Sir Peter Parker

(1721–December 21, 1811)

English Admiral

Parker is best remembered for commanding the ill-fated expedition against Charleston, South Carolina, in 1776. Intensely brave and a fine sailor, he overcame this defeat to serve as Admiral of the Fleet and was a patron of the famous Horatio Nelson. 

Peter Parker was born probably in Ireland in 1721, the son of Adm. Christopher Parker. After serving several years aboard ships as a cabin boy, he followed his father into the naval profession by becoming a lieutenant in 1741. Parker then served with a succession of warships in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, rising to captain in 1747. His first command, the small frigate HMS Margate, returned to the Mediterranean for two years before sailing home at the conclusion of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1749. Parker was subsequently placed on half-pay and stationed ashore until 1755, when he directed construction of the HMS Woolwich at Bristol. He then conducted that vessel on several successful cruises before returning to half-pay status at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763. Parker spent the next decade ashore, receiving a knighthood but scarcely any employment. In 1773, he was placed at the helm of the 50-gun vessel HMS Bristol and, three years later, received control of a small naval squadron with the rank of commodore. Parker then departed England for service in American waters during the Revolutionary War. 

In February 1776, Parker sailed from Plymouth en route to North Carolina. He conveyed seven army regiments as reinforcements for Gen. Henry Clinton, with whom he would rendezvous off the Carolina coast. Bad weather interrupted his journey for several weeks, and it was not until May 1776 that his squadron reached its destination. Parker and Clinton united for the purpose of landing and establishing a safe haven for numerous Loyalist sympathizers in the region. These forces were supposed to secure a landing zone for the fleet in advance, but in the wake of their defeat at Moore's Creek Bridge, this proved impractical. Parker and Clinton then decided to hit a secondary target, the South Carolina capital of Charleston, which was rumored to be lightly defended. Its seizure would facilitate the reconquest of the South and serve as a rallying point for thousands of Loyalists. 

Charleston was, in fact, imperfectly defended. Its major fortification was a small fort on Sullivan's Island in the harbor, commanded by Col. William Moultrie. He directed a small garrison of 26 guns and 430 men. Another 600 riflemen were stationed at either end of the island. The fort itself was only half-finished, being covered with sand and newly sawed palmetto logs. Based on initial appearances, Sullivan's Island did not appear capable of putting up much resistance. Parker and Sullivan certainly concurred when they anchored off Charleston on June 1, 1776. The British armada consisted of nine warships carrying 280 guns, as well as an invasion force of 2,500 soldiers. However, the British lacked navigation charts, and nearly four weeks lapsed before soundings could be taken and the battle commenced. The Americans put this respite to good use by shoring up Sullivan's Island, awaiting the inevitable onslaught. 

On the morning of June 28, 1776, Parker's squadron entered the harbor and expertly assumed bombardment positions. The fleet then ladled the American position with a heavy concentration of solid shot and exploding mortar balls. Much to the surprise of both sides, little damage was inflicted upon Moultrie's fort. The sand embankment absorbed much of the exploding shells while the spongy wood of the palmetto logs did the same to the round shot. By comparison, Moultrie's gunners kept up a steady stream of heated balls at Parker's vessels, damaging several. One round cut the cable of Parker's flagship, and it drifted around, permitting a raking fire. Numerous shots killed and wounded virtually everybody on the quarterdeck while the crew worked furiously to right the vessel. Parker himself had a very close call when a red-hot ball tore most of his clothes off, burning him. Clinton, meanwhile, tried to land boatloads of troops on the island, but he was repulsed by the riflemen. 

Worse, three frigates were grounded, and one, the HMS Acteon, became lodged and had to be burned. After a lopsided engagement of 10 hours, the twice-wounded Parker finally conceded defeat and withdrew. British casualties numbered upward of 250 men; the Americans sustained just 12 killed and 25 wounded. The defeat at Charleston, minor in military terms, subsequently became a tremendous symbolic victory, a rallying point for the entire nation. 

