The Many-Headed Hydra
Page 30
We, levellers and avengers for the wrongs done to the poor, have unanimously assembled to raze walls and ditches that have been made to inclose the commons. Gentlemen now of late have learned to grind the face of the poor so that it is impossible for them to live. They cannot even keep a pig or a hen at their doors. We warn them not to raise again either walls or ditches in the place of those we destroy, nor even to inquire about the destroyers of them. If they do, their cattle shall be houghed [hamstrung] and their sheep laid open in the fields.14
Despard thus grew up a country of intense social antagonism. Charles Coote complained of the “irreclaimable barbarity and uncivilization of the peasantry”; Arthur Young found the people there more impertinent than elsewhere, and wrote that “stealing is very common.”15 During the 1790s, a Ribbon Society (a secret peasant association) was formed in Slieve Bloom; sixteen of its members were eventually hanged. At the same time and in the same region, regiments of loyalists were formed from above, including Mountain Rangers and a regiment raised by Despard’s brother.16 Years later, his niece Jane would recall, “Living one Winter in terror, we were driven away by rebel whitefeet or blackfeet; lost all our plate which had been placed in a neighbouring town for safety; the house we lived in set fire to and burnt and my poor father received only £50 damages from the country. We were moved then to Mount Mellick for protection and afterwards to Mountrath.” The Despards were, if not great landlords, landlords still, and part of the military junta that doubled the size of its army between 1792 and 1822. The Despard family was, in short, on the front line of the class struggle between the colonizer and the oppressed.
How was Edward the boy affected by all this? His niece’s memoirs, composed in the 1820s and preserved in the Despard family papers, provide information about him that could be relevant. By nature mild tempered and mild mannered, he was said to have soaked up the contradiction with equanimity. He listened raptly to the fantastic “lies” of the Gaelic storyteller brought in at holidays. He detested the afternoon announcement “Master, the coffee is ready” because it meant he had to read Scriptures aloud to his grandmother.17 According to family tradition, even in childhood he loathed the Bible and coffee equally. At the age of eight, “Ned” was placed as page to Countess Hertford, whose husband at the time was lord lieutenant of Ireland, a member of “the proudest and least moral family of any in the British dominions then as now.” Despard was known as a Latin and French scholar and a “great belle letter person.”18
At fifteen, Ned entered the Fiftieth Regiment of the British army. Since Cromwell’s time Ireland had nourished the army and navy with salt beef and butter, and so, too, was it the army’s and navy’s nursery, providing such manpower or cannon fodder as was needed. (In 1798 the “hibernicization” of the British regular army would almost backfire, as some regiments would not be considered “English” enough to be trusted to suppress the rebellion.)19 All of the Despard brothers joined the British army, except for the eldest, who inherited the family estate. Ned’s formative years in his native land had been passed in a period of renewed and violent class struggle over the common lands and their associated culture. Any seeds of sympathy that may have been sown in him would lie dormant for decades.
JAMAICA
In January 1766, Despard’s regiment landed on Jamaica. The young Irishman disembarked into one of the world’s preeminent slave societies, in which a small class of sugar planters and their overseers lived off the labor of some two hundred thousand African slaves. Despard would have seen immediately that this society was based on terror, for he arrived in the aftermath of Tacky’s Revolt. Three more slave revolts soon followed it, one in 1765 and two in 1766; hangings and gibbetings marked the island landscape. Within six years Despard would be promoted to lieutenant and entrusted to help design the shore batteries and fortifications of Kingston and Port Royal, the headquarters of the British navy in the Caribbean. During his near-twenty-year residence in Jamaica, three experiences were decisive: Despard learned to survive in a deadly land; he learned to be a strategic thinker in matters military; and he learned to organize and lead motley crews, multiethnic gangs of laborers.
