To mark the publication of Indomitable, the second book in the Newt Beresford Naval Adventures, author Jonathan Eyers takes a closer look at the Battle of the Chesapeake — one of the most crucial naval engagements in United States history.
In the 250 years since the United States declared its independence from Great Britain, the American struggle for freedom has become a key part of the country’s glorious story. Most of the story is true, of course, but it is also fair to say that the level of accuracy depends on who is telling it.
Ask your average American what the turning point for the war was and most will say the Battle of Yorktown in October 1781. And they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. This was the last major land battle of the War of Independence; the British didn’t just lose, but were forced into the humiliation of surrendering an entire army. It led to the resignation of the British Prime Minister and a subsequent vote in Parliament to begin negotiations to end the war — in effect, recognising American independence.
But ask historians, especially maritime historians, what the turning point for the war was and most will that say the Battle of Yorktown was only lost by the British because a month before they had also lost the Battle of the Chesapeake. Once you look at who fought in this battle, also known as the Battle of the Capes, you start to understand why it is so little known, despite being so important.
After all, it’s arguably the most decisive battle of the American War of Independence — but not a single American fought in it.
At this point it’s crucial to understand the broader context of the entire war from a European perspective. For the British, what started as a bit of unrest in Massachusetts, which they expected to be able to put down with the same ease they put down unrest elsewhere in the Empire, had turned into a prolonged, deeply unpopular war. For the Crown and the government, the need to keep fighting it was a matter of pride. For a lot of the British, however, the American colonies were an offshoot of the motherland, full of their own relatives (however distant), unlike most other British colonies.
For the French, meanwhile, the War of Independence was a splendid opportunity. It was entirely in the interests of the French that the British, their main rival for power not just in Europe but across the entire world, get bogged down, distracted and exhausted by a fight an ocean away. Cities and schools across the US are named after the Marquis de Lafayette, but the French contribution to the American cause was far more extensive than its most famous volunteer.
Indeed, France poured so many resources into what for them effectively became a proxy war with the British that it almost bankrupted itself. It continued to support it, however, in the expectation that after finally winning independence due to French assistance, the newly free United States would be so grateful to France that it would become almost a vassal state, with American trade dominated by France. Instead, the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton pushed to begin trading with Great Britain again almost immediately there was peace. France had no way to recoup its huge financial losses, and the resulting financial crisis was a key factor in France’s own Revolution. But that’s another story.
Even before George Washington’s men arrived at Yorktown, on the southern bank of the York River in eastern Virginia, Lafayette was there making trouble for the British. The British had been led to believe the American and French forces were preparing for a major attack on New York, and here General Cornwallis was mustering his forces. He soon found his army surrounded and besieged by the Americans and the French, at which point he became dependent on the Royal Navy either bringing reinforcements or evacuating British forces via Chesapeake Bay.
So the French blockaded it. Cornwallis’ position was soon rather dire. If the Royal Navy didn’t break that blockade, he stood little chance against the combined forces of the Continental Army and their French allies. Under Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Graves, a British fleet of nineteen ships of the line sailed from New York. The French fleet of twenty-four warships, under Lieutenant Général des Armées Navales François Joseph Paul de Grasse, left Chesapeake Bay to meet them.
The British initially had the weather gauge, so believed they had the advantage, even if they were outnumbered. Ships of the line were so named precisely because they were intended to sail in single file, parallel to the enemy’s line, firing broadsides at the other side until one side lost sufficient ships to realise they couldn’t win, so disengaged and withdrew.
In the Battle of the Chesapeake, however, the British and French fleets converged at an angle, rather than forming parallel lines. This meant the vanguard saw brutal close-quarters fighting, whereas ships bringing up the rear on both sides barely participated in the battle at all. Much has been written about why the Royal Navy fleet failed, beyond being somewhat unexpectedly outnumbered, but that loss sealed the fate of General Cornwallis and his army. Without relief or escape by water, the British forces at Yorktown were brought to surrender in under six weeks.
You can see why the story of the Battle of the Chesapeake doesn’t get told quite so often as that of the Battle of Yorktown, or the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, which convinced France to ally with the American revolutionaries in the first place. No Americans fought in it, so it’s not as glorious a part of the narrative as Yorktown. The British lost it, and with it the war, and defeats never get quite the same attention as victories. And as for the French, it was the last major naval victory of L’Ancien Regime, which lost its heads a few years later precisely because it impoverished the French to bolster the Americans.
But it’s a fascinating and exciting battle to explore in fiction, which is why I have put it at the heart of Indomitable, the second book in the Newt Beresford series. To the men of Royal Navy ships like the fictional third-rate ship of the line HMS Indomitable, caught up in the noise and terror of a sea battle, they would have been unaware that history was being written all around them. For Newt and his fellow midshipman Banks, the Chesapeake is a battleground of another sort, as their rivalry mirrors that of the British and the French. Only one of them can come out of it with all the glory, too.
Tenacious and Indomitable are available from Amazon now.
