The Phantom Fleet

Okay, so, I had my own Alternate History dream last night.

It was pretty ASB in most aspects, but I'll explain what I knew.

My dream was being narrated by some guy who had an accent I couldn't place, and he told me part of the story of the world.

There was some native state that seemed to control North America, that did the usual fight back the Europeans blah blah blah then unite the continent blah blah blah.

Anyways, what interested me the most was when he talked about when the Arabians (I legitimately do no know how or why the Arabians would have launched an invasion of the Americas. Maybe they were a Caliphate spreading to Morocco?) sending their Great Royal Fleet, presumably filled to the brim with Men-of-War and massive multi-deckers, to invade and conquer this empire.

What he said next stunned me.

The Native American Empire obliterated the Arabian fleet through the use of what the narrator called their "Phantom Fleet"; A fleet which used hit-and-run, ambush, and guerrilla tactics, where no ship was bigger than a sloop. Basically, an organized pirate fleet.

The time frame seemed to be late 1600s early 1700s, for reference.

So, everything else ASB aside, what do you guys think? Could an organized fleet of small ships using these tactics effectively fight off a fleet of Ships-of-the-Line and the like?

EDIT: I'd also like to note that the narrator spoke of this native state in extremely hushed tones. It appeared to be overly isolationist and amazingly hostile to outsiders. Probably for good reason, mind you, but I just found it interesting that it was essentially considered a continent-spanning North Korea, at least in terms of how much other people knew about how it worked on the inside.
 
Well I would certainly think it feasible that a mosquito fleet could destroy a lumbering one of galleons etc

Very nice to see some other AH dreams on here today!

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
I don't remember much about it, I am sorry but what I think I remember is this. I may be wrong however

  1. The English ships were smaller and tried to engage at long range
  2. Border actions were avoided and harassment was common
  3. They used fire ships as well
  4. The armada had its launch delayed by Sir Francis Drake who attacked it at anchor, he was pretty much a pirate
That said I do not think the English had the degree of organization you are talking about, but I suggest you do some research just in case
 
Well, a hit-and-run force like you're suggesting would probably be composed of a large number of fire ships. Those vessels were pretty damned effective when used in the right circumstances, but their success often depended on perfect timing and wind (unless they were used in large numbers).
 
I don't remember much about it, I am sorry but what I think I remember is this. I may be wrong however

  1. The English ships were smaller and tried to engage at long range
  2. Border actions were avoided and harassment was common
  3. They used fire ships as well
  4. The armada had its launch delayed by Sir Francis Drake who attacked it at anchor, he was pretty much a pirate
That said I do not think the English had the degree of organization you are talking about, but I suggest you do some research just in case

Well, a hit-and-run force like you're suggesting would probably be composed of a large number of fire ships. Those vessels were pretty damned effective when used in the right circumstances, but their success often depended on perfect timing and wind (unless they were used in large numbers).

The English certainly did use fire ships, but their main advantage was superior cannon. Their cannons had the power and size to pound the Spanish at a range where Spanish fire was pretty ineffective. To be sure, while the English did try firing at their extreme range, at which the Spanish literally could not touch them at all, that proved rather futile--it was just a standoff. In order to really hurt the Spanish they had to close in to a range where Spanish fire could do them some harm-but the balance was clearly on the English side, despite the size and number of the Spanish fleet. The Spanish maneuvered ably to minimize their losses, but aside from the fire ships and attrition from more conventional attacks and the final storm, behind the English was a gauntlet of Dutch patrol ships they'd have also had to run if the storm hadn't mooted the issue.

So, relevant to this thread, the notion that the English were plucky little pygmies outwitting a strong but stupid giant with sheer gall is wrong; they had superior firepower.

I don't know if that disproves the general notion of a "phantom fleet" but it certainly does suggest such a fleet had better have very good guns.

I presume the Islamic Armada in your dream was equipped with cannon? If so, the spooky Native American power had better have had cannon too (which seems mighty unlikely) and at that better ones that they could nevertheless mount in their swarming patrol boats (which seems ASB). Maybe the Muslims had either no cannon at all (again unlikely) or the general state of the art of naval cannon in this dream-alt's Age of Exploration was not quite as good even as that of OTL 1500 or so; the Spanish Armada, like most navies of any year before their expedition, expected the battle to be decided ultimately by grappling and hand-to-hand combat, and in such fights the bigger size of their biggest ships and the sheer numbers of hulls would have weighed heavily in their favor.

