by Ben Hughes
In December 1689, the West Indian fleet departed from Custom House Quay. The first leg of the voyage saw the ships sail past the impoverished districts of London’s East End. The narrow-fronted, two-story wooden houses of Stepney, Whitechapel, Aldgate, Spitalfields, Shadwell, and Ratcliff were home to many of the sailors on board. At Wapping, the fleet passed the scaffold at Execution Dock, where pirates and mutineers were launched into oblivion on the orders of men such as “Hanging Judge Jeffries.” Alongside the scaffolds, blackened, decaying corpses hung in gibbets, slowly turning in the breeze. Later, the ships passed Gravesend, “the last town of the River of Thames,” before passing on to the Nore, a vast anchorage in the estuary to the north of Sheppey Island. There they would remain for the next two months while several of the men of war due to escort them across the Atlantic joined them.5
BY DECEMBER 1689 the Nine Years’ War had reached an impasse. After several initial successes earlier that summer, notably the siege and capture of the fortress town of Mainz, by autumn Louis XIV’s invasion of the Rhineland had ground to a halt. As several German principalities, including Brandenburg, Saxony, and Hanover, had mobilized against them, the French had withdrawn, laying waste to the borderlands to deny their enemies the supplies they would need to launch a counterattack. In Ireland, James II and his deputy, the Duke of Tyrconnell, had been struggling to pacify several Protestant strongholds ever since the ousted king had landed in Kinsale in March 1689. The siege of Derry, opened in April, proved particularly grueling. After one hundred days without a breakthrough, the Jacobites withdrew. At sea, the only fleet engagement of note had taken place at Bantry Bay off the south coast of Ireland on May 11, 1689. A French force of twenty-four third and fourth rates, two frigates, and a number of fireships had landed reinforcements for James’s army before turning on a numerically smaller English fleet. A four-hour engagement resulted in an inconclusive victory for the French. While neither fleet lost a ship, the English suffered four hundred casualties and were forced to retreat to the open sea. Wary of French invasion, the English made their way back to the Channel. The French admiral, François Louis de Rousselet, Marquis de Châteaurenault, failed to follow up his advantage. In August 1689, the commander of William’s land forces, the Duke of Schomberg, arrived in the north of Ireland with fifteen thousand Danish, Dutch, Huguenot, and English troops. The capture of Carrickfergus proved Schomberg’s sole success. His offensive stalled at the siege of Dundalk and, as the winter set in, fevers and scurvy killed six thousand of his troops. Many others deserted. Thus, with stalemate in Ireland, on the high seas, and in the Rhineland, were the battle lines drawn at the end of 1689.6
AMONG THE twelve Royal Navy ships that would gather at the Nore to convoy the West Indian fleet that winter was HMS Swan, a 32-gun fifth rate destined for Jamaica. Originally built by the Dutch, the frigate measured seventy-four feet along its keel, had a breadth of twenty-five feet, and a burden of two hundred and forty-six tons. After being captured in the English Channel in 1673 during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, it had been commissioned into the Royal Navy’s Irish Squadron. Over the next fourteen years the Swan had seen service in the English Channel, the Mediterranean, and the Caribbean, as well as off the coasts of Newfoundland and Virginia. In 1688, considered well past its prime, it had been converted into a fireship and sent to the Baltic only to be recommissioned as a fifth rate the following January on the outbreak of war. On March 10, 1689, the Swan took on a skeleton crew of six men. Over the next nine months a further one hundred and fifty-four names were entered in the muster. First among them was Captain Thomas Johnson. “A diligent man . . . [of good] carriage,” Johnson had previous experience of command on the Jamaican station. The second in command, the Honourable Lieutenant Edward Neville, was the polar opposite of his captain. A high-born idler who owed his appointment to nepotism, Neville would not serve the frigate well. The majority of the sailors were pressed men. Spirited away from merchant vessels or kidnapped ashore, they were bundled aboard the Swan by press gangs armed with cudgels. Among a dozen men pressed at the Nore on December 12, 1689, were two brothers. On examination by one of the Swan’s lieutenants, Jonathan and Andrew Hodge were rated able seamen, testament to the experience they had garnered from service on merchantmen plying the English coast or the European or intercontinental trade routes. Once processed, the Hodges joined their new shipmates on the foul-smelling berth deck and slung their hammocks between the guns. Over the next two years, the brothers would barely leave the ship. Their lives would become a routine of hard work, poor diet, and limited sleep, for which they earned a pittance of ten shillings per month. The days were punctuated by corporal punishments dictated by the Articles of War. These included such indignities as keel hauling, flogging, hanging in the bilboes, ducking at the yard arm, paying the cobty, and running the gauntlet. Unlike the majority of their peers, over the next two-and-a-half years while the Swan was based at Jamaica, the Hodges would neither run nor be discharged nor killed in battle nor succumb to disease. Both would survive until the day the ship met its end at Port Royal in June 1692.7
