So far as is necessary to enable the battle-fleet to secure the control, we have to furnish it with eyes from our cruiser force.
Sir Julian Corbett
Was I to die this moment, “Want of Frigates” would be found stamped on my heart.
Lord Nelson
DURING THE AGE OF FIGHTING SAIL, ONE CLASS OF VESSEL WAS THE frigate—a small, fast warship, large enough to rate a full captain as its commanding officer but too small to lie in the line of battle and contest the ultimate control of the sea with the enemy’s battle fleet. That was left to the ships of the line of battle, or as we more commonly know them today, battleships. Nevertheless, the frigate—also widely known by the term “cruiser”—was a considerable tool with the potential for significant flexibility and versatility in its employment. In fact, the frigate was the key workhorse relative to naval intelligence.
It is important to specifically define the designation frigate as understood during this time. Again, smaller than the ships of the line, frigates were nevertheless the busiest and most aggressive warships: “Rarely in port except for refit or damage sustained in action, they were the Navy’s light cavalry, scouting, patrolling, protecting, capturing—and . . . fighting.”1
A wonderful example of the frigate’s versatility—showing also that British and American ships had no corner on the market—is the following operation executed by the small French frigate Brune. In late 1795 the French gained intelligence that an Austrian commissary was spending a night at an inn in Voltri, Italy (about nine miles east of Genoa) and that he had almost ten thousand pounds sterling in pay for the Austrian troops operating in that area. So, on a bitter winter’s night “a landing party of about three hundred from La Brune took the neutral post[,] . . . robbed the commissary, and seized the corn and flour magazines. Next day, flushed with triumph and rich in booty, their captain was publicly enlisting men for [the French army] in the streets of Genoa.”2
In any event, the classic wooden sailing frigate was a descendent of the 1757 Pallas (and the French Aurore of the same period).3 They were basically single-gun-deck warships which functioned as scouts and as cruiser/escort vessels. Of the fifth and sixth “rates,” in naval establishment description, these ships had from twenty-two to forty-four “great” guns (cannon).4 Essentially built for speed, they nevertheless outmatched everything else afloat except the enormous ships of the line.
Despite the relatively slow evolution of technology in that time, there was notable development of the frigate class in the last half of the eighteenth century. Soon after the launching of the thirty-six-gun seven-hundred-ton Pallas (and her related sisters in the sixth rate of twenty-eight and thirty-two guns), skillful French and Spanish designers brought forth thirty-eight- and forty-gun ships (mounting 18-pounder cannon versus the common British 12s). By the time that the pioneering Capt. Edward Pellew (later Sir Edward and ultimately Adm. Viscount Exmouth) deployed with his 12-pounder thirty-six-gun Nymphe in 1793, the French were producing forty-gun, 1,000-ton frigates—quickly followed by forty-four-gun 1,240-tonners (often carrying 24-pounders). This rapid evolution more or less ended, at least for this era, with the creation of Joshua Humphrey’s American superfrigates circa 1797—though no real notice was taken of these until the USS Constitution (the famous, still commissioned, and still afloat “Old Ironsides”) and her sisters played havoc with the Royal Navy in 1812–13.
A British thirty-two-gun frigate, the Triton was built in 1796. Shown here hove-to, it presents the appearance of the typical, if small, frigate operational in the Age of Nelson. Prior to the familiar black-and-yellow striping pattern, which began to appear (and then became standard) in the years after 1800, most ships displayed one dominant color with various contrasting trim colors. Paint schemes were basically at the captain’s discretion, though anything much beyond the dockyard minimum would come out of the captain’s purse. This marvelous illustration was done by one of the foremost marine artists of the day, Nicholas Pocock (1740–1821).
© National Maritime Museum, London
Indeed, any discussion of naval intelligence during this period must spend time on the frigate’s two most important and very closely related jobs—sea control and reconnaissance—which were the keys to the operability of fleets two hundred years ago. However, any discussion of frigates and their employment opens the debate among authorities as to which function was the more vital.
