by Willis, Sam
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In November 1780 Rodney returned to the Caribbean from a disastrous visit to New York, where he had assumed authority over the miserable and spineless Arbuthnot, thereby claiming, as the highest-ranking officer on station, the greatest portion of prize money seized during his stay. With the fresh taste of antagonism in his mouth, Rodney proceeded to annoy Peter Parker, the British commander of the Jamaica station. Parker, who had endured the most destructive and deadly Atlantic hurricane on record while Rodney had caroused in New York, was desperately trying to pick up the shattered pieces of his fleet and dockyard. Jamaica, ‘the most Beautiful Island in the World’, had the appearance of ‘a Country laid waste by Fire and Sword’. Two ships of the line and five frigates had foundered, and seven ships of the line and three frigates had been dismasted. At the Jamaican port of Savanna la Mar, one of the ships in the harbour ‘went over the fort, the parapet of which at other times is about fifteen feet above the level of the water’.4
Days earlier the storm had hit Barbados, killing 4,326 people, allowing slaves and prisoners to escape, and leading to, in the words of General Vaughan, ‘a continuous scene of Rapine & Confusion’ in the streets.5 It then hit St Lucia ‘with a degree of violence not to be described’,6 flattening Rodney’s fledgling naval hospital and his temporary naval infrastructure ashore. The Montague was unfortunate enough to be at sea. ‘Without a single blow of the ax’, wrote her captain, ‘all our masts were blown overboard.’ She was soon rolling so deeply that her quarterdeck gun-ports, twenty-two feet above the surface of the water on a calm day, were repeatedly submerged, a motion that her captain could only describe as ‘far beyond the conception of anyone but a seaman’.7 The report from the captain of the Amazon, who was caught at sea by the storm, is truly terrifying.8 Witnesses had no idea how to describe what they had seen and groped for words: ‘irresistible fury … incessant flood … ruin, desolation, destruction … incredible vehemence … unusual and dreadful scene … totally transformed.’9 Every single ship that Rodney had left behind in the Leeward Islands had been sunk or damaged. Measured in these terms, the 1780 hurricane season was far more destructive than any fleet battle in the war, and by far the worst naval blow suffered by the British. The French were also savaged by the hurricane, with 4,000 fatalities on Martinique, which suffered from a 7.6-metre storm surge.*
Enter Rodney, whose own ships had been damaged on their return to the Caribbean by the coat-tail storms of that hurricane. Parker now had to contend with Rodney, who wielded his seniority like a boarding axe to demand priority in all things. His ships were to be repaired first; his men were to be given priority in getting food and medical supplies; his strategic demands were to be met and anyone who stood in his way was a traitor to his country.
Having created his own hurricane of antipathy in Jamaica, Rodney sailed to Barbados, where he received some wonderful news among the carnage. The British, it seemed, had declared war on the Dutch, and the politicians had suggested an early strike against St Eustatius. Rodney now had an enormous fleet under his command and 3,000 soldiers under General Vaughan that he could summon to sing his song. In almost delirious glee, Rodney fell on St Eustatius.
His motivation was a mixture of avarice and hatred. Rodney, whose general intolerance was aggravated by raging gout and prostatitis, hated a lot of people, but he reserved a special loathing for the Dutch of St Eustatius. He hated them for trading with the Americans, and he particularly hated them for helping the French in the aftermath of the battle of Martinique in 1780 while denying his own fleet critical supplies. The island was, in his own colourful words, a ‘receptacle for the outcast of every nation’ and was full of ‘men who will make no scruple to propagate every falsehood their debased minds can invent’.10 His attack on St Eustatius would be a punishment mission as much as it would be a strategic move. Everyone in St Eustatius was in his sights, regardless of their nationality. Even British merchants were fair game. Such men, he argued,
[have] meanly condescended to become Dutch burghers (and as such they shall be treated) … Thank God that Providence has ordained General Vaughan and myself to be the instrument of a great, powerful, but injured nation to scourge them for their perfidy, and scourged they shall be.11
This conception of the attack as punishment was even immortalized in commemorative coins after the event. In the collections of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, one coin survives which applauds the ‘Glorious Memory’ of how Rodney ‘Punished the Dutch at St Eustatia’ [see fig. 16].12
This is what he did.
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Rodney made his preparations exhaustively and in utter secrecy.13 On 3 February 1781 Rodney arrived with fourteen ships of the line, ‘as sudden as a clap of thunder’. The island was defenceless. In the words of one contemporary, ‘Its inhabitants were a mixed body of all nations and climates; not reduced to any species of military duty or military discipline.’ It had ‘no fortifications for its defence; no garrison, no martial spirit, nor military regulations’.14 To make matters worse, it had also been savaged by the hurricane, with 4,000 reported deaths. Rodney secured the island’s surrender, all of the ships in her harbour, six warships and 150 merchantmen. A large convoy was then taken by surprise, and after a brief scuffle every ship was taken. The capture was so easy that the only evidence of conflict was ‘part of a blue-sleeved arm with white trim … seen floating in the sea’,15 and the captain of one of the British ships involved in the fight was left raging at the mortally wounded Dutch admiral for needlessly sacrificing his life and those of his men.16 Back ashore, Rodney set about his work with conviction, all attempts to hide in sheep’s clothing abandoned.
