Death Before Glory

by Martin Howard

  8: Barrack Master to keep barracks clean and free from insects.

  9: Barrack Master not to be absent from barracks without permission.

  10: Barrack Master must be accountable to the commanding officer of the troops in barracks.

  11/12: re: Management of wood supplies.

  13: re: Regulations to promote discipline in barracks.

  14: Officer of the day to inspect the messes (messing of the soldiers is of the utmost importance) to ensure the food is wholesome and sufficient and to check the rooms are clean and beds made up. No man to be permitted in the day time to lie on the bed. No things to be permitted that may tend to prevent that cleanliness which is necessary for the health of the troops (e.g. entrance of tradesmen).

  15: If a regiment leaves a barracks dirty the commanding officer of the newly arriving regiment is to report the fact to the commander in chief.

  The regulations imply a degree of order that was not always achieved in practice. Barrack accommodation was sometimes deficient in quantity and quality. On Jamaica in 1798, Balcarres complained that the entire windward part of the island lacked a barracks or any other soldiers’ accommodation except for 170 men. Balcarres’s replacement, George Nugent, inherited the problem. The temporary barracks at Up Park near Kingston had poor buildings and an inadequate water supply. More isolated postings were even more likely to lack proper accommodation. A detachment of the 7th West India Regiment stationed on Trinidad in 1804 had no access to barracks and the men were housed in shoddy cane huts.

  The situation on Trinidad had not improved four years later, despite promised new accommodation. It appears that the construction of necessary barracks was often delayed by administrative and financial constraints. When troops arrived at the Môle in 1796, they were held on the transports because the new barracks were not finished. George Nugent laboured to solve the problems on Jamaica despite the sanctioning of a plan to build a permanent barracks for 1,000 men on high ground in the interior of the island.

  The Embarrassments which a military man labours under upon this Establishment are very great as he cannot under the present System, direct the driving of a Nail, without the consent of the Board of Works, let the Exigency of the Service be ever so great.

  The expenditure of the barrack department in Jamaica between 1796 and 1802 was almost £70,000.

  There was a contemporary view, particularly among the army’s doctors, that most of the barracks in the Caribbean were overcrowded. William Fergusson says that he had never seen a barracks where the men would not have been better moved to separate houses or even hovels. Hammocks were favoured as they allowed men to be crammed together, each soldier allowed only 22 to 23 inches. Many of the barrack buildings were in poor repair. At Brimstone Hill, there were problems with drainage and ventilation and at Up Park on Jamaica the floors were damp. Some institutions, for instance the St John’s barracks on Antigua, were known to be ‘sickly’. We have few accounts from the ranks of the details of barrack life in the West Indies. Men were probably pleased to be under cover and protected from the elements. Private John Simpson thought the barracks on St Vincent to be comfortable despite the men having no beds or bedding except their camp blankets.7

  When not in barracks, soldiers slept in the open or in tents or huts. On campaign, it was not always possible to carry tents and troops bivouacked in the open air. In good weather this was tolerable, but men suffered during the frequent tropical storms. Thomas St Clair describes a typical downpour.

  … [the rain] penetrates at once cloak, and coat, and all, to the very skin, nay more, through the skin itself, chilled to the marrow of one’s bones. The bivouac instantly becomes a scene of desolation and dismal solitude. Jokes, laughter, and fires at once extinguished, the dripping crowd sought shelter where they could…

  Thomas Browne endured this misery on Martinique in 1809, the troops wet through but at least able to start fires and cook their food. Many officers, Phipps Howard among them, believed that bivouacs were harmful.

  Baggage is so very difficult, if not impossible, as to totally hinder the carrying of Tents…The Men are obliged to sleep in the open fields, exposed to the heavy showers known by the Name of the West India Rains, not to be conceived in Europe; and the Damps arising after them, & exhalations of which, nothing can be more prejudicial to health.

