CAMPAIGNS
Chapter 3
The Crater of Vesuvius: Saint Domingue 1793–1794
The hundreds of West Indian islands form an arc of 2,400 miles in the Caribbean Sea and can be most simply divided into two groups (see map 1). To the west are the Greater Antilles including Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The latter two countries together form the island of Hispaniola referred to as St Domingo in the late eighteenth century. The smaller group, the Lesser Antilles, form the Caribbean’s eastern border and include the Leeward Islands (the Virgin Islands, Anguilla, St Martin, St Bartholomew, Saba, St Eustatius, St Kitts, Nevis, Barbudo, Antigua, Montserrat and Guadeloupe) and the Windward Islands to the south (Dominica, Martinique, St Lucia, Barbados, St Vincent, The Grenadines and Grenada). At the time of the French Revolutionary Wars, the division of Leeward and Windward was subject to variation. On the edge of the two Antilles groups of islands are the Bahamas in the north and Trinidad and Tobago off the Venezuelan coast.
For much of the eighteenth century this complicated geography was familiar to senior British politicians and military men. According to Bryan Edwards, ‘Whenever the nations of Europe are engaged, from whatever cause, in war with each other, these unhappy countries are consistently made the theatre of its operations. Thither the combatants repair, as to the arena, to decide their differences’. In the 1750s, the French colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint Domingue were both lucrative centres for the sugar trade and havens for French privateers preying on British and American shipping. William Pitt was prompted to launch an expedition to the region, culminating in the capture of Guadeloupe, a triumph attributed by Major General John Barrington to ‘great perseverance’ and achieved despite the troops succumbing to fever in alarming numbers. This early ‘War for Empire’ peaked in further Caribbean operations in 1762 and led to at least 41 British regular battalions being employed in the Americas. Even during subsequent periods of peace the number of redcoats in the region was maintained at significantly higher levels than in the earlier years of the century. Predictably, France also had designs on a wider role in the West Indian colonies; in the War of 1778−83 Britain was forced to relinquish Tobago and to grant her American colonies their independence.
In 1793, the West Indian islands were divided amongst the leading European powers. Britain maintained a hold on Jamaica, Bahama Island and the Bay of Honduras to leeward and, to windward, Barbados, Grenada, Antigua, St Vincent, Dominica, St Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat and the Virgin Islands. Her implacable enemy held sway in Martinique, Guadeloupe, the Saints, St Lucia, Tobago, Marie-Galante and in the western part of St Domingo (Saint Domingue). Spain retained the islands of Cuba, Trinidad, Puerto Rico and the eastern part of St Domingo (Santo Domingo), whilst the remaining islands were split amongst the lesser European players of Holland, Portugal, Denmark and Sweden.
On the eve of the French Revolution, Saint Domingue was one of the wealthiest colonies in the world and a colonial powder keg. The whites of the island, numbering only around 7% of the population, were, in the words of Mirabeau, ‘Sleeping on the crater of Vesuvius’. The Revolution flowed like hot lava through the land we now call Haiti, tearing away the fabric of French colonial society. Wealthy white planters sought more autonomy from the mother country whilst the poorer whites, evoking liberté and égalité, claimed equal rights to their social superiors. Soon, the mulattoes were seeking equality with the whites and all groups were breaking free of traditional restraints imposed from France.
The unrest was not limited to a solitary island − a civil war was also erupting in Martinique − but it was in Saint Domingue that events took the most savage turn, with the increasingly anarchic behaviour of the white factions of grand and petit blancs and a suppressed mulatto uprising. This dissension in the upper echelons of colonial society led to unrest among black slaves, culminating in the ‘Night of Fire’ in August 1791 when 50,000 slaves revolted under the leadership of the priest Boukman and took brutal revenge for centuries of oppression, humiliation and torture. Now the white planters were dragged from their homes and gruesomely put to death. In a few days, 2,000 whites were massacred and almost 200 sugar plantations and 1,000 coffee plantations were destroyed. Historian David Geggus concludes that ‘considering the reckless complaisance of most whites and the excessive suspicion of others, not to mention the provocation of troops arriving from France, perhaps the most surprising feature of the slave revolt is its slowness in coming’. The whites joined with the mulattoes and took predictable revenge, apparently bent on complete extermination of the blacks. Perhaps 10,000 slaves died in these reprisals.
A firm European response was needed, but France was unable to spare sufficient troops to either dominate the feckless whites or suppress the insurgents. In early 1792, the National Assembly in Paris granted equal rights to the mulattoes. Two new commissioners, Sonthonax and Polverel, were sent to the colony to root out racial discrimination and restore order. To implement the Jacobin revolution on Haiti, Sonthonax, the dominant commissioner, needed the mulattoes’ cooperation and his activities alienated white opinion. His only allies at the end of the year were the increasingly confused mulattoes and a dwindling number of French troops. The slave armies, numbering around 30,000 men, continued to control large areas in the north. Such was the situation in February 1793 when the French Republic declared war on Britain.
