The Glorious First of June, 1794: Howe's victory and the grain convoy

In the spring of 1794 France was short of bread. A convoy of 117 ships was crossing from America to Brest with, according to the Oxford Companion to British History, 67,000 barrels of flour for the hungry capital. Putting the French fleet to sea to protect it was a political order, not a naval choice. Villaret later told the British naval writer Edward Brenton that Robespierre had sent him out and warned that his head would answer for it under the guillotine if the convoy were lost.²

The hunt in the Atlantic

Admiral Richard Howe, nicknamed Black Dick and 69 years old, sailed from Spithead on 2 May with 26 ships of the line under his own command, after detaching six more under Rear-Admiral Montagu to cover convoys. He looked for the grain fleet out in the Atlantic, found nothing, and on returning to Ushant learned that the French had left Brest: 25 ships of the line had slipped past him in the mist and been joined by one more.³ › Richard Howe

The fleets met on 28 May, some 365 nautical miles off Ushant, the Royal Museums Greenwich records. In the first clash the British van mauled the rear of the French line and crippled the three-decker Révolutionnaire. On 29 May Howe in his flagship Queen Charlotte broke through the French line and gained the weather gauge, the windward position that let him choose when to attack. Then fog came down. For two days the fleets drifted out of touch while Villaret drew Howe farther from the convoy, and Howe waited for clear weather and enough daylight to finish the job.⁴

The first of June

On the morning of 1 June, about 225 nautical miles west of the first contact, Howe signaled that he meant to pass between the enemy ships and engage them from leeward. He wanted each ship to break through the French line and fight at close range. Not every captain understood the signal. The Queen Charlotte fought the French flagship Montagne, of 120 guns, but lost her fore-topmast and dropped astern, and the Montagne escaped.⁵

Elsewhere the French line was torn apart. Six French ships of the line struck their colors. A seventh, the Vengeur du Peuple, which had fought a long duel with HMS Brunswick, sank, a rare event in the age of sail when wooden ships were very hard to send to the bottom. British boats pulled survivors from the water, the scene Philip James de Loutherbourg put in the foreground of his painting for the Royal Museums Greenwich collection. A persistent story in the British fleet held that another French ship, the Jacobin, had also gone down fighting with her upper guns still firing; Payne notes that it was untrue and that Howe never claimed it.⁶

Counting the cost

The losses were very unequal. The Oxford Companion to British History gives about 1,500 French killed against 300 British, with no British ship lost. Alan Payne, writing for the Naval Historical Society of Australia, counts more than a thousand French casualties in the seven ships taken or sunk alone. In the age of sail, he adds, losses in a fleet battle fell almost entirely on the beaten side.⁷

A victory without the prize

Howe did not pursue. His own journal lists the Marlborough and Defence totally dismasted and the 2 and 3 June spent fitting jury masts and taking the prizes in tow; Captain Cuthbert Collingwood wrote that their condition did not admit of further pursuit. Payne cites a later account by Vice-Admiral William Dillon, who served in the battle as a midshipman, that the Captain of the Fleet, Sir Roger Curtis, persuaded the exhausted admiral to make sure of what he had won. The grain convoy was never even sighted by the British, and it reached Brest unharmed.⁸

Villaret's verdict, as Brenton reported it, was blunt: he had cared nothing for the half dozen rotten old hulks he lost, because he had saved the convoy and his head. Payne warns that Brenton was a biased witness. In Britain the action was popularly hailed as a triumph over French republicanism. Howe's order to break the enemy line at every point and fight at close quarters pointed toward the battles Nelson would fight at Cape St. Vincent and Trafalgar. Payne judges that it set the standard for British naval superiority for the next 20 years of war.⁹