  Regulations dictated the optimal placement of tents. It was suggested that hammocks be installed in the round version and that a trench should be dug to aid drainage. John Moore tacitly approves their use on St Lucia, citing the protection given against sun and rain. However, soldiers did not necessarily appreciate the cover, William Dyott claiming that, ‘To experience misery in extreme is to live in a tent in the West Indies’. His own tent was infested by insects and mice and was as wet and muddy as the surrounding ploughed field. He believed them to be ‘of very little service’. Several eyewitnesses testify that they were easily blown away in storms. Physician Fergusson also weighs in against tents which, he says, caused the soldiers to lie on cold ground in a confined space. They were ‘hot beds for the generation of dysentery’.

  Huts were an alternative form of temporary accommodation and they were sometimes constructed with care and ingenuity. Lieutenant Henry Sherwood was proud of the efforts of his regiment on St Vincent in 1799:

  We built our huts in the following form. Six uprights with forked heads about six feet from the ground. The piles across lying on the forks. The rafters from the pole to a ridge pole. Then tying split bamboo or rather canes like laths we take the feathery top of the cane and, breaking it through the lath, leave the leafy part hanging outwards and tuck the stalk under the second lath within, tying a second lath on the outside which holds it all firm. Thus is built an excellent hut for less than six pounds having two rooms.

  This was a serious undertaking. Sherwood’s own ‘house’ was thatched by a 27-man working party. Dyott notes that huts were widely used on Grenada, housing the 25th Regiment, and David Stewart confirms that soldiers on St Lucia also erected them as the only option to provide shelter. Huts were not well suited for the climate and had their own set of problems. Surgeon James McGrigor was cooped up with five other officers in a small ‘bombproof’ on Richmond Hill on Grenada. It was intolerably hot and he soon developed dysentery.

  On active campaign, officers often had to rough it like their men. Many spent uncomfortable nights in soaking clothes. At other times, they benefitted from better barrack facilities or admission to an inn or a billet in a local planter’s house. The officers’ quarters blockhouse at Shirley Heights was constructed towards the end of the eighteenth century and is the largest remaining building on site. The cool front colonnade provided a pleasant informal meeting place whilst the interior was divided into a number of comfortable rooms, some of the original plaster still surviving. To the immediate rear of the quarters are a kitchen, servants’ house and stables. At Brimstone Hill, there were separate barrack buildings for the infantry, artillery, engineer and medical officers. Again the quarters were imposing and fronted by colonnades.

  Local taverns and inns were popular among the officers who put up in them. They were usually named after the owner and the most famous of all was Nancy Clarke’s, commonly referred to as Nancy’s, in Bridgetown. This was such a successful institution that the proprietress died a wealthy woman. Thomas St Clair, coming ashore in the town, heard the local blacks singing a ditty referring to the two most patronised inns of the time.

  If you go to Nancy Clarke,

  She will take you in the dark;

  When she get you in the dark,

  She will give you aquafortis.

  If you go to Susy Austin,

  She will take you in the parlour;

  When she take you in the parlour,

  She will give you wine and water.

  The allusion in the first verse was to an incident in which Nancy Clarke allegedly threw aquafortis (nitric acid) into the face of a young woman in a fit of jealousy. The s
tandard of accommodation was not, according to George Pinckard, ‘precisely what a Bond Street lounger would expect in St James’s Street’, but it was comfortable enough.

  Houses could be commandeered as temporary barracks; Pinckard and his medical colleagues in Demerara were accommodated on a cotton plantation. The rooms were commodious and the house conveniently close to the hospital. Alternatively, individuals or smaller groups of officers might be billeted with local families. Often they were well received, Norbert Landsheit being very pleased to find himself in the home of a fellow German in Port au Prince. He refused his countryman’s offer to marry one of his daughters, admitting that it was tempting but that he did not dare to desert. Conversely, some billeting of officers was resented by the local population. The Privy Council in Saint Domingue repeatedly complained that army officers were allowed to lodge in the best houses in Port au Prince, leaving the local administration to pay the rent. This was one small example of the corruption endemic in the British military occupation of the colony.8

  Women were an integral part of the British army presence in the West Indies. A return of November 1795 reveals that 808 women accompanied Abercromby’s expedition, a ratio of roughly one woman for every 20 men. In the garrison of the Windward and Leeward Islands nine years later, there were 758 women, a rather higher proportion of the 12,500 strong force. Regulations from 1800 stipulated that soldiers’ wives could follow the army in the proportion of six to 100 men; in the 1790s it was probably left to the discretion of senior officers. There are only fleeting references to the lives of these women in memoirs of the wars, this information supplemented by sparse instructions in the army’s regulations and general orders. The adjutant general on Martinique in 1794 directs that the barracks ‘ought not be crowded with women’.

