Arthur Phillip Read online

  If the enemy fire were directed at the guns, rather than at the masts, the gun deck could become a charnel house. If a cannon scored a direct hit, the gun crew would be eviscerated – killed, maimed and splattered with blood, brains, gristle and bone. If the oak hull was strong enough to stop the ball, an eruption of splinters on the inside wall might mutilate any man in near proximity. This is where Phillip and the other boys worked – crouching, flinching and hauling gunpowder amid the horror and darkness, where everyone was blackened and the deck was ‘so completely filled with smoke that no one can see two yards before him’.

  By mid-afternoon the fourth and fifth French ships, the Sage and the Guerrière, were driven out of the line and the French van began to disintegrate. This was the moment for the British squadron to press home its advantage, but the ships in the rear under Byng’s command failed to join the battle. Byng’s flagship, the Ramilles, barely fired a shot. Despite this half-hearted response, late in the afternoon the whole French line unexpectedly broke off and sailed away. But instead of advancing on Minorca to relieve the residents and troops in the garrison, Byng directed his squadron to Gibraltar. The survivors held out in Fort St Phillip until 28 June, inflicting many casualties on the besieging French, who lost almost 5000 men. But the hardship to the British residents, their eventual surrender and the loss of Minorca were inevitable.

  After the battle, Phillip wrote to his sister Rebecca. His letter captures the essence of the engagement:

  When Admiral Byng hoisted the Red Flagg a signal to Engage, we with our Division bore down to the Enemy, and with Six Ships engaged their Van, (as we led the Van) which He (ie., Admiral Byng) instead of doing the Same with the Rear, layed his Main Top-Sails aback, then all his Division was obliged to do the like.

  The French began fireing at us, Some time before we fired at them, as their aim was to engage at a distance, and ours to engage them as close as we could. But when we began, we played upon [them] very briskly, and Soon drove the 4th and 5th Ships out of the line & Raked them fore & aft as they went. One of them was their Rear Admiral, whose Stern was Shattered very much, & by this time our Van had a very great advantage over theirs, which we was hinder’d from making use of, by their Rear coming up. For all this time Admiral Byng lay with his Top Sails aback, and only fired now & then, & that at too great a distance to doe, or Receive any damage. But we gave them So brisk a fire that they declined coming to a close engagement tho’ they had it in their power; So they filled their Sails and edged away to the rest of the Fleet, who altogether stood towards the Island of Minorca, and Soon after we tacked, and lay too.

  We received but very little damage considering what a hot Fire we was exposed to … But then we can give very good reasons for it, every man in our Fleet burned with the greatest ardour imaginable, and theirs by their behaviour i.e. the French with a great dastardness, for their not coming to a close engagement when they had Such Odds as their Whole Fleet against our [Division] plainly Shewed that most of them had rather Run than Fight. And it is very certain, that their fear kept them from taking proper Aim, which Saved Us a great many Men, as well as our Masts and Rigging. I need not mention the great Courage & conduct of our Admiral [ie. West] and Captains Shewed that Day in our Division, nor the Cowardice of the Only person Admiral Byng, that kept the French Fleet from being Distroyed, and the Island from being relieved. For no doubt all England will Soon be convinced of the merit of Admiral West, and the downright Cowardice of Admiral Byng.

  There was national hysteria in England, fuelled by a press that was as jingoistic then as it is now. Byng was replaced, recalled and imprisoned under guard in Greenwich Hospital. Pamphlets and broadsheets accused and lampooned him; mobs burned and hanged his effigy. He was ridiculed as pompous and effeminate. In advance of his trial, George II unforgivably told a group of London merchants: ‘Indeed he shall be tried immediately, he shall be hanged directly.’ In that hyped state of affairs, Byng’s court martial commenced on 27 December 1756 before a bevy of admirals and captains on board the St George moored in Portsmouth harbour. In happier days, Byng had been her captain.

