Thomas, Cochrane: Britannia’s Sea Wolf, London 1978, 126–145. 66 Justin Reay, ‘A Place of Considerable Importance: Lord Cochrane and the Siege of Rosas, 1808’ , MM 95, 2009. 67 Tom Pocock, Remember Nelson: The Life of Captain Sir William Hoste, London 1977, for an account of Lissa and of a frigate’s exploits on detachment. 68 For French shipbuilding, see Richard Glover, Britain at Bay, London 1973, 28–29, and Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 608. 69 Christopher D. Hall, Wellington’s Navy: Sea Power and the Peninsular War, 1807–1814, London 2004, 182–191.

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the most famous. In 1814, in the ebb of French power, British ships were able to seize such places as Genoa and La Spezia.70 Peace, or at least an end to fighting, came in spring of that year. It was unfortunate that the ships in the Mediterranean – the fleet was reduced as soon as the fighting stopped - were unable to ensure that Napoleon was confined to his tiny Elban kingdom, but probably no-one could have stopped him once he had a group of small ships to hand. At least the navy had the satisfaction of transporting him, like the convict he was, to confinement in the South Atlantic after his final defeat. Over the years following Collingwood’s death, the tide of French conquest had receded. Spain was freed by 1813, much of Italy during 1814, and Naples was handed back to its king next year. The formerly Venetian territories were partitioned between Austria and Britain – Austria taking the mainland territories in Italy and Dalmatia, Britain the Ionian Islands. Minorca had become a base once more for British ships in these years, once the Spaniards were allies, and Gibraltar was safe for the same reason, but Minorca’s usefulness was only temporary, and anyway had been handed back to Spain in 1802; Malta was retained. From 1814 the British navy had a line of bases from Gibraltar to Malta to Corfu from which to operate. The only challenge to its predominance could come from France, which was now flat on its back after its Napoleonic excesses. This period of extended warfare was later seen as the Royal Navy’s greatest achievement. But it had taken a long time. The years until the battle of the Nile had seen the navy gradually excluded from the sea, despite the obvious advantage produced by the seizure of much of the Toulon fleet in 1793. By 1796 the navy, reduced to a single base at Gibraltar, was unable to venture far into the sea. The result was the easy French Egyptian expedition, which seized Malta and then conquered Egypt. But from the Nile onwards the sea became a British area, finally confirmed when Villeneuve’s fleet failed to return to the Mediterranean in 1805. In the next ten years Collingwood’s ships were in control, and able to range all the way to Constantinople and Acre and Alexandria without hindrance.

70 Clowes,

Royal Navy, 5.304–307.

Chapter 9 Dominance 1815–1856

The three British possessions in the Mediterranean – Gibraltar, Malta, Corfu – had all been acquired by the British navy, and the first two were retained primarily for the navy’s use. All three were also human communities which were only partly dependent on the British navy for their livelihood. They were composed of people of varied origins, and these were in large part not British in persons or religion or language. Gibraltar by the end of the Napoleonic wars had been a British possession for over a century. It had suffered several sieges by Spanish (and French) troops, during which most of the people of Spanish origin had been driven out as unreliable, or potentially so. In at least two of the sieges the civilian town had been largely battered into ruin, and then rebuilt. The place was essentially a fort, with the town crouching behind solid fortifications which had stood up to the Spanish bombardments much more successfully than anything in the town. Its people were dependent on imported supplies from Spain, if the border was open and the Spanish government permitted commercial traffic to pass, or from North Africa; in wartime supplies had to come from Britain as well. There was not enough space on the Rock to develop a local indigenous food supply other than some vegetable patches. Malta was an archipelago of islands – three were inhabited – which contain monuments which predated the development of civilisation anywhere in the world. The population was at least in part descended from the makers of these monuments, a people therefore which had inhabited the islands for at least seven thousand years. They spoke a language of North African origin, much affected by Arabic, which was transliterated into Latin characters in a very awkward way, and they were Roman Catholic in religion. They had, for nearly three centuries, been ruled by the violent crusading order of the Knights of St John of the Hospital, which had developed from a group aiming to assist pilgrims in the Holy Land into an aristocratic coterie of celibate

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warriors. The Maltese had been unenthusiastic subjects, liable to heavy taxation, conscripted to public works and the galleys, and all too often kidnapped by the enemies of those Knights. The separation between Knights and Maltese was symbolised by the city of Valetta, a massively fortified city named for an early Grand Master, in which the Knights lived in their Auberges, and the Maltese city of Mdina in the centre of the main island. Valetta was on the coast, controlling a harbour in which the Knights built, repaired, and maintained their sailing warships and their galleys, which were rowed by slaves captured from their enemies. By contrast, Mdina and Rabat, in the centre of the secondary island of Gozo – note the Arabic names of these cities – were places founded with a view to defence against raids from the sea. The Knights were participants in the continuing conflicts and crusades of the Mediterranean: the Maltese were victims, keeping away from the vulnerable coasts, and they were victims not only of their religious enemies but of their knightly rulers. The third British possession, the Ionian Islands, was technically the Republic of the Seven Islands, or Septinsular Republic, a formulation which was a relic of the French occupation after 1796. They were strung along the west coast of Greece for five hundred kilometres. Each island was different, and there were ineradicable rivalries and jealousies between them, but most of the inhabitants were Greek Orthodox in religion, Greek in language, and independent in spirit; there were considerable numbers of Jews, especially on Corfu, and of Greek Catholics, the result of being ruled by Venice since the twelfth century. In the previous twenty years the islands had been juggled between France, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Britain, finally being adjudged to Britain by the distant Congress of Vienna and the Treaty of Paris, at whose deliberations none of the inhabitants had participated, any more than they had been consulted at any point in their previous history. Three of the islands, Corfu, Cephallonia, and Zante, were of much the same size; the other four were much smaller. Their repeated occupation by foreign forces in the previous twenty years had largely rendered their populations indifferent to their rulers. When the British acquired the islands, ‘liberating’ them from French rule, no inhabitants had either hindered or assisted their forces. Why the British kept the islands after the war is something of a mystery. Initially they took control simply because the French were in occupation, but keeping them at the peace was odd, though Corfu was a handy place from which to dominate the entrance to the Adriatic, should that be necessary. The harbours were of minor use, and the navy was not much interested in Corfu as a naval station; the islands’ commercial

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products were of little importance, though Zante had been, and still was, an important source of dried fruit, often imported from mainland Greece. The British had thus kept them mainly to deny them to any other state. Gibraltar and Malta, on the other hand, were certainly valued by the navy. Gibraltar was a familiar place by 1815, though little had been done to improve its naval facilities. It was not impressive in any maritime sense, and loading and unloading still took place at the Old Mole and the New Mole, which predated the conquest of 1704. It remained, however, the key to the entrance to the Mediterranean – and to its exit. It had a civilian population in 1814 of about 10,000, probably the highest it had ever been. The numbers had grown erratically from about 3000 at the end of the great siege in 1783 until yellow fever reached the place in 1804, causing about 5000 deaths, so reducing the population once again to about 3000. Despite attacks such as this, therefore, the recent growth of the population had been surprisingly strong. Growth continued to about 17,000 by 1830, mainly due to immigration. It was clearly a place of economic opportunity, a free port which had prospered in the days of Napoleon’s Continental System, and it attracted migrants – Genoese and other Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese, Jews from North Africa, and British. The majority were, of course, Catholic; attempts to encourage Protestants to immigrate had been unsuccessful. On top of these numbers, there were several British regiments stationed in the garrison, though civilians outnumbered soldiers considerably by the end of the wars, and there was a fluctuating population of sailors, both from the merchant ships and from the Royal Navy. It was a cosmopolitan population, fairly typical, except for the military and the unusually large British element, of any Mediterranean seaport.1 Malta was a much larger community, with a population of about 100,000 in 1800, rising slowly during the nineteenth century to double that number by 1900.2 It was fortunate in having as its first British governor Captain Alexander Ball, one of Nelson’s captains, who was sympathetic to the Maltese. The main island was reasonably extensive and agriculturally productive, for which the navy provided a market; the navy’s concern was concentrated in the bays and harbours next to Valetta, and this helped to keep local peace, but rendered the island a much less cosmopolitan place than Gibraltar – though Valetta itself had the usual Mediterranean mixture of peoples. 1 2

Jackson, Gibraltarians, 224–227; Hills, Rock of Contention, 361–363. William Hardman, A History of Malta during the period of the French and British Occupations, 1798–1815, London 1909, reprinted 1994, 539–540.

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The Seven Islands had been established as formally independent, but under British protection, in the Paris treaty of 1815. This ambiguity scarcely made for stability, and they were also unlucky in their first governor – ‘Lord High Commissioner’ - Sir Thomas Maitland, who was as autocratic, and sometimes as unpleasant, as any British colonial governor ever was.3 The islands were never seen as important, and often as a nuisance. They were basically Greek in population, but Corfu in particular had become as cosmopolitan as Gibraltar and Valetta. The population of the islands was perhaps 200,000, double that of Malta.4 Malta was not unfamiliar to the navy, or indeed to British sailors and merchants. It had been a useful port of call for the previous century and more, and Admiral Narbrough had used it briefly as a base even earlier.5 Once the virulence of Catholic–Protestant enmity faded, and the power of the Royal Navy had become clear to the Knights, they ceased attacking British vessels, though not their corsairing anti-Muslim activities. The islands were technically under some degree of Spanish or Neapolitan suzerainty, which complicated matters, though any exercise of that suzerainty had faded to nothing and had not impeded British annexation. During the eighteenth century the degree of French influence among the Knights had generally increased, though the Grand Masters were usually of Spanish or Italian origin; France had become the primary field of recruitment for new Knights,6 and French merchants and artisans were present and prominent in Malta. The Knights, all of aristocratic descent, were automatically hostile to the French Revolution but this hostility did not last long once the French Republic was victorious. When Bonaparte seized the islands in 1798, the Knights were driven out, but hostility of the Maltese to the French Republic continued.7 The Knights’ militancy had been of a naval variety. They had been fierce and vicious corsairs, a major scourge of Muslims in the Mediterranean, though this, again, tended to fade during the more tolerant eighteenth century; individual knights had participated in several European wars on the French or Austrian side. They kept up their

3 4

C. W. Dixon, The Colonial Administration of Sir Thomas Maitland, London 1969. Robert Holland and Diana Markides, The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1850–1960, Oxford 2006: the population was 230,000 in 1860. 5 M. S. Anderson, ‘Great Britain and Malta before 1798’ , MM 40, 1954, 128–140. 6 Three of the eight langues of Knights were French to begin with; the English langue was virtually defunct. 7 Alain Blondy, ‘Malta and France 1789–1798: The Art of Communicating a Crisis’, in Victor Mallia-Milanes (ed.), Hospitaller Malta, 1530–1798, Msida, Malta 1993, 659–686.

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naval expertise, at first in the galleys powered by Muslim captives, just as the Barbary corsairs powered their galleys with Christian captives. The Knights also took up the use of sailing ships, and during the century before the British conquest they had maintained a small sailing fleet, ranging in size from xebecs to third-rates of up to 64 guns. Twenty-five of these vessels were built and maintained in the Knights’ own shipyards during the eighteenth century. Like ships in the British navy the ships had variable lengths of service, but several lasted for over thirty years.8 As a navy, however, the Knights were well outclassed by 1750, though they could still hold their own against the similarly reduced corsairs. The Grand Master Despuig (1736–1741) actively campaigned throughout the Eastern Basin; the last Turkish assault on Valetta had been in the reign of his predecessor, Grand Master de Vilhena (1722–1736).9 This history meant that Britain, in acquiring Malta, had also acquired a functioning dockyard and shipbuilding facility and a skilled workforce. This contrasted with both Corfu and Gibraltar, neither of which contained anything nearly as useful. The buildings of the dockyard were taken over and remained in use, usually in their original forms, for at least the next thirty years.10 The difficulty the Maltese and British forces had in taking Valetta from the small French garrison in the siege between 1798 and 1800, not to mention the successive Turkish failures in the previous three centuries, also emphasised the strength of the fortress of Valetta. Once naval interest moved from the Western into the Eastern Basin with Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt, it is not surprising that the British would not give up the place during the Amiens truce, nor that Bonaparte, who had seized the place from the Knights, was so keen to have the British leave that he used it as the pretext for a new war. To the British it was obvious that he wanted to seize it for himself. Not only was the island a strategic asset to a sea power, it was a highly useful naval base. The end of the war against Napoleon’s empire in 1815 had therefore extended British maritime influence from the Sea-entrance at Gibraltar into the Mediterranean’s Eastern Basin. The peace also induced the British government, as usual at the end of a war, to reduce its expenditure on the army and the navy drastically. However, there 8

Anton Quintano, The Maltese–Hospitaller Sailing Ship Squadron 1701–1798, San Gwann, Malta 2003. 9 Charles Malo, The Princes of Malta, San Gwann, Malta 2000, 211–214, 203–204; for a general discussion, cf Salvatore Bona, ‘Naval Exploits and Privateering’, in Mallia-Milanes (ed.), Hospitaller Malta, 351–398. 10 Philip MacDougall, ‘The Formative Years: Malta Dockyard, 1800–1815’ , MM 76, 1990, 205–220.

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was a task in the Mediterranean which it was recognised needed to be attended to before disarmament was completed. During the war, often at inconvenient times, the British commanders-in-chief had felt compelled to pay attention to Algiers. For example, in 1797, when he had withdrawn his ships from the Mediterranean, Admiral Jervis had nevertheless sent a small squadron to menace Algiers, and implicitly to threaten reprisals if British merchant vessels were molested while the fleet was absent; the following year, with Bonaparte in Egypt, Commodore Duckworth had conducted awkward and expensive negotiations with Algiers to ensure a supply of fresh food for the reconquered Minorca; Nelson and Collingwood had both been distracted from the French war by problems with Algiers and Tunis, which had sheltered French privateers as well as being corsair bases.11 None of these interventions had resulted in any serious change in the situation, and corsair captains were still liable to make attacks on ships sailing alone, of whatever nationality. In 1815, Admiral Lord Exmouth, commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean for the last few years of the war, went to Algiers to require the dey (whose last two predecessors had been murdered that year) to extend to the ships of Sardinia, Sicily, and the Ionian Islands the freedom from molestation which was accorded to (most) British ships. This was agreed, with great reluctance, for the possibilities of predation on ships in the Mediterranean were becoming vanishingly small. But then the following year Exmouth returned, to inform the dey that the Congress of Vienna had agreed that slavery and piracy would now be outlawed, and that all Christian slaves still held at Algiers must be freed. Abolition of slavery would destroy the Algerian economy, already damaged by the treaties with so many European states. The dey refused. Exmouth left, but returned soon afterwards with his own and a Dutch squadron, an indication to the dey of the European dimension of the demands. When these were again refused, his ships bombarded the city, destroying the ships in the harbour and battering the fortifications. (Several Algerine ships had recently also been destroyed in a fight with a United States squadron.) The dey succumbed, and agreed to a new treaty incorporating the new demands;12 he survived for less than a year. The result of his killing was a brief civil war, in which the janissary soldiers were defeated by local troops and soldiers recruited by the new dey from the Kabyle mountaineers. This 11 Piers

Mackesy, The War in the Mediterranean 1803–1810, London 1957, 115–117. 12 Wolf, Barbary Coast, 330–332; Clowes, Royal Navy, 6.226–231; James, Naval History, 6.278–291; see also Roger Perkins and K. J. Douglas-Morris, Gunfire in Barbary, Havant 1982, and [Anon.], ‘The Battle of Algiers’ , MM 27, 1941, 324–338.

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marked the effective end of the corsair regime, except for the usual nostalgia, which could still issue in minor piracies. The apparent ending of this ancient problem – which had originally brought British naval power into the Mediterranean in the first place – persuaded the British government that the Mediterranean was now a quiet sector. The Mediterranean squadron was reduced to the normal strength of earlier periods of peace: one line-of-battle ship and several frigates and smaller ships. This did not last long, and was only possible because there was for the moment no naval competition in the sea. But in 1820, a revolution in Naples induced the Austrian Chancellor, Prince von Metternich, to ask for British naval help in suppressing the revolutionary regime. The Mediterranean squadron, reinforced by an extra line-of-battle ship, was sent to overawe Naples, and the Vengeur (74) carried King Ferdinand to the European congress at Laibach which authorised the Austrian intervention.13 At Algiers the dey was incapable of controlling his sea captains, who persisted in corsairing – and perhaps he had no wish to control them. By 1824 it was felt necessary to send a protest by means of a pair of small ships who found that two Spanish ships had recently been taken and their crews enslaved. The two British ships fought an Algerine vessel (the captor of the two Spaniards) at the entrance to the harbour, reducing it to a wreck; another ship was destroyed along the coast at Bone; the arrival of a larger squadron persuaded the dey to give in once more.14 One of the navy’s oldest tasks had largely disappeared with the dey of Algiers’ knuckling under; another went with the suppression in Britain of the Levant Company in 1825, and the ending of its pretended monopoly of trade with the Ottoman lands. The trade had been effectively open for decades, and the Company had been sending no more than a single ship to the east for the previous half century and more, and not always every year. The Company’s demise was part of the reforms being instituted in the last years of the Tory government of Lord Liverpool, generally tending in a liberal direction. Yet the protection of British commerce in the Mediterranean was still perceived as a necessary task for the navy, and this had been the official reason for the reinforcement of the squadron at Naples in 1820–1821.15

13 H.

M. M. Acton, The Bourbons of Naples 1734–1825, London 1956, 681–682; C. J. Bartlett, Great Britain and Sea Power, 1815–1853, Oxford 1963, 65. 14 Wolf, Barbary Coast, 335; Clowes, Royal Navy, 6.235–236. 15 Robert Walsh, Account of the Levant Company, [London] 1825, reprinted 2009; section 3 deals with the winding-up of the Company.

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It is in the period between the Naples crisis of 1820 and the Greek crisis from 1825 that, in retrospect, a basic change came upon the British naval force in the Mediterranean. For, from the 1820s onwards, the fleet in the sea increased its numbers permanently, and events in the Eastern Basin became its main concern. The base at Malta from that time became the main centre of its operations, with Gibraltar and Corfu of lesser importance. The crises of the 1820s – Algiers, Naples, Greece – and later, the problems of the Ottoman Empire and the ambitions of Muhammad Ali in the 1830s, forced the British government to transfer into the Mediterranean a large part of its fleet; as a result the Mediterranean became the fulcrum around which British naval policy revolved. The pattern of British presence in strength in wartime and absence in peacetime had not been consistent, and in at least two of the wars the sea was effectively abandoned. The removal of the fleet by Admiral Jervis in 1797–1798 is the most famous case, essentially a reversion to a peacetime condition, in which Gibraltar was held as a point d’appui, so that the fleet could return as it wished. Much the same had happened in the Seven Years’ War and in the War of the American Rebellion, though in both cases the convoy escorts had continued to operate; the period of abandonment by Jervis was no longer than the gap between some of the convoys. In the period after 1815, therefore, as noted already, what happened was once more the general retreat to Gibraltar and the use of a small squadron based there as convoy escorts when necessary. But even in 1815 the conditions for the squadron were different. Exmouth needed a full fleet and three visits to accomplish his mission at Algiers. Reinforcements had to be sent to the sea in 1820, then again in 1825. The possession of Malta and the Ionian Islands more than replaced Minorca, and British naval power was now projected more consistently into the Eastern Basin. The French had long been able to do this from Toulon – squadrons in the Adriatic and the Aegean, Napoleon in Egypt, Ganteaume’s forays. These two last cases had provoked a serious British presence in the east; from the navy’s point of view this was only because a French fleet was there, not really because of the French army in Egypt. In previous centuries wars in the east had not stirred any British interest, but as legatees of the French presence – and of the Knights of Malta – it was necessary after 1815 to pay new heed to the east. As the suppression of Algiers had shown the British navy was now the only such force of any size in the Mediterranean; any naval problem, or indeed any problem, in the sea necessarily involved it. And these problems, from 1820 onwards, were overwhelmingly in the Eastern Basin.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

The Western Basin and the Sea-entrance were not problematic after 1815. Neither Algiers nor Naples detained the navy for long, and the French fleet at Toulon was small. The Greek rebellion, however, with its piracy and its proximity to the Ionian Islands, demanded the attention of the one naval power in Europe capable of acting. This had been the rationale for Exmouth’s action at Algiers, and for the squadron at Naples – if it was a naval problem Britain was the only state capable of acting. This would not necessarily always be the case, but in the Eastern Basin after 1815, only the British navy had the ships to act. That is to say, Britain had graduated out of the general ruck of European ‘Great Powers’ into a special category of its own, a naval superpower. And such a superpower by its very existence is inevitably concerned in everything which happens at sea or close to it. This is why the navy became involved in Greece, and then remained the dominant naval force in the sea for the next century and more – for it was the Greek problem in the 1820s which compelled the Royal Navy to concentrate much its strength in the Mediterranean. In the 1820s the Greeks of the south, the Morea (the ancient Peloponnese) had rebelled against their Turkish rulers. The proximity of the Morea to the Ionian Islands meant Britain was at once involved, and in Britain and other parts of Europe there was much sympathy for the rebels, seen as successors to the ancient Spartans. The islanders sympathised with the rebels for nationalistic reasons, and the islands became bases from which assistance, weapons, and recruits were sent to the mainland. The provisional rebel government licensed privateers, which everyone else called pirates. The provisional government had no international standing, though the British accorded it belligerent status in order to be able to exert some influence. The privateers did not discriminate between their enemies and everyone else, and Maltese ships were some of their victims. Ships of the Mediterranean squadron were soon involved in suppressing these privateers.16 The fighting in Greece became much more unpleasant when the Turkish sultan enlisted the governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, to send forces to the region. The rebellion also interested several of the European powers, notably France and Russia, both of whom had old and predatory interests in the Ottoman region; these were also the only other European powers with fleets of any size. An irregular series of European diplomatic congresses after 1815 had the aim of 16 For

the diplomatic context, see Schroeder, Transformation, 614–621, 637–669; for the privateers, see G. C. Pitcairn-Jones (ed.), Piracy in the Levant, 1827–8, NRS 1934.

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maintaining the peace settlement of Europe as established at the first congress, in Vienna; the Greek rebellion undermined that system: geopolitical changes were difficult to accommodate while maintaining the original settlement. The transfer of the campaign in the Morea to Egyptian control, the victories of the Egyptian army, and the appearance of a large Muslim fleet in the eastern Mediterranean, all upset the congress ‘system’ . There was a strong possibility that Russia, an old Ottoman enemy, might intervene, which might result in the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and quite possibly in a general European war. The continued atrocities by both sides in the fighting stimulated anger in educated circles in Europe (who imagined the modern Greeks were ancient Greeks revived), but this and the increasing likelihood of an armed intervention from outside brought the Greeks to form a government which could be seen to be in control of their fighting men. Lord Cochrane and Captain Richard Church were given naval and military commands by the Greeks. Britain, France, and Russia came to a diplomatic agreement to compel both sides to agree to an armistice (the Treaty of London, 1827), and organised a joint Russo-FrancoBritish fleet to exert pressure. The joint fleet gathered in September–October 1827, commanded by Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Codrington. It consisted of four line-ofbattle ships from each of the three navies, plus eight frigates - three British, one French, four Russian - and several smaller craft, mainly British. As they were gathering an Egyptian fleet arrived with a large reinforcement for the Egyptian army in the Morea. (If this force had been able to land and been supported it would probably have been able to finish the land campaign fairly quickly.) The Egyptian fleet included seven line-of-battle ships, fifteen frigates, and almost forty smaller ships, plus transports. This fleet, together with four ships sent by the bey of Tunis, moored in Navarino Bay on the southwest coast of the Morea. On 20 October Codrington brought his joint fleet into that bay. Codrington’s instructions were vague, in the long tradition of instructions to Mediterranean commanders, and he had to interpret them. His main aim was to enforce the armistice; to this the Greeks had agreed, seeing full well that, because they were losing the land war, they needed to be rescued; the Turks had refused at first, but then had indicated in late September that they would agree. The commander of the Egyptian fleet, Ibrahim, Muhammad Ali’s son, complained that Lord Cochrane had broken the truce by threatening to attack Patras, and attempted several times to send some of his ships to intervene, but his ships were driven back into Navarino Bay by Codrington’s ships. To Codrington it seemed that it was Ibrahim

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himself who was breaking the agreement, and this was when he took the joint fleet into Navarino Bay. In fact, the imposed armistice was never secure on either side, and some commanders failed to hear of it for some time. By anchoring in such a way as to block the Egyptian fleet’s only exit, Codrington almost guaranteed that a battle would result. Sure enough, even before the joint fleet had fully arrived in the bay, fighting began when an Egyptian ship fired when it felt it was about to be attacked – or so the allies claimed. The joint fleet was fully prepared to fight; the Egyptians were unwilling to do so but were rightly suspicious. There seems no doubt that Codrington’s orders and actions made a fight certain. In the battle the Egyptian fleet lost one of its line-of-battle ships, a dozen frigates, and over forty small ships, and 4000 men as casualties; the joint fleet had about 650 casualties.17 This had hardly been intended, and some suspicions must arise over Codrington’s conduct, but it did clear the air somewhat. The Egyptians withdrew from Greece and the Greeks achieved international recognition; Russian forces invaded Turkey over-confidently, and found progress to be slow, while proclaiming that their war was not one of conquest, a statement they eventually had to honour. Peace was made at Adrianople in 1829, by which time the French had cleared the last of the Egyptian forces out of the Morea, and more or less definitive Greek boundaries had been established. It also rapidly became clear that, whatever Russia expected of Greece in the way of gratitude or fellow Orthodox Christianity, it was Britain and France, the two naval powers of any size in the Mediterranean, who exercised most influence over the new country. They could not solve its problems, but this is not something anyone, Greek or otherwise, has ever done. The crisis had revealed that Russia was most interested in reducing the Ottoman Empire to a buffer state against attack from the south – a return to Tsar Paul’s idea of thirty years before. This set up the conditions for a series of crises in the next generation, and continuing Greek dependence on outside help.18 Also revealed was that France was once again a major force in the Mediterranean, but it was also a powerfully disturbing influence, since one of the main springs of its foreign policy was to upset the Vienna Congress decisions of 1815, the mark of French defeat. Its participation in the Greek crisis was a symptom of this, since anything which

17 James,

Naval History, 6.358–380; Clowes, Royal Navy, 6.252–261; Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali, Cambridge 1984, 220–221. 18 Schroeder, Transformation, 657–659, 663–664.

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upset the Congress system was welcome to the French, though any real possibility of a large-scale revision of the treaty was something which would unite the rest of Europe against France. The Mediterranean region was one area where French policies could be implemented and where French gains could be made. Egypt was one of these, where French officers had been influential in the development of Muhammad Ali’s navy and army; another was Greece; a third was Algiers. French interests and ambitions were as wide as the assumed responsibilities of the Royal Navy; clashes were inevitable. Relations between Algiers and France sank to crisis point in 1828; the French evacuated their citizens, the dey struck the French consul, insults were shouted; the French fleet blockaded Algiers. In Paris the government of King Charles X, increasingly unpopular, dusted off an old plan of Napoleon’s for the conquest of Algiers and in 1830 put it into effect. Barely interrupted by the overthrow of Charles X and the installation of King Louis Philippe, the campaign went ahead. The matter had been discussed diplomatically in Europe in advance, where French assurances were that it was only a punishment campaign. Louis Philippe and his government, however, decided on permanent conquest.19 This was awkward for the Royal Navy. The French now had naval bases on both north and south coasts in the Western Basin, so that the sea communications of the two navies cut across each other. On the other hand, the conquest proved to be long and difficult, since even when the last dey surrendered, all the French army gained was Algiers city itself; no one else in North Africa accepted the dey’s decision as definitive for them; the French army was in for a long fight. The uncertainty and the absorption of French resources in the slow conquest suited the British perfectly. The Greek problem died down in the 1830s, with decisions on the newly independent state’s form of government – a monarchy – foisted on it by the Great Powers. The Egyptian/Ottoman problem continued. In 1832 Muhammad Ali sent Ibrahim into Syria to secure control of it and western Arabia. The result of the Russo-Turkish war of 1828–1829 was now quickly confirmed: the Russians sent an army to defend the Ottoman position in Anatolia, and so compelled the Egyptians to restrict themselves to the lands south of the Taurus Mountains. Muhammad Ali had a competent navy still, and now he had the use of the string of ports along the Levantine coast, as far as Scanderoon (Alexandretta).20 British policy turned to reducing 19 Wolf, Barbary Coast, 334–338; Schroeder, Transformation, 668–669. 20 M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question, London 1966, 77–87;

Muhammad Ali, 221–223.

Marsot,

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Muhammad Ali’s new power, and to prise the Ottoman state out of Russia’s grip. The Egyptian armed forces were both trained by French officers, and French influence at Muhammad Ali’s court was strong. French officers were training the Egyptian army and navy, and had commanded Egyptian ships at Navarino; French engineers were building a dock at Alexandria and fortifying the port; the French consul Bernardino Drovetti, who had first been posted to Cairo by Napoleon, was close to Muhammad Ali, to such an extent that he claimed to have helped him to power.21 The continuing French warfare in Algeria menaced both Tunis and Morocco; the Mediterranean fleet was sent to demonstrate off Tunis in 1836 and 1837 to deter any French adventures. The fearful imaginations of some of the British politicians conjured up a vision of French control of the whole of the African coast from Morocco to Egypt, and on to Syria. At the same time the British were looking carefully at the problem of communicating with India. In 1833 an expedition commanded by Colonel Chesney went to Syria to test the old land route from Scanderoon through Aleppo and down the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. An alternative route lay through Egypt, landing at Alexandria, moving by river to Cairo and then by desert road to Suez. In 1834 a Briton called Waghorn organised a regular transport system between Alexandria and Suez, and in 1836 a regular steamer service between London and Alexandria began. The last part of the route, south through the Red Sea, opened in 1839, when the East India Company seized control of the island of Socotra and the nearby port of Aden at the southern mouth of the Red Sea. A regular voyage by steamer between Bombay and Suez complemented the steamer route through the Mediterranean.22 Thus a new use for the Mediterranean developed, as a transportation route between Western Europe, specifically Britain, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans, specifically India. This was one of the sources of the new shift in British policy: support for the Ottoman Empire, hopefully easing out Russian influence, and detaching Muhammad Ali from his dependence on, or at least his attachment to, the French. British and Russian policies were in fact congruent, at least as far as Muhammad Ali was concerned. An Ottoman offensive into Syria in 1839 was defeated by the Egyptian army, and the Ottoman fleet

21 Ronald T. Ridley, Napoleon’s Proconsul in Egypt: The Life of Bernardino Drovetti, 22

London (n.d.). H. L. Hoskins, British Routes to India, London 1928; G. S. Graham, The Politics of Naval Supremacy, Cambridge 1965, 64–67.

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deserted wholesale to Muhammad Ali, but the Russo-British accord, soon joined by Austria, which similarly had no wish to see the Ottoman Empire collapse, produced a concentration of naval force in Syrian waters sufficient to stop Ibrahim in Syria from making any further advance. Muhammad Ali relied on French support, which failed to materialise in the face of this allied coalition, but he still defied an ultimatum from the three powers to evacuate Syria and return the Turkish fleet. The allies resorted to force, aiming first to drive the Egyptian forces out of Syria. They were assisted by local resentment in Syria at Ibrahim’s oppressive (that is, Egyptian) methods of government, by the local princes in the Lebanon area, and by the fact that Ibrahim’s Syrian communications were particularly susceptible to attack from the sea. Part of the British Mediterranean fleet guarded the entrance to the Dardanelles in case Muhammad Ali used his enlarged fleet to attack Constantinople; the other part, four line-of-battle ships, a frigate and a paddle steamer, commanded by Commodore Charles Napier, was sent to menace Beirut. Admiral Sir Robert Stopford, the allied commander, with fifteen line-of-battle ships, four frigates, eight paddle steamers and five smaller ships, was joined by an Austrian squadron of two large frigates, five smaller ships, and a steamer. Stopford declared Syria and Egypt blockaded, and put two of his big ships off Alexandria. Stopford let Napier direct the efforts on shore, and Gebail (ancient Byblos), Sidon, Tyre, and eventually Beirut, were taken. This gave the allies control of the Lebanese coast road, and allowed them to move south to attack Acre, the strongest fortified town in Palestine – the place which had defied Napoleon successfully. The whole fleet bombarded two sides of the town from the sea, inflicting little damage on the solid fortifications, until by chance a shell hit the main magazine, which exploded. A thousand men were killed, and Egyptian return fire died down, due to a lack of powder for the guns, and shock. The surviving garrison left that night. The town was occupied by Turks, British and Austrians, and the retreating Egyptians were pursued, though without being caught.23 Napier was sent to take command of the ships off Alexandria. Exceeding his authority he contacted Muhammad Ali and concluded an agreement: the Turkish fleet was to be returned, Muhammad Ali would be recognised as hereditary governor of Egypt. After some huffing and puffing by those who thought they should have done the negotiating, and not a mere commodore, the agreement was accepted. Indeed, Muhammad Ali had accepted such terms before the fighting 23 Iaacov

Kahaim et al., ‘Between Shoal and Wall: The Bombardment of Akko 1840’ , MM 100, 2014, 147–167.

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began, but the sultan in Constantinople had not; it was yet another (undeclared) war which had been unnecessary.24 One effect of this crisis had been to shift the main concentration of the Royal Navy from home waters into the Mediterranean. This had already begun in the early 1830s, with the first of the eastern crises. The diplomacy pursued by Lord Palmerston in securing Austrian and Russian support had isolated France once more, and the French reaction was loud annoyance, and a build-up of its own fleet in the Mediterranean. The size, manning, and efficiency of the French ships impressed both Stopford and Napier, but Palmerston was quite confident that France would not go to war over the fate of Muhammad Ali. He was right, but the cost was renewed French hostility, so the British navy’s strong presence in the Mediterranean was now regarded as both essential and permanent. Confining Egyptian power to Egypt did not stop the slow ongoing decay of the Ottoman Empire. Attempts were made to introduce ‘reforms’ into the administration, prompted often by European meddlers, above all Britain, but it would take decades for the old habits to be replaced by the new. In the meantime the decrepit state had already become subject to a tug-of-war between the European states, and this continued. One of the reasons the British (and the Austrians) had involved themselves in the crisis in Syria in 1839–1841 as allies of Russia had been to be able to exercise some restraint on Russian actions. The prospect of an active Russian fleet in the Mediterranean was an ongoing nightmare for British diplomats and politicians and admirals. It was much better for the Mediterranean fleet to do the work in Syria than to have a Russian army campaigning in Syria, or a Russian fleet off the Syrian coast.25 In 1833 the Russian Black Sea fleet had arrived off Constantinople to protect the sultan from the Egyptian advance; if it could do so once, it could do so again, and move further on; Russian naval forces had appeared in the Mediterranean several times between 1768 and 1827; British apprehensions were by no means without foundation. The immediate result of the Syrian affair, however, was the growling enmity of France. This was a situation where almost anything either country did rasped the nerves of the other. It even produced a potential war in 1844, when the British suffered one of their periodic fits of fright that the French could, or might, or were hoping to, or even were preparing to, invade across the Channel. One of the sources of tension

24 Clowes,

Royal Navy, 6.309–323; Schroeder, Transformation, 736–756; Anderson, Eastern Question, 95–105; Bartlett, Sea Power, 128–147; Marsot, Muhammad Ali, ch. 10. 25 Bartlett, Sea Power, 79–80, 103–105.