  Officers’ wives had a relatively privileged existence, but they still needed stoicism to flourish in the climate and the atmosphere of doom induced by the prevailing diseases. Lady Maria Nugent’s diary entries give an insight into the routine life of a senior officer’s family in Jamaica.

  October 15, 1801 – Very unwell; and I mean, as symptoms arise of any illness, always to mention it; because, if I should die in this country, it will be a satisfaction to those who are interested about me, to know the rise and progress of my illness, & c.

  October 5, 1803 – Hear that poor Captain [John] Murray has the fever. Of late I have omitted to mention illness, for it only makes one melancholy and miserable; but there are, in fact, only three subjects of conversation here, − debt, disease and death. It is, indeed, truly shocking. January 17, 1804 – Doctor McNeil came early to tell us that General C. [Hugh Carmichael] was in great distress, and very ill, too, himself. His nephew, Mr Cowen, died in the night, of convulsions, after the fever had left him, and he was supposed likely to recover. These awful circumstances, do indeed affect the spirits, but we must try not to think of them.

  The lot of the wives of the rank and file was immensely worse. It appears that they were only grudgingly tolerated by the army’s senior administrators as they were suspected of spreading venereal disease, plundering supplies and dealing in rum. They were mostly accommodated in the ordinary barracks, only a hanging cloth between them and the other soldiers for privacy. At Brimstone Hill, there was a small amount of married accommodation in the 1790s but this was in the form of decayed and condemned huts. In such extreme circumstances, it is understandable that at least some of these women and their spouses had flexible loyalties. Aytoun refers to this.

  I know a man whose name was Daws, whose wife had been anything but a vestal. He sold her to the ninth of a man, whose name was Robert Lee, for fourteen dollars and a pair of silver buckles. I knew two women who changed from their husbands just as a servant would leave one family and go to another but they certainly mended their conditions by getting better men who kept them comfortable during life.

  Undoubtedly some women made vital contributions to the garrison and there are instances of them playing an active part in combat. Lieutenant Colonel Stewart of the 42nd recalls the wife of a soldier of the regiment joining the assault on the Vigie Ridge on St Vincent in June 1796. Her husband was behind the lines looking after the knapsacks.

  When the enemy had been beaten from the third redoubt, I was standing giving some directions to the men and preparing to push on to the fourth and last redoubt, when I found myself tapped on the shoulder and I saw my Amazonian friend standing with her clothes tucked up to her knees; and seizing my hand, ‘Well done, my Highland lads!’, she exclaimed. ‘See how the brigands scamper like so many deer! Come’, added she, ‘let us drive them from yonder hill.’ On enquiry, I found that she had been in the hottest fire cheering and animating the men, and when the action was over she was as active as any of the surgeons in assisting the wounded.

  There were children in the garrison; the previously quoted return from 1804 shows that there were just over 500 in the Windward and Leeward Islands. They are mentioned in contemporary accounts even less than their mothers, but their presence is confirmed by the toys found among the artefacts of old West Indian military camps. Infant mortality was high. A tombstone at Brimstone Hill is dedicated to Elizabeth, wife of Sergeant William White, who died in 1810 and shared her grave with four of her children. Other records document births on the islands. Ensign David Wainright and his wife Elizabeth had 13 children of whom the first two, a boy and a girl, were born on Martinique in 1795 and 1796.