The health of the English officer in the Caribbean depended on the nursing he received from Jamaican women. “A soldier should be nursed,” declared the senior physician to the British military in Jamaica, Dr. Benjamin Moseley, adding that the drudgery “should be performed by negroes.”20 J. B. Moreton, a planter of Clarendon Parish, advised the recently arrived English officer or gentleman to find an African American woman as quickly as possible: “If you please and humour her properly, she will make and mend all your clothes, attend you when sick, and when she can afford it will assist you with any thing in her power.” The informal domestic-service sector of the Caribbean economy, from which the internationally esteemed tradition of Jamaican nursing would grow, did not neatly distinguish at this time among housekeepers, lovers, and nurses. The West Indian boardinghouse was something of a hospital as well as a restaurant and dance hall, as R. R. Madden, the Irish historian, attested after living in such a lodging in Barbados.21 Such establishments, and the relations they assumed, could arouse color prejudice, fear of sexuality, and revolutionary fright even among Anglo reformers such as John Thelwall, who was terrified by the lascivious and riotous dancing, as described in his 1801 novel largely set in Haiti, The Daughter of Adoption; A Tale of Modern Times. A Kingston woman might well have adopted the free and easy approach expressed in one Jamaican ballad, which concludes on a note characteristic of the antinomianism of the 1650s. It was to be sung to the air of “What Care I for Mam or Dad”:
Me know no law, me know no sin,
Me is just what ebba them make me;
This is the way dem bring me in;
So God nor devil take me!
It is likely that Despard relied on the ministrations of such a woman of African descent, though we do not know for a fact that he met his future wife at this time. Significantly, the women slaves of Jamaica, no less than the men, were freedom fighters: “The head Negro Women about Lucea, even those kept by white men, were concerned” in the slave revolt of Hanover Parish in 1776, for example.22
Despard’s military career depended on military production by men of African descent, enslaved and free, as well as by European soldiers, who were themselves poor and multiethnic—English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish. This labor had two strategic objects, as set forth in a treatise on the fortification of Jamaica, written in 1783: “1st Security against Insurrections” and “2nd Security against Foreign Invasion.” Thereby, a “General Security of the Settlements against enemies, whether intestine or foreign, is the fundamental principle.”23 It was assumed that any invading force would encourage slave revolt, against which the authorities pursued a policy of dividing the black population, promising freedom to slaves who joined the militia. Five thousand black pioneers were to be instantly mobilized upon alarm. Despard studied cooperation, division, and the relationship between insurrection and invasion.24
“The unfortunate Edward,” his niece wrote years after his death, “was an accomplished draughtsman, mathematician and engineer.”25 Like other engineers, he supervised the labor that built roads and bridges, he conducted sieges, he maintained fortifications, he prepared maps and sketches, and he kept financial accounts.26 In Jamaica, twenty-one locations, with tracery, hornwork, redoubts, or glacis, required attention. “It was here in these material arrangements,” wrote E. K. Brathwaite, referring to the roads, bridges, aqueducts, churches, burial grounds, great houses, and forts erected in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, “that the white contribution to the island’s cultural development lay.” This was architecture, “invented,” said John Ruskin, to make “slaves of its workmen, and sybarites of its inhabitants.” To this we must add its military function, which indeed made possible the other two characteristics.27
Much of the work Despard organized was like the hewing of wood and the drawing of water, for which thousand
