Planters and the government needed slaves. Without slaves, there could be no sugar cultivation. And planters needed hundreds of thousands of them. “It is as great a bondage for us to cultivate our plantations without Negroes as for the Egyptians to make bricks without straws,” explained the St. Kitts council in 1680.25
No slaves, no sugar. No sugar, no revenue. A British admiral said abolition of the slave trade would “deprive the state of one of the most valuable branches of the national commerce . . . a sort of suicide against the trade of their country and its navigation.” Besides, “the Negroes in the many [Caribbean] plantations I have seen never appeared to me to be in a desponding state, but rather satisfied with their condition.”26
By 1700, the British alone had brought 250,000 Africans to the West Indies. On the eve of the war, French Martinique had more than 71,000 slaves, compared to 12,000 whites. Jamaica had nearly 193,000 slaves to 13,000 whites. In the 1780s, the French West Indies had 64,000 whites, 13,000 free blacks—and nearly 438,000 slaves. By the 1790s, British islands had 65,000 whites and 456,000 blacks, most of them slaves.27
The Africans and their descendants refused to accept their enslavement. The first documented slave rebellion in the West Indies was in 1522, against the Spanish on Hispaniola. It was not the last. Revolts were frequent—often every several years—and they occurred in nearly every major British, French, Spanish, and Dutch colony. Shortly before the war began, for example, white Jamaicans demanded greater protection from “massacre and desolation from an internal enemy.” They were “on our constant apprehension of the revolt of our slaves.” In 1776, skilled Jamaican slaves including millwrights and distillers, desperate because the war restricted food imports, rebelled; seventeen were eventually executed, some burned alive or gibbeted. Across the Caribbean, just thirteen years before, in Dutch Berbice, slaves formed an army of four thousand men that fought for a year before it was put down. Just 116 of 286 white civilians survived the war. A little more than half of the blacks survived, many dying from disease. Nearly 1,700 were tortured to death. Eight years after the American war ended, slaves revolted in French Saint-Domingue. Hundreds of thousands of blacks died; estimates of the French dead range from the tens of thousands to one hundred thousand.28
Once France and Spain joined the war, the fighting inevitably moved to the West Indies, and Yorktown accelerated the pace of fighting already taking place there. Spain intended to recover its former colonies of the Bahamas and Jamaica. France wanted to expand its profitable possessions. Both France and Britain needed the Caribbean cash flow to survive. Americans—both Loyalists, assuming they won, and Whigs—needed a friendly West Indies for trade. “The West Indies will become the principal theater of war,” a British cabinet member predicted in early 1780.29
25. The Golden Rock
FRANCE AND BRITAIN BEGAN SEIZING EACH OTHER’S ISLANDS within months of the Franco-American alliance’s formation in mid-1778. Major naval battles, as well as hundreds of minor encounters, shipping seizures, and chases ensued; they would continue for the rest of the war. In early 1780, after Spain entered the war, Britain invaded Spanish territory in Central America—what is now Nicaragua.
The only safe harbors belonged to the neutral Dutch and Danish colonies. For Holland—officially, the United Provinces—that would soon change in the worst way.
Holland’s lifeblood was international commerce, and as a neutral, it wished to continue its lucrative trade with America and its Europeans neighbors, France and Spain. No Dutch colony was more central to commerce—and to the rebel war effort—than St. Eustatius (Sint Eustatius), Statia for short.
