A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  Milhot was once a pretty suburb of Cap Français. It is now a collection of squat, white-plastered nouses, the majority of them with cone-shaped corrugated iron roofs; looking down on them from the hills they seem like the bell tents of a military encampment. Nothing remains of the old Milhot except the ruins of Christophe’s palace, and of that only the façade and the terraces are left. Goats and lizards drowse under the trees where the King delivered judgment. The underground passage to La Ferrière is blocked. The outhouse walls are creeper-covered.

  Christophe’s carriage drive to the citadel is little more than a mountain path. It is a hard two and a half hours’ climb by mule or pony. You pass little along the way: a thatch-roofed hut or two from whose doors natives will run out in the hope of selling you bananas, a gendarme returning from the citadel to duty, a Negro collecting coconuts. For a hundred years that road had been abandoned. The natives were frightened of the citadel. It was a symbol of tyranny. They could not be prevailed upon to go there. As the road mounts you have a feeling of nature returned into possession of its own. The lizards are larger and greener that dart across the road, the butterflies brighter and more numerous, the birds that dip into a richer foliage are wider-winged. For ninety minutes you climb in silence. Then, suddenly, at a bend of the road, you see high above you the citadel’s red-rusted prow.

  Words cannot describe the citadel. In photographs it would look like any other ruin. A cinematograph, worked from a circling air-plane, would give no more than an impression of it. To appreciate its meaning you have to come to it as they that built it did, with the hot sun upon you, with your back damp against your shirt, with the fatigue of riding in your knees, with the infinitely varied landscape before your eyes, with the innumerable jungle sounds in your ears, and in your nostrils the innumerable jungle scents. Then you can walk along the grass-grown courtyards, the galleries with their guns that will never fire, the battlements through whose windows trees are sprouting; then you can realize the prodigious effort that the citadel’s building cost; you realize that nothing that has been said of it has been an exaggeration, that it is the most remarkable monument in the modern world.

  10 Trafalgar

  With Rochambeau’s surrender, Napoleon recognized that his plans for a colonial empire had foundered. He was a man to cut his losses. New Orleans was now no use to him. He negotiated the Louisiana Purchase, and concentrated upon creating a self-sufficient European fortress behind which he could disregard his rivals, very much as Hitler was to do a century and a half later. He was only to be concerned once again with the Caribbean, and then indirectly, in the campaign that was to lead to the battle of Trafalgar. As Hitler was to do, he decided that an invasion of England was the essential prelude to the establishment of Europe as a fortress. For twenty-six months, from May 1803, when the Treaty of Amiens proved itself to have been no more than an uneasy truce during which the English ladies of fashion were enabled to see how far they had been outstripped by their Parisian counterparts, Napoleon maintained at Boulogne an army of 130,000 men, which he hoped to throw on the coast between Dover and Hastings. To transport this army he amassed a flotilla of over two thousand flat-bottomed vessels, built to be rowed, of shallow draught, so that they could take the ground without suffering damage. An immense sum of money was spent on the assembly and equipment of this flotilla. He had at first believed that during a calm it could cross the Channel, but he soon recognized that it was very unlikely that any calm would last long enough for the transportation of so many vessels. He must therefore create sufficient concentration of his fleet in the Channel to give him a temporary command of its waters.

  This was not an easy project. He had squadrons at Brest, at Toulon and Cádiz. He had ships at L’Orient, Rochefort and El Ferrol, but all these ships were watched by British blockading squadrons. Napoleon’s problem was how to get these ships together before the British fleet could combine against them.

  He decided that the French vessels must slip out of harbour and sail for the Caribbean; the English would give chase; his ships would elude their pursuers and join forces in the Channel before the English could return. Villeneuve was the officer chosen for this operation. The plan was to be modified by Britain’s declaration of war on Spain, since Napoleon could now enlist the Spanish navy. Britain was in the meantime provided with useful information by a French Royalist who was employed in Dresden as a Russian diplomatic agent.

