Peter Padfield - Broke and the Shannon: A classic biography of a British naval hero

BROKE

AND THE SHANNON

Peter Padfield

First published by Hodder and Stoughton Limited in 1968

Copyright Peter Padfield 1968

This edition published in 2021 by Lume Books

30 Great Guildford Street,

Borough, SE1 0HS

The right of Peter Padfield to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

FOR BUN

BROKE AND THE SHANNON

An account of the eight years during which

Captain Philip Bowes Vere Broke

commanded His Britannic Majestys frigate Shannon ,

of how the man made the ship

and the ship the man.

Also of Captain James Lawrence

and the United States frigate Chesapeake

who met them in chivalrous combat off Boston

and made history.

NOTE

All the conversation attributed to Broke in these pages is, with unimportant exceptions, taken either from his letters to various people or from accounts by witnesses to the action. Where the conversation is from his letters no attempt has been made to keep to the date of the letters; they may have been written years after or years before the cruise of the Shannon . They are nevertheless representative of Brokes views on the subject under discussion. The seeker after their chronological truth is provided with detailed notes in a Chronological Index at the back, showing where each quotation comes from and when.

Heres a health, brave Broke to you, to your officers and crew

Who aboard the Shannon fri gate fought so han dy O!

And may it always prove, that in fighting and in love,

The British tar for ever is the dan dy O!

Last verse of the sea shanty, Shannon and Chesapeake , still popular at the turn of the century.

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

Broke Hall stands four square and battlemented close by the river Orwell below the little village of Nacton in Suffolk. It is an unpretending house. The main gates are plain. The drive leads straight, shadowed and scented by limes either side, a long way before the plain oak front door. To the right the sun flashes off broad reaches of the river; ahead the ground rises and folds around the square house, the old flagstones and the lawns. Oak trees and evergreens complete its shelter from sea winds. Birds sing among them.

From the gentle high ground beneath these trees the view of the river and the far banks breathes England; there is nothing harsh, nothing swift, no feverish rapids, no sparkling pools, only the broad, easy stream leading in lazy curves to the sea. The far bank about a mile away rises alternately wooded and swelling with green and rich brown fields, pointed up with white houses, more trees, village churches, nothing to jar nature.

The only strange notes in all this peace are provided by the gulls; they pipe as shrilly and excitedly as ever a swarm of Boatswains Mates, mingling their sea noises with the land birds. For this is a meeting-place rural Suffolk with maritime England. A hundred sail and more have been anchored between those green banks within cannon shot of the house Britannias shield, their canvas-clouded masts have thrilled generations of slow farmers and labourers and villagers of Nacton, and their great guns in salute have startled the gentlemens deer in those fields once parks and caused pheasants to rise and drum away like Frenchmen.

Leading from Broke Hall down to the river there is an avenue of lime trees. It ends at a sand beach scattered with shingle which runs along the shore, narrowly dividing the grass banks and knotted roots of Suffolk from the mud flats at low water. Sea wrack in the mazy indentations. Salt smell of estuaries. Here is a silence and peace that is not of the twentieth century.

Here we can drift back through the years without intrusion, through generations of Brokes, through this century and the last until we come upon a boy wandering this same sand, his eyes filled with this expanse of water, his mind with great thoughts of the ships that pass upon it. He is dreaming of the day he can get to sea himself of the high, giddy adventure and romance of life under those raking spars, the far ports, the Indies, the skirmishes with Monsieur Crapaud, the brave epaulettes of an officer of the King, those tall ships! It is not unusual for East Coast boys to be seized in this way.

This boy is Philip Bowes Vere Broke, elder son of Philip Bowes Broke, Esquire, a solid, landed gentleman with literary tastes not wealthy but able to maintain his seat and his station comfortably from the few farms in Essex and Suffolk which go with the Broke estate. He has ambitions for a liberal education for his sons, Winchester, his old school perhaps, or Eton. But Philip is under the spell of the ships.

Young Philip has red hair from his mother, who is a parsons daughter, and from her also a firm religious grounding which admits of no uncertainties he is representative, perhaps, of the last generation of educated Englishmen who can go through life without doubt. From his mother and father and the extensive library at Broke Hall he has a taste for books and the Latin poets in their own tongue. He will carry with him through life as surely as his red hair this taste for literature, these classical ideas, this absolute faith in one God all mixed in with the quiet and beauty of Suffolk, the wild flowers along the edges of the fields and narrow, windy, tree-hung lanes, the slow herds the sea wind, keen from across the Orwell. He will also carry the stability and sense of station of a Broke descended from countless landed Brokes tracing back to Saxon times, from William de Doyto del Brooke, son of Adam, Lord of Leighton in Cheshire, through the Chief Baron of the Exchequer, Sir Richard Broke, builder of Broke Hall in 1526, and Captain Packington Broke, slain while in command of the frigate Fforesight at the battle of Solebay in 1665. Young Philip will feel the privilege of his position and the responsibilities that this privilege carries, one of which is to set an example in defence of his country even with his life.

We have moved on from the boy on the sand. He does not comprehend all this yet, and is only concerned with persuading his father that there is really only one career for him, His Majestys Navy. His father, disappointed, makes a compromise: young Philip may attend the Naval Academy at Portsmouth; this, although a most unfashionable way of entering the sea service and frowned upon by stalwarts of the old school as a sink of vice and abomination, is probably a kinder introduction for a lad than the fearful squalor of the gunroom in a man-of-war certainly more likely to encourage study.

So from the age of twelve until he is fifteen Philip studies the theory and high art of seamanship under canvas and obtains some glimpses into the New Principles of Gunnery, which have been propounded recently by an Englishman named Benjamin Robins, and which bring the light of science to this hitherto mysterious practice: the flight of a ball does not conform to a parabola in flight, but is continuously retarded by the air it pushes, and most surprising, the spin imparted to a ball by contact with one or other side of the bore as it leaves the muzzle will cause it to curve towards that side during its flight.

The Naval College instructors are not convinced of the practicality of this science, knowing well that the art of Naval gunnery consists in laying the ship so close to the enemy that the shot cannot miss however it leaves the barrel and whatever it does thereafter. More important is the composition of the powder and its preservation in the damp magazines below the waterline.