ON FEBRUARY 15, 1690, taking advantage of a brisk westerly breeze, the West Indies fleet upped anchor and sailed east. Skirting the wrecks which littered the Kentish Flats, they tacked off the North Foreland, turned south, passed the castles at Deal, the Goodwin Sands, and Dover, and then headed west along the south coast, arriving at Plymouth Sound on March 6, where the rest of the ships bound for the West Indies awaited them.8 Before leaving Plymouth, several passengers were taken aboard. A short-tempered, one-eyed Irishman, William O’Brien, the second Earl of Inchiquin and the newly appointed governor of Jamaica, was better suited to the battlefield to which he had taken in his youth than the Council meeting room that awaited him. Inchiquin’s predecessors had ruled the kingdoms of Munster and Thomond since the late tenth century. Having switched their allegiance to the English crown in 1542, the family had been rewarded with the hereditary title of Baron Inchiquin on condition that they covert to the Anglican faith. The Inchiquins proved equally elastic in their loyalties during the Civil War. In 1641 Murrough O’Brien, the father of the new governor of Jamaica, had fought for the English during the Irish Rebellion. Murrough was later forced to submit to Parliament only to declare for Charles I in 1648, a move which saw the family forced into exile when Cromwell landed the following year. With his teenage son in tow, Murrough joined Charles II’s court in France where he was created Earl of Inchiquin in 1654 as a reward for his loyalty.9
Like many exiled royalists, the O’Briens lived a peripatetic existence. Father and son served with the French against the Spanish in Catalonia before traveling to Paris in 1655 where they were implicated in Edward Sexby’s plot to assassinate Oliver Cromwell. The Inchiquins spent the next four years between Catalonia and Paris, then turned up in London in December 1660 following the Restoration, where Inchiquin senior met the diarist Samuel Pepys at the Sun Tavern on Fish Street Hill, before sailing for Lisbon to fight for the Portuguese in their war of independence against Spain. En route the Inchiquins’ ship was captured by Barbary pirates. In the melee, William lost an eye. Father and son were imprisoned in Algiers only to be released after the English Parliament had paid a ransom of 70,000 dollars. Subsequently, Inchiquin senior retired to his native Ireland where he died in 1663.
As the second Earl of Inchiquin, William O’Brien took up a post in the Privy Council in 1671 and was made captain general of the colony of Tangiers three years later. Acquired by the English crown as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry to Charles II, Tangiers was of strategic importance, but it was a problematic posting due to the interminable state of siege it was placed under by a hostile population. Nine governors would administer the colony in the two decades it remained an English possession. Inchiquin governed it for six years before returning to England in 1680 having lost the outlying fortifications to the Moors. It was a shameful reverse. Over one hundred of the garrison were captured and beheaded. Inchiquin’s placa
tory gift to the king of a pair of ostriches did little to restore his reputation on his return home.10 Following the death of his first wife, Margaret Boyle, with whom he had had three children, in 1683 Inchiquin married the Honorable Elizabeth Herbert, the coheiress of Lord Chandos. The couples spent the next five years in Ireland until the upheavals of 1688 presented an opportunity for Inchiquin to reinvigorate his stuttering career by siding with the Prince of Orange. Initially, the plan backfired. Inchiquin had his estate, O’Brien’s Bridge in Clare County, sequestered and the family were forced to flee to England by superior Catholic forces under Major-General Macarthy. In London on September 19, 1689, William and Mary rewarded Inchiquin by commissioning him governor of Jamaica. The posting, which commanded a salary of £2,000 and would ensure a steady stream of additional income, could not have come at a better time. Inchiquin was in major financial difficulties: his estate had been attainted, he had been obliged to pawn his wife’s jewels for £1,000, and he would spend the better part of his last two months in England squabbling with the Lords of Trade and Plantations, a subcommittee of the Privy Council responsible for administering the colonies, over the travel allowance he would be granted to accommodate his retinue on the voyage to the New World. As well as his wife Elizabeth, to whom the earl was particularly devoted, James O’Bryan, his third son from his first marriage, went aboard the flagship of the West Indies fleet along with the seventy-five servants deemed necessary to tend to the Inchiquins’ every need.11