It’s a small, hilly, volcanic island, less than five miles long, three miles wide, roughly two hundred miles east of Puerto Rico, forty miles south of St. Martin (Sint Maarten). The tallest point on its tallest volcano crater is 1,975 feet—forty percent higher than the Rock of Gibraltar. Statia, said an early geographer, is “small and inconveniently laid out by nature.” Edmund Burke, a British MP, described the island as “different from all others. It seemed to have been shot up from the ocean by some convulsion: the chimney of a volcano, rocky and barren. It had no produce.” He called it a freak of nature, “hastily framed, neither shapen nor organized, and differing in qualities from all other.”1
An early seventeenth-century attempt by the French to settle there failed due to lack of water. The Dutch arrived soon after; they made it habitable by building cisterns to catch rain; they made it profitable by turning it into what Burke called “an emporium for all the world.” When, in 1756, the Dutch made Statia a free port and eliminated custom duties, it became the “Golden Rock,” the “general market and magazine to all nations.”2
Janet Schaw said its “whole riches . . . consist in its merchandise. . . . The town consists of one street a mile long, but very narrow and most disagreeable, as every one smokes tobacco, and the whiffs are constantly blown in your face. But never did I meet with such variety; here was a merchant vending his goods in Dutch, another in French, a third in Spanish, etc., etc. . . . Here hang rich embroideries, painted silks, flowered muslins, with all the manufactures of the Indies. Just by hang sailor’s jackets, trousers, shoes, hats, etc. Next stall contains most exquisite silver plate, the most beautiful indeed I ever saw, and close by these iron-pots, kettles, and shovels. Perhaps the next presents you with French and English millinery wares.”3
Schaw didn’t mention the arms trade. As early as March 1776, a rebel agent was sending arms north. That November, the Dutch returned the ritual salute of a gun-buying Continental navy ship—the “first salute” to officials of the new nation. In 1780, forty percent of all ships entering Philadelphia and Baltimore came from Statia. It wasn’t just the Whigs that neutral Statia helped. France sent an armed convoy there every other week for supplies for its colonies. Even merchants from British Caribbean colonies used Statia warehouses as a hedge against French attack. An English historian complained, “The Dutch settlers waxed fat, and a discreditable feature of this free-trading was the number of British subjects engaged in the traffic.” By 1779, up to ten ships a day were unloading goods at Statia. A Dutch rear-admiral reported 3,182 ships sailing from Statia over a thirteenth-month period.4
For Britain, Statia’s so-called neutrality was notorious. The password for British troops at the Battle of Saratoga was “St. Eustatius.” A British admiral complained that “the piratical rebels” pointed their guns at his ships from the safety of Statia harbor. “The Dutch governor took no notice of this insult.”5
The situation became untenable in late 1780, when Holland joined a loose alliance with Russia, Sweden, Denmark, and others that vowed to resist any seizures of their “neutral” cargo ships. A month later, Britain declared war on Holland. It outlined a list of warlike Dutch acts, from failing to come to Britain’s aid in violation of a 1678 mutual defense treaty to secret negotiations with the rebels for an alliance. Moreover, “at St. Eustatius, every protection and assistance has been given to our rebellious subjects. Their privateers are openly received into the Dutch harbors, allowed to refit there, supplied with arms and ammunition, their crews recruited, their prizes brought in and sold.”6
The same day it declared war, London ordered its top admiral and general in the West Indies to seize Statia and other Dutch colonies. Three days after receiving their orders, Admiral George Bridges Rodney, his second-in-command Rear Admiral Samuel Hood, and Major General John Vaughan, sailed for Statia with fifteen warships and three thousand troops. Six days later, on February 3, 1781, they demanded that Statia’s governor surrender the town within one hour. The Dutch were shocked: They hadn’t gotten the word that they were at war. Their “surprise and astonishment was scarce to be conceived.” The governor surrendered, asking Rodney and Vaughan to give the town’s inhabitants “clemency and mercy.” Clemency and mercy—that is, allowing civilians to keep their property—had been the West Indian norm for peaceful capitulations for the previous two centuries.7
Rodney refused.
Rodney’s life revolved around his men, family, and money. His men liked him for his success in capturing enemy ships—prizes whose eventual proceeds were shared with them. They considered him humane. He advocated for his men and supported innovations that led to healthier onboard living conditions. To his son-in-law, Rodney was “generous, friendly, full of humanity, the tenderest and most indulgent of parents, a kind and affectionate husband, and a faithful friend.” Virtually every letter he wrote to his wife expressed love for her and his children.8
But he needed money. Born around 1718, he was raised by wealthy relatives because his father, a marine captain, had lost everything speculating. Like most career officers, Rodney began young. By fifteen, he was an able seaman on a guardship. He spent many of the ensuing years in the Mediterranean and off Newfoundland. By 1743, he was a captain. For about eighteen months, Samuel Hood, a young midshipman, served under him—the same Hood who later joined him in Statia.