Parker's squadron limped back to New York, where it joined forces with Adm. Richard Howe. In this capacity he participated in the landing of British troops on Long Island in August 1776, which resulted in the American abandonment of New York City and vicinity. That December, Parker conveyed Clinton on another expedition against Newport, Rhode Island, which was quickly seized. He remained on station there for several months, until the rank of rear admiral was conferred on April 28, 1777. The following June he gained appointment as commander in chief of Jamaica, and two years later he was promoted to vice admiral. Parker ventured back to England in 1782, conveying the captured French Admiral de Grasse and several of his officers. For his Revolutionary War services he was made a baron. Parker remained in the service for many years thereafter, rising to admiral in 1787 and also serving as commander in chief of Portsmouth Harbor in 1793. There he struck up a cordial relationship with a young naval lieutenant, Horatio Nelson, the future victor of Trafalgar, and facilitated his early career. Parker was one of the foremost mourners at Nelson's state funeral in 1805. By the time Parker died in London on December 21, 1811, he had been elevated to Admiral of the Fleet following the death of Lord Howe. Parker's unfortunate defeat off Charleston was but a minor episode in a long and distinguished naval career, but it is the incident for which he is best remembered in America.

Bibliography Bearss, Edwin C. The Battle of Sullivan's Island and the Capture of Fort Moultrie. Washington, DC: Division of History, Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, U. S. Dept. of the Interior, 1968; Farley, M. Foster. "Battering Charleston's Walls." Military History no. 6 (2000): 38-45; Ireland, Bernard. Naval Warfare in the Age of Sail. New York: Norton, 2000; Lambert, Andrew. War at Sea in the Age of Sail: 1650-1850. London: Cassell, 2000; Miller, Nathan. The Age of Fighting Sail, 1775-1815. New York: Wiley, 2000; Ralfe, James. The Naval Biography of Great Britain. Boston: Gregg Press, 1972; Reid, Ronald D. "The Battle of Sullivan's Island." American History 33, no. 5 (1998): 34-39, 70-72; Stokely, Jim. Fort Moultrie: Constant Defender. Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1985; Syrett, David. The Royal Navy in American Waters During the Revolutionary War. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998; Tilley, John A. The British Navy in the American Revolution. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987; Tracy, Nicholas. Navies, Deterrence, and American Independence: Britain and Seapower in the 1760s and 1770s. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988.

Longitude Problem

P.L. Tassaert's half-tone print of Thomas King's original 1767 portrait of John Harrison, located at the Science and Society Picture Library, London

The problem of the longitude, locating the east-west position of a ship on the open sea, was the classic technological problem of the early modern period, assaulted by many of the greatest scientists of the scientific revolution, including Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695), and Edmond Halley (1656–1742). The great astronomical observatories founded in the period, most notably the Paris Observatory and the English Royal Observatory at Greenwich, had the solution of the longitude problem high on their agendas. All failed, leaving the problem for the eighteenth century. If anything, it was of increasing urgency, given the expansion of the territory covered by European vessels. As the celestial bodies seemed to rotate around Earth from east to west, they did not seem to offer a way to know one’s position on it. Existing methods, based on observation of the Moon, or simply estimating the speed one had been traveling for a given time, were maddeningly and even dangerously imprecise. Most approaches to the longitude reduced the problem to that of finding the difference between the time on the ship, set by observation of the Sun’s meridian at noon, and the time at a fixed point, usually that of the home port. The difference in time could be translated into spatial terms as the difference in longitude between the two points. There were all sorts of bizarre schemes for this, but the two main approaches were using astronomical events to give the correct time and creating a clock able to give accurate time on a ship. If the home-port time of a celestial occurrence were known, all that would be necessary would be to compare the ship’s own time on observation of the occurrence. For example, if the time when an eclipse would occur at a fixed point were known, all that would be necessary would be to compare the time that the ship’s navigator saw the eclipse, and the distance between the two points would be known. This method was limited in its uses, however, as eclipses were quite rare. Galileo’s idea of using the frequent eclipses of the moons of Jupiter became dominant in geography and cartography on land, but the difficulty of observing Jupiter’s moons from a moving ship made it difficult if not impossible at sea.

The greatest eighteenth-century sea power, Great Britain took the lead in most eighteenth- century longitude schemes, although its colonial rival, France, was not far behind. Two unsuccessful longitude solvers, William Whiston and Humphrey Ditton (1675–1715), set forth a project in 1713 for the creation of a network of stationary ships over the seas, whose crews would fire guns at designated times, enabling passing ships to set their distances by factoring in their knowledge of the speed of sound. This idea was impractical on many levels, and never seriously considered. Whiston and Ditton’s lobbying of the British Parliament for a more active approach to the problem along with London’s maritime leaders whom they had organized resulted in the Longitude Act of 1714. This act established a prize of 20,000 pounds for a solution accurate to half a degree of a great circle around Earth; 15,000 pounds for a solution accurate within two-thirds of a degree; and 10,000 for a solution accurate within a degree. It also set up the Longitude Board whose ex officio members included the astronomer royal, the president of the Royal Society, and the first lord of the Admiralty, among others. The board disposed of funds to encourage promising ideas and was the first great institutional patron of science. It was deluged with solutions, most of them crackpot, and for the first decade and a half of its existence never met and concerned itself with little beyond sending out rejection letters. The French Royal Academy of Sciences meanwhile had used a bequest from the magistrate Rouille de Meslay to set up a prize of 125,000 livres for the longitude and other improvements in navigation, and were considerably more active, awarding 2,000 livres in 1720.

