26. More British Humiliations
SPAIN CONTROLLED MOST OF CENTRAL AND NORTHERN SOUTH America, but here and there, Dutch, French, and British adventurers, traders, and plantation owners created other scattered settlements. Three of them clustered along rivers in Guiana (now Guyana), four hundred fifty miles south of Barbados, a British Caribbean stronghold.
Once ships navigated past shoals and sandbars where the rivers met the ocean, they could sail several hundred miles upriver. This opened land to coffee growing, lumber cutting, and, like the West Indies, sugar plantations. Guiana’s climate was as difficult as the Caribbean’s. Coastal settlements got up to one hundred thirty inches of rain a year, and before the settlers’ slaves could plant sugar, they had to clear “dense, luxuriant, and magnificent vegetation,” while avoiding deadly insects, reptiles, snakes, wild boars, and big cats.1
By the 1590s, the Dutch had established a strong base: Fort Kijkoveral on the Essequibo River, fifty miles from its mouth. Despite Spanish harassment, other colonies followed. Like Fort Kijkoveral, they were identified by the names of their rivers. The colony on the Berbice River began in 1627, about sixty miles to the southeast of Essequibo, and sixty miles from the coast. Closer to Essequibo, a trading post on the Demerara River opened in 1691, ten miles from the ocean. By 1775, Demerera was the region’s largest town, in part because the Dutch welcomed prosperous British planters.2
The South American colonies frequently changed ownership. The British unsuccessfully attacked Berbice in the mid-1660s, but they succeeded in taking Essequibo and a colony north of it that had been settled by Portuguese Jews from Brazil. The French later plundered Essequibo, but the Dutch retook it. The French held Berbice from 1712 to 1714, when the Dutch bought it back. The Spanish raided Dutch outposts in 1758 and 1769.
Slave rebellions also threatened the colonies, and, as a counterbalance, the Dutch tried to stay on good terms with the native Arawak and Caribs. The policy didn’t prevent slaves from taking control of Berbice in 1763 for eleven months; a joint Dutch-Indian army finally suppressed the rebellion, and the Dutch executed its leaders, mostly by roasting them alive. Another slave rebellion in 1772 brought Demerara to “the brink of total destruction,” the governor said.3
In early 1781, the Dutch governor of Demerara sent word to his British counterpart on Barbados that he would be willing to surrender to British regulars because his colony was threatened by privateers—“adventurers” who jeopardized the colony’s physical safety. He was right. Four or five British privateers, in late February 1781, looted the town, and captured thirteen Dutch ships “laden with sugar, coffee, cotton, flour, and lumber.” Several weeks later, they did the same to Essequibo.4
Help was on the way. On March 17, the Dutch surrendered Demerara and Essequibo to the British navy, which offered generous terms. Berbice followed in April.
Now, the French planned an attack. Armand Guy Simon de Coëtnempren, Comte de Kersaint, 40, was the son of a navy captain. As a teenager, he had served as an ensign on his father’s ship. In early 1782, he was a captain leading a squadron of frigates and smaller ships against the enemy.5
On the night of January 29, 1782, his squadron arrived off the coast of Demerara. Despite British attempts to slow the attackers by destroying a navigation landmark and flooding a road, Kersaint landed troops and took the town on January 31. British navy captain William Tahourdin escaped upriver with his small squadron and 376 men. Three days later, Kersaint caught the British. Outgunned, Tahourdin surrendered. Kersaint captured half a dozen small armed ships and thirteen merchant ships. He sent Tahourdin to Barbados on parole. On the 5th, Kersaint took Essequibo; several days later, Berbice.6
Again, Rodney was beside himself. The Admiralty “may easily imagine my surprise and astonishment at this event,” he wrote. Tahourdin, “who seems to have taken the lead in this capitulation,” would be court-martialed. “So many frigates being given up to the enemy is of great detriment to His Majesty’s service.” Tahourdin’s court-martial apparently ended in acquittal: Navy records in 1783 list him as a captain, and when he died on May 1, 1804, the navy approved his widow’s application for a pension. His will provided modest gifts to his siblings, nephews, and nieces, including a gold watch, twenty-volume Shakespeare set, and a print of Isaac Newton.7
Although the French returned the colonies to Holland in 1784, they were active interim rulers. Kersaint built a new capital at the mouth of the Demerara (now Georgetown, Guyana’s capital). To help collect taxes, he conducted a census, finding nearly thirty thousand slaves in the colonies who worked on 387 plantations and two hundred fifty smaller estates. He concluded there was widespread rum-tax evasion, and he enforced the capitation tax against British residents, but exempted the Dutch and American allies to encourage their trade. At year’s end, a new governor replaced Kersaint.8
After the war, Kersaint was sympathetic to the French Revolution. He wanted to reorganize the navy based on competence, not nobility, and supported demands for Louis XVI to abdicate. However, because he opposed the king’s execution and the revolution’s violent excesses, he was arrested in 1793 and then executed.
