by Alec Waugh
At the start it had not fared well for them. Their forces were divided and extended. During the Seven Years’ War Britain had kept France occupied by financing Prussia, and had concentrated upon colonial expeditions. In the War of American Independence, Britain was occupied in the north, and France was free to manoeuvre in the Caribbean. She captured Dominica and St Vincent and prepared an expedition against Barbados, but the winds were contrary and instead she turned against St Kitts. Each side was picking up what it could. Britain had captured St Lucia, and it was to prove of immense value. Spain had captured Minorca and had laid siege to Gibraltar. The focus of French and Spanish strategy was a joint assault upon Jamaica. St Kitts seemed an essential hinge in that campaign, and early in January 1782, de Grasse’s victorious fleet of twenty-nine ships of the line drew up in front of Brimstone Hill, the large high mountain that has been described as ‘the Gibraltar of the West Indies’. It had been described as equally impregnable, but it was then in no condition to resist an army of eight thousand French troops under the trusted and competent Marquis de Bouillé.
St Kitts lay only seven miles southeast of St Eustatius. Most of its merchants had had some of their goods confiscated by Rodney, and many of them were in sympathy with the North American colonists. They were not prepared to inconvenience themselves by going into action on behalf of a tyrannical home government. They were prepared to welcome liberation for themselves and, refusing to put Brimstone Hill into a proper condition of defence, they left at its foot eight brass sixteen-pounders with six thousand shot and two fifteen-inch brass mortars with fifteen hundred shell, which the French were to find highly useful when they began their siege. The governor of the island had less than a thousand men at his command, of whom nearly half were local militiamen. A prolonged resistance was impossible.
At this point Rodney reappears upon the scene. Although he had been acting under orders when he captured St Eustatius, his conduct there occasioned an immediate outcry in London, since a great deal of his booty belonged to British merchants. Burke demanded in Parliament that a committee should inquire into the affair. Rodney was recalled to England; he had to justify himself before Parliament and he found himself involved in extensive and costly litigation. It might well have seemed that his career was at an end, but England’s position was too desperate for that to be allowed to happen; with France and Spain gathering for the kill, England’s greatest admiral could not be allowed to loiter in Whitehall corridors. He was over sixty and his health was shattered, but once again he was ordered back to the Caribbean. Lord Sandwich said to him, ‘The fate of this empire is in your hands, and I have no wish that it should be in those of any other.’
The news of his imminent return became known in the islands, and desperate though the position might be at St Kitts, it was important that the defence of Brimstone Hill should be maintained as long as possible. To strengthen that defence, Hood was in the area with a fleet of twenty-two ships, and on January 24 he sailed round Nevis Point and made for the capital, Basseterre, in whose open roadway de Grasse was anchored. The action that ensued does not figure prominently in either French or British history, yet Admiral Mahan in his Influence of Sea Power upon History has described it as being in ‘the very first rank of naval battles’, and, by delaying de Grasse’s timetable, as having prepared the situation that culminated in ‘The Battle of the Saints’.
De Grasse’s ships were arranged somewhat irregularly, and Hood had hoped to attack them at their anchorage, as Nelson did sixteen years later at Aboukir; but he was prevented from doing so by a collision between two of his ships, and de Grasse had time to weigh anchor and draw out to sea. Hood, taking advantage of the north-east trade wind, held close to the island of Nevis, forcing de Grasse to leeward. During the afternoon, night and following morning, Hood kept to windward, so that at noon, rapidly forming his line on the starboard tack and heading north for Basseterre, he was able to seize the anchorage that de Grasse had left, cutting the French fleet off from their shore base. De Grasse recognized his plan too late.
