Instead of rum laced with water, which the British called grog, the French gave their men wine twice a day; it was also a French tradition when in the Caribbean to start the morning with a brandylike liquor known as tafia. On the morning of July 23, the clerk of the Intrepide was deep within the interior of the ship with a lantern in one hand as he worked the pump to the cask of tafia with the other. Suddenly the lantern’s flame brushed against the spigot and ignited the cask. Soon the center portion of the ship was engulfed in flames.
“A fortune in this misfortune,” an officer later recalled, “was that the bulkhead of the after room had been masoned with bricks in order to prevent the very thing which now happened.” This gave the Intrepide’s crew the time to mitigate the impending disaster. As the ship was towed away from the other vessels toward shore, the officers and crew frantically threw casks of gunpowder into the sea while others cut holes into the ship’s sides below the waterline. Soon the fire had spread to the masts and rigging, prompting a sailor to shout, “Sauve qui peut!” (“Save yourself, if you can!”)
“Then everyone rushed to the boats,” another officer remembered. So much thick black smoke poured out of the burning ship that “the sun disappeared from us—we could only see the flames bursting from the portholes.” The intensity of the heat caused the barrels of the ship’s cannons to glow a bright red as they began to discharge into the town, which according to the officer, “received her whole broadside.” Seconds later, what remained of the ship’s powder magazine erupted with such force that the entire stern “sprang into the air” as a deadly shower of splinters rained down on the waterfront. As if this tragedy were not enough, a few days later de Grasse learned that yet another of his ships, L’Inconstante, anchored at a small island four miles to the northwest, had also been destroyed in almost exactly the same manner. One could only wonder whether the French sailors’ thirst for tafia might consume the entire fleet before it became time to leave Cap François.
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ON JULY 28, five days after the loss of the Intrepide, the frigate Concorde departed for Boston with copies of a dispatch for the allied generals in White Plains. “I have thought myself authorized,” de Grasse wrote, “to take everything on myself for the common cause.” He would be sailing for the Chesapeake, “the place which seems to me to have been indicated by [you] as the surest to operate best as you propose. . . . By these efforts which I have made, you may realize the desire that I have to effect a change in our position and in the condition of affairs.”
What de Grasse chose not to mention in his dispatch was that yet another, potentially fatal problem had emerged. Haiti’s governor had announced that the colony’s coffers were empty. If de Grasse was to come up with the million-plus livres needed to fund Rochambeau’s army, let alone pay for his own voyage, the funds would have to be provided through loans from the island’s planters.
There was no doubt they had the money. In 1781, Cap François, with its newly built stone houses and wide, crowded streets, was “the Paris of the isles,” and its white residents were some of the wealthiest people in the world. Whereas Cuba’s Havana owed much of its riches to the Spanish gold and silver mines of Mexico and South America, Cap François’s prosperity was based on Haiti’s highly profitable sugar industry, which was in turn based on what has been called the most brutal manifestation of African slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Of the estimated thirty thousand slaves shipped to Haiti annually, more than a third were worked to death within the first years of their arrival. De Grasse and his officers might pride themselves in furthering the cause of freedom through their efforts on America’s behalf, but the unsettling truth was that even if the United States should win its independence, African slavery would remain a reality not only here in Haiti but also in Virginia and the rest of the thirteen states. And in what is a consummate historical irony given America’s self-proclaimed role as the upholder of human liberty, the slaves of Haiti would win their freedom (through a bloody revolution of their own) more than a half century before those of the United States.
The planters of Cap François might have been rich in the summer of 1781, but that did not mean they were willing to loan Admiral de Grasse the money. Although the terms were favorable, the French government had been slow to honor its commitments in an earlier instance. There were also grumblings about de Grasse’s refusal to provide any warships for a convoy slated to sail for France. Even when he offered his own considerable property on the island as collateral, the planters declined to cooperate. By July 31, de Grasse had come to fear that due to a lack of funds, “his fleet [must] remain idle in port.” But, once again, Saavedra had an idea. What if the Spanish envoy sailed to Cuba in advance of the French fleet and solicited the colony’s government in Havana for the loan?