Bouillé’s naval counterpart was an architect of the Yorktown victory, Admiral François Joseph Paul, Marquis de Tilly, Comte de Grasse. In August 1781, Grasse and his fleet eluded Rodney and spent part of hurricane season repulsing the New York–based British fleet that tried to rescue Cornwallis from Yorktown.
Washington’s first meeting with Grasse was memorable, according to family tradition. Grasse greeted the prim-and-proper general with a hug, kissed him on both cheeks, and called the fellow six-footer, “my dear little general.” Washington’s staff hid their laughter, except for Major General Henry Knox (the future secretary of war) who, “heedless of all rules, laughed, and that aloud, till his fat sides shook again.”9
Grasse, 60, was “reckoned as one of the handsomest men of the age” when he was younger. He was born a noble with a family history of military service. But his advance through the navy “has been more slow and gradual than might naturally be expected from his rank and interest.”10
His ability, however, was respected. “He was the best skilled captain in the squadron,” said an admiral who commanded him. “Although his vessel was very inferior in quality, he nevertheless gave to the evolutions all the precision and brilliance possible.” In hindsight, a mid-nineteenth-century French naval historian gave a more critical assessment: “He brought to command a biting arrogance and a disposition that never stooped to conciliate. . . . He was capable of sacrificing a whole plan of operations to a single detail. Brave and good as captain of a ship, the count de Grasse was an embarrassing commodore and a still more ill-starred admiral.”11
He spent much of his career in the Mediterranean working for the Knights of Malta, which protected convoys against pirates. An ensign in the French navy in 1747, the British captured him in a battle in which he received a severe head wound. In the next British war, he served in the East Indies and captained his first ships. After the war, he returned to the Mediterranean where he again fought pirates. Later, he was based on Saint-Domingue. After the French entered the American war, he fought in an indecisive battle off the Normandy coast in 1778, saw more action in the unsuccessful attempt to stop the British from taking Savannah, and spent two years fighting inconclusive Caribbean battles. Ill, and with hurricane season approaching, Grasse left for France in August 1780.
His final promotion, to rear admiral, and final assignment, commanding the West Indian fleet, came in March 1781. With Rodney preoccupied at Statia, Grasse arrived in Martinique with twenty-three warships and a convoy of one hundred fifty supply ships, having fought off Hood’s interception attempts.
Grasse tried unsuccessfully to take strongly defended St. Lucia, but settled instead for capturing Tobago in June. The next month, he was in Saint-Domingue, where he received Rochambeau’s plea to rendezvous in Virginia. He agreed that with hurricane season approaching the plan made
sense, but promised his Spanish allies to return for a joint spring campaign against the British. His gamble of bringing the entire fleet with him led to the Yorktown victory.