The battle lasted for thirty hours. Hood shortened sail and ‘brought his unmolested van, his centre, and heavily pressed and outnumbered rear’ to anchor. The Frenchmen filed past on their way southward, firing as they went. During the night, Hood rearranged his line in a triangle; his first ship was so close to the shoals round Salt Pond that nothing could get to windward of her; his own ship, the Barsteur, stood at the apex. ‘Springs’ were put out, enabling every ship to swing round and deliver two broadsides to the enemy’s one. De Grasse delivered his first attack early in the morning, the whole French line passing before the British. At three o’clock in the afternoon he attacked again. When night fell, his flagship, the Ville de Paris, had received over eighty shots in her hull; all his ships were damaged. He had lost over a thousand men against Hood’s seventy-three killed and 244 wounded. He decided not to attack again, but to leave the siege of Brimstone Hill to de Bouillé’s troops.
Here the situation had become desperate, but Hood was still in a position to provide diversions. He had taken on board at Antigua a force of six hundred men and the sixty-ninth regiment. These he landed at Frigate Bay, where they captured and then fortified a battery position. The curious situation had thus arisen of de Bouillé, who was besieging Brimstone Hill, having his rear menaced by a handful of men who were protected by Hood’s squadron. Hood, in his turn, was kept in check by de Grasse’s fleet, which now numbered thirty-three ships, and all the time Rodney was drawing closer. Could Brimstone Hill hold out? Another week might have sufficed, but the defenders could not know that. The fire from the hill grew weaker every day, and the advancing line grew closer. The sixty-ninth regiment was re-embarked. On the evening of the twelfth the northern flank of the defence was breached. At midnight the governor decided to surrender. Twenty hours later, Hood summoned his captains on board the Barsteur; he ordered them to cut their cables at eleven o’clock that night, slip away to leeward, and wait there for Rodney.
Rodney landed at Barbados on February 19. The campaign of the next sixty days was to send him home to honour, to a barony and an annual pension of £2,000, all calumny forgotten; it was one of the greatest campaigns, not only in British naval history, but in the history of naval strategy. It initiated the tactic of ‘breaking the line’ that was to be exploited later so effectively by Nelson.
When Rodney arrived upon the scene, the Comte de Grasse, his spirits high after his victories at Yorktown and St Kitts, was at Fort Royal in Martinique with a fleet of thirty-three ships. He was planning to join the Spanish fleet in Havana and attack Jamaica. St Lucia was at this time in British hands, and Rodney anchored in Gros Islet Bay. In front of the bay is a low, humped piece of land that is called Pigeon Island. On this island he placed his sentinels to watch for the first movement of the French fleet. Time passed slowly, and the courtly traditions of eighteenth-century warfare were observed. Late in March, de Grasse received a rich convoy of supply ships. He decided to give a ball, which he invited English officers to attend under a flag of truce. Rodney was prevented by his gout from accepting the invitation, but several of his officers went, and the commanders exchanged gifts, French liqueurs and sweetmeats against English ale and cheese.
It was now early April; the rainy season was nearly over; the tulip and flamboyant trees were in flower; in the hills the pale pink of the immortelle protected the immature cocoa plants, and the sun shone brightly fifty miles away on the mountains of Martinique. Across that narrow channel de Grasse and Rodney watched and waited; de Grasse to slip northward to his waiting ally; Rodney to intercept him. Everything depended on the wind. The trade wind was at its strongest between February and March, at its weakest in the hurricane season between August and September. The breezes now were light and variable. At last, on April 8, Rodney’s frigates reported that the French had sailed, and Rodney started in pursuit.
De Grasse’s object was to sail through the channel between Dominica and Guadeloupe and t
hence catch the trade wind to Havana. He was hampered by the number of troops and stores that he was transporting to the siege. Rodney was travelling light and anxious to force a battle. On April 9, eight British ships which had got ahead of the remainder encountered and were attacked by fifteen French ships off the leeward coast of Dominica. They were at a disadvantage, but de Grasse did not press home his attack. He was concerned with getting through the channel, and during the night of the eleventh he did manage to get most of his ships through; there was, however, a collision between two of his ships, one of which was badly damaged. When this ship was spotted and pursued by the British van, de Grasse decided to recall his ships, and at eight o’clock in the morning the first shots were fired in the action which the French call ‘The Battle of Dominica’ and the British ‘The Battle of the Saints’, after the small rocky islets in the channel. Rodney had thirty-five sail of the line and de Grasse had thirty-three, but the British advantage in numbers was more than counterbalanced by the greater size and superior qualities of the French ships.
