As for all wars, the morale of the British soldier in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic West Indies varied according to his level of training, the quality of leadership and the immediacy of the campaign. We can make some generalisations about efforts to boost morale and the mindset of the troops. The alien and frightening nature of the West Indian campaigns for European soldiers was well understood by good senior officers and men such as Grey and Abercromby missed no opportunity to lift the spirits of their charges. Grey praised his troops in general orders, emphasising their fighting abilities and the inferior quality of their mostly irregular opponents. He passed on the approbation of the King and promised them free postage home. Abercromby reminded his men that they should disregard the ‘shouts of savages’ and that they possessed ‘infinite advantages over the enemy’. Success, he told them, was certain. These statements hit home and there are instances of high morale among soldiers and sailors. Bartholomew James saw an army and navy in 1794 which had complete confidence in its commanders; ‘…in short, the cause we were employed in created an emulation not to be surpassed and a true loyal joy not to be equalled’. Fifteen years later on Martinique, Thomas Henry Browne insists that the troops were impatient to get into action. An excellent speech by Beckwith was received with loud and enthusiastic cheers from the ranks. Some soldiers chose to remain in the Caribbean, spurning opportunities to return home. David Stewart informs us that in 1796 many men of the 79th in Martinique refused a transfer to the 42nd which was about to embark for England, suggesting that regimental loyalties persisted and that there was not universal demoralisation.
These anecdotes of good morale are greatly outnumbered by eyewitness testimonies of disillusionment. The reluctance of recruits to be sent to the region has been discussed and, in general, morale fell away in the course of campaigns, even Grey’s keen and experienced force eventually becoming demotivated. Fortescue compares British West Indian service with the French experience in 1796, when the young Napoleon struggled to lead his men over the bridge of Arcola: ‘There is a limit to human endurance and what is pardoned to Bonaparte’s French in Italy must not be too harshly judged in the British soldier who was subjected to a far harder trial in the West Indies’. There were two overriding factors in the genesis of low morale. Firstly, there was the lack of official recognition for dangerous Caribbean service. Archibald Campbell, on Grenada in 1795, expresses a widely held opinion.
The species of war in this island is such that a man may easily lose credit by the least misfortune but cannot gain any degree of honour in beating what may be termed a despicable enemy…
The second factor was the constant and overwhelming threat of debility and death from disease.17
Chapter 11
A Great Mortality: Disease
Men began to get sick and die before they reached the West Indies. Despite attempts to root out the most debilitated and vulnerable recruits, many soldiers who boarded ships in England or Ireland were unfit for Caribbean service. General John Whyte’s force, collected at Cork in the autumn of 1795, suffered 500 deaths from disease before the planned departure for Saint Domingue. Once they arrived at their destination, the chances of an early death from obscure and little understood disease spiralled alarmingly. Soldiers saw their comrades perish and their regiments melt away in the tropical heat.
The available medical data is most accurate for individual units and a few examples illustrate that the fear of West Indian service was fully justified. After the capture of Port au Prince in Saint Domingue in the summer of 1794, it was reported that the troops newly arrived from Europe were dying of fever in ‘incredible numbers’. The 41st Regiment lost 318 men in three months, 44% of its strength, and the 23rd 319 men, 48% of its number. In their first year in the colony, both regiments buried more than three-quarters of their men and many of the demoralised survivors deserted or were discharged. Particular regiments might be spared for a period, but eventually they too were overwhelmed. The 22nd, stationed at the Môle, avoided serious losses until September but then lost 60% of its men in eight weeks. Cavalry regiments did not escape; the 29th Light Dragoons lost two-thirds of its troops in six months. Overall annual death rates in Saint Domingue for the period 1794−1798 were in the region of 50−75%.