  Nelson was at this time blockading Toulon, where Villeneuve was in command. Villeneuve was one of those unlucky men who appear at the start of their lives to be fate-favoured mortals but on whom, it is later recognized, fortune has smiled too soon. Born in Provence in 1763, he entered the French navy as one of the corps of ’noble officers’ (Garde du Pavilion). Most of his comrades were massacred or driven into exile during the terror, but he had good looks and southern charm; and he convinced the Jacobins of the sincerity of his revolutionary sentiments. There was a lack of trained officers and he was promoted quickly. He was a captain at the age of thirty, a rear admiral at thirty-three. In the Battle of the Nile his ship was one of the few that escaped unscathed. He was severely criticized by his superiors on this account, but Napoleon took his side, maintaining that the only reproach he had to make of Villeneuve was that he did not retreat sooner, since the position taken by the French commander had been broken and surrounded. In St Helena, Napoleon was to retract this commendation. The defeat of the Nile, he said, was largely due to ‘the bad conduct of Admiral Villeneuve’. But that change of opinion was probably due to subsequent events. He had not yet lost faith in his admiral’s ability. And here was Villeneuve’s supreme chance.

  Villeneuve did not welcome it. He was not ready for such high responsibility. He felt that the operation could only succeed through a remarkable combination of good luck and skill. He lingered in Paris, till Napoleon rapped his knuckles with a curt command. New Year’s Day, 1805, found him in Toulon, at the age of forty-two, with the fate of two empires in his hands. The giant’s robe hung loosely on his shoulders.

  Nelson had no such qualms. His policy was to lure Villeneuve into the open by not staying too near the port. For some time a cat-and-mouse game proceeded. Then, at last, in late March, Villeneuve managed to slip out of Toulon, eluding Nelson’s scrutiny. The winds were friendly, and he reached Cádiz, where he strengthened his fleet of eleven ships with one French and six Spanish ships. He then sailed for the West Indies, reaching Martinique, which was then still French, on May 14. His instructions were clear: to wait in Martinique till he was joined by ships from Brest and Rochefort; if they had not arrived by July 5 he was to sail for El Ferrol, pick up the French and Spanish ships and make for the Channel. With the consequent command of the seas, Napoleon’s flotilla could attempt the crossing from Boulogne.

  The drama of the next few weeks has the intensity and speed of a motion picture. On June 8, Villeneuve learned in Martinique that Nelson, in his pursuit, had arrived four days earlier in Barbados, having been delayed by contrary winds in the Mediterranean. Villeneuve had little faith either in his own ships or the seamanship of his Spanish allies. Convinced that an action in the West Indies would ruin the Emperor’s plans for concentrating in the Channel, he decided to return right away to El Ferrol. Nelson, receiving false information, believed that Villeneuve was planning to attack the British islands, and began a frantic search for him; he went south as far as Trinidad; he watered in Antigua and was there for a brief twenty hours; no letter of his is extant to record with what emotions he saw, after an interval of twenty years, the ochre-brown barracks of the dockyard, the low hills guarding it, and the veranda of Clarence House, where he had spent so many lonely months, months whose loneliness had driven him to the dreary experiment in domesticity that was so opposed to his volatile, tempestuous nature. He watered his ships and was away, with the high cloud-covered cone of Nevis to his starboard. Not till June 13 did he learn the truth, or rather half the truth. He knew that Villeneuve was on his way back to E
urope, but he had not been informed of Napoleon’s master plan; he believed that Villeneuve was bound for Toulon, so he himself made for Gibraltar, but sent a brig home with dispatches, and on the nineteenth this brig sighted the French fleet heading for the Bay of Biscay.

  The French plan was now apparent. The brig hurried back to England and the Admiralty took action; a fleet was sent to intercept the French outside El Ferrol. On July 25, on a day of fog, the British and French fleets met, thirty-five leagues north-west of Finisterre. The action was confused. Two Spanish ships were captured, but the British admiral, who was outnumbered, was irresolute and withdrew to Brest. Now was Villeneuve’s chance. His ships were in poor condition, their crews exhausted by the double trip across the Atlantic and their recent battle, but he was at last able to join the fleet at El Ferrol; had he pushed forward up the Channel he would have given Napoleon that two days’ command of its waters that the army waiting at Boulogne required.

