The British Fleet

I love ships and sailing. And I don’t mean that I love it in the sense that it’s a great hobby, but rather that it’s an all-consuming obsession. Luckily for me, it’s one that my wife shares. My passion for sailing came late in life, when I was in my thirty’s, in New York City of all places. I became volunteer crew on a schooner built in 1885, the Pioneer. Owned and operated by the South Street Seaport Museum, with gaff-rigged fore and aft sails set on two masts and headsails set on a long bowsprit and jib-boom. She was flat bottomed, built to collect sand for a foundry during low tide, and had a long heavy centerboard that could be retracted into the ship when she was sitting on the sand. She was a hard boat to sail: the heavy spars were hauled aloft by willing crew, rather than winches; her undersized engine made docking a chore in New York’s tidal estuary; and she handled like a pig. However … I. LOVE. That boat!

Schooner PIONEER sailing in New York Harbor

I think all sailors love the boats they build, sail and maintain. They may be honest with themselves about the flaws, but the beauty of the vessel is never hidden from the crew. I think about that when I read historical fiction and more specifically when I write it. I don’t think that’s said enough, the love and pride that a crew will have for their vessels, even the ones that are flawed. In my novel, War on the Inland Sea, one of the characters that may escape notice is the little schooner Alert. She’s a fictional character of sorts, but one based on the written record which we’ll describe below. Called at the time a “row galley”, she was no more than fifty feet length overall and with a shallow draft. Undecked and built of green wood, she would have been leaky, open to the weather, and made enormous leeway in any wind. Despite the misery that sailing her might have been, I think the men that built her and sailed her still would have loved her. I tried to capture this feeling in the following passage:

“Robert admired the seamanship in the maneuver displayed by the captain and crew of the little schooner. Joseph was making the little ship dance and it was always a joy to see a crew handle a ship well above the abilities of her construction. Rare though it was in most cases, Robert had learned early on that when a crew learned the ways of an individual vessel, she could be sailed beautifully. With a good crew who handled her well, any ship could be more than the sum of her parts.

Captain Walton had once told Robert a story of why ships were called ‘she’ and how it affected the crew of the vessel. The story was that in times long past, young women, virgins one would suppose, were sacrificed during a ship’s launching and that their souls were thought to inhabit the ship afterward. As the story went, the soul of the woman was present in every frame and timber of the vessel and she could do extraordinary things with a crew that cared for her. Like most sailors, Robert was both a romantic and superstitious by nature and believed that somehow it was still true: that ships were alive in some mysterious way, due in no small part to a good crew.”

When I started researching the ships that were part the British fleet on Lake Ontario, I found that there’s surprisingly little first hand information (and even less on the French). Though there is a great deal of interpretation available from a variety of sources, I’ve always been leery of accepting other people’s ideas without checking first hand accounts. Luckily, the correspondence of the commanding officer of the British squadron, Captain Housman Broadley, was transcribed and made available by the New York Historical Association in 1914. Additionally, a French naval officer on Lake Ontario made a map that included depictions of the captured and renamed British fleet. Pierre Boucher de la Broquerie was in command of the French schooner of ten guns, the Hurault. I’ve taken this map as a legitimate representation of the British vessels, given that they were drawn by a naval officer that saw them.

The two small schooners in the map are called “Luis & Vive,” which correspond to the names of the British vessels given in history books: George and Lively. However, Major John Bradstreet, the aide to the commanding General at Fort Oswego, wrote of two small schooner’s being built in 1755, which he called the “Alert” and the “George.” These small schooners, as shown in Pierre Boucher’s map of 1757, had a two masts with mainsail, foresail, and with a single jib. They were known to have been armed with swivel guns, rather than cannon. The Alert mentioned above may have been renamed the Lively or that may have been her name from the beginning. Captain Broadley never mentioned their name, considering the schooners to be tenders to the larger vessels. For the purposes of my story, I decided that the Alert was a perhaps fictional third schooner, so that my main character would have a command.