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was the continuing French campaigns of conquest in Algeria, which at times spilled over the borders and involved occasional crises with Tunis and Morocco. The Algerian opponents of the French certainly made use of their ability to disappear into their neighbours’ lands, there to refresh, rearm, and then return to the fight. The French army was equally in the habit of sending reprisal raids, particularly into Morocco. In 1844 Palmerston made friendly gestures to Morocco on the subject, and the British naval force at Gibraltar was reinforced with two line-of-battle ships. Neither had any effect on the French, whose ships bombarded Tangier in that year.26 There was much talk of war, but this was at the end of a period of successive reductions in the naval budget and so of the number of ships in commission,27 and the British government suddenly awoke to the fact that their deterrent navy was not powerful enough to deter anyone. Not only that, but there was simultaneously a nearcrisis with the United States, and the prospect of fighting France and the United States at the same time (as in 1812–1815) chilled the Cabinet’s collective blood. A rumour that the French were about to commission four line-of-battle ships at Toulon led to the British plotting to commission six. The fright died down later in 1844: one dispute was settled, the French making a treaty with the Sultan of Morocco, and they did not, as feared, attack Tunis. In Britain the fright was taken to heart (at least for a time) and the naval estimates were increased, as were the number of ships in commission. The Mediterranean fleet remained the second largest of the navy’s squadrons, and it became exceptionally busy in the late 1840s. The whole of Europe, except Britain and Russia, collapsed into revolution in 1848. The process began in the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean commander-in-chief, Admiral Sir William Parker, was one of those officers who was never afraid to use his own judgement in a crisis. He had forcefully used it in Portugal in 1846 in resolving an internal dispute in that country, and during an AngloFrench dispute over the marriage of the Spanish queen he sent some of his ships to block a possible French seizure of the Balearic Islands. In 1848 he joined with the French Admiral Baudin in stopping a Neapolitan bombardment of the Sicilian city of Messina, but he did not interfere when the Neapolitan army crossed into the island and defeated the rebellious islanders.28 The Mediterranean fleet was thus used in Syria, Morocco, the Balearics, Portugal, and Sicily in the 1840s. One of the failed revolutions, 26 Ibid, 160–161. 27 Ibid, appendices I and II. 28 Andrew Lambert, Admirals,

London 2008, 235–239.

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in Hungary, drove refugees into Turkey, whence their extradition was demanded by both Austria and Russia. The sultan refused. Parker had by this time finished with Sicily and moved to Corfu. He was reinforced by a new line-of-battle ship, Ocean, and was then summoned to give his support to the sultan when threats were made. He brought the fleet to anchor in Bezika Bay, just outside the Dardanelles. The sultan, so encouraged, was gratified when both of the threatening empires ceased their demands. The British government wanted the fleet to stay on station until everything was settled. By arrangement with the Turks, Parker moved his fleet from Bezika, a bad and at times dangerous anchorage, into the mouth of the Dardanelles. This turned out to be illegal. The Straits were forbidden to foreign fleets by an international convention, and the government feared that Parker’s move, in breach of that agreement, would be taken as a precedent for the Russian Black Sea fleet to move into the Bosporos, where it could threaten Constantinople. Here was where diplomacy was useful. While the British government publicly regretted the Admiral’s action, so mollifying his critics, Parker was privately congratulated. The admiral was then directed to Greece to enforce a blockade of Athens and the Piraeus in pursuit of, among other matters, compensation for Don Pacifico, a Gibraltarian with British citizenship, whose possessions had been damaged and looted in a riot. By exercising restraint, but sticking firmly to his brief, Parker was able to convince the Greek Parliament to accept his suggested terms, at which the government in Athens, outflanked, gave in.29 The revolution in France in 1848 had brought Louis Napoleon Bonaparte to power, first as president, then as the Emperor Napoleon ‘III’ . His advent evoked contradictory reactions in Britain. On the one hand a dictatorial regime seemed to be the answer to ‘republican chaos’ produced by the recent revolution; on the other, a Bonaparte in power in France indicated an even more adventurous French foreign policy. Stoked by the usual inconsistencies and inaccuracies and inventions of the circulation-seeking press, invasion scares in 1851 and 1853–1854 gripped the minds of many politicians from the queen down, despite the evident lack of any French preparations. It did produce a measure of self-defence in Britain with the passage of a Militia Act, and the Royal Navy was now reckoned to be stronger in numbers and power and efficiency than any of its rivals.30 Given the war frights and invasion scares of the early 1850s it is something of a surprise to find Britain and France allied in a real 29 Ibid, 239–241. 30 Bartlett, Sea Power,

277–293.

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war by 1854. This was a result of one of Napoleon III’s foreign policy lunges: a demand that the Ottoman Empire allot France the guardianship of the Holy Places in Palestine in place of Russia; Bonaparte was seeking domestic support by a gesture towards the Catholics in France. After the Russian reply the demand was reduced to parity, but this message was delivered to Constantinople by a French ambassador who was carried there in the new French screw-battleship Charlemagne, which steamed through the Dardanelles in violation of the Straits Convention of 1841. (Admiral Parker’s venture inside the Strait in 1849 might have been cited as a precedent.) The Russian reaction was distinctly adventurous and out of scale – a suggested partition of Turkey, and an attempt to gather the other Great Powers into a coalition to isolate France. But the idea of an Ottoman partition, which would bring Russian power to the Mediterranean, was too much for the British government, even one headed by the pacific Lord Aberdeen; it also alienated Austria. Russia abandoned the idea of partition, but demanded that the sultan accept that Russia should be the protector of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire. This would have restored the situation of the 1830s, if in a different way, whereby Turkey was in effect brought under Russian protection. Alongside the negotiations in Constantinople, Russian forces in the Black Sea were prepared ostentatiously. By the time the tsar finally understood that his demands could not possibly be accepted by the sultan, and that Austria and Britain were adamantly hostile to them, the situation was out of his control. France was no longer isolated, and was, under Napoleon III, powerfully anti-Russian. The British representatives at Constantinople sent messages to the Mediterranean commander-inchief at Malta, Vice-Admiral Sir James Dundas, urging him to move into the Greek Archipelago. But Dundas reported to London before moving, and the Cabinet decided not to take action. The French were left out on a limb in their hostility to Russia, unable to act alone. But the issue of a war with Russia had been raised, an eventuality which would require British fleets in both the Baltic and the Black Seas. Meanwhile the Turks were fortifying the Bosporos and the Russian military preparations were almost complete. When the Turks refused Russian demands (the Holy Places issue had been settled), Russia had gone too far to be able to retreat without a serious loss of prestige, which in this case would mean a drastic reduction in the tsar’s influence in Constantinople. The British Cabinet, after considerable discussion, agreed to move the Mediterranean fleet from Malta to Bezika Bay to show support for the sultan. This brought in France, whose fleet joined the British. Russia demanded that the Turks permit them to occupy the Danubian

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Principalities (Wallachia and Moldavia), and when the Turks refused, did so anyway. Diplomatic manoeuvring during the summer of 1853 produced no solutions other than to increase Russian and Turkish intransigence.31 Fighting broke out between Turks and Russians on the Danube late in September, and on the Asian frontier about the same time. At the end of October the British and French fleets at Bezika sent detachments into the Dardanelles, and some ships moved on to Constantinople. This provided naval protection for the city, adding to the Turkish preparations already effected). The Turks sent a frigate squadron into the Black Sea, where Russian ships had captured Turkish vessels and had bombarded Batum. The squadron anchored at Sinope, two days’ sail south of the Russian naval base at Sebastopol in the Crimea, and sent supplies on to Batum. The Russian fleet located the Turks and brought up six battleships to attack and sink the six Turkish frigates.32 Naval command of the Black Sea was clearly in Russia’s hands; British and French ships were only the length of the Bosporos away. The winter of 1853–1854 was spent by the British and French in preparing for war. Napoleon, having gained his object of upsetting the international system, now made an attempt to discuss peace with the tsar, but was rebuffed, and found he had to go ahead. In January the two fleets escorted a Turkish convoy along the north Anatolian coast to Batum. At the end of February Britain and France issued an ultimatum that the Russians must evacuate the Danubian Principalities. When the tsar refused, on 24 March Britain and France declared war.33 The decision clearly came only after a long, slow growth of tension and dispute, in an almost classic case of escalation. Each participant, of course, had its own aims and intentions. For the British the main purpose was to remove Russian influence from the Ottoman Empire, and so to shore up that state as a defence of the British position in the Mediterranean – the reverse of the Russian aim. Thus it was a matter of enforcing British sea power not only in the Mediterranean, but, given Russian activity, further forward in the Black Sea as well. This was why the fighting in the south centred on Sebastopol, the major Russian naval base. It is often described as an unnecessary

31 A.

J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1945, Oxford 1954, 49–67; Andrew Lambert, The Crimean War, London 1990 (the best modern account of the war), ch. 2; Anderson, Eastern Question, 116–132; Andrew C. Rath, The Crimean War in Imperial Context, 1854–1856, London 2005, not only gets the war’s dates wrong, but ignores the Mediterranean entirely. 32 Lambert, Crimean War, ch. 5. 33 Clowes, Royal Navy, 6.399.

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war, or one which ‘took place by accident’ . 34 But these are evasions: the slow development of the crisis gave everyone involved plenty of time to consider the consequences and certainly the British Cabinet spent long enough in discussion on the issue. The war could have been avoided even in February or March 1854 (though Russians and Turks were already fighting), but the participants chose to continue. The war was, for those who made the decisions, neither unnecessary nor accidental. What followed is called the ‘Crimean’ War, since one of the central events was the allied invasion of the Crimea, and the siege of Sebastopol. The real decision, however, lay in the Baltic, where by late 1855 it was clear that the British fleet had developed a capability of attacking both Kronstadt, the fortress defending St Petersburg, and the city itself.35 For the Mediterranean fleet, though, the Crimea was the target, at least after a preliminary visit to the Bulgarian coast, a bombardment of Odessa, and a visit by a detachment to the east coast of the Black Sea. The British fleet was built up from five lineof-battle ships and ten steamers in Bezika Bay in March 1853 to ten line-of-battle ships in October 1854, each of which had its own attendant paddle steamer to move it into position when the wind failed. The French fleet was even larger. The two fleets reconnoitred Sebastopol, where the Russian ships either stayed in port or were used to form a solid boom at the entrance to the harbour. This defensive measure meant that the only way to fight the war was to land an army and take the city by land assault. The role of the fleets was thus reduced, at least for a time in the winter, to blockade and convoy protection. The siege of Sebastopol began in September 1854. (A landing at Varna on the western Black Sea coast had already induced the Russian forces in the Danubian Principalities to withdraw - thus achieving the original ostensible purpose of the war). A new landing then took place at Eupatoria in the Crimea and the armies marched to besiege the city. This made the navy the handmaid of the army for some months, especially since during the winter much of the northern part of the sea was iced over and inaccessible. The allies held on through the winter, defeating Russian relieving forces, the soldiers surviving, or succumbing to, the cold, the disease, the doctors, and their commanders. With the thaw, the ships could have a decisive effect. Winter ice had excluded the allies from the Sea of Azov and facilitated the movement of Russian supplies across it. The thaw reversed the situation. The great joint fleets of the allies were 34 Anderson, Eastern Question, 132. 35 Lambert, Crimean War, passim.

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effectively immobilised by the siege and the needs of the blockade, but the small ships could be used effectively. The targets were in the lands around the Sea of Azov. Out of reach in the winter, this was a region where great quantities of Russian supplies had been accumulated. The Strait of Kertch was seized by an expedition landed from the fleet, and then garrisoned firmly; the local towns were sacked. Then the small ships of the fleet – the sea was too shallow for the larger vessels – ranged along the northern and eastern coasts, seizing and destroying all the stores they could find. For three months the small ships, mainly British, enjoyed their destructive spree, varied by landings to buy fresh food supplies from the local peasants. The ships were withdrawn when the sea began to freeze in November.36 It had already had its effect, as had new, more skilful assaults on the Sebastopol fortifications. In an orgy of further destruction by the Russians, the forts of Sebastopol were blown up and the ships destroyed. The ruins were occupied after the Russian withdrawal in September.37 The allies were now somewhat at a loss. The capture of Sebastopol did not convince the tsar or the Russian government generally that the war was lost, and indeed, from the Russian point of view, the Crimean campaign was of importance only in preoccupying its enemies. The fleet went off to attack the fortress at Kinburn, at the mouth of the Dnieper River. The place was taken by bombardment, but without troops further exploitation was impossible.38 There was little more for the allied ships to do. Winter approached, and most of the French ships went home to Toulon; the British sent several vessels back into the Mediterranean to show the flag. There was a clear impression that the war was winding down. A conference at Paris, attended by the British admirals, discussed what further steps should be taken. It produced no result because Austria was persuaded that if the war continued there would be trouble in Poland – Palmerston (now Prime Minister) was ruminating aloud at the desirability of dismantling the Russian Empire; trouble in Russian Poland would undoubtedly spill over into Austrian and Prussian Poland. Austria made clear to Russia that the game was up, in effect threatening war. The threat of an Austrian war (and possibly war with Prussia and Sweden, both hostile by now) brought the Russians to accept the need for peace – not to mention that the next British naval campaign would bombard Kronstadt and St Petersburg, neither of which was likely to survive the experience. The conference at Paris was 36 Ibid, 230–234; Clowes, Royal Navy, 6.453–464. 37 Lambert, Crimean War, 239–248; Clowes, Royal Navy, 6.467–469. 38 Clowes, Royal Navy, 6.470–474; Lambert, Crimean War, 259–261.

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succeeded by a peace conference, also at Paris.39 Russia had been more or less defeated, but not so drastically that it could be seriously punished. The naval clauses were the crucial ones for the British: Sebastopol was to remain dismantled, the Black Sea fleet reduced to a minimum. The Ottoman Empire was firmly under British protection, and this would keep the Russians bottled up in the Black Sea even when the Black Sea fleet was rebuilt. France was satisfied that for the moment its old isolation was removed. The Crimean War emphasised that in a European conflict the Mediterranean was always a secondary theatre as it had been in the Napoleonic wars and was to be in the twentieth-century wars – which does not mean it was unimportant. The invasion of the Crimea only occurred because the war was initially conceived as a defence of the Ottoman Empire; it soon became an attack on Russia, and that shifted the weight of the fighting into the Baltic, the only area where Russian power was truly vulnerable. The Mediterranean fleet had been employed for the previous forty years in dealing with occasional crises in its area, and its essential role was typified by Admiral Parker’s visits to the various likely trouble spots from the Balearics to the Dardanelles. The fleet, though it was of a substantial size, was until, and after, 1856, only a means of shoring up British influence. But from 1856 onwards, this began to change.

39 Winfried

Baumgarten, The Peace of Paris 1856: Studies in War, Diplomacy and Peacemaking, trans. Ann Pottinger Saab, Santa Barbara CA 1981.

Chapter 10 Ottoman Problems 1856–1905 The Crimean War highlighted many of the new conditions in which the British navy operated, but developments soon after the war produced much more crucial changes. In the Crimean War, considerable numbers of ships in both the British and French fleets were powered by steam, though many of these were small paddle steamers which were used as handmaids of the traditional windpowered line-of-battle ships, pulling them into position or into and out of harbour. The next stage in this development, the replacement of paddle power by screw propulsion, had begun, though it was going to be some time before the biggest ships used such power. The paddle steamers had proved to be all too vulnerable to enemy fire, their paddle wheels being very exposed; the screw ships had greater speed and potentially more power and manoeuvrability. In 1853 Admiral Dundas had sent his messages from Malta to London, first by ship to Marseilles, whence they were sent by telegraph to London.1 By 1855 cable telegraphy had reached Constantinople and the Crimea, and the admirals found that orders could be sent to them directly from their governments. Napoleon III was notoriously liable to second-guess his commanders, effectively stifling their initiative, unless, like General Pelissier, they were tough-minded enough to ignore him. The British government does not seem to have been quite so interfering, though the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir James Graham, had a distinct tendency that way.2 These changes – steam power, telegraph, iron ships – tend to be regarded as violently altering naval affairs, but in fact they were the culminating developments of a long line of gradual changes. It took over a century to get from the first small fragile steamships to oil-powered battleships like the Dreadnought; in other words, the speed of change was fairly gradual, and it followed on from continuing changes in ship construction, improvements in the sail plan, better 1 2

Andrew Lambert, The Crimean War, London 1990, 16. As experienced by his commanders in the Baltic: ibid, 28, and chs 12 and 13.

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charts and navigation, more accurate means of communication, and copper-sheathing, which had characterised the eighteenth century. The engine for these changes was, of course, the never-ending competition of repeated warfare, and that was also something which continued.3 And yet the shift from wind to steam, from wood to iron to steel, really was a rather greater set of changes than earlier, and these changes tended to arrive more quickly and then be overtaken by further improvements, often before the earlier had been properly assimilated. So such technological changes as these became part of naval officers’ everyday existence from this time onwards. Not only that, but, spurred on in large part by the ambitions and adventurousness of Napoleon III, the configuration of the European political system underwent serious changes after 1856. In the next fifteen years Italy was created as a unified state under the monarchy of Piedmont-Sardinia, Poland exploded in another brutal rebellion, brutally suppressed, and Prussia brought much of Germany under the control of the House of Hohenzollern in a series of wars. Little of this directly affected the Mediterranean fleet, though occasionally its ships were involved: the crossing of Garibaldi’s little army into Sicily and then into Italy, for example (in a reverse of the Neapolitan invasion of Sicily a dozen years before), was certainly facilitated by the presence of HMS Hannibal, the fleet flagship, which deterred the intervention of any other ships or powers. The Italian wars did not involve the fleet, for the process was generally approved of by the British government, other than to supervise it benevolently: but it was an interview between Garibaldi and the fleet’s commander-inchief Admiral Rodney Mundy which persuaded the Italian adventurer not to march on from Naples to Rome, but to return to his island of Caprera and retirement;4 this left it to the Sardinians to accomplish the union of north and south. The rise of Prussia, like the fate of Poland, took place out of the reach of any British fleet. The French naval capability had been notable during the Crimean campaign, even if it did evoke a good deal of British scorn at its supposed clumsiness and inefficiency. But this was to miss the point. The French navy was not designed to fight a more efficient and more self-confident navy. It was used instead to menace non-naval enemies 3

For a detailed account of the changes before the Crimean War, see Basil Greenhill and Ann Giffard, Steam, Politics, and Patronage: The Transformation of the Royal Navy, 1815–1854, London 1994: see also Lawrence Sondhaus, Naval Warfare 1815–1914, London 2001; these books also contain plentiful references to other studies. 4 Robert Holland, Blue-Water Empire: The British in the Mediterranean since 1800, London 2012, 90–92.

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– such as Austria – and to accomplish political moves. In 1849 a French squadron of steam-powered ships had intervened at Rome to bring down the revolutionary republic;5 Napoleon III used it in the eastern crises, at Constantinople, at Piraeus, in the Crimea (and in the Baltic). At such places it was happy to leave the main fighting to the British, who were only too pleased to do so. The use made of it in the Italian war of 1848–1849 was characteristic of this approach. In 1860 it was also used in the next phase of the continuing Ottoman debacle. Riots amounting to civil war in the Lebanon and Damascus, in which the various Lebanese groups indulged in mutual massacres and drove refugees from their homes, aroused European interest, and British ships at Sidon and Beirut helped to rescue refugees. Napoleon III spotted an opportunity to extend his influence into Syria by acting as a Christian protector, and sent part of the French fleet there with a small expeditionary force. The British, having failed to dissuade him, sent warships of their own, as did the Austrians – a revival of the coalition which had driven Muhammad Ali from Syria in 1840. The British were concerned to keep the French under some sort of control, and to lock out the Russians, who were primarily interested in revising the verdict of the Crimean War and in recovering their influence over the Ottoman Empire. The various fleets, and the French army, succeeded in calming things down, and the diplomats crafted a local solution in which Lebanon was made into a semi-autonomous region.6 The overall Mediterranean situation was therefore once again tilting towards France. Napoleon had succeeded in breaking the grip of the 1815 settlement on European affairs, first in the Crimean crisis, then in Italy. The development of a new French navy was now a standing threat to the British forces in the Mediterranean. Since 1840 a war between Britain and France had repeatedly emerged as a possibility, and the French construction of a major fleet base at Cherbourg had been countered by substantial fortifications at the fleet bases in southern England. The development of powerful, armoured, steam-driven screw warships became the basis of these scares. First was the appearance of the French screw battleship Napoleon, launched in 1850, and then the notorious case of the French screw battleship Gloire in 1858. This was answered by the ironclad HMS Warrior within a year, and this

5 6

Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 47. Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860, Berkeley CA 1994; briefly in William Harris, A History of Lebanon, 600–2011, Oxford 2012, 157–159.

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competition set off a minor arms race for a few years, until Napoleon had to switch his resources to his land forces when a threat from Prussia was apprehended: the geographical imperatives of France’s situation once more compelled the French navy to be relegated into comparative neglect.7 One of the minor sideshows of the Crimean War had been the attempted intervention of Greece on the Russian side. This had been scotched first by the Turkish defeat of the Greek attacks, and then by an Anglo-French squadron which occupied the Piraeus; the force stayed in occupation for three years.8 This was the first of a series of problems and crises and uprisings which brought Greece and the Greek region to the forefront of the attention of the British navy for the next ten years. British involvement in Greece dated from the acquisition of the Ionian Islands at the end of the Napoleonic War. An awkward administration had begun to collide with the local demand for self-determination and enosis – union with Greece. In 1858 W. E. Gladstone was sent to investigate and came to realise that enosis was the general wish of the population, but then attempted to insist that this was impossible, standing on the ‘Public Law of Europe’ , by which he meant the provisions of the treaties at the end of the Napoleonic War.9 This cut no ice with the Ionians, who could correctly point out that they were not participants in the Vienna conference, and when Britain proved to be sympathetic towards the idea of Italian unification, and the French actually fought on its behalf – these being two of the original protecting powers of the independent Greek kingdom – the wish for enosis became still more determined. The Royal Navy was regularly involved in patrolling the Greek seas, and in carrying commissioners to and fro between Malta, where they usually landed, and Corfu, the governing centre. A naval vessel was normally present in Corfu harbour, and others often turned up at the Piraeus. So in 1863, when a series of uprisings in the kingdom unseated King Otto of Greece, he and his wife took refuge on the screw corvette HMS Scylla. There followed negotiations to find a new king for Greece, which settled eventually on William George of the Danish dynasty, whose sister Alexandra married Prince Edward of Britain at about the same time.10 As part of the package the British finally accepted that continued British rule of the Ionian Islands was 7 8 9

Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 41, 73–75. C. M. Woodhouse, Modern Greece: A Short History (4th ed.), London 1986, 167. Robert Holland and Diana Markides, The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1850–1960, Oxford 2006, ch. 2, gives a sardonic account of Gladstone’s mission. 10 Woodhouse, Modern Greece, 169–171.

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futile, and agreed that they be handed on to the kingdom, repeatedly referring to it as a ‘gift’, and so again denying that the wishes of the inhabitants were relevant. In 1864 the transfer was done, with a ceremony which became more familiar in the twentieth century, of an orderly British evacuation in which the British could claim to have done the right thing, properly and with dignity, even though to anyone else it was clear that they had left under effective compulsion. The British navy was also involved in suppressing disturbances in parts of Greece, at least where they came near the coast – the screw corvette HMS Icarus, for example, cruised along the east coast of the Morea doing just this. (The ‘Public Law of Europe’ had clearly ceased to be a consideration.11) The effects of this cession, and the reinvigoration of Greece by the arrival of a new king, had effects elsewhere. Enosis was a potent slogan wherever Greeks were ruled by non-Greeks, nowhere more so than in Crete. This island had been ruled by Venice until conquered by the Ottomans in 1669 - almost their last military success. The Cretans, misgoverned by Western European standards – and their own - by the Turks, regularly rebelled. In the period since the erection of the Greek kingdom they had been ruled by Muhammad Ali of Egypt, rebelled when handed back to Ottoman rule (in 1841), rebelled again in 1858, and now rose in rebellion once more in 1866. The normal Ottoman method of suppressing such rebellions was to send in a military force, undisciplined and savage, but at the same time to promise reform and self-government, which promise was then not implemented. This time, however, when reforms and a return to Egyptian rule were promised, the Cretans held an assembly and rejected the offer; such an offer had been promised and reneged on too often; instead they wanted enosis. This was not something in their power to achieve. It would require Turkish agreement, Greek acceptance, and the agreement of the three guaranteeing powers, Britain, France, and Russia. But only Russia was interested, and only because of the prospect of upsetting the Paris settlement of 1856. Britain sent the screw corvette HMS Wizard to watch, but otherwise the rebellion was allowed to fizzle out in the usual massacre and ruin. There were plenty of Greek volunteers who went to the island to assist in prolonging the agony (just as Ionian islanders had flocked into Greece in 1854 to fruitlessly assist in the Greco–Turkish War). The end came when the sultan imposed yet another promise of self-government for the Cretans,

11 Ibid,

170; Holland and Markides, British and Hellenes, ch. 3.

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which satisfied the Great Powers, but not the Greeks, and worked no better than earlier attempts.12 One of the many Mediterranean ventures encouraged by Napoleon was well under way by this time: Ferdinand de Lesseps had gained enough support, financial and political, to begin the excavation of the Suez Canal within a couple of years the end of the Crimean War. Financed largely by French resources, and built by French engineers and near-enslaved Egyptian labourers, the canal took ten years to complete. It was opposed at first by the Ottoman and British governments, but for different reasons: neither wished to enhance the power of the khedive of Egypt, who was Said, Muhammad Ali’s son, until 1863, then Ismail, the son of Ibrahim. Britain had an additional reason for opposing the canal (apart from the fact that it was French), in that it would clearly facilitate communications between the Mediterranean and India, and the Mediterranean was coming to look like a French lake. Lesseps surmounted all obstacles.13 In 1869 the canal was opened amid a grand festival by the Empress Eugenie (a relative of Lesseps). The canal, a hundred miles long, connected the Red Sea and the Mediterranean by water directly for the first time. The Red Sea might now be considered to be a maritime extension of the Mediterranean: indeed it had been recognised as such in a way since the 1830s, when the East India Company seized control of the southern entrance at Socotra and Aden. The geopolitical consequences of the canal emerged only over time. Three British naval ships sailed the canal at its first opening, and the fleet understood its importance from the start: it was yet another new factor to consider. The canal changed the functions of the Mediterranean fleet. With an ability to reach the Indian Ocean in a few days by steamship, the fleet in the Mediterranean could be seen not just as exerting British power in that sea, but it was also a reserve fleet for problems further east – or alternatively it could be reinforced relatively easily, by a message sent by telegraph, from the ships in eastern waters. The Mediterranean was no longer a closed sea with only one entrance– exit; it had become a throughway.14 The canal therefore soon came to be seen as an essential British imperial link, but its French and Egyptian connections now became problematical; within a decade the British government was looking at Egypt as its major problem in the Mediterranean. By acquiring 12 Holland and Markides, British and Hellenes, 83–84. 13 Good accounts are by John Marlowe, The Making of

the Suez Canal, London 1964, and Lord Kinross, Between Two Seas: The Creation of the Suez Canal, London 1968. 14 Gerald S. Graham, The Politics of Naval Supremacy, Cambridge 1965, ch. 3.

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a controlling share in the Suez Canal Company stock - buying the shares held by the indebted Khedive Ismail - and then by establishing an Anglo-French control over Egyptian finances in order to pay the interest on Egyptian debts, Britain closed in on Egypt. The Mediterranean fleet was at the centre of a new Eastern Question crisis in 1875 when yet another nationalist rebellion against Turkish misrule developed, this time in Bulgaria; the Turks responded in their usual fashion, with massacre and destruction. The Russians saw another opportunity to secure a revision of their losses of 1856, encouraged by a campaign of anti-Ottoman outrage by W. E. Gladstone which shocked the Conservative government of Disraeli into a semi-paralysis and derailed its policy of generally supporting the Turks, particularly against Russian encroachments. The crisis evolved by June 1877 into a Russo-Turkish war, with Russia taking advantage of Turkish isolation to begin the dismantling of the restrictive terms of the Treaty of Paris. Stiff Turkish resistance at Plevna, at the crossing of the Danube, surprised everyone, especially the Russians, and diplomacy had time to work.15 The Mediterranean fleet moved from Malta to Athens (the Greeks were very liable to join in on the Russian side, and needed to be dissuaded) and then moved forward to Bezika Bay. The commander-in-chief, Vice-Admiral Sir Geoffrey Hornby, established contact with the British ambassador in Constantinople, and telegraphic contact with London. But the British government, particularly the Foreign Secretary Lord Derby, was fooled by specious Russian promises and the fleet was left at Bezika, or was ordered into the Straits then out again.16 The fortress of Plevna, the focus of the fighting on the Danube, fell to the Russians at last on 11 December; the Russian army was then able to move forward through the Balkan Mountains in January, and took Adrianople on 20 January. This put them within campaigning distance of Constantinople, and the British government’s focus suddenly sharpened. Hornby was ordered to bring his fleet forward to defend the city’s approaches. (One of the reasons for the slowness and difficulty of the Russian advance had been the Turkish navy’s control of the Black Sea, where Russia had only small torpedo boats and some armed merchant ships; this had restricted the movement of Russian supplies to the bad Balkan roads.17) The fleet’s forward move was cancelled almost at once, and the Russians were able to impose armistice terms which amounted to the 15 M.

S. Anderson, The Eastern Question, London 1966, ch. 7; R. W. SetonWatson, Disraeli, Gladstone, and Eastern Question, London 1935; Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, ch. 11; Clowes, Royal Navy, 7.291–292. 16 Lambert, Admirals, 267–270. 17 Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 123–124.

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destruction of the Turkish position in Europe. At this the British fleet was ordered forward again, and this time the move was not cancelled. There followed a week of confusion and tension. War preparations in Britain included sending the Channel fleet to Malta, the organisation of a fleet for the Baltic, and bringing 10,000 Indian troops to the Mediterranean – the Suez Canal thereby proving its imperial usefulness. The Russian forces reached as far as San Stefano, 8 miles from Constantinople, but this was on the coast of the Sea of Marmara, so they were vulnerable to the British ships. There a peace treaty was signed, on Russian terms: most of the conquered territory was to become a new state, Bulgaria.18 This created another crisis; Britain and Austria demanded that the treaty be renegotiated and the new ‘Big Bulgaria’ reduced. A European Congress was called, at Berlin. The fleet remained in the Sea of Marmara, but it was Russian exhaustion, financial and military (and the Turkish navy’s continued dominance of the Black Sea), which brought about the climbdown by Russia at the Congress. One of the terms of the eventual treaty was that Cyprus was assigned to Britain (though remaining technically Turkish) as a forward base which would allow the fleet to come to the support of the Turks in any new crisis, though the island soon became another British colonial possession. The navy investigated and decided that Famagusta was a suitable base for the new ironclad ships, somewhat optimistically – it never did become one.19 Another clause in the treaty restricted the size of Bulgaria so that it had no maritime frontage on the Mediterranean – it was assumed that Bulgaria would be a Russian satellite, and without a Bulgarian Mediterranean coastline there would be no temptation for the Russians to create a base there. The potency of the Mediterranean fleet, and of British sea power generally, had been shown in this crisis, though it had had to do no fighting, and its ability to influence events within the Balkan landmass beyond the range of its guns was nil. (The effectiveness of the Turkish Black Sea fleet, however, had been considerable.) The true threat had been one, as in 1855–1856, of a British fleet approaching Kronstadt and St Petersburg, together with Russian exhaustion, which would perhaps not have been able to withstand an attack by the Indian troops and Ottomans together. But eventually the fleet had been used to assist the Turks in resisting Russian designs, though

18 Lambert, Admirals, 271–275; Clowes, Royal Navy, 7.292–299. 19 Clowes, Royal Navy, 7.300–302; Lambert, Admirals, 274–275;

Holland and Markides, British and Hellenes, 163–166; Dwight E. Lee, Great Britain and the Cyprus Convention Policy of 1878, Cambridge MA 1934.

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the size of Turkish losses – Serbia, Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus – was, to the Turks, a tough price to pay for such support. The financial pit into which the Khedives (and Lesseps) had plunged Egypt inevitably brought an Egyptian reaction. The army was the one Egyptian institution which could act. The Egyptian nationalist reaction came in 1879–1881, in a complex series of events which ended with an internal coup led by Colonel Arabi Pasha. This threatened to overturn the international system of control which had been imposed on Egypt with a regime more to the benefit of the Egyptians. Britain and France, the major creditors, reacted with annoyance, but not in agreement. Eventually, as rioting spread in Egypt and targeted Europeans, they sent a joint fleet to lie off Alexandria. This was a tactic used often enough to subdue violent affairs onshore, and it seemed to have worked at Constantinople four years before. However, Alexandria was not Egypt, and most Egyptians were not impressed by ships which were far away from them – Alexandria was, as it had been in the ancient world, a foreign adjunct to Egypt, and not really Egyptian at all.20 Further, the two admirals, British and French, had been given no orders about shooting, so the ships simply lay at anchor, facing the city, and were soon seen to be a non-threat. In the end Admiral Sir Beauchamp Seymour decided that he had to fire in an attempt to cow the rioters in the city, and to pre-empt a bombardment of his ships from the shore. His targets were the forts defending the harbour (built by French engineers). The French admiral, citing his lack of orders (and perhaps assuming that British unpopularity as a result of the bombardment would redound to French advantage), withdrew to Port Said. The bombardment lasted all day, the forts closing down one by one. This did not stop the rioting in the city, which simply became worse, and parties of sailors and marines were landed to impose their sort of order on the inhabitants, a method which included summary executions.21 Examination of the Alexandrian forts after the bombardment showed that, although they had all been hit numerous times, they were all still capable of being fought. Many of the British shells had failed to explode. Of the Egyptian rifled guns, the most potent weapons they had, only a quarter had been so damaged as to be put out of action. Several of the British ships had also been hit, and though their armour was not usually penetrated, several Egyptian 20 As

is clear in the relevant chapters of Philip Mansel, Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe in the Mediterranean, London 2010. 21 Clowes, Royal Navy, 7.323–337; J. F. Maurice, The Campaign of 1882 in Egypt, [London] 1887, 10–12; William Wright, A Tidy Little War, Stroud 2009, 93–102; Anthony Preston and John Major, Send a Gunboat, 2nd ed., London 2007, 101–103.

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shells, which like the British had a tendency not to explode, reached dangerous parts of the ships. The Navy’s self-congratulation at silencing the forts was a good deal premature. The bombardment only reinforced widespread Egyptian support for the nationalists, who now seemed to threaten the Suez Canal. Marines and seamen from the fleet were landed to secure control of Alexandria, where fires raged and much looting and killing took place; expeditions, usually by train, moved into the nearby Delta, but there were not enough men to spare for anything like a lengthy occupation. Troops were sent to Malta and Cyprus under General Sir Garnet Wolseley, to be used if necessary. And, of course, it was soon seen that they were ‘necessary’ . Wolseley considered Alexandria and the Delta, but had already decided, on his way out to Egypt, that an invasion by way of the canal was preferable. Suez had been occupied by a naval expedition in the Red Sea commanded by Rear-Admiral Sir William Hewett, commander-in-chief of the East Indies station; when the army’s forces arrived in the eastern Mediterranean Wolseley organised a demonstration off Alexandria as a distraction, then moved the troops to Port Said, which was taken on 20 August. Ships had already been in the canal for several days; a small force seized Ismailia, where the road to Cairo began, also on the 20th; in the next days the whole army was landed at Ismailia. A month later the Egyptian army at Tel el-Kebir, halfway to Cairo, was defeated, and Cairo was occupied on 14 September. Along the Mediterranean coast units of the fleet bombarded Egyptian positions and landed forces at Alexandria and Aboukir Bay and Damietta.22 This conquest reordered the situation in the Eastern Basin, but British control brought continuing problems; a gradual alteration in the British strategic position in the Mediterranean took place. The occupation of Egypt was not taken well at Constantinople, and the government of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1878–1908) began to withdraw from British influence, though the obvious alternative of Russia was not palatable. To the Turks British influence had come to mean handing over sections of their empire to foreign rule – Tunis was taken by the French in 1881, and a section of Thessaly was manhandled to Greece in that year; this policy of appeasement could only encourage other demands on Turkish territory. The occupation of Egypt was regarded without pleasure by the French, even though the French Assembly had decisively rejected the opportunity to participate in the

22 Clowes,

Royal Navy, 7.339–346; Wright, Tidy Little War; Maurice, Campaign, chs 5–13.