Serious eighteenth-century longitude ideas divided into two categories: the creation of an accurate shipboard clock and the astronomical method known as “lunar distances.” Lunar distances rested on the invention of a new astronomical instrument, the octant. This happened twice in 1731, with the independent work of the Englishman John Hadley (1682–1744) and the Philadelphian Thomas Godfrey (1704–1749). An arrangement of mirrors enabled a navigator to hold the distances between two celestial objects steady, even on the deck of a rolling ship. By observing the angular separation of the Moon and a given star, then comparing the time of observation with a table giving the times when that angular separation would appear from a fixed point such as London or Paris, the navigator could get the time differential and thus the longitude. All this plan required were accurate, mathematically skilled navigators and accurate tables of the extremely complex lunar motion, and legions of astronomers all over Europe set to work to provide the latter. Although the English and French scientific establishments poured effort and money into the project, the most accurate tables were the work of a German, Johann Tobias Mayer. Mayer’s death prevented him from claiming the prize, although his widow received 3,000 pounds from the board.

By comparison, the clock idea was somewhat old-fashioned. The leader in the creation of a navigational clock was a self-taught English clock maker of genius named John Harrison (1693–1776), who worked outside the London-based English clock-making establishment. Harrison had contacted Astronomer Royal Edmond Halley early in the project and enjoyed some support from the Longitude Board and the Royal Society. But he also faced opposition from a series of royal astronomers, including James Bradley and Nevil Maskelyne, who strongly favored lunar distances and were ex officio members of the Longitude Board, often supervising the trials. Harrison received several thousand pounds from the Longitude Board, at one point benefiting from the personal intervention of King George III (r. 1760–1820), but never won the prize he sought. The French, meanwhile, were also investigating the possibility of an accurate watch, led by the royal clock maker Ferdinand Berthoud (d. 1807). After shipboard watches were tested on voyages to Saint Domingue in 1769 and 1771, their use became common in the French marine.

In England Harrison was pitted against Maskelyne, the greatest exponent of lunar distances, who Harrison believed applied unnecessarily stringent conditions to the tests of the clocks and did not care for them properly when they were in his custody. Maskelyne’s annual Nautical Almanac and Nautical Ephemeris, first published in 1767, with its associated lunar tables, was the best available and put the lunar-distance method on a sound footing. This idea originated in the work of the Frenchman Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille (1713–1762) in the 1750s, but the French had never followed up Lacaille’s work. They did publish a French translation of Maskelyne’s almanac, beginning in 1772, a project with which Maskelyne cooperated even while the two countries were at war. The British navy required its navigators to be certified as proficient in Maskelyne’s method, although this was not consistently enforced at first. Updated, Maskelyne’s works served the international navigational community into the early twentieth century. It is due to Maskelyne’s lunar tables that the meridian of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich became the determining point for world time.

The lunar-distance method had the disadvantages of not being possible on moonless nights, and of requiring several observations and much tedious and difficult calculation. The chronometric method using timepieces eventually became the most common way to find the longitude. The problem was not the accuracy of the watches, particularly after Captain James Cook used a timekeeper based on Harrison’s on his second voyage, from 1772 to 1775, and enthusiastically testified to its merits (although he also praised Maskelyne’s almanacs).The difficulty was the cost of reproducing accurate timepieces. Late-eighteenth-century London watchmakers, most notably John Arnold (1736–1799) and Thomas Earnshaw (1749–1829), simplified Harrison’s designs and began mass production of accurate shipboard watches, which became the dominant way of finding the longitude by the 1820s. The Longitude Board itself was disbanded in the new Longitude Act of 1828. Its greatest prize was never awarded.

References Howse, Derek. Nevil Maskelyne: The Seaman’s Astronomer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Sobel, Dava. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. New York: Walker, 1995.