During these years, Rodney captured rich prizes. At the end of one war, he was promoted to commodore and governor of Newfoundland, and elected to Parliament. As governor, he worked with Boston merchants whose republican impulses “gave me such disgust.” After a tour of duty in Portugal, he returned to England in 1752, exhausted and ailing, a pattern that would repeat. In the Seven Years’ War, Rodney gained fame by successfully blockading the French navy off Le Havre. He was promoted to rear admiral, and later helped take four French Caribbean islands.9
With peace, his debts mounted despite a well-paying job as governor of Greenwich Hospital. His campaigns for re-election to Parliament, gambling debts, and expenses forced him to borrow money from an early-day version of a loan shark. By 1770, he was faced with ruin. To escape his debts, he accepted the post as commander-in-chief in Jamaica. There, wrote a friend, “He does, and must, save money.” Four years later, he returned to England where he found his pay frozen because of unauthorized expenses. A navy official later described him as a “vulture,” ready to steal public money. He fled to Paris to avoid debtors’ prison.10
When France entered the American war in 1778, Rodney was still in Paris, and had run up debts there. A friend described him as in a “forlorn, unfriended state, with nothing but exclusion and despair before his eyes.” But a French acquaintance paid some of his debts, and he returned to England. He was sixty-one.11
The navy named him commander-in-chief of the Leeward Islands squadron (those islands other than Jamaica). On his way to the West Indies in late 1779, he destroyed a Spanish fleet and brought supplies to the besieged Gibraltar. In the West Indies in 1780, he fought three inconclusive battles with the French, then spent hurricane season in New York, where he alienated its commander in a dispute over prize money, men, and supplies. London admonished him not to seize other admirals’ prizes and resources again.12
To Rodney, Statia residents deserved no clemency, no mercy. “What terms did perjury, treason, rebels, traitors deserve? None. And none they had,” he said. “This island has long been an asylum for men guilty of every crime, and a receptacle for the outcast of every nation.”13
He confiscated and began selling all the property and goods he found, even that of British merchants. “The riches of St. Eustatius are beyond all comprehension,” he wrote his wife. To London, he reported, “The capture is immense and amounts to more than I can venture to say.” The seizures came to £3–£5 million ($527–$878 million today)—of which Rodney was entitled to one-sixteenth.14
He allowed some civilians to stay, albeit minus their property. Others, he either made prisoners of war or deported. He singled out Jews—even Jews who had escaped persecution in America for their loyalty to Britain. He confiscated Jewish property, and separated the men from their families, deporting them to unstated destinations.15
Soon, British merchants raised hell in London. Burke, in an unsuccessful demand for an investigation, said Rodney confiscated “all the property found upon the island, public and private, Dutch and British, without discrimination, without regard to friend or foe . . . the wealth of the opulent, the goods of the merchant, the utensils of the artisan, the necessaries of the poor . . .” It was “a most unjustifiable, outrageous, and unprincipled violation of the law of nations.” Ironically, Rodney’s auction of confiscated goods allowed neutral and British traders to buy them cheap, and sell them back at below-market prices to the American rebels, the French, and the Spanish. Another politician quipped, “Admiral Rodney has a little over-gilt his own statue.”16
Hood, Rodney’s second-in-command, secretly protested to influential friends in government for a different reason: Rodney had hurt the war effort. He was so distracted by the money that he refused to authorize an expedition to seize Dutch Curaçao, and failed to try to intercept the French fleet that eventually helped defeat Cornwallis at Yorktown.17
During his four-month stay in Statia, Rodney made a personal enemy of a French general. François-Claude-Amour, the Marquis de Bouillé, governor of all French West Indian islands other than Saint-Domingue, protested to Rodney that the British were treating Statia’s French civilians poorly. Rodney replied with acid: “Perfidious people, wearing the mask of friendship, traitors to their country, and rebels to their king deserve no consideration or favor, and none shall they ever meet with at my hands.”18
An angry Bouillé got in the last word: “Your excellency, no doubt, forgot that you were writing to a French general, who, from the events of the war, has been for some time in the habit of despising insolence.” Bouillé said he would refuse to engage in any prisoner exchanges or any further communication with Rodney: “In the future, the interpreters of our sentiments shall be our cannon.”19
