No wonder, then, the “vast number of spectators” assembled in Boston on April 19, 1740, to hear Massachusetts governor Jonathan Belcher announce a levy of troops to fight in the newly declared war with Spain. The king had resolved “to distress and annoy” Spain’s “most considerable Settlements in the West Indies.” Massachusetts would do its part by enlisting all willing and able-bodied men under the most generous terms: arms, clothing, payment, conveyance, and “a Share in any Booty which shall be taken from the enemy.”48 Belcher had read his audience astutely. Massachusetts had to turn away four hundred volunteers. Other colonies met with equal success—such as Maryland, which sweetened the deal with debt, tax, and toll relief.49
If war is plunder, as Governor Belcher’s proclamation suggests, plunder was both the trigger and the underlying cause of the conflict that introduced Americans to Guantánamo. For decades leading up to April 1740, colonial newspapers bristled with tales of abuse visited on British shipping by privateers policing Spain’s West Indian monopoly—a monopoly made all the more vexing by Spain’s refusal to take advantage of it.50 In the twenty-six years leading up to the war, Spain’s desultory trading fleet sailed but nine times. In one seven-year period, it never left port at all. Not content to squander an opportunity, British merchants took up a lucrative smuggling operation checked only by Spain’s licensed pirates, who found it more convenient to raid British vessels than to engage in legitimate trade themselves.51 One such raid, at the hands of the notorious Juan de León Fandino and “his crew of Indians, Mulattoes and Negroes,” relieved Robert Jenkins, captain of the British merchantman Rebecca, of his ear.52 When, eight years later, Jenkins paraded his pickled ear before an exercised Parliament, Britain declared war on Spain.53
Making the rounds of their final good-byes in autumn 1740, the sons of Massachusetts and Maryland and the other colonies might have been excused for exuding a certain level of confidence. The troop levy whose unanticipated success they embodied coincided with news out of Jamaica of Admiral Vernon’s capture of Porto Bello the previous November. In the run-up to war, Vernon, then sitting in Parliament, had boasted that he could take the Spanish stronghold with just six ships. In England, news of Vernon’s feat sparked jubilation.54 In the colonies, it inspired visions of a grand payout. Typical is a column from the Boston Post Boy, which, after noting how amply Vernon’s men had “enriched themselves with the Plunder of one Town,” invited readers to imagine “how much more will those who serve in this Expedition enrich themselves by the Plunder of many!” And not “of Towns only, but of a wide extended Country, abounding in Gold, Silver, and every other sort of Riches.” So confident was Vernon in the odds of the new campaign that before re-embarking for the West Indies, he commissioned medals depicting his Spanish adversary, Admiral Blas de Lezo, kneeling at his feet.55
American hopes for the expedition faded upon the colonists’ arrival in Jamaica. Within a matter of days some three hundred American troops were stricken with yellow fever, which, along with dysentery, cholera, malaria, and scurvy, would claim more lives than did any Spanish arms. Inexplicable delays plagued the campaign from the start. For over two months the British force languished in Port Royal, thus forfeiting the element of surprise, inviting further disease, and introducing the colonists to that peculiar brand of snobbery known as British disdain. Going out, the Americans regarded Spain as the principal impediment to colonial interests. Heading home, their perspective had changed considerably. Surely, being included on this campaign reinforced some colonists’ sense of Britishness.56 But more seem to have developed lasting resentment toward their British cousins, who treated them like pawns, splintering colonial companies to fill shipboard vacancies, setting Americans to common labor alongside Jamaican slaves, and using Americans and Jamaicans as cannon fodder to clear the way for British regulars.57 British army officers, particularly, refused to undertake any action that might be perceived as benefiting specifically colonial interests.58
In this unhappy climate Vernon stood out not only for regarding British and colonial interests as one and the same but also for his frank solicitude for the Americans. Though not beyond branding some as lazy, he took pains to assure his superiors that “the Americans have had nothing to complain of from the Sea, and have never expressed themselves dissatisfied at being employ’d on board his Majesty’s Ships.”59 An experienced politician as well as a seasoned sailor, Vernon was drawn to the more cultivated Americans, and to one in particular, Lawrence Washington, a twenty-three-year-old captain in one of the Virginia companies. British-educated and immensely ambitious, Washington came to Vernon’s attention for his leadership in one of the signal achievements of the ill-fated Cartagena campaign, the storming of the Barradera battery, which helped open the harbor to the British fleet. In the end no amount of individual daring could overcome the incapacity of the British army and navy to act in concert. British forces withdrew from Cartagena in mid-April 1741, after six weeks’ futile engagement and amid heavy losses due mostly to disease.60
Later, at Guantánamo, Vernon would demonstrate intimate acquaintance with the motives and aspirations of the colonists.61 At Port Royal, he struck up a lasting friendship with the young Washington before embarking for Cuba. To Washington, Vernon’s attentiveness almost made up for the discomfort and inconvenience of Port Royal. “We are all tired of the heat and wish for a cold season to refresh our blood,” Washington wrote his father, Augustine. “I mentioned the extravagance of this Island before but they have now raised the prices of everything so that I really believe I shall be under a necessity of drawing Bills” (i.e., taking out a loan). Nor was Washington’s regiment receiving the treatