To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  Unzaga responded that while he could not agree to a formal commercial alliance without permission from his superiors in Madrid, he would secretly begin shipping supplies of gunpowder from New Orleans upriver to Fort Pitt. In Madrid, Spanish authorities, led by José de Gálvez, Minister of Indies, agreed with Unzaga’s assessment, with Gálvez informing the Council of Castile that Spain should “establish indirect and secret intelligence with the American colonies, inspiring them to vigorous resistance.” In September of 1776, 9,000 pounds of gunpowder was transferred from the “king’s stores” to Oliver Pollock in return for a draft of $1,850, drawn from the Grand Council of Virginia. Pollock then loaded the powder in ninety-eight kegs in a riverboat for transport up the Mississippi and eventually to the battlefields of North America. To allay the suspicions of British spies plying their trade in New Orleans, Unzaga pretended to arrest Gibson while his men embarked on their supply mission. When he was released from his mock arrest, Gibson was provided with a ship, once more stuffed with Spanish supplies and sent to Philadelphia.12

  Over the coming months, a sophisticated system of clandestine aid was developed in which Spanish money and supplies of powder were gathered in Havana and then funneled through New Orleans under the auspices of Oliver Pollock and the Spanish company Roderigue Hortalez operating out of Havana and the Gardoqui company operating out of Bilbao. The aid proved crucial to the survival of the American cause. In the early days of the war, American forces were constantly short of gunpowder, and it would take time for them to get their own production up to speed. Without timely Spanish intervention, much of the early momentum of the revolution might have been lost, especially on the frontier, where Spanish supplies likely saved Fort Pitt and George Rogers Clark’s Ohio Valley campaign from defeat at the hands of the better supplied British.13

  Perhaps most crucially, though now little recognized, Spain suspended its own monopoly on trade with its Caribbean colonies and gave official permission for American ships to trade freely in Havana. This proved to be a major boon for the beleaguered Americans. Since the war began, the American war effort had been undercut by a lack of cash and the very real prospect that inflation would render the new paper currency worthless. Without specie, America could not afford to purchase the arms and supplies necessary to combat the British nor to pay their soldiers regularly enough to prevent wholesale desertion. By allowing American merchants to trade with Cuba, Spain provided America’s single greatest source of hard cash at a crucial juncture. Without this breach of Spanish protectionism, the United States might not have had the funds to hold out long enough for Britain’s European enemies to intervene.

  France and Spain had been chastened by their disastrous defeat in the Seven Years’ War, but not cowed. Since 1768 they had agreed a “family pact” as Bourbon monarchies and enemies of Britain to renew the imperial struggle as soon as was practically possible. By the time the American colonies began to chafe openly at their imperial shackles, both countries had done much to address the fatal errors of the previous war and prepare for its renewal. It had become painfully clear that in a world of imperial competition, naval might would play a central role in any future contest between Europe’s imperial powers. With this hard-learnt lesson in mind, both Spain and France had launched full-scale overhauls of their naval forces, employing cutting-edge construction, infrastructure, training, and tactics to create navies that more than matched the British navy. With its navy rebuilt and peace secured on its land borders by a treaty with Austria, by 1778 France was ready to take the fight to the British once more, though Spain would proceed more cautiously.

  France’s entrance into the war in 1778 fundamentally altered the conflict’s center of gravity. Before 1778, the fighting had been almost entirely concentrated in North America, but now everyone realized that the key to the contest had changed. France and Britain both considered their Caribbean possessions to be the most valuable piece of their respective empires. The lucrative sugar islands—Barbados, Jamaica, Martinique, Guadeloupe—were the true lynchpins in their imperial systems, the wellspring of most of their wealth, and the source of their many conflicts. Britain was funding its war in large part through its Caribbean sugar wealth, both as a direct source of revenue and as a guarantee of future revenue that it used to secure larger and more favorable loans than its rivals. France too relied on its Caribbean possessions to fund its military endeavors. Both sides, therefore, realized that the battle over the Caribbean would be the most important theater of the emerging Franco-British War. Whoever succeeded in capturing or disrupting its opponent’s Caribbean empire would likely win the war. As George III cautioned, “Our islands must be defended even at the risk of an invasion of this island [Britain], if we lose our sugar islands, it will be impossible to raise money to continue the war and then no peace can be obtained . . .”14