The battle opened in the traditional and classic manner, with the two fleets in line of battle slowly passing each other, the British sailing to the north, the French to the south. By ten o’clock the first of the British ships had passed the last of the French. Then the caprice of weather intervened. The northern extremities of the fleets were in an easterly breeze when suddenly a land breeze blew up from the south. In the confusion that followed, a large gap appeared in the French line, immediately in front of Rodney’s flagship, Formidable. This was the decisive moment. The captain of the fleet, Sir Charles Douglas, excitedly called Rodney’s attention to it. ‘Look there, sir. Let’s steer through it.’ Rodney hesitated. That was not the traditional manner of fighting a sea battle. The manual of instructions laid down that an admiral should preserve unchanged the order in which an action started; but Whitehall was far away. Rodney gave the order, and Formidable and the six ships immediately following steered through the gap. The technique of ‘breaking the line’ had been evolved. It is not certain whether the credit for this innovation should go to Rodney or Sir Charles Douglas, but since it was Rodney who would have been held to account if the attack had failed, its success must surely be allowed to him.
By the early afternoon its success was manifest. In the confusion and the smoke, the British rearguard sailed through the French ships, not realizing that they had done so till they were past the enemy. Those British ships that were not beyond the French went to the east of them. The French were broken into three bodies and disorganized. The Comte de Grasse, in his flagship, Ville de Paris, was cut off from his van and rear with five other ships. Rodney concentrated upon and eventually captured them. He was thus enabled to boast, ‘Within two little years I have taken four admirals, two Spanish, one Dutch, and now a French one.’
Two of the escaping French ships were captured a week later in the Mona Passage, but a great many of Rodney’s men felt that the victory could have been exploited a great deal further had the fleeing Frenchmen been pursued more hotly and Rodney been less interested in the prize money that would be his personal share. Be that as it may, his was a notable victory against odds; it saved Jamaica, it restored British and lowered French prestige in the Caribbean; it was the kind of victory that has led to the saying, ‘England loses every battle except the last.’
From one point of view, the war ended in a complete defeat for Britain. She lost everything for which she went to war; no surrender could have been more unconditional; yet in regard to her larger interests, she ended the war on good terms with herself. France had gained nothing from the war except the spectacle of her old foe’s abasement, She had further depleted her exchequer; she had not won or regained a foot of soil in the New World. Spain had acquired New Orleans and Minorca, but had not recovered Gibraltar, and her prestige as a naval power had been further diminished by the defeat which Rodney had administered to her off St Vincent. Britain could, in fact, view the situation of her chief rivals with some complacence, and thanks to The Battle of the Saints she was, in spite of the capitulation at Yorktown, still mistress of the seas.
8 The Lull Before the Storm
The war was ended, peace was signed, and ‘the fortunate islands’ could return to their lucrative pursuits. A few minor problems were still unsettled. One of these concerned the resumption of commercial relations between the West Indies and the United States. Wars in those days were not ‘total’, in the sense that they are now, and private citizens and subjects often tended to regard them as a nuisance with which they were only casually concerned. Byron made his grand tour of Europe and the Levant during the Napoleonic era. During the War of American Independence Louis XVI ordered that Cook’s vessel was to be respected. It is not apparent from her novels that Jane Austen was aware that she was living through a momentous period. This was particularly true of men engaged in commerce. For a long while friendly relations had existed between the merchants and brokers of New England and the planters and ship chandlers of the British West Indies. They were men of the same stock, united now and again by ties of blood; they could scarcely think of themselves as enemies; their overlords might have quarrelled, but that did not concern them. They must wait till ‘the silly thing blew over’. When it did, they would pick up the threads and resume their old relations. When peace was signed, the West Indians and the New England merchants very naturally thought, ‘Now we can go back to where we started’.
