Tecumseh and Brock (9 page)

Chapter 4

Isaac Brock and the Defence
of the Canadas

T
HE FATE OF
THE GLOBAL ENTERPRISE
that became the second British Empire — the first British Empire having been destroyed by the American Revolution — hung in the balance at the turn of the century. The struggle between Britain and France would determine which power would dominate the world in the nineteenth century. If the French succeeded in landing an army on British soil, Britain would lose the war and would be reduced to an offshore island in France's imperial sphere. Political and military leaders in London were keenly aware that all means at their disposal must be mobilized for the struggle.

Britain had two services in its arsenal: the great shield provided by the Royal Navy, and the sword in the hand of the British army. Take away its naval supremacy and Britain would have been doomed. The leaders of the British government and the admirals of the Royal Navy were prepared to do whatever was needed to sustain British command of the seas around the world. In the years prior to the War of 1812, the dominance of the Royal Navy over the fleets of other states is captured in the fact that it deployed 152 ships of the line, compared with 46 by the French, 13 by the Netherlands, 28 by Spain, and 33 by Russia, with some of the Russian ships interned under British command. The Royal Navy had 183 cruisers, France 31, the Netherlands 7, Spain 17, and Russia 10.
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During the wars between Britain and France from 1793 to 1815, 103,660 men died while serving in the Royal Navy. Illness and personal accidents carried off 84,440 (81.5 percent) of these men. A further 12,680 (12.2 percent) of the deaths resulted from non-combat calamities, mostly shipwrecks, the foundering of vessels, and fires. Enemy action took the lives of 6,540 (6.3 percent) of the naval force.
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Over the course of the Napoleonic War, the Royal Navy was globally pre-eminent, not only as a weapon of war but also as an industrial enterprise. Together, the dockyards of the navy were the world's leading industrial operations. In 1803, 100,000 seamen and marines served in the Royal Navy. The navy sustained this complement and then increased it to 145,000 men in 1810 and kept it at that level through 1812, after which the number of seamen and marines declined to 117,000 in 1814 and 90,000 the following year. Maintaining this huge fighting force severely strained the British treasury. In 1803, the Royal Navy received a grant of just over ten million pounds, and that sum increased year by year to a peak of just over twenty million pounds in 1813.
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The immense effort to sustain and expand the Royal Navy, in addition to the risks faced by men in the service, pressured those in charge of the Admiralty — the strategy was crafted by a small group of senior officers and civilians in the Admiralty Board Room in London
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— to take decisions that were bound to generate intense conflict, and possibly war, with the United States.

In theory, service in the Royal Navy and in the army was voluntary. In practice, the masters of the Royal Navy had to resort to desperate measures to keep up the complement of men on the ships. Impressment was the solution. The British state took unto itself the right to bodily carry off men for service — and not just the deserters they found on American ships. Lieutenants in British port towns organized gangs of ruffians to seize able-bodied men to serve on ships. Exempt were gentlemen (those of sufficient means), those under eighteen or over fifty-five, seamen already in the Royal Navy, fishermen, tradesmen, apprentices, and a few others. Royal Navy ships also stopped merchant ships returning to home ports and impressed their most promising sailors. Once impressed, men were often offered the opportunity to “volunteer,” which made them eligible to receive a bonus that varied over the period of the wars with France from one pound ten shillings to ten pounds. Genuine volunteers may have accounted for as few as one-quarter of those serving on the ships of the Royal Navy.
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Early-nineteenth-century warships combined the most advanced industrial technology of the day with the technology of a much earlier period. Wooden vessels, propelled by wind and deploying as much sail as possible to ensure maximum speed and manoeuvrability, coexisted with the rising firepower of guns — cannon, we would call them — and mortars. The ships of the line were packed with enormous firepower. They were the most concentrated engines of destruction in existence at the time. Although most of those who died while serving on ships were not killed in action, casualties were extremely high when naval battles erupted. When warships fought each other broadside, unleashing their firepower at close range, ships and masts were torn asunder and men were blown to bits.