On one side is sea control. This is essentially focused upon aspects removed from the role of the main battle fleets, including hunting and patrolling, convoy and shipping protection, blockading, attacks on enemy coastlines, commerce raiding and otherwise taking “prizes,” ship-to-ship combat, conveying communications, and shadowing enemy fleets. Frigates were all-purpose cruisers, sweeping the seas of enemy frigates, privateers, and merchant ships, not to mention conducting special operations, escorting convoys, and blockading. Some of this work fell to small brigs and sloops. However, “unable as they were to take on enemy frigates, such vessels were essentially auxiliaries: the Navy’s cutting edge was always its frigates—and it was they, above all, which were consequently always in short supply.”5
Today we might use the modern term C3 (command, control, and communications) to encompass—at least obliquely—most of these activities. As the eminent British naval strategist, historian, and theoretician Sir Julian Corbett notes, “If the object of naval warfare is to control communications, then the fundamental requirement is [a] means of exercising that control.”6 The frigate was the ideal means for the task; in fact, Sir Julian insisted that this was the principal duty of the frigate class—not reconnaissance:
On no . . . communication theory, can we regard the primary function of cruisers as being to scout for a battle-fleet. [Even in] Nelson’s practice [the frigate’s] paramount function was to exercise the control which he was securing with his battle-squadron. . . . He was so deeply convinced of their true tunction that he used them to exercise control to an extent which sometimes reduced his [scouting] cruisers below the limit of bare necessity. . . . If he found that he had not a sufficient number of cruisers to exercise that control and to furnish eyes for his battle-fleet as well, it was the battle-fleet that was made to suffer.7
The critical subtask of shipping protection and convoy duty—which many considered the cruiser’s true priority, must not be underplayed. Lord Nelson certainly believed it important. Consider the opening of this letter to Capt. Benjamin Hallowell of HMS Argo: “Whereas I consider the protection of our Trade the most essential service that can be performed . . .”8 Nelson also was very concerned with the frigates’ reconnaissance and signals-transmission support to the fleet in combat, as expressed in a letter to Sir Alexander Ball in August 1804: “I am keeping as many Frigates as possible round [my flagship]; for I know the value of them on the day of Battle: and compared with that day, what signifies any Prizes they might take?”9
Importantly, the lure of prize money—the proceeds of the sale of a captured vessel and its cargo, paid by the government and distributed among the officers, crew, and admiral of the ship making the capture—was extremely motivating to most officers: “Patronage, promotion, and prize-money have been described as the three masts of the Royal Navy. It would be illiberal to assert that prize-money was by any means the most important, but . . . it was certainly the subject still most frequently discussed.”10
All that aside, the other overall frigate role, which this chapter will tend to focus on a little more sharply when discussing intelligence, is the one of scouting, reconnaissance, and general gathering of information. It must be stressed that sources of intelligence are far different today than in 1800; the modern fleet commander can rely on national-level satellite imagery and communications interceptions, tactical communications interception, and radar, sonar, and aerial reconnaissance to help him find the enemy or acquire other important information—and all of it is virtually instantaneous. In great contrast, Nelson and his colleagues fundamentally had only the eyes of a human being—albeit enhanced by a telescope—on board their ships. Moreover, these ships had no radios to communicate their information, and their ability to move, in order to physically bring any gathered information to the commander (or a political minister), was entirely dependent upon the vagaries of wind, tide and current. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this discussion, the basic scouting function may, when added to the above sea-control notion, let us loosely appropriate the equally modern term of C3I (command, control, communications, and intelligence) to cover the whole concept.
In fact, a key raison d’àtre for the frigate was to be the “eyes” of the fleet, trying to identify where the enemy was, what they were doing, and then communicating that information to larger fleet units. (Of course, even though ships are referred to as “she,” they are, after all, inanimate things; it was the men on board, and most specifically the commanders, who really were the fleet’s eyes. It is the commander’s collection, processing, and dissemination of intelligence information that is central to this book.)11 And even though one might consider “cruisers as the eyes of the fleet, their purpose is almost equally to blindfold the enemy. Their duty is not only to disclose the movements of the enemy, but also to act as a screen to conceal our own” by preventing “our” movements and strength from being scouted by enemy cruisers.12
With respect to Sir Julian and his supporters, the “eyes of the fleet” aspect was at the core of frigate utilization. Reconnaissance and communications were inseparable for this model, and after highlighting this concept it is possible to proceed with the discussion.