In this apocalyptic scenario, Mirabeau’s predicted volcanic eruption, it is unsurprising that some of Saint Domingue’s white colonists sought help from Britain. Sixty planters arrived in London agreeing to transfer their allegiance to George III in return for British protection up to the time of a general peace. Royalist emissaries from Martinique and Guadeloupe, which had renounced the Paris revolution, were also in England. Ministers were initially wary of these approaches, but with the outbreak of war the case for an offensive strategy in the Caribbean was growing. Henry Dundas, surveying the globe for potential threats of conflict, concluded that the West Indies ‘was the first point to make perfectly certain’.
British willingness to intervene in the region in the early 1790s was the result both of perceived opportunities and threats. The major gains of assimilating the islands were the exploitation of their undoubted wealth and the generation of naval power. The West Indies contributed substantially to British prosperity, being easily the country’s largest overseas capital investment. In the British colonies there were almost 600,000 slaves and these islands exported products worth over seven million pounds. West Indian investments generated around 20% of all British trade. France’s West Indian colonies were even more valuable and contributed close to half of all her foreign trade. For both countries the loss of annual income from the Caribbean would have inevitably led to a serious financial crisis. As the region was sparsely populated by European colonists, mostly concentrated on Jamaica and Barbados, this capital investment was unusually exposed both to foreign attack and to internal unrest.
The West Indian colonies also made significant contributions to Britain’s and France’s maritime power. In the late eighteenth century, trade with the Caribbean serviced over one-eighth of all British merchant tonnage and its trained seamen. This contribution to naval strength was in itself of such magnitude that abandonment of the islands was unthinkable. Furthermore, control of a number of strategic harbours, such as on St Lucia, potentially allowed control of the Atlantic and the extension of influence to South America. For France, the influence of the region on her naval power was arguably even more crucial; a quarter of her merchant tonnage and over a third of her seamen were reliant on her West Indian dominions. Loss of the islands would seriously undermine her pretensions to be a world maritime power.
There were more negative reasons for action. A passive non-interventional policy risked the spread of the chaos on the French islands to the British colonies. Disaffection was already growing among British colonists due to the home country’s abolitionist tendencies. Although there had so
far been no equivalent uprising on the British islands, mobilisation of the militia on Jamaica allaying initial alarms, there were potential trouble spots on Grenada, St Vincent and Dominica. Imitation of the Saint Domingue slave revolt was a real possibility.
In considering the factors – materialistic, maritime and defensive – which led to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in the West Indies, it is important not to view the region in isolation. Geggus points out that it is easy to over-rate the role of the islands in the Government’s overall strategy.
To depict [Prime Minister William] Pitt [the Younger] and Dundas as engaging in a headlong, purposeful pursuit of Caribbean spoils, and la perle des Antilles [Saint Domingue] in particular, is a little misleading. Although, within a deeply divided cabinet, proponents of an aggressive West Indian policy predominated, primacy was always accorded to the War in Europe.
Britain’s first priority was to blunt the French threat to its interests in Belgium and Holland. Once war was inevitable, on the basis of European considerations, then the seizure of the French West Indies was a secondary but highly desirable objective, at once bolstering the empire and endangering French wealth and sea power. Thus it was, at the start of 1793, Dundas forbade the Governor of Jamaica to take any offensive action whilst peace endured, but added pointedly that in the likely event of war it was the Government’s intention ‘to extend the protection of His Majesty’s Arms to the French West Indies, and secure to them the advantages of being subject to the Crown of Britain’.1
With war declared, the first British assault – the start of 22 years of intermittent fighting in the region extending beyond Waterloo – was against Tobago. Dundas believed that the island merited early attention as the overwhelmingly British white population had suffered loss of prestige and wealth after 20 years of French rule. One of the most prominent planters, Gilbert Petrie, had already been in contact with the Government. The French garrison, not reinforced since 1788, was, in the words of a French historian, ‘très faible’. Perhaps a further incentive for the capture of Tobago was that it was the only French colony from which the prevailing winds allowed any attack to be made on the key British possession of Barbados.
On 10 February 1793, Dundas sent a secret despatch to Major General Cornelius Cuyler at Barbados ordering him to attack Tobago as soon as he judged his force to be adequate. On 10 April, the naval squadron of Vice Admiral Sir John Laforey arrived and the expedition sailed three days later. Cuyler had not received reinforcements ordered in December and his small army was limited to a detachment of artillery, nine companies of the 9th Regiment and a small number of marines, in all about 470 men. On the 14th, the troops disembarked at Great Courland Bay on the north side of the island (see map 2). Petrie supplied the invaders from his estate but, contrary to expectations, most of the colonists kept their distance or even joined the Republican governor Monsieur Montel, lieutenant colonel of the 31st ligne (Régiment d’Aunis), who was occupying the French fort above Scarborough (Port Louis) on the other side of the colony. Cuyler’s men marched across the island and summoned the fort two to three miles distant, but Montel refused to yield. It is likely that the small British expeditionary force was of the same size as the garrison, both numbering a few hundred. The British were regulars and, not having the means to undertake a siege, Cuyler decided to risk all on a night attack. This was despite the enemy’s fortifications being much stronger than he had expected. The affair of the 14th was confused and disjointed, the best account being that of Cuyler who was himself wounded.