The regimental returns are likely to reflect the reality of cheap death in West Indian service, but it is problematic to calculate with any confidence the total number of deaths between 1793 and 1815. Historians have made what can be regarded as well informed guesses, but their estimates are confounded by disparate time periods and variable inclusion of deaths among sailors and the West India Regiments. Fortescue’s figures are widely quoted – he asserted that there were 80,000 casualties of which 40,000 were deaths – but these numbers pertain only to the earlier part of the wars up to 1798. He later extended his calculation up until early 1799, now including navy losses, and concluded that the British had lost 100,000 men, half of them dead and the remainder permanently unfit for service. Michael Duffy also focuses on the early campaigns, deriving a figure of 44,000 deaths among white non-commissioned officers and men in the Caribbean and en route to the region between 1793 and 1801. There were perhaps 1,500 officer deaths. Roger Buckley extends his calculations to the entire period up until 1815 and gives the total number of casualties among white troops in British service as 352,000, of whom 70,000 perished. To these figures can be added the estimated 72,000 casualties and 5,000 deaths suffered by the West India Regiments. The term ‘casualty’ describes all episodes of sickness, wounding, reported missing and death. Less than 10% of all events were directly related to fighting, disease being the British army’s greatest enemy. More than half of the fatalities occurred in the first six years of the war when the greatest burden of the campaigning fell upon European as opposed to West Indian troops. The relentless loss of lives was such that the garrison in the Windward and Leeward Islands had to be completely replaced every six years.
Whatever the caveats regarding the precise figures, this was clearly a human disaster. Death was not, however, entirely random. Army doctors were quick to discern that some soldiers were more at risk than others. Assistant Inspector of Hospitals for Saint Domingue Hector McLean tells us that younger men, those aged between 25 and 30 years, were more prone to ‘rapid, serious and violent fevers’ than their older comrades and women. William Fergusson, another experienced army doctor, noted that ordinary soldiers in Saint Domingue were more likely to become sick than their officers. Within the rank and file there were further distinctions to be made. McLean bemoans the fact that British soldiers fell ill more easily than their European enemy. ‘The French possess other advantages. Their constitutions seem better calculated for warm climates than ours.’ Most significantly, it was obvious that the native soldiers of the West India Regiments were much more resistant to the dangerous local diseases than their white counterparts. Mortality rates among black soldiers were only 25−50% of those of European soldiers. The causes of death were also different, black troops most likely to succumb to chest infections, dysentery and smallpox.1
It was the two mosquito-borne diseases, yellow fever and malaria, which cut swathes through the British and other European forces in the region. Yellow fever is caused by a virus which is carried from person to person by the mosquito. The virus attacks the liver causing a deep jaundice which gives the disease its modern name. Because of liver failure there is a tendency to bleed and the vomiting of dark blood (now often described as ‘coffee grounds’) accounts for the contemporary term ‘black vomit’. In advanced disease there can be torrential bleeding – from the mouth, nose, rectum and any open skin lesions – and death often ensues in six or seven days. The onset of the disorder could be insidious and in the absence of jaundice or vomiting the diagnosis might not be obvious. Robert Jackson, an army doctor in the West Indies and one of the greatest experts on the local fevers, describes the possible early symptoms.
In some instances the yellow fever began in the morning, though
the evening, upon the whole, was the more usual time of its attack. The first symptoms were languor, debility and headache, together with an affection of the stomach peculiarly disagreeable. The last often preceded the others, and was in some measure characteristic; but it is impossible to give a clear idea of it in words: − anxiety, nausea, and certain unusual feelings were so strangely combined that any description which I might attempt to give of this complicated sensation would hardly be intelligible.
The nature of the illness became clear when the more characteristic symptoms and signs appeared. In describing a case, Jackson tells us that, ‘…on the morning of the fourth [day] he became a deep orange colour and vomited black matter in great quantity. I then suspected that this complaint, to which I had not paid particular attention, was actually the disease known by the name of yellow fever…’
Some survivors have left accounts of their struggle against the disease. George Pinckard contracted the malady in Demerara.