s of people were mobilized. Sappers, miners, and pioneers did the pick-and-shovel work. The sapper executed fieldworks; he built and repaired fortifications. The pioneer worked with others in small squads. The work was carefully coordinated: “A pickaxe breaks the ground, two shovels following, throw the earth towards the scarp, whence two other shovels throw it up the berm; from thence again two shovels throw it upon the profile.” It took seven men to transport as much dirt as one horse. The work included blasting, grubbing, mucking, hacking, bending, thrusting, straightening, and hauling—suggesting why the word fatigue, with its double meaning as “punishment for military misdemeanors” and “physical exhaustion,” entered the English vocabulary at this time.28 (On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, in addition to “Vomiting and Diarrhoea, Shivers and Shakes and Heartaches,” the Gaelic poet in his curses wished upon the English [“Sud An Nidh Ghuidhimsi Saxonig”] “Digging the Drains and Making Ditches.”)29 Despard himself had come to Jamaica from a spade culture, and moreover one in high mobilization in the 1760s as Ireland embarked on the most intensive land cultivation of its history. The spade combined many of the functions of the mattock, ax, crowbar, mallet, shovel, and hoe. It was essential to large-scale drainage projects and lazy-bed cultivation alike. Despard and his crews worked on a variety of sites, from marsh to mountain. He shared in the dangers of the work: slippages, irregularities, falling boulders, shifting earth, flooding trenches, falling objects, collapsing pilings, and weak shoring.30
During his time on Jamaica, Despard saw his military career advance. His work as an engineer helped to save both Kingston and the island as a whole—as Britain’s headquarters in the Caribbean—from Spanish attack during the American War of Independence. His success was built upon the slavery and terror of island society, as he was part of a privileged class and dependent on the wealthy sugar planters for preferment and promotion, which came to him in 1783 with the award of the rank of colonel in a provincial regiment. With the help of African women, he survived the tropics. He could not have organized the polyglot motley crews had he not developed some sympathy, intellect, and lucidity in forming and coordinating the gangs of workers whose labor was his triumph. In that way, he was creolized.
NICARAGUA
Since Despard’s regiment was disabled by disease and at less than full strength in 1776, he was not assigned to join General Howe in the British military campaign against the American colonies, but rather appointed later, in 1779, to be one of the commanding officers in an expedition against the Spanish Main. The goal was to sever North from South America by sending an expedition across Nicaragua to cut the Spanish Empire in half, at the same time connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Governor John Dalling of Jamaica conceived the expedition while dreaming over Thomas Jefferys’s Atlas of the West Indies, and he believed that success would produce a “new order of things.” Yet the plan posed problems of logistics and communication. Troops, ships, and provisions had to be mobilized in Jamaica and then transported across a thousand miles of sea, and a base of operations had to be established on an unknown coast. The troops would disembark and reassemble on river craft, carrying materiel and provisions sixty miles upriver, surmounting rapids, shoals, and blind tributaries. They would then lay siege to Fort Inmaculada, which had been built in 1655 to defend against buccaneers. Once in command of all the strong points along the river, the men would build vessels and outfit a fleet for operations in Lake Nicaragua. All of these operations were, moreover, to be carried out in a debilitating milieu of tropical heat and, after May, torrential rains.
Thomas Jeffreys, The West Indian Atlas; Or, a General Description of the West Indies Taken from Actual Surveys and Observations (1777). William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.
The expeditionary force was raised in Kingston in February 1780 under martial law. Despard and other officers would lead several squadrons of soldiers (from the Sixtieth Loyal Americans, the Seventy-ninth or Liverpool Blues, and the Royal American Foot) as well as a larger group of irregulars from Jamaica—the Legion (composed mostly of sailors), the Black Regiment, the Loyal Irish Company, the Royal Batteaux Corps, and a motley contingent of Royal Jamaica volunteers. Lieutenant Governor Archibald Campbell took the farewell salute. The irregulars were drawn up, he wrote, “in a ragged line, half-clothed and half-drunk, they seemed to possess the true complexion of buccaneers and it would be illiberal to suppose their principles were not in harmony with their faces. A hundred of them were collected together and seemed so volatile and frolicsome, I thought it good policy to order ten guineas for them to be drunk in grog on board their transports and embarked them with three cheers to the great satisfaction of the town of Kingston.”