IN 1798 THE ROYAL NAVY had approximately two hundred frigates. Yet this number was significantly short of operational necessity. Nelson’s often-quoted (and misquoted) lament, from a letter to Lord Spencer on 9 August 1798, forcefully articulates this problem, which plagued him and most other fleet commanders for the entire war: “Was I to die this moment, ‘Want of Frigates’ would be found stamped on my heart. No words of mine can express what I have, and am suffering for want of them.”13
He understood the problem, even if he did not like it. After all, he knew perfectly well that the demands on warship distribution were staggering, for at “the tail-end of the eighteenth century, the blockade of France had to be maintained, the approaches to the British Isles patrolled, and dozens of convoys escorted somehow.”14
Nelson was so short of frigates that after the Battle of the Nile, in which he annihilated a French fleet in the first of the three great victories of his career, he was obliged to send off his dispatches in a small ship of the line as he had no other suitable smaller vessel—nor any other means of message transmission. (Nelson’s messenger was HMS Leander, which was unfortunately caught and captured by the French Généreux while on this mission.) Moreover, Nelson’s need was even more acute prior to the battle, as he unsuccessfully attempted to search the Mediterranean in an effort to intercept France’s huge Egyptian expeditionary-invasion force—including Napoleon himself (see chapter 10).
This lack of frigates (as well as other, smaller vessels, such as sloops and brigs) to act as scouts and conveyers of information was a continual problem for intelligence-minded fleet commanders all through the war. Nelson’s letters, for over eight years and at least three campaigns, are full of this concern. While literally dozens of his complaints exist, a handful here will illustrate his frustration:
To Sir William Hamilton, Ambassador to Naples, on 20 and 23 July 1798: “The destruction of the Enemy . . . would have fallen to me if I had had Frigates. . . . What a situation am I placed in! As yet, I can learn nothing of the Enemy. . . . I have no Frigate, nor a sign of one.”15
To Prime Minister Addington, 27 July 1803: “From Cape St. Vincent … to the Head of the Adriatic, I have only eight frigates; which, with the service of watching Toulon, and the necessary Frigates with the Fleet, are absolutely not one half enough. I mean this as no complaint, for I am confident the Admiralty are hard pressed, and will send me more when the Service will admit it.”16
To Capt. Sir Alexander Ball, governor of Malta, 7 November 1803: “I am too often with only five Frigates. . . . Lord St. Vincent’s words are, ‘We can send you neither Ships or Men, and with the resources of your mind, you will do without them very well.’ Bravo, my Lord!”17
To Sir Alexander, again, 11 February 1804: “The loss of the Raven is very great, and the Admiralty seem determined not to increase my force. I, at this moment, want ten Frigates or Sloops. . . .—It is shameful: Lord St. Vincent was not treated so.”18 And again, 10 November 1804: “The Admiralty have directed me to keep a Frigate with the King of Sardinia . . . and to place a Naval Force [there]. Sometimes I smile, sometimes I am angry; for in the same packet, Lord Melville says, ‘We can send you nothing [no additional ships].’ ”19
To Viscount Castlereagh, secretary of state for War and the Colonies, 5 October 1805: “I have only two Frigates to watch them. . . . I am most exceedingly anxious for more eyes, and hope the Admiralty are hastening them to me. The last Fleet was lost to me for want of Frigates; God forbid this should.”20
To Mr. Marsden, secretary of the Admiralty, 5 October 1805: “I am sorry ever to trouble their Lordships with anything like a complaint of a want of Frigates and Sloops.. . . I am taking all Frigates about me I possibly can; for if I were an Angel, and attending to all the other points of my Command, [if I] let the Enemy escape for want of the eyes of the Fleet, I should consider myself as most highly reprehensible. Never less than eight Frigates, and three good fast-sailing Brigs, should always be with the Fleet to watch Cadiz; and to carry Transports in and out to refit it, would take at least ten and four Brigs, to do that service well. At present I have only been able to collect two, which makes me very uneasy.”21
To the Rt. Hon. George Rose, vice president of the Board of Trade, on 6 October 1805: “I think, not for myself, but for the Country, therefore I hope the Admiralty will send . . . Frigates, and Sloops of War, for I am very destitute. . . . Therefore, if [Prime Minister] Mr. Pitt would hint to [Admiralty First Lord] Barham, that he shall be anxious until I get the force proposed, and plenty of Frigates and Sloops in order to watch them closely, it may be advantageous to the Country: you are at liberty to mention this to Mr. Pitt, but I would not wish it to go farther.”22
Clearly, as commander in chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Nelson was constantly in friction with Whitehall regarding his difficulties in making do with the small force under his command. The small numbers of frigates and dispatch vessels were the main problem. Adequate disposition to the east meant losses of merchant ships to the enemy in the west; shifting of frigates back to the west resulted in losses in the east—with strong complaints made to the Admiralty.
