Seapower and Naval Warfare, 1650-1830

Dr Richard Harding, Richard Harding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135364854
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From the author of "Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century" and "The Evolution of the Sailing Navy, 1509-1815", this book serves as a single- volume survey of war at sea and the expansion of naval power in the 18th century. The book is intended for undergraduate courses on 18th century European history, and for amateur and professional military historians, and for navy colleges, and navy and ex-navy professionals.

Chapter One

“The age of sail” and naval history

The sea is the great barrier between land masses and, at the same time, the great highway of communication, open to anyone who can traverse it. Long before 1650 the world’s oceans and seas were being crossed by merchant vessels of many countries. States fought each other on the seas and used power at sea to pressure their enemies on land. However, it was in the two hundred years after 1650 that maritime affairs intruded deeply into the development of the world. By 1830 the sea was far less of a barrier than it had been in 1650. The technology of shipping, the science of navigation, the infrastructure of ports, systems for provisioning, financing and supply enabled people and goods to travel faster, further and safer than ever before. The volume and variety of world trade increased dramatically. The coastal regions of most parts of the world became familiar with trading vessels from far afield, and maritime communities based upon a cash economy had an unprecedented political, social and economic impact upon the agrarian hinterlands.

From classical times urban economies and civilization depended on maritime commerce. The technological and financial requirements of shipping were a primary force in the cultural evolution of Europe. After 1830 the new industrial factory systems in Europe and America relied heavily upon seaborne commerce for raw materials and markets, but catered for increasingly integrated continental markets.¹ Maritime industries continued to be at the forefront of technological change, but other developments such as machine tools, the telegraph and railways were the technological wonders of the age. By 1900, the railways had opened up the continental land masses for the transport of bulk goods and people. Trade overland had become cheaper and more efficient in Europe, America and to a much lesser degree Africa. From the mid-nineteenth century, the economic and cultural impulses of the maritime world merged with those of the new factory systems.

The mid-nineteenth century was also the time when political attention swung from a maritime and world-wide to a continental focus. In both America and Europe, the opening up of the continent was not just an economic phenomenon, but a political and cultural one as well. The territorial definition of states created wars of independence, unification, expansion and secession which dominated the period 1815 to 1870. With these wars came a focus on the factors that created a national unity between the peoples that occupied a given territory. For statesmen and nationalists domestic nation-building took priority over maritime expansion.²

Some states, usually smaller states on the perimeters of the great land masses, stood outside these general mid-nineteenth century political changes. The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and, most significantly, the United Kingdom, all had strong maritime traditions and were less driven by the need to define their position within the continent. Britain, particularly, defined itself with reference to its global maritime empire. The European wars of unification only served to reinforce Britain’s global, rather than European, perspective. By the 1890s, Britain saw itself and was also seen by other states as the model of the modern thassalocracy.³

Britain’s distinctive position is important to the modern writing of naval history. During the early 1880s political and diplomatic attention in Europe and America focused once again on the wider world. With European boundaries confirmed, and intense economic rivalry between states, imperial expansion overseas offered an attractive solution to growing political problems. It was during this period and the years leading up to the First World War that the modern study of naval history took shape. Underpinning the national competition of the late nineteenth century was a deep quasi-Darwinian assumption that the nations were engaged in a deadly struggle for survival. It was a struggle that demanded the energies of the whole nation, including its financial, industrial and intellectual capital. In Britain, despite strong liberal traditions, the importance of applying higher education to the needs of the state was not missed. Norman Lockyer, the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, noted in his 1903 address to the Association that “University competition between states is now as potent as competition in building battleships”.⁴ Not just the physical and applied sciences, but history as well developed as a vital, serious study across Europe and America. Britain was the dominant naval and imperial power and it was her history that provided the focus for much of the new writing at the end of the nineteenth century. By 1914 the “British” perspective in naval writings had thoroughly eclipsed other valuable and interesting perspectives of European naval theorists and historians.⁵

The background to this increased interest in naval history was the technical and organizational changes in warfare from the 1860s. Mass mobilization of armies and new materials contributed to spectacular and rapid victories for Prussia against Austria and France in 1866 and 1870–1, but the same factors produced a long and bloody civil war in America between 1861 and 1865. The lessons learned from these conflicts were that victory went to the power best able to produce and organize materials and manpower for war. Industrial capacity and the organizational power of nineteenth-century bureaucracy imposed the need for administrative and strategic skills upon officers which far exceeded those of only a generation earlier. On land, the changes in the technology of war itself were less dramatic than those in industry and government. Although artillery became ever more powerful and plentiful on the battlefield, and small arms more efficient and effective, the horse and human power remained the principal means of movement and combat still took place at close quarters. However, the experience of war provided plenty of information and some clues towards the education of army officers. It also confirmed that the traditional battlefield role of the officer was largely unchanged. It seemed possible to develop the professional education of the army officer with some degree of certainty. Naval officers faced much greater ambiguity. Unlike their army colleagues, there had been no recent intensive naval campaigns. The last naval battle of any scale had been at Lissa in 1866, between Austrian and Italian naval units. It had no significant impact on the outcome of the Austro-Prussian War. Anglo-French naval domination was a major element in the Russian War (1854–6), but, subsequently, became overshadowed in popular imagination by the land campaign in the Crimea. The American Civil War (1861–5) at sea was equally one-sided. The Confederate States Navy hardly existed and although a handful of commerce raiders on the high seas created a major impact on the public, the United States Navy effectively blockaded the Southern States without having to overcome a substantial enemy at sea.⁶ If anything, these limited operations had created greater ambiguity for officers interested in the future of naval warfare. The tactic of ramming the opposing vessels, employed by Rear Admiral von Tegetthof at Lissa, had an influence on ship design that ran counter to the improvements in artillery. The success of the Confederate commerce raiders and the apparent inability of oceanic battlefleets in the Baltic to influence the course of the Crimean War raised questions about the relative effectiveness of high seas battlefleets, coastal bombardment fleets and a privateering war against commerce–the guerre de course.⁷