They were disconcerted to find that there were differences; the first difference being that the New England merchants were no longer British subjects but foreigners, and though they were no longer exposed to stamp and molasses acts, they were exposed to navigation acts, and the harbours of Kingston, Bridgetown and St John’s no longer flew the same flag as they. They were, however, practical persons, and they had acquired from their ancestors a due regard for compromise. It was wiser not to raise certain issues, not to ask certain questions. Their vessels had originally been registered as British; let them therefore continue to fly the Union Jack when they were in British waters. But since their owners were now American subjects, let the ships be also registered in Boston, Baltimore and Maine. Let the ships have dual nationality. That way the thing could be had both ways. It was an arrangement that suited everyone, except the officers of His Majesty’s Customs and Excise. On that score there was a loss of revenue, and Whitehall felt that action should be taken.
With this end partially in view, the Lords of the Admiralty appointed to its Leeward Islands West Indian station, four years after the cessation of hostilities, a twenty-six-year-old naval officer of somewhat unusual character, slightly odd in appearance, with a great power to arouse affection and an inner glow indicative of fire. Prince William, Duke of Clarence, who was later to be King William IV, had met him three years earlier and has left the following description of him. ‘He appeared,’ wrote the Prince, ‘to be the merest boy of a captain I ever beheld, and his dress was worthy of attention. He had on a full-laced uniform; his lank unpowdered hair was tied in a stiff Hessian tail of an extraordinary length; the old-fashioned flaps of his waistcoat added to the general quaintness of his figure and produced an appearance which particularly attracted my notice, for I had never seen anything like it before, nor could I imagine who he was or what he came about. My doubts were, however, removed when Lord Hood introduced me to him. There was something irresistibly pleasing in his address and conversation and an enthusiasm when speaking on professional subjects, that showed he was no common being.’
This exceptional officer was Horatio Nelson. He had already had experience of the West Indies; he had been sent there by his uncle as a boy in a merchant vessel, and he had been posted there directly after he had passed his examinations as a lieutenant. He had not seen a great deal of active service, but he had impressed his superiors with his potentiality, and when the American War was over and the establishment was considerably reduced, he was not relegated to unemployment. He, no doubt, though
t himself lucky when he was given command of the frigate Boreas, with Antigua as his base.
Antigua is one of the most charming and friendly of the West Indian islands. It has not the majestic grandeur of the mountainous Martinique, Grenada and Dominica. It is an island of low, rounded hills, set with squat stone windmills and red brick plantation houses, with cane stalks swaying in the wind, and a succession of white-sanded beaches. Its capital, St John’s, lies behind an open roadstead; the harbour where the Boreas was anchored was on the other side of the island and has recently, by the energies of a former governor, Sir Kenneth Blackburne, been restored so successfully that it looks very much as it did in Nelson’s day. On the hill above it stands a charming eighteenth-century bungalow that was once the residence of the future William IV and is known now as Clarence House. It was protected by the battlements of Shirley Heights.
Nelson was stationed here three years. It should have been one of the happiest periods of his service, but it was the dreariest. He was a highly conscientious officer, and the seriousness with which he accepted his responsibilities may be gauged from his first public act, his refusal to recognize as his superior a half-pay officer who was acting as commissioner of the dockyard at Antigua.
It was Nelson’s first command. He was a very ambitious man. He had spoken already to his friends of ‘the radiant orb’ which urged him ‘onward to renown’. He was not prepared to compromise with what he held to be his duty, and he was shocked at the amount of corruption that was operative in the Antigua dockyard, with American vessels sailing in and out as though they were still British. He strictly enforced the navigation acts. His actions were invariably correct, but even the Admiralty considered him at times overpunctilious, and he soon found himself involved in lawsuits that, even though they were defended by the government, were to be the cause of irritation to him for many years. The inhabitants of the island were naturally incensed; they refused to call on him or invite him to their houses. It was an exceedingly lonely time for him, and he was in a state of mind and heart to welcome the mildest friendliness. He found that friendliness in another island.
