Captain Popham and the Ostend Expedition – 19-20 May 1798

In May 1798 the maverick Captain Home Riggs Popham instigated a high-risk and controversial attack on a Flanders canal which briefly achieved its objectives but resulted in the capture of the landing forces.

Captain Home Riggs Popham was not everybody’s cup of tea. Although promoted post-captain in 1795, it was only at the behest of the Duke of York for services in Flanders with the army two years previously. By 1798 he had not even held as much as a temporary command afloat as a captain. Instead, he had remained ashore, pestering the Admiralty and anybody else who would listen with schemes involving the navy. Some of them, such as the organisation of a naval militia (the Sea Fencibles) were valuable – indeed on 1 February at a meeting in Hastings his enthusiastic promotion of that project had reportedly inspired two hundred men to volunteer to serve in coastal batteries. But many of his other suggestions did not meet with the approval of the Admiralty and his contemporaries within the Navy.

One of Popham’s ideas was for a combined operation with the Army to land a force in Flanders and destroy the Saas Lock and sluice gates on the new canal between Saas and Bruges. This would prevent the movement of French and Dutch invasion barges from Flushing to the North Sea port of Ostend along an inland, and therefore protected, waterway. It would be a risky venture, but nevertheless his proposal was taken up by the venerable General Sir Charles Grey, the Army’s commander of the Southern District. With the support of the secretary for war, Henry Dundas, and the under-secretary for war, William Huskisson, Grey persuaded the government to despatch an expedition, with the stipulation that Popham take command of the accompanying squadron.

Home Riggs Popham, portrayed as a lieutenant in 1783

The first lord of the Admiralty, Lord Spencer, was appalled, and so was a member of his board, the junior sea lord, Rear-Admiral William Young. As the senior service, far more experienced in combined operations, the Navy did not take kindly to what it considered reckless expeditions. Spencer wrote to Dundas expressing his misgivings at the Army nominating a particular naval officer for the task, and also his belief that the 36-year-old Popham was too junior and inexperienced, qualified only to be an agent of transports. Yet the secretary of war refused to budge, and so the naval lords were left with little choice but to sanction the expedition, even though from the outset they believed it would fail.

After days of spring gales had kept them at anchor, Popham’s force, consisting of the fifth-rate Expedition 44 armed en-flute, four other frigates also armed en-flute, two fully armed frigates, and a score of smaller vessels, set sail from the Margate Roads at 6 a.m. on 16 May. With them sailed Major-General Sir Eyre Coote, the commander-in-chief at Dover, and a force of almost eighteen hundred troops who would be responsible for destroying the lock gates. Once at sea, the hitherto secret plans were revealed to the men, and they fell in with the sloop Fairy 14, Commander Joshua Sydney Horton. He provided intelligence that a force of transport schuyts (Dutch flat-bottomed boats) fitting out at Flushing were about to enter the canal system and head for Dunkirk and Ostend. As far as Popham was concerned there was now not a moment to lose, and this urgency was reinforced when he learned from a captured cutter that the French had got wind that something was afoot and were sending troop reinforcements to the coast.

At 1:00 a.m. on the morning of 19 May the expedition came to anchor off the Dutch coast. A difficult westerly wind meant that conditions were less than ideal for disembarking the army, whilst to complicate matters even further, one of the frigates carrying a number of troops (the Minerve), had temporarily parted company. Nevertheless, when the armed cutter Vigilant’s cut out a vessel under a lighthouse battery the captured enemy sailors indicated that the garrisons at Ostend, Newport and Bruges were less numerous than expected. A difficult decision now had to be made – should the attack go ahead while conditions on land remained temporarily favourable, although conditions at sea were not.

According to Popham’s later report, Major-General Coote asked to be landed; according to Coote, he was reluctant to launch his troops ashore. Coote later said he was persuaded by Popham claiming that the heavy surf would not represent a problem for re-embarking the landing force, once the lock gates had been destroyed. The upshot was that the mission would go ahead, and orders were given to disembark eleven hundred troops and an accompanying party of seamen to the north-east of Ostend,

Under cover of the dirty weather and the darkness, much of the landing force got ashore before the enemy was alerted. When the batteries at Ostend did discover British ships off their harbour and opened up at 4:15 a.m., they were met by the fire of the gun-vessels Wolverine 16, Asp 12, and Biter 12, together with shells from the bomb vessels Hecla and Tartarus, which set fire to buildings in the town and several vessels in the basin. By 5 a.m., the landing force, complete with ‘artillery, miners, wooden petards [explosive charges], tools and gunpowder’ had all been landed some three miles east of Ostend.