  When the French fleet arrived in the Caribbean in 1778, Britain’s forces were in a sorry state. Most of Britain’s soldiers were still off fighting in North America, leaving some one thousand soldiers to defend more than a dozen possessions strung across the breadth of the Caribbean. With so few men to defend the islands and populations dominated by slaves, Britain’s Caribbean empire was vulnerable to invasion from without and slave rebellion from within. Moreover, by the mid-eighteenth century Caribbean planters had converted almost all of their islands’ land to sugar cultivation in pursuit of greater and greater wealth. The overwhelming focus on the sugar monoculture crowded out producers of foodstuffs, making Britain’s Caribbean islands dependent on imports of food from the North American colonies, Ireland, and Britain. All of this meant that the Caribbean colonies were almost entirely dependent on Britain and its navy for food, for protection, and for trade, ensuring that few in the Caribbean seriously advocated joining their North American brethren in revolt.

  But though they remained overwhelmingly loyal, British subjects in the Caribbean did not remain untouched by the war. Supplies from North America were entirely cut off, while Irish imports were reduced by British efforts to control Ireland’s trade. Even shipments of food from Britain itself were reduced as voyages became more dangerous and more and more supplies were siphoned off to feed the hungry armies in the north. France’s entrance into the war only exacerbated these problems, further disrupting British trade and ensuring that more and more supplies were consumed by the swarms of soldiers and sailors who arrived to fight the French. The effects were devastating. Prices for everyday staples such as flour skyrocketed, while the profits from the sugar trade plunged. As usual, it was the most vulnerable who were the hardest hit. Across the Caribbean famine hit and slaves starved as food became scarce. In British Antigua alone, nearly 8,000 slaves died between 1778 and 1781, casualties of a war that prioritized feeding sailors and soldiers over feeding civilians, let alone slaves.15

  Though unquestionably better fed, the soldiers and sailors who contested the Caribbean suffered keenly as well. The Caribbean had long been a graveyard for European immigrants, with as many as one in three succumbing to the climate or disease in the first three years of residence. In the overcrowded barracks and ships of the war years, conditions were even worse, pestilence was rife, death frequent, and it was not uncommon for ships to be severely undermanned, with half their crews in the hospital or in the grave. As one sailor grimly reported, “we buried in six days about twenty seamen and seven marines . . . The 28th of this month the master, purser and surgeon was taken ill, and a few days after myself, gunner, surgeon’s mate, and sixty more men were ill in severe fevers, during which time we had not men to work the ship.” Even the usually energetic Nelson was not spared the frustrating enervation of illness and disease. In 1779, Captain Locker, Nelson’s former commander, friend, and patron, fell ill, and eventually was forced to abandon the Caribbean permanently to convalesce in England. Within a year, Nelson would write to Locker of his own illness, and his growing fear that he too would be forced from the field of battle. “You must not be surprised to see me in E
ngland,” he informed his former captain, “for if my health is not much better than it is at present, I shall certainly come home, as all the Doctors are against my staying so long in this country.” The ravages of the Caribbean were not limited to humans. Like the men who manned them, British ships crumbled under the tropical conditions, eaten by worms, rotted by the climate, and smashed by storms. It was, Samuel Barrington, commander of the British fleet in the Leeward Islands, complained, the “most wretched sickly fleet, without stores, and in a most shattered condition.”16

  The French fleet that arrived under the Comte d’Estaing in 1778 was in much better condition, with more ships, more sailors, and more soldiers than the British could hope to muster. With such an advantage, France was determined to drive the British out of the Caribbean, starting with the Leeward and Windward Islands. Barbados—the wealthiest and most populous British possession outside of Jamaica—was the key to the entire chain. Its capture would be the pinnacle of French ambitions in the Caribbean. But knowing the British would expect an attack on Barbados, French forces under the Governor of Martinique, the Marquis de Bouillé, first attacked Dominica, a British possession located between the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Despite its precarious position and strategic importance, Dominica was unprepared and poorly defended, easy pickings for de Bouillé’s forces who quickly overran the island and captured rich British vessels in the harbor.