Before leaving Yorktown to return to the Caribbean, Grasse excused himself from a final meeting with Rochambeau and Washington. “My sickness grows worse every day, and I do not know how it will end,” he said. “The longer I live, the more I am convinced that a man 60 years old is not fit to direct a fleet such as this.”12
He would have one final victory, at an island called St. Kitts—formally, St. Christopher. Columbus, in 1493, “was so pleased with its appearance that he honored it with his own Christian name.” Janet Schaw, the traveler, described it as “crowned with wood-covered mountains,” the highest being the 3,800-foot Mount Misery (now Liamuiga). “The people in town live very well . . . The stores are full of European commodities, and many of the merchants very rich. . . . There is, however, a great want of shade, as every acre is under sugar.” A Swedish sailor couldn’t believe the island’s “most beautiful imaginable” view. “It resembles a large, well-equipped plantation, which rises in an amphitheater on the high mouldy [overgrown] hills clear up to the clouds, in a continuous variation of extensive fields, alternating with groves of trees and beautiful estates.”13
Starting in 1623, British and French settlers shared the island when they weren’t attacking each other during wars, or being attacked by the Spanish. A 1713 treaty gave Britain sole possession; most French residents moved to Saint-Domingue.
Grasse arrived in Martinique from Yorktown in November 1781. He tried to go on the offensive, but contrary winds and storms thwarted two December expeditions against Barbados and another two against St. Lucia. He switched his target to the more-distant (two hundred twenty miles) St. Kitts, less than ten miles from Statia. Seven hundred fifty British regulars and three hundred militia garrisoned St. Kitts, defending five thousand white civilians and their thirty thousand black slaves. Bouillé and eight thousand ground troops accompanied Grasse.14
They arrived on January 9, 1782. Assured by civilian leaders that they wouldn’t oppose him in return for humane treatment, Bouillé landed his troops without resistance. But the British garrison at St. Kitts retreated to the heavily fortified, 765-foot-high Brimstone Hill—“considered impregnable,” said a French officer. They were led by Brigadier General Thomas Fraser—it was probably a local rank; army records show him as a colonel—and Governor Thomas Shirley, son of a Clinton and Carleton predecessor and brother of two soldiers who died in Pennsylvania and New York during the Seven Years’ War. The attack became a siege, and a relief expedition came in the person of Samuel Hood.15
Hood, 58, was the son of a country vicar, and his family had no navy connection. Family tradition says Hood’s father befriended a captain passing through the town whose carriage had broken. The captain repaid the favor by mentoring the son in a navy career. As a midshipman, he served on two ships commanded by then-Captain Rodney. Three years later, he was a lieutenant fighting the French off Scotland, and in the North Sea and the Channel; during one fight, he was wounded in his hand. He married in 1749 into a family with political connections, which helped his advancement. As a captain during the Seven Years’ War, he again saw action off Britain, but also served in American waters, and toward the war’s end, the Mediterranean. He distinguished himself in all the theaters of war.
After the war, the Admiralty promoted him to commodore and naval commander-in-chief in North America, based in Halifax. He visited Boston often as colonial unrest increased. When rebellion began in 1775, Hood was in England, overseeing the Portsmouth shipyard and governing the Naval Academy. France entered the war in 1778; Hood’s prime job was to ready the fleet. That year, the king inspected Portsmouth and rewarded Hood with a baronetcy. He was now Sir George.
But the Admiralty had a problem: It couldn’t find a suitable second-in-command with whom Rodney could get along. “It has been difficult to find out proper flag officers to serve under you,” it wrote Rodney. “Some are rendered unfit through their factious connections, others from infirmity or insufficiency.” Hood was the solution. The government promoted him to rear admiral, and in late 1780, he left England for Rodney and the West Indies. For his part, Rodney reacted, apocryphally, by likening Hood to “an old apple-woman.”16
Being second-in-command didn’t mean silence. Hood obeyed Rodney’s orders, but when he disagreed with them, which was often, he challenged them to Rodney’s face and behind his back. His pushback to Rodney’s face could be long and convoluted. When he disagreed on positioning ships after the Statia capture, he wrote Rodney: “I most humbly beg leave to suggest, with all due submission to your better and more enlightened judgment, whether it would not be more advisable when the whole of the very respectable force you have done me the honor to commit to my charge are watered, stored, victualed, and collected together and was stationed to the windward.”17
Behind Rodney’s back, Hood was blunt. He complained constantly to Charles Middleton, the navy’s controller, and George Jackson, the Admiralty’s deputy secretary, about Rodney:
“Sir George Rodney requires a monitor perpetually at his elbow, as much as a froward child. . . . There is, I am sorry to say it, no great reliance to be placed in a man who is so much governed by whim and caprice.”