Back at sea, Popham was not only starting to fret about the weather conditions, which had begun deteriorating, making the re-embarkation of the landing force more difficult, he was also having difficulty supporting Coote’s attack. The Dart, Harpy and Kite were sent in to draw the enemy fire away from the troops, but the ebbing tide prevented them from manoeuvring in sufficiently close, and they were soon forced to withdraw further offshore. The Wolverine, which was suffering considerable damage under the fire of the batteries (including losing her fore topgallant mast), and the Asp, which had been within 300 yards of the enemy for several hours, were also forced to withdraw, so that shortly after 7:00 a.m. only the Hecla and Tartarus remained in action, bombarding the enemy garrison in Ostend to distract them from turning their fire on the landing force.

Major-General Sir Eyre Coote

At 9:30 the Minerva arrived, and Popham (who was aboard the Kite), sent her commander, John Mackellar, on shore to communicate with Coote. By now the gale rising in the north-east had become so severe that when the colonel commanding the troops on the Minerva ordered his men into two flat bottomed boats to join the force ashore, Captain James Bradby of the Ariadne wisely dissuaded him from tackling the increasingly rough surf.

At 10:30 the sound of explosions alerted the ships to the fact that the landing force had blown up the sluice gates – the prime objective of the expedition. The landing seemed to have proved a resounding success, particularly as Coote’s men had to that moment suffered only five casualties. Within the hour troops and sailors began congregating on the sandhills at the top of the beach to await their re-embarkation, but by now the weather was so bad that Popham was no longer able to communicate with Coote onshore. Instead of re-embarking aboard the flat-bottomed boats, the men ashore were forced to remain entrenched on the beach for the rest of the day and into the early hours of the 20th.

Reacting promptly to the invasion, a large enemy force had been assembled from other local garrisons to oppose Coote’s men, and early in the morning of the 20th it began to advance on the beach. At 4:00 a.m. battle was engaged and over the next two hours sixty Britons would be killed and another hundred wounded as they were shot down in the skirmishes on the sand-dunes. The remainder, totalling 1,134 officers and men (including Major-General Coote, who had been shot in the thigh and Commander Mackellar of the Minerva) were eventually forced to lay down their arms. In addition to the loss of the landing force, the Navy suffered casualties of fifteen men killed and fourteen wounded.

During the night the covering ships had been forced to put out to sea, and when they returned on the morning of the 20th, Popham went ashore from the Kite to discover the sad state of affairs – the landing force was gone, and all that was left on the beach was the detritus of a battle. Commander William Brown of the Kite and an army officer were sent under a flag of truce to seek an exchange of prisoners with the enemy, but they came back empty-handed. To compound this misfortune, although Popham reported that morning that the canal was ‘quite dry’, it was later found that the attack on the sluice gates had not been so successful as first thought, and within a matter of weeks the canal was back in operation.

Popham’s dispatch, dated 20 May from the Ostend Roads, was delivered to the Admiralty two days later by Captain Robert Winthrop of the Circe 28. The squadron itself reached Margate on the 22nd, whereupon Popham rushed to the Admiralty in London to submit his report before the recriminations could begin in earnest. Unsurprisingly, he blamed the weather for the loss of the landing force, whereas Coote, who arrived at Dover on 3 September aboard a packet, having been released from the citadel at Lille on parole*, later blamed Popham for pushing ahead with the landings despite his (Coote’s) concerns over the conditions. On this occasion, it appears that the army officer’s opinion was the more accurate and the affair was probably best summed up in Parliament by General Banastre Tarleton, who lamented what he described as ‘a useless and chimerical ‘expedition.

*Major-General Coote was soon exchanged for General Louis Baraguey d’Hilliers who had been aboard the French frigate Sensible 32 when she had been captured by the Seahorse 38, Captain Edward James Foote, in the Mediterranean on 27 June.

Principal ships:  (EF indicates en-flute, with lower deck guns removed):