I know not from which I suffered most, the excruciating pain, the insatiable thirst or the unappeasable restlessness; for all were equally insupportable, and either of them might have sufficed to exhaust the strongest frame. Combining their tortures they created a degree of irritation amounting almost to phrenzy.
Pinckard’s morale cannot have been improved by the regimental officers who peered at him through the mosquito net. ‘Ah poor doctor! We shall never see him again!’ He gradually recovered, as did Harry Ross-Lewin who was hospitalised in Saint Domingue for 36 days. He heard the medical officers expressing the opinion that he would only live a few hours and this ‘had the good effect of rousing me a little’.
Some sufferers became desperate, confused and even delirious. Thomas Phipps Howard saw men who ‘were absolutely drowned in their own Blood, bursting from them at every Pore’. Some, he says, died ‘raving mad’ whilst others irrationally plotted their escape or were simply despondent. Death was present in ‘every form an unlimited imagination could invent’. William Fergusson noted that, in his experience, patients often retained their self-control and awareness. All agreed that yellow fever could snatch people with shocking speed.
Lieutenant Wright, one of my [Fergusson’s] early patients at Port au Prince, St. Domingo, on the fourth day of the fever rose from his bed in perfect possession of his senses, dressed himself correctly, and went into the market-place accompanied by myself, where he spent some time purchasing fruits and other things, returned to his barrack-room where he shortly expired in a torrent of black vomit. Lieutenant Mackay, of the quarter-master-general’s department, Cape St. Nicholas Mole, on the day of his death, was up and dressed on the sofa, with books and papers before him at ten in the morning, passing jokes of comparison between his own dingy complexion, made so by the disease, and that of his mulatto nurse; at two he expired in the same way as Lieutenant Wright.
In epidemics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the mortality rate from yellow fever was around 70% and although we have no precise disease related statistics for the British army in the West Indies, this is probably close to the truth.2
The second great mosquito-transmitted killer was malaria, much more widespread at the time of the Napoleonic Wars than it is today. Malaria affected troops in Europe but the tropical form of the disease was potentially more virulent. It was characterised by an intermittent fever and rigors, often occurring on the first and third day (‘malignant tertian fever’) and it had a propensity to relapse and cause prolonged debility. Army doctors referred to the disease as ‘intermittent’ or ‘remittent’ fever and the soldiers called it ‘ague’. It was understood at the time that malaria blighted different parts of the world.
…there is much similarity among the diseases of warm climates: and the remittent fever appears to be the disorder which prevails in all of them. That disease, as described on the coast of Africa, and on the banks of the Ganges, would seem to be nearly the same as in Jamaica.
It was also appreciated that there were different subtypes of the disorder with different periodicities of fever; Jackson refers to tertian, quartan and quotidian forms.
Severe and fatal cases of malaria would often have been difficult to distinguish from yellow fever. Indeed, many soldiers who died from disease may have had multiple infections. We can be most confident of a diagnosis of malaria where soldiers describe an illness with intermittent fever, rigors, profound fatigue and a tendency to relapse. John Moore very likely had malaria on St Lucia, being ‘seized with the fever’ and so weakened that he could not work properly for a month. He was then well for three weeks before suffering a relapse; ‘I believe I was very near dying’. He never recovered his full strength whilst in the Caribbean and was forced to return home the following year. Major General Hugh Carmichael was equally afflicted in Guadeloupe in 1810, complaining that many of his fellow officers were confined to bed with fever and that he was ‘actively indisposed’ and struggling to keep up his correspondence. Thomas St Clair gives one of the best accounts of a paroxysm of fever due to ‘ague’.
My fingers by degrees turned as white as snow, my nails a perfect blue; and, whilst occupied with breakfast, my teeth knocked so hard together that I really thought that they would have fallen out. I was now recommended to return to bed, when the fit soon came upon me with such violence that my trembling made the whole house shake on its foundation. Thus I continued until four o’clock in the afternoon, when the cold fit began to change to a burning fever; and in like manner as my shivering fit had made me consume gallons of hot water, Madeira and sugar, to warm me, I was now obliged to drink cold lemonade to cool my burning palate’.