Or rather--King Philip of Spain probably expected it to go that way, based on centuries of naval history up to that point. I have reason to believe a number of Spanish captains already knew better:

Garrett Mattingly in "The Armada said:
To satisfy his {Pope Sixtus's} curiosity he had not only alerted his nuncio at Madrid but sent a special emissary to Lisbon...He {the emissary} was talking privately, he said, to one of the highest and most experienced officers of the Spanish fleet (can it have been Juan Martinez de Recalde?) and found the courage to ask him bluntly, "And if you meet the English armada in the Channel, do you expect to win the battle?"
"Of course," replied the Spaniard.
"How can you be so sure?"
"It's very simple. It's well known that we fight in God's cause. So, when we meet the English, God will surely arrange matters so that we can grapple and board them, either by sending some strange freak of weather or, more likely, just by depriving the English of their wits. If we can come to close quarters, Spanish valor and Spanish steel (and the great masses of soldiers we shall have on board) will make our victory certain. But unless God helps us by a miracle the English, who have faster and handier ships than ours, and many more long-range guns, and who know their advantage just as well as we do, will never close with us at all, but stand aloof and knock us to pieces with their culverins, without our being able to do them any serious hurt. So," concluded the captain, and one fancies a grim smile, "we are sailing against England in the confident hope of a miracle."

It would take a kind of miracle for small craft, however handy and fast, to do major damage to large ships of a kind that could cross the Atlantic, without having superior guns or some other kind of long range weapon--torpedoes, missiles, the ability to magically summon krakens from the deep and sic them on the invaders--something like that. They certainly couldn't hope to grapple, board, and overwhelm the crews of such a fleet, unless again they had either much more advanced weaponry for hand-to-hand or were something like Aragorn's Army of the Dead.

So, it isn't ASB if say a bunch of US Navy PT boats of a WWII vintage hold off an invasion of the entire Royal Navy--of say year 1900 vintage. And such technological disparities, favoring the more advanced side as common sense would lead one to expect, aren't unknown to real history--ask the Japanese faced with Commodore Perry, or the Chinese losing the Opium Wars.

Having the advantage run the other way on the other hand is--well, I hate the way people around here throw around the term "ASB" to dismiss things, and look forward to how you might show how these Native Americans have a trick up their sleeves no one from the Old World was prepared to deal with. DValdron had his T'salal in Green Antarctica taking on the Royal Navy with rocket artillery and wiping out everything in their path on their way to an orgy of gruesome rampages in the British Isles, and then someone came in to the thread to denounce it as "ASB." Well I think he did his homework, laying the groundwork for the Antarctic development of gunpowder rocketry in lieu of guns, and given that development (and a technical base that on the whole was roughly equivalent to, though different from, mid-19th century Euro-American levels) it made sense.

But either your dream-narrator needs to mention a POD long before the Europeans and "Arabs" show up in the Americas so this shadow kingdom was actually quite high-tech in at least some remarkable respects before contact, or needs to frankly and cheerfully admit this is an ASB scenario where either a handful of Native geniuses learn and surpass Euro/Muslim gunnery and ship rigging, or frankly use voodoo or call upon their bloodthirsty gods to do execution. In which case perhaps the darting little pirate boats are not necessary and maybe they are, but anyway there's no lesson to be learned here for people who aren't accomplished witches.
 
Gun boats

During the siege of Gibraltar in 1779, an Spanish admiral (Antonio Barceló) created the "gun-boat". It was just a boat of 14 rows (arround 50 feet long) and equipped just with a 24 pounds gun or a mortar. They proved to be really effective not only against the coastal defences of Gibraltar but against ships as well. As they were really hard to aim at and they were equipped with a heavy cannon.

Soon other navies started to use them.


I think these boats could be used in hit and run coastal actions.
 
It would take a kind of miracle for small craft, however handy and fast, to do major damage to large ships of a kind that could cross the Atlantic, without having superior guns or some other kind of long range weapon--torpedoes, missiles, the ability to magically summon krakens from the deep and sic them on the invaders--something like that. They certainly couldn't hope to grapple, board, and overwhelm the crews of such a fleet, unless again they had either much more advanced weaponry for hand-to-hand or were something like Aragorn's Army of the Dead.
The 1589 Armada suffered some of these hit and run attacks from a small fleet of five galleys that were based in Lisbon. They attacked lone English ships and captured or sank several of them without suffering any loss.
 
If the galleons have cannon as distance-ranged weapons, and the attackers in smaller ships can get in amongst them it would negate the advantage in firepower. It would, as an allegory, be like trying to fire your 12" turret guns on a dreadnought at a torpedo boat that had come up close.

It could certainly be reasonable to assume that it is possible that large ship warfare had evolved to the point where they only carried large fire-pieces, aimed at hitting the enemy from maximum range inwards and destroying them once they were at optimum range.