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conquest; for the next twenty years the French made it their business to attempt to thwart all British initiatives in Egypt. The problem of the Ottoman decline brought other crises: Britain was one of the participants in a partial blockade of the Greek Aegean coast in 1886 which prevented the Greeks from starting a new war with Turkey. (The British ships involved numbered twenty, the rest, German, Austrian, Russian, Italian, and Turkish, numbered thirty-one.23) The problem of Crete revived in the 1890s. Yet another set of riots had happened in 1877, affected by the Russo-Turkish war, which persuaded Sultan Abdul Hamid to send a Christian as governor, and to promise reforms which again failed to be implemented. More disturbances occurred in 1889, suppressed by the Ottoman army, but in this case a permanent insurrectionary organisation survived the events. More riots began in 1896, and were exploited by that organisation to stir up opposition to Turkish rule, and this developed into serious inter-communal riots and massacres. A Greek army unit and Greek ships intervened, without much effect other than to annoy the Turks. British ships arrived – HMS Hood was the first, a battleship this time – as did those of every other naval power in the Mediterranean, even a German ship. A Council of Admirals made futile attempts to impose order. Their ships could not seriously affect matters inland, though an attempted advance by Greek troops on the capital was stopped by naval gunfire. The admirals divided the island into four sections, controlled by Italy, France, Britain, and Russia; the British-controlled area held most of the Muslims, which caused nasty comments from all sides (except possibly, those being protected). Ships bombarded both sides’ positions. The decision by the naval committee to start collecting taxes led to a further riot, and an ultimatum to the Turkish governor. A further ultimatum was delivered to the sultan that he evacuate his forces. The result was that Crete became autonomous, with a Greek prince as High Commissioner;24 the British were seen by the Turks to have engineered the loss of yet another province. The Mediterranean command was the premier naval command in the British navy, though the home command, or Channel fleet, was usually larger, at least while France was perceived as the most likely potential enemy. But France’s power faded for a time after its defeat by Prussia and its German allies in 1870–1871, and the main naval action for the British was fighting pirates in the China Seas, or diplomacy in the Mediterranean Eastern Basin. It was this 23 Clowes, Royal Navy, 7.385–386. 24 Holland and Markides, British and

Hellenes, 84–107; Woodhouse, Modern Greece, 181–182; Clowes, Royal Navy, 7.444–448.

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fleet which attracted the senior commanders, anxious to exercise their skills, though for much of the time the skill they required was diplomatic. Sir William Parker in 1849–1850 is perhaps the chief modern example, though Collingwood between 1805 and 1810 had been an earlier case; Sir Geoffrey Hornby, moored uncomfortably in Bezika Bay in 1877–1878, and Sir Beauchamp Seymour at Alexandria in 1882, were also men who had to combine sea-command and diplomacy. These men also exerted themselves to revive the fleet’s condition. The pattern of its history was to have a vigorous commander who shook up the command by energy and an insistence on some particular fad – discipline, fleet tactics, exercises – followed by a period of fallow time in which the discipline lapsed, the appearance of the ships became more important than their fighting efficiency, and/ or financial constraints were tight. This was followed by the need to reinvigorate the fleet once more. Parker had done the energising in the 1840s, Hornby in the 1870s; Admiral Sir John Fisher did so again at the end of the nineteenth century. It is noticeable that none of these three were fighting admirals of the Nelsonic type - there had been no opportunities for full-scale battles - but they kept the fleet in trim, efficient in a warlike rather than a decorative sense, capable of fighting if necessary - so capable, in fact, that it did not need to. One of the troughs of this fleet’s see-saw career came in 1893 (in the period between Hornby and Fisher) when the battleship Victoria, flagship of the fleet, collided with the battleship Camperdown, which was the flagship of the second-in-command. Victoria sank quickly, taking the fleet’s commander-in-chief Sir George Tryon and most of its crew to their deaths. The collision was caused, in the end, by a too-rigid and unimaginative obedience to orders, combined with a failure of initiative, both of which characteristics are typical of a service becoming ossified. It also provided plenty of opportunity for derision from the navy’s enemies, both at home and abroad. This was exactly why the fleet needed a periodic shaking-up.25 The use of Malta by the British navy during the crises in the Eastern Basin reduced the usefulness of Gibraltar to its ships, especially as the harbour at Malta was larger, better developed, and better sheltered. The capacity of the Malta base expanded during and after the Crimean War, and the constant problems of the Eastern Basin required that the fleet be accommodated there repeatedly, in readiness to be moved to the seat of the next crisis. More dockyards, better defences, more supplies, were all needed, but it was only after 1850 that the facilities inherited from the Knights became inadequate. The 25 Clowes,

Royal Navy, 7.415–426.

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

presence of coal-driven vessels, and then ironclads, required better storage and maintenance facilities and workshops. The Knights had feared invasion and had built forts of various sizes at potential landing places; from 1860 or so the British did the same, concentrating (as had the Knights) on fortifying Valetta.26 The opening of the Suez Canal and the adoption of steam propulsion also brought a certain increase in the commercial potential of Malta, and a new civilian port was developed. The opening of the through-Mediterranean route once the Suez Canal was open brought revival to Gibraltar, which became a port of call again, this time for ships, naval and civilian, sailing through the Mediterranean and further east; it also became the source of refuelling for coal-driven ships – the coal heavers were a substantial, and ill paid, part of the working population. The increased spending on the navy which began in the 1880s included plans directed to improving the Gibraltar dockyard: a new breakwater was constructed, using stone quarried from Gibraltar itself, and a dry dock was excavated. The anchorage became much safer, and the facilities much more useful than earlier.27 In addition, of course, steamships were unlikely to be pinned down in the harbour by adverse weather. Yet this improvement, begun in 1894, and largely finished early in the new century, came just at the time when new pressures on the navy were about to call the very existence of the Mediterranean fleet into question. The understanding with France, and the settlement of many outstanding colonial disputes, lessened the pressure in the Mediterranean. This entente brought with it a less strained relationship with Russia, which was France’s military ally, and Russia’s comprehensive naval disaster at the hands of the Japanese navy in 1904–1905 meant that it ceased to be a naval threat. For Britain the German High Seas Fleet in the North Sea was now the crucial threat, and a new threat to India was perceived in the slow construction of a railway from Constantinople towards Basra in Mesopotamia, supposedly capable of providing access to India and its ocean from Europe, specifically Germany, which was financing the railway – the ‘Berlin– Baghdad’ railway.28 It was in this period also that the Mediterranean region as a whole became a popular destination for visitors, particularly from Britain. These were middle-class successors of the aristocratic wanderers to various parts of the Mediterranean in the previous hundred years

26 Robert

Holland, Blue-Water Empire: The British in the Mediterranean since 1800, London 2012, 100–101. 27 Jackson, Gibraltarians, 255–261. 28 Anderson, Eastern Question, 264–267.

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or so – people such as Lord Byron and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; the new visitors included Queen Victoria. The south of France and Italy were the most popular regions, but after 1882 Egypt became an especial target, especially since it was close to Palestine, regularly described as the ‘Holy Land’ . From the 1850s Thomas Cook organised tours to these places, and local enterprise ensured that hotels were built, improved, and even cleaned. Where the Navy went, so went the tourists.29 The possession of Egypt from 1882, in whatever guise it was cloaked, had a hampering effect on British diplomacy, since six European powers were represented on the control of the Debt Commission and any set of three of these could block any British initiative. It also began to change naval presumptions of the situation in the Eastern Basin, for with a major naval base at Alexandria and the use of ports in Cyprus, the fleet could be stationed much closer to the political crises of the Ottoman Empire. For the British, any threat by outsiders to Constantinople and the Straits was of immediate concern. The fleet based at Malta had to respond by being stationed outside the Dardanelles, but now the steam-powered fleet, stationed at Alexandria or Cyprus, was much closer to the potential trouble spot. Not only that, but the issue was not just a matter of preventing the exit of the Russian Black Sea fleet – still of little real strength even forty years after the Crimean War. The Suez Canal had now become the defence post of the British sea route to the Indian Ocean. Control of Egypt made this task much easier, for a fleet based at Alexandria, and the British garrison of Egypt and the Suez Canal, could maintain a tight grip on the essential points. Even if the Russian fleet got through the Straits and evaded the British fleet, it would not be able to get through the canal any more than it would be able to get past Gibraltar, and therefore the Russian fleet would be bottled up in the Mediterranean to be dealt with by the British ships at their leisure, either those already in the Mediterranean or by reinforcements from the Channel fleet. Strategically the canal was only usable by the British. British interest in supporting the Ottoman Empire was therefore much less by 1890 than earlier; also changes in the European diplomatic system made it less possible (as opposed to less desirable) to do so. From 1888 the two powers which feared German armed strength on the continent, Russia and France, slowly drew together into a full alliance, effective by 1892 and ratified in 1894. This put the French fleet at Toulon into a position to intervene in an eastern crisis on 29 John

Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South, Oxford 1988.

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the Russian side, thereby ‘immobilising’ the British fleet, if it was supporting the Ottomans.30 In addition Sultan Abdul Hamid II was much less willing to listen to British advice, and as a signal of his displeasure was fortifying the Dardanelles, a factor which could only be directed against the British fleet. In the 1877–1878 crisis it had been the fortifications of the Bosporos which had been one of the key factors which had blocked the Russians; now the forts of the Dardanelles effectively blocked any naval intervention against Turkish wishes.31 And by the 1890s the British public was thoroughly sickened by the violent methods of the Ottoman government; the British government found it much more difficult to justify supporting that empire – massacres in Armenia and Crete in that decade were only the latest examples. German engineers built the Dardanelles forts, an early sign of the new Ottoman preferences among the European powers. (Germany’s emergence as a united power gave the sultan an alternative supporter, and the new German Empire welcomed the chance of displaying its diplomatic strength as well as its military power.) A crisis in 1894–1896 over massacres of Armenians by Ottoman forces further soured the relations of Britain and the sultan, while the manifest reluctance of Germany to become involved in the Cretan crisis of the 1890s was clear – one ship was sent, briefly - and this was noted by the sultan. The British role in detaching that island definitively from Ottoman control further alienated Turkish opinion. From the late 1890s, therefore, the Mediterranean fleet was no longer expected to be ready to sail to assist the Ottoman sultan, and over the next ten years the international situation in the eastern Mediterranean shifted, rendering the role of the British fleet there less decisive. One result of this change was a developing friendship between Britain and France. In 1896 sailors were present in the campaign to reconquer the Nile Valley in the Sudan, and it was Mediterranean fleet gunboats which sailed as far as Fashoda to confront the French exploring expedition under Captain Marchand.32 This meeting effectively ended the French colonial challenge to Britain. A simmering resentment remained, but this was the effective conclusion of the partition of Africa – there were no unclaimed territories left and the potential for quarrels was thus reduced. Then in 1904–1905 France’s ally Russia suffered its catastrophic naval defeat at the hands of the Japanese, a British ally.

30 Anderson, Eastern Question, 252. 31 Ibid. 32 Preston and Major, Send a Gunboat,

Clowes, Royal Navy, 7.439–440.

116–117; Lambert, Admirals, 337–340;

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This did not persuade the French to go to war, but it did contribute to the resolution of colonial disputes between Britain and France known as the Entente Cordiale, agreed the previous year.33 Among other matters, this agreement much reduced the British problems in Egypt, for one of the clauses bound the French to support Britain there in return for British support for the French in Morocco. Therefore, when in 1905 the German Kaiser Wilhelm landed from his gunboat at Tangier and ruminated aloud about German ‘rights’ , this was recognised as a German attempt to destabilise the new Franco-British diplomatic agreement. The ploy came unstuck when Germany found that France was steadfastly supported by Britain at the subsequent conference at Algeciras, and that no other European state, apart from Austria-Hungary, provided any support for the German case. Morocco’s geographical position at the Sea-entrance made it a traditional British concern, which gave Britain clear weight in the conference.34 But paradoxically, the dashing of German hopes and the displayed durability of the Franco-British entente began the process of making the Mediterranean fleet much less relevant in power terms than at any time in the previous century, even though Egypt and Morocco had been the central elements in the agreement. 1905 is the point at which, in retrospect, the Great War which broke out in 1914 became, if not inevitable, then much more likely than before. The diplomatic alignments in Europe remained almost stationary for the next ten years amid a succession of diplomatic crises, and so the diplomatic division of the continent became increasingly rigid. The one uncertain element was the posture of Italy, which was always suspicious of France, and so was technically allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary – but it was also at enmity with Austria-Hungary. Which way Italy would go if war began was quite unclear (to the Italians as much as anyone) and so the issue was disturbing, but it gradually became clear that the one thing Italy would not do was go to war with Britain. Since any war was predicted to be short, Italy became only a minor concern.35 Maritime technology was much more upsetting to the fleet than Italy’s diplomatic problems. From the 1880s technical developments and international ambitions had driven the expansion of European 33 Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, 413–417. 34 Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German

Antagonism 1860–1914, London 1980, 275–285; C. J. Lowe and M. L. Dockrill, The Mirage of Power, vol. I, British Foreign Policy 1902–1914, London 1972, 11–28; Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War, London 1992, 351–369. 35 Paul G. Halpern, ‘Italy, the Second Mediterranean Power’ , in Halpern, The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 1908–1914, Cambridge MA 1971, 187–219.

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navies (just as it had in the 1780s). The size and hitting power of major fighting ships steadily increased, and new types of ships were developed. Battleships grew in speed and range and firepower, and, with the invention and development of the torpedo, in vulnerability as well. A small torpedo boat now seemed to be capable of sinking a battleship with a single shot. Navies developed smaller and faster ships to defend the battleships – torpedo-boat destroyers, which were to be aimed at battleships and simultaneously intended to destroy other torpedo boats – in the Royal Navy they became simply ‘destroyers’ . Tactics became complicated, and the speed of ships steadily increased with the development of turbine engines and the use of oil as a fuel in place of coal. Every navy went thorough these repeated technical changes, and each major change rendered existing ships obsolete and vulnerable. In fact, it was impossible to replace ships all the time to adapt to the new inventions, and in many cases the technical changes took place cumulatively, each development being relatively minor; for example, the use of oil fuel did not put coal-fired ships out of use. But the steady accumulation of improvements and developments forced navies to build and rebuild. The two most important of these cumulative changes were the development of the submersible boat armed with torpedoes (commonly referred to as ‘submarines’) and the construction of the first all-big-gun battleship Dreadnought. This latter took place in the fateful year 1905, when the diplomatic division of Europe became clear.36 The Royal Navy had also, by 1905, become quite clear that it was no longer France and Russia, separately or in alliance, which posed the most serious challenge to its dominance. Germany had repeatedly clashed with British positions in the previous ten years, in the Ottoman Empire (the forts of the Dardanelles, the building of the Baghdad railway, the Kaiser’s visit to Jerusalem), and in the Moroccan crisis. More serious was the German challenge to the Royal Navy when it began a determined effort to develop a navy capable of dominating the North Sea. This was seen as a direct threat to Britain, even if the German assumption was that their fleet was intended as an inducement to agreement and accommodation. The launching of Dreadnought, and the new British naval building programme, were replies to that challenge. The century-long domination of the Mediterranean by the Royal Navy had therefore come under unprecedented challenge by 1900. 36 Sondhaus,

Naval Warfare, 160–224; Jon Tetsuro Sumida, In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy, 1889–1914, London 1989.

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It is commonly remarked that the building of Dreadnought rendered every other battleship afloat out of date, and this included the Royal Navy’s own battleships, now referred to, rather disparagingly, as ‘pre-Dreadnoughts’ . It did not really do that, of course, at least not straight away. It was really only one more technical development in the long list of those which had changed the composition and capabilities of navies repeatedly, continuously, since the application of steam power to ships, and even before. The Royal Navy was not insensitive to the need to adapt itself to the new conditions. It was very early recognised, for example, that the increasing range of shore-based guns, combined with the secretiveness of torpedo-armed submarines, made it impossible to use the navy’s tried and trusted weapon of a close blockade of enemy ports. The answer to this was a distant blockade, assisted in the case of a war with Germany by the fact that the exits from the North Sea could be closed to enemy ships by continuous patrols. Battle tactics were steadily developed to cope with big-gun ships and destroyers; the submarine threat was recognised, though a counter to it had still to be developed. The German threat, replacing that of France and Russia, necessarily brought a reconsideration of the role of the Mediterranean fleet. Once again, as in other wars where active enemies were not present on the Mediterranean coasts, that fleet’s usefulness began to seem much reduced. But that was before the war came – and when it did, previous calculations proved wide of the mark, as usual.

Chapter 11 Great War 1905–1923

Britain and Germany settled into an arms competition, while Germany was also in a similar competition with France over their land armies; the strain on all three was very great. This pushed Britain and France steadily closer together. They did not conclude a formal alliance, but they openly cooperated to combat the German threat. France deliberately increased the conscription period of her soldiers from two years to three, so increasing the number of soldiers immediately available if a war began; Britain drove ahead with its determination to outbuild Germany in warships. France’s alliance with Russia was supplemented by an Anglo-Russian Convention which attempted, not very successfully, to solve their disputes along the lines of the Entente Cordiale.1 This alignment was fragile; had German diplomacy been more skilful, it could have brought about its disintegration. But Germany was arrogant and clumsy, and put its faith in power, not in finesse or conciliation. If a war between Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side and France and Russia and Britain on the other did break out, the Mediterranean was likely to be only a minor theatre of warfare; the only hostile coast, as far as Britain and France were concerned, would be the Austrian Dalmatian province. Austria-Hungary was developing its navy, based at Trieste and Fiume, though this was mainly in competition with its theoretical ally Italy; Italy was also building, with one eye on Austria and the other on France; the exact diplomatic stance of Italy was uncertain. If Italy stayed neutral, the Austrian ships became a threat; and if Italy joined in the war against Britain and France, the two together could pose a serious threat, though cooperation seemed unlikely. Between them in 1914 they had six Dreadnoughts, along with the usual array of smaller vessels. But 1

George F. Kennan, The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War, New York 1984; Jennifer Siegel, Endgame: Britain, Russia and the Final Struggle for Central Asia, London 2002.

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Britain faced its greatest threat from Germany, and in concert with France adjusted its forces accordingly. Yet it could not permit the route through the Mediterranean to be severed. Meanwhile the problems of the Eastern Basin continued as before, and contributed to the eventual decisions of all those who participated in the war to come. The international force remained in Crete until 1908, at which time it was agreed by the European consuls and the High Commissioner that a local police force had been properly trained and a reasonable distribution of posts between Muslims and Christians had been achieved. The occupation forces were withdrawn in batches in the second half of the year, but the seizure of power in the Ottoman Empire by the Young Turks in October 1908 upset the process. The coup prompted Austria to annex Bosnia, which it had been occupying, and Bulgaria to seize Eastern Rumelia. With a nudge from Greece, the autonomous Cretan administration announced that Crete had united with Greece – enosis. It was yet another Near Eastern crisis in the apparently unending sequence. The British government reacted in traditional form, by sending part of the Mediterranean fleet, and the naval powers who had provided the international occupation force sent contingents of ships to Crete once more in order to undo enosis; an international party of marines commanded by Captain Thursby of HMS Swiftsure symbolically cut down the flagpole on which the Greek flag had been raised. The situation within the island gradually deteriorated, with both Greece and Turkey meddling in the island and hoping to gain or regain control; the international flotilla remained on call, but it could do little about the internal conditions on the island. Almost simultaneous crises in 1911, over Agadir in Morocco, and the Italian invasion of Ottoman Libya, made matters worse. The following year the Cretan problem was effectively solved when the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire were conquered by the Balkan states, in the course of which Crete was finally annexed by Greece. As the Balkan region became the focus of interest, the international naval contingent at Crete evaporated. The cruiser Hampshire was sent to Salonika, one of the new Balkan flashpoints; the last ship in the area, HMS Yarmouth, left in February 1913. It is difficult to decide if the Mediterranean fleet had been at all effective in the island’s internal affairs, but the removal of the ships clearly allowed the Greeks to take full control of the island.2 In 1905 the first crisis over Morocco had been a challenge to the French ambition to acquire some sort of control over the country; it was also a more distant challenge to the British navy, whose base at 2

Holland and Markides, British and Hellenes, ch. 6.

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Gibraltar was close by, and a deliberate German test of the British commitment to its new friendship with France, which was redeemed in the conference held in Algeciras. This was ostensibly a neutral Spanish port, but Spain was itself interested in Morocco, holding the small Mediterranean ports of Ceuta and Melilla. Perhaps more to the point, one only had to look out of the seaward windows of the hotel in which the conference was meeting to see Gibraltar, its Rock, its guns, and its ships. The Germans took note, as did the French.3 The development of heavy, long-range artillery, firing with a new accuracy, gave the British an even greater control over the Strait. Of course, the threat of heavy artillery can work both ways: in Spanish hands it could make life in Gibraltar virtually impossible, as pointed out by several British commentators.4 Partly because of this, diplomatic efforts were made throughout the later nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries towards keeping Spain friendly to Britain. Gibraltar was the centre of employment of a considerable part of the population of nearby parts of Spain, and any new siege would be economically disastrous for them. They could work for better wages in Gibraltar than were paid (or too often, not paid) by the great landowners of Andalusia, who were almost the only alternative employers. The British had pushed their control northwards, taking over the neutral ground between the rival fortifications; this, despite Spanish protests.5 The heavy cost of building ships to compete with Germany was a further problem, particularly in the Mediterranean context where both Italy and Austria-Hungary were also building up their battleship strengths. As fellow members with Germany in the Triple Alliance they were likely to be ranged against Britain and France in a war, though Italy’s indecision was disturbing. Italy’s conquests in the Turkish war included Libya, with its ports and long coastline, and the Dodecanese islands between southwest Turkey and Crete. Together with Sardinia, Sicily and southern Italy this gave Italy potential control over the whole central Mediterranean – with the exception of French Tunisia and British Malta. So the old problem for the British, a constant issue in the eighteenth century, revived: it was necessary to concentrate the major part of the navy for the defence of the homeland, though the threat was now from across the North Sea, not the English Channel; at the same time, there was a clear threat to the British position in the

3

The hotel, replete with mementos of the meeting, is now populated largely by British pensioners, seeking the Spanish sun. 4 As did Thomas Gibson Bowles, Gibraltar: A National Danger, London 1901. 5 Jackson, Gibraltarians, 250–252; see the map of the shifting frontier on 251.

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Mediterranean as the Italian and Austrian fleets grew. It was reckoned that, according to the plans of these two, by early 1915 they would jointly have ten dreadnoughts between them. (As it happened, they had only six, but ten were projected.6) Such a force, if the two states worked together, would be a major threat to the Royal Navy in the sea, which had become, since 1869, a vital communications link between Britain and its eastern empire, including Egypt. For Britain, it was as necessary to safeguard this link as it was to guard against invasion across the North Sea. Yet any attempt to match or overmatch the joint Austro-Italian naval strength in the Mediterranean would subtract significantly from that necessary concentration of British naval forces in the North Sea.7 There was one new consideration compared with the eighteenth century: after 1904 it was unlikely that the French fleet would be hostile; instead, it was increasingly likely that Britain would join France in any war with Germany; they now had a common enemy. This became quite clear after the second Moroccan crisis of 1911, when Germany’s meddling brought an explicit threat of war from Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on behalf of the British government.8 The British had steadily reduced their battleship numbers in the Mediterranean from twelve in 1904 to just two in 1912, but when the Admiralty planned to withdraw these last two, the Foreign Office in London insisted that some replacement must take place, and three battle cruisers were sent. The intention was also to make Gibraltar the primary base rather than Malta, using the recently constructed dockyard and the better defences, with the intention that the Mediterranean ships could be quickly brought into home waters in a crisis. But the naval arms race in the central Mediterranean between Italy and Austria-Hungary, Italy’s recent conquests, war between Greece and Turkey in 1913, and the regular disturbances in the east, required a continuing presence in Malta, so the two remaining battleships remained based at Gibraltar and the three battle cruisers at Malta.9

6

Paul G. Halpern, The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 1908–1914, Cambridge MA 1971, 30–31 and appendix. 7 Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, London 1976, ch. 8; Michael Simpson, ‘Superhighway to the World Wide Web: The Mediterranean in British Imperial Strategy, 1900–1945’ , in John B. Hattendorf (ed.), Naval Strategy and Policy in the Mediterranean, Past, Present and Future, London 2000, 51–76. 8 C. J. Lowe and M. L. Dockrill, The Mirage of Power, vol. 1, British Foreign Policy 1902–1914, London 1972, 37–47. 9 Kennedy, Rise and Fall, 223–229; Lambert, Admirals, 312–313; Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, 479–481; for the fleet distribution in 1902, see British

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Independently, the French navy in 1912 decided that their aged battleships stationed at Brest could never cope with the new modern German fleet, so they were transferred to Toulon. There seems to have been no formal agreement between Britain and France over this, but some collusion was implicit in the British evacuation – even abandonment – of the Mediterranean in the same year and the French abandonment of their position in the north, implying that the two powers would operate in concert in the event of war, with the British protecting the French northern coast (which would automatically follow anyway from their domination of the North Sea - by defending themselves the British necessarily defended France); the French would therefore provide a certain defence for the British position in the Mediterranean in a war in which Austria, almost certainly, and possibly Italy, were enemies of both Britain and France.10 Both the British and the French were concerned at the growth in the power of these potential enemies. Italy and Austria-Hungary were building competitively against each other,11 but they made an agreement in 1913 on how they should operate in a war against France. Their joint strength would certainly be capable of overwhelming French forces in the Mediterranean; this was the basic reason for the British battle cruisers being stationed at Malta.12 In the Aegean, powerful animosities between Greece and Turkey after the Balkan wars of 1912–1913 had led to both countries searching for new naval strength. Neither had much in 1914, but both were buying, or having built, new vessels. Turkey had also to be wary of the growing Russian Black Sea fleet.13 None of these three countries was yet a serious threat to anyone but each other, but Turkey in particular was a problem because of its increasingly close relationship with Germany. Having been defeated by Italy and the Balkan states in recent years, and resentful of British and French meddling in their affairs, it had become quite possible that the German side would be the Turks’ choice if a new war came; the widespread perception that the Ottoman state was weak, however, led to its enmity being as widely discounted. Naval Documents, 751–754; for the initial redistribution, see Arthur J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, vol. I, Annapolis MD 1961, 40–43; for the 1912 distribution, 287–310. 10 Paul G. Halpern, ‘French and Italian Naval Policy in the Mediterranean, 1898– 1945’ , in Hattendorf (ed.), Naval Strategy, 78–106. 11 Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 209–213. 12 Halpern, Mediterranean Naval Situation, 220–252, for Austro-Italian rivalry; 30–31 and the appendix for the Royal Navy’s distribution and general fleet strengths. 13 Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 217–221; Halpern, Mediterranean Naval Situation, 295–354.

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In 1913 an extra item was added to this volatile and uncertain situation by the arrival in the Mediterranean of two German warships. The Austro-Italian naval convention of that year, promoting the idea of cooperation between the two fleets of Austria and Italy, had been brokered by Germany; the arrival of these two ships was intended to add some cement to an agreement which was regarded as potential rather than firm. The main unit was Goeben, a battle cruiser faster and more powerful than any other ship in the Mediterranean. The German intention was that this ship (and its companion, the cruiser Breslau) would lead the Italian and Austrian fleets in an offensive to clear the Mediterranean of Allied ships; a rendezvous at Messina was fixed.14 The partial abandonment of the Mediterranean by the British navy in 1912, therefore, left the sea open to Britain’s enemies, if they could combine. In the event, as the declarations of war were sprayed across Europe during August 1914, Italy declared its neutrality. This at once disabled German–Austrian plans, but left Goeben and Breslau free to act as the German Admiralty wished. They sailed west to bombard Bone and Philippeville in Algeria, but missed the main target, the French troop transports carrying soldiers from North Africa to France. Having been refused full bunkering in Italy, they headed for Constantinople, as ordered. They evaded the British battle cruisers by sheer speed, and frightened off a set of British cruisers, who had been told not to attack a stronger force. They were allowed through the Dardanelles and anchored off Constantinople. The escape of the two German ships led to dispute in Britain, and Admiral Sir Ernest Troubridge, the British commander, was court-martialed as a result. The real problem was interference by the Admiralty, particularly by the First Lord, Winston Churchill - but also from the fact that the Goeben was faster than any of the British ships. Overconfidence in the Royal Navy did not help either. The Turks soon announced that they had purchased the two German ships (though this was fictitious) to replace two dreadnoughts being built in Britain which had been taken over by the British government.15 It was therefore scarcely a surprise when Turkey entered the

14 Halpern, ‘French and Italian Naval 15 Paul G. Halpern, The Naval War

Policy’, 85–86. in the Mediterranean, London 1987, 46; documents in E. W. R. Lumby, Policy and Operations in the Mediterranean 1912–14, NRS, 1970, part II; Marder, Dreadnought, vol. II, 20–41; Ulrich Trumpener, ‘The Escape of the Goeben and Breslau: A Reassessment’ , Canadian Journal of History 6, 1971, 171–187.

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war on the German side, though it took them three months and a heavy German nudge before their war actually began.16 These two German–Turkish ships had to be watched, which task fell to a British squadron, including the two battle cruisers. The French set up a distant blockade of the Adriatic to keep the Austrians in, though they showed no intention of moving, knowing that their mere presence tied up plenty of Allied ships and resources. Other than these blockades, there was at first no serious threat to the Allied position in the Mediterranean, and the earlier withdrawal of the British ships was seen to have been fully justified. The Italian decision for neutrality had been decisive, but with the entry of Turkey into the war in November 1914 the situation began slowly to change. The long Mediterranean coastline of the Ottoman Empire, from Sinai to Thrace, should have provided the British forces with plenty of targets. But the Mediterranean, even in a world war, and even as a ‘superhighway’ connecting Britain and much of its empire, was always a secondary theatre. Compared with the fighting in Russia, or on the Western Front, or the situation in the North Sea, no campaign in the eastern Mediterranean could be considered vital. Nevertheless, given the inability of the Allies to make any impression on German and Austrian power on the European continent for four years, any possible distraction or chance was worth taking. Not only that, but both Britain and France (and Italy later) saw the possibilities of imperial conquests at Ottoman expense; their rival ambitions sometimes clashed with the military and naval possibilities. The Ottoman entry into the war took some time to be acted on. Unless considerable land forces were available no serious attack could be mounted. Ottoman forces were relatively numerous, and while the internal communications of Syria and Anatolia were hardly up to European standards, railways did exist and could be used to transport troops and supplies into a threatened area. Not only that, but the Ottoman Empire proved to be a lot more resilient than its enemies expected. In the Mediterranean there were three points at which one side or the other was vulnerable. From the British point of view, the Suez Canal, only a hundred miles from Ottoman territory in southern Palestine, was vulnerable to land attack. At the Gulf of Alexandretta, the old Scanderoon, the mountain geography provided a particular combination of communication targets the severing of which would cut off much of the Ottoman southern territories. The third crucial

16 Y.

T. Kurat, ‘How Turkey Drifted into World War I’ , in K. Bourne and D. C. Watt, Studies in International History, Hamden CT 1967, 291–315.

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point was the Dardanelles, giving access to Constantinople and the Black Sea. In early 1915 the Turks invaded Egypt through Sinai and reached the canal. They brought with them boats with which they intended to cross the water and invade Egypt, assuming that their call to jihad would bring a response from the Egyptians. But, like all too many schemes launched in this war by both sides, little real thought had been given the potential enemy responses. The canal was patrolled by British and French warships, and British troops guarded the waterway, both on the Egyptian and on the Sinai side. Having failed with their intended crossing, the Turks were pushed back from the canal into the desert, where a line of bunkers and fortifications was built to keep them away. Stuck in the desert, the Turkish forces withered, though they could still claim to be occupying the Sinai Peninsula, which was part of Egypt. The Egyptian response to the call to jihad had been of no significance.17 An Allied landing at Alexandretta was suggested in 1914 by the new Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, who was familiar with the geography of the whole region. It would cut Turkish communications between Anatolia and Syria, and restrict those with Mesopotamia. The Baghdad railway was still incomplete just at that point, and an occupation would prevent any attempt to finish the work. In Syria the need to recover the link with Anatolia would surely bring the invasion of Egypt to a sudden end, and the necessary withdrawal of troops from Sinai to the north would permit the British forces to move into Palestine. It was realised, however, that the number of troops available would not be enough to prevail quickly at Alexandretta and Tarsus. Yet the main obstacle to an attack here was not Turkish forces, but French objections. They had imperialist ambitions in Syria and objected to the British establishing themselves in ‘their’ territory. The idea of a landing at Alexandretta was raised again in the course of the war, but was always blocked by the French.18 The third point of vulnerability was the Dardanelles, and this was regarded by some in Britain as a major point of opportunity. It was too obvious a target to require any great argument to point it out, and British and French ships bombarded the forts at the entrance as soon as the war with Turkey began. A plan was developed to push a large squadron of battleships – old ones mainly – through the Dardanelles 17 Halpern,

Naval History, 106–109; Julian S. Corbett and Henry Newbolt, History of the Great War: Naval Operations, 5 vols, London 1920–1931, 1.111– 117, 366–369, 2.223–226. These are the two main detailed histories of the war in the Mediterranean; see also Lawrence Sondhaus, The Great War at Sea: A Naval History of the First World War, Cambridge 2014, for a recent version. 18 Marder, Dreadnought, 2.239–240.

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and into the Sea of Marmara, where their guns would threaten the city of Constantinople. It was assumed, apparently without argument, that such a threat would cause the Turks to surrender. The idea was a naval one, originating in part from the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. It was accepted, but then opposed, by the First Sea Lord, Lord Fisher. It was opposed by the War Office, where Lord Kitchener liked Alexandretta better and knew that both projects were not possible. The plan was therefore entirely naval, despite the navy’s knowledge that the Dardanelles forts had been recently strengthened and were well armed. The Turks fully appreciated the vulnerability of the Dardanelles and were further strengthening the fortifications and blocking the waterway with mines even as the plan was being discussed in London.19 That is, the plan, though plausible in its way, was not one which one service alone was capable of carrying out. It required a combined operation, a landing in combination with – or before – any naval attempt to drive through. (Nor was it at all obvious that Constantinople under the menace of naval bombardment would give in; in the only cases in recent history it had not succumbed to a Bulgarian land attack in 1913, or the Russian threat in 1878, and it had not succumbed to Admiral Duckworth’s menacing guns in 1807.) The basic fault of the plan was that it failed to receive the proper cool consideration it required, becoming a matter of service pride and political dispute, so that it was executed ineffectively and unintelligently. The basic idea was good, the planning was hopelessly bad, the execution almost as bad as the planning. The casualties were deeply unpleasant. The plan envisaged a large force of battleships moving slowly through the Strait, with a flock of minesweeping trawlers going ahead to clear the path.20 The big ships would be used as mobile artillery platforms pounding the Turkish forts and artillery positions on both sides of the Strait. The process was relatively successful at first but slow, and, as usual, the Turkish response had not been properly factored in. Mines in the entrance to the Strait were largely cleared or located in advance. This was the area between the entrance (between Sedd al-Bahr on the Gallipoli peninsula and Kum Kale on the Asian side), and the trawlers moved forward towards Kephez Bay at the start of the narrowest part of the passage. Twelve British and four French battleships were by 18 March within this small area. But ahead of the battleships the Strait narrowed to less than a mile in

19 Ibid, 2.199–228; Halpern, Naval History, 109–113. 20 There are numerous accounts, notably Marder, Dreadnought,

2.229–265 and 308–328; Halpern, Naval History, 114–124; Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli, London 1965; Corbett and Newbolt, Naval Operations, 2.213–223.