He and his men ignored centuries of convention regarding the sanctity of private property in wartime. Put simply, Rodney seized everything that was owned by anyone. He conducted ‘a general confiscation of 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’.17 British merchants caught up in the plunder presented a petition to Rodney, who told them that he had a special place for their petition in his quarter-gallery – i.e. his loo.18 We now understand quite how big a deal this was: modern archaeological excavation of St Eustatius in this period has revealed a wealth of British manufactured goods on the island.19 Rodney even kept the Dutch flag flying over the town and fort to lure in ignorant merchants – a brazen deception which worked beautifully. In the subsequent days the British ensnared more than fifty American merchant ships and captured more than 2,000 American sailors. Thus, wrote one Dutchman, ‘A sentence of general beggary [was] pronounced in one moment upon a whole people.’20
In an act of pointless malevolence the British also destroyed the Statian governmental archives: past and current lawsuits, notarial deeds, wills, probate inventories, manumission, prenuptial agreements, contracts, muster rolls, ships’ manifests – everything. It was all simply wiped out. The aspect of Rodney’s behaviour that has survived the centuries with most colour and controversy, however, is his treatment of the St Eustatius Jews. One hundred and one adult males were herded together and some were forcibly strip-searched in the belief that they were concealing money. Thirty were immediately set aside for deportation to St Christopher’s, a nearby British island. Forced to leave behind their wives and children, they were marched to the shoreline and embarked on British boats under the guns of British sailors. They were taken aboard the British warship Shrewsbury, and their names still survive in her musterbook.21 Those not selected for immediate deportation were imprisoned and their belongings auctioned. The question of anti-Semitism as motivation is unresolved, but there is no evidence of anti-Semitism in Rodney’s previous conduct and there is some suggestion that this was all carried out without his knowledge.22
‘Great Britain lauds the enormities of Rodney and Vaughan in the most fulsome terms to conceal t
heir iniquity. I, for my part, filled with horror at their cruel behaviour, call Rodney Nero and Vaughan Caligula.’
Nonetheless, the entire operation was led by an admiral and facilitated by the Royal Navy: the rape of St Eustatius was a manifestation of British sea power. That fact is made perfectly clear by a contemporary cartoon. Here, on a beach lined by Dutch-style houses, are tons of trade goods, heaped and stacked. Boats are crammed with people being taken away, mournfully waving back to shore, where others reach out to them in desperation. All this happens in the direct and ominous shadow of a British warship.
Rodney acted throughout as supreme commander, admiral, judge, jury, prize agent, accountant and auctioneer. As he filled his pockets, his critics filled envelopes with letters of condemnation. British Caribbean merchants, some of whom were currently under French control, were terrified that Rodney had set an appalling precedent. Rodney’s most senior subordinate, Rear-Admiral Samuel Hood, who had not sailed with Rodney to St Eustatius, pondered his behaviour from afar and came to the conclusion that ‘They will find it very difficult to convince the world that they have not proved themselves wickedly rapacious.’23 Charles Goore, a prosperous Liverpudlian merchant, believed that the Dutch war ‘has made some persons run mad’.24 Most eloquent and far-sighted of all was the politician Edmund Burke, who instinctively knew that with great maritime power came great moral responsibility and a need to uphold universal values of jurisprudence, reason and justice.25 This was one of the first times that a link between British maritime power and moral responsibility had been identified – a key feature by which the British empire would, in time, be judged.
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Issues of anti-Semitism and morality aside, the British had struck a severe blow against the Dutch and through them against the Americans and French. ‘There never was a more important stroke made against any state whatever’, claimed an overexcited Rodney to his wife.26 It was estimated, and by thoughtful and conservative men, that as much as £3 million had been seized, though no one really knew for sure. Samuel Hood simply said ‘an amazing amount’.27
Back in England, Lady Rodney was soon to discover how sea power, exercised thousands of miles away, could transform the British social scene. ‘Your express [letter]’, she wrote to her husband,
… arrived on the morning of 13 March. My house has been like a fair from that time till this. Every friend, every acquaintance came. I went to the drawing-room on Thursday following. It was more crowded than on a birthday; and the spirits which every one was in was enlivening to a degree, and the attention and notice I received from their majesties were sufficient to turn my poor brain.28
The guns in the Tower of London were fired, no doubt deafening the captive Henry Laurens, and government stocks rose by one-and-a-half per cent.