If they never have to deal with any other type of warfare, or if other types of warfare are dealt with by different ships, that have not accompanied the fleet across the ocean, then one can see how it might come about.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
Well Shevek23 it appears I was wrong, thank you for the information though. I had forgotten about the superior English cannons, or didn't know about them. In fact now that I think about it my information may have come out of a middle school US history book
 
The English certainly did use fire ships, but their main advantage was superior cannon. Their cannons had the power and size to pound the Spanish at a range where Spanish fire was pretty ineffective. To be sure, while the English did try firing at their extreme range, at which the Spanish literally could not touch them at all, that proved rather futile--it was just a standoff. In order to really hurt the Spanish they had to close in to a range where Spanish fire could do them some harm-but the balance was clearly on the English side, despite the size and number of the Spanish fleet. The Spanish maneuvered ably to minimize their losses, but aside from the fire ships and attrition from more conventional attacks and the final storm, behind the English was a gauntlet of Dutch patrol ships they'd have also had to run if the storm hadn't mooted the issue.

So, relevant to this thread, the notion that the English were plucky little pygmies outwitting a strong but stupid giant with sheer gall is wrong; they had superior firepower.

I don't know if that disproves the general notion of a "phantom fleet" but it certainly does suggest such a fleet had better have very good guns.

I presume the Islamic Armada in your dream was equipped with cannon? If so, the spooky Native American power had better have had cannon too (which seems mighty unlikely) and at that better ones that they could nevertheless mount in their swarming patrol boats (which seems ASB). Maybe the Muslims had either no cannon at all (again unlikely) or the general state of the art of naval cannon in this dream-alt's Age of Exploration was not quite as good even as that of OTL 1500 or so; the Spanish Armada, like most navies of any year before their expedition, expected the battle to be decided ultimately by grappling and hand-to-hand combat, and in such fights the bigger size of their biggest ships and the sheer numbers of hulls would have weighed heavily in their favor.

Or rather--King Philip of Spain probably expected it to go that way, based on centuries of naval history up to that point. I have reason to believe a number of Spanish captains already knew better:



It would take a kind of miracle for small craft, however handy and fast, to do major damage to large ships of a kind that could cross the Atlantic, without having superior guns or some other kind of long range weapon--torpedoes, missiles, the ability to magically summon krakens from the deep and sic them on the invaders--something like that. They certainly couldn't hope to grapple, board, and overwhelm the crews of such a fleet, unless again they had either much more advanced weaponry for hand-to-hand or were something like Aragorn's Army of the Dead.

So, it isn't ASB if say a bunch of US Navy PT boats of a WWII vintage hold off an invasion of the entire Royal Navy--of say year 1900 vintage. And such technological disparities, favoring the more advanced side as common sense would lead one to expect, aren't unknown to real history--ask the Japanese faced with Commodore Perry, or the Chinese losing the Opium Wars.

Having the advantage run the other way on the other hand is--well, I hate the way people around here throw around the term "ASB" to dismiss things, and look forward to how you might show how these Native Americans have a trick up their sleeves no one from the Old World was prepared to deal with. DValdron had his T'salal in Green Antarctica taking on the Royal Navy with rocket artillery and wiping out everything in their path on their way to an orgy of gruesome rampages in the British Isles, and then someone came in to the thread to denounce it as "ASB." Well I think he did his homework, laying the groundwork for the Antarctic development of gunpowder rocketry in lieu of guns, and given that development (and a technical base that on the whole was roughly equivalent to, though different from, mid-19th century Euro-American levels) it made sense.

But either your dream-narrator needs to mention a POD long before the Europeans and "Arabs" show up in the Americas so this shadow kingdom was actually quite high-tech in at least some remarkable respects before contact, or needs to frankly and cheerfully admit this is an ASB scenario where either a handful of Native geniuses learn and surpass Euro/Muslim gunnery and ship rigging, or frankly use voodoo or call upon their bloodthirsty gods to do execution. In which case perhaps the darting little pirate boats are not necessary and maybe they are, but anyway there's no lesson to be learned here for people who aren't accomplished witches.

Hey, I didn't come up with this scenario, my dream mind did.

From what I remember, the native ships had cannon, yes. The narrator never mentioned if they were superior cannon... I just remember seeing cannon on the ship.

Actually, fuck, I don't even know if they had cannon. It was heavily implied, sure, but I never SAW a native ship, and nobody ever said they had cannon. I mean, I'll presume they did though.

And, I mean, to justify this and make it not ASB... I mean, as I said, I wasn't the one who came up with the timeline. I don't even know what the POD was. But to make this whole "Phantom Fleet" deal not ASB...

I mean, I dunno. Is there maybe someway the natives could learn the secret of Greek Fire? Put it on a small ship, ride up close to the big galleons so they can't shoot at you (And the others can't shoot at you without risking hitting their ally), then fire away and let the ship burn?
 
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