St Clair’s symptoms persisted for several months before resolving. He was, like many others, later to suffer a relapse which necessitated his evacuation from Demerara to Barbados.3
The West Indian garrison was affected by a large number of other diseases, some familiar to soldiers who had campaigned in Europe and some more tropical in nature. Typhus stalked overcrowded Napoleonic armies and civilian populations; it has been said that the history of the disease is ‘the history of human misery’. It is caused by rickettsia, microorganisms somewhere between bacteria and viruses and is most commonly passed from person to person by the human body louse. Symptoms include fever, headache, the appearance of small haemorrhages in the skin (petechiae) and gangrene of the extremities. Typhus was relatively rare in the West Indies but it was very likely a significant cause of death among the troops first arriving from Europe. McLean refers to ‘ship’s fever’ in the troops reaching Saint Domingue from Ireland and McGrigor, whose opinion is not to be discounted and who believed the term ‘typhus’ to be overly used, described the new soldiers in the colony as being ‘overwhelmed’ with the disease. He says that ‘a great mortality’ followed.
The disease which caused the most deaths in the Peninsular War was dysentery, and this affliction and related diarrheal disorders were prevalent in the Caribbean. Like typhus, the disorder tended to break out in unhealthy cramped conditions and was especially dangerous to men already debilitated by fever. McGrigor contracted the ‘loathsome complaint’ on Grenada and suffered greatly in suffocating quarters. He was fortunate to be treated with kindness by his fellow officers and he gradually recovered. Dysentery remained a problem throughout the period, Thomas Henry Browne noting in his journal in June 1809 on Martinique that the number of cases was increasing.
Whilst considering diseases not unique to the tropics we should also mention scurvy, the well-known affliction of the navy caused by a deficiency of vitamin C. The realisation towards the end of the eighteenth century that the disease could be prevented by the inclusion of lemon or lime juice in the diet was one of the great medical advances of the era. William Richardson confirms that the disorder had not been eradicated from the fleet returning from the West Indies in 1797, many of the sailors becoming ill with the deficiency.
Venereal disease – gonorrhoea and syphilis – must have been common. It is described in contemporary
medical accounts of the West Indies but it is almost absent from soldiers’ memoirs. Mentions of mental disease are also sparse, their inevitable presence in the garrison often having to be inferred from oblique allusions. In medical circles the psychoneuroses of the Napoleonic Wars were usually referred to using the catch-all term ‘nostalgia’. Army Physician Benjamin Moseley confirms that the disorder afflicted soldiers in the Caribbean.
Nostalgia – that longing after home, exerts its painful influence in the remotest regions, and magnifies to danger, the most trivial indisposition of either body or mind, when both are already half subdued by the heat and dread of climate.
George Pinckard describes army officers suffering from depression and there are a number of suicides documented in the mortality statistics. More bizarre derangements of mental state were variably defined as madness, insanity and imbecility.
The environment of the islands took its toll on the men. Sunstroke, leg ulcers and insect bites were all commonplace. The routine excessive consumption of alcohol must have caused great harm and some have claimed that it was a bigger killer than yellow fever and malaria. Major General Hugh Carmichael, a veteran of 15 years in the West Indies, believed the primary cause of morbidity and mortality to be the ‘corrosive and insidious Effect of Rum’. There were multiple deleterious consequences of drinking the local rum and other alcoholic beverages; men fell down dead at the side of the road from dehydration when consuming spirits instead of water, they demised from liver disease and they probably also suffered lead poisoning. Lead entered rum from vessels used in the manufacturing process and this was the likely cause of ‘dry bellyache’ which was endemic among the British battalions in the region.4
Death Before Glory Page 30