Nelson wrote the Admiralty, begging for frigates, until they stopped answering those parts of his letters. “It was only by the most persevering and ingenious economy in the employment of his small craft that Nelson was able to struggle along at all,” Forester explains. Dispatches were not sent, nor ships sent to dock, unless those ships could simultaneously convoy merchantmen. Frigates gathering intelligence were also searching for enemy privateers. All ship movements were planned weeks and months ahead. Nelson’s considerable skills at organization and his incredible attention to detail allowed this system to work—barely: “He kept his scanty forces on the move ceaselessly, round and round the Mediterranean, and once or twice ill-advised orders from London, over his head, upset the whole precarious arrangement and annoyed Nelson exceedingly, although he realized that the Admiralty had not appreciated how delicate were the workings with which they were interfering.”23
Two hundred frigates in the fleet seems a large number, by eighteenth-or twentieth-century standards, and it was certainly the greatest cruiser force ever seen in history. But “more than half of it was always under repair, fitting out or otherwise non-operational. Not until the last years of the next round of this war, when there were some 250 of such ships in commission and France’s frigates had been almost driven from the oceans and seas would there be British frigates to spare.”
Of course, other commanders had this same problem; it certainly was no eccentricity of Admiral Nelson. Another such commander was Lord St. Vincent. Hard pressed to handle French vice admiral Eustache Bruix, who was “descending upon him, St. Vincent warned Spencer and Nepean on May 10, 1799, that he had no frigates with which to track down Bruix, and that he could no longer protect convoys.”24
Lord Keith observed repeatedly that the number of cruisers at the disposal of a commander in chief was extremely limited; this was particularly true later on as the navy was stretched to the limit by the outbreak of further war with the United States.25 Lord Collingwood was as short of frigates, from 1805 to 1810, as Nelson ever was when operating as Mediterranean commander in chief.
Even as late as 6 July 1815, Rear Adm. Henry Hotham, writing from Quiberon Bay to Lord Keith, brings up this same lament: “As I am quite alone, if your Lordship can send me any vessel for communications I should be thankful; of those named [by] your Lordship . . . the Helicon, Telegraph and Nimble are absent on voyages to England.”26
What exactly were frigates tasked to do with regard to gathering intelligence? The different circumstances provide a wide range of examples. As a fleet commander, Nelson frequently operated in this pattern: “Leaving a frigate or some smaller cruiser at the appointed rendezvous, with intelligence as to where the flagship was to be found at any time, and dispersing his cruisers at various strategic points to keep watch for the enemy, Nelson sailed to and fro across a wide stretch of sea … through which the [enemy] fleet, wherever bound, would be obliged to pass.”27
The order below, written by Nelson on board HMS Victory to the captain of HMS Active on 5 December 1803, is typical of dozens of similar assignments in his letters:
Secret. Whereas it is of the utmost importance that the Enemy’s Squadron in Toulon should be most strictly watched, and that I should be made acquainted with their sailing and route with all dispatch, should they put to sea, You are therefore hereby required and directed to employ his Majesty’s Ship Active, under your command, on the above service. . . . Should the Enemy’s Squadron, or any part of it, put to sea in the meantime, or you obtain any intelligence necessary for my immediate information, you are to dispatch a Frigate to St. Pierres, near the Island of Sardinia, with an account thereof. . . . You are to continue on this service until relieved, or you receive my orders for your further proceedings.28
Another order directed Capt. Thomas Staines of HMS Cameleon to seek intelligence from merchant ships: “Whereas, it is probable, from the information I have received, that the Enemy’s Fleet may be at Sea, or that some of their Frigates, with Transports, having Troops on board, may be coming this way, You are therefore hereby required . . . to speak every Merchant-Vessel which you may be able to fall in with, for the purpose of gaining intelligence of any of the Enemy’s Ships or Vessels.”29
This order tasked Capt. Ross Donnelly of HMS Narcissus to actually contact people on shore in order to find out what was current; he was to proceed “into the Bay of Rosas, and endeavour to communicate with the shore, for the purpose of obtaining the latest and most correct information of what is passing in France.”30 This one directed Capt. Richard Moubray, of HMS Active, to execute a quick patrol through an area for information in the company of HMS Seahorse: “Proceed immediately to the head of the Gulf of Lyons, where you will take a sweep for the space of forty-eight hours, in order to obtain intelligence of the Enemy’s intended movements at Toulon.”31
