Naval architecture saved the United States at its birth

ABSTRACT

Naval architecture was developed by European sailing navies (mostly France and Spain) as a force multiplier against Britain. It became the basis for the design of the combined French-Spanish Bourbon Armada, which fought the British Navy around the globe, outnumbering and overwhelming it during the War of American Independence. Coppering, which reduced resistance, was one of the most important naval technologies developed during the war. The French frigate Concorde, designed with most advanced naval architecture theory of the era and fully coppered, carried the key dispatches that enabled French and American forces to coordinate and converge at Yorktown in 1781. All of these actions, taken together, forced Britain to sue for peace, resulting in an independent United States of America.

KEYWORDS:

• American revolution
• War of American Independence
• battle of the Chesapeake
• Yorktown
• naval architecture
• hydrodynamics
• coppering
• French navy
• Spanish navy
• Bourbon Family Compact

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The ‘bow shock theory’ of fluid resistance was based on Isaac Newton’s ‘solid of least resistance’ proposed in his 1687 Principia mathematica. It was concerned with the ‘shock’ of the water against the bows, and completely ignored the rest of the ship and frictional resistance. Pierre Bouguer provided a systematic, practical method of analysis, working with Duhamel du Monceau to reduce that hydrodynamic analysis to rote calculation, which became an integral part of French ship design for several decades. For many centuries, naval historians have attributed the higher speeds of French warships, which were attested to by British naval officers, to the French use of hydrodynamic theory. However, more recent investigations using modern fluid dynamics and computer simulation have called into question the assertion that improved hull forms were responsible for the higher speeds, given the fact that sailing warships of the 18th century operated at low Froude numbers, where frictional resistance, not resistance due to hull form, plays the dominant role (Ferreiro 2010, 2006, pp. 176–179, 2020, pp. 41–42).

2 Concorde, built in 1778, had been coppered in 1779 and in March 1780 had completed an overhaul and hull cleaning at Brest, where it remained until it departed for America in March 1781 (Demerliac, 1996, p. 61). The great advantages of coppering to defeat wood-borers and reduce frictional resistance were seen even at the time. In 1780, at the height of the naval conflicts, a British naval officer, Walter Young, wrote to the Controller of the Navy, Charles Middleton, 1st Baron Barham: ‘For God’s sake and our country’s, send out copper-bottomed ships to relieve the fouled and crippled ones. With those, everything will be done; if you do not, nothing but misery and distress must ensue’. A later analysis (1783) by the Spanish navy of the performance of their coppered versus uncoppered ships led the Spanish admiral Luis de Córdova y Córdova to declare, ‘Navío que no se forre de cobre no vale nada (uncoppered ships are worthless)’ (Ferreiro 2018a, p. 64). The effect of coppering on ship and fleet performance was made clear in the sea chase in March 1781 between the French fleet commanded by Chevalier Destouches, and the British fleet commanded by Admiral Arbuthnot. A modern analysis of their logbooks shows that, under the same weather and sea conditions on the same day, the coppered British fleet had a 10% speed advantage over the uncoppered French fleet (Ferreiro 2018b). It is worth noting that the importance of coppering was universally recognized, so that by the time of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, all the ships of the three fleets – Spanish, French and British – were coppered.

3 Concorde was one of the fastest ships in the French fleet: The French naval officer LaTouche-Treville wrote in 1780 that he considered his frigate Hermione, once it was coppered, to be ‘one of the best frigates the King owns’. This statement applies equally to its coppered sister-ship Concorde (Villiers and Lemineur 2016, p. 126). This appraisal is confirmed by modern evaluations by British and French naval historians, who compared contemporary sailing reports of French frigates, and affirmed that Chevillard’s frigates ‘out-performed all other frigates’ and were indeed faster than British frigates (Boudriot et al. 1993, p. 137).

4 The masting, rigging and sail arrangement for Concorde undoubtedly contributed greatly to its speed, but there is little known about them, as they were generally absent from the plans submitted by naval constructors. In both the French and British navies, the ship’s captain had great discretion as to the sparring, rigging and use of sails, which could vary almost as much between ships of the same fleet, as between British and French ships. Although there was a great deal written about sails and masting by Bouguer and other 18th-century scientists, almost none of their insights found their way into actual ship construction (Ferreiro 2006, pp. 100–112).