Bouillé, 42, was twenty-one years younger than Rodney. His mother died giving him birth; his father died several days later. An uncle, a royal court official, raised him. He began the Seven Years’ War as a captain, fought in Germany, and was wounded several times. By war’s end, he was a colonel, had been captured, and then exchanged. He first visited the West Indies immediately after the war. He returned in 1768 as governor of Guadeloupe.20
His new bride joined him there, already pregnant with their first son. Years later, the son would spend the first eleven pages of his autobiography describing what he felt to be his mother’s cruelty. As much as he detested his mother, he loved his father: “He was my idol as well as my model. I gained insight into his examples that showed me not only encouragement, but large obligations to fulfill.”21
Bouillé returned to France in 1771, not returning to the Caribbean until 1777, when he was named military governor and “maréchal” (equivalent of a major general). With war the next year, he showed himself to be an aggressive general, even creating his own small fleet when the French navy was in North America or Europe for hurricane season. “Wherever the enemy appeared,” a contemporary said, “he found Bouillé, and Bouillé alone was worth an army because of the confidence he inspired in each island’s garrison, and by the fear that his name caused to the enemy.”22
He also showed grace. When a British frigate shipwrecked off Martinique, he released its crew, explaining he would have treated them as prisoners if he had captured them in battle, but he “scorned to profit by the misfortunates of an enemy.” Burke contrasted Bouillé with Rodney. “Bouillé, by his spirit and activity, had wrested from us many of our possessions, but he treated the conquered with tenderness and humanity.”23
Rodney left Statia at the end of May 1781, and before hurricane season began he returned to England. No one carried out his orders to keep the 670-man garrison on high alert and defended with three frigates. Unhappy Statia residents informed the French.24
In the early hours of November 26, Bouillé, with a fleet of small ships carrying one thousand five hundred men, made a quiet but difficult landing on a remote part of the island. His men “underwent very great toil in ascending a steep craggy mountain before they could reach a path by which they could proceed to attack the ga
rrison.” Near the fort, they captured Lieutenant Colonel James Cockburn, the British commander who was out on morning exercises with some of his men. Approaching the fort, other British soldiers mistook the red uniforms worn by some of Bouillé’s men for their own. When the British recognized their error, it was too late. The garrison surrendered. It was a “clever affair,” Lafayette said. “I never read of a prettier coup de main [surprise attack].”25
That evening, Bouillé restored Dutch law, named some of the remaining Dutch residents to civilian posts, and began returning about £250,000 of goods to their owners. Within the two days, Bouillé also recaptured St. Martin, Saba, and St. Bartholomew, which Rodney had taken earlier.26
Rodney got the news about Statia in late February or early March 1782. He reacted angrily. “The surprise of St. Eustatius is the most disgraceful affair that ever happened to a nation,” he said. He echoed widespread condemnation of Cockburn. One account concluded that “nothing but the most culpable negligence in the British commandant can account for his [Bouillé’s] success. With him lay all the blame, for he had a garrison of such strength and spirit that if he had done his duty as a good officer, he must have made the French to smart for their temerity.” The general opinion was that Cockburn had accepted French bribes.27
Cockburn, though, was experienced and trusted. He had served thirty-six years in the army, been wounded several times during the Seven Years’ War, and fought at Bunker Hill and White Plains. At his May 1783 court-martial, his character witnesses included a stellar list of generals—Thomas Gage, Jeffrey Amherst, William Howe. General Vaughan, who, with Rodney, had captured Statia ten months before, said Cockburn was “an exceedingly good officer who perfectly understood his duty.” Cockburn defended himself by saying other officers had been surprised in war, but none were persecuted like him. “My reputation as a soldier in every rank was unblemished till this unfortunate accident, which I shall ever look upon as the greatest misfortune of my life.” The court found him guilty of “culpable neglect,” and cashiered him. He apparently retired to an estate, possibly owned by his Irish heiress wife. One source says he died shortly after. A family genealogy, however, says he inherited a baronetcy in 1800, and died in 1809.28
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