  The “commencement of the French war” spelt a sea-change for Nelson’s fortunes as well. Since his arrival in the Caribbean the year before, Nelson had spent much of his time chasing American privateers, mostly fruitlessly and without effect. The arrival of the French and a proper enemy fleet, however, meant more danger, but also more opportunity for an ambitious young sailor. In July 1778 he was transferred from the Lowestoffe to the Bristol, the flagship of the newly arrived Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Peter Parker, and quickly rose through the ranks to become first lieutenant. In December of that same year, Parker gave Nelson his first independent command as commander of the brig Badger, assigned to protect British shipping on the Bay of Honduras and British settlements on the Mosquito Coast. Nelson would later reflect that Admiral Parker’s “partiality for me” had put him on the path to rapid promotion, and years later he would write fondly of Parker, calling him “as good a man as ever lived” and promising to “drink his health.”17

  The year 1779 proved more favorable for Nelson than the British in the Antilles. His service on the coast of Central America was recognized with yet another promotion, this time to Post Captain of the 28-gun Hinchinbrooke. In August, while Nelson was in Jamaica waiting for his new ship to return to port, news arrived that d’Estaing’s fleet of 26 ships of the line, 12 frigates and 22,000 soldiers had been spotted off the coast of Hispaniola. Pandemonium ensued as gossip and speculation spread that Jamaica, the centerpiece of Britain’s Caribbean empire, was sure to be the intended target of this massive French fleet. The island was ill-prepared to repel such an overwhelming force. John Dalling, Jamaica’s Royal Governor, declared martial law, raised the island’s militia, repaired and constructed batteries and fortifications around Kingston, and sent plaintive letters to North America for aid. Still waiting for the Hinchinbroke, Nelson was given the command of Fort Charles, the seventeenth-century fort that commanded the entrance into Kingston harbor, and with it 500 soldiers. This was a heady responsibility for such a young officer, but even in “this critical state” Nelson immediately made an impression with his energy and confidence.18

  Fort Charles’s new commander, however, was not at all confident in the strength of Jamaica’s defenses. For weeks, the British would wait in the sweltering heat of the Caribbean summer with the prospect of invasion “daily expected,” tensions near to boiling, and faith in British might fading. In a letter to his former Captain William Locker, Nelson described Jamaica’s defenses and left Locker to “judge what stand we shall make,” adding his own prediction with grim humor, “you must not be surprised if you hear of my learning to speak French.” But in the end, despite the fear, panic, and pessimism, the French invasion never materialized. A British ship reported that the French fleet had disappeared, heading north into the Atlantic. The threat, at least for the moment, had passed. Jamaica had trembled in terror, and two small islands had changed hands, but by the fall of 1779, the war in the Caribbean had reached a stalemate. It was at this moment that the Spanish decided at last to intervene, bringing yet another European empire into the contest over the Caribbean.19

  Spain found itself in a delicate position at the outbreak of the American War. There was certainly much to be gained by a British defeat. Spain still smarted over the loss of Gibraltar to the British in 1704 during the War of Spanish Succession and the loss of Florida and Menorca during the Seven Years’ War. Further still, since its victory in the previous war, Britain had become a tyrant on the seas, protecting its mercantile interests from any foreign incursion while undermining and invading the commerce of Spain. More recently, Britain and Spain had nearly come to blows over control of the Falkland Islands. Relations between the old rivals became even more tense in 1776 when British officials, already on edge because of the expanding crisis in America, insisted on being informed about a recent military build-up in Spain. Upon being informed that Algiers was the target of the military expedition, British officials wasted no time leaking the plans to the intended target, helping to ensure that the assault ended in disaster for Spain. There was little reason, therefore, for Spain to wish Britain success in its American quagmire.