It required him a night to think it over, but de Grasse ultimately decided to go ahead with what he realized was becoming an increasingly “risky operation.” Saavedra would depart on a “swift frigate” for Havana while de Grasse led his fleet up the Old Bahama Channel, a dangerous and rarely used passageway along the northeast coast of Cuba. Assuming Saavedra was able to raise the cash, he would meet de Grasse off Matanzas, about 70 miles to the east of Havana, before the French fleet sailed for Virginia.
“His plan seemed good to me,” Saavedra wrote, and on August 3, he boarded the frigate Aigrette and was soon on his way to Cuba.
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ON JULY 7, Admiral George Rodney, then stationed at Barbados and close to incapacitated with the pain caused by his swollen prostate, learned that de Grasse was planning to sail up the American coast that summer. He quickly dispatched the Swallow with a message for Admiral Graves in New York. “I shall keep as good a look out as possible on their motions,” he promised, “by which my own shall be regulated.” However, by the time the Swallow arrived in New York on July 27, Graves had already sailed for Boston in hopes of intercepting the convoy from France. Leaving a copy of the dispatch in New York, the captain of the Swallow headed out to find Graves and his fleet, only to be driven ashore on Long Island by some American privateers.
By the end of July, Rodney had decided he must seek medical treatment. On August 1, he sailed for England with two ships of the line and a frigate, leaving Samuel Hood in command of the British squadron in the Caribbean. Rodney had left instructions for Hood to stop at the Chesapeake and Delaware on his way north and if he did not find any signs of de Grasse’s fleet, rendezvous with Graves in New York. On August 3, Hood sent out another dispatch for Graves informing him of his impending departure. Unfortunately, this vessel also ran afoul of the Americans and never made it past Philadelphia. This meant that when Graves returned to New York on August 16 (after spending much of the month in a fog bank off Georges Bank futilely searching for the French convoy) and found a copy of Rodney’s dispatch, he had no word of Hood and knew only that back in early July Rodney had promised that at some undetermined time a British fleet would be sent up the coast.
Most extraordinary of all in this ever lengthening list of failed British opportunities is the one involving Rodney himself. On the night of July 31, before his departure from St. Eustatius for England, he received the most vital piece of intelligence to date. Up until that point, he knew de Grasse was about to sail up the North American coast, but he didn’t know to where. From the Danish island of St. Thomas came the news that the French were headed for the Chesapeake. For reasons that are difficult to understand, Rodney neglected to pass along the news to Hood, who sailed from Antigua on August 10. Rodney may have been too overcome with pain to process the importance of the intelligence at the time of his departure on August 1; he also held out hope that once out of the sweltering heat of the Caribbean, his condition might improve to the point that he could rejoin the British fleet on the American coast. Twelve days later, while sailing on the latitude of Bermuda, he determined that, no, he must continue o
n to England. He did, however, decide to communicate, at long last, the intelligence he had received before his departure from the Caribbean. Not until September 8, far too late to be of any help to Graves, did the frigate Pegasus arrive at Sandy Hook with information Rodney had first received more than a month before.
One is struck by the contrast between the British and the French during these crucial months. Whether it was the feuding between Clinton and Cornwallis or the dubious and sometimes unfathomable behavior of Rodney, the British were plagued by discord and miscommunication. The French also had their share of problems, but there was something—whether it be as loftily intangible as fate or as prosaic as the steadfast competence of Francisco Saavedra—that kept them on course. And then there was Washington, aligned with a general he did not entirely trust, waiting to know when and where he could expect de Grasse. On August 14, he got the answer.