John Adams was in Amsterdam when the news arrived. ‘You have no idea, Sir,’ he wrote to his friend Robert Livingstone, then American Secretary for Foreign Affairs, ‘no man who was not upon the spot can have any idea, of the gloom and terror that was spread by this event.’29
Unfortunately for the Dutch, however, the loss of St Eustatius was only the start of their troubles. Back in European waters the British had raised more ships and more men to fight the Dutch, which weakened their ability to act in other theatres but allowed them to act decisively in the North Sea. They blockaded the Dutch coast, using their cruisers to prevent the Dutch from trading with the Spanish and French, and within only a few weeks they had captured 200 Dutch merchantmen with cargo estimated at 15 million guilders.30 Meanwhile 300 more Dutch merchantmen were incarcerated in foreign ports by British warships. The most telling fact of all is that the number of Dutch ships passing into the Baltic via the Øresund at Copenhagen fell from 2,051 in 1780 to just nine in 1781.31 That summer, intelligence reported that the harbour of Amsterdam, one of the pre-eminent hubs of global trade in this period, ‘was like a desert’.32
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The British rather easily absorbed this new war, therefore. The Dutch had no naval strength of any significance in foreign waters, and British strength in home waters had been maintained since the start of the war, for fear of invasion. The problem for the British remained their territories abroad: India, America, Canada, the Caribbean, Gibraltar and dutch disaster 419 Minorca. With limited resources some things would have to be prioritized. The obvious two contenders were the Caribbean, the economic engine of the British empire and war effort, and America, where the battle that could win this war might actually be fought. The answer settled upon by British politicians, however, was neither one nor the other.
* Only slightly smaller than the 8 metre storm surge created by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 which devastated the Gulf Coast of America.
28
BRITISH OBSESSION
There had been great celebrations in London when news of Rodney’s 1779 relief of Gibraltar and victory over the Spanish at the Moonlight Battle reached British shores, but there had also been a national sigh of relief. At last – at last – the navy was doing what it was supposed to do. Rodney’s isolated success in Spain was thus reason for renewed confidence and hope in the war in general. There was also, however, an important symbolic narrative in the relief of Gibraltar that appealed to the British because it seemed to reflect the war in microcosm and their favoured interpretation of it: threatened from all sides, Gibraltar, like Britain, was a lonely and isolated rock holding out against hordes of enemies. The Americans saw themselves as fighting for liberty against tyranny, but the British saw it as a defensive war, fought against the odds for the maintenance of the status quo. The British considered themselves under attack and could point to the French threats against Rhode Island, New York, St Lucia and Savannah, the French captures of Guadeloupe and Grenada, the Spanish threats against Jamaica and Pensacola, the Spanish captures on the Mississippi and at Mobile, and the combined Bourbon invasion threat which had so troubled British shores in both 1778 and 1779. Gibraltar, however, was different because Gibraltar had endured, because there the fear of invasion was sustained. The story of Gibraltar’s resistance was therefore of immense political value.
Its strategic value, however, also rose in this specific period. The recent string of Spanish victories in the Floridas and Solano’s threat hovering over Jamaica meant that, from mid-1780, Gibraltar rose in importance as a bargaining chip. If, as seemed likely, Jamaica, the cornerstone of the British empire, was to be lost to the Spanish, the British would stand a very good chance of getting it back at the negotiating table if they could bargain it for Gibraltar.
This, then, is the background to Gibraltar’s surprisingly elevated position in British strategic thinking in the new year of 1781, and it led to a second major relief operation, led this time by Vice-Admiral George Darby. First, however, we must consider the situation as it then stood in Gibraltar, for the story of Gibraltar between the reliefs of Rodney and Darby is interesting, important and insufficiently known.
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The practical value of Rodney’s 1779 relief, as measured by its impact on the Gibraltar garrison rather than on the British newspaper-reading public, is easy to overstate. Rodney certainly brought ammunition, powder and salt provisions, but otherwise the relief was not what had been hoped for. Many of the supplies were inedible, the flour rotten, the peas maggoty, the meat stinking; many of the ‘fresh’ men were sick after the long voyage; and none of the colliers, so desperately needed, had been ready in time to make the journey.1 This all meant that, in the words of one depressed soldier, ‘The exigencies of the garrison since Admiral Rodney’s departure had been as severe, if not more so, than before.’2
The situation in Gibraltar from 1780 therefore continued in much the same way as it had prior to Rodney’s relief, which had been coloured by the inability of the Spanish squadron in Algeciras to impose an effective blockade of the Rock. Yet again it is striking how far distant were the realities of sea power and the expectations attached to it: in reality Barceló’s squadron was a sorry jum
ble of ships, and yet rumours that the Spanish had actually taken Gibraltar reached America.3
Barceló had not come remotely close to taking the Rock, but his men had become increasingly ingenious. On one occasion, inspired by visible British naval weakness, they launched a fireboat attack. Shortly after two British warships had left their berths at the Mole, the location of the crucial powder store, the Spanish unleashed a tide of fireships. First one, then two and then nine shadowy masses appeared and then were ignited. The flames swiftly took and roared into life, illuminating the waters around them with bright orange tongues that caused shadows to dance all over the great Rock itself. They appeared like ‘moving mountains of fire’4 and threw out such heat that the pitch between the hull planks of the British warship Panther, lying at anchor nearby, melted.