ON MARCH 9, 1690, two more passengers boarded the fleet. James Harlow and Alan Mullen were Irish scientists dispatched to Jamaica by Sir James Rawdon, a keen amateur botanist known as “the father of Irish gardening,” their mission to collect plant samples and transport them home. Little is known about Harlow aside from the fact that he had traveled to Virginia on another plant collecting expedition in 1688. Mullen comes down to us as a more fully rounded character. After studying medicine at Trinity College, he had become a member of the short-lived Dublin Philosophical Society, but was best known for his work on the human eye and a bizarre account of the anatomy of the elephant, which he had published after dissecting an unfortunate specimen that had been burned to death in Dublin in 1681. Five years later, as the result of “an indelicate love affair,” Mullen had been forced to leave Ireland for London where he met the Earl of Inchiquin. A few months later both men had boarded the West Indian fleet along with James Harlow. The latter sailed on HMS Swan. Mullen and Inchiquin traveled on the flagship, HMS Mary.12
Another passenger aboard the Mary was a Spaniard named Santiago Castillo. Born in Barcelona, Castillo had risen to prominence in Caribbean affairs as an agent of the asiento, a trade agreement aimed at keeping Spain’s American colonies supplied with slaves. Lacking the resources to compete in the West African trade, the Spanish relied on foreigners to supply their overseas plantations. In the 1560s, the Portuguese, operating out of Angola, had been granted a monopoly. Thus had the situation remained until two Genoese merchants, Grillo and Lomelin, were awarded the contract in 1662. Unable to fulfil the terms themselves, the Genoese subcontracted the Dutch India Company and the English Royal Adventurers, the short-lived predecessor of the Royal African Company, to complete the contract. Both purchased their slaves at bases along the Guinea Coast in West Africa, before transporting them to the regional entrepôts of Curaçao and Jamaica for trans-shipment to Havana, Portobelo, and Cartagena. The Genoese struggled to fulfill their responsibilities, while the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1665 crippled the English Royal Adventurers and in 1671 Grillo’s contract was terminated. Various Spanish traders took over for the next ten years, but by 1680 Spanish agents were back in Jamaica, purchasing slaves from the newly established Royal African Company. Four years later Santiago Castillo, who had worked for fourteen years out of the Dutch colony of Curaçao, became the first asiento agent to be permanently based in Port Royal.
During the governorship of Hender Molesworth (1684–1687), Castillo’s business had prospered. As Jamaica’s principal agent of the Royal African Company, Molesworth engineered an agreement by which Castillo got the pick of the company’s slaves in exchange for an annual “commission” of somewhat over 10,000 pieces of eight paid to the governor. When the Duke of Albemarle took over in 1687, Castillo’s activities were curtailed. With no direct interest in the RAC, Albemarle favored the interests of the Jamaican plantocracy, who were in competition with Castillo for the company’s slaves. After detaining several of the sloops the Spaniard used for trans-shipment, Albemarle had a warrant for Castillo’s arrest issued on the pretext of a religious squabble between the Spaniard and Thomas Churchill, chief minister of the Catholic faith in Jamaica who had been appointed by James II. Castillo fled for Cuba, where he was detained for some time by the Spanish authorities for having failed in his mission, before traveling on to England in 1689 with the hope that the Glorious Revolution would enable him to secure favorable terms. Granted an audience with King William’s Privy Council, Castillo struck a deal to reestablish the Jamaican asiento and was awarded a knighthood by a government keen to promote friendly relations with Spain as a counterbalance to an increasingly hostile France. On September 17, 1689, it was agreed that the Royal African Company should furnish two thousand “negroes” for the asiento at Jamaica over the next twenty months with the price per head fixed at eighty pieces of eight, a little under £20. Thus Castillo boarded the fleet at Portsmouth with full sanction to purchase slaves for Spanish America and the new governor’s unfettered support.13