The most crucial battle of the age was Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson's decisive victory at Trafalgar in 1805, fought off the southwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula. Against the combined fleets of France and Spain, Nelson managed a triumph that was the very opposite of the normally inconclusive battles at sea. Nelson used his uncanny understanding of the dictates and tactics of naval war to achieve Britain's most strategically important victory on the seas.
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And he died in the fight, becoming as a result Britain's pre-eminent naval hero.

At Trafalgar the British did not overturn Napoleon's empire, but they gained for themselves much needed protection against a French invasion of the British Isles. In the end, it would be a soldier, not an admiral, who would finish off Napoleon — the Duke of Wellington, at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Similarly, in North America, the Royal Navy would be indispensable to Britain's defence of its holdings in North America. But it was soldiers who would have to mount a defence along an all-too-lengthy border when the Americans launched their war. While soldiers in the United States were most often farm boys, in Britain they were as likely to be recruited from the urban poor, from coal-mining or cloth-manufacturing towns.

The men who served in the army's rank and file were drawn from among the poorest segments of society in the British Isles. English, Irish, and Scots, they manned the regiments that served at home and in the colonies. Common soldiers were paid a pittance — seven shillings a week — from which were subtracted sums to cover rations, personal equipment, and materials for washing and cleaning. The soldier was fortunate to receive one and a half shillings after these deductions. British soldiers were poorly housed and clothed and inadequately fed. They spent long periods of time stationed away from wives and children. A small number of wives — ranging from six to twelve, depending on where the unit was stationed — were allowed to accompany about one hundred men. These women were charged with doing the washing and often cared for the wounded and the sick.
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Officers, who regularly purchased their posts, came from higher rungs on the social ladder, from prosperous merchant families and families of the gentry. For them, as for enlisted men, the army was a calling for life. It was a tough, wearisome existence, especially for those posted in distant colonies. The generous consumption of alcohol made the drabness more endurable. Wars and battles punctuated army life with excitement, danger, and fear.

Reliability was the quality most prized in the British army. Regiments were trained to perform on battlefields the way the new machines in British industry performed. Soldiers were disciplined to follow orders while under fire, and officers learned how to give those orders and maintain cohesion when it counted.

Many of the top officers were better suited to politics or administration. But among them were men with genuine military talent, and, more rarely, warriors with the skills to inspire men and the foolhardiness and daring to throw caution to the wind on the battlefield. One of these was Isaac Brock.

Isaac Brock was a career soldier from a very early age. The British army was much more than his vocation. It was his entree to the world; it was his taskmaster, his school, his life.

Brock was born in a setting that could hardly have been more different from that of Tecumseh, his future comrade-in-arms. The two did share one crucially important commonality: both were born on
the front line, Tecumseh in the Ohio country and Brock on the Channel
Island of Guernsey, off the coast of Normandy, in a centuries-old conflict zone between England and France. Although Brock fashioned himself a British general in appearance and manners, and even in his exquisitely crafted letters and superb penmanship, he was at heart a Guernseyman.

The eighth son among fourteen children, Brock was born in St. Peter Port, the chief town and capital of Guernsey, on October 6, 1769. Brock's father, John, had married Elizabeth de Lisle, the daughter of the bailiff of Guernsey. With deep roots in island society, the Brock family was linked to other leading families through marriage. Although John Brock died at the age of forty-eight while taking the waters at Dinan in Brittany for his health, he managed to endow his wife and their large brood with the means for a comfortable middle-class life.

The Brock family traced its history in Guernsey to the sixteenth century, a turbulent time in the Channel Islands during an often violent transition from Catholicism to Protestantism. With Jersey only fourteen kilometres from the Norman coast at its closest point, and Guernsey farther west, the major Channel Islands were caught amid sociopolitical forces from England and France. The government of Elizabeth I wanted to impose Anglicanism on the islands, but the population was heavily influenced by French Calvinism as well as by the Protestantism of the Huguenots, some of whom fled to Guernsey and Jersey and the smaller Channel Islands to escape Catholic persecution in France. Pockets of Catholicism survived in the islands; among Anglicans, the Calvinist hue remained.