HORATIO NELSON

Vice Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson, by Lemuel Francis Abbott.

“Our country will… forgive an officer for attacking an enemy than for leaving him alone.” CAPTAIN HORATIO NELSON, 1794. Admiral Nelson Devotion to duty and individualistic swagger vied for supremacy in Nelson’s style. He became the ultimate British hero for the Romantic age.

Born in Norfolk to a country clergyman, Horatio Nelson grew up to be Britain’s most famous admiral. He was not just admired but extravagantly fêted, attracting such interest and excitement that his status came close to that of a celebrity. While his sense of duty was strong, he showed an audacity that bordered on indiscipline and a dashing courage that kept him in the public eye. His romantic life was equally reckless, with his long-standing affair with Lady Emma Hamilton arousing scandal and admiration in equal measure.

Nelson joined the Royal Navy in 1771, aged only 12. Starting his career as an ordinary seaman, he soon became a midshipman, the lowest officer rank. In 1773, he volunteered to serve on HMS Carcass in a journey in search of the Northwest Passage. It was on this voyage that the 14-yearold encountered a polar bear on an ice floe. His musket misfiring, Nelson had to fight the beast off with the weapon’s butt. His Arctic foray was followed by a venture to the tropics, when Nelson sailed with HMS Seahorse to the East Indies. The late 1770s and the American War of Independence and associated battles with France brought great opportunities for an able officer and Nelson attained several commands.

Hero of Cape St. Vincent

In 1783, now a captain, Nelson married Frances “Fanny” Nisbet, the daughter of a wealthy West Indian planter. Though they appeared to have been happy together, Nelson had more time than he wanted with his wife. Peace had left him bored and it was only after the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792 that the Admiralty finally gave him a new command.

Nelson quickly showed himself worthy—displaying, moreover, a readiness to put his own safety on the line. He lost the sight in one eye in action in Corsica in 1793. Four years later, he disobeyed orders in leading a boarding party at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, off the Portuguese coast. Fortunately, the gamble paid off and, the Spanish fleet defeated, Nelson returned to England a hero, especially after having lost an arm in a later battle at Tenerife. Nelson was idolized as a dashing rule-breaker who led from the front.

Battle of the Nile, Augt 1st 1798, Thomas Whitcombe, 1816. The British fleet bears down on the French line.

Battle of the Nile

Napoleon, the French general, was one of Nelson’s strongest rivals. In May 1798, Napoleon set sail with his fleet from Toulon, France. His plan was to invade Egypt as a first step in a campaign against the British in India. Although Nelson narrowly failed to intercept Napoleon, he found the fleet a few months later at Aboukir Bay, Egypt, completely destroying it in the brief Battle of the Nile that followed. Nelson’s victory influenced the course of the entire war and he was awarded the title “Baron Nelson of the Nile.”

Nelson now broke another rule by embarking on a long affair with Lady Emma Hamilton, who was the wife of the British ambassador to Naples. Yet, however scandalous his conduct, he seemed to have a special license. At Copenhagen in 1801, where the Danish and Norwegian fleets had been defying the British blockade on French trade, Nelson famously put his telescope to his blind eye and “did not see” Admiral Parker’s signal to withdraw. In the battle that ensued, he forced the Danes to ask for a ceasefire and surrender. Victory, it appeared, vindicated any misconduct, and at home Nelson was made a viscount.

Battle of Trafalgar

HMS Victory was to be Nelson’s flagship as a commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, locked in conflict with the navy of a France now led by Emperor Napoleon. By 1804, the French were trying to destroy the Royal Navy, or at least entice it away from the English Channel to give an invasion force a clear run at Britain. But Admiral Villeneuve’s Franco-Spanish fleet was trapped at Toulon. Breaking out eventually, it was pursued south to Cádiz, in Spain, by Nelson, who finally confronted it near to Cape Trafalgar.

Breaking the rules for the final time, Nelson formed his fleet into smaller squadrons in order to outmaneuvre Villeneuve’s traditional line formation. He had the signal flags spell out the message “England expects every man to do his duty.” He was no exception, walking openly on the deck throughout, an inspirational presence to his men— and an irresistible target for the French sniper who finally felled him with a shot. His hero’s death, in the hour of victory, became emblematic of the British spirit of self-sacrifice. His body, having been taken home, was borne up the River Thames on a barge and he was given a splendid state funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral.