by Roy Adkins
Towards the end of 1803 Dillon was taken to Verdun, where he would remain for nearly four years. He was the first naval officer to arrive at this prison, but was soon joined by others from captured or wrecked vessels, such as the officers of the frigate Hussar. Another early arrival was Captain Jahleel Brenton, originally from Rhode Island in America, but serving in the British Navy. His frigate, the Minerve, had grounded off Cherbourg harbour in thick fog, and the entire crew was taken prisoner, most of whom were sent to Givet.
With both officers and the civilian détenus present at Verdun, many with their wives and children and often lodging in the town, the place was unlike any of the other prisons and developed into a microcosm of English society, with schools, theatricals, clubs, hunting, gambling and horse-racing much in evidence. One Verdun prisoner commented that ‘not only a hare hunt, and consequently a tally ho club, but racing was among the English amusements . . . A jockey club was formed. Every midshipman was becoming a horseman, every sailor a groom.’69 The fortunes of the French citizens of Verdun rose greatly with the arrival of these prisoners with money. James Choyce, born in Finchley, had been a seaman on merchant ships for many years, but in March 1804 he was captured in the Atlantic by a French privateer. On his long march of over 1000 miles to Sarrelibre prison, he and his fellow-prisoners were held for several days at Verdun, where he observed the character of the place:At last we drew near to Verdun, and when still some miles away we met many Englishmen, some on foot, some on horseback, and some in carriages with livery servants behind them; but never a word had they for us - not even so much as to say, ‘Countrymen, we pity your condition.’ There were such a number of them I thought half London had come to Verdun. When we got within sight of the town we met another Englishman . . . We enquired of him the meaning of meeting so many Englishmen on the road, and he told us they were some of those who had come to France before the war, some to spend their own money and some, no doubt, that of their creditors29, and that when war broke out Buonaparte had laid an embargo on them all and sent them to Verdun as prisoners of war. They were only allowed to leave the town when given a passport by the general; and that all those we had seen were going to some races about five or six miles away which were much patronized by Lord Yarmouth and many of his friends. On entering Verdun we saw many of our countrymen about, some as complete dandies as one would see in Bond Street or the piazzas of Covent Garden.70
Even among prisoners-of-war held in Republican France, the British class structure remained unbroken.
SEVEN
INVASION FLEET
Does haughty Gaul invasion threat?
Then let the louns beware, Sir.
There’s wooden walls upon our seas,
And volunteers on shore, Sir.
Poem by Robert Burns1
Some prisoners had travelled great distances by sea before even reaching France, having been captured in the Far East or the West Indies, because as well as the close blockade of Europe to keep the ships of the French and their allies in port, another strand of British strategy was the recovery of colonies that had been relinquished as part of the Peace of Amiens. This was intended to increase the British trading empire at the expense of the French, and out of all the colonies the most lucrative were those in the West Indies - the sugar islands. The problem was that few ships could be spared, and when war was declared in May 1803 the task of recapturing the islands fell to Samuel Hood. At this time Hood was a commissioner in Trinidad, which had remained a British colony, and dispatches arrived appointing him commodore and commander-in-chief in the West Indies. He was responsible for a vast swathe of islands stretching over 800 miles from Trinidad in the south, off Venezuela, to as far north as the Virgin Islands. The small force at his disposal consisted of two battleships, the Centaur and Blenheim, six frigates and a handful of smaller vessels and troop transports. With this he was supposed to patrol the islands, protect British shipping and retake the lost colonies, starting with St Lucia.
In the event, the recapture of many islands was accomplished fairly rapidly. St Lucia was attacked on 21 June and taken in two days, and Tobago was secured shortly afterwards. These two islands had been occupied by the French, but now Hood turned his attention to those colonies in Guyana that had been restored to the Dutch, and by September Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice became British possessions. Further to the north-west, Commodore Loring’s ships were blockading the ports of Cape François and St Nicholas Mole, the last footholds the French had on the island of Hispaniola. Just before the Peace of Amiens, Napoleon had revoked the emancipation of slaves and reintroduced slavery in the French colonies. His expedition against the former slaves in Hispaniola had been a dismal failure, though, and it was now cornered in the two blockaded ports. Squeezed between the British at sea and the black armies on land, some French escaped but most eventually surrendered to the British. By the end of 1803 nearly all the French had left the island, and on 1 January 1804 it became the Free Black Republic of Haiti.
Now the French had only two major naval bases left in the Caribbean: Guadeloupe and Martinique. Napoleon realised that the French colonies in the West Indies were expensive, and it was becoming almost impossible to keep control of them, particularly with Britain dominating the sea lanes. This also applied to the Louisiana territories on mainland America, which he had bought from Spain in 1800. These territories covered a vast area of over 800,000 square miles, land that Napoleon sold to President Jefferson for around $15 million in April 1803 - an acquisition that doubled the area of the United States. With interest costs on the payments, the price finally rose to just over $27 million, but even this only amounted to around five cents an acre. Since Napoleon knew it would be extremely costly to defend if the Americans were determined to take the territories by force, it is debatable who made the most out of the deal, but it gave Napoleon a substantial boost to his war chest in Europe.
The French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique acted as shelters for numerous privateers that preyed on British merchant ships, capturing valuable cargoes and forcing British Navy ships to be diverted to escorting convoys. It was now the responsibility of the ships in Hood’s squadron to patrol the area, capture or destroy privateers, and protect the merchant fleets, and his small force was badly stretched. Realising that if he could set up an efficient blockade of Martinique it would curtail the actions of the privateers and prevent supplies reaching the French garrison, Hood decided on an unusual course of action - to capture Diamond Rock. Patrolling the southern side of Martinique, where the two main ports of St Pierre and Fort Royal (known to the French as Fort de France) were located, he realised that the rock on the south-east of the island was in an ideal position to control the main shipping route. This was because the prevailing currents and winds determined that the easiest way to approach both ports, but particularly Fort Royal, was to sail within sight of Diamond Rock.
This rock, about a mile off Martinique, rises to a height of 574 feet and is roughly square, with sides about 400 yards long. As Hood soon discovered, the only landing spot was on the western side, and even here access was very difficult. It was a natural fortress, surrounded by sea, and he considered that ‘thirty riflemen will keep the hill against ten thousand . . . it is a perfect naval post’.2 Men were landed on 7 January 1804 to establish the first base and begin the task of fortifying the island. James Maurice, first lieutenant of Hood’s flagship, the Centaur, volunteered to command the landing party, which Midshipman John Donaldson described:
A working party of fifty seamen and twenty-five marines . . . with fourteen days’ provisions, were landed on the Diamond Rock. As the party was to keep the launch completely armed with her 24-pounder carronade, she was secured at the only landing-place, and the gun mounted on a projecting point, commanding this little cove. Immediately opposite the landing-place a very large cave was discovered, in which the forges were erected, and the carpenters and other artificers established their workshops; indeed it was so capacious, that it conta
ined the whole party and material for the first night. The interior of this cave, generally with the whole rock, being grey limestone, was very dry. From the roof were suspended numerous stalactites, which made a most brilliant appearance when the forge and other lights were burning; added to which, the mirth and fun of the party at getting on shore after long confinement on board, and our very novel employment of fitting out such a nondescript vessel as his Majesty’s sloop the Diamond Rock, made this evening pass off very cheerfully; and at the next dawn our party entered most zealously into the various duties they had to do, so very different from what they had lately been accustomed to.3
With no easy paths to the summit, they also began the essential task of fixing safety ropes and rope ladders at the most difficult points. Apart from the danger of falling off, there was an additional hazard from a deadly poisonous snake, the fer-de-lance, with which the rock was infested. Many of the men who lost their lives on the rock died from snakebite. Other caves were also found, but they needed work to make them habitable. Bales of hay were burnt to drive away the bats before the accumulated guano could be shovelled out and then the caves offered shade from the fierce Caribbean sun and shelter from storms and hurricanes. Midshipman Donaldson noted that ‘a number of small dry caves and openings at the base of the rock were selected by the seamen for suspending their hammocks, and forming themselves into messes, while the officers were in tents, pitched on the flattish part of the ground, containing about three quarters of an acre’.4 Food, gunpowder and ammunition were supplied to the rock by boats in fair weather, and it was found that water also had to be brought in as the few springs were totally inadequate for the needs of the garrison. In time, tanks were constructed for water storage.
Gradually the defences of Diamond Rock were organised, with two 18-pounder guns on the top, a 24-pounder halfway up, and two more 24-pounders just above sea-level, as well as boats, one of which had a 24-pounder carronade, that were used to intercept passing ships. Getting the guns into position on the rock required superb engineering skills, particularly for the ones on the summit. Here a platform was cleared by blasting and holes were bored in the rock to secure the two guns. The operation to transport these guns to the top of the rock began in early February. A cable was rigged from the mainmast of the Centaur to the top of the cliff, which itself was some way below the summit. A cannon was hung in a sling from a pulley block riding on that cable to take the majority of the weight, and another rope attached to the cannon was used to haul it to the top of the cliff. When everything was in place, Donaldson said thatthe word was given at the capstan to heave round; and to all the inspiring tunes the band could play, away marched the first gun up its tremendous and perilous journey of seven hundred feet from the level of the sea, and four hundred feet horizontally from the ship. The men at the capstan were relieved every hour; and commencing at half-past ten A.M., the gun was landed at the upper end of the stream-cable at five o’clock P.M., having been seven hours in heaving him up to the first landing-place, when the party on shore par-buckled him up to his berth on the top of the rock with three cheers . . .The next day they began on board the ship earlier, and the second gun was got up about three P.M., by the same means as the first: but the men were nearly nine hours at the capstans, in consequence of the wind blowing very fresh this day, causing the recoil of the waves from the base of the rock to be so powerful, that the ship became unsteady, swinging the gun at such a fearful rate, that three times the end of the stream-cable was cast off from the ship, and the gun remained suspended from the rock. Indeed, they almost despaired on board of getting it up, but fortunately they did succeed, as the gun was scarcely landed, when one of the cables which held the ship was discovered severely cut by the rocks.5
During this operation the Centaur and the rock itself were very vulnerable to attack by the French, because the shallow waters left the British ship little room to manoeuvre against gunboats, and being anchored so close to the rock would have made escape difficult. The French missed their chance, though, and were generally slow to react to Hood’s invasion of the rock, probably because they did not believe what was happening. When the British interest in Diamond Rock was first noticed by the French, the governor of Martinique, Vice-Admiral Louis-Thomas Villaret de Joyeuse, had ordered the repair of the road from Fort Royal to the coast opposite the rock, in preparation for establishing a gun battery. The black population of Martinique favoured the British and were already secretly selling fresh food to the garrison of Diamond Rock, as well as providing information. At the end of January the British were informed that an engineer and his men had arrived to set up the battery, and so a raiding party was sent on shore and captured him and three of his men without a shot being fired. After further raids on the area the French abandoned attempts to threaten the rock from the coast of Martinique.