Underpinning this problem were the remarkable changes in the technology of war at sea during the last half of the century. Steam power, which was used aboard warships from the 1840s was becoming increasingly efficient. The triple expansion steam engine, the screw propeller and, a little later, the turbine transformed the ability of warships to manoeuvre, travel at speed and keep at sea in hostile conditions. While steam freed the warship from the constraints of the wind, iron and later steel plate completely transformed warship design. The size of warships, their configuration and their capabilities are determined by the materials from which they are constructed. In the early years of the nineteenth century, ship designers and constructors reached the limits of wood as a material. Vessels could not be made larger or increase their carrying capacity. Iron construction in the form of cast parts assisted improvements during the 1830s, but it was the strength and flexibility of steel which from the 1880s enabled shipbuilders to increase the size and capacity of vessels beyond all previous experience.⁸

By the 1840s improved smooth-bore artillery and shell guns gave warships greater firepower than their predecessors. Rifled artillery and chemical propellants and bursting charges increased the range and destructive power of gunfire from the 1860s. These new heavy artillery pieces were restricted on land by the need to haul them by horse power over poor roads and keep them supplied with ammunition by the same means. At sea these weapons could be housed in turrets, manipulated and served by hydraulic and electric power and supplied by extensive magazines. Ships, which from the sixteenth century had become floating artillery platforms, became even more formidable weapons against land and sea targets. During the nineteenth century, naval gunfire achieved a concentration and power that land-based defences might be able to resist but few were able to counter. New weapons added to the changing environment of naval warfare. The torpedo and the mine extended the potential danger to vessels of attack from under the sea.⁹

These technological changes raised significant questions about how naval wars would be fought and what the naval officer needed to be taught. The need to understand the technical principles of the weapons and propulsion systems led to a major and controversial change in the education of Royal Navy midshipmen announced in 1902. The curriculum and pedagogy remained a matter of dispute in succeeding years. For senior officers, the tension between a curriculum that kept them up to date with the latest technical developments and the need to develop them as strategic thinkers was never resolved.¹⁰

While the services were extending and re-examining the education of their officers, history was becoming more distinct as an academic discipline. Although there were relatively few professional historians, history was developing and growing in popularity. History has always had a place in a liberal education, but it was seldom distinguished from literary, philosophical or legal studies. The research-based approach to history, which dominated German and later American history schools by the beginning of the twentieth century, provided it with a distinctly “scientific” structure.¹¹ Science was not seen as a discipline or department of knowledge, but “the proper method of knowing and apprehending the facts in any department whatever”.¹² In France, Germany, Britain and the United States ambitious historical studies based upon primary source materials were in vogue. State and public archives were being systematically catalogued and opened up to historians. Collections were being preserved and published. Implicit within the scientific method was the belief that the knowledge discovered was useful and would contribute to improvement. The questions asked by historians were, therefore, essentially those upon which improvement was sought. The method was a training of the mind that was useful for those in public service–lawyers, administrators, statesmen, naval and military officers. The content was vital background information for those very same people. It is no surprise, therefore, that armies and navies were at the forefront of the scientific study of history. History was seen as “the most effective means of teaching war during peace” and of bringing into relief “the unchangeable fundamentals of good generalship in their relation to changeable tactical forms”.¹³ More than anything else a proper study of history distinguished between cause and effect and developed the greatest attribute of any officer–judgement.