  On the other hand, as a few prescient Spanish ministers fully realized, a triumphant, independent United States could well pose an even greater risk to Spain’s American possessions. Though an intractable problem on the seas, on land Britain’s fear of the costs of imperial overstretch had done much to restrain the westward and southward expansionist impulses of her colonial subjects, blunting America’s incipient sense of manifest destiny. Without this restraining hand, an independent United States, already poised to become a dominant power, would almost certainly set her sights on Spain’s possessions in the Mississippi watershed, Louisiana and New Spain. It was thus with interests seemingly equally balanced and the senior ministers divided over which was the more pressing threat, that Spain had initially opted for a policy of official neutrality combined with informal, clandestine aid. The American War, Francisco Saavedra warned, could only serve to “disturb the spirits of our colonies with the example” of revolution, and “create a formidable enemy to the rear of our most opulent possessions.”20

  In 1779, Spain’s clandestine aid to the American colonies was transformed into outright war. Initially, Spain’s enlightened, reform-minded foreign minister the Conde de Floridablanca, had sought to continue Spain’s position of official neutrality when he came into office in 1777. But France’s declaration of war in 1778 changed everything. Spain and France had been close allies and joint opponents of British power since the War of Spanish Succession placed a Bourbon on the Spanish throne at the beginning of the century. Spanish and French interests had become as intertwined as their royal houses, and by the end of 1778, France and her representatives in Madrid were placing considerable pressure on Spain to join the anti-British crusade. The French foreign minister the Comte de Vergennes—the spider at the center of a continent-wide web of anti-British alliances and intrigues—promised Spain the return of Minorca, Gibraltar, and Florida, and perhaps even Jamaica, transforming the Caribbean back into a Spanish lake. In the end, King Carlos III was won over to the French cause with an appeal to ties of both kinship and revenge. Cornered by the French ambassador to Madrid, he was told, “Your Majesty is the Abraham of the House of Bourbon, and Heaven now offers you the decisive moment to avenge the great harm you have received from Great Britain; unite the great maritime forces you have provided and England will be humbled.” On April 12, 1779 Spain and France secretly signed the Convention of Aranjuez, with the official declaration of war to follow in J
une. Still, Spain could not officially support a republican rebellion against a fellow monarch—a dangerous precedent—and so would never officially ally with the United States. Nevertheless, in 1779, the nature of the conflict was transformed, bringing new theaters and new objectives into play.21

  Initially, Spain’s primary focus lay in Europe. The terms of the Treaty of Aranjuez made Spanish priorities plain. Gibraltar, the tiny British possession on the southern coast of Spain, had been an affront to Spanish interests and Spanish honor since it was captured by the British seventy-five years earlier. It threatened Spanish trade and ensured Britain access to the Mediterranean, and so it became the first target of Spanish aggression in 1779. In June, a combined Franco-Spanish fleet blockaded the harbor, cutting off the British garrison from escape or resupply by sea. On land, the Spanish army dug trenches, threw up redoubts and batteries, and laid siege guns. By the winter of 1779, British forces were fully encircled and supplies began to dwindle. Food became scarce, fuel for fires dwindled, rations were cut and disease began to cut a swath through the ranks of the malnourished British defenders. It seemed to be only a matter of time before the British were forced to surrender, or wither away in their captivity. But just as the noose began to tighten around the British, Admiral George Rodney appeared in the Mediterranean. In January 1780, he had dealt a crushing blow to the Spanish navy, capturing a Spanish convoy and decisively defeating a Spanish fleet under Don Juan de Lángara at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent off the southern coast of Portugal. Rodney brought with him more than a thousand soldiers to supplement the flagging forces in Gibraltar, and enough supplies to withstand the siege for the foreseeable future. Rodney’s heroic relief of Gibraltar was a godsend for the British, but for the Spanish it was a costly failure, and when combined with the aborted invasion of Britain in 1779, signaled a change in tactics and a re-evaluation of Spain’s strategy and interests. The siege of Gibraltar would drag on for three more years, but after 1780, the focus of Spanish resources began to shift west.22