The flying squadron

Author's Note

The depredations of privateers are largely unrecorded in purely naval histories, but 'letters-of-marque and reprisal' were issued in copious numbers by both the French and American governments at this time. Indeed, most American merchant ships carried them, so the distinction between the dedicated privateer and the opportunist cargo-carrier is somewhat blurred. However, the astonishing successes of the corsairs in the war against British trade were far from insignificant and the most interesting of the vessels used by the Americans was the Baltimore clipper schooner which possessed a revolutionary new hull form, with hollow entry and run, the antithesis of the frigates and sloops sent against them. Nevertheless, many were captured and, like the fast French frigates before them, adopted and copied by the Royal Navy.

The lengths to which the British went to keep Wellington's army in the Iberian peninsula supplied were often devious. American traders were quite happy to supply both sides, no matter their government was at war with one of them. Much of the investment available for the later expansion of nineteenth-century America originally came from this source.

Napoleon assiduously worked on an American rupture with Great Britain, seeking to embroil his implacable enemy with an opponent who had designs on Canada and posed a very real threat at sea.

Henry Vansittart is my own invention, though a King's messenger was sent to Washington at the time Drinkwater first arrived in the Potomac. The surplus of American naval officers is also a fact; many brilliant young men were unable to find employment in naval vessels and were driven, like Stewart, to find other ways of demonstrating the fervour of their patriotism.

The value of the frigate actions between the Royal and United States navies was much exaggerated and had little real effect. In America they provided the foundation for a tradition of glory; in Britain they were taken as a sign that the Royal Navy was in decline. The Americans assumed that, like schoolboys with a triumphant conker, the victor accrued to itself the triumphs of its victim. This was plainly nonsense. The value of a navy rests on its strategic power and the fate of its individual parts is only significant if it materially affects this. The Royal Navy suffered such damage in the early years of the Second World War, not between 1812 and 1814. The defeat of a handful of British cruisers did not diminish the great and wearying achievement of continental blockade and when this was extended to America, the balance swung back in favour of the British. Nevertheless, it rattled the British public at the time, and was thought to be of greater importance than the destruction of the Grand Army in the cold of a Russian winter.