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width, and there were ten more minefields to clear. This was also, of course, the part most heavily fortified, and the range was easy for even small field guns. The minesweeping trawlers were wholly incapable of doing their work while under fire. It is extraordinary that these vulnerable ships and their untrained civilian crews should have been expected to sweep the mines while under near point-blank artillery fire. It rapidly became clear that this attack was failing. The fire of the battleships was less effective than expected, the Turks fought with great determination, and they particularly targeted the very vulnerable minesweepers, which fled. The Turks countered the battleships’ gunfire, which was concentrated on the forts, by using mobile artillery whose fire proved to be almost impossible to suppress, and was effective in damaging several ships. And one Turkish minelayer laid a new minefield, which was not detected. Many of the forts, being fixed targets, were silenced, either in the preliminary bombardments, or during the battleship attack on 18 March, but the mobile guns were unreachable, and some batteries, well hidden, were not located. The trawlers could not make any serious progress at Kephez Bay or further on, so the Narrows were still blocked. The newly laid minefield, which was laid parallel to the shore, though the rest had been laid across the Strait, was finally located when some of the battleships ran onto its mines. Six out of the sixteen big ships were either sunk (the French Bouvet, the British Irresistible and Ocean) or badly damaged (the battle cruiser Inflexible, the French battleships Gaulois and Suffren) - four had hit mines, and two were sunk from fire from the shore, either artillery or torpedoes. This was a high casualty rate, and still the attack had not made any real progress. It was obvious that any attempt to force the Narrows, even if the forts themselves had been silenced, would result in even worse casualties. The attack was called off. This was the end of the purely naval part of this campaign. The decision was then made to land troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula, with the intention of securing control of the west bank of the Strait, and so letting the ships through. The forts and guns on the east bank would thus be dominated from the peninsula, or could be attacked by landing parties. Landings took place on 25 April on the tip of the peninsula at Sedd al-Bahr (the ‘Helles’ area), but Turkish resistance prevented the invaders from advancing more than three miles from the landing point. On the Asian side a French force landed to seize Kum Kale, but found that they had a tough fight on their hands, and were evacuated. A third landing, at Ari Burnu (‘Anzac Cove’) in April, and a fourth at Suvla Bay (the ‘Anzac’ area) in August were similarly held by Turkish counter-attacks. (No attempt was made to land at

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the most vulnerable point, the root of the peninsula; bad planning and execution, and lack of imagination, yet again.) The naval part of this land campaign was largely concerned with transport and seaward protection. The base of operations was set up at Mudros on the Greek island of Lemnos (arranged semi-clandestinely with the pro-Allied Greek Prime Minister Venizelos – the Greek king was pro-German). The troops were assembled on the island, stores were landed, transport ships loaded and unloaded. Up to two hundred vessels were employed in various ways. This area was therefore a large, rich target for any enemy warships which could reach it. Some ships were also positioned close to the peninsula, providing covering fire, collecting wounded, bringing supplies, and providing another rich target. The Austrian navy, geographically the closest to the action (apart from the Turks) did not have the capability to intervene, especially with a French squadron on guard on the southern end of the Adriatic; this became even more difficult when Italy decided to join on the Allied side on 23 May, convinced by the apparent Allied progress at Gallipoli that the war was nearly won. The Austrian submarines, active in the Adriatic, did not have the range to reach the Aegean from any of their bases, but German boats could, with help. Two small boats, assembled at the Austrian naval dockyard at Pola from dismantled parts sent from Germany, were towed part way by Austrian ships, then were refuelled in Asia Minor; a third German boat, U-21, sailed from Germany, refuelled from a hired Spanish ship in Spain, and reached Austrian-occupied Cattaro (Kotor) almost without fuel. The approach of these boats was discovered by British radio intercepts, and Admiral de Robeck, in command at Mudros, had to take expensive and extensive defensive measures, but U-21 still succeeded in sinking the old British battleships Triumph and Majestic on 25 May.21 Even more defensive measures had then to be taken, with the result that much of the Allied energy was thereafter devoted to defence. British submarines penetrated through the Dardanelles where the battleships could not go, and campaigned throughout the Sea of Marmara, but their effects were of little significance or effect on the land campaign.22 In fact, neither set of submarines had a decisive effect anywhere on this campaign. They were never numerous enough, or versatile or accurate enough, to be effective, but this only became clear once they had been tried. Their threat was potent

21 Halpern,

Naval War, 107–112; Corbett and Newbolt, Naval Operations, 3.28–31. 22 Corbett and Newbolt, Naval Operations, 2.302–304, 374–375, 3.32–35, 75–79, 114–119.

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enough in Allied minds, however, to compel those extensive defensive measures. The land campaign was clearly in a stalemate from May in the Helles area, and from the beginning in the Anzac area, despite the second landing there in August. It took the Allies – the British were in command – another four months to accept the hopelessness of the situation, but then, in efficient and successful operations, they evacuated their soldiers without loss. The success of these evacuations suggested that some progress in planning and preparation for joint operations had been made since the origin of the campaign. With these evacuations, the Mediterranean was relegated to its continuing role as a transport corridor. Much of the aggressive maritime activity by the Allies was little more than minor raids – by the British in Asia Minor, by the Italians into Dalmatia. With Italy on the Allied side the danger of an extensive naval emergency had ended. The British campaign across Sinai and into Palestine from 1916 to 1918 did not need naval support – supplies, including water, were delivered by a new railway and a new pipeline which were constructed from Egypt into southern Palestine. A pair of destroyers and a monitor operated to assist in the Third Gaza battle in October 1917, and at the very end, in October 1918, as the British land forces were advancing rapidly through northern Palestine and Syria, ships arrived at several ports, the French particularly at Beirut, where they intended to establish the right to seize that territory.23 The main naval purpose became to ensure that ships sailing through the Mediterranean were not sunk by the enemy submarines. As in the Atlantic, this proved to be very difficult to achieve until convoys were instituted late in 1917. Four old British battleships and a group of much newer cruisers and destroyers were added in June 1915 to the Italian squadron based at Brindisi and Taranto to keep the Austrians bottled up in the Adriatic. The battleships were of little use, being old and virtually worn out, needing much maintenance – but then the Italian and Austrian battleships, though more modern, rarely came out, and never fought. In the end, the British ships were decommissioned and their crews used more usefully in smaller ships.24 The Brindisi squadrons had occasional brushes with the Austrians, who were as unwilling to become involved in a full-scale battle as their enemies. An attempt was made to prevent submarines from getting out of the Adriatic and into the Mediterranean by the Otranto Barrage, a line of drifters brought in from Britain manned 23 John

D. Grainger, The Battle for Palestine 1917, Woodbridge 2006, and The Battle for Syria 1918, Woodbridge 2013. 24 Halpern, Naval History, 145–146.

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(like the trawlers in the Dardanelles) by civilian skippers and crews. They were later equipped with anti-submarine nets, but nothing they could do had any effect on the submarines, though the drifters did present an easy target for Austrian raids, so they had to be protected by destroyer patrols.25 The German and Austrian submarine menace was the factor which largely dictated maritime affairs in the Mediterranean between 1916 and 1918, particularly after February 1917, when Germany adopted a policy of laying few restrictions on the activities of its submariners. Losses grew in the next four months to catastrophic levels, finally forcing the British Admiralty to accept that protecting merchant ships by organising them into convoys was the effective policy. In the Mediterranean this was begun in late May, with the Malta–Alexandria shipping, and gradually other convoys were organised, notably ships carrying coal from Britain to Italy were convoyed between Gibraltar and Genoa. German boats operated also in Canarian waters, making the Sea-entrance almost as dangerous as the Mediterranean itself; indeed the first boat in Canarian waters came from the Mediterranean.26 The rate of sinking slowed as the number of escort ships increased. There were the usual inter-Allied disputes, but the sheer number of British escort vessels – half of the total in the Mediterranean – gave the British the predominant voice. Even so, plenty of commanding officers, including the British commander-in-chief, Vice-Admiral Sir Somerset Gough-Calthorpe, hankered after a return to the old days of hunting groups, whereby small sets of destroyers and sloops and trawlers sought for submarines almost at random, but only very rarely found them. Sinking U-boats, in fact, was only very rarely achieved whatever the method employed - only two, for example, were sunk at the Otranto barrage.27 The pressure nonetheless told more on the enemy than on the Allies, and the gradual reduction in submarine successes in the Mediterranean, as in the Atlantic, demonstrated to those with eyes to see the value of the convoys. Gough-Calthorpe calculated that, between May and August 1918, sinkings were reduced from 122,000 tons per month to 53,000 – the total in the worst ever month, April 1917, had been 254,000 tons.28 The anti-submarine campaign compelled the Allies to work together more effectively than earlier. The most awkward were the Italians, 25 Ibid,

159–166; Marder, Dreadnought, 4.93–98; Halpern, Naval History, 159–166. 26 Javier Ponce, ‘Commerce Warfare in the East Central Atlantic during the First World War: German Submarines around the Canary Islands, 1916–1918’ , MM 100, 2014, 335–348. 27 Halpern, Naval History, ch. 11 (399 for the U-boats). 28 Marder, Dreadnought, 5.30–38.

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but neither were the French happy submitting to British domination. The institution of the convoys required them all to cooperate, as did the arrival of squadrons from other allies. A highly efficient squadron of Japanese destroyers arrived early in 1917, and was much appreciated by the normally critical British. A variety of United States ships arrived later in the year, a mix of old destroyers and Coast Guard cutters and small and ineffective ‘submarine chasers’ . (A Brazilian squadron was also sent, but was held up at Dakar by illness, and never actually reached the Mediterranean.) A further element in the British predominance in this aspect of the campaign was that the most effective areas of the command were all under British control – Alexandria (and Port Said), Malta, and Gibraltar. Malta had been designated the headquarters of the Allied commander-in-chief at the beginning of the war, but this was an office held by a succession of French admirals, and all of them were uncomfortable in British Malta. But when they moved out, to Bizerta or Corfu, they cut themselves off from the main events and intelligence; combined with the predominance of British warships in the sea, this brought the effective direction back into British hands under Gough-Calthorpe. Malta became extremely busy, partly because it was the evacuation point for the wounded from the Gallipoli and Salonika campaigns. Inevitably it was a time of relative prosperity for the Maltese. The same development took place at Gibraltar, which became the headquarters for the convoys in the Western Basin, and the base of the United States’ ships in the Mediterranean. The commander in Gibraltar, Rear-Admiral H. S. Grant, proved able to work well with his American counterpart, Rear-Admiral Niblack, in contrast to the French at Malta.29 There were other, briefer, problems to be dealt with. The defeat of Serbia in late 1915 had forced the Serb army to retreat through Albania to the coast, and the refugees were evacuated from Albanian ports and landed mainly at Salonika, where an Allied force and been put ashore to threaten Bulgaria. It was mainly British and French ships which carried out the evacuation. The immobile force at Salonika became another naval responsibility, to which regular supplies had to be transported.30 Neutral Greece was partly occupied by Allied forces. Lemnos was still the headquarters of the squadron which blockaded the Turkish

29 Malta:

Anthony Zarb-Dimech, Malta during the First World War, 1914–1918, San Gwann, Malta, 2004; Holland, Blue-Water Empire, 166–169; Gibraltar: Jackson, Gibraltarians, 264–266. 30 Halpern, Naval History, 120, 152–159.

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exit at the Dardanelles, for the continued presence of Goeben and Breslau in their Turkish guise remained a standing threat; the sailors at Mudros also carried out raids into Turkish territory. Corfu had been the headquarters of the French squadron which, along with the Italians at Brindisi and Taranto, blocked Austrian egress from the Adriatic. (The French also at times used Argostoli on Cephallonia as a base - another Greek island.) Salonika was a city which the Greeks had only seized in 1913 during the Balkan wars; the Allies landed there soon after evacuating Gallipoli, when Bulgaria joined the war on the German side and attacked Serbia. The idea of the landing was to help Serbia; the effect was partly to defend Salonika, a city Bulgaria was as keen to acquire as was Greece (and Serbia and Turkey, for that matter), but it mainly operated to immobilise the Allied army as firmly as at Gallipoli. The effect of the Allied intrusion in Greece was to exacerbate the internal tensions between King Constantine, a would-be pro-German autocrat, and Eleftherios Venizelos, the Prime Minister, who relied for his power on the democratically elected Parliament, and was pro-Allied. At the end of 1915 the king forced Venizelos from power, and Venizelos’ party boycotted the subsequent elections. This, of course, put the king’s men still more firmly in power, and Constantine made open preparations to join the German side. The Allies eventually delivered an ultimatum to the king and his government, requiring the dismissal of that government and the demobilisation of the army. Venizelos, meanwhile, in his native Crete conducted a campaign to overthrow the king’s authority, and was joined by the commanderin-chief of the Greek navy. Then he went to Salonika and established a provisional government. The Allies in Salonika, while not officially recognising Venizelos’ movement, used the confusion in Greece to extract more concessions from the king, but he withdrew some of the terms after an agitation by his pro-German supporters. The French admiral at Piraeus put a force of British and French sailors on shore, who became involved in a fight on the way to Athens, with casualties on both sides. The Allies had now had enough of Greek politics: Venizelos’ government was recognised, a blockade of Greece was imposed, and reparations were demanded from Constantine’s government. Further demands were made when the first set were not complied with Constantine tried again to wriggle out of agreements. Venizelos’ movement steadily gathered more support, but Constantine was able to hang on in Athens without too much difficulty. In the end the Allies – Britain and France using their positions as two of the three protecting powers from the time of Greek independence – required Constantine’s government to be dismissed, and Constantine himself

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to abdicate. Characteristically, he did not actually abdicate, but did leave the country, so setting up trouble for Greece in the future. His second son Alexander was installed as king, with Venizelos as Prime Minister, and Greece declared war (2 July 1917) on Germany and Austria and Bulgaria. Once again, the vulnerability of Greece to sea power had been made all too obvious; once again, a Greek government had failed to heed that lesson. And once again, the Allies had been effectively distracted from their real task by the internal affairs of a minor but thoroughly awkward state.31 It was a sign of the growing desperation in Turkey when the Goeben and the Breslau, technically Turkish ships, came out through the Dardanelles in January 1918 in an apparent attempt to disrupt the British Palestine campaign. They sank two monitors in the mouth of the Strait, but in heading for the rich target at Mudros both ships ran onto mines. Breslau was sunk; Goeben retreated, badly damaged, and as a final humiliation ran aground at the Narrows. The British sent aircraft to finish the ship off, without success. The ship was refloated, though it was out of action permanently since there were no adequate repair facilities at Constantinople.32 The Central Powers collapsed serially, beginning in September 1918 with Bulgaria, only a fortnight after being attacked and defeated by the newly awakened Salonika army. Turkey was threatened by the same army, and had been defeated in both Mesopotamia and Syria, though it was beginning to recover lost lands in the Caucasus after the Russian collapse. Austria broke into fragments. Finally Germany gave up the fight in November. The Allied navies sought to hurry on the process by a bombardment of the Albanian port of Durazzo, which was under Austrian control, but the operation was essentially a failure, and the Austrians pulled out next day, as they had planned to do all along; the coincidence did not amount to an Allied victory.33 The German Mediterranean U-boat squadron was ordered back to Germany several days before the armistice, though one of the boats defiantly sank the old British battleship Britannia off Cape Trafalgar as they went. The Austrian fleet had joyously given up fighting earlier. Admiral Gough-Calthorpe organised the surrender of Turkey. He was deliberately ordered into the Aegean by the British government, along with a substantial number of extra British ships, in order to outrank and outnumber the local French commander in the Aegean, Admiral Amet, so ensuring that the Turkish surrender was tendered

31 Woodhouse,

Modern Greece, 198–203; Anderson, Eastern Question, 334–336; Holland, Blue-Water Empire, 161–162. 32 Halpern, Naval History, 255–256. 33 Ibid, 177–178.

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to Britain. (The French were already moving ships and troops to Syria to stake their claim there.) The surrender terms included the Allied occupation of the Straits and of Constantinople, largely by the British Army with small Allied contingents. Ships of the Mediterranean fleet moved through the Straits and into the Black Sea. But their work was by no means over. The Mediterranean had been a region where isolated land campaigns – Venetia, Salonika, Dardanelles, Palestine/Syria – had emphasised the essentially minor importance of the sea during the Great War. Naval activity was similarly relatively minor when compared with the North Sea and the Atlantic. Yet this did not mean that these campaigns, on land and sea, were a waste of time and resources, though the execution of many campaigns was incompetent, and resources were wasted on such ineffective measures as the Otranto Barrage. But it was in the Mediterranean that the defensive power of Germany and its allies first cracked, so beginning the collapse of the whole house. The naval contribution, while less than the land campaigns, at least after the Dardanelles defeat, succeeded in maintaining sea communications throughout the Mediterranean during the war. Without control of the sea the land campaigns would have withered and died. The conduct of the naval war ensured that the Allies’ enemies remained as separated as the Allied land campaigns, but without the sea communications which the navies of the Allies provided. The Austrians were confined to the Adriatic, the Turks to the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara; the German U-boats had some successes, but were never able to seriously threaten the Allied navies’ control. Disturbances followed the end of fighting, particularly acutely in the eastern Mediterranean. From the north clockwise, they were: the Russian Revolution, which went from overthrowing the decrepit monarchy to coups d’état and on to disintegration and civil war; the Ottoman Empire went from disarmament, loss of its outer provinces, to revolution and civil war; Syria was resentful of French interference, and went from several attempts at self-government to French conquest; Palestinian Arabs came to realise something of the implications of the Balfour Declaration in favour of Jewish settlement, and their disappointment at not gaining self-rule came out in riots; the Arabs of Arabia were equally disappointed at the Allied seizure of the fertile lands of Syria and Palestine and began to raid them; Egypt descended into near civil war and was subject to severe British military repression; Italy had to begin the conquest of Libya all over again; in Greece the governmental instability continued and was complicated by its attempts to conquer large areas of Asia Minor; in the Adriatic the collapse of Austria-Hungary led at once to territorial

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disputes between Italy and the new South Slav state (an enlarged Serbia, called Yugoslavia); in 1922 Italy succumbed to a coup d’état led by Mussolini which evolved into the fascist dictatorship. The Mediterranean fleet was particularly involved in the Aegean and Black Seas. The problems in Syria, Egypt, and Libya were dealt with either by foreign powers or by the British army; in the Adriatic a few British ships were sent to the northern part of the sea to help keep the peace between those who were quarrelling. The major concerns were Russia and Turkey, and so the fleet was concentrated in their waters. On top of all this, the British government became increasingly anxious to promote the demobilisation of its soldiers and sailors, and to reduce the size of the expensive navy, with the result that as the difficulties in the eastern Mediterranean continued, the Admiralty and its admirals had to try to deal with them with fewer and fewer men and ships.34 The initial problem, as seen from the Admiralty and from the Mediterranean fleet, seemed to be the Russian Black Sea fleet, which had been taken over by Germany when the latter’s army advanced across southern Russia earlier in 1918. The German war continued for a fortnight after the armistice with Turkey, so the fleet was under hostile control. A formidable fleet of Allied vessels, including eleven battleships, nine cruisers, and thirty destroyers, was pushed into the Sea of Marmara; minesweepers cleared the Dardanelles, and the destroyer Shark went ahead to arrange for the fleet’s arrival; the Gallipoli peninsula was occupied by marines from the fleet and Indian soldiers. Gough-Calthorpe was in overall command, and he took a mixed squadron through the Bosporos to find out the exact situation of the ex-Russian ships in the Black Sea, heading first for Sebastopol. Some of the ships were in German hands and some were held by Russian revolutionaries, but all were in a bad condition and low on fuel and ammunition. There were some at Novorossisk on the east coast which were in Russian hands, and were scuttled to avoid being taken over by the Allies; others were at Odessa. Some concern was

34 The

main accounts for these events are, for Russia, Richard K. Ullman, AngloSoviet Relations, 3 vols, Princeton NJ, 1961–1973; Peter Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920, Berkeley CA 1977; George A. Brinkley, The Volunteer Army and Allied Intervention in South Russia, 1917–1921, Notre Dame IN 1966; however, from a naval perspective the introductions in Paul G. Halpern, The Mediterranean Fleet 1919–1929, NRS 2011, together with the documents in that volume, are perhaps the best account; a general overview of the whole British involvement is in Clifford Kinvig, Churchill’s Crusade, London 2006; see also Stephen Roskill, Naval Policy Between the Wars, 1919–1929, London 1968.

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felt about some unfinished submarines at the naval dockyard at Nikolayev. There was, however, no obvious danger from any of these vessels. Gough-Calthorpe sent ships to all possible Russian bases in search of information. France took control in Odessa and the western part of the Black Sea, Britain in the east; Sebastopol was supposed to be taken over by the French, but they had no forces to spare and British troops and sailors continued in control there until the French were ready. Both countries were opposed to the Bolsheviks, but who to support against them was another issue. Several groups contended for power in the region: White Russians, concerned to overthrow the Bolsheviks nationally; local nationalist groups aiming for the independence of their own region – Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and others. One major problem was that Bolshevik propaganda appealed strongly to many of the Allied soldiers and sailors, so much so that early in April 1919 French sailors at Sebastopol mutinied, while the French command had suddenly evacuated Odessa a fortnight before to reduce its responsibilities. The mutineers were actually less politically motivated than wanted to go home. The withdrawal of the French ships alarmed and disgusted the British commanders, but there were also rumbles of discontent in the British ships, particularly at Mudros, again from sailors whose only wish was to go home, and who expected to be demobilised once the fighting stopped. This threat was suppressed quickly by a well-publicised programme of replacing hostilities-only sailors and conscripts with volunteers on longer contracts. An early complication had been the presence of considerable numbers of German soldiers – there were 11,000 in Sebastopol. They were subjected to much local hostility, and had imposed their own sort of order on the places they occupied. For a time the Allies accepted them as a subordinate police force, but this could not last long; given Ukrainian hostility, they were eventually evacuated by ship to Hamburg. This was to be only the first of many evacuations. Gough-Calthorpe was hindered in almost everything he did by equivocation in London, where the government could not make a clear decision on which Russian faction to support, nor on how far to commit its forces. Most of the fighting in Russia took place well away from the Black Sea coasts, and was barely affected by the activities of the Allied ships. The priorities of the fleet, and its continuing tasks, are illustrated by the concentration of its forces in the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea: of the six battleships, six cruisers, eighteen destroyers, six submarines, twenty-two sloops and three seaplane carriers, only one old battleship, immobilised as a depot ship at Port Said, a cruiser, two destroyers and a sloop in the north

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Adriatic, and an old cruiser in the Red Sea were elsewhere. Some ships were, of course, always passing in and out of the region on supply runs and mail runs, or going away for maintenance, usually at Malta. During the last months of 1918 and throughout 1919 the main problem was perceived as the securing of the former Russian fleet, and operating for or against a variety of Russian groups. The ships were either seized or scuttled, but then it was difficult to know what to do with those taken over. In the end the French took them and removed them to French North Africa; most were never used again. The government in London gradually came to a decision to support General Anton Denikin, the White Russian commander in the south, and he was given supplies and naval support. There was some fear (inherited from nineteenth-century anxieties) that if the Bolsheviks gained control of Central Asia, India would be in danger; a small force under Major-General Lionel Dunsterville (‘Dunsterforce’) operated along the railway in Central Asia and the Caucasus area, and several ships in the Caspian Sea were seized and armed and formed into a makeshift Royal Naval squadron.35 Many of these activities were only temporary expedients; there was no intention that the navy should be permanently present in the Black Sea, still less in the Caspian. During 1919 naval attention gradually came to concentrate on the fate of the Crimea and the coasts west to Odessa and east in the Sea of Azov. On several occasions ships bombarded ‘enemy forces’ to support those currently in favour – at Mariupol, for example, but especially at the Strait of Kertch, where the battleship Emperor of India blocked the advance of the Red forces with a bombardment. Again, these had no more than a temporary effect, especially as the government in London was adamant that British troops should not be used in direct support of the White forces; they could be placed as garrisons, but they could only fight to defend themselves. Occasional landings did take place, either to rescue British subjects or to prevent a massacre, or to secure the destruction of something seen as militarily vital – the ships and the unfinished submarines at Nikolayev and the ships at Sebastopol were eventually destroyed. Several of the Nikolayev submarines were captured by the Bolsheviks and completed, so justifying Gough-Calthorpe’s worries, but by then he had been succeeded by Admiral de Robeck. By March 1920 the White forces were reduced to the Crimea. Near to starvation and without supplies, they had clearly been defeated. During the rest of the year the fleet was mainly occupied with 35 L.

C. Dunsterville, The Adventures of Dunsterforce, London 1920.

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evacuations – at Novorossisk, Odessa, and finally the Crimea. By the end of November even the Crimea had fallen to Red forces. Among the refugees taken on board British ships and given refuge elsewhere were the former Habsburg Emperor Karl and Empress Zita, and the Dowager Empress of Russia; later, several members of the Greek royal family who fled Greece in 1922 were collected from Athens and Corfu. Every port in the Mediterranean, from Beirut to Algiers and Marseilles, received an influx of Russian refugees. Meanwhile the condition of the surviving fragments of the Ottoman Empire had become a concern which gradually overtook the Russian problem.36 The Allied occupation of parts of the empire left the main part of the Turkish lands, the interior of Anatolia, free. A rising tide of nationalist fervour developed during 1920, fuelled by the savage peace treaty (of ‘Sevres’) imposed at the Paris peace conference. The reaction was headed by the former commander of Turkish forces in the Gallipoli campaign, Mustafa Kemal, who had also commanded against the British in Palestine and Syria. The main fuel for, and target of, the nationalist movement, however, was the Greek invasion of Asia Minor. As in Russia, the British government chose to support the side which eventually lost: the Greeks were assisted by Royal Navy ships in their landings at Smyrna, and at Panderma on the Marmara coast. Meanwhile the sultan’s government was protected and controlled by the Allied occupation forces (mainly British) at Constantinople; inevitably its authority elsewhere in Turkey withered. The British commanders at least had relatively clear instructions to give their support to the Greeks, but the Greeks were beaten.37 By the middle of June 1921 skilful Turkish diplomacy had made an agreement with the Bolsheviks in Moscow, which threatened to supply war materials to the nationalists, and did result in two Turkish gunboats being refitted at Novorossisk. Turkish diplomacy brought France and Italy to agree to evacuate and abandon their claims in southern Anatolia in exchange for trade agreements, though French and Italian units remained as part of the occupation force at Constantinople.38 The Mediterranean fleet patrolled the Straits and the Sea of Marmara, intent on keeping the Kemalist forces out of Constantinople and Thrace. The Greeks in Asia Minor were finally defeated in September 1921, and driven back to the sea; the Kemalists approached the western Anatolian coast in 1922. British concern was 36 For

this, see Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3rd ed., Oxford 2002; part III of Halpern, Mediterranean Fleet, covers this aspect. 37 Woodhouse, Modern Greece, 204–207; Anderson, Eastern Question, 366–371. 38 Roderick C. Davidson, ‘Turkish Diplomacy from Mudros to Lausanne’ , Essays in Ottoman and Turkish History 1779–1923, The Impact of the West, Austin TX 1990, 206–242.

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centred on the Gallipoli Peninsula, which was held by Allied forces, but only lightly. If it was seized by the Kemalists they would be able both to close the Dardanelles and to infiltrate the city. Naval patrols searched any ships coming from the southern Marmara coast, and instituted a blockade of that coast, occasionally finding arms being ‘smuggled’ across the waters. Bombardments were performed, as in the Black Sea, to prevent advances by ‘enemy’ forces. In August 1922 the Greek army in Asia Minor finally collapsed, and another great evacuation took place, above all from Smyrna, where the city burned.39 The Greek collapse brought Kemalist forces to the Asian shores of the Straits in strength. At Chanak, at the Narrows of the Dardanelles, the final crisis seemed likely to become a British– Turkish war, but the Turks were careful, the British commander in Constantinople, General Tim Harington, ignored both some wild bellicosity out of London and his orders, and the two sides agreed an armistice at Mudania on the Marmara coast, thereby setting up a new peace conference. The bellicose government of Lloyd George in London fell. This was effectively the end of the Mediterranean fleet’s involvement in the Straits and the Black Sea. It took, needless to say, a long time for the diplomats to sort out a new peace treaty (at Lausanne in Switzerland, finally agreed in July 1923). There were crises along the way, including a sequence of mutual bluffing at Smyrna in February. The sultan abdicated, and yet another emperor was evacuated on a British warship. In all this, for only the second time in its existence, the British Mediterranean fleet held power in the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. But the limitations of that power were made perfectly clear: the withdrawal from the Black Sea could only be called a defeat, for it ceded power in that sea to the Russian land forces which Britain had been opposing; its retreat from Constantinople and the Straits was clearly another defeat by the Turkish land power (for the second time in less than ten years). It threw into relief the extraordinary achievement of that same fleet, assisted by the same French fleet, in the Crimean War; it also showed the wisdom of Admiral Duckworth in 1807 in not becoming too involved in a conflict with the Turks in the same region; neither he nor General Harington would have been thanked by their political masters for involving Britain in a bigger conflict.

39 The

most complete account of this disaster is by Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City, Kent OK 1988; a recent, brief account is Philip Mansel, Levant, London 2010, 204–242.

Chapter 12 Retrenchment and a Greater War 1923–1945

From 1923 onwards, the Mediterranean fleet was the major naval force under British control. In the North Sea the elimination of the German navy in 1918–1919, by the surrender and scuttling of its ships, had cleared the sea of the most serious enemy; in the Far East there was apprehension at the growth of both Japan’s and the United States’ naval power, though these two tended to cancel each other out, being mutually hostile; the naval base at Singapore formed the basis for British power in the Indian Ocean and the China Seas. These two regions, therefore, were not held, in naval terms, very strongly, and their reserve strength was the Mediterranean fleet. Positioned as it was, its ships could sail quickly into the Atlantic and British waters, or reinforce the Indian Ocean and the Far East. The Rock of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal were therefore seen even more than before as essential imperial maritime links, and Malta was the main naval base.1 In order for the Mediterranean fleet to be of use in a crisis, it had to be large, well-trained, and fully equipped. It was put through constant exercises, in many parts of the sea, and kept up-to-date in equipment so far as possible. It received the reinforcement of aircraft carriers from the beginning; the original carrier, Argus, was already being used in the Russian and Turkish troubles in 1921–1923, and the fleet received as its commanders the most capable admirals. But as the political situation developed, especially after 1930, its clear maritime advantage of the 1920s gradually eroded. This was the classic age of the Mediterranean fleet. Sailors and officers were professionals, the disciplinary regime was benign, sailors received regular leave, and were rotated into different ships and through regular educational and retraining programmes. There 1

For the interwar period, see Stephen Roskill, Naval Policy between the Wars, 2 vols, London 1968 and 1976; another discussion, from a useful American point of view, is in Lisle A. Rose, Power at Sea, vol 2, The Breaking Storm, 1919–1945, Colombia MO 2007, ch. 3.

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were annual visits by parts of the fleet to places all around the sea – Greece and Turkey were favourites, though France and Yugoslavia and Italy were included; the visits were social occasions as much as exercises, promoting good international relations, at least supposedly (but they were also exercises in intelligence gathering). The ships were polished and painted to impress, but exercised in evolutions, firing practice, and navigation as well. Plans were developed to cope with possible naval operations. For ten years or so after 1923 the fleet rode the Mediterranean unchallenged and with vast confidence.2 On the other hand, the fleet exercises were largely, perhaps inevitably, based on the experiences of the preceding war. Submarines, for example, were exercised only on brief voyages, and in generally artificial situations,3 and the possession of aircraft carriers did not produce an understanding of the threat land-based airpower posed to the ships. The tight financial policies of successive governments after the end of the war and the immediate post-war crises, restricted the ships in many awkward ways. For example the ‘economical’ speed for ships was kept unrealistically low in order to conserve fuel, but that meant that the exercises they underwent were even more artificial than usual. Petty accounting procedures caused a great increase in bureaucracy, to the irritation of all involved, and a multiplication of clerical workers. Further, the ships were generally of Great War vintage, and were not replaced by new vessels, in part because international naval agreements restricted the number and size of the navy’s major vessels. Other navies, which had to be regarded as competitors, expanded up to and beyond the agreed international limits, and became powerful enough to pose threats. In the Mediterranean this meant the French and Italian navies, though their numbers were not perceived as major threats until after 1930. The 1920s was therefore a relatively quiet period. Occasional crises and problems developed, but nothing of sufficient size to seriously threaten a war. The only major problem was a quarrel with Turkey in 1924–1925 centred on Turkish resentment at British possession of Mosul in Iraq, but this faded away. The fleet was also liable to be called on to provide men to support imperial proconsuls when colonial troubles blew up – in Egypt, for example, in 1927, in Palestine and the Arab revolt which began in 1929, and in Cyprus in 1931. In the 1930s, however, the Mediterranean was the seat of successive crises, all of which involved the fleet. Historical attention is normally fixed in that decade on the problem of Nazi Germany, but in fact 2

Paul G. Halpern (ed.), The Mediterranean Fleet 1919–1929, NRS 2011, part 4, introduction. 3 An example is in J. D. Grainger, 13 Sharks, Barnsley 2016, ‘Shark XI’ .

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it was in the Mediterranean that the more active crises occurred, particularly in the latter half of the decade.4 The relative comfort for the Mediterranean Fleet vanished in October 1936. For a year the relations between Italy and Ethiopia5 had been deteriorating, and in October 1935 war began between them. Both countries were members of the League of Nations, and so the victim in the war (Ethiopia) was entitled to assistance in the name of collective security. But such a concept did not in the event appeal to anyone except the Ethiopians. For a time, it is true, it seemed that the annoyance of British public opinion at Italian actions might force the government to intervene to restrain Italy, but the alternative public attitude, that peace was preferable to war, overrode any wish to invoke collective security. A substantial reinforcement of the Mediterranean fleet was certainly ordered, and the Italian government was informed of this, as an apparent threat. But Britain had no intention of going to war, and the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini called its bluff by sending Italian reinforcing forces to Libya, where they posed an equivalent threat to the British position in Egypt. In the meantime the Mediterranean fleet had had to stand aside and permit the Italian forces to be transported from Italy to Eritrea by way of the Suez Canal. The British decision not to uphold the League’s condemnation of Italian actions, other than to impose some ineffective commercial sanctions, merely annoyed the Italians without having any effect. Without the British willingness to confront Italy, above all by blocking Italian access to the Red Sea by way of the canal, no one else could be expected to do anything. The British did give the Emperor Haile Selassie a lift in HMS Enterprise to Palestine, and then in HMS Capetown to Britain, where he lived at Bath for the next five years, but this was the extent of the help he received, at least for the moment.6 The result of British sanctions and equivocation was a new Italian hostility, and suddenly the Mediterranean fleet found itself under threat from the Italian navy, which had been developing in power. In that same year, 1936, other problems finally forced the British into beginning to rearm seriously. The German reoccupation of the 4 5 6

Paul G. Halpern (ed.), The Mediterranean Fleet, 1930–1939, NRS 2016. Referred to as ‘Abyssinia’ at the time, but the people there prefer ‘Ethiopia’ . James Cable, Gunboat Diplomacy, 2nd ed., London 1981, 213, quoting A. J. Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs 1935, Oxford 1936, 357; Alberto Sbacchi, Legacy of Bitterness: Ethiopia and Fascist Italy 1935–1941, Lawrenceville NJ 1997, ch. 10, ‘Anglo-Italian Relations and Ethiopia’ , makes it clear that not all the fault lay with Italy: British interference in Ethiopia was almost as constant, and Haile Selassie was ambitious to extend his territories at British and Italian expense.

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Rhineland took place during the Ethiopian crisis, taking advantage of the British and French preoccupation elsewhere. By then it was clear that both Italy and Germany were, at least in 1936 and for some time later, hostile. Italy’s naval building had been directed against the French Mediterranean fleet since the 1920s, and not against the British, but now Italian plans for a larger and more versatile fleet were made.7 The situation therefore arose which had been threatened several times in the previous century: two major naval powers came into existence in the Mediterranean, and threatened the fleet’s predominance. This was the result of deliberate building by Italy and France, and the standstill in building in Britain. In other parts of the world the challenge had been less immediate – the development of the United States’ navy, or that of Japan was a challenge largely confined to the Pacific, or it had been met and defeated, as with Germany. But now there were challenges and threats in too many places simultaneously: Britain suddenly found itself in a situation where the challenges were likely to be overwhelming. While the crisis over Ethiopia preoccupied the fleet, the politics of Spain erupted into civil war. This lasted three years, with the navy involved in various attempts to confine the fighting to Spaniards alone, generally fruitlessly. Ships patrolled the Spanish coast to deter interventions and prevent the delivery of supplies by Russia, Germany, and Italy. This was never an effective policy, except when ships were permitted to act offensively against interveners. There was never an intention of making any overt British intervention in Spanish affairs, but elements of the navy were kept busy in Spanish waters. The principal problem for the navy was the actions of Italian submarines, which were liable to attack almost any vessel approaching Spanish ports. HMS Havock survived one such attack, but when a British tanker, Woodford, was sunk, Britain and France – mainly Britain, in effect – agreed to attack submarines when located;8 this deterred the Italians for a time, but their attacks began again in 1938. (Italy had 50,000 men fighting on the Nationalist side in the war, and had pre-emptively occupied the Balearic Islands and part of the mainland.) The Italian government was then formally notified that any submarine located in the region would be automatically attacked, 7

The effects of the Abyssinian crisis on the Mediterranean fleet are discussed in Simon Ball, The Bitter Sea: The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean, 1935–1949, London 2009; see also Lawrence R, Pratt, East of Malta, West of Suez: Britain’s Mediterranean Crisis 1936–1939, Cambridge 1975. 8 For interwar Franco-British naval relations, see George E. Melton, From Versailles to Mers el-Kebir: The Promise of Anglo-French Naval Cooperation 1919–1940, Annapolis MD 2015.