The other vessels launched in 1755 included the large topsail schooner, HMS Oswego, followed by the sloop, HMS Ontario, both of ten guns. The Ontario was similar to the Oswego and was supposed to have been a schooner, but Captain Broadley thought that the sloop rig would perform better on the lake. The sloop likely would have sailed closer to the wind and Broadley mentions in his correspondence that the HMS Ontario was a better than the Oswego. Broadley was appointed by Commodore Keppel to command the Oswego, while Lieutenant John Laforey was promoted into the HMS Ontario.

These were all the vessels built in 1755, but unfortunately by the time they were completed, the campaign for that year had ended in disaster. The Battle of Monongahela had destroyed a British Army marching against the French in western Pennsylvania and supply delays meant the cancellation of the intended invasion of Fort Niagara. The next year, the British supply chain proved to be worse as the war expanded, but more ships were ordered to be built in order to gain control of the lake from the French. Initially it was decided that a sloop and two brigantines were to be built, but one of the latter was changed to a “snow” instead.

"A Trading Brig Entering the Bristol Avon" by Joseph Walter ca. 1838

Brigantines, brigs and snows are all similar vessels and during the period the term “brig” was used interchangeably to describe the three. They all have two masts of about equal height and the foremast has square sails. But a brigantine has no lower square sail on her main mast. Rather she only carries a fore and aft gaff-rigged mainsail, with square topsail set above. A brig on the other hand, can set a lower square sail on the main mast, with perhaps a gaff-rigged fore and aft sail behind it. The snow is a combination of the two, but with an extra mast of sorts just behind the mainmast. The gaff-rigged fore and aft sail can be raised and lowered on this extra mast, without interfering with the square mainsail. I’m sure that this description did nothing to clear up the distinction between rigs for the novice, but if you see them in harbor, you’d be able to tell.

The HMS Mohawk was a sloop of twelve guns, while the HMS London was a brigantine of sixteen guns. The largest of the vessels, the largest built on the lake by either country, was the HMS Halifax of eighteen guns. The British at this point had a larger squadron than the French and had fewer posts on the lake to defend, yet the two fleets never faced one another. The supply situation was such that the Oswego was stripped of her guns, rigging and crew in order to man and arm the other vessels. She sat in the anchorage while the other ships went to sea. In the end though, like most poorly planned and executed military campaigns, the two fleets played no part in the final capture and destruction of the British forts at Oswego. All the lives and resources that had been sacrificed to make the fleet and forts at Oswego were destroyed in less than a week in August of 1756.

I would imagine that when the final surrender came and the crews left their ships for the last time, that there was a degree of sadness at their loss. The captured British squadron was sailed to Fort Frontenac at present day Kingston, Ontario, while the forts and few unfinished ships in the yard at Oswego were burned. Most of the crews would have been sent to France to await an uncertain exchange or in some cases to remain in prison in Quebec. The French fleet and what remained of the British fleet were ultimately destroyed in 1758 by then Lt. Col. John Bradstreet during his raid on Fort Frontenac. After the surrender of that fort, he burned it and all the ships in the harbor, before returning to New York.

REF:

Correspondence of Houseman Broadley. Grant, W.L. & Broadley, H. (1914). The Capture of Oswego in 1756. Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association, Vol. 13, 339-367.

Correspondence of Major Bradstreet to General Shirley. Waterbury, E.M. (April 1951). Naval Activities During Montcalm’s Capture of Oswego. Paper presented at the Oswego County Historical Society, Oswego, NY.

Hoyne, Thomas. “Schooner Amy Knight ('Headers on the Banks).” Peabody Museum of Salem, Russell W. Knight Collection.

Map by Pierre Boucher de la Broquerie, 4 October 1757. British Library Collection

Walter, Joseph (1838). “A Trading Brig Entering the Bristol Avon.” National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.