  Byng was charged under the Twelfth Article of War. It laid down that if any person in the fleet failed through ‘cowardice, neglect or disaffection’ to do his utmost to take, sink, burn and destroy the enemy’s ships in battle, he shall receive the death penalty. The Article had once stipulated alternative penalties – either death or ‘such other punishment as the court should judge fit’. But a recent amendment removed the discretionary alternative. This fatal amendment was introduced after an officer was controversially acquitted at an earlier court martial, over which Byng himself had presided. Ironically for Byng, he became the first officer to be tried under the amended Article. After a month of evidence, including from old General Blakeney, the commander of the garrison on Minorca, and Augustus Hervey, who was Byng’s most valiant supporter, the court martial found the charge proved but specifically absolved Byng of any cowardice or disaffection. Byng was found guilty only of neglect. But it made no difference. Death was now the unalterable punishment for conviction, whether the finding was cowardice, disaffection or merely neglect. No senior naval officer thought this appropriate in Byng’s case and those who constituted the court martial recommended clemency.

  George II ignored the court martial’s recommendation and refused to consider any leniency. He even rejected William Pitt the elder, who did all he could to obtain the King’s pardon. Byng apparently bore the month-long court martial and sentence with great fortitude. But the sense of tragic theatre was exacerbated by the order to all the men-of-war at Spithead, the anchorage off Portsmouth, to send their boats with their captains and all of their officers to attend the execution. Byng was ceremoniously shot by a party of marines on the quarterdeck of the Monarque at 12 noon on 14 March 1757. The muzzles of their muskets were only three or four feet from his chest. He was kneeling and blindfolded. Voltaire was so provoked that he remarked in his novel Candide that ‘in England it is thought necessary to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others’.

  Phillip cannot have failed to have shared in this controversy, which engulfed England. Not only had he participated in the battle at Minorca, he was also at Spithead as a midshipman on the Neptune when her officers attended the execution. Phillip’s own views on the appropriateness of the punishment are unknown but in his letter to Rebecca, he complained with youthful ardour of the ‘downright cowardice of Admiral Byng’, adding that ‘no doubt all England will soon be convinced of the merit of Admiral West’. In truth, Temple West was so opposed to Byng’s execution that he refused to sign the warrant and resigned his seat at the Board of Admiralty before the execution was carried out.

  After Minorca, Phillip temporarily lost Everitt’s patronage when he and the other captains were ordered home to give evidence at Byng’s court martial. Phillip transferred briefly to the Princess Louisa, serving for a short time as the captain’s clerk before returning to England in November 1756 on the Ramilles. There he rejoined Everitt on the Neptune, which was no ordinary warship. She was a massive 98-gun first-rate ship of the line, but she did not go to sea and Phillip’s experience on her was brief and uneventful. From February until June 1757, the Neptune remained at anchor at Spithead. This was the period during which the trial and execution of Admiral Byng took place. In June, Phillip was discharged as ‘unserviceable’, connoting illness. By August, however, he was back with Everitt, but this time on the Union, another 90-gun battleship, in an apparent crew swap. The London Chronicle reported that the Union’s captain and officers ‘are all turned over to the Neptune, and the Neptune’s to the Union’. A biographical note in the Naval Chronicle of 1812 confirms that although Phillip’s name does not appear in the Union’s muster book he sailed with Everitt on the Union between August 1757 and November 1758. The absence of Phillip’s name from the muster book is not unusual. There was often a degree of informality in the records kept of the captain’s followers.