Actually, large-scale sweeping was utilized as well. When Nelson briefly returned to England in the summer of 1805, “the whole system of cruiser control was carefully overhauled and reorganized by Barham and Nelson with a view to securing more efficient communications and protection of commerce. A line of frigates was directed to cruise between Cape Clear and Finisterre, and between Finisterre and St. Vincent, for the dual purpose of intelligence and trade protection. To the same end the telegraphic signal code of Sir Home Popham was issued to frigates as well as to battleships.”32 Sir Julian Corbett confirms that these new lines were primarily intelligence patrols.33
It must be observed that the presence of frigates, as intelligence-gathering sensors, did not always equate to successful operations. As an example, sighting no British blockaders in mid-January 1805, French vice admiral Pierre Charles Jean Baptiste Sylvestre de Villeneuve sortied from Toulon on the seventeenth. He was hopeful of combining with Adm. Edouard Thomas de Burgues, Comte de Missiessy, who had left Rochefort on 11 January. Missiessy had five ships of the line, three frigates, and thirty-five hundred embarked troops; he was successful in eluding the blockading forces of Rear Adm. Sir Thomas Graves. Villeneuve intended to join Missiessy with eleven ships of the line and seven frigates in an expedition to the West Indies. However, HM frigates Active and Seahorse were just over the horizon and shortly sighted the French fleet. After shadowing them for two days and, presumably, ascertaining their course, they broke contact to carry the news to Nelson at Agincourt Bay. Nelson’s diary reads that in the morning they had very heavy “squalls from the West-ward; Seahorse in sight coming down. At half-past nine, she made the signal that she had been chased by the Enemy’s Frigates; and at ten, that she had ‘Intelligence to communicate.’”34 Within two hours Nelson’s fleet was under way in hot pursuit.
This became an intelligence failure, however, for the French changed course after the British frigates broke contact. Only able to signal key information at very limited range, they had to choose between maintaining contact with the enemy and reporting their intelligence to the principal officer who needed it. Reporting required them to come almost into physical contact with Nelson, who then could only estimate, from the last sighting, where the French were bound. While his analysis was very sound, given the information available, as it turned out he guessed wrong and totally lost the trail. Fortunately, in this instance anyway, no real harm was done; the French had run into a gale and sustained significant damage to masts and rigging. Deciding they could not go on, the majority of the fleet returned to Toulon.35
One cannot leave the topic of frigates—as well as other small vessels—acting as the fleet’s eyes without the observation that the duty was not entirely safe. The enemy certainly was not happy about being observed, and when the opportunity presented itself to attack such a scout they were not very shy. Nelson comments on such an incident in a 10 August 1803 letter to Lady Hamilton, writing that “a Schooner belonging to me, put her nose into Toulon, and four Frigates popped out, and have taken her. . . . However, I hope to have an opportunity, very soon, of paying them the debt, with interest.”36 Two days later he instructed the captain of HMS Active, Richard Moubray, on such hazards: “It is not my intention to close watch Toulon, even with Frigates; for I see the gentlemen want one of our Frigates. . . . I beg you will not keep too close to Sepet or Sicie in the night.”37
Even if the enemy did not always pose a threat, the dangers of trying to handle large sailing ships in tight quarters and varying sea conditions always did. For example, the distinguished and experienced frigate captain Jahleel Brenton wrecked HMS Minerve, shortly after the war resumed in 1803, while scouting the approaches to Cherbourg. He was captured with his entire crew.38
MANY TYPES OF VESSELS were used by the navy for scouting, reconnaissance, and information transmission including sloops, brigs, cutters, schooners—and, of course, Post Office packets. However, it was the cruiser class known as frigates that played the key role relative to gathering, transmitting, and disseminating intelligence information. They were fast (though some finely designed French and Spanish ships of the line were faster!), they were formidable (carrying considerable armament, crews, and marine detachments), and they were versatile (capable of multiple simultaneous missions).
In a low-technology era, they were basic gatherers of intelligence for the fleet, continually working to identify the enemy’s location and what the enemy was doing, and then communicating that information back to the larger fleet concentrations. Although the navy owned many of them, they were always in short supply because of the heavy all-around demands present during a world war. Moreover, it took many units to cover the seven seas when the main sensor was the line-of-sight human eye. It is of some interest to speculate how things might have been different had there been more frigates operational earlier in the war.