BY EARLY MARCH the West Indian fleet was sixty-six sails strong. The largest of the fourteen men of war was the flagship, HMS Mary, a 54-gun third rate ship-of-the-line commanded by Captain Matthew Aylmer which had fought at the Battle of Bantry Bay the previous May. The Mary also carried the commander in chief of the West Indies fleet, acting admiral Matthew Wright, as well as Inchiquin and his retinue, James Kendall, the newly appointed governor of Barbados, and the scientist, Alan Mullen. Eight fourth rates of between 40 and 48 guns—the Bristol, the Antelope, the Assistance, the Tiger, the Success, the Princess Ann, the Hampshire, and the Jersey—were also present, along with two fifth rates: the Swan and the Guernsey, both of 28 guns. There was a small armed ketch, the Quaker, which would eventually join the Swan at Jamaica, and a fireship named the Saint Paul. The remaining fifty-one vessels were merchantmen. Most were bound for Barbados, but eleven would go on to Jamaica. In total the fleet carried over three thousand sailors, both Royal Navy ratings and merchantmen. Divided among the men of war there were also thirteen companies of the Duke of Bolton’s regiment. Destined to fight the French in the Caribbean, the regiment had been embarked since mid-December 1689 to prevent desertion. Cramped conditions, poor provisions, and a lack of clothing and beds had led to the outbreak of disease. Despite the close attention of their senior officers, Lieutenant Colonel Holt and Major Nott, the troops suffered terribly. On February 19, 1690, Nott complained that the men were “the wretchedest fellows that ever were seen.” By March 1, with the fleet still at anchor in Plymouth Sound, sixty of the nine hundred and thirty strong regiment were sick of “a malignent fever” and “one or two bodies [were being thrown] overboard every day.”14
On March 9, the fleet departed. The Mary’s gunner fired a signal cannon at 4 A.M. and a lantern was hung out on her maintop mast shrouds to advise the captains to raise anchor and prepare for sea. The Mary set sail at 7 A.M. with the entire fleet of sixty-six ships in company. Coming out of the sound with a fresh gale billowing out of the east, they made good progress and at 2 A.M. the next morning the Lizard was sighted due north three leagues distant. Over the next five days the fleet covered an average of fifty-five miles every twenty-four hours, but on March 15, as they traversed the Bay of Biscay, “a violent storm” sprung up out of the southwest. The following day the winds increased and by the afternoon of March 17 the waves were towering over the decks. “We were near foundering,” Governor Kendall wrote. “The upper deck was full of wa
ter up to the gunwales, and the tarpauling not being good the water in the hold was above the ballast.” As the men worked the pumps, the Mary’s foremast was sprung “about ye upper portions.” Captain Aylmer ordered the foreyard hauled down to ease the strain, but at 4 P.M. a giant wave “stoved [in] all ye windows” in the state rooms. “[It] broak much carved work in ye ships stern,” the log recorded, “and filled up ye great cabin half full of water.” “A great sea pooped us,” Governor Kendall recorded, and “filled the cabin so full that it set me and the other gentlemen swimming. . . . We had meanwhile lost sight of the fleet.”15
The next morning the wind died and the waves abated. At 6 A.M. the Mary set its main topsails and stood off to the northeast, intending to return to England to make repairs, but the following day the wind began “blowing very hard” from the southeast, forcing Admiral Wright to turn once more toward his original destination: the Portuguese colony of Madeira. On March 23, the Mary came up with “8 Sails of Hollanders & an Englishman bound to ye Southward” and at daylight on March 28, an unidentified sail was spotted. Captain Aylmer gave chase and by 8 A.M. had caught the stranger, a hundred-ton French merchantman bound for Martinique. A prize crew was sent aboard and letters were found which spoke of “great preparations” to send a “considerable” French fleet to the Caribbean. Elsewhere, out of sight on the open ocean, HMS Swan suffered its first casualties of the voyage. After the briefest of ceremonies, the bodies of Henry Tewk, an able seaman pressed into service on August 1, 1689, and Garfield Welch, a young midshipman, were committed to the deep. Their clothes and the meager possessions they had crammed into their sea chests were auctioned off at the mast. Over the next few days the Bristol, Hampshire, and Success and eleven merchantmen rejoined the flagship, and on April 3, they sailed into Funchal Bay, Madeira, a deep cove dominated by two strong, stone castles perched on high cliffs to the north and east. Admiral Wright was delighted to find all but a handful of the rest of the men of war and merchantmen riding at anchor in fifty-five fathoms in the roads.16
