First Battle of Cape Finisterre, 1747: Anson's general chase

Five months apart in 1747, two British squadrons fought two battles off the Bay of Biscay that both carry the name of Cape Finisterre; French and Canadian historians often call the first one the battle of Cape Ortegal. The second, Hawke's in October, is the better remembered. The first, in May, made George Anson a peer and gave the Royal Navy a French ship of the type that would become the backbone of its fleet.²

Background: convoys to the colonies

The War of the Austrian Succession set Britain and Austria against France, Prussia and Spain, and at sea the British tried to cut France off from its colonies. In 1745 an Anglo-American expedition, with Peter Warren commanding at sea, had taken the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, and a great French fleet sent in 1746 to retake it had been wrecked by storm and disease off Nova Scotia.³

In the spring of 1747 the French tried again. Two expeditions were to sail together for safety: the Marquis de La Jonquière, a veteran of the 1746 disaster who had since been named governor general of New France, with a squadron meant for North America, and Captain Grou de Saint-Georges of the French East India Company, bound for the Indian Ocean. With their merchantmen and Company ships they made up a convoy of about 30 ships by the reckoning of the Royal Collection and the Maritime Archaeology Trust, 38 by W. Laird Clowes's count and 39 in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.⁴ › Battle of Dettingen, 1743

Armies and commanders

George Anson was already famous. In 1740 he had sailed for the Pacific with six poorly manned ships to raid the Spanish, lost three of them rounding Cape Horn and more than half of his men to scurvy, and in 1743, with the Centurion, his one remaining ship, captured the Manila treasure galleon Nuestra Señora de Covadonga off the Philippines. He came home in 1744 a rich man. In 1747 he commanded the Western Squadron, the fleet that guarded the approaches to the Channel, with Rear Admiral Peter Warren, the victor of Louisbourg, as his second.⁵

The Admiralty knew the French plans and gave Anson a decisive advantage: 14 ships of the line and two frigates. Against them La Jonquière could form a line of only a handful of real warships, padded out with armed East India Company ships. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography sets 312 French guns against 978 British, and the naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan counted 14 British ships against 8 French, weaker individually as well as in number.⁶

The battle in phases

The sighting

On 14 May by the modern calendar, 3 May by the Old Style calendar still used in Britain, the British sighted the French some 24 or 25 leagues out to sea from the Spanish coast. La Jonquière did what an escort commander had to do. He ordered his best ships to shorten sail and form a line of battle between the enemy and the convoy, while the merchantmen crowded on sail and ran to the west.⁷

From line of battle to general chase

Anson at first signaled for a line of battle of his own, apparently believing, in Clowes's account, that he faced a stronger squadron than he did. Warren urged a general chase instead, as both Clowes and the National Maritime Museum record, and Anson replaced the signal with one that freed each captain to close the enemy as fast as his ship could sail. Samuel Scott's painting of the battle records the signals: at 2 p.m. Anson's 90-gun flagship, the Prince George, flew the order to chase to the southwest, and at 3 p.m. the red flag at the mainmast head, the order to engage without regard to the line of battle.⁸

Mahan, writing in 1890, drew the battle's one tactical lesson from it: when a beaten or much weaker enemy is running, order must give way to a general chase, letting the fastest ships overtake the slowest of the pursued. The Canadian biographer of La Jonquière saw it less kindly, judging that Anson attacked rather uncertainly and so gave the merchant ships time to escape.⁹

The running fight

The faster British ships fell on the rear of the French line one after another. The fight lasted from about 4 to 7 p.m. in Clowes's account, about five hours according to the Royal Collection and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. La Jonquière's flagship, the 64-gun Sérieux, was battered into surrender, and he himself was wounded. Several French captains, Clowes writes, fought with great courage while some of the Company ships thought only of saving themselves.¹⁰

L'Invincible, a new two-decker of 74 guns under Saint-Georges, fought on to cover the convoy. Here the sources disagree on the finale. The Maritime Archaeology Trust says L'Invincible was the last ship to strike her colors, while the Dictionary of Canadian Biography gives that honor to the Diamant. In Scott's painting L'Invincible lies beside the Prince George with her mainmast falling, surrendering to Anson as his flagship arrives.¹¹

The convoy

Once the French line had struck, Anson sent ships after the convoy. How much of it they caught is again disputed. Clowes has the Monmouth, Yarmouth and Nottingham take three more ships and six merchantmen before night saved the rest; the Royal Collection Trust counts four French ships of the line, two frigates and seven merchantmen captured in all, the Yale Center six men-of-war and four merchant ships, and the National Maritime Museum eleven of the twelve ships in the French line and three of the convoy. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says the merchantmen reached their destination without further interference.¹²

Turning point

The battle was decided when Anson gave up the line. A formal line of battle would have let La Jonquière's escort hold the British off while the convoy escaped; the general chase let the fastest British ships catch the French line from behind and crush it ship by ship. That, in Mahan's reading, is the lesson of both battles of 1747.¹³

Aftermath

For a chase the battle was costly. Clowes gives about 700 French and 520 British killed and wounded. La Jonquière was taken prisoner to England and reached Quebec as governor general only in 1749, after the peace. On the British side Captain Thomas Grenville of the Defiance was killed; his uncle Lord Cobham raised a column to his memory in the gardens at Stowe the following year. Anson was raised to the peerage and Warren made a Knight of the Bath.¹⁴

All the captured warships were bought into the Royal Navy. L'Invincible, built at Rochefort in 1744, kept her name and became the most influential prize of all. With two decks, 74 guns and a crew of 700, she combined firepower that could match all but the largest three-deckers with the speed of much smaller ships. Historic England credits the study of her design with giving rise to the Royal Navy's very successful 74-gun ships, and the Maritime Archaeology Trust notes that the 74 became the backbone of the fleet for half a century: sixteen fought at Trafalgar.¹⁵

Legacy and memory

Five months later Hawke caught another French convoy farther out in the Bay of Biscay, and the two victories together left France without a battle fleet. Mahan wrote that the two encounters of 1747 completed the destruction of the French fighting navy. In 1748 neither France nor Spain could mount an effective naval counterstroke, and the war ended that year.¹⁶ › Second Battle of Cape Finisterre, 1747

Anson went on to reform the navy as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1751 to 1756 and again from 1757, and both Britannica and the National Maritime Museum credit his reforms with a large share in the victories of the Seven Years' War. Invincible herself served as a flagship until 1758, when she ran aground in the Solent on her way to the second siege of Louisbourg. Her wreck was found by a fisherman in 1979 and has been a designated historic wreck under the Protection of Wrecks Act since 1980.¹⁷