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LONG BEFORE HE LEARNED that the French admiral was sailing for the Chesapeake, Washington had begun to have his doubts about the wisdom of attacking New York. As early as June 28 he had admitted to artillery chief Henry Knox, then in Philadelphia, “I am every day more and more dubious of our being able to carry into execution the operations we have in contemplation.” On July 30, he wrote to Lafayette in Virginia that it was “more than probable that we shall . . . entirely change our plan of operations.” Two days later, on August 1, he recorded in his diary: “I turned my views more seriously (than I had ever before done) to an operation to the southward.”
When it came to his communications with Rochambeau, however, he revealed none of these misgivings about attacking New York. Indeed, he seems to have been unwilling even to discuss the possibility of a southern option. This also applied to his own officers in White Plains, particularly his quartermaster, Timothy Pickering, whom he continued to pester with impatient demands for the boats needed for an amphibious attack on New York. So far as almost everyone around him was concerned, Washington was implacable in his resolve to attack New York.
The reason for the discrepancy between what he told intimates such as Lafayette and Knox and what he told both the French and American officers at or near his headquarters was the absolute importance of secrecy. As soon as Rochambeau learned that Washington had decided on the Chesapeake instead of New York, the French would inevitably begin to prepare for the nearly five-hundred-mile march south to Virginia—preparations that would quickly tip off the British as to what was really afoot. Rochambeau might have been concealing the truth about his correspondence with de Grasse, but Washington was being just as cagey and, in his own way, manipulative. There is even evidence he had gone to the lengths of establishing his own line of communication with de Grasse. Years later, Allan McLane, who was a thirty-five-year-old Continental officer in 1781, claimed he had been dispatched from Philadelphia aboard the privateer Congress for a secret mission to Haiti. According to McLane, he met with de Grasse aboard the Ville de Paris at Cap François, where he passed along messages from Washington. Whether or not this is entirely true, Washington was not about to reveal the full extent of his thinking to Rochambeau, because the future success of any land-based movement of troops to the Chesapeake depended on its being as much a mystery to the French as to the British.
What Washington held out hope for was that the allied army would not have to travel the entire way by land. On August 2, he wrote to Robert Morris (who was now the equivalent of the country’s finance minister) in Philadelphia about the possibility of finding enough ships on the Delaware to transport his troops. Once again, his chief concern was secrecy. “The principal difficulty which occurs,” he wrote, “is obtaining transports at the moment they may be wanted; for if they are taken up beforehand, the use for which they are designed cannot be concealed and the enemy will make arrangements to defeat the plan.” The good part about assembling the fleet in Philadelphia was that it was removed from the cloud of British spies surrounding New York. “I can direct certain preparations to be made in Philadelphia and at other convenient places,” he explained, “without incurring any suspicions.”
His best option, however, involved de Grasse. If the French fleet should suddenly appear at Sandy Hook as he had earlier recommended, he and Rochambeau could immediately march their men to New Jersey and embark them for the Chesapeake. But as de Grasse made clear in his July 26 letter, it had been represented to him that he should sail directly to Virginia. According to Richard Peters, president of the Continental Congress’s Board of War and an old friend of Washington’s who was at headquarters with Robert Morris on the morning Washington learned of de Grasse’s dispatch, “The general . . . [responded] with expressions of intemperate passion (which I will not repeat), [then] handed me [the] letter. . . . ‘Here,’ said the general, ‘read this; you understand the French’; and turning away, ‘so do I now better than ever.’”
As Lafayette had learned that spring, marching an army from New York to Virginia was fraught with difficulties. How Washington and Rochambeau were supposed to do it in the heat of summer, with an American army that had not been paid in over a year and was without the necessary provisions, uniforms, and arms, was anyone’s guess. No wonder Washington was enraged when he learned that because of de Grasse’s decision to sail to the Chesapeake rather than first stopping at Sandy Hook, they had lost the opportunity to transport their armies by water. As he complained to Pickering, “I wish to the Lord the French would not raise our expectation [of] a cooperation, or fulfill them!”