  On the very day when the action took place off Finisterre, Nelson reached Gibraltar. He could not have intervened. For over two years Napoleon had been waiting for this moment. But Villeneuve did not know how dispersed were his adversaries’ forces. He only knew how inefficient his own fleet was. He had no faith in the Spaniards. He believed that a large British fleet was awaiting him in the Channel. He held that his first duty lay to his own fleet, even if its safety ruined his emperor’s plan. Instead of pushing northward, he sailed south for Cádiz. Napoleon, when the news reached him, broke up his camp at Boulogne and marched into Germany. He knew that he had missed his moment.

  For Villeneuve, two months later, came the grim sequel to his long voyage to Martinique. For a month he waited in Cádiz with a fleet of thirty-four ships and with the British watching him. In mid-September, on the fourteenth, Napoleon issued orders that he was to set sail at the first opportunity and make for Naples. If on the way he encountered an inferior British fleet he was to attack it. In his estimate of numerical superiority, two Spanish ships were to be reckoned as the equivalent of one French. On the next day Napoleon decided that Villeneuve’s ‘excessive pusillanimity’ rendered a change of command essential, and he sent a replacement, Admiral Rosily. Villeneuve did not receive Napoleon’s orders till September 28. On that very day Nelson arrived in supreme command of the operations. Villeneuve by now knew that Rosily was on his way, but he did not know that he himself was to be superseded. On October 5 Villeneuve held a council of war. His officers agreed with him that their ships were in no condition to meet the British; at the same time Napoleon’s orders gave him no alternative. The council admitted that a sortie must be made. At the moment, however, a strong wind was blowing from the west. Only in an east wind could a cumbersome fleet be manoeuvred out of Cádiz.

  On the fourteenth, the wind fell; but Villeneuve lingered. He seemed to be waiting for some intervention of providence, and on October 18 providence played its card. Villeneuve learned that Rosily was at Madrid and on his way to supersede him. Villeneuve might be overcautious as a warrior, but he had his pride. He was not going to wait for his dismissal. On the following morning, although once again the wind was westerly, he took advantage of a light land breeze from the east and sailed out to meet destruction at Trafalgar.

  Eighteen of his ships were captured; only eleven found their way back to Cádiz, where a fragment of the French squadron under Rosily remained until 1808, when it was forced to surrender to the Spaniards. Villeneuve himself was captured. He was taken back to England, but he was soon released. He returned to France, his spirit broken, to die in April, by his own hand, in an inn at Rennes.

  The battle of Trafalgar not only freed Britain from the danger of invasion, but it removed the Caribbean from the arena of operations. Napoleon continued to build line-of-battle ships, but he never again sent a fleet to sea; his ships filled the role of privateers, harassing British trade and forcing Britain to maintain exhausting and expensive blockades. The role of the British fleet, as it was in the 1914-1918 war, was to provide convoy service, to protect commerce and to transport troops on colonial expeditions. West Indian products became of immense value to Britain now that she was cut off from European markets. One by one the West Indian colonies of France and Spain fell into British hands: Trinidad, Martinique, St Lucia and Guadeloupe. Holland and Denmark were also involved in the war. Curaçao was captured. The Swedish island of St Bartholomew alone retained neutrality; the graveyards of St Croix and the Episcopalian church at Frederiksted testify to British residence.

  Before this happened, one remarkable action in the early months of the war has attached a footnote to the history of the period. The tourist today, looking northward from St Lucia, will see on the horizon a small high rock. It is a part of Martinique. It rises sheer out of the water, six hundred feet high. It is about a mile in circumference. It can be reached only from one point on the leeward side, when there is no surf. It is uninhabited. But once, for eighteen months, it bore in the books of the British Admiralty the designation HMS.

  When war broke out again in 1803 between France and Britain, Sir Samuel Hood, who was in charge of the ships stationed in St Lucia, realized toward the end of the year that the French ships bound for Fort Royal eluded him by sailing through the channel between this rock and Pointe du Diamante on the mainland of Martinique. Hood decided that he must try to bring fire to bear upon this channel. He therefore brought one of his ships alongside it, attached a hawser to the top of the rock, and contrived to have five guns hauled up on it. The naval chronicles of the day described the sailors who performed this operation, ‘hanging like clusters’, looking ‘like mice hauling a little sausage’. Under the command of Lieutenant James Wilkie Maurice, this curious fortress was maintained by 120 men and boys, with ammunition, provisions and water for months, and was registered at the Admiralty as a sloop, His Majesty’s Ship Diamond Rock.