Twenty years earlier, Molyneux, the first published British authority on amphibious warfare, had described the technical/military potential of the motley crew: “Wonderful things have been done, even with little Boats, with an handful of bold and cunning men.” “We [the British Empire] call ourselves the Neptune of the Sea, without knowing how, in many parties, to sway the trident,”—admitting, in other words, that their command of the “handful of bold and cunning men” was less than perfect.31 He soberly noted that in North America and the West Indies ten such amphibious efforts had succeeded, and thirteen failed. The 1780 expedition fell into two phases. The first, lasting from February to the end of April, the dry season, culminated in the defeat of the garrison at the castle up St. Johns River. The second phase, during the rainy season, was characterized by disease, huge mortality, and, finally, retreat in December. The first was a westward movement upriver, and the second an eastward one, downstream. In the first we see Despard as a bold and daring soldier, in the second as a survivor. He was the first to arrive and the last to leave. Usually shoulder to shoulder with Despard, the young Horatio Nelson here got his boots mired in the mud and fell behind. In the first phase, Despard reconnoitered, he planned the attack, he led the first party and took fire. On April 30, Commanding Officer John Polson wrote to Governor Dalling that “nearly every gun fired was aimed either by Nelson or Despard.” Despard organized parties of sappers to begin mining the ramparts. The siege was successful: the garrison surrendered, and prisoners were taken.32
There was a political economy to the operation: war was work, and Despard commanded. He put the men to work, set their hours, and created a wage and skill hierarchy, offering extra money to those “who really understand their business,” as one of his lieutenants observed. He contended with broken and missing tools, a problem that made it difficult for the party to blow up the Spanish fort before retreating. He searched for skilled masons, carpenters, sawyers, and most of all boatmen. He was part of a military system in which authority and discipline were maintained by providing food to the soldiers. They were discouraged from providing for themselves, especially in woods that abounded “in game, such as warrus, or wild Hogs, guanas, Ducks, Pigeons, Currasoa Birds, Quams, both as big as Turkeys,” because that would encourage their independence. The officers refused to allow the soldiers to barter, to exchange clothing for provisions, or to hunt in the woods without permission. Troops were soon put on short allowance; then their provisioning fell in arrears. The sick had no fruit or vegetables.33 By the beginning of June, the “melancholy effects of famine” were beginning to be felt at the castle, and so, too, because of the scarcity and deteriorating conditions, the effects of resistance: pilferage, theft, and desertion.34 The sailors, soldiers, artificers, boatmen, and laborers had to be continually replaced as the original complement succumbed or ran away. The soldiers who remained at the fort were soon too weak to crawl. At Greytown, downriver, the soldiers were too sick to bury the dead.
Despard’s drawing of Fort Inmaculada, 1802. Robinson, A Pictorial History of the Sea Services. John Hay Library.
The “gray-eyed people,” as the Mosquitos called the English, increasingly depended upon native people for transportation and food.35 Those who knew the local ecology were a product of three continents: t
hey were American, African, and European. In the seventeenth century, the Mosquito Indians had incorporated European buccaneers and escaped or shipwrecked African slaves into their communities. By the eighteenth, they had become an advanced maritime people with major settlements at Blewfields, Pearl Key Lagoon, Boca del Toro, Corn Island, St. Andres, and Old Providence. Olaudah Equiano spent a year with them; they helped build his house south of Cape Gracias á Dios, “which they did exactly like the Africans, by the joint labor of men, women, and children.”36 They celebrated with a dryckbot, or drinking bout (a buccaneer custom), “without the least discord in any person in the company, although it was made up of different nations and complexions.” Equiano sailed to Jamaica from London with four Mosquito chiefs, with whom he studied Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the mammoth sixteenth-century Protestant text of struggle and persecution. Charles Napier Bell grew up among the Mosquitos in the early nineteenth century and learned their lore from an ancient Mandingo woman, a Muslim from the headwaters of the Niger. He described the amplitude of the cockles, the plenty of the seas, the simplicity of plantain cultivation, and how the flowers, the birds, and the cricky jeen supplied all the information of an almanac. The Mosquitos, wrote another observer, “have no interest in the accumulation of property, and therefore do not labour to obtain wealth. They live under the most perfect equality, and hence are not impelled to industry by that spirit of emulation which, in society, leads to great and unwearied exertion. Content with their simple means, they evince no desire to emulate the habits or the occupations of the colonists; but on the contrary, seem to regard their toils and customs with a sense of pity or contempt.”37