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and the attacks ceased. By that time, of course, the civil war was coming to an end with the victory of the Nationalists.9 And by then also, Italy was locked into almost overt hostility to Britain. The Mediterranean fleet’s existence as the reserve imperial fleet, available to reinforce the position in the Far East or in British home waters, as well as to defend the British position in the Mediterranean itself, thereby came to be seen as unsustainable. The fleet became fully preoccupied with issues within the sea, and its ships could not be spared for more distant problems. If a crisis with Japan occurred, much of the fleet would clearly be needed to defend the Australian and Malayan territories of the empire, not to mention India. If a German war began – the new German navy was being built up in the 1930s – the fleet would be needed in the North Sea, not just to deter possible invasion, but to pen into that sea the German commerce raiders and U-boats which had been so dangerous in the Great War. In the actual crisis of 1935–1936 in the Mediterranean, the fleet itself had had to be reinforced from both the Atlantic fleet and by ships from the China Station. It was a graphic demonstration both of the flexibility of sea power and that the Royal Navy was over-extended.10 The possibility of hostilities with all three likely enemy states became the Admiralty’s nightmare from 1936 onwards.11 There were serious considerations given to that old Admiralty standby, the abandonment of the Mediterranean by the fleet, but this was no longer a viable proposition. Apart from the British colonies of Malta and Cyprus, and responsibilities in Egypt and Palestine, the absence of a British fleet from the Mediterranean would cede the sea to Italy, and open up Egypt and the Suez Canal to an enemy invasion from Italian Libya convoyed and conveyed by the Italian fleet - just the threat implied in 1935 – and Egypt itself would be liable to rise against the British occupiers. For three years the Admiralty pondered the conundrum of how to fight three enemies at once, without reaching any clear conclusions.12 The Mediterranean fleet continued on its stately way, exercising, planning, relaxing, visiting, though not forgetting its essential 9

The ‘incidents’ are detailed in Cable, Gunboat Diplomacy, 213–217, and in more detail in Roskill, Naval Policy, vol. 2, ch. 13, and Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, London 1961; for the documents, see Halpern, Mediterranean Fleet 1930–1939. 10 The dilemma of the Admiralty is detailed in Roskill, Naval Policy, vol. 2, and, with reference specifically to the Mediterranean, Pratt, East of Malta; see also Holland, Blue-Water Empire, ch. 6; Ball, Bitter Sea, chs 1–3. 11 The problem the Admiralty faced in the Otchakov crisis in 1791 was not dissimilar: in that case the Admiralty was able to deflect the British government; in the 1930s it was the foreign hostility which could not be deflected. 12 Pratt, East of Malta.

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political and military purpose. A small submarine flotilla sailed along the Yugoslav coast, wending its way through the coastal islands, very conspicuously passing Italian outposts, sailing as far north almost as Trieste, and being greeted exuberantly by Yugoslavs all along the way; other flotillas of various sizes paid well-publicised visits to Corsica (carefully passing closely, and visibly, to Sardinia) and Villafranca, the old anchorage used in the past by the Royal Navy, which had been part of the Italian kingdom and was now French, and was the subject of Italian irredentist claims, as was Corsica.13 A more explicit set of warnings to Italy, combined with gestures of support to other countries, could hardly be devised. Greece was one of Italy’s claimed enemies and potential victims, and Athens was one of the favourite summer destinations for visits by the fleet. In the event, of course, the three naval enemies emerged one by one in succession, Germany in September 1939, Italy in June 1940, Japan in December 1941, though this gradual increase in pressure was no less uncomfortable than simultaneity would have been. The hostility of Italy had been assumed, at least in the Admiralty, since 1936, and it was no surprise, when France was on the way to defeat in June 1940, that Italy declared war. The Mediterranean fleet, in accordance with its strategic purpose between the wars, detached ships into the Atlantic and the North Sea in 1939 to cope with the German war, but in advance of Italy’s declaration it had been reassembled and even reinforced, even as the threat of a German invasion of Britain came ever closer. Thus the intentions inherent in maintaining the Mediterranean fleet as a strategic reserve had succeeded in the first year of the war, since it had been used to reinforce the Home Fleet and to hunt down German Atlantic raiders. Now under the command of Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, it was on course to take action in its own region.14 The situation in the Mediterranean became acute when Italy joined in as Germany’s ally, and the fleet was generally ready, but there then also developed a most unexpected extra problem. The three anchors of British power in the sea, Gibraltar, Malta, and Alexandria, were all variously in awkward situations. Gibraltar was possibly threatened by Spain, where the newly victorious dictator Francisco Franco inclined to the German side after the defeat of France, the more so since Italy and Germany had been of significant military assistance to his forces in their fighting. But Franco presided over a wounded and wrecked country, and he was above all a Spanish nationalist; he had no intention of doing Germany’s 13 Cf, for an example, Grainger, 13 Sharks, ‘Shark XI’ . 14 S. K. Roskill, The Navy at War 1939–1945, London 1960,

102–103.

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bidding. At a meeting with Hitler after the fall of France he pitched his demands so high that he knew the Germans would not agree to them, and thereby kept out of the war. Nonetheless the naval base at Gibraltar was clearly vulnerable, both to external attack and to internal subversion; and there were German and Italian agents active in Algeciras and Spanish Morocco, so that little or nothing could be kept secret. The Rock was also to a degree a burden; its civilian population required supplies of every sort which had to be brought in by sea, using significant shipping resources; further, much of that civilian population was of little use in war conditions, since it had been employed largely in mercantile activities which had ceased with the fighting. (One of the pre-war decisions, now implemented, was to deny the Mediterranean to all merchant ships of Britain and its allies.) In 1940 the ‘surplus’ population – those not required or employed in war work – were removed, evacuated first to French Morocco, and then dispersed to Britain, Ireland, and Canada, and even the West Indies. They remained exiled until after the war.15 Thus Gibraltar at last became what it had always been – a naval fortress. This could be done because Gibraltar was technically a fortress and the affected population was relatively small in number and could be moved out without much difficulty or resistance. It was not a solution available for Malta, whose population was much larger. The island was dangerously vulnerable to attack by sea and air from Sicily only sixty miles away; its position meant that as a naval and air base in the air age it was a less than comfortable place. The tentative intention of the Admiralty in pre-war planning was that Malta should be abandoned, and in preparation the main base for the Mediterranean fleet had been relocated to Alexandria, where it could act in defence of the British position in the Middle East and block any enemy penetration into the Indian Ocean by way of the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. (The move to Alexandria had been implemented four or five times between 1936 and 1940, and each time reversed; none of this was any help to nervous Maltese.) Alexandria was not as good a base as Malta, being undeveloped and poorly defended; Port Said and Haifa could also be used, but were even less developed.16 (Haifa was also the terminus of the oil pipeline from Iraq and the site of an oil refinery.) It proved to be impossible to abandon Malta; after all, to do so would present the enemy with

15 Jackson,

Gibraltarians, 274–276 and 277–278; the issue is not seriously considered in Constantine, Community and Identity, except incidentally, despite his title. 16 Roskill, Navy at War, 100–103.

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the best naval base in the Mediterranean. The entry of Italy into the war nevertheless made Gibraltar and Alexandria the fleet’s main bases; and at the same time events compelled Gibraltar to become the base for a detachment of the Atlantic fleet, nominated ‘Force H’, commanded by Admiral Sir James Somerville; he and Cunningham were two of the outstanding fighting admirals of the war. Britain and France had intended that, in the event of war with Italy, the British ships based at Alexandria would operate in the Eastern Basin, and France with its bases at Toulon, Bizerta in Tunisia, and Oran/Mers el-Kebir in Algeria, would operate in the west. Little naval activity had taken place in the Mediterranean before Italy’s entry, though as things became worse for France, parts of the French fleet in the Mediterranean were moved out of Toulon to the new base recently constructed at Mers el-Kebir in Algeria (also referred to as Oran); other ships were stationed at Bizerta; some French ships were sent to Alexandria to operate under Cunningham; Force H would operate with the French in the west. The Italian war brought naval attacks by the French along the Genoese coast, and by French and British ships on the Libyan coastal towns, but the French armistice came too quickly (20 June) for much more to have been accomplished. The future of the French fleet came into question as a result of the Franco-German and Franco–Italian armistices. It was assumed in Britain that, whatever agreement was made by Germany as part of the armistice, the Germans would sooner or later break the terms and move to gain control of the ships. This would not happen right away, but it was assumed it would do so fairly soon, and in the context of the German attempt to invade Britain. The French ships were modern, fast, and capable; they would make formidable enemies. The balance of sea power in that case would be decisively against the Royal Navy. In numbers the French had four battleships and battle cruisers and the Italians six; combined they also had 35 cruisers, almost a hundred destroyers, and over 150 submarines; the British had four battleships, two aircraft carriers, but only ten cruisers, thirty-one destroyers, and twelve submarines.17 The junction of Italian and French (that is, potentially German) sea power would be overwhelming. Alternatively a combination of the German fleet in the North Sea and the French in the Atlantic would be a very difficult force for the Royal Navy to confront. The new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was quickly convinced that the Franco-German armistice, followed by the installation of the 17

Figures from J. Rohwer, Chronology of the War at Sea 1939–1945, 2rd ed., London 2005, 27.

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German-friendly Vichy regime in France, posed a serious, if potential, threat to the British position at sea. In addition, he needed to display his and Britain’s resolve after the overwhelming defeat of its army in mainland Europe and its expulsion from the continent through Dunkirk and other French ports. He demanded that the ships at Mers el-Kebir/Oran be rendered inaccessible to the Germans: disabled, handed over to the British, or sailed to the French colonies. When these options were ignored or rejected, amid a good deal of French dithering, Admiral Somerville with Force H was instructed to put the French ships out of action by bombardment. He protested, hating the whole process, but complied, mounting an attack on the ships on 3 July. One of the ships, the battle cruiser Strasbourg, escaped to Toulon; the others were damaged beyond use.18 And the word went out that Britain was resolved to fight on – though the bodies it was sacrificing were French. The French ships in British ports were seized with only a little fighting. At Alexandria Admiral Cunningham was able to box the French ships in by his own ships in the harbour, and so could reject a violent decision; the French Admiral Godfroy agreed that his ships should be disarmed.19 The French West Indian squadron, including an aircraft carrier, was effectively immobilised by American pressure and the refusal of rearmament or resupply – the United States had no wish to find a strong German-controlled fleet operating close to its shores; President Roosevelt’s government was just as mistrusting of Nazi ability to be true to their agreements as the British. The French fleet was thus effectively reduced and intimidated, but other French ships defeated a British attack on Dakar in West Africa a little later;20 most of those ships thereafter remained as immobile in French harbours as Godfroy’s ships at Alexandria, and most of those at Toulon also remained in port for the next two years. The effect was precisely as the British had wished – the message of a resolute hostility to the Nazi and Fascist war was clear; any Spanish hopes of seizing Gibraltar were dashed; the French fleet was reduced to neutrality; the Italian navy received a clear warning. This was reinforced a few days later when Cunningham brought the Mediterranean fleet, covering the passage of two convoys, close to Calabria 18 Roskill,

War at Sea, 1.242–243; Michael Simpson (ed.), Somerville Papers, NRS 1996, 86–113; Stephen Roskill, Churchill and the Admirals, London 1977, 150–160; Ball, Bitter Sea, 48–49. 19 Roskill, War at Sea; id., Churchill and the Admirals, 150–160; Ball, Bitter Sea, 50; Michael Simpson (ed.), Cunningham Papers, NRS 1999, 82–97; Lord Cunningham of Hyndhope, A Sailor’s Odyssey, London 1951, 246–250. 20 Arthur Marder, Operation Menace: The Dakar Expedition and the Dudley North Affair, Oxford 1976.

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and clashed with the Italian fleet, which was also at sea to cover the passage of a convoy to Benghazi. The two fleets fired at each other without result, neither willing to risk serious damage, but that the ‘battle’ (of Punta Stila, or Calabria) took place close to Italy was a mark of British aggressiveness at sea.21 This action is regarded by British naval historians as establishing a mental and moral superiority of the British over the Italian navy.22 This may be what the British felt had happened, though there is little evidence that the Italians thought so. It is a theory based, of course, on traditional British naval arrogance, and on a basic misunderstanding of the Italian strategy in this war: the Italian navy had no intention of fighting great battles, though when one was forced on them their ships fought well. The Italian purpose was mainly to get their own convoys through to North Africa and to block British convoys, for which it was recognised that submarines, motor gunboats, destroyers, and air power were the most effective weapons. Whatever ‘moral ascendancy’ the British achieved, it did not prevent the Admiralty from seeing that Malta was extremely vulnerable to Italian attack, and serious consideration was given once more to the idea of abandoning the island, and indeed of the whole Mediterranean. It was obvious that Gibraltar and Alexandria, with the Suez Canal, had to be held to block Italian egress. This was a matter Mussolini had repeatedly complained about and therefore wished to change. Interrupting Italian communications with its vulnerable East African empire would restrict Italian raids into the Indian Ocean. Consideration of the wider effects of abandoning the Mediterranean also showed that this would involve abandoning the transport route through it. This would be expensive, since the alternative was to go round southern Africa, a voyage which added several thousands of miles to the journey to the Far East, Australia, or India. It certainly went against the grain to abandon a British colony, especially without a fight, while Cunningham himself apparently never even considered withdrawing. Further, if Italian Libya could be conquered, Malta could be much more easily defended. The decision was made the more easily by the use Cunningham’s fleet made of Malta’s facilities for repairs and refuelling during the Punta Stila action. The relative success of four Gladiator fighters discovered on the island in combatting the early Italian air raids, as well as the manifest usefulness of the island, both as a naval base and as an unsinkable aircraft carrier, largely persuaded the Air and 21 Jack

Greene and Alessandro Massignani, The Naval War in the Mediterranean 1940–1943, London 1998, 66–81. 22 Roskill, Navy at War, 106: claiming a ‘moral ascendancy over the Italian navy’ .

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Naval Staffs in London that the island should be defended.23 By then, of course, the distances involved meant that the reinforcing planes had to be brought by carrier close enough to fly in. The ancient carrier Argus – it had been used in the Mediterranean in 1918 – was employed repeatedly in this, and in August a dozen Hurricanes arrived on the island.24 The line of communications for the British therefore lay east–west, linking Gibraltar (which could be supplied from Britain), Malta, and Alexandria (which it was necessary to control to hold the Middle East and the Indian Ocean). For the Italian navy their communications lay north–south, their main naval bases at Naples and Taranto linked by convoy to the Libyan bases at Tripoli and Benghazi. It followed that if any serious threat to Italy was to be mounted, Malta was an essential base which had to be retained, as an air base, as a fleet base, and as a base for the British submarine fleet in the seas around Italy and between Italy and Libya. The pre-war intention not to defend the island had been largely an Air Staff plan, fixated as they were on massed bombing raids.25 Wider strategic interests overrode this parochial and mistaken policy. The naval war in the Mediterranean, therefore, from the time Italy joined the war consisted effectively of conducting convoys, by the British throughout the length of the sea, by the Italians from Italy to Libya. Each convoy became a battle in itself, and both sides were particularly concerned to avoid collisions in which they might lose ships. This was not very popular in the respective Admiralties, where chair-bound sailors thought battles ought to be fought, but to the admirals and sailors in the Mediterranean it was difficult enough to get a convoy through without having to fight an enemy fleet as well. So Malta would be held, but it took much longer to make it a secure base than was anticipated. For one thing, the coast of French North Africa, from Tangier to Tunis, was now unfriendly, if not actively hostile, and unavailable to British ships: French coast guards repeatedly alerted Italians to the presence of British ships availing themselves of French territorial waters, particularly off Tunisia, and occasionally fired at them. Also, several other areas had to be dealt with before Libya could be taken. The Middle East Command in Cairo in 1940–1941 had to look in all directions at once – north to Syria (and Greece), east to Iraq and Iran, west to Libya (and Malta), and south to the Italian East African territories. A year-long campaign to remove

23 James

Holland, Fortress Malta: An Island under Siege, 1940–1943, London 2003, ch. 3; Holland, Blue-Water Empire, 239–241. 24 Greene and Massignani, Naval War, 87. 25 Pratt, East of Malta, 10–12.

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Italian power from Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea (June 1940–May 1941) was needed to eliminate the threat of Italian ships and submarines to British shipping in the Indian Ocean. In the six months after the Italian war began, Force H and the Mediterranean fleet escorted convoys, and also conducted offensive operations. The reinforcement of Malta by flying in Hurricanes has been mentioned already. Three weeks later a flight of three Gladiators targeted aerial torpedoes at Italian ships in the harbour of Bomba, west of Tobruk. A submarine, a depot ship, and a torpedo boat were sunk or damaged (and an attack by human torpedoes on Alexandria harbour was thereby frustrated). The success of this raid – the Gladiators came from the carrier Eagle, though they launched the actual attack from a land base – stimulated thoughts of a bigger enterprise of the same type. A week later a convoy was escorted by Force H to south of Sardinia, sent supplies into Malta, and some of the ships were then met by the Mediterranean fleet and taken on to Alexandria. The Italian fleet, including four battleships, came out to interfere but failed to find any of the British ships. In this and the next convoy operation, the British were extremely careful to avoid action. Meanwhile raids were made by both sides, mining enemy harbours, and blockading enemy ports and airfields (the latter by the British). Both sides used submarines extensively. In early November an air attack from the aircraft carrier Illustrious sank or damaged three of the Italian battleships in harbour at Taranto. This raid was partly inspired by the success of the raid on Bomba, but it had been a topic of discussion and planning within the Mediterranean fleet before the war began. The remaining Italian battleships withdrew to Naples forthwith. This was a naval spectacular, and the first large-scale offensive use of torpedo aircraft against big ships. (One of those who took due note of the effects was the Japanese air attaché at Rome.26) However, the Italian battleships were not daunted, and two came out a little later to menace Force H, which was running another convoy towards Malta. The two forces came close to each other near southern Sardinia, but the Italians realised that Somerville had two battleships, not one, and equal odds were not to be accepted. Somerville followed their retreat for a time, but then turned back to protect the convoy, his primary task – for which he was criticised in the Admiralty and almost called a coward. (This was the ‘battle’ of Cape Spartivento.) Somerville was clearly correct; neither side in this war was anxious to flight at anything less than 26 Cunningham

Papers, 1.174–190; a clear account is by Thomas P. Lowry and John W. G. Wellham, The Attack on Taranto, Mechanicsburg PA 2000.

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overwhelming odds; it took a long time for office-bound Admiralties in London and Rome to understand the conditions at sea. A first attack on the Italian army in Libya in January 1941 was highly successful, but provoked Hitler into intervening to assist his ally. In January 1941 German air reinforcements were sent to Sicily to assist the Italian air force, and a German army force went to Libya to assist the Italian armies. This was the first appearance in Africa of General Erwin Rommel, whose activities tended to mesmerise the British forces, both commanders and soldiers. The victorious British forces were then sent to assist the Greeks, who had defeated the Italians but were now attacked by German forces. The weakened British forces in Africa were driven back to Egypt, though a force held out in Tobruk, which was placed under siege. At sea this meant that the Mediterranean fleet had to use many of its ships in Greece, and more vessels and much energy to supply Tobruk, and later in exchanging the garrison when the Australian government objected to its troops being used as that garrison. The Vichy French forces controlled North Africa from Tunisia to Morocco, and Syria as well. After Oran, they were distinctly unfriendly towards Britain – or rather, even more unfriendly than before – but Marshal Petain resisted declaring war. Gibraltar was attacked by French bombers from Morocco twice after the failure of the British attack on Dakar, but active Anglo-French hostilities died down after that – the French were gratified that they had won the Dakar fight. The Vichy Admiralty began to send small convoys from Toulon through the Strait of Gibraltar to Casablanca or Dakar, and the British refrained from interfering. On the other hand, when it became clear that some materials which the British considered to be war-contraband were being imported in French ships they treated them in the same way as other neutrals, stopped and searched them, and confiscated the cargoes. Most of these incidents passed off peacefully.27 In effect the French ships sailed in and out of the sea by British permission: the Sea-entrance, with its coasts and islands mainly neutral, was nevertheless commanded from Gibraltar. The British intervention in Greece was another disaster, both in that it was comprehensively defeated by the German invasion and because it weakened the army in North Africa and so contributed to the loss of the earlier conquests. The fighting in and around Greece and Crete was extremely costly for the Mediterranean fleet. Hardly had congratulations on the Taranto raid faded away than the carrier whose planes were used, Illustrious, was badly damaged by 27 Examples

are in the Somerville Papers, 1.221, 234–235; the codename for these interruptions was ‘Ration’.

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an air attack - one of the first results of the arrival of the German aircraft.28 On the other hand, a battle (Matapan) between the two fleets resulted in the sinking of several Italian ships, including three cruisers. The British had been alerted to the Italian fleet’s sortie from message interception and code breaking at Bletchley Park (Ultra), and their ships were equipped with radar which gave them a great advantage in attacking enemy ships at night.29 (This was a perfect example of a battle resulting from a perceived serious discrepancy in the strengths of the two sides by the stronger; not only did the British have Ultra and radar, but the battle was between British battleships and Italian cruisers.) Overall the Greek and Cretan campaigns were extremely expensive, in both cases ending in the evacuation of the land forces. The ships proved to be shockingly vulnerable to air attack, particularly to the dive-bombing Stukas. In the Cretan evacuation the fleet had virtually no air cover, since the RAF was withdrawn from the island before the German invasion. Twenty ships, mainly small vessels, were sunk or damaged in the Greek evacuation, and at Crete the Mediterranean fleet lost two cruisers and six destroyers sunk, with three battleships, a carrier, six cruisers, and seven destroyers damaged.30 The fleet was effectively reduced to impotence as a result. It was a serious maritime defeat.31 Meanwhile the Vichy French regime in Syria proved to be only too willing to lend itself to assisting a German lunge into Iraq, where supplies were airlifted to assist a feeble coup led by Colonel Rashid Ali. (These supplies were less than helpful, since the ammunition did not correlate with the Iraqi army’s guns; a supply sent by rail through Turkey was intercepted when the Turks finally understood what was going on – and when it became clear that the rebels were losing.) The French in Syria were open in their support for the rebels, allowing German aircraft to stage through their airfields, so now another military campaign was required. Once Iraq was secured, the army went on to remove the Vichy regime; several ships of the Mediterranean fleet were involved in the latter campaign, again fighting against French

28 Greene

and Massignani, Naval War, 134–135; Cunningham Papers, 1.257, 259–260. 29 Cunningham Papers, 1.308–326; Greene and Massignani, Naval War, 145–160; S. W. C. Pack, The Battle of Matapan, London 1961 (written before Ultra had been outed, though there are coy references to intelligence successes). 30 Greene and Massignani, Naval War, 161–173; Christopher Buckley, Greece and Crete 1941, London 1952, reprinted Athens 1982. 31 Cunningham described it as ‘a trial of strength between the fleet and the German air force’; the latter won; Cunningham Papers, 1.409–446 (quotation from 409).

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ships. It was another distraction from the main war, though in this case the campaign was successful. The result was British control of all the Middle East, but German–Italian control of Greece.32 The German and Italian air forces in Sicily were now beginning to pound Malta with distressing frequency. From the island a squadron of submarines ranged about the nearby waters, around Sicily, in the Aegean, off the African coast, seeking for Italian convoys to attack. The air raids very largely kept the surface ships of the fleet away, for Cunningham could scarcely afford to lose more ships; the submarines had to be serviced in a bomb-proof underground bunker. The campaign was much helped by the decryption of Italian signals (though the Italians had broken the British codes as well). These several campaigns, British victories in Iraq, Syria, and Ethiopia, German/Italian victories in Greece, all more or less concluded by the middle of 1941, narrowed the active war in the region to the Eastern Mediterranean: the land war in Egypt/Libya, the sea war along the convoy routes between Alexandria and Malta. In the west the Gibraltar base was not seriously threatened, though occasional French bombers or Italian submarines might attack, and Force H was available both for the Atlantic (it played a decisive part in the destruction of Bismarck in May 1941) and on the convoy route from Malta. Malta’s position now became an advantage rather than the liability it had seemed. It became the central point of resistance in the Mediterranean: in British hands it was a standing threat to the Italian supply lines from Italy to Libya; similarly, if it fell to the Italians the British route through the Mediterranean would be cut; the difference in consequences would be crucial, for an Italian Malta would be a large British naval defeat, convoys carrying troops and supplies to Egypt would be forced to go round Africa, and Egypt, and perhaps Gibraltar, would be much more vulnerable to the enemy forces in North Africa, which in turn could be supplied much more easily. In addition, of course, this was, for the whole of the period from June 1940 to December 1941, the only place where the British could directly confront an enemy – the air war over Britain and Germany notwithstanding. There were, in addition to the more visible activities of the Navy, a long series of minor, clandestine operations based largely at Gibraltar but also at Malta, aimed at landing agents and evacuating escaped prisoners of war, returning agents, and bringing off the occasional escaping general. Most of these operations took place along the coast of the south of France, or in the Adriatic. The Vichy regime in France 32 Christopher

Buckley, Five Ventures, London 1954, reprinted 1977 (Iraq, 3–40; Syria, 41–140); id., Greece and Crete.

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proved to be inefficient at holding on to prisoners, particularly Poles, and in the Adriatic the aim was to assist the Greek and Yugoslav Resistance. These operations very rarely impinged upon the greater activities of the Navy, but it is worth recalling that they continued all through the war in the Mediterranean until 1944.33 After Crete and the Syrian fighting the Mediterranean campaign consisted of the land campaign in Libya, and the defence and resupply of Malta. The former involved the Mediterranean fleet in attacks along the North African coast and in attempts to intercept the Italian ships which were convoying supplies to Africa. The defence of Malta was also another way of interrupting those supplies, but it became a campaign in itself, one of putting convoys of supply ships from Alexandria or from Gibraltar through to the island against at times formidable opposition. Each Malta convoy was a major battle, but the Mediterranean fleet also had the satisfaction of several times fighting directly against the Italian fleet. The strategy was similar to that which the German High Seas Fleet had attempted in the Great War: faced with a much larger enemy force (six Italian battleships against two or three British, who were also outnumbered in cruisers, destroyers, and submarines – but not, crucially, in aircraft carriers) the aim was to gradually reduce the Italian navy to a condition where it would cease to be a menace. This proved to be an ideal situation for the methods of Admiral Cunningham, an aggressive commander who was willing to take risks and ignore peremptory orders from the Admiralty if he considered he had an advantage. The convoys for Malta were mainly sent from the Britain, and were shepherded eastwards from Gibraltar by units of Force H, but the two fleets from east and west cooperated very successfully in acting together to divide the enemy forces, and in passing some ships through all the way to Egypt. Yet each convoy was expensive. For several months in early 1941 most got through more or less unscathed, but from January 1941 the German air force detachment, Fliegerkorps X, which had been transferred to Sicily, became a major threat. German bombing tactics centred on dive bombers; Italian methods were to bomb from considerable heights. No transports were lost from convoys between June 1940 and May 1941, and none from any of the convoys which went on from Malta to Alexandria.34 But then the loss of Greece and Crete, and 33 These

operations are detailed in Brooks Richards, Secret Flotillas, vol. 2, Clandestine Sea Operations in the Western Mediterranean, North Africa and the Adriatic, 1940–1944, 2nd ed., Barnsley 2013; this is a reprint of the official account, originally written c.1995. 34 David A. Thomas, Malta Convoys, Barnsley 1999, appendices II and III.

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the increased military efficiency brought to the war in North Africa by the arrival of General Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps, much increased the pressure. The battles around Crete reduced the Mediterranean fleet to two battleships, one cruiser, and ten smaller ships; fifteen of its ships, including two battleships and an aircraft carrier, were damaged and unavailable for service. The enemy air forces were now based in Greece and Crete, and in Cyrenaica and Libya, as well as Sicily, and dominated the route between Alexandria to Malta – an area nicknamed ‘bomb alley’ by the British sailors. The convoys thus became steadily more dangerous and costly from mid-1941 onwards. Each convoy was a battle lasting several days, with the merchantmen/transports and their warship escorts coming under continual attack by aircraft and submarines, and sometimes by surface forces. In reply the British escorting forces were steadily increased in force and number, and the submarine, air, and surface patrols sought out the Italian forces. All convoys, from Gibraltar or Alexandria, had to pass close to enemy-held territory: Sardinia and Sicily in the west, Libya, Greece, and Crete in the east, whence air attacks were launched; submarines were stationed across the convoy’s line of advance. The German invasion of Russia in June 1941 relieved some of the pressure on Malta as the German air strength in Sicily was reduced, but the Italian air force was persistent, as were the Italian submarines. From July convoys suffered steadily increasing casualties. Operation ‘Substance’ in July 1941 consisted of seven merchant ships escorted by the battleships Renown and Nelson, the carrier Ark Royal, four cruisers, a minelayer, and sixteen destroyers; eight submarines were deployed to harass any Italian surface intervention. This was by any standards a formidable force – thirty-two warships escorting seven merchantmen. Of the seven, one had to turn back; of the escorts one destroyer was sunk, Nelson was damaged by a torpedo hit, two cruisers were damaged; two transports were also damaged, one near to sinking. Such hits seriously degraded the ability of the navy to continue operations, and reduced the carrying capacity of the merchantmen. And this was just one convoy.35 Almost every action between the rival navies took place in connection with convoys (as it had, in fact, from the beginning). The Italian convoys tended to be fairly small for some time, much of the needed equipment having been stockpiled in Libya before the war, but as this was used up, and as the German forces arrived and were reinforced, the Italian convoys increased in size and frequency; fuel was always 35 Thomas, Malta Convoys, 91–102; Greene and Massignani, Naval War, 178–179;

Somerville Papers, 285–295.

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particularly needed. The British convoys similarly increased in size, though the increase had begun much earlier, Malta not having been prepared for the war. Intelligence on both sides was largely based on monitoring radio traffic, and both sides were able to decrypt the other’s signals. (Bonner Fellers, the US attaché in Cairo, was exceptionally careless over his codes in his reports to his government, and thus provided much accurate information on British plans.36) Much of the fighting was done by the smaller ships, destroyers, submarines, light and heavy cruisers. On the British side the Royal Navy’s possession of aircraft carriers helped to provide air cover for the fleet, but these ships therefore became prime targets for their enemies, while the Italian airfields in Sicily and Sardinia were the source of attacks on Malta and on the fleet. Convoys were successfully run to Malta in July and August 1941, and several operations flew Hurricanes to the island without Italian interference, but still more supplies were always needed, for the more aircraft there were on the island, the more fuel and ammunition was required. Meanwhile a British submarine operation sank two Italian liners carrying troops to Libya; most of the men were rescued but all their equipment was lost; the Italians ceased using these large civilian ships to transport their soldiers.37 Operation ‘Halberd’ in September was a much larger convoy operation than usual, with nine transports carrying over 80,000 tons of supplies for the island, and over 3000 soldiers as reinforcements for the garrison. The escort and accompanying forces included the carrier Ark Royal, three battleships – Nelson, Rodney, Prince of Wales – five cruisers, and nineteen destroyers. By this time both sides were operating more or less to a pattern. The convoy was assembled in the Atlantic, then sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar at night, to be joined by the main escort out of sight of land, hoping to avoid being spotted by Italian and German agents in Algeciras or Tangier. Italian aircraft, however, constantly reconnoitred the western Mediterranean from Sardinia and spotted the convoy within a day. The escort was in two parts, a close escort with the transports, and a larger force, including the big ships, at some distance, intended to intervene if required; since it included the carrier, it was soon in action. The covering force was to turn back when south of Sardinia, leaving the close escort, covered it was hoped by aircraft from Malta, to make the final run to Valetta. It was some time before the Italians understood that this was a convoy for Malta, but many of their forces were at once brought to readiness, and a force including two 36 Artemis Cooper, Cairo in the War, 1939–1945, London 1989, 203. 37 Greene and Massignani, Naval War, 180–182; Cunningham Papers, 1.509–510.

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battleships - Vittorio Veneto and Littorio - five cruisers, and fourteen destroyers was assembled north of Sicily; eleven submarines were deployed to intercept. Despite these Italian ships being at sea, the fighting which took place was all between the convoy and its escorts on one side and Italian aircraft on the other. The Italian fleet found that it was not covered by the land-based fighters it required, whereas the fighters from Ark Royal were successful in breaking up the main Italian air attacks, but Nelson was damaged by an aerial torpedo, and, after Somerville’s large escort turned back, the transport Imperial Star was sunk. The Italian fleet several times attempted to close to attack, but the British were not interested in a battle. Delivering the convoy was their task, as Somerville had made clear to the Admiralty before he sailed – earlier complaints that he had not indulged in a battle had stung - and the Italian ships (and their aircraft) were constrained by a general shortage of fuel. The battle lasted for three days; at Malta it was widely understood what was happening; when the ships arrived, thousands of Maltese cheered them in from the battlements, as the ships’ bands played.38 Developments on both sides changed the situation in the autumn of 1941. Even as the ‘Halberd’ convoy was being fought through to Malta, the German Admiralty ordered U-boats into the Mediterranean; first a set of six, four more in November, and then ten more.39 Meanwhile the British code-breaking system called Ultra was providing intelligence of Italian convoy movements in good time for their interception. In October that ‘Giulia’ Italian convoy of four ships was detected by Ultra, and was then ‘found’ by an aircraft from Malta; air attacks sank three of the ships.40 The British had also decided that a force of surface ships – Force K – should be stationed at Malta: two cruisers and two destroyers. The presence of these ships forced the Italians to increase the size of their convoy escorts. In November Ultra detected the formation of a new Italian convoy, codenamed ‘Beta’ , but often known, from the name of one of the ships, as the ‘Duisberg’ convoy. It comprised six transports, carrying 17,000 tons of fuel, 34,000 tons of munitions, soldiers, and some civilians, and was escorted by two heavy cruisers (more powerful than anything in Force K) and ten destroyers. As with the British escorts these were divided into close and covering groups, but neither of them expected a night attack, nor were they trained for it. Force K, having prepared for night fighting, 38 Somerville

Papers, 303–323; Greene and Massignani, Naval War, 181–191; Thomas, Malta Convoys, 105–112. 39 Rohwer, Chronology, 105–106, 118; Greene and Matssignani, Naval War, 192–193. 40 Greene and Massignani, Naval War, 192.

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and using speed and radar in their approach, conducted a model attack. All the transports (six ships) were sunk, as was one of the Italian destroyers. None of the British ships suffered any damage.41 This was a major success, but at almost the same time one of the German submarines, U-81, encountered the carrier Ark Royal, which was flying off a reinforcement of Hurricanes to Malta. The carrier was hit by a single torpedo and sank while under tow for Gibraltar, to much German glee. Two weeks later Force K attacked another Tripoli convoy, sinking two merchantmen. The Mediterranean fleet (now operating without a carrier under the designation Force A), came west to support Force K, and was attacked by U-331. A hit on the battleship Barham caused an immediate explosion which destroyed the ship.42 Both the U-boat and German aircraft contingents were reinforced. This series of events is a good indication of the precarious balance achieved by both antagonists at this time. In December 1941, war with Japan added yet another element of strain to the mix, though since the Japanese chose to attack the United States, the British Empire, and the Dutch in Indonesia simultaneously the full Japanese naval strength did not fall on the British, though what did attack proved sufficiently disastrous. An enlarged British fleet had to be deployed in the Indian Ocean (commanded by Admiral Somerville, transferred from Gibraltar) and this required the transfer of some ships from the Mediterranean and from home waters – just as had been envisaged in pre-war ideas. Somerville, with much experience in the Mediterranean of the effect of air attacks, showed a canny ability to hide his ships when at their most vulnerable, and both he and they survived; but the loss of Burma and Malaya was economically very awkward, and a new and wider war front was opened up, but the British merely stood on the defensive in the Far East for the next three years. The arrival of the U-boats in the Mediterranean, plus reinforcements for the German air component in Sicily, brought the central Mediterranean very largely under German–Italian control by the end of 1941. In mid-December a single transport, Breconshire, was escorted towards Malta by an escort of three cruisers and eight destroyers from Alexandria; at the same time, an Italian convoy of four ships was escorted by three battleships, two cruisers, and ten destroyers towards Tripoli. In addition, Force K came out from Malta to collect Breconshire. In a complex encounter fight (called the First Battle of Sirte), the two escort forces met but failed to close. Force K took Breconshire to Malta, then came out again to attack another 41 Ibid, 194–196; Thomas, Malta Convoys, 120–125. 42 Greene and Massignani, Naval War, 193, 196–197.