  Officers and men had different sorts of relationships with the local women. A number of memoirists testify to the general lack of morals. Thomas Phipps Howard claimed that, ‘…there is no Country in the World where the Inducement to dissipation & Libertinism are greater than is to be met with in the West Indies − & that in every point of View. In the first place Morality is scarcely known’. He blamed the heat for the inflammation of passions, ‘…a Man inclined to Libertinism finds here perhaps the largest field in the World to gratify himself in’. George Pinckard agreed, noting that it was commonplace for his South American hosts to offer him female company. There were essentially two forms of common prostitution in the region. The most numerous were the licensed prostitutes, slave women who had the approval of the army to serve the garrison’s soldiers. Unlicensed or civilian prostitutes operated in the brothels of the hotels of the larger towns.

  The relationships formed between officers and local women were potentially more complex. Here we are referring to ‘mistresses’ or ‘concubines’. These liaisons may have arisen from mutual attraction; British soldiers often found the Creole women to be irresistible and they in turn were not inured to the glamour of a scarlet uniform. Money might be involved but this was not viewed as a form of common prostitution. Aytoun refers to a ‘mulatto woman’s daughter’ in Demerara. ‘Her father had been white. She was not a common prostitute but hired herself to officers etc. by the week or month…’ That this arrangement was not always of an entirely monetary nature is suggested by the reaction of a drummer whom she refused to marry. He tried to hang himself and was only saved by a comrade who cut the cord. Thomas St Clair tells us that it was usual for Europeans arriving in the Caribbean to take a mistress and that the usual price was £100 to £150. They performed ‘all the duties’ of a wife. Two of his fellow officers kept two such girls in their barracks; ‘…one in Demerara, Lieutenant Myers, had a beautiful young mulatto and Lieutenant Clark in Berbice, had with him a handsome black woman’. St Clair says that he disapproved of these relationships but he had to acknowledge that the women formed a strong and sincere attraction to their new partners. As will be discussed in a later chapter, soldiers often benefitted from the excellent nursing care provided by these women.

  Mistresses of senior officers could, on occasion, exert significant influence. When Thomas Picton was governor of Trinidad, it was alleged that his mulatto mistress had the fuel contract for the garrison and the means of retribution against local inhabitants who offended her. Another possible liaison was that between British sol
diers and sailors and European women resident in the colonies. William Dillon came across a Dutch family at Curaçao in 1801; ‘There were 6 or 8 very handsome girls, of splendid fortune for that place, with good landed estates who wished to unite themselves with the English officers. But, strange to say, none of them received an offer.’ One naval colleague did marry a European woman but she had very little property. ‘Sailors’, Dillon concluded, ‘do not manage well in these matters’.9

  Most officers and men on service in the Caribbean had only time to kill. Cavalryman Norbert Landsheit remained for some months in the vicinity of St Marc in Saint Domingue in 1794.

  …I could not avoid remarking to them with whom I associated, that if this were indeed war, we had no cause to wish, at any moment, for the return of peace… as to military operations there were none; our most perilous duties never going beyond a patrol, or at the most, an escort of stores to headquarters.

  The centrality of the garrison regimen has been described. Ordinary soldiers were given routine housekeeping tasks to punctuate the hours of inactivity. Andrew Bryson recalls a dozen men of his company being picked out to wash their dirty clothes in the river. They were embarrassed to find themselves in the company of black women and quickly moved on to a more solitary spot. The officer class could take on servants to spare them such indignities, the regulations of 1795 making this explicit.

  It is not permitted in the West Indies that an Officer should be allowed to keep a white soldier as a servant. As an Equivalent to the Officer for this necessary Restriction, they will be allowed a just sum to have Blacks or Mulattoes, which will be paid at stated Periods by the Commissary General.

  A field officer was permitted three black servants, a captain two, and a subaltern only one.

  Officers thus had plenty of leisure time to divert themselves with various entertainments. Dancing was popular, especially in more developed areas. A ball at Jérémie in Saint Domingue was a major event bringing in 200 people from the surrounding countryside. Thomas Henry Browne makes reference to dances held at Susy Austin’s hotel-tavern. Where there was a continuous British presence, such as on Jamaica, more sophisticated balls could be expected. Maria Nugent describes an elaborate affair arranged in Spanish Town.