/>   For his first four years Phillip followed Everitt, but by 1759, at the age of 21, he began to progress independently of his patron. In June, he was formally entered in the books of the 36-gun frigate Aurora as a midshipman. Her captain was Sam Scott. As a midshipman, Phillip was now a cadet officer and a candidate to become a commissioned officer. In this role he enjoyed his first formal responsibilities in the ship’s hierarchy and became entitled to walk the quarterdeck and wear a midshipman’s uniform. The midshipmen slept in hammocks on the gun deck, but in a separate section away from the officers, in an area towards the stern known as the gunroom. It was separated from the seamen by a canvas bulkhead. The daily role of the midshipmen was to direct the men’s work, subject to the supervision of the lieutenants. They could give orders, even to much older seamen, and beat them if necessary. All midshipmen, regardless of their background, were referred to as ‘young gentlemen’ and were expected to behave like officers, but they were often treated like schoolboys – and naughty ones at that. Great enthusiasm, indeed dreams of glory, often accompanied a boy’s appointment as a midshipman. After one boy received his midshipman’s uniform, he wrote grandly: ‘Brightly dawned the auspicious morning that beheld me habited in His Majesty’s uniform and which, in my excited imagination, was at once to make a man and a hero of me.’ Phillip would have been equally enthusiastic.

  Frigates such as the Aurora were considered to be better schools for service than ships of the line. Many of the best captains for training boys commanded them. They were an intermediate class of warship that represented a compromise between power and speed. Lighter, more versatile and of shallower draft than a line-of-battle ship, a frigate could range ahead in search of the enemy, drop over the horizon, nose into bays and harbours, run up rivers and carry intelligence back to the flagship. Line-of-battle ships were huge, heavy and relatively slow. They carried at least 64 guns, often more, on two or three gun decks. A frigate on the other hand, commanded by a lieutenant or a recently appointed captain, mounted her battery of 24 to 36 guns on a single gun deck. And the officers and crew of frigates usually undertook more independent cruising and experienced more frequent action than those who sailed on men-of-war. With some justification, they tended to regard themselves as a professional elite. If a frigate could avoid it, however, it rarely engaged an enemy line-of-battle ship, for the frigate would be cruelly outgunned.

  Phillip’s service as a midshipman on the Aurora would have broadened his experience in valuable ways, advancing his seafaring skills and teaching him about the supervision of men. But the naval component of the war was now largely being fought in North America and the West Indies. In February 1760, Phillip chose once again to join his fortune to Everitt, this time on the Stirling Castle, a 70-gun third-rate ship of the line being fitted for service on the West Indies station. He was included in the ship’s company as an able-bodied seaman but this was not a demotion, simply a customary means by which a captain such as Everitt might find a place for a young man whom he wished to favour when the ship already had her full complement of midshipmen. There was no immediate sailing, however, let alone any naval action, and Phillip was compelled to curb his enthusiasm during much of 1760 while the Stirling Castle was fitted out, first at Woolwich on the Thames and later at Spithead.

  The fitting-out of vessels for West Indies service presented particular problems for the Admiralty. The warm waters caused ships to grow foul quickly with parasitic barnacles and weed on the ships’ bottoms, inhibiting steering and slowing sailing. The marine borer known as the Teredo worm, endemic throughout the Caribbean, could render a ship unserviceable within two years – a problem so great the Admiralty would eventually introduce copper-sheathed hulls, but until then sailors made do by tarring and caulking the timbers of the hull and sometimes adding a temporary layer of wood planking over its underwater section. The annual hurricane season was another local problem. It imperilled the safety of the men and their ships, and drained supplies of spare masts, spars, rigging and sails stored in the British naval dockyards at Jamaica and Antigua.

  The Stirling Castle eventually sailed from Spithead, arriving at the West Indies station in October 1760. There she stayed quiet until December, lying at anchor in the roadstead off St John’s, Antigua until after the hurricane season. The preceding year had been a tale of British victories. It was known as the annus mirabilis. Horace Walpole, the social commentator and Whig politician, said that ‘our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories’. By September 1760, Quebec had fallen and with it all of Canada. And in the West Indies, the French island of Guadeloupe had surrendered, although France still had a substantial presence on other islands. Between hurricane seasons, the Stirling Castle patrolled constantly among the slender archipelago of volcanic islands known as the Lesser Antilles, which stretch from Puerto Rico in the north to Trinidad and Tobago in the south. At the ‘windward’ end of this chain, closer to South America, the French island of Martinique remained a strategic British objective.