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Italian convoy, ran into a new Italian minefield, and all four ships were sunk or damaged.43 Meanwhile Malta had come under new, intense, and sustained air attack. To complete the British disasters, on 18 December an attack by three Italian midget submarines sank the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant in Alexandria harbour. Within a month the British had lost three battleships, an aircraft carrier, and several cruisers and destroyers, while their enemies had built up their airpower and their submarine numbers. For the next several months the Royal Navy would be outmatched, and Malta’s siege would be intensified. Malta suffered increasingly destructive air attacks, though for a time the naval base continued to be used, if at times on a much reduced scale. The anti-aircraft defences of the port became so dense and lethal that enemy pilots ceased to attempt any sort of accuracy when releasing their bombs; one result was widespread destruction in the city of Valetta.44 The Mediterranean war came down to the replenishment of Malta. In February a convoy of three ships (convoy ‘MF-5’), escorted by three cruisers and eight destroyers, was destroyed by air attack. In reply a series of raids from Malta by Wellington bombers destroyed several ships, German and Italian, in the harbour of Augusta in Sicily, one of the assembly points for Italian convoys.45 By March Malta was in greater need of supplies than ever, and a new attempt had to be made, coming from Alexandria. It was no longer possible to reach the island from Gibraltar, though several reinforcements of fighters were dispatched by being flown off from carriers, so the ships had to come from Alexandria. There were four supply ships in the new convoy (‘MW-10’) escorted by four cruisers and seventeen destroyers, commanded by Rear-Admiral Sir Philip Vian, with the remnant of Force K (a cruiser and a destroyer) coming out from Malta. Warned by intelligence of a sortie by Force H (now commanded by Vice-Admiral Neville Syfret), and of the approach of the convoy, the Italians sent out a powerful force - the battleship Littorio, three cruisers, and eight destroyers – to contest the convoy’s passage. On 22 March in the sea more or less equidistant from Malta, Tripoli, and Benghazi they and Vian’s force fought another complex battle (the Second Battle of Sirte). Outgunned, Vian resorted to cunning; he had his ships lay down a dense rolling smoke screen to cover both the escorts and the freighters. Out of the screen 43 Cunningham Papers, 1.549–553; Greene and Massignani, Naval War, 200–202. 44 For a good description of conditions, see Ernle Bradford, Siege: Malta, 1940–

1943, London 1985, particularly chapters 19–21 and 25; also Holland, Fortress Malta. 45 Greene and Massignani, Naval War, 214.

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the smaller warships darted, fired a few shells then dipped back into cover. The freighters were sent off on a more southerly course while most of the escort preoccupied the Italian ships; in the end the Italians withdrew, unable to locate their prey, the convoy. This is regarded by the British as a major victory, one in which clever tactics foiled the greater force, and Admiral Cunningham was very complimentary (though the Italians had used a version of the smoke screen tactic at the Punta Stila battle). However, the transports were now located from the air. Just two of them reached Malta, one being damaged; Breconshire was bombed to a standstill outside the island; the fourth ship was sunk. Bombing next day finished off the Breconshire, and sank the two ships which had reached Valetta. Only 6000 tons of supplies (out of the 26,000 carried) were landed. Several of the warships suffered damage, but only the destroyers Legion (of Force K) and Southwold were sunk; two destroyers of the Italian fleet were sunk in a storm as they were retiring to Taranto.46 Combined with the result of the earlier convoy, this operation amounted to an effective defeat for the British forces; the quantity of supplies delivered was nowhere near what Malta required, and to regard the operation as a victory is to misunderstand the purpose for which it was launched. Certainly most of the warships survived to return to Alexandria, but Force K at Malta, reduced to a single ship, had now effectively ceased to exist. The air attacks on Malta intensified even more; the submarines were withdrawn in April, and the last ship of Force K, the cruiser Penelope, was also pulled out. The general conditions had thus been achieved on the Italian side for an invasion of the island. An elaborate and detailed plan was developed which would have seen a force of almost 100,000 men deployed, landing from the sea and from the air. Had even half of these men survived the landing Malta would almost certainly have fallen, since there were only about 26,000 British and Maltese troops available for the defence, many of them only partly trained. But neither Hitler nor Mussolini was keen on the idea, thus betraying their joint inability to understand the necessary wider strategy of the war. The senior commanders in both Italian and German forces were divided over it, taking their cue from their indecisive masters. In June Rommel attacked the Gazala line in Libya, broke through and drove the Eighth Army all the way to Alamein, only sixty miles from Alexandria, and it was reckoned in Rome and Berlin, counting their chickens, that Malta was even more of a sideshow than before: Rommel would soon be in Cairo. The Malta operation was abandoned. The conquest of

46 Ibid,

222–231.

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Malta would have solved so many German-Italian problems that this decision was one of the crucial mistakes of the war. Supplies trickled into the island, brought by submarines and by several trips by two fast minelayers, Manxman and Welshman, but the supplies they carried were relatively small-scale. Unloading had to be swift, even immediate, and the ships sailed out again as soon as possible. Hunger was an ever-present condition for everyone on the island, troops and civilians alike, and it was noted that some of the soldiers were skeletal. The British Governor General Sir William Dobbie had to be replaced when a message from members of the Maltese government to London reported that he was actively considering surrender.47 The new governor, Lord Gort, transferred from Gibraltar, was much more popular, and, above all, much more cheerful. The presence of Rommel at Alamein from July onwards put a premium on supplies for his forces; he had virtually no local resources, and every item, above all fuel, had to come from Italy. So, just as Malta suffered shortages because of the siege and bombardment and the extreme difficulty of delivering supplies, the German– Italian army in Africa was slowed because of the interdiction of its supplies by British sea and air activity. Yet the removal of the British naval forces from Malta allowed a resumption of the Italian supply convoys, and the one serious attempt to launch an attack on an Italian convoy, from Alexandria by four fast destroyers in May, saw three of them sunk by air attack in ‘bomb alley’. 48 Meanwhile Malta was so reduced that it had no supplies available for anything more than survival. The arrival of successive fighter reinforcements was heartening, but without fuel and ammunition they were also an extra burden. The only way to change the situation was to resupply the island by another convoy. A two-convoy operation was organised: ‘Harpoon’ from Gibraltar, ‘Vigorous’ from Alexandria. In total seventeen transports were used, six from Gibraltar escorted by the old battleship Malaya, the equally aged carriers Argus and Eagle, four cruisers, sixteen destroyers, and four minesweepers; ‘Vigorous’ had eleven supply ships, covered by eight cruisers and seventeen destroyers. The fast minelayer Welshman went on ahead of ‘Harpoon’ to deliver its supplies alone. The escort for ‘Harpoon’ was reinforced from the Home Fleet for the occasion, and that of ‘Vigorous’ from the Indian Ocean forces. Both operations were defeated. The ‘Vigorous’ ships had a very dangerous passage through ‘bomb alley’, between hostile forces in 47 Ibid, 224; Bradford, Siege: Malta, 176–177. 48 Greene and Massignani, Naval War, 234.

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Crete and North Africa, the very area where the previous group of destroyers had been defeated. They were found quickly by Italian reconnaissance aircraft and were then faced by an Italian fleet which included the battleships Vittoria Veneto and Littorio out of Taranto. Even Admiral Vian was deterred, and was further hampered by indecision by Admiral Harwood, the new commander-in-chief at Alexandria. After being attacked almost continuously for three days by submarines, aircraft, and motor gunboats, and threatened by the Italian fleet, Vian turned back. Two of the merchantmen were sunk, as was a cruiser and three destroyers. Nothing reached Malta.49 The ‘Harpoon’ force did not face the Italian fleet, but was attacked by aircraft from Sardinia and Sicily, and had to fight an Italian squadron after the covering force (the battleship, the carriers, and the cruisers) withdrew. A reckless British destroyer attack was properly punished by a well-conducted Italian defence; four of the supply ships were sunk, as was one of the destroyers, and almost every other ship in the close escort was damaged. Only two of the supply ships reached Valetta, but they did deliver 15,000 tons of supplies. Overall the whole double operation was a stinging defeat for the Royal Navy.50 This took place just as the army in Africa was being driven back to Alamein, which at least reduced the likelihood of Malta being invaded. The supplies brought in by the ‘Harpoon’ ships (and Welshman) were enough to keep the island going, but not sufficient to allow it to become a base for offensive operations. It was certainly possible to use the aircraft stationed there to raid Italian ports, but this did not prevent Italian convoys setting out. The lack of warships, above all submarines, at the island prevented any serious attempt to cut the enemy convoy routes. A new convoy operation had to be mounted, and more distant operations had their effect in allowing it. In May the Vichy French in Madagascar had been conquered by a naval expedition from Britain, and the ships used there became available for use elsewhere; in June in the Pacific the US Navy defeated the Japanese operation mounted to seize Midway Island, sinking four Japanese carriers. This reduced the possibility of Japanese operations in the Indian Ocean. In the Arctic the disaster of convoy PQ 17 led to the suspension of the Russian convoys for the rest of the summer, paradoxically releasing ships to be used in the Mediterranean. It was therefore possible to concentrate British and some American resources in a massive 49 Ibid, 239–240: Thomas, Malta Convoys, 50 Greene and Massignani, Naval War,

166–173. 234–238; Thomas, Malta Convoys, 156–165; Roskill, Navy at War, 218–220; Roskill is unable to bring himself to apply the term ‘defeat’ to the operation: ‘unhappy experience’ is the best he can do.

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operation to relieve Malta. Even so it took two months before the new convoy – codenamed ‘Pedestal’ – could be organised. Fourteen supply ships were collected at Gibraltar, nearly 100,000 tons of supplies. The escorting force was immense, and included four carriers (Victorious, Indomitable, Eagle, Furious), two battleships (Nelson, Rodney), seven cruisers, and thirty-three destroyers – the sort of force used in the Pacific at the Midway battle. It had originally been intended to complement ‘Pedestal’ with a convoy from Alexandria, but the German–Italian conquest of the African coast made the voyage too dangerous, as the ‘Vigorous’ convoy had demonstrated all too clearly – ‘bomb alley’ now extended for over 1000 miles. (From Gibraltar the really dangerous part of the voyage was ‘only’ the 400 miles south of Sardinia and Sicily.) A sortie by a small squadron from Alexandria bombarded Rhodes as an attempted distraction, but it had no effect on the wider operation. No-one imagined that the convoy run would be easy; as ‘Harpoon’ and ‘Vigorous’ had shown, it would be both difficult and very costly. The convoy sailed from Gibraltar on 10 August, and was immediately reported to Rome by an Italian agent in Algeciras. The Italian command laid out three lines of interception – a line of submarines between Algiers and the Balearic Islands, more submarines and several groups of motor torpedo boats between Tunisia and Sardinia, and a third force of cruisers and destroyers coming past western Sicily to intercept the survivors on the last leg towards Malta, though these were constrained by the shortage of fuel which afflicted the Italian navy. These Italian dispositions were generally successful, especially when combined with relentless air attacks. On the morning of 11 August the carrier Eagle was torpedoed by U-73 and sank at once. The carrier Furious successfully launched an air reinforcement of fighters for Malta, but was then damaged by a torpedo attack, and turned back (as planned), escorted by several destroyers. An air attack in the afternoon out of Sardinia was unsuccessful, but next day the ships were within much easier range and a series of air attacks came gradually closer to the ships, damaging the carrier Indomitable and one of the transports. The submarine attacks failed, with two Italian boats damaged or sunk and another driven off by the destroyers. The convoy had therefore largely survived the first interceptions, and had inflicted some damage on the attackers, but as the ships went further east they lost the protection of the larger covering force, which turned back near Sardinia. Indomitable was further damaged, and hits to its flight deck rendered it inoperable, though it survived; with the battleships it turned away in the evening. So far only one

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of the transports, Ducalion, had been hit (and was still moving along slowly, though separated from the convoy). The Italian submarine ambush off Cape Bon began the process of fatally degrading the convoy. An attack by the submarine Axum hit three ships, the cruisers Nigeria and Cairo and the tanker Ohio. Nigeria had to turn back, escorted by three destroyers; Cairo, a valuable anti-aircraft cruiser, was eventually sunk. Ohio was set on fire and had a huge hole in her side, but managed to survive, put out the fire, and make slow progress. An unexpected air attack came just after sunset. Two of the merchantmen in the convoy and the isolated Ducalion were sunk; another was damaged. Three of the ships which had turned back for Gibraltar were now sent to help out with the convoy, but the German and Italian gunboats sank another three transports during the night, and damaged yet another. The Italian surface attack did not materialise, the ships having been located by aircraft from Malta and then recalled; on the way the submarine Unbroken damaged two of the cruisers with a torpedo attack. The convoy was now attacked from the Sicilian airfields. On the morning of the 13th, two more transports were sunk. The Ohio was further damaged when a Stuka crashed into it. As the survivors approached Malta, however, fighters from the island were able to intercept the Sicilian air attacks, and the last of their raids was abandoned because of this. During the day the surviving transports arrived at Valletta, only five left out of the fourteen which started out. Crucially, however, the Ohio, with its vital oil, grievously hurt but still afloat, was one of them, brought in with the physical support of two destroyers: ‘the Navy nursed her like a patient and the enemy targeted her like a stalker’; she was cheered in by the people lining the battlements in what is surely one of the great moments of the war. Altogether 32,000 tons of supplies reached the island, and the fuel in Ohio and on other ships - the cargoes had been distributed throughout the ships, each carrying a mixture of goods - enabled the aircraft stationed there to begin to operate much more freely against the enemy convoys, and there was enough to fuel the submarines, which soon returned to operate from the island once more.51 The cost had been great to both sides, but the Italians could afford their losses much less than could the British. Apart from the ships sunk, many others suffered damage, and sixty-two of their aircraft were shot down by the very effective anti-aircraft defence mounted by the convoy escorts. The arrival of fuel in Ohio and other ships enabled a new and successful offensive to be mounted against the 51 Greene

and Massignani, Naval War, 242–262; Roskill, Navy at War, 233–237; Thomas, Malta Convoys, 174–192.

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Italian convoys supplying the army in Africa. Ultra identified the tankers in the Italian convoys, and these were specifically targeted. Thus the practice of starving Rommel’s army resumed; his defence at Alamein was rendered largely stationary. The immediate calculations would therefore suggest a marginal defeat for the convoy, in that nine of its transports were sunk and only five reached Malta - the navy’s losses were also grievous. But that these five did arrive was sufficient to revitalise Malta’s offensive capability. The losses on the enemy side (three submarines sunk, two cruisers damaged, aircraft and their pilots lost) were enough to blunt any further aggression from Sicily and Sardinia. Furthermore the strategic consequences were clear to all commanders up to and including the commanders-in-chief and their navy staffs. The ‘Pedestal’ convoy was the culmination of the convoy war in the Mediterranean, but it was not the end. Malta continued to receive supplies, by submarine, by the Welshman, and by air, together with reinforcements of aircraft and ships and soldiers. Two more fully organised and dedicated convoys reached the island in November and December, and convoys continued to be necessary so long as German and Italian airpower could reach into the southern part of the Mediterranean. But in October the battle of Alamein began, in which a dogged German-Italian defence could not in the end prevail over British numbers and firepower (and supplies); in November British and US sea power was exerted to land forces in North Africa – Operation ‘Torch’ . (The ‘Pedestal’ convoy’s experience had its effect here: the original plan was to land forces east of Algiers but this part was abandoned when the ferocity and strength of enemy air attacks was noted during that convoy.) The landings in Morocco and Algeria were the first successful such operations by the Allies. The difficulties of such operations were consistently under-estimated: a raid on Dieppe in August had been a disastrous failure, another on a small scale at Tobruk in September had been as bad. The ‘Torch’ landings in North Africa were successful in part because the planning was much more careful, but largely because the landing forces were in overwhelming strength and the French defending forces were only half-hearted. The Vichy regime did not inspire much loyalty, and its leaders in Africa were less than resolute. Landings against German, or even Italian, opposition were likely to be much more difficult.52 By December the defeat of the German–Italian forces at Alamein and in the west reduced German control to Tunisia alone.

52 Roskill,

Navy at War, 240–248.

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The southern Mediterranean routes were therefore opened to Allied shipping, reducing the need to sail supplies round Africa and so increasing the use which could be made of transport ships. A heavily reinforced German army held out in Tunisia, but it was a lost cause and in the end a waste of troops; German and Italian attempts to supply these forces cost them over 500 transport ships and twenty submarines.53 Allied sea and air power isolated and then captured and imprisoned them. Malta now became an aggressive base, its aircraft and submarines and surface ships establishing a fierce grip on the surrounding seas and over Sicily and southern Italy. A cruiser squadron returned to Valetta, and a similar force was based at Bone in Algeria; combined with aircraft based in North African airfields, this sufficed to deter most enemy activity, particularly since the Italian navy and its air force had been badly worn down during the convoy battles in the previous two years. The availability of ports along the whole of the African coast allowed the Allies to provide their armies with regular supplies of fuel and water – the fuel coming largely from the refineries at Abadan in Persia and Haifa in Palestine. Meanwhile the large forces assembled in the Mediterranean area were used to invade Italy. Sicily was chosen as the first target (over the original preference for Sardinia) in part to further free the sea route. The invasion forces came from the east coast of the USA, from North Africa, Malta, and from the eastern Mediterranean. The British forces were landed at five beaches on the southeast corner of the island, and the US forces were landed thirty miles to the east across the open beaches near Gela. The navies were responsible for protecting and transporting the soldiers (180,000 men), and the Royal Navy and its European allies provided for this purpose a prodigious force of four cruisers, fifty-eight destroyers, and almost fifty other smaller ships, apart from the landing craft; in addition there was a covering force of four battleships, two carriers, four cruisers, and eighteen destroyers, backed up by a reserve of two battleships, two cruisers, and six destroyers – all in case the Italian fleet should attempt to interfere. The US Navy provided four cruisers and forty-seven destroyers. Each of the landing forces was guided in by a beacon submarine, and was commanded from a headquarters ship.54 The Sicilian landings were generally successful, though the presence of enemy submarines caused several casualties, as did the enemy air forces. Once ashore the troops could be supported for a

53 Ibid, 281–282. 54 Rohwer, Chronology,

255–256; Carlo d’Este, Bitter Victory: The Battle for Sicily 1943, London 1988, 227–309; Roskill, Navy at War, 283–293; Greene and Massignani, Naval War, 283–293.

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time by naval bombardment, though this made the ships vulnerable to air attack. It was these tasks – landings, bombardments, supplies – which became the main activities of the navy in the Mediterranean for the next two years, and still convoys had to be escorted and defended against submarine and aerial attack, though this latter task was much reduced now that air cover was more plentifully available. Exploitation of the conquest of Sicily brought landings at Reggio di Calabria on 3 September and Taranto and Salerno on the 9th; negotiations for an armistice with Italy were concluded on that day, and included the requirement that the Italian fleet be surrendered. The Germans had anticipated this, succeeding in occupying large parts of north and central Italy in force. The landings at Reggio and Taranto were barely resisted, but that at Salerno was fiercely contested; naval gunfire was required from close to shore to prevent the landing forces being overwhelmed; naval casualties were considerable.55 The Italian armistice was decisive for the naval war in the Mediterranean. Much of the Italian fleet was surrendered to the Allies; the rest, mainly smaller vessels, was either attacked or seized by its former German allies; many ships were scuttled by their crews to prevent either their allies or the Allies gaining control.56 (In August 1942 the French fleet at Toulon had been scuttled when the Germans broke the armistice terms and occupied the southern part of France.) The Germans seized Italian ships in various harbours but many were in process of repair or construction; only two were usable destroyers, the rest smaller ships. German forces seized many of the Italian Aegean islands, but these occupation forces were then useless for the wider war. A British attempt to gain control of the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean failed, costing several ships.57 Sardinia and Corsica were seized, effectively unopposed, as the battle at Salerno was being fought, but on the Italian mainland the German defence was well-prepared and obdurate. An attempt to break the stalemate by landing two divisions at Anzio was successful in putting the troops on shore, but was soon penned in by the Germans’ rapid reaction; this successfully weakened the overall German defences, but considerable naval losses occurred because of the vulnerability of the ships to German air attack.58 Two more major naval operations remained: in August 1944 landings in the south of France (Operation ‘Dragoon’) were conducted with great efficiency, and included, for the first time in the Mediterranean, 55 Greene

and Massignani, Naval War, 297–303; Roskill, Navy at War, 296–301; Rohwer, Chronology, 271–273. 56 Rohwer, Chronology, 272. 57 Roskill, Navy at War, 325–329. 58 Ibid, 332–336.

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a heavy preliminary bombardment from the sea and the air. Earlier landings had been at night and with no such bombardment, the army preferring the confusion of surprise which it imagined would give them an advantage. But this had never happened, and the Normandy landings in June showed conclusively that bombardment was best. ‘Dragoon’ quickly succeeded, partly because the bombardment stunned the defending forces, but also because the opposition was poor. The capture of Toulon and Marseilles reduced German naval bases in the western Mediterranean to Genoa alone; the Dragoon forces soon captured the remaining German air bases in southern France, leaving the western Mediterranean largely free of that threat as well as of the submarines. The other major operation took place in the Aegean. The early attempt to seize the Italian Dodecanese islands at the time of the Italian surrender was thwarted by a German reaction, in part because of a lack of Allied air cover, but by mid-1944 German forces were beginning to retreat. The British tried to harry the German evacuation, which began in late August, with little success, though the German forces were gradually reduced to moving their men in local caiques. By mid-September they had removed their forces from many of the islands and were pulling out northwards by land, finally evacuating Salonika on 31 October. The navy sent in ships to Piraeus and occupied Athens, only to find that they had arrived into the middle of a nasty civil war which lasted for several years. The naval war in the Mediterranean was by then one in which fleets were no longer useful. On the Allied side the task was to escort convoys and raid the enemy’s remaining coasts. The bigger ships were generally removed to the British seas to carry the war into northwest Europe. The remaining German sea activity was confined to the Ligurian coast and the northern Adriatic, in which light forces conducted raids and counter-raids, but in which Allied, largely British, forces also assisted the advance of the armies. The U-boats in the western Mediterranean remained active only until the capture of their final base at Toulon; and in the Eastern Basin until the destruction of the last of the boats at Piraeus. By late 1944 it was possible to abandon regulated convoys, and merchantmen were able to sail through most of the Mediterranean independently. Naval operations in the upper Adriatic and the Ligurian Seas continued until the end, since transporting supplies by sea was still the most economical method for the German forces, as the land routes in northern Italy and Yugoslavia were increasingly hazardous from guerrilla and air attacks. The several landings in Africa and Italy had been largely inspired by British planning, with the US forces providing half the manpower

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or less. The Torch landings had been about half-British and halfUS, but the invasion of Sicily had been two-thirds British, and the landings at Reggio and Taranto wholly British. Salerno and Anzio had been half-and-half. The last of the great landings in the sea, in the south of France, comprised US and French forces exclusively, and only one-third of the naval contingent was British. On the other hand the German withdrawal from the Greek Islands was harried by a naval force which was largely British. The war in the Mediterranean ceased to be a naval campaign when the German forces in Tunisia surrendered. From then on the navy’s tasks became one of supporting the several landings, plus convoy escort; in effect it had returned to the tasks performed in the Mediterranean for most of the Great War. And the arrival of the US Navy in strength was a harbinger of what was to come.

Chapter 13 Supersession from 1945

In the last year and a half of Hitler’s War the Mediterranean theatre was steadily downgraded in importance. The U-boats withdrew late in 1944, and by the time of the German surrender in Italy on 2 May 1945 the only active naval operations were in the northern end of the Adriatic, the Gulf of Genoa, and the Aegean, where some small German ships were able to operate for short periods before being found and usually sunk. The demands of the Normandy and North Sea campaigns from early 1944 pulled most British naval strength to those areas; then the need to finish off Japan quickly took the main British naval strength to the Pacific. The Mediterranean was thus a quiet area in the greater scheme of things in the last year of the fighting, but then a series of specifically Mediterranean problems developed and brought the Royal Navy back to the sea. These issues were largely concentrated in the eastern part of the sea – in effect, they were the continuation of, or relics of, the Eastern Question and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire - and their resolution compelled the navy eventually to retire from the region. There were three main problem areas – Greece, Palestine, and Egypt – and several minor ones – Trieste and Libya, for example – and over all these came the gradual realisation that the navy no longer had the power to impose itself on events, though the attempt was usually made. That is, the navy still carried with it the attitude which had made it so powerful before 1939, but it did not have the political support at home. Its role was now taken up by the United States Navy, after a time at least, and to its admirals the Royal Navy was only a minor, if rather annoying, ally. For ten years the two navies jockeyed for influence; the larger, as usual, won.1 Civil warfare in Greece involved British forces from December 1944. This was both an outcome of the German and Italian conquest in 1

Edward J. Sheehy, The U.S. Navy, the Mediterranean, and the Cold War, 1945– 1947, Westport CT 1992.

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1941 and their subsequent occupation of the country and a precursor for the British of the end of their power in the Mediterranean. The dispute was partly over the return of the unpopular royal family, partly the aspiration to power of the Greek communists, whose guerrilla forces had hoarded their weapons for this occasion rather than turning them on the occupiers who, by early 1944, seemed to be leaving anyway, and partly a British determination to prevent the communists’ success. In this situation the British tended to equate any anti-monarchy feeling with communism, thereby sidelining the moderate republicans. Greece was seen as a vital area whose alliance, or at least friendship, was necessary for the Mediterranean fleet to be effective; Churchill, an ancient and adamant anti-communist, had agreed with Stalin that the British should have a predominant voice in Greece after the war, but that did not mean that he could trust Stalin to abide by the agreement – and the Greek communists were not party to it.2 The necessity for a friendly Greece had been graphically demonstrated by the actions of German and Italian airpower based in that country during the war. To the British, therefore, the end of Hitler’s War marked the resumption of interrupted British dominance in the Eastern Basin, a return to the condition of the years before 1940, since their viewpoint was the old one of restricting Russian access to the sea; the shift from Tsarist to Soviet Russia had not changed the strategic situation: keeping Russia out of the Mediterranean remained a priority; a communist Greece could ‘let the Russians in’; and, once in, Russia, as was seen in the aftermath of the war in the rest of Eastern Europe, stayed and exercised control. The communist threat seemed to be developing when the newly installed communist government of Albania attempted to close the strait between the Albanian mainland and the Greek island of Corfu. Two British warships were fired on from shore batteries in May 1946, and two more were mined in the strait in October. The mines were swept a month later by a substantial fleet, but attempts by Britain to get compensation were never successful.3 It was, however, a traditional use of British sea power in a situation where it could be effective. In the other problems in the Mediterranean, including Greece, a naval solution was not possible.

2

The condition of Greece is delineated by M. Mazarow, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation 1941–1944, New Haven CT 1993; for the subsequent civil war, see C.M. Woodhouse, The Struggle for Greece, 1941–1947, London 1976, and David Close, The Origin of the Greek Civil War, London 1995. 3 Leslie Gardiner, The Eagle Spreads his Claws, London 1966; James Cable, Gunboat Diplomacy 1919–1979, 2nd ed., London 1981.

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Greece was only one of the major problems faced by the British in the Mediterranean after 1945 – issues they had tackled, generally unsuccessfully, in the pre-war years. They included the revival of French power, which was partly fuelled by resentment at British policy during the war, and partly by the delivery to the French Navy of surplus British warships, including aircraft carriers; like Britain, the French looked to resume their pre-war position, but Britain was less than supportive of French demands, particularly in Syria. When the French attempted to reimpose their rule there, the British government insisted that the country be made independent; the French, overmastered despite shelling the Syrian parliament to destruction, had to leave.4 The revival of Egyptian demands that Britain leave Egypt was articulated much more strongly than before, and not unconnected with Britain’s Egyptian problem, there was the resumption of the endemic hostility between Arabs and Jews in neighbouring Palestine, something which had never ceased during the war. Beyond the Mediterranean there were vastly greater problems than these for the British government to deal with. Britain itself was economically exhausted, and its industry, devoted overwhelmingly to war production, had to be reconditioned for peace. The election of the Labour Party to power in 1945 brought in a government uninterested in imperial matters, but determined on a transfer of resources from the armed forces and the empire towards social welfare spending (and social engineering). The Indian Empire slipped out of British control during 1946, including a mutiny in the Indian Navy. In Europe the devastation caused by the German conquest and looting and the Allied reconquest was so great that measures had even to be taken, secretly, to send food from a hungry Britain to prevent the German population from starving. Beyond Germany there now loomed Russia, in control of everything from the Elbe eastwards – except Greece and Turkey. The final blow came in the winter of 1946–1947 when Britain itself was paralysed by the severest winter of the twentieth century. Spending on the armed services was therefore drastically reduced, though this was normal at the end of any war. The navy was bloated with ships and seamen as a result of the war, and would obviously need to be drastically trimmed; many of its 9000 ships were no longer needed. The initial reduction, directly after the war, was generally uncontroversial, but from 1949 onwards there were repeated attempts to decide just what the navy’s tasks were, and then to decide how big it should be, how many ships, and so on – all bedevilled by changing 4

Stephen Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon under French Mandate, Oxford 1958, 340–349; John McHugo, Syria from the Great War to Civil War, London 2014, 108–110.

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political priorities as the empire evaporated and the Russian threat continued. Almost every new Minister of Defence (or First Lord, earlier) instituted a ‘review’ or an enquiry. It became impossible for the navy to settle down.5 The initial reduction process was happening at a time when apprehensions as to Russian intentions were growing. Soviet Russia installed communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1945, instigated a communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1947, threatened Persia and Turkey in 1946, encouraged the communist conquest of China between 1945 and 1949, and attempted to expel Western forces from Berlin in 1948. The United States now became aware of the problems of Europe and the Mediterranean, and became involved. During the war the United States had been unhappy at British insistence that the Mediterranean was a vital area of combat, and in the end insisted successfully on concentrating Allied forces on the invasion of Western Europe. This attitude carried over into the succeeding peace, and it proved extremely difficult to wrench US attention back to problems in the sea; the US naval force in the Mediterranean was reduced to no more than five destroyers by the middle of 1945, and before that the commanding US admiral had been ordered to cease helping the British deploy their forces to Greece. The simplistic attitude of US political opinion was that British policy was based on the maintenance of its empire, and that this was a bad thing. And yet US appreciation of Mediterranean affairs was not entirely absent. In the September 1945 at the Foreign Ministers’ Conference in London, the US Secretary of State James Byrnes supported the British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in rejecting Soviet demands for access to, and bases in, the eastern Mediterranean. The US Navy still had ships in the region, and Byrnes made it clear that they would stay there. The perception in the United States that Britain as a power was aiming to maintain its empire was not, of course, wholly inaccurate, but there had been a drastic shift of opinion in Britain, and the maintenance of the empire was no longer a priority. For several months, until September 1945, the United States was necessarily preoccupied with the conquest of Japan during which the Royal Navy made a point of regaining control of British colonies in Malaya and Borneo and Hong Kong. Like Britain at the end of its wars, the US was then concerned to return to peacetime conditions, and to demobilise its huge army and navy. And yet internal US problems and policies compelled attention to overseas issues: the problem of Palestine 5

Eric Grove, Vanguard to Trident, London 1987, for a detailed account of the twists and turns in naval policy.

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particularly impacted on the political and financial power of Jews inside the US, and the old fear of socialists and communists (usually confused and linked) rose up into international policy in the form of a new fear of the power of the Soviet Union. Combined with the continued US military presence in Europe and the need to occupy and govern Japan, all this required US political attention to issues in the Mediterranean. There were, of course, as after every devastating war, issues which had been unimportant while the fighting went on, but which rose up to demand attention with the peace. The future of Libya was one, that of Trieste another, and both of these involved British forces; Trieste lingered on as a dispute between Italy and the now-communist Yugoslavia until 1954, with a British occupation force in the middle; Libya was finally offloaded to a local potentate as king in 1951, but bases were retained. The problems of Greece and Palestine were, however, the major issues. Greece was solvable at first by military force, and then the monarchy returned after a (rigged) referendum, and after the defeat (by British forces) of the communists.6 The country slowly ceased to be a major problem, except for itself, though some British forces, and later US forces, continued to operate in the country for several years. That it had been communists who had attempted to seize power once again brought the issue of Soviet power and ambitions to European and American attention. This was not the only harbinger of the Cold War. The meeting of Allied heads of government at Potsdam in July 1945 revealed a deep division between the three victorious Great Powers, and a growing suspicion among the US officials and politicians as to Russian policy, and the British hardly needed to be tutored on suspicion of Russia. In 1945 and 1946 Soviet Russia put heavy diplomatic pressure on Turkey for a revision of their 1925 treaty, and above all for an alteration in the conditions by which Russian warships could pass through the Straits. This had been one of the issues in the London Conference in September 1945, and when the Russians returned to the matter in 1946, the United States got involved.7 The exiguous US naval presence which still remained in the Mediterranean was now boosted by the arrival of a number of destroyers. In March 1946 the body of the deceased Turkish ambassador in Washington was returned on board the giant battleship Missouri (on which the surrender of Japan had been staged six months earlier), to great Turkish pleasure; a perfect demonstration of ‘gunboat diplomacy’ , emphasising the diplomacy.8 6 7 8

Woodhouse, Struggle. Sheehy, The U.S. Navy, the Mediterranean, 55–57. Ibid, 33–45.

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The Russian Black Sea fleet went on manoeuvring for some time, and was answered by comparable US and British manoeuvres in the Aegean; the confrontation then died down.9 Even more effective was the arrival of a huge aircraft carrier, the Franklin D. Roosevelt, and its attendant escorts, in August 1946, during which the ship ostentatiously called at Piraeus. This evident and very obvious ship of power was deployed with some discretion – paying a visit to Piraeus rather than Istanbul, for instance - but it was eye-catching nonetheless. The suppression of the Greek communists, who were now confined to the hills but still dangerous, continued, so involving the United States even more. The change in US policy in the Mediterranean became that much clearer when Britain insisted the following year (1947) that it could no longer support the civil war in Greece: the United States responded with its ‘Truman Doctrine’, by which Greece and Turkey were bundled together under its protection; US forces in Greece were increased – they were military ‘advisers’ , a concept later to be well used and extended. The United States’ fleet in the Mediterranean slowly increased. It had consisted of half a dozen ships, mainly destroyers, at the end of 1945; by the beginning of 1947 it had three cruisers, nine destroyers and an auxiliary. This was occasionally supplemented by a carrier, which became a permanent addition by late 1947, together with three more cruisers. Many of the ships paid well-publicised visits to ports throughout the sea, emphasising the US presence.10 By contrast, the move out of Greece was the first of a series of British withdrawals from the Mediterranean over the next years. In 1947 the United States extended its power into the eastern Mediterranean, and Britain withdrew from India. There were still fragments of empire left in the east – Hong Kong, Malaya, the Persian Gulf, Aden – but the end of the Indian Empire meant that the requirement of a Mediterranean fleet to control the route to India was much reduced. The British in the Mediterranean were therefore now primarily concerned with specifically Mediterranean issues, and with the problem of Greece handed over to the United States, this came down to Palestine and Egypt. Both of these countries were now (1947–1948) impossible for the British either to deal with or to control. In Palestine British forces were subject to continual guerrilla harassment from both Arab and Jewish terrorists. This practice was not yet so prevalent in Egypt, but was developing in seriousness; the British presence was withdrawn to the area of the Suez Canal, theoretically protecting the canal itself, 9 Cable, Gunboat Diplomacy, 10 Ibid, 82–86, 90, 99, 102.

223.