The societies of Guernsey and Jersey hummed with commercial energy. The leading families of Guernsey developed trading links with many parts of the world. They shared little in common with the English aristocracy — making money and dirtying their hands in commerce, much abhorred by the great English aristocrats, was the lifeblood of the Guernsey merchants. This put them on the leading edge of the rising international capitalism, much in the manner of Holland. Many of the leading Guernsey families, including the Brocks, set up as privateers, licensed pirates who obtained letters of marque from the English Crown. They attacked Spanish and French ships carrying bullion on the high seas, handing most of it over to the Crown but keeping an important share for themselves. It is not unlikely that some ambitious Guernsey privateers acquired letters of marque from France as well as England, which allowed them to attack English ships in addition to those of France and Spain. Energy, vitality, and the ability to adapt to changing conditions were the hallmarks of the leading families of Guernsey, and Isaac Brock was unmistakably in their mould.

In his youth, Brock excelled at swimming and boxing. One of his favourite activities was to swim to Castle Cornet, a military strongpoint six hundred metres offshore. He attended school in Southampton when he was ten and spent a year in Rotterdam, where he was taught in French by a Protestant clergyman. After school, he devoted a great deal of time to devouring books on military tactics and science, as well as on ancient history. He grew to a height of six foot two, unusually tall in his day. At the time of his death, measurements taken from his uniform revealed an ample waist size of forty-seven inches. A few inches can be subtracted from this girth, since his uniform had to be loose fitting so he could move in it on a battlefield.

At the time, it was a common practice for men of means to purchase a rank and then sell it when they purchased a higher rank. In 1785, when Brock was fifteen, his family purchased for him the rank of ensign in the 8th (King's) Regiment of Foot, in which his eldest brother, John, also served. In 1790, Brock purchased the rank of lieutenant. That same year, he raised his own company of soldiers, for which he was promoted to captain. Soon after, he was transferred to the 49th (Hertfordshire) Regiment of Foot, joining the unit in Barbados in 1791 and serving subsequently in Jamaica. In 1793, he contracted a fever and nearly died, only recovering fully during sick leave after his return to England in 1793.
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Captain Brock was assigned the task of recruiting men into the army, initially in England and later in Jersey. Discontent and threats of mutiny were all too common in the British forces. In 1797, by which time Brock had purchased the rank of lieutenant colonel, major mutinies broke out among Royal Navy sailors at Spithead, near Portsmouth, and Nore, in the Thames estuary. The mutinous sailors wanted their living conditions improved and they demanded a pay raise to make up for the high inflation of recent decades. At a time when Britain was at war with revolutionary France, there were fears within the upper classes and the higher ranks of the Royal Navy that the mutinies could spark a revolution in Britain.

As the mutinies gained strength, the objectives of the leaders of the movement spread beyond the typical trade-union-style demands of better working conditions and a raise in pay; they included pardons for mutineers, the election of a new parliament, and peace with France. In the end, the movement was divided and the radical elements among the mutineers lost the support of many of the sailors. The authorities prevailed and the mutinies collapsed.

Richard Parker, the leader of the Nore mutiny, was convicted of treason and piracy and was hanged from the yardarm of the HMS
Sandwich
, the vessel on which the uprising had begun. In all, twenty-nine leaders of the mutinies were hanged; others were flogged, and still others were sent to Australia.

In the summer of 1797, when the naval mutinies were reaching their peak, Brock's regiment was stationed on the banks of the Thames. Many of the men in the regiment felt sympathy for the mutineers and identified with their goals. Brock acted to deal with grievances and to restore discipline. When the regiment was stationed in Jersey in 1800, Brock went on leave for several months, during which time the men were commanded by a much disliked junior lieutenant colonel. The regiment was standing at ease in front of the barracks at St. Helier when the men recognized Brock striding into view. They gave him three loud cheers. He immediately rebuked them for unmilitary conduct and sent them to their barracks, where they were confined for a week.
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Brock was popular, but he was a staunch disciplinarian.