The armed services’ need to involve themselves in the study of history clearly stemmed from the increasingly complex operational and political demands of contemporary warfare. However, neither the content nor methodologies of historical studies were ever as firmly established in the serving officers’ minds as the naval historians would have liked. Professor Sir John Laughton was a first-rate scholar who was committed to extensive primary research to educate the navy, but Captain Herbert Richmond, one of the Royal Navy’s most distinguished historians, was disgusted by the ignorance of his colleagues. On 4 April 1907 he wrote in his diary “I know only too well how ignorant we are, not only of modern war, but even of wars in history.” He recorded his despair that Admiral Durnford had never heard of Nelson’s Nile Campaign of 1798, and worse: “that was typical of ninety percent of our admirals.”¹⁴ The first professor of history (and English) at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, Professor Sir Geoffrey Callander, was by no means a distinguished scholar and the navy did not seem to regret that fact. Since then the Royal Navy and the Royal Naval Colleges have produced some of the foremost naval historians, but to focus upon them would be to ignore the vast majority of officers for whom history was simply part of a curriculum that had to be tolerated. Likewise in America, although the founder of the Naval War College, Admiral Stephen Luce, saw history as the keystone in the study of war, its role rapidly diminished. The post of professor of naval history at the US Naval War College was abolished in 1894 and not reinstated till after the First World War. The principal use of history was to provide the data for case studies and simulations used by officers studying tactics or strategy. Original research and wide-ranging explorations of historical situations were considered unnecessary.¹⁵

Over the period 1870 to 1914 naval history had become an established part of the intellectual development of the naval officer in Europe and America. The sources of the data were identified, the methodology of disseminating the information and extracting the lessons were established and the means of publishing it were developed. The staff histories and the research were not abstract historical investigations, but attempts to provide sound data from which to extrapolate lessons for future naval wars. More than anyone else, it was the American, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, who established the dominant lessons to be drawn from those historical studies.¹⁶ Mahan’s views were not unique, but his Influence of sea power upon history, published in 1890, had the greatest impact upon the public, politicians and statesmen. Mahan was convinced that the guiding principle of sea warfare was the concentration of overwhelming firepower upon the enemy to drive him from the sea. Thus, the battlefleet of capital ships was the only way to ensure control of the sea. For Mahan the British Royal Navy had proved this thesis and his purpose in writing Influence was to demonstrate this historical example and the “principal considerations” upon which British seapower was built.¹⁷

The idea struck a chord in political and naval circles throughout the world, and although, as Barry Gough has pointed out, few of these people may have read beyond the first part of the book, the focus on the domination of the oceanic battlefleet became the historical orthodoxy for the public. In France, where the possibility of competing in a naval race with Britain after the disastrous war of 1870–1 was unlikely, Admiral Aube headed a powerful group of naval thinkers, the Jeune École, who looked to the new weapons of torpedo and fast light cruisers to deny the use of the sea to the enemy. Although they had influence in Europe between 1885 and 1895, Mahan’s battlefleet theory of naval war had swept these ideas away by 1898.¹⁸

Subsequent historical investigations used established methodology and sources to fill chronological gaps, and fitted the narratives into Mahan’s analysis of seapower. Whether Mahan was right or wrong in his predictions about future naval warfare, his views about the history of the sailing navy were unchallenged. So far as the naval profession was concerned, history had done its job and established a permanent but limited role for itself in the professional curriculum. Since 1900 history has had to accommodate itself to other disciplines which could also throw light upon the future performance of navies in combat. Administration and management studies taken from the business world were absorbed into the military curriculum before and after the First World War. Psychology and leadership studies, international relations, economics and political sciences have taken an increasing share of study time since 1945. History, particularly that of the sailing navies, which was so prominent one hundred years ago, can still be found in the curriculum of naval colleges, but more for the continuity it demonstrates with the past–what Sir Julian Corbett called “a means of mental and literary culture”–than for the insights it provides to the modern professional navy.¹⁹

The naval history of the sailing ship era has, therefore, emerged as an identifiable subject, shaped like most disciplines, by the pragmatic requirements of its practitioners between 1870 and 1914. Its primary focus was the contemporary application of naval power. The battlefleet and the naval battle were at the centre of this power and the causes of success and failure in battle were the crucial factors to understand. The narrative was the narrative of campaigns and the reasons for particular outcomes were deduced by going backwards from the battles. By the time the First World War broke out in 1914, the period of the sailing navies had received almost 30 years of detailed attention from scholars, who produced some first-rate campaign histories and excellent collections of printed documents.

After the First World War, naval history and historians were drawn into the debates about the lessons to be learned from that conflict. The general disappointment that the overwhelming naval power of the allies in all waters had not produced a decisive result, or indeed a decisive naval battle, led to a re-examination of the doctrine derived from the historical writing of Mahan. The role of commerce raiding and amphibious o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Tables
• Maps
• Preface
• Chapter One: “The Age of Sail” and Naval History
• Chapter Two: The Changing Maritime World
• Chapter Three: The Battlefleet and the Idea of Seapower In the Early Modern World
• Chapter Four: The Establishment of the Battlefleet, 1650–88
• Chapter Five: The Growth of Operational Flexibility
• Chapter Six: The Nine Years War (1688–97) and the War of Spanish Succession (1701–13)
• Chapter Seven: Seapower On the World Stage, 1713–56
• Chapter Eight: The Seven Years War and Global Seapower (1756–63)
• Chapter Nine: The Acceleration of Naval Competition: 1763–89
• Chapter Ten: Seapower and Global Hegemony, 1789–1830
• Chapter Eleven: Seapower, Battlefleets and Naval Warfare
• Appendix: The Nominal Strength of Selected Sailing Navies, 1680–1830
• Notes
• Select Bibliography