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though from whom it was not clear; this was not enough to stop the guerrilla attacks, but it did reduce them. The conflict in Palestine spread to the sea when Jewish refugees from Europe began to arrive. British policy was to maintain the balance of the Palestinian population as it already existed, and since the importation of Jewish migrants would inevitably upset this balance (though the Arab population was also increasing rapidly), the Royal Navy was ordered to intercept the ships that were being used to carry the migrants to Palestine, and take the migrants elsewhere. In the end this meant putting them on shore in Cyprus where they were held in camps. Several of the ships actually got through, a favoured tactic being to run them ashore so that the migrants could land and then disappear into the general population. Each interception was difficult, some were dangerous, and the later ones were violent. This campaign, for it was nothing less, used a large fraction of the British fleet, including at one point even an aircraft carrier. It was largely successful in preventing most of the migrants reaching Palestine, though once the British had withdrawn from the country those who are being held in Cyprus could be allowed to go on to their destination. As with Greece, this Palestine patrol proved to be unpopular with the sailors involved, and with other countries.11 The fighting on land in Palestine continued with no resolution in sight, or indeed possible. Advice from outside, from the United Nations, or the United States, or anyone else not directly involved, was as useless as were all attempts to solve the Palestinian problem from within. In May 1948, having given due notice to all concerned, British forces were evacuated - the mandate of the old League of Nations was ‘returned’ to the United Nations; both sides in Palestine proclaimed their independence, then turned on each other even more brutally than they had on the British, resulting in the first Arab– Israeli War. The help provided by the nearby Arab states developed into their seizure of the Arab territories they had ‘rescued’ . By then it was no longer a concern of the Mediterranean fleet, and without the Alexandria naval base, or access to Port Said or Haifa (and Cyprus being of little use as a naval base) there was little reason to bring its ships east of Malta. Meanwhile the US Navy’s presence in the Mediterranean steadily increased. What had been no more than a Task Force in 1945 grew to the Seventh Fleet by 1949. The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in 1949 brought several Mediterranean states into formal alliance with the United States, including eventually Italy, Greece, and Turkey, and later Spain. The hostility of Soviet Russia 11 Ninian

Stewart, The Royal Navy and the Palestine Patrol, London 2002.

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did not diminish, but the NATO carapace blocked much of Russian access to the sea. Given the absence of imperial concerns, the US Navy had a freer choice of where it should be based than the British, who were still tied to Gibraltar, Malta, and Cyprus, and chose Naples as its primary base. The collapse of British imperial power was not in fact total, and in the Mediterranean the old naval bastions were still under British control, while the Mediterranean fleet was still of a substantial size, though greatly outweighed in political and naval power by the US Seventh Fleet. The United States had both replaced the British Mediterranean fleet with its own and had taken on some of the traditional British concerns, especially in the eastern Mediterranean in facing down the Russian attempt to enter the sea in strength, but it had not similarly taken up the same bases. None of the British naval bases were acceptable as United States’ naval bases, perhaps because of the lingering aura of British imperialism, though Gibraltar was used at times. And yet the geographical locations of the new US bases demonstrated the same concern to dominate the Sea-entrance in the west, and command the Sicilian Narrows in the centre, and dominate the Eastern Basin, as had actuated British naval strategy in the sea since the eighteenth century. At the Sea-entrance the British maintained Gibraltar, and slowly returned the evacuated population (a process not completed until about 1954), but the United States established its own base at Rota, between Gibraltar and Cadiz; for a time it had maintained a logistics base at Fort Lyautey in Morocco, inherited from the war. Developing the base at Rota involved an agreement with the Spanish Fascist dictator Franco, who had been persona non grata for the victorious and democratic Europeans after the war. But the United States did not wish to be beholden in any way to Great Britain, of which it was even then still morbidly suspicious, and claimed that Gibraltar was too small for its fleet. (Since Gibraltar as a naval base dated from the sailing ship period, this argument had weight, though the British used it quite comfortably.) Yet in geopolitical terms it was clearly necessary to have a base close to the Strait of Gibraltar – hence Rota, only a few miles west of Gibraltar and close to the Spanish naval base at Cadiz. In the central Mediterranean, Naples became the base of choice, which reinforced the inclusion of Italy within NATO. The fact that Naples had been, after Taranto, Italy’s main naval base during the late war meant nothing, except that the existing facilities would be useful – the US Navy was not strong on tact, or the United States on historical sensitivities. NATO was originally set up between United States, Britain, and the Western European states of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, so including Italy rather

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stretched the definition of the North Atlantic, but then Greece was eventually included (as in the end were Spain and Turkey). Piraeus became a third main United States Mediterranean base, more convenient to face Russia than the British base at Alexandria, but largely equivalent; Haifa may have been available, but the US Navy recoiled from a base in Israel which would ratchet up Arab hostility. So, just as the British naval power withered in the Mediterranean, that of the United States expanded. Since the United States faced essentially the same political and military problem in the Mediterranean as had long concerned Britain – the Russian threat - perforce its naval presence there became distributed in much the same way as that adopted by the British during the previous century and a half. The US bases (Rota–Naples–Piraeus) exactly mirrored the Gibraltar– Malta–Alexandria sequence developed by the British. At the same time the British maintained a fleet of some size in the sea for a number of years, and were able, while it still had the ships, to reinforce it from the British seas at need. The Egyptian bases along the Suez Canal became a liability once Egypt itself had removed its effete monarchy (in 1952). The new republican government permitted guerrilla activity against the British bases along the canal, with such success that by 1954 the British evacuated those bases, having concluded a facesaving treaty by which the British were supposed to be able to return if the canal was thought to be in danger.12 The continuing hostility between Britain and Egypt was such that more quarrels quickly developed, fuelled by personal dislike between the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden and the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Eden saw Nasser as an Egyptian reincarnation of, if not Hitler, then at least Mussolini; Nasser saw in Eden a traditional British imperialist; neither was altogether wrong. The United States was involved because it had originally agreed, and then pulled out of an agreement, to fund a new dam across the River Nile at Aswan - and President Eisenhower agreed as late as 1953 that a British base along the canal was necessary. The Soviet Union was involved because Nasser was buying weapons for his army and air force from Czechoslovakia, a Russian satellite state, and because eventually Russia agreed to finance the dam, mainly to spite the United States. The new state of Israel was involved because Nasser had put himself at the head of Arab resentment at Israel’s existence, and was making threatening noises about a full-scale attack, while also tolerating guerrilla activities across the ill-defined border.

12 Elizabeth

Monroe, Britain’s Moment in the Middle East, 1914–1956, London 1963, 174–177.

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It was scarcely surprising, given all these conflicting interests, that the whole situation boiled over into violence, in which Britain and France agreed with Israel that the latter should attack Egypt, while the two former countries would then ‘intervene’ to ‘protect’ the canal. This required a large naval contingent mainly supplied by Britain, which demonstrated that Britain still had a sufficiency of vessels, a certain military inventiveness, and air power, to plan and execute a military landing in Egypt. It took three months to be assembled, however, by which time opinions had widely developed that Egypt had not done anything seriously wrong, and Egyptian pilots were competently operating the canal. The force assembled in the end was formidable enough: seven carriers (five of them British), one French battleship, and attendant smaller vessels; a hundred land-based bombers were used. Cyprus and Malta became the air bases, along with the carriers, the fleet convoyed the soldiers, and helicopters transported the troops to a landing – the first use of helicopters in this way. The landing force succeeded in getting ashore, and secured control of much of the Canal, but not before the Egyptians had blocked it with sunken ships – to which the invaders contributed by sinking other ships in the Canal during their attack. The whole process of preparation and invasion took so long that international objections became deafening. Eden had failed to bring the United States onside, and President Eisenhower was annoyed enough to object.13 The Seventh Fleet was present watching the operation and cruising about in such a way as to make it quite clear that the United States disapproved; in the end the Allies threatened the US ships to make them leave, or at least get out of the way. The US government’s eventual public and vocal objection scarcely came as a surprise. The landings and the expedition were generally successful, but the political repercussions in the United States and in many other parts of the world were so negative that the British government lost its nerve. (Nasser’s military restraint, which included refusing to allow his Russian warplanes to be used – they were much more capable than anything his enemies were fielding, luckily for the British and French - was well judged and allowed Egypt to be portrayed as the victim.) In the end it was United States’ financial pressure which was said to have been the trigger for the British loss of nerve, but it was as much the widespread condemnation by many other countries (and

13 An

account of these events from the United States’ point of view is in Stephen Z. Freiberger, Dawn over Suez: The Rise of American Power in the Middle East, 1953–1957, Chicago 1992.

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by much popular and political opposition in Britain) which contributed to it.14 British prestige, which had been inherited from success during the Second World War and from lingering memories of its empire and its long-present Mediterranean fleet, collapsed in the wake of this humiliating defeat. In such circumstances, and outgunned in every respect, naval and diplomatic, by the United States Navy in the Mediterranean, there was little point in preserving a large British fleet in the sea. Over the ten years or so following the Suez crisis in 1956 the fleet was run down, Cyprus was given its independence after a desultory murder campaign by a few Greek Cypriots could not be suppressed (1960),15 and the decision was made to withdraw from all British bases and possessions ‘east of Suez’ (1966). All this meant that there was no further point in a British fleet of any size in the Mediterranean. The last substantial argument for it had been the availability of the ships as a reserve force to intervene in the Indian Ocean, and possibly even in the Far East. With no territories or bases there that argument fell. The original function of the fleet had been to protect British trade; this was another task which was in effect assumed by the US Navy. The Royal Navy’s size steadily decreased, and its attention became concentrated in the North Atlantic. That is to say, just as in many previous times – the Spanish Armada, the Dutch wars, the French wars from Louis XIV to Bonaparte, the German wars of the twentieth century – the major threat was seen to be from continental Europe and directed at the United Kingdom. In those crises the navy had been large enough to spare a substantial force for the Mediterranean while keeping the main naval force closer to home; by the 1960s this was no longer possible. The Russian threat by sea came from the north (and perhaps from the Baltic) so the Mediterranean, dominated anyway by the US Navy, became steadily less important. The Royal Navy was brought to concentrate in the waters around Britain. In those earlier crises and threats centuries before the Mediterranean had often been abandoned, or at least the British strength in that sea had been decisively reduced, and in peace it had fallen to a few ships in many periods; the same happened when the threat came out of Soviet Russia, whose naval strength was in the Baltic and the Arctic – and under the surface. This was, of course, not necessarily the thought processes of those who made the decisions in the Admiralty, where the relevance of past 14 Monroe, Britain’s Moment, ch. 8, with a short bibliography; there are numerous,

usually partisan, discussions since. Blue-Water Empire, 322–324,

15 Holland,

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wars to the new navy of aircraft carriers and submarines was largely discounted. After the Suez crisis there was little point in maintaining a Mediterranean fleet since it was unlikely that anyone would be impressed – and impressing the locals had been its main peacetime purpose. The Royal Navy was as enclosed within the NATO command structure as was the navy of any other European state – with the exception of the French, of course, as always. The British presence in the Mediterranean from then on was always as part of a NATO fleet, and rarely at a strength of more than a few ships. As a separate naval region, the Mediterranean had ceased to exist in British eyes. One result of this was that British guarantees to Mediterranean countries became so much waste paper; in 1974 Turkey invaded Cyprus, which had been given a British guarantee of protection at its independence; although there were some British ships in the area at the time they failed to act other than as occasional rescuers. This was despite the existence in Cyprus of two ‘sovereign base areas’ , occupied by British forces. But Cyprus had never been of much use as a naval base, its harbours being too shallow for the bigger ships. The bases were effectively air bases and intelligence-gathering locations aimed in part at Soviet Russia, but also at the surrounding Middle East countries. Leaving Malta was a more difficult task. There was a long hankering for independence among the Maltese, modified by the knowledge that the islands were heavily overpopulated, and very strongly dependent upon the British Navy as an employer. The Maltese government system had long had a strong Maltese component, which could be, and regularly was, overruled by the British governor, a situation intensely irritating to both sides. With the decline of the Mediterranean fleet there was little to hold the British to the island other than memories and gratitude for wartime loyalty. A campaign seeking independence, and yet getting Britain to continue using the dockyard, resulted in Malta becoming an independent state in 1979; the base was abandoned.16 Gibraltar, repopulated by its various groups of evacuees, remained under British control. Spain, encouraged by its friendly relationship and later alliance with the United States, clearly felt that it had the muscle to compel the enervated British to leave, and instituted a blockade in 1969 (which could stand duty for a new siege). This followed a quarter-century-long fruitless attempt to get the United Nations to become involved. This latest ‘siege’ was maintained until 1985, and even when it had been relaxed it could easily be reimposed. There was a strong suspicion that these renewals of threat coincided with government problems in Madrid, Gibraltar being a 16 Ibid,

342–344.

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useful political distraction. The British reacted by instituting democratic reforms, and an elected local government determined to maintain the ‘British connection’ took control on the Rock. The Gibraltarians were very successful in pressing the right buttons in Britain whenever there was a suggestion anywhere of handing over the Rock to Spain, or even of abandoning it to independence.17 By 1980, therefore not only was the Mediterranean fleet a thing of the past, but so was the British Empire in the Mediterranean. They faded away together.

17

Jackson, Gibraltarians, chs 16 and 17.

Conclusion The Royal Navy was active in the Mediterranean for almost three and a half centuries, from the first expedition to combat the activities of the Algerian corsairs to the final humiliation of the Suez crisis. In fact, of course, it continued with occasional forays into the Mediterranean after 1956, including intervening in Libya in 2012 in order to assist the overthrow of a particularly unsavoury dictator and rescuing desperate refugees from Africa afterwards; and if one counts the Levant Company’s ships as representative of the English kingdom from 1580, it had also been present in the sea for forty years before the Algerian expedition of 1620. For much of that time the British naval presence in the Mediterranean was only occasional in strength, and otherwise minimal. Only in major wars, and not always then, did the Royal Navy arrive in the Mediterranean in real strength. The earliest cases were the contrasted presence of the armed ships of the Levant Company and the English privateers/pirates who infested the sea and bothered the Venetians. Both of these were a mix of private and public enterprise: privateers were licensed by the English government until the peace of 1604, but they slipped into piracy when out of the government’s view, and became openly piratical once the Spanish war ended; the Levant Company operated as a near independent arm of the English state, and its ships were deliberately sizeable and well-armed because of the threat posed by corsairs, privateers, and pirates. Both of these groups were privately financed; it is difficult to separate public and private participation. This may be considered the earliest phase of the English naval presence, one of essentially private naval actions, but with significant input by the English state. The increased threat of the corsairs (whose capabilities were enhanced by English and other European skills), after about 1600 coalesced into their widespread activity, throughout the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic. The suppression of this threat was the object of successive naval expeditions from 1620 to the 1680s. These anti-corsair campaigns constitute the second phase of British naval involvement, a series of intermittent campaigns directed at the corsairs, with only limited success, lasting until the 1680s. The corsair problem was, however, reduced to something manageable by the use of these occasional patrols and threats and

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bombardments, and by a persistence, once a nearby base at Tangier had been acquired, in requiring the adherence to public treaties and agreements. The solution included the temporary occupation of Tangier; this was not a successful expedient, abandoned in 1684, but by this time the sea was frequented by substantial numbers of English merchant ships, which had insinuated themselves into the local trading pattern, and were cheerfully encroaching on the Levant Company’s ‘monopoly’ . The next stage in the navy’s use of, and presence in, the Mediterranean began in 1689–1690, centred on formal fleet campaigns against French or Spanish fleets during the wars which followed. These occurred intermittently until 1796, and in between the wars the navy’s presence was usually reduced to a minimum, to consist of a set of small ships based at the new naval bases of Gibraltar and Minorca. Their function was to provide a light escort for the convoys to the eastern trade ports as far as, usually, Smyrna. In other words, the British naval presence in the Mediterranean was tiny during periods of peace; it only became significant during wars, and even in some of the wars – notably the Seven Years’ and the American Rebellion – it was a little account. Gibraltar, taken in 1704, was held to enable the sea to be re-entered at need, and Minorca, taken in 1708, was mainly an advance base over against the two potential enemies, Spain and France, whose naval bases could be overlooked from the island. Their retention at the end of the War of Spanish Succession was a clear indication that the British navy was intended to be a permanent presence, even if the number of its ships was usually small during peacetime, while the conflict with Spain in the early eighteenth century showed that it was possible to send reinforcements to Gibraltar from Britain quicker than for Spain to mount an attack. The corsair problem was by now substantially reduced by the use of passes and the threat of force, but it was not eliminated altogether; the minimal naval presence in the sea was sufficient for most of the time. The possession of Gibraltar was crucial. Without it the navy would have to be based at an allied port such as Lisbon, or perhaps Cadiz, if Spain was allied or neutral, and could be persuaded. With control of Gibraltar the gateway from the Sea-entrance into the Western Basin was always available, while if Spain and Britain were at war it could be controlled. This operated successfully all through the eighteenth century, despite general Spanish hostility. British interest in the Eastern Basin was limited at that time, and was confined largely to the protection of Levant Company convoys and other ships which might choose to join convoys. Possession of Minorca had seemed likely to be as useful as Gibraltar, if not more

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so, but, despite considerable investment in the island, it proved to be far too vulnerable to reconquest, first by France in 1756, then by Spain in 1782. It was retaken after each of these losses but after the final capture in 1798 British interest died away and it was returned to Spain in 1802. In effect it was replaced by Malta once a base within relatively easy reach of the Eastern Basin was thought to be required. When French naval power was extended decisively into the Eastern Basin British attention could not afford to flag even for a moment. The issue was dramatised vividly by Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition in 1798, which was made possible by the withdrawal of the British fleet the year before. From then on French control of all Italy and the Ionian Islands gave that country easy access to the Eastern Basin, to which the Royal Navy had to respond – holding Malta was part of the response. So the fourth stage of the British naval presence in the Mediterranean centred on the problems of the Eastern Basin – the ‘Eastern Question’ , which was essentially the slow decline of the Ottoman Empire. Possession of Malta with its superb harbour, trained workforce, and defensibility provided oversight of the Sicilian Narrows and events in Italy and North Africa, and access to the Eastern Basin. The repeated problems in the region from the French conquest onwards – Greece, Syria, Egypt, the Crimea, Lebanon, the Balkans, Crete, Egypt again – meant that the fleet could not be seriously reduced at any time in the nineteenth century, and this carried on through the Great War into the 1930s - the Italian–Ethiopian war of 1935–1936 was another of these crises. The culmination came with the Italian and North African wars between 1940 and 1943, and the post-war problems in the Eastern Basin – Greece, Palestine, Egypt – meant that a substantial Mediterranean fleet remained in the area for another ten years or so. From 1956 the Mediterranean fleet faded away. Within fifteen years it had been reduced to little more than half a dozen ships at the most. The withdrawal of imperial authority from Palestine, Egypt, and Cyprus, and finally from Malta went on in parallel with the fleet’s reduction. This brought to an end the long centuries during which the British navy had been first interested, then active, and finally dominant in the Mediterranean. Underlying all these various stages was the requirement that British trading vessels should be protected against corsairs and pirates and against rather more serious enemies. That is, its function was essentially protective of English, then British, trade. In the various wars from 1689 to 1945, its function was to prevent enemy fleets getting to sea, and if they did to chase them and destroy them. It was, that is, also a defensive force, intended to prevent any attack on the homeland. This function faded

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in the Mediterranean with the formation of the collective defence of NATO. The numbers of British trading vessels shrank in parallel with the reduction in the fleet and the evaporation of the empire. The Mediterranean continued to be a major highway for trading vessels, and came to be dominated by the United States’ Navy, which found that it had to deal with much the same problems, even including some piracy, as the British earlier. Needless to say, it took some time for the US Navy to understand the parallel, but when it needed to do so, the history of the British Navy in the Mediterranean was available to provide the necessary precedents and lessons. It is unlikely in the extreme that the British navy will ever return to the Mediterranean in any strength while NATO continues, and the US Navy is present; yet Gibraltar remains.

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Reynolds, David, Britannia Overruled: British Policy and World Power in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed., London 2000. Richards, Brooks, Secret Flotillas, vol. 2, Clandestine Sea Operations in the Western Mediterranean, North Africa and the Adriatic, 1940–1945, 2nd ed., Barnsley 2013. Richmond, Sir Herbert, ‘The Expedition to Sicily 1718 under Sir George Byng’ , Journal of the Royal United Services Institute 53, 1909, 135–152. Richmond, Herbert (ed.), Papers Relating to the Loss of Minorca, 1756, NRS 1913. Richmond, Sir Herbert, The Navy in the War of 1739–48, 3 vols, Cambridge 1920. Ridley, Ronald T., Napoleon’s Proconsul in Egypt: The Life of Bernardino Drovetti, London (n.d.). Rodger, N. A. M., The Command of the Ocean, London 2004. Rohwer, Jurgen, Chronology of the War at Sea 1939–1945, 2rd ed., London 2005. Rose, Lisle A., Power at Sea, 3 vols, Colombia MO 2007. Roskill, S. K., The Navy at War 1939–1945, London 1960. Roskill, Stephen, Naval Policy between the Wars, 2 vols, London 1968 and 1976. Roskill, Stephen, Churchill and the Admirals, London 1977. Routh, E., Tangier: England’s Lost Atlantic Outpost, London 1912. Runciman, Steven, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols, Cambridge 1951–1954. Saul, Norman E., Russia and the Mediterranean, 1797–1807, Chicago 1970. Sbacchi, Alberto, Legacy of Bitterness: Ethiopia and Fascist Italy 1935–1941, Lawrenceville NJ 1997. Scammell, G. V., ‘The English in the Atlantic Islands, c.1450– 1650’ , MM 72, 1986, 295–317. Schofield, B. B., British Sea Power: Naval Policy in the Twentieth Century, London 1967. Schroeder, Paul W., The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848, Oxford 1994. Schur, Nathan, Napoleon in the Holy Land, London 1999. Seton-Watson, R. W., Disraeli, Gladstone, and Eastern Question, London 1935. Sheehy, Edward J., The U.S. Navy, the Mediterranean, and the Cold War, 1945–1947, Westport CT 1992. Sheres, Sir Henry, A Discourse touching Tangier, 1680. Siegel, Jennifer, Endgame: Britain, Russia and the Final Struggle for Central Asia, London 2002. Simpson, Michael (ed.), The Somerville Papers, NRS 1996.

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Index Abdul Hamid II, Ottoman Sultan 197, 198, 202 Abercromby, Sir Robert, General 154 Aberdeen, Lord, Prime Minister 183 Aboukir Bay, Egypt 151, 197 Acre, Palestine 153, 179 Aden 193 Adrianople, Turkey were ninety-four Adriatic Sea xiv, 3, 19, 68, 69–70, 109, 156, 161, 163, 164, 167, 173, 212, 216, 217, 223, 225, 242–243, 257, 259 Aegean Sea xiii, xiv, 27, 32, 112, 146, 173, 210, 221, 242, 256, 259, 264 Africa, partition of 202 Agadir, Morocco 207 Agde, France 79 Alamein, Egypt 249, 250, 251 Alassio, Italy 99 Albania 219, 260 Alberoni, Cardinal 82, 84, 85 Alboran Sea xiv, 16 Albuscema I. (‘Bezuma’) 68 Aleppo 8, 11, 44 Alexander I, Russian Tsar 156, 161 Alexander, King of Greece 221 Alexandretta (also Iskenderun, Scanderoon) 8, 213 Alexandria, Egypt 8, 29, 44, 151, 155, 156, 178, 179, 196, 197, 199; bombardment of 196–197; British naval base 201, 218, 219, 234–236, 237, 247–248, 252 Alexius I, Comnenos, Byzantine emperor 1–2 Alfred, King of Wessex 3 Algarve, Portugal 2, 15, 17, 121, 158 Algeciras, Spain xv, 75, 87, 118, 128, 133, 148, 155, 203, 208,

232, 245, 252 Algeria 181, 254 Algiers 16, 65, 226; consuls 11; corsair base 45–47; mole 43; and Oran 70, 82; ransom of prisoners from 94; treaties with 27, 59, 61–62; tribute paid to 95; and England/Britain: Mansell’s campaign 23–24, 26; Blake at 35, 37; Allin’s campaign 49–51; Narbrough’s campaign 55; Herbert’s campaign 56–57; British bombardment 171–172, 173; and France: bombardment 61–62; conquest 177; Ottoman 18; Spanish attack 42 Alicante, Spain 23, 37, 59, 60, 76, 90, 103, 105, 147 Allin, Sir Thomas, Admiral 47–48, 49–50, 53 America 15, 69, 113, 123, 133 Amet, Admiral 221 Anatolia 177, 212, 226 Andalusia, Spain 6, 208 Anne, Queen of Britain 75 Anson, Admiral 114 Antibes, France 110 Antwerp 6 Anzio, Italy 256, 258 Appleton, Captain Henry 32, 33–35 Arabi Pasha, Colonel 196 Arabia 177 Aranjuez, Convention of 126 Arbuthnot, Charles, ambassador 162 Archipelago (e.g. Aegean Sea) 19, 32 d’Arcon, Jean Claude le Michaud 133 Argostoli, Cephallenia 220 Ari Burnu (‘Anzac Cove’) Turkey 215 Armenia 202, 224 Asia Minor 8, 216, 217

292

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

Asiento, trade concession 80 Aston, Sir Walter, ambassador 23 Athens, Greece 182, 194, 220, 226 Atlantic Ocean xiv, 18, 32, 48, 71, 111, 233; Atlantic fleet 232 d’Aubuisson, duc de Feuillade, Marshal 55 Augusta, Sicily 248 Australia 232, 237, 240 Austria, Austria-Hungary 43, 68, 70, 82, 84–87, 100, 101–102, 103, 106, 110, 123, 142, 152, 160, 162, 183, 186, 190, 203, 221; and Great War 206–210, 217–218 Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) 101, 146 Azores Islands 32 Azov, Sea of 185–186, 225 Badiley, Richard, naval commander 31, 32, 33, 36 Baker, Sir John, Admiral 94 Balchen, Sir John, Admiral 98, 107 Balearic Islands xiv, 31, 32, 36, 37, 181, 187 Balkan Mountains 194 Ball, Alexander, Captain, Governor of Malta 168 Baltic Sea 44, 58, 141–142, 183, 195 Baltimore, Ireland 26 Barbary States 60, 69, 70, 94, 112 Barcelona, Spain 64, 72, 73, 76, 78, 81, 84, 109, 147, 157 Barham, Lord 107 Barnett, Curtis, Captain 98 Basra, Iraq 200 Battles: Algeciras (1800) 155 Alamein (1942) 254 Almanza (1707) 77 Armada, Spanish (1588) 13–14. Assietta (1747) 110 Barfleur (1692) 63, 77 Bassignana (1745) 109 Beachy Head (1690) 62 Blenheim (1704) 72, 75 Cape de Gata (1758) 119

Cape Noli (1795) 145 Cape Passaro (1718) 86 Cape St Vincent (‘Moonlight’, 1780) 127; (1797) 149 Cape Santa Maria (1804) 158 Cape Spartel (1689) 50l; (1782) 137 Cape Spartivento (1940) 239–240 Chesme (1770) 141 Crete (1941) 241, 244 Dakar (1940) 236 Dettingen (1743) 101 Elba (1653) 33 Gaza (1917) 217 Gibraltar Bay (1705) 74 Lagos Bay (1693) 63 Lissa (1811) 164 Maida (1806) 161 Malaga (1704) 73–74, 75, 79 Matapan (1941) 241 Midway (1942) 251 Minorca (1756) 116 Navarino (1827) 175–176 Nile (1798) 151–153, 159, 165 Oran (1940) 235–236, 240 Pantelleria (1585) 14 Porto Farina (1655) 36 Plevna (1877) 194 Punta Stila (1940) 237, 249 Santa Cruz (1657) 37 (1797) Sinope (1853) 184 Sirte (1941) 247; (1942) 248–249 Strait of Gibraltar (1590) 15–16; (1591) 17 Taranto (1940) 239 Tel el-Kebir (1882) 197 Tobruk (1941) Toulon (1744) 101–105, 109 Trafalgar (1805) 158–159 Velletri (1744) 106 Vigo (1703) 69 see also Operations Baudin, Admiral 181 Bavaria 101 Beaufort, duc de 48–49 Beirut, Lebanon 179, 190, 217, 226 Belleisle, duc de 114, 115, 120, 125, 157 Belle Isle, France 123

Index Benghazi, Libya 155, 237, 238 Berlin-Baghdad Railway 200, 204, 213 Bevin, Ernest, Foreign Secretary 262 Bezika Bay, 182, 183 Biscay, Bay of 108 Bizerta, Tunisia 219, 235 Black Sea xiv, 141–142, 156, 182, 183, 186–187, 194–195, 212, 222, 224, 227 Blake, Robert, General-at-Sea xv, 30, 34–37, 46, 47, 48, 62, 67, 73, 147 Blake, Robert, merchant 29 Blakeney, Lord, General 115–116, 117 Bomba, Libya 239 Bombay, India (Mumbai) 41, 60, 178 Bonaparte, Joseph, King of Naples 161 Bonaparte, Napoleon, French Emperor xiii, 107, 143, 147, 168, 170; Egyptian expedition 151–153, 155, 275; Trafalgar campaign 158–159; escape from Elba 165 Bone, Algeria 172, 211, 255 Boscawen, Edward, Admiral 119– 121 Bosnia 196, 207 Bosporos xiii, 162, 182, 184 Boston, Massachusetts 123 Bougie Bay, Algeria 50 Bou Reg Reg River, Morocco 28 Bramley, Sir William, captain 118 Brazil 7, 31, 32, 96, 149, 219 Brest, France, French fleet base 34, 49, 62–63, 64, 66, 72, 104, 106, 111, 120, 125, 148, 153, 210 Brett, Sir Piercy, Admiral 123 Brindisi, Italy 217 Bristol, England 5 Britain, British Isles 3, 46, 161–162, 168; Admiralty 111, 112, 115, 125, 141, 209, 218, 232, 233, 239–240, 246, 269; strategic interests 94, 118, 138–139, 161–

293 162; planned/threatened invasion of 101, 114, 125, 130, 140, 150, 157, 180–181, 182–183; and Algiers 23–24, 26, 35, 37, 49–51, 55, 56–57, 171–172, 173; and Crete 198; and France 101; entente cordiale 203, 206; and Germany 206; and Great War 210–222; and Second World War 210–222, 233–260; and Gibraltar, passim; and Greece 174–177, 191; and Japan 202; and Spain 82–83, 85; Mediterranean fleet to 28 to 13, 232, 240–241, 247, 269–270, 275; Force A 247; Force H 235, 236, 239, 242, 243, 248; Force K 246–247, 248 see also Wars, Operations

Broderick, Thomas, Admiral 116– 117, 121 Browne, Robert, consul 47 Brueys, Admiral 151 Bruix, Eustashe de, Admiral 153– 154 Buenos Aires 72 Bulgaria 194, 195, 196, 207, 214 219, 221 Burma 247 Button, Sir Thomas, Admiral 22 Byng, George, Admiral 70, 76–77, 85–86 Byng, John, Admiral 105, 110–111, 115, 117 Byrnes, James, US Secretary of State 262 Byron, Lord 201 Cadiz, Spain xv, 32, 49, 53, 90, 125; Spanish naval base 15–16, 87, 93, 106, 107, 109, 129, 146, 148, 150, 155, 266; Britain/England and 6, 30–31, 34–35, 44, 45; raids on 13, 15, 17, 26, 69, 70; blockade 38–40, 97–98, 110, 121–122, 151, 158; British naval base 59, 63–66, 67. 73, 80, 85, 163–164, 274; French naval base 107–108, 120

294

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

Cadiz, Gulf of xv Cagliari, Sardinia 36, 37, 60, 84 Cairo, Egypt 178, 197, 238, 249 Calabria, Italy 236–237 Canada 119, 234 Canary Islands xiv, xv, 6, 7, 45, 46, 56, 121, 164, 218 Cannes, France 110 Cape Bojador xiv Cape Bon xiii Cape de Gata 50 Cape Finisterre 136 Cape St Vincent xv, 136, 149 Cape Spartel xv, 50, 56, 106–107, 119, 137 Cape Trafalgar xv, 56, 119 Caprera I, Italy 189 Caribbean Sea 125 Carlos II, King of Spain 68 Carpenter, Lord, governor of Minorca 84 Cartagena 16, 103, 106, 107–108, 109, 122; blockade 110, 111, 119, 158; Spanish naval base 147, 148–149, 153, 159 Casablanca Caspian Sea 225 Catalonia 65, 72, 76, 79 Catherine II, Empress of Russia 141 Catherine of Braganza, Queen of England 41 Cattaro (Kotor) 164, 216 Caucasus 221 Central Asia 225 Cephallonia, Ionian Islands 33, 167 Cerigo, Ionian Islands 150 Cette, France 79 Ceuta, Morocco 56, 87, 89, 92, 95, 120 Cevennes, France 69, 71, 77, 79 Chanak, Turkey 227 Charles I, King of England and Scotland 27 Charles II, King of England and Scotland 41, 53, 55, 56, 59, 60 Charles V, Emperor 79 Charles III, King of the Two Sicilies 95, 96, 99; = Carlos III King of Spain 121, 126

Charles, Archduke (‘King Charles III of Spain’) 68, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76–77, 78, 79; Emperor 79–80 Charles X, King of France 177 Chesney, Colonel 178 China Sea 198, 228, 232 Chios 8, 9, 162–163 Choiseul, duc de 123 Cholmley, Sir Hugh 43 Church, Richard, Captain 175 Churchill, Winston, First Lord 211, 214; Prime Minister 235–236, 260 Ciudadella, Minorca 115 Civitavecchia, Italy 9, 79, 151 Clayton, Colonel Jasper, Lieutenant Governor of Gibraltar 90 Clue, Admiral de la 119–121 Cochrane, Lord Thomas, Captain 164, 175 Codrington, Sir Edward, Admiral 175–176 Cold War 263 Collingwood, Cuthbert, Lord, Admiral 149, 160–164, 171 Congreve, Colonel, Lieutenant-Governor of Gibraltar 88 Constantine I, King of Greece 220–221 Constantinople 2, 5, 8, 10–12, 14, 19, 25, 37, 44, 51, 58, 179, 180, 182–184, 188, 190, 194, 201, 211, 212; British threat to 161–162; Allied occupation 222, 226 Convoys 45, 46, 48, 52, 62, 63–64, 70, 71; Levant 32, 33, 44, 45, 56, 62–63, 146; Malta 242–247 Cook, Thomas 101 Copenhagen, Denmark 156, 164 Cordoba, Jose de, Admiral 137, 149 Corfu, Ionian Islands 8, 150, 163, 219, 220, 226, 260; British 165, 167, 182, 191 Cornwall, England 26 Corsairs 18–22, 26–28, 32, 35–37, 42, 47, 49–50, 61, 94, 112, 273 Corsica 32, 109, 115, 117, 122, 144–145, 147, 233, 256

Index Cotton, Colonel, Lieutenant-Governor of Gibraltar 88 Court, Admiral 102–103, 105 Crete xiv, 5, 13, 35, 111, 192, 198, 202, 274; union with Greece 207; and Second World War 240–241, 251 Crillon, duc de 131–139 Crimea 141, 185, 188, 119, 225, 226, 275 Cromwell, Oliver, Lord Protector of England 34–39 Crusades 1–3, 6 Cuba, British conquest 122 Cunningham, Sir Andrew, Admiral 233, 235, 236, 242, 248 Cyprus xiii, 3, 8, 9, 27; British 195, 196, 197, 201, 229, 232, 265, 268, 269, 270 Dakar, West Africa 219, 236, 240 Dalmatia 163, 206, 217 Damascus, Syria 190 Damietta, Egypt 197 Danube River 184, 194 Darby, George, Admiral 129–130, 135, 138 Dardanelles xiii, 161–162, 179, 182, 183, 184, 187, 201, 202, 204, 211, 212, 220, 221, 227; Allied attack on 213–215 Dartmouth, Lord, Admiral 59 Denikin, Anton, General 225 Denmark 49, 63 Derby, Lord, Foreign Secretary 194 Despuig, Maltese Grand Master 170 Devon, England 28 Digby, Sir Kenelm 27 Digby, Admiral 127 Dilkes, Sir Thomas, Admiral 78 ‘diplomatic revolution’ 113–114 Dobbie, Sir William, governor of Malta 250 Dodecanese islands 208, 256 Dover, England 27 Dover, Strait of 101, 106 Downs, English Channel 24 Drake, Sir Francis 15–16, 17 Draper, Sir William, Colonel, Lieu-