The troops lay upon their Arms at the Place where we had halted until One o’ Clock, at which Time we formed, and marched at Half-Past One, leaving the Artillery under the care of Lieutenant Hope and the Detachment. We had more than two miles to proceed. The men were positively forbidden to fire, but to trust entirely to the Bayonet; the Smallness of our Number not justifying a Diversion to favour the general Attack, which was determined to be on the North West Side where I had reason to believe that the Work was most imperfect.
We reached the Town of Scarborough undiscovered, but here we were fired upon from a House by some of the French Inhabitants which gave the Garrison the Alarm; however no return of Fire or Delay was made.
In consequence of a Negro, who served as a Guide to the Grenadiers, running away, a part of the Column separated in mounting the Hill; this occasioned a Delay and separation that could not be rectified during the Night, which was extremely dark. Separated however as they were, the Troops approached the Fort; the Light Infantry and a Part of the Grenadiers on the side where the fort was most defenceless, and where the whole were to have made their Effort.
The other Part of the Troops having taken the Road which led directly to the Barrier, and the Enemy’s Fire commencing on the Flank companies, the former advanced to attack the Barrier under a heavy Fire of Round and Grape Shot and Musketry, which drew the attack of the enemy to this Part of the Work; and the Flank companies at that moment pushing forward, very gallantly entered the work, upon which the enemy surrendered, and the Humanity of the British Troops accepted of them as Prisoners of War.
The night attack on Tobago, carried out by a small expeditionary force armed with the bayonet over unmapped treacherous terrain against a strongpoint held by an unpredictable and irregular enemy, was to foreshadow many of the British operations in the region during the remainder of the wars. Cuyler’s force suffered three killed and 24 wounded. The French were reported to have 15 killed and wounded. When the fort was stormed, around a hundred armed inhabitants, including a number of mulattoes and blacks, fled the scene. Ninety-six French prisoners were taken, mostly men of the 31st ligne, and a hundred sailors were also captured. Cuyler immediately restored the British colonial constitution which the French had usurped in 1781.2
Attention now turned to Martinique in consequence of representations made by Royalists on the island to Major General Thomas Bruce that the arrival of even a small force, as few as 800 men, would induce the inhabitants to submit to British rule. News of the execution of Louis XVI and of the declaration of war between Britain and France had encouraged the Royalists to take up arms against the Republican governor, le Vicomte de Rochambeau. Bruce met the former Royalist governor of the island, the Comte de Behague, and decided to support the revolt. The general commanded a small army of around 1,100 troops consisting of the flank companies of the 9th Regiment, nine companies of the 4th Battalion of the 60th Regiment, some marines from the fleet, and the Black Carolina Corps. The men were embarked at Barbados on 10 June and sailed with Rear Admiral Sir Alan Gardner’s squadron.
As the British plotted the capture of Martinique, events were conspiring against them. The Republicans were suddenly in the ascendency, Rochambeau capturing the main Royalist stronghold and all their artillery. Nevertheless, Bruce remained optimistic and he disembarked his men at Case de Navire between the 17th and 19th (see map 3). He believed that his force, now supported by around 800 Royalists, was ‘perfectly adequate to the service proposed’, the plan being to seize the commercial port of St Pierre where Rochambeau commanded a few hundred French troops. British progress was delayed by the need to bring up artillery, a number of 6-pounders, to their stations and also by a brief sally by the enemy. When the attack on the town was finally launched against the two defending batteries it was an ignominious failure, well described in Bruce’s despatch to Dundas.
We were to move forward in Two Columns, the one consisting of British Troops, the other of the Royalists; for this Purpose the Troops were put in motion before Day-break; but, unfortunately, some Alarm having taken place amongst the Royalists, they began, in a mistake, firing on one another; and their Commander [Gimat] being severely wounded on the Occasion, his troops were immensely disconcerted, would not submit to the Control of any of the other officers, and instantly retired to the post from which they had marched.
This conduct strongly proved that no Dependence could be placed upon them, and the attack against St Pierre must
solely have been carried on by the British Troops, to which their Numbers were not equal; and, as they luckily were not yet engaged with the enemy they were ordered immediately to return to their former posts.
Senior British officers met the following day and decided that further operations were futile. All British accounts stress the incompetence of their Royalist allies as the reason for the failure of the expedition, but French opinions were predictably at odds with this view, The Royalist Behague thought the British troops precipitous retreat was due to tactical naivety, ‘…if they had the order to attack they did not do enough and if they didn’t have such an order, they did too much’. Rochambeau was keen to take some credit from his enemy’s debacle, attributing the route of the Royalists to an ambush made by three to four hundred of his men. Poyen believed the British withdrawal to be understandable, ‘…if one remembers that they had marched with the hope of the fort surrendering on their arrival and of taking possession of the island without spilling a drop of blood, and that they had much hesitated to undertake any military action, we should not be surprised to see them abandon their attempts after the first check’. Winter was now approaching and, on 22 June, the British fleet left for Barbados carrying the troops and 5-6,000 Royalist refugees escaping from Republican retribution.3
Death Before Glory Page 5