His anger was short-lived, however. After being “not a little astonished” by Washington’s initial response to the letter, Peters and Morris returned to their rooms to prepare for breakfast. Once at Washington’s table for the morning meal, they were just as amazed to find him “as composed as if nothing extraordinary had happened.” Having unleashed his emotions privately, he was now ready to assume his public role as commander in chief and continue to do his best to win the war. Later in the morning, once breakfast was finished, Washington turned to Peters. “Well,” he said, “what can you do for us, under the present change of circumstances?”
What none of them knew was that as late as only a few days before, de Grasse’s arrival in the Chesapeake was anything but assured.
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AT 600 MILES FROM EAST TO WEST, with a coastline of 2200 miles, Cuba is the largest of the Caribbean islands. For about 140 miles along Cuba’s northeast coast extends the Old Bahama Channel, a narrow curving passage between Cuba to the south and the Bahamas to the north. In the sixteenth century it had been used by the Spanish treasure fleet but had long since fallen out of favor due to the dangers posed by the many coral reefs and sandbars. This especially held true during the hurricane season, exactly when de Grasse decided to take his twenty-eight ships of the line and assorted frigates through a channel that no other French fleet had ever attempted.
He had several reasons for this bold decision. First, it greatly increased the chances of his fleet’s making the voyage from Haiti to the outskirts of Havana without being detected by the enemy. Not only did it put the entire island of Cuba between his fleet and the prying eyes of the British in Jamaica, the sheer outrageousness of the maneuver meant that enemy frigates were unlikely to be looking for the French fleet along this portion of the Cuban coast. The other benefit was that assuming his ships could successfully negotiate the channel, it would deliver them to the safest and most inconspicuous place possible to meet up with the hopefully money-laden Aigrette.
As it turned out, the wind deserted them at the narrowest part of the channel, where they were “surrounded by reefs on every side, experiencing an unsupportable contrariety of winds.” At one point the Northumberland came terrifyingly close to crashing into the breakers when the helmsman mistakenly turned the wheel in the wrong direction. Then, on August 14, a strong breeze finally began to blow from the prevailing southeasterly direction, an
d the fleet sailed to the designated rendezvous point three leagues (almost ten miles) off Matanzas. Now the great question was whether Saavedra had been successful in securing the 1.2 million livres.
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ALMOST AS SOON AS FRANCISCO SAAVEDRA had arrived in Havana, he learned the terrible news. As chance would have it, the only convoy Spain would send across the Atlantic during the entire war had just left a few weeks earlier, taking with it most of the gold and silver in Cuba. A new shipment was expected soon from Mexico, but at present the public money that Saavedra had been counting on was not available. “Amidst all this difficulty,” he recorded in his journal, “a decision urgently had to be made because without money de Grasse could do nothing, and to allow him to wait off Matanzas for a long time was to expose his fleet to great danger.” Saavedra had only one option: attempt exactly what de Grasse had unsuccessfully tried at Cap François and “turn once again to the citizenry, making known the urgency of the case, so that each man would give what he could.” But why would the residents of Havana be willing to fund a French expedition in support of the Americans, especially when the French in Haiti had refused to help?
Circumstances, however, were considerably different in Cuba. Rather than having to deal with a distant governmental official in Europe, as would have been the case at Cap François, the residents of Havana would be repaid (at 2 percent interest) as soon as the next treasure ship arrived from Mexico. Two French naval officers were sent out into the streets of Havana to collect the funds on the morning of August 16, and in just six hours they had come up with 500,000 pesos, the equivalent of 1.2 million livres. According to a legend promulgated by de Grasse, who referred to “the million that was supplied by ‘las damas de la Havana,’” a portion of the money came in the form of diamonds donated by the well-to-do ladies of the town. Unfortunately, existing documentation demonstrates that instead of from “las damas,” most of the money came from a handful of local businessmen with a history of lending to the Spanish government, as well as several regiments of Spanish soldiers who donated what was in their military coffers. No matter who stepped forward to support the French expedition, it cannot be denied that the Spanish residents of Cuba provided what one commentator has called “the bottom dollars upon which the edifice of American independence was raised.”
In the Hurricane's Eye Page 16