295

tenant-Governor of Minorca 132 Drovetti, Bernardino, consul 178 Duckworth, Sir John, Admiral 152, 161–162, 171, 214, 227 Dundas, Sir James, Admiral 183, 188 Dunkirk, France 38 Dunsterville, Lionel, General 225 Duquesne, Marquis 119 Durazzo, Albania 221 Dutch, neutrality 114, 124; revolution 141; merchants 7, 30; and corsairs 23, 32, 62, 115, 173; and England/Britain 22, 30, 32–34, 43, 47–49, 52–53, 62–79; and Japan 247; and Spain 19, 23 see also Netherlands Eden, Anthony, Prime Minister 267–268 Edgar the Atheling 1-2 Edgecumbe, Hon. George, Captain 115 Edmund II Ironside, King of England 1 Edward I, King of England 3 Edward VII, King of Britain 191 Egypt xiii, 8, 9; British rule 154, 156, 162, 194, 196, 201, 203, 209, 2 to 9, 232, 259, 261, 275; British withdrawal 267; French rule 151–152, 154, 155, 173, 197–198; and Syria 177–180; Ottoman invasion 213; and Second World War 280; Elba, Italy 33, 147–148, 165 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 9–10 Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia 24 Elliott, Augustus, general, governor of Gibraltar 128 Elliott, Sir Gilbert 144 Elphinston, John, Russian Admiral 141 England, Corsair raids on 21, 61; crusaders 2; exiles from 1–2; interests in Mediterranean 4, 5, 10–11, 43–44, 69, 70; privateers 16; royal succession problem 62, 80 see also Britain

296

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

English Channel 3, 28, 30, 48, 58, 62, 63, 125–126, 146, 157, 208 Eritrea 213, 239 Essex, Earl of 17 d’Estaing, Comte, Admiral 125–126 d’Estrees, Comte, Admiral 63, 64 Ethiopia 230–231, 239 Eugene, Prince 77 Eugenie, Empress 192 Eupatoria, Crimea 185 Euphrates River 178 Europa point, Gibraltar 87 Exmouth, Lord, Admiral 171, 173 Famagusta, Cyprus 195 ‘Family Compact’ 101, 126 Far East 232, 237, 269 Faro, Portugal 2 Felipe V, King of Spain 68, 71, 76, 77, 80, 82, 85, 88, 93, 96, 110 Fellers, Bonner, US diplomat 245 Ferdinand IV, King of Naples 152, 171 Fernando VI, King of Spain 96, 110, 121 Ferrol, Spain 97, 153, 158 Fisher, Sir John, Admiral 199, 214 Fiume 206 Flanders, Flemings 2, 82, 111 Florida 123, 137 Formentera I., Balearic Islands 37, 60 Forth, River, Scotland 44 Fowke, Thomas, General, Governor of Gibraltar 116 France xiv, 3; and corsairs 57; merchants 9–10; privateers 30; revolution 140; and Britain/England 34–35, 37, 40, 69, 162–163, 203 bombardment of Algiers 61–62 Navy 48–49, 66–67, 98, 123–124, 140, 142, 189–190, 210, 235, 261; and Crete 198; and Egypt 177–180, 196, 197–198; and Greece 174; and Italy 190; and Malta 169; and Russia 201; and Syria 190; and great War 210–222; and Second World War 233–260

see also Wars Franco, Francisco, Spanish dictator 233 Fremantle, Thomas, Captain 147 Frisia, Frisians 2 Funchal, Madeira xiv von Galen, Admiral 33 Galicia, Spain 2 Galley warfare 14, 16, 17 Gallipoli, Allied attack 214–217, 219, 220, 227 Gallissoniere, Marquis de la, Admiral 114–117 Gantheaume, Honore, Admiral 146, 154–155, 163, 173 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 189 Genoa 3, 5, 8, 9, 43, 77, 78, 108– 111, 117, 145, 151, 153, 157, 165, 235 Gela, Sicily 255 George I, King of Britain 88, 89 George I, King of Greece 191 George of Hesse-Darmstadt, Prince 72, 74 Georgia 224 Germany, Germans 2, 3, 58, 63, 68; under French control 157; unification 189; Navy 190, 211, 218; submarine campaign 218–219; and Greece 198; and Mediterranean 229–230; and Morocco 203, 204; and Ottoman Empire 202, 204; and Great War 210–222; and Second World War 233–260 Gibraltar xiv, xv, 31, 48, 56, 64, 95, 166, 168; Spanish base 16, 23; and England/Britain 59, 60, 72–73; sieges 74–75, 90–94, 126–139, 142, 168; British base 80–81, 83, 87–88, 102, 107, 108, 112–113, 115–116, 118, 121– 123, 148, 151, 161, 163, 173, 181, 200, 208, 209, 219, 228, 266, 274, 276; Spanish claim on 96, 100, 110, 122, 126, 233, 270–271; and Second World War 233–235, 237, 240 Gibraltar Bay 87, 128, 136, 148

Index Gladstone, W.E. 191, 194 Godfroy, Admiral 236 Gort, Lord, governor of Malta 250 Gough-Calthorpe, Sir Somerset, Admiral 218–219, 221, 223–224, 225 Gourjean Bay, France 144 Gozo, Malta 157 Grant, H.S., Admiral 219 Gravina, Admiral 159 Greece 5, 8, 168, 174, 191–192, 194, 197–198, 228, 275; annexes Crete 207; and Great War 219–222; invasion of Asia Minor 226–227; and Second World War 238, 240–241; Civil War 259–261, 263–264 Grieg, Samuel, Russian Admiral 141 Guadaloupe 123 Guise, duc de 35 Haddock, Nicholas, Admiral 97–98 Hadj Mohammed, dey of Algiers 52 Haifa, Palestine 234, 255 Haile Selassie, Ethiopian Emperor to 230 Hall, Edward, Captain 32, 33 Hamburg to 24 Hanover 102 Harborne, William, Ambassador 10, 13 Harrington, Tim, general to 27 Harold II Godwinesson, King of England 1 Harwich, England 150 Harwood, Admiral 251 Haward, Charles, Captain 98 Hawke, Sir Edward, Admiral 114, 117, 118, 121 Hawkins, Sir Richard, Admiral 22 Hellespont xiii Henry VII, King of England 5 Henry VIII, King of England 4 Herbert, Arthur, Admiral 55–57, 61, 62, 67 Hereford map 4 Hewett, Sir William, Admiral 197 Hitler, Adolf, German dictator 234, 240, 249

297

Holmes, Robert, Admiral 47, 52 Holy Places, Palestine, custody of 183 Hood, Lord, Admiral 142–144 Hopsonn, Edward, Admiral 91–92 Hornby, Sir Geoffrey, Admiral 194, 199 Hoste, William, Captain 164 Hotham, Sir William, Admiral 144–146 Howe, Lord, Admiral 135–136 Hungary 182 Hyeres Bay and Islands, France 99, 102, 106, 110, 145 Iberia xiv, 7 Ibrahim, Khedive of Egypt 175, 177, 179, 193 Ibiza, Balearic Islands 76, 78 Iceland 26 India 129, 133, 178 Indian Ocean xiv, 8, 14, 154, 178 Indonesia 247 Ionian (’Seven’) Islands, Septinsular Republic 8, 14, 150, 156, 163; British 165, 167–168, 169, 171, 173; union with Greece 191–192 Ionian Sea 39 Iran 238 Iraq 238, 241 Ireland 26, 30, 33, 37, 44, 62, 146, 151 Isabella, Queen of Felipe V 82, 84, 88–89, 93, 100, 121 Iskenderun (see Scanderoom) Ismail, Khedive of Egypt 193, 194 Ismailia, Egypt 197 Israel 267 Italy xii, 2, 3, 5, 34, 43, 44, 45, 63, 67, 82, 88, 102, 103, 105–108, 110, 198, 223, 231, 233; under French control 157, 165; unification 189; neutrality 206, 211, 212; Navy 208, 209, 210, 217, 231, 237; and Ethiopia 230–231, 239; and Great War 211–222; and Second World War 233–260 Jacobites 83, 86

298

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

Jaffa, Palestine 5, 8 James VI and I, King of England and Scotland 22, 25 James VII and II, King of England and Scotland 58, 59, 62 Japan 200, 202–203, 219, 228, 231, 232, 233, 247, 259, 262–263 Jenkinson, Antony 7 Jennings, St John, Admiral 91 Jerusalem 204 Jervis, Sir John, Lord St Vincent, Admiral 146–153, 171, 173 Jezzar Pasha, Governor of Acre 153 Joseph I, Emperor 79 Kabyle Mountains, Algeria 46, 171 Kane, Richard, Colonel, Governor of Minorca 83, 84, 87–90, 94–95 Karl, Austrian Emperor 226 Keith, Lord, Admiral 153–154 Kemal, Mustapha (‘Ataturk’) 216 Kempthorne, John, Admiral 57 Keppel, Hon. Augustus, Captain 111–112 Kephez Bay, Turkey 214, 215 Kertch, Strait of 186, 225 Killigrew, Henry, Admiral 62 Kinburn, Russia 186 Kitchener, Lord 213, 214 Knights Hospitaller (Malta) 21, 95, 155, 166–167, 169–170, 199–200 Knut, King of England 3 Kronstadt, Russia 185, 186 Kum Kale, Turkey 214, 215 Lagos, Portugal xv Laibach, Congress 172 Lancaster, James, 13 Langara, Juan de, Admiral 127, 143, 148 Lattakia, Syria 2, 8 La Spezia, Italy 165 Lawson, Sir John, Admiral 41–42, 46–47 Leake, John, Admiral 57, 74, 75–77, 78, 84 Lebanon 179 Leghorn (see Livorno) La Havre, France 65

Leicester, Earl of 19 Leiva, Don Pedro de, Spanish naval commander 14, 21 Lepanto 9 Lerins Is, France 110 Lesseps, Ferdinand de 193, 196 Lestock, Richard, Admiral 98–100, 102, 104 Levant 5, 8, 9, 14, 34, 44, 56, 62, 63, 65, 70, 71, 107, 109 Libya xiii, 20, 273; Italian invasion 209, 208, 222, 230; and Second World War 235, 237–238, 240, 243, 249, 259, 263 Linois, Admiral 155 Lions, Gulf of Lisbon, Portugal xiv, xv, 28, 34, 38, 68, 122; capture 2; English threat to 13; entrepot 15, 29; Blake’s blockade 30–31; French base 35; English/British base 46, 69, 72, 76, 78, 80, 106, 148, 151, 274 Liverpool, Lord, Prime Minister 172 Livorno (‘Leghorn’) 9, 32, 43, 78, 80, 98, 157l Dutch blockade 33, 35; entrepot 37, 44, 45, 54; and Enhland/Britain 35, 39, 40, 55, 59, 60, 70, 118, 144–145 Lloyd George, David, Prime Minister 209, 227 London 1, 6, 11, 27, 29, 41, 45, 49, 56, 188 Long, Robert, Captain 107 Louis XIV, King of France 49, 53, 55, 58, 61, 68, 69, 79, 82, 86 Louisburg, Nova Scotia 118 Louis Philippe, King of France 177 Maastricht, Netherlands 107 Madagascar 251 Maddalena Is, Sardinia 157–158 Madeira xiv, xv, 6, 45, 46, 64, 66, 163 Madrid, Spain 23, 89, 90 Maitland, Sir Thomas, governor of Ionian Islands 169 Majorca, Spain 23, 76, 78 Malaga, Spain 16, 23, 37, 38, 40,

Index 64, 72, 90, 119, 120 Malaya 232, 247 Malcolm III Canmore, King of Scotland 1 Malta xiii, 9, 21, 28, 54, 59, 60, 85, 95, 106, 107, 112, 166–167, 168; British conquest 152–154, 155–156, 163; British naval base 157, 160, 161, 165, 169, 173, 199–200, 208, 209, 218, 219, 232, 266, 267, 270, 275; French conquest 151; and Second World War 234, 237–239, 242–248 see also Knights Hospitaller Man, Robert, Admiral 145, 147–148 Mansel, Sir Thomas, expedition against Algiers 21–26, 29, 36, 62 Mantua, Italy 147 Marchand, Captain 202 Margaret, Scottish queen 1 Mariupol, Russia 225 Marlborough, duke of 72 Marrakesh, Morocco 29 Marseilles 3, 9, 36, 37, 65, 188, 226, 257 Martin, Pierre, Admiral 145 Martin, Samuel, consul 57 Martin, William, Commodore 99 Martinique 123 Mathews, Thomas, Admiral 98–100 Maurice, Prince 31 Mauritius 127 Mazarin, Cardinal 39 McCleverty, William, Captain 120 Mdina, Malta 167 Mediterranean Sea, geography xiii– xvi; British naval control 159– 160; Eastern Basin xiv, 5, 17, 44, 45, 162, 170, 173, 197, 198, 199, 207, 235, 260, 274–275; ‘Sea-entrance’ xiv, 7, 15, 45, 63, 64, 67, 71, 106–107, 108, 122, 157, 174, 240, 266; Western Basin xiv, 17, 27, 40, 42, 44, 45, 64, 65, 70, 71, 122, 174, 177, 219, 274 Medley, Henry, Admiral 108, 110 Melilla, Morocco 208 Melos 112 Mers el-Kebir, see Oran

299

Mesopotamia 200 Messe, George, Captain 66–67 Messina, Sicily 32, 55, 86 Methuen, John, Ambassador 69 Metternich, Prince von, Austrian Chancellor 171 Milan, Italy 68, 84 Minorca: and Britain 78, 79, 80–81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 90, 93, 94, 95, 102, 112, 123, 152, 153, 156, 171, 173, 274; and France 114–118, 122, 125; and Spain 97, 100, 127, 138, 130–133, 136, 137, 138–139, 147, 165 Mohammed V, Moroccan Sultan 29 Mohammed II, dey of Algiers 111– 112 Moldavia 184 Monson, Sir William 25 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 201 Morea (Peloponnese), Greece 174, 175 Moreno, Juan de, Admiral 155 Moriscos, expulsion of 20, 26, 28, 38 Morocco xiv, 3, 26, 61, 95; corsairs of 20, 46; and Tangier 41, 42, 56, 60; source of supplies 38, 93, 96, 128; trade with 7, 9, 19, 49; and France 178, 180, 240; crises over 203, 207–209; Spanish 234; landings in 254 Moscow, Russia to 26 Mosul, Iraq 229 Mountagu, Edward, General-at-Sea, Earl of Sandwich 37–38, 41–42, 46 Mudania, Turkey 227 Mudros, Lemnos 216, 220, 221, 224 Muhammad Ali, Khedive of Egypt 173, 174, 177–180, 190, 192 Mundy, Rodney, Admiral 189 Murray, James, general 128, 130–133 Muscovy 9 Mussolini, Benito, Italian dictator 230, 237, 249 Mytilene, Lesbos 113

300

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

Napier, Charles, Commodore 179–180 Naples, City 35, 44, 107, 189, to 37, 266; Kingdom 21, 34, 40, 69, 70, 95, 96, 99, 106, 143, 147, 151, 12, 156, 157, 165, 172–173, 181; Naples, Bay of 161 Napoleon III, French Emperor 182, 183, 188, 189, 190–191 Narbonne, France 2, 71 Narbrough, Sir John, Admiral 53–55, 56, 58, 59, 62 Nasser, Gamal Abdul, Egyptian dictator 267 Navarino Bay, Greece 175–176 Navarro, Admiral 102 Nelson, Horatio xv Netherlands 18, 43, 44, 47, 49, 63, 141; allied with France 146 see also Dutch Neville, John, Admiral 66–67 Newcastle, Duke of 83–84 Newfoundland 26, 56 Niblack, Admiral 219 Nicholls, Edward, Captain 21–22 Nice, Savoy/France 71, 72, 102 Nieuchese, duc de 35 Nikolayev, Russia, 24–225 Nile, River 202 Nootka Sound 141, 142 Nore, England 150 Normandy, France 125 Norris, Harry, Captain 99 Norris, Sir John, Admiral 77, 78, 96 Norris, Richard, Captain 109 North Africa xiv, 18–21, 44, 96 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) 265–267, 270, 276 North Sea 41, 48, 200, 208, 209, 212, 222, 228, 233 Novorossisk, Russia to 23, 226 Odessa, Russia 185, 223, 226 O’Hara, Charles, general, Lieutenant Governor of Gibraltar 143 Oneglia, Italy 105, 106 Operations, Second World War: Dragoon (1964) 256; Halberd (1941) 245–246; Harpoon (1942) 250;

Pedestal (1942) 252–254; Substance (1941) 214; Torch (1942) 254, 258 Oran, Algeria 70, 82, 95 Orbetello, Italy 97 Orde, Sir John, Admiral 159 Osborn, Henry, Admiral 107, 108, 118, 190 Osborne, Sir Francis 10 Otchakov, Russia 141 Otranto barrage 217–219, 222 Otto, King of Greece 191 Ottoman Empire 5, 7–8, 7–11, 51, 58, 142, 156, 259, 275; Capitulations 11–12; Young Turks 207; and corsairs 18; and Britain 178, 201; and Crete 192; and Egypt 177–180; and France 152–153; and Greece 174–177, 210; and Russia 141, 194–195; and Germany 202, 210; and Great War 212–222 see also Turkey Otway, James, Colonel, commander in Minorca 89, 90 Pacifico, Don 182 Palamos, Spain 66 Palermo, Sicily 156 Palestine 2, 3, 6, 201; British 217, 221, 222, 229, 232, 259, 262–263; British abandonment 264–265 Palmerston, Lord, Prime Minister 180, 181, 186 Panderma, Turkey 226 Pantelleria 14, 21 Paris 107, 125 Parker, Sir William, Admiral 181– 182, 183, 199 Parma, Italy 82–83, 96 Patras, Greece 175 Paul, Russian Tsar 155–156, 176 Pelissier, General 188 Penn, William, General-at-Sea 32, 93 Pepys, Samuel 59, 62 Persia 7–8 Persian Gulf 8

Index Peru 158 Petain, Marshal, French dictator 240 Peterborough, Lord 76 Philadelphia 125 Philip II, King of Spain 15 Philip, Duke of Parma 96, 109 Philippeville, Algeria Philippines, British conquest 122 Piacenza, Italy 109 Piedmont (= Savoy) 143, 189 Piosin, Admiral 107 Piraeus, Greece 182, 190, 191, 220, 257, 267 Pisa, Italy 5 Pitt, William, Prime Minister 141, 142 Plate, River 123, 158 Plymouth, England 32 Pointis, Baron de, Admiral 66–67, 74, 75 Pola, Austria 260 Poland 162, 186 Ponent 8 Popham, Edward, General-at-Sea 30–31 Port Mahon, Minorca 59, 60, 80, 81, 83–84, 86, 97, 105, 107–108, 113, 114, 123 Portmore, Lord, Governor of Gibraltar 87, 88, 93 Porto Farina, Tunis 36, 37, 39, 47 Porto Longone, Italy 33 Porto Santo xiv Port Said, Egypt 197, 219, 224, 234 Portsmouth, England 78, 91, 161 Portugal xiv, xv, 2, 3, 6, 15, 19, 41–42, 45, 52, 56, 60, 63, 68, 71, 96, 108, 122, 126, 151, 160, 163, 181 Privateers 12, 18, 30, 32, 56, 77–78, 94, 118, 174 Provence, France 105 Prussia 101, 123, 141, 142, 161, 182, 186, 189, 191 see also Germany Québec, Canada 119

301

Rabat, Malta 167 Ragusa (Dubrovnik) 29, 163, 164 Rainborowe, William, Captain, expedition against Sallee 28–29 Rashid Ali, Colonel 241 Red Sea xiv, 178, 192, 225, 230 Reggio di Calabria 256, 258 Revest, Admiral 118, 119 Rhineland 231 Rhodes 252 Richard I Coeur de Leon, King of England 3 Richelieu, duc de 115, 117 Richery, Joseph de, Admiral 145– 146, 147 Robeck, Admiral de 216, 225 Robert, Duke of Normandy 1 Rochefort, France 121 Rodney, Sir George, Admiral 127– 128, 135 Roe, Sir Thomas, Ambassador 25 Rognvald Kali, Earl of Orkney 2 Rome 3, 189, 190 Rommel, Erwin, General 240, 244, 249, 250, 254 Rooke, George, Admiral 57, 63, 66, 69, 71–73, 75 Roosevelt, Franklin, President 236 Rosas, Spain 64, 164 Rota, Spain xv, 266 Rowley, William, Admiral 106–109 Rupert, Prince 30–32, 33, 35 Russel, John, Captain 105 Russell, Edward, Admiral 62, 64–66 Russia 7–8, 101, 123, 131, 141, 152, 155–156, 161, 162; Navy 210, 225; revolution 222; and Britain 206, 260–261, 263, 269; and Crete 198; and Egypt 267; and France 201, 206; and Greece 174–177, 260; and Japan 200; and Ottoman Empire 183–187; and Great War 212–222, 251; German invasions 223, 244 Ruyter, Admiral de 47 Said, Khedive of Egypt 193 St Malo, France 65 St Petersburg, Russia 142, 185,

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The British Navy in the Mediterranean

186, 195 St Tropez Bay, France 99 Saladin, Amir of Egypt 3 Salerno, Italy 256, 258 Sallee, Morocco 40; corsair base 19, 26, 38, 45–46, 53, 54, 56, 58, 94; Rainborowe’s attack on 28–29 Salonika 219–220, 257 San Fiorenzo, Corsica 144, 145 San Lucar, Spain 6, 30 San Remo, Italy 105, 109 San Roque, Spain 75, 120 San Sebastian, Spain 86 Santa Cruz, Tenerife xv, 39 Sardinia xiv, 3, 21, 31, 32, 36, 40, 65, 67, 78, 82, 84, 156, 171, 233, 245, 256; King of 102, 152 Saumarez, Sir James, Admiral 155 Saunders, Charles, Admiral 118– 119, 122–123 Savona, Italy 78, 109 Savoy, Italy 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 76, 83, 85–87, 104, 106, 108, 110, 152 see also Piedmont, Sardinia Saxe, Marshal de 107 Scanderoon )Alexandretta) 8, 27, 239, 44, 45, 177, 212 Scilly Is 78 Scotland, Scots 3, 33, 37, 61, 86, 112; interests in Mediterranean 4, 5, 44–45; union with England 44 Sea of Marmara xiii, 161–162, 195, 214, 216, 223, 224 Sebastopol, Crimea 141, 184–186, 223–224 Sedd al-Bahr, Turkey 214, 215 Selim the Grim, Ottoman Sultan 9 Serbia 196, 219–220, 223 Seven Islands–see Ionian Islands Seville, Spain 6 Seymour, Sir Beauchamp, Admiral 196, 199 Ships, Merchant: Centurion 16, 17; Dolphin 21, 22; Ducalion 253; Edward Bonaventure 14; Hercules 28; Imperial Star 246; Jesus 13; Marmaduke (= Revenge of

Whitehall) 31–32; Ohio 253–254; Princess 36; Phoenix 33; Prudence 27; Royal Merchant 13, 14; Salomon 16, 17; Sampson 28; Susan (Suzanne) 14; Thomas Bonaventure 13; Tobie 14; William and John 14; Woodford 231 Warships: British: Agamemnon (64) 145; Agincourt (64) 158; Ajax (74) 162; Antelope 28; Argus (aircraft carrier) 228, 250; Ark Royal (aircraft carrier) 244, 245–247; Barfleur (40) 103; Barham (battleship) 247; Berwick (74) 145; Black Prince (10) 31; Bombay Castle (74) 148; Breconshire (transport) 247, 249; Cairo (anti-aircraft cruiser) 253; Camperdown (battleship) 199; Capetown (cruiser) 230; Captain (74) 149; Censeur (74) 146; Charles Galley (32) 52; Constant reformation (42) 32; Couragueux (74) 148; Culloden (74) 120; Deptford (60) 113; Dragon (90) 92; Dreadnought (battleship) 188, 201, 205; Duke (fireship) 99; Eagle (aircraft carrier) 239, 250, 252; Emperor of India (battleship) 225; Enterprise (28) 125; (cruiser) 230; Excellent (74) 149; Expedition (30) 28; Faversham (44) 98; Folkestone (44) 98; Furious (aircraft carrier) 252; Gibraltar (80) 120, 148; Hampshire (cruiser) 207; Hannibal (74) 154; (screw battleship 91) 189; Havock (destroyer) 231; Hood (screw battleship, 91) 198; Icarus (screw sloop) 192; Illustrious (74) 145; (aircraft carrier) 239, 240–241; Inconstant (36) 147; Indomitable (aircraft carrier) 252; Inflexible (battleship) 214; Intrepid (64) 116; Irresistible (battleship) 214; James Galley (32) 53; Jersey (60) 118 Latona (38) 136; Lion (25) 22; Leopard (34) 28; Lyme (28) 120; Majestic (battleship) 216; Manxman

Index (minelayer) 250; Marlborough (96) 103; Mary (ketch) 28; Merlin (14) 48; Minerva (32) 112–113; Minerve (38) 149; Monmouth (64) 119; Namur (90) 103, 105; Nelson (battleship) 244, 245–246, 252; Nemesis (28) 146, 147; Nigeria (cruiser) 253; Ocean (110) 182; (battleship) 214; Pallas (36) 113; Penelope (cruiser) 249; Prince of Wales (battleship) 245; Prince William (64) 127; Proserpine (28) 125–126; Providence (30) 28; Queen Elizabeth (battleship) 248; Renown (battleship) 244, 245; Rodney (battleship) 252; Roebuck (34) 31; St George (98) 149; Scylla (screw corvette) 191; Shark (destroyer) to 23; Southwold (destroyer) 249; Swiftsure (74) 154; (battleship) 207; Triumph (battleship) 216; Unbroken (submarine) 253; Valiant (battleship) 248; Vengeur (74) 172; Victoria (battleship) 199; Victorious (aircraft carrier) 252; Victory (100) 107; Warrior (armoured ship) 190; Welshman (minelayer) 250, 251, 254; Wizard (screw corvette) 192; Yarmouth (cruiser) 207; Zealous (74) 148 Warships: French: Alcide (74) 145; Bouvet (battleship) 214; Charlemagne (90) 183; Foudroyant (80) 119; Gaulois (battleship) 214; Gloire (battleship) 190; Napoleon (battleship) 190; Strasbourg (battlecruiser) 236; Suffren (battleship) 214; Terrible (74) 103 Warships: German: Bismarck (battlecruiser) 242; Breslau (cruiser) 211, 220, 221; Goeben (battlecruiser) 211, 220, 221; U-21 (submarine) 216; U-73 (submarine) 252; U-81 (submarine) 247; U–331 (submarine) 247 Warships: Italian: Axum (submarine) 253; Littorio (battleship) 246, 248, 251; Vittorio Veneto (battleship)

303

246, 251 Warships: Spanish: Poder (60) 103; Princesa (70) 98; Real Felipe (114) 103; San Miguel (72) 136–137; San Jose (112) 149; San Nicolas (74) 149; Salvador del Mondo (112) 149; San Ysidra (80) 149; Santissima Trinidad (130) 149 Warships: United States: Missouri (battleship) 263; Franklin D. Roosevelt (aircraft carrier) 264 ships, technological changes 188– 189, 203–205, 208 Shovell, Sir Cloudisley, Admiral 47, 69,–71, 72 Sicilian Narrows xiii, 14, 17 Sicily xiii, xiv, 32, 40, 67, 71, 148; and Austria 87; and Britain 152, 156, 160, 161, 164, 171, 182; and France 53, 54–55, 79, 151; and Richard I 3; and Savoy 82; and Spain 14, 21, 26, 85–86; and Second World War, 242, 243, 255–256 Sidon, Lebanon 179 Silesia 101 Sinai 212, 213, 217 Sirte, Gulf of xiii Smith, Sir Sydney, Admiral 144, 153, 160, 161 Smyrna 8, 11, 29, 44, 45, 48, 52, 112, 147, 226, 227, 274 ‘Smyrna fleet’ 63–64 Smyth, Sir Jeremy, Admiral 48–49 Socotra 178, 193 Soissons, France, conference 93, 94 Somalia 239 Somerville, Sir James, Admiral 235, 236, 239, 246, 247 Spain xiii, xiv, xv, 3, 6, 30, 40, 82–86, 216; Navy 123, 140, 142; and corsairs 26, 71, 95; and England/Britain 6, 23–24, 43–45, 47, 56, 96, 122, 126; anti-French rising 163; and Morocco 208; and Ottoman Empire 9, 18–21; sieges of Gibraltar 73–74, 90–93; and Second World War 233–234 see also Wars, Gibraltar, Minorca

304

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

Spithead 135, 141, 150 Spragge, Sir Edward, Admiral 50–52, 53 Stalin, Josef, Russian dictator 260 Stanhope, James, general, Lord 78, 80, 85, 87, 88 Staper, Richard 10 Stayner, Richard, Captain 38–39 Stoakes, John, Captain 39–40, 46 Stopford, Sir Robert, Admiral 179–180 Strait of Gibraltar xiv, xv, 2, 30, 40, 42, 52, 89, 98, 245; British control of 15–17, 32, 35, 48–49, 62, 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 81, 107, 109, 119, 240 see also Battles Straits xiii, 156, 201, 222, 226–227, 263, 273 Sudan 202 Suez 178, 197; crisis 267–269 Suez Canal xiv, 192–193, 195, 197, 200, 201, 212–213, 228, 230, 234, 237, 264 Suleiman the Magnificent, Ottoman Sultan 9 Suvla Bay, Turkey 215 Sweden 49, 63, 101, 123, 186 Syfret, Neville, Admiral 248 Syracuse, Sicily 151 Syria xiii, 2, 27, 46, 153, 177, 178–179, 119, 212, 217, 221, 238, 241, 261, 275 Tangier xv, 41–43, 47–49, 52–60, 61, 67, 75, 112, 181, 203, 238, 245, 274 Taranto, Italy 217, 238, 239, 240, 249, 256 Tarsus, 213 Taurus Mountains 177 Telegraph, development of 188 Tenerife xv, 39, 150 Tetuan, Morocco 16, 38, 40, 90 Thessaly, Greece 197 Thrace 212, 226 Thursby, Captain 207 Tobruk, Libya 240, 254 Torbay, England 66, 130

Torres, Marquis de la 89, 91, 133 Toulon, France, Allied occupation 142–144; British naval threat to 69–71, 72, 75, 77, 81, 89, 118, 151; blockade 101, 106, 110, 119–120, 122, 157, 163, 164; English squadron at 38; French fleet base 35, 37, 48–49, 62–63, 64–66, 97, 105, 106, 119, 124, 142, 145, 146, 173, 181, 186, 210, 235, 240, 256; German base 257; Prince Rupert in 31; privateer base 36; Spanish base 97–99, 100 Toulouse, Comte de, Admiral 73–74 Tourville, Comte de, Admiral 63–64 Townshend, Lord 94 Townsend, Hon. George, captain 110 Trade, in Mediterranean 4, 5, 6 Trading Companies: Barbary 19; East India 8, 13, 60, 178, 193; Levant 11–16, 17, 18–19, 22, 25, 27, 28, 29, 33, 34, 44, 45, 63, 64, 107, 172, 273–274; Merchant Adventurers 6, 11; Merchants of the Staple 11; Muscovy 7, 10; Spanish 6, 10; Turkey 10, 12; Venice 11 Trapani, Sicily 36, 60 Trieste, Italy 163, 206, 233, 259, 263 Treaties: Adrianople (1829) 176; Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) 111; Amiens (1802) 156–157, 170; Anglo-Algerine (1622) 25; (1662) 46; (1671) 51–52); (1682) 57; Anglo-Russian Convention (1907) 206; Berlin (1878) 195; Lausanne (1923) 227; London (1827) 175; Paris (1856) 186–187; Ryswick (1697) 67; San Stefano (1898) 195; Seville (1728) 94, 96; Sevres (1920) 226; Straits Convention (1841) 183; Tilsit (1807 (161, 162; Utrecht (1713) 83, 84, 85, 88, 90–91; Vienna and Paris (1815) 175, 191

Index Tripoli, Libya 13, 18, 26, 35, 39–40, 45, 54, 59, 94, 238 Tripoli, Syria 8, 14 Troubridge, Sir Ernest, Admiral 211 Tryon, Sir George, Admiral 199 Tunis 18, 26, 35–37, 39, 40, 45, 61, 70, 80, 94, 95, 113, 147; and France 178, 180, 197 Tunisia xiii, 18, 208, 238, 240, 254–255 Turin, Italy 77 Turkey 8, 229, 241, 264, 270 see also Ottoman Empire Tuscany, Grand Duchy 9, 32, 33, 39, 69, 71 Tyre, Lebanon 179 Tyrrhenian Sea xiv Ukraine xiv, 224 Ultra, code breaking system 241, 246, 254 United States 171, 181, 219, 228, 231, 236, 247, 261–263; Navy 258, 261, 263–264, 276; Seventh Fleet 265,268 Vado, Italy 78 Valencia, Spain 76 Valetta, Malta 167, 168, 169, 200, 251, 255 Var, River, France 77 Varna 185 Velez Malaga, Spain 31 Venice xiv, 3, 4, 5, 8, 14, 20, 35–36, 68, 150, 163 Venizelos, Eleftherios, Greek Prime Minister to 16, 220–221 Vian, Sir Philip, Admiral 248, 251 Victoria, Queen of Britain 201 Vienna, Austria 58 Vigo, Spain 30, 38, 69 Vilhena, Maltese Grand Master 170 Villafranca, Italy 99, 233 Villeneuve, Admiral 148, 158–159 Wager, Sir Charles, Admiral 92, 93 Waghorn 178 Waldegrave, Hon. William, Admiral 147

305

Wallachia 184 Ward, John, consul 52 Warren, Sir John Borlase, Admiral 155 Wars: American Rebellion 123–139, 173, 274 Anglo-Algerian 22–24, 49–52, 54–57; Anglo-Dutch, first 32–34; second 43, 47–49; third 43, 52–53; Anglo-Spanish: Armada 6, 14–15; Cromwell’s 34, 37–38; for Gibraltar 89–94; Jenkins’ Ear 97; 158; Anglo-Egyptian (1882) 197; (1956) 267–269; Anglo-French 43, 48, 62, 79; Anglo-Tripolitan 54; Austrian Succession 100; Balkan (1912–1913) 207, 210, 220; Crimean 183–188, 199; English Civil 29–32; French Revolutionary 142–156; Great (First World) 203, 211–222; Greek independence 174–175; Greek-Turkish (1881) 197; Hundred Years’ 4; Italian-Ethiopian 230–231, 275; Napoleonic 156–165; Nine Years’ 43, 62–67; Ottoman-Egyptian 178–180; Ottoman-Italian (1911) 207; Ottoman–Russian 141–142, 162, 194, 198; Ottoman-Spanish 6, 19; Ottoman-Venetian 35; Second World 233–260; Seven Years’ 113–123, 173, 274; Spanish civil 231–232; Spanish Succession 43, 68–83, 274 Warwick, Earl of 19 West Africa 7, 9, 19, 47 West Indies 34, 66–67, 92, 96, 97, 98, 108, 109, 111, 127, 129, 137, 146, 234 Wheler, Francis, Admiral 57, 64 Whetstone, Thomas, Captain 39 Whitby, England 43 White Sea 7 Wilhelm II, German Emperor 203, 204 Wilkinson, Captain Edward 14 William I, King of England 1 William II Rufus, King of England 1 William III, of Orange, King of

306

The British Navy in the Mediterranean

England and Scotland 55, 62, 64, 68 William IV, King of Britain 127 Wolseley, Sir Garnet, General 197 Wright, Fortunatus, captain 118

Wynne, Betsy 147 Yugoslavia 223, 229, 233, 257 Zante, Ionian Is 14, 27, 39, 44, 167 Zita, Austrian Empress 226

British Navy in Mediterranean.qxp_Layout 1 09/10/2017 13:37 Page 1

JOHN D. GRAINGER is the author of numerous books for a variety of publishers, including seven previously published books for Boydell & Brewer, including The British Navy in the Baltic, Dictionary of British Naval Battles and The First Pacific War: Britain and Russia, 1854-56.

The British Navy

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the activities of the British navy in the Mediterranean Sea from the earliest times until the twentieth century. It traces developments from Anglo-Saxon times, through the Crusades, and to the seventeenth century, when the Barbary corsairs became a major problem. It outlines Britain's involvement in the wars of the long eighteenth century, when Britain obtained bases at Gibraltar, Minorca and Malta and repeatedly defeated the French and Spanish navies. It examines the navy's activities during the First and Second World Wars, when the Mediterranean was again of crucial strategic significance and a major theatre of war, and goes on to consider Britain's withdrawal from the Mediterranean in the later twentieth century. Throughout, the book relates naval activity to patterns of trade, including the rise and decline of the Levant Company, and to wider international politics.

Cover illustration: HMS Illustrious, Corfu, 1902, by Ian H. Marshall, Past President and Fellow/ASMA.

GRAINGER

The

British Navy JOHN D. GRAINGER