Referring to Rodney’s account of a battle, and alluding to his debts: “Lord Rodney has not lived in France for nothing, for I defy any Frenchman living to have written a more gasconade [boasting] account.
“How Sir George Rodney could bring himself to keep his whole force to guard one path . . . to leave another . . . without any guard at all, is a matter of utmost astonishment to me.”18
He complained about both Rodney and General Vaughan after Statia: “The commanders-in-chief could not bear the thought of leaving the money behind them . . . They will find it difficult to convince the world that they have not proved themselves wickedly rapacious.” He complained about Rodney’s flagship captain: “Sir Charles Douglas is so weak and irresolute. He is no more fit for the station he fills than I am to be an archbishop.” He complained about Admiral Robert Digby in New York, when Digby failed to loan him ships: “I endeavored all I could to prevail upon Admiral Digby . . .” He complained about Admiral Hugh Pigot: “Very unequal to the very important duty.”19
But Hood praised himself often. “I am not a little proud of my own conduct while in sight of the enemy’s fleet,” he wrote Middleton. After one naval action, he told Jackson: “I am perfectly conscious of no one omission in the whole of my conduct and of having done everything that was in my power for the support of the honor of the British flag.”20
And yet, his self-praise wasn’t undeserved. He mentored Horatio Nelson, the epitome of British admirals, who described Hood as “the greatest sea officer I ever knew.” Another admiral said Hood “took me by the hand soon after I entered the profession and never quitted his hold. . . . I never saw an officer of more intrepid courage or warmer zeal. . . . Without the least disposition to severity, there was a something about him, nevertheless, which made his inferior officers stand in awe of him.”21
At St. Kitts, Hood proved himself worthy of the praise.
Bouillé and Grasse had besieged Brimstone Hill for two weeks when, on January 23, Hood arrived with a relief expedition of twenty-two ships. Hood hoped to surprise Grasse, but two of his ships collided, and Grasse, with his twenty-six ships, left their anchorage to engage the British. They fought the next afternoon and continued on the 25th.22
Then, in what a British captain called “the most masterly maneuver I ever saw,” Hood seized Grasse’s former anchorage and positioned his ships defensively so that Grasse was unable to continue the attack without severe losses. By the next day, Hood counted seventy-two dead and 244 wounded, while Grasse had 107 dead and 207 wounded. Grasse now changed his strategy: He would blockade Hood in the harbor. On the 28th, Hood sent a small force ashore. Bouillé drove it off.23
&n
bsp; Hood and Grasse now were at a standstill, but Bouillé on shore continued to tighten his noose, bombarding Brimstone Hill without stopping. He was helped by abandoned British guns and ammunition that civilians hadn’t retrieved. Then, on February 12, Grasse’s men “saw a white flag raised on the breach of the redoubt. We could scarcely believe our eyes, for the toil and hardship that de Bouillé’s army had to undergo are incredible, and men must love a commander to suffer the severe duty imposed on 7,000 men doing that of 21,000.”24
Fraser explained his surrender after the five-week siege. “The fortifications were very old, and in a ruinous state . . . The fire from the enemy increased daily on us, new batteries frequently opening, and for the last three weeks, they were constantly night and day, bombarding and cannonading the garrison.” He had few provisions left, little ammunition. His men had been killed, wounded, took sick, or deserted. “I would be wanting in humanity to have risked the lives of the small body of gallant soldiers.”25
Hood was now in trouble. Reinforcements had reached Grasse during the siege, and the French had 50 ships. They took Montserrat, sixty miles away, without difficulty. Hood himself watched Grasse take Nevis, two miles off St. Kitts’s southeastern tip, without firing a shot. (Alexander Hamilton had been born there twenty-seven years before.)26
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