  In the midst of its cruising the Stirling Castle captured a small French prize. But in a move of greater personal significance for Phillip, the commodore of the Leeward Islands station promoted him from midshipman to fourth lieutenant. Subject to the Admiralty’s confirmation, Phillip became a commissioned naval officer from June 1761. Apart from six years’ service at sea, including at least two as a midshipman, a candidate for lieutenant had to obtain a ‘passing’ certificate. This was a formidable examination in seamanship. Candidates had to prove that they could ‘Splice, Knot, Reef a sail, work a Ship Sailing, Shift his Tides, keep a Reckoning of a Ship’s way by Plain Sailing and Mercator, Observe by the Sun or Star, find the variation of the Compass and is qualified to do his Duty as an Able Seaman and a Midshipman’.

  Contrary to popular misconception, the pool of lieutenants was not a socially exclusive club. The majority started their seagoing life as captains’ servants, of whom a proportion was inevitably drawn from humble circumstances. As a lieutenant, Phillip became for the first time responsible for keeping a log and taking turns with the master to be officer of the watch. He was in charge of a division of the seamen and a group of the midshipmen, for whose welfare and efficiency he was responsible. He had to know his men as individuals, attend to their needs and endeavour to handle them in an intelligent and humane fashion. Unlike the midshipmen who slept on the gundeck, the lieutenants’ sleeping quarters were below the great cabin near the wardroom. They graduated from hammocks and now slept in wooden cots with a mattress. All commissioned officers dined off china, drank from real glasses and used silver cutlery. Phillip was fortunate to have started his service in 1755 with Everitt, who saw him through to promotion to the first rank of a commissioned officer six years later. Then, as if he had done his duty, Everitt returned to England, leaving the new lieutenant to impress others under fire. Phillip was now available for promotion and advancement as and when any officers senior to him succumbed to death or disease or were themselves promoted. Hence the naval toast – ‘To a bloody war or a sickly season.’

  In January 1762 the Stirling Castle joined an invasion force consisting of eighteen ships of the line, 120 support vessels and 12,000 soldiers. She formed part of a renewed assault on Martinique, which the British had tried and failed to take in 1759. Phillip’s ship bombarded the French batteries at Grand Anse d’Arlet and joined in the disembarkation of troops. Her role was modest but the expedition was successful and by February the French Governor had surrendered. In the meantime in London, while the British naval and military forces savoured their success in finally wresting Martinique from France, grander and more dramatic plans were being laid.

  On 4 January George III, the 23-year-old grandson of George II, decided on war with Spain. The reason was the emergence of a secret pact between France and Spain that bound Spain to side with France against Great Britain if no peace had been concluded by May 1762. Within days, in a quiet room off Whitehall overlooking Horse Guards Parade, the Cabinet was
deliberating over an ambitious strike force against Spain. London was soon full of talk about a mighty secret expedition against an undisclosed target. The target was Havana, Cuba, securely located within a deep harbour and guarded at its entrance by a mighty fort known as El Morro. It was Spain’s strongest naval and military base in the Americas. It was also the most strategically important of all her colonial possessions. For all the Spanish galleons and treasure ships carrying the riches of Mexico, Peru and Columbia came to Havana before crossing the Atlantic on the return voyage to Europe.

  Lord Anson, the old sailor who had circumnavigated the world in the 1740s and was now First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed a coup de main of astonishing boldness, to which the Cabinet agreed. The plan involved a surprise attack on Havana from an unexpected direction, with an expeditionary force of over 16,000 men carried in ships to be assembled from squadrons scattered right across the northern hemisphere – in British home waters, the Caribbean and off North America. It would be a race against time: the ships would be unable to operate off the coast of Cuba once the hurricane season resumed, and after a few weeks on land the army would be susceptible to a grim range of tropical diseases.