The defences on Diamond Rock proved very successful, as Midshipman Donaldson related:About four days after, Sir Samuel Hood made a signal to the rock to try the range of the 18-pounders, which was done, and found to command the passage between the rock and the main island so effectually, that no vessel could attempt it without great risk; and from the great height of the guns above the horizon, the shot were carried to such a distance, that vessels passing the rock on the outside, or great channel between Martinique and St. Pierre, were obliged to keep so far off the land, that the winds and strong westerly currents would not let them fetch into Port Royal Bay. Thus the object of taking possession of the Diamond Rock fully answered the purpose intended.6
The administration of Diamond Rock had to be put on a proper footing, with a permanent commander. Impressed by the exertions of Lieutenant Maurice, Hood promoted him to that post, and on 7 February reported to the Admiralty:In the singular situation of the Diamond, so close to the enemy’s shore . . . I thought it right a superior command to a Lieutenant should be held, and have, in consequence of the very zealous conduct of Lieutenant Maurice, first [lieutenant] of the Centaur, in arranging its works since the commencement of hostilities, given him an acting order as Commander and one hundred men for the present establishment of the Fort Diamond as a sloop of war, including the Rock, by which warrant officers will be useful for the security of the stores, etc., with a Lieutenant to command the vessel when she might leave the Rock on any service. A Purser will also very much facilitate the arrangement, and the Surgeon will superintend a small hospital for thirty men or, if necessary, a few more, in any casualties or bad fevers from the ships, and which will allow me to do away totally [with] the hospital at Barbados which is not half so healthy. I hope their Lordships will approve this measure which will be executed with little expense and may save thousands to the country, independent of its utility in consequence to the enemy and protection of the trade passing this channel.7
In order to circumvent the administrative problems of manning an offshore rock as a captured enemy ship, Diamond Rock was treated as if it was an appendage of one of the ship’s boats stationed there. This boat was commissioned as the sloop Diamond Rock by the Admiralty (changing the name from Hood’s Fort Diamond), but this was a technicality - the boat was later captured by the French, and was merely replaced by another without any effect on the rock’s status. In time, the technicalities were forgotten and the rock itself came to be known as the ‘Sloop Diamond Rock’.
The hospital was very successful, and Donaldson described how it was set up: ‘The . . . cave, on the east side of the rock, was built up in front to the height of three stories, and converted into a most excellent and well-aired hospital, (where the sick and wounded were sent, instead of conveying them to Barbadoes or Antigua) amply supplied, after we left it, with a good medical staff, and every comfort for such an establishment.’8 Garrison duties on the rock were popular with sailors. It was regarded as a healthy place, the men enjoyed fresh food, and there appears to have been some fraternisation with the black female population on the nearby coast of Martinique. Visitors from passing British ships were a welcome d
istraction, and one of these was Midshipman George Vernon Jackson. After his spell of impressing men in the Shetland Isles, the frigate in which he served escorted a convoy of merchant ships to Barbados and then cruised through the islands looking for privateers. This visit to the rock left a lasting impression on Jackson: not from admiration of the skill of the sailors who had managed to occupy it, nor of the insight of Hood, who had first seen its strategic potential, but because it was on the rock that he first tried smoking a pipe and did not like it, as he recalled:One of the Lieutenants at the Rock insisted on trying to make me a disciple of the ‘fragrant weed’, and failed most disastrously in his kind intentions. I became so horribly ill, and took such a dislike to him, and tobacco, and the place in consequence, that I never think of them without a qualm. Perhaps I lacked energy to persevere and conquer, but I have never touched tobacco since, and perhaps am all the better for it. From being considered a filthy indulgence, it has reached the character of a gentlemanly habit, so I must not abuse ‘what all the world approves.’ A long way off, and in the open air, I do not mind it much, and even this is a great admission to make. There are some young fellows I know who, when they come to see me, are sure to have a stale pipe in their pockets, and I can scent them afar off; but they assure me the more beastly a pipe looks and smells, the nicer it is to smoke. So much for taste.9