  For eighteen months the guns of this fortress swept the channel, until she was forced to surrender for want of powder to a French squadron, dispatched by Villeneuve, of two 74’s, a frigate, a corvette, a schooner and eleven gunboats. In the final action she inflicted seventy casualties upon her besiegers and sank three gunboats. It is an episode without parallel in naval history.

  11 Twilight in the Antilles

  In the summer of 1815 the crowned heads of Europe assembled at Vienna to install order in the chaos that had been created by Napoleon’s imperialism, and in the case of the Caribbean colonies there was much the same shuffling of cards that there had been at Paris in 1763 and at Versailles in 1782. The Virgin Islands went back to Denmark, Holland got Curaçao, Saba, Aruba and St Eustatius; Martinique and Guadeloupe were restored to France; Grenada, St Vincent, St Lucia and Dominica were retained by Britain. The signatories made pious declarations of their devotion to peace, assuring one another that at last, thanks to the grace of God, they had arrived at a final settlement, but it is doubtful whether any of the distinguished diplomats believed, in their secret thoughts, that they were doing anything more than sign a truce. And, indeed, within a very few years cracks were showing in the fabric.

  In respect of the Caribbean, however, the Treaty of Vienna was to prove a ‘final settlement’. The islands were not to change hands again, except in two major and one minor instance. Cuba and Puerto Rico, at the end of the century, severed their connection with Spain to become independent, and in 1917 Denmark sold her share of the Virgin Islands – St Thomas, St John and St Croix – to the United States, while St Bartholomew, which had become a liability to Sweden, was transferred to France. Otherwise the status quo has been maintained for a century and a half.

  It was through an unexpected intervention that this happened. For Spain the Napoleonic period was a distracted and disastrous interlude. She found herself fighting first on one side, then on another, not really of her choice and never to her advantage. During the American War of Independence and afterward, she had felt that her one chance of recovering her colonial and naval ascendancy at the expense of Britain
was through the ‘family compact’ with France. But there could hardly be a ‘family compact’ with France when Louis XVI was a victim of the terror, and soon she was engaged in a war with France that cost her the eastern part of Santo Domingo.

  For the next few years she shifted miserably and ineffectively from one side to the other. She re-allied herself with France, but her defeat in the battle of St Vincent only seems slight in comparison with her defeat at Trafalgar. Her servility to France increased, and she ceded Louisiana to Napoleon. Her servility indeed seemed to him so complete that he imagined that he could place his brother Joseph upon her throne. But there he failed to reckon with the pride, the dignity and the intense national feeling of the Spaniard. Soon British bayonets in the peninsula were helping to rescue her from foreign domination.

  While this was happening in Europe, her colonies in Central and South America were one by one breaking from Spanish domination. There was no War of Independence as there had been between Britain and the thirteen colonies. The system just ceased to work, and the Spanish Empire dissolved, with states now independent managing their own affairs, a fact which constituted a considerable problem when Napoleon was at St Helena, for Spain herself had not acknowledged their independence. Her former colonies might be trading freely with France and Britain, but technically this commerce was, under her colonial laws, illegal, and pirates under the Spanish flag were preying on it without there being any possibility of redress from the Spanish government. In the meantime, the chaos of that government was so complete that the European governments were deciding to give France a free hand in Spain. This appeared to give Britain the opportunity that she needed to acquire fresh power in the Caribbean, and when it appeared certain that there would be an invasion of Spain with the co-operation of Russia, the British Prime Minister, Canning, warned the French government that Britain would not accept the subjugation of the Spanish colonies by foreign force. There was a moment of uncertainty, when it seemed possible that the Caribbean would become once again a cockpit. But a solution came from an unexpected quarter; the President of the United States, delivering himself of a message that came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, asserted that his country would not tolerate any interference by a foreign power in the affairs of the American continent.