Ch. 4.2. The British Royal Navy

Through the early 1500s England had only a small navy, consisting of no more than a few dozen ships for patrolling the coast. England gradually began to build its naval forces after about the middle of the 1500s, in part due to efforts to establish overseas colonies and compete with other powers, such as Spain and France, for a share of the lucrative trade in products from tropical areas, including spices from south and southeast Asia, slaves from Africa, sugar from Brazil and the Caribbean islands, and silver from Mexico and South America–the latter often seized by English pirates from Spanish ships. England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 marked a turning point towards a greater emphasis on sea power. But from the early 1600s and through most of this century, the Netherlands remained the leading maritime power.

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In the late 1600s England fought a series of wars with the Netherlands, and by the early 1700s the British Royal Navy (in 1707 England combined with Scotland to make the larger country of Great Britain) grew to be the largest and most powerful ocean-going navy in the world. What this meant, however, requires careful analysis. It meant most obviously, that the British navy had more and (often) better warships than any other nation. In a pitched battle with any other navy, Britain was likely to win. But in fact even Britain’s naval power was extremely limited. This becomes clear once one considers the total number of warships that Britain had, given the tasks assigned to it, which stretched across several regions of the globe. Most of the navy was always assigned to home defense, around the British Islands themselves, and in the nearby English Channel and North Sea, to protect against possible attacks from the Netherlands, France, Spain, and other powers. Other ships aided in the defense of trading routes frequented by British shipping, the most lucrative of which went to Africa, the Caribbean, and around Africa to south and southeast Asia. The North American mainland’s coast was a very low priority, to which the British navy never assigned more than a few ships, at least in the period before the American Revolution.

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To count the total number of Britain’s or any other country’s warships in the 1700s is complicated by the fact that only the larger ships are well documented, and any given ship had a relatively brief period of sea-worthiness; ships often had to be repaired or de-commissioned. The largest ships were called “ships of the line,” because they had the largest number of canons, and thus could face-off in a line of ships against a similar line of the largest enemy ships. Over the 1700s the number of canons on ships gradually increased.

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In the mid-1700s Britain had about 300 of the largest sizes of warships, which by the later years of the American Revolution (in 1783) had increased to about 500. Of these, about 150 were “ships of the line” with at least 50-100 canons. Another 350 large warships were classified as “frigates,” which usually had about 20-50 canons. In addition to these large battleships, the British Navy also depended on much larger numbers of smaller ships, which went by various names, including corsairs, schooners, etc.

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Through most of the 1700s France had the second-largest and most effective navy, but it was usually about half the size of Britain’s, and it typically focused on a defensive role.

After 1776 a U.S. Continental Navy was created, but it remained very small (with about 10-25 frigates and perhaps 50 smaller vessels), and by 1779 it had been eliminated as a factor in the revolutionary war. However, many smaller, private or state-sponsored ships played a major role in harassing British naval ships and merchants. During the revolutionary war the U.S. Congress licensed more than 1,700 such “privateer” missions, which involved at least 800 different ships (see the Constitution, Article I, section 8, clause 11 = C1.8.11). A few states also licensed privateers. Scholars estimate that all told such privateers captured or sank somewhere between 600 and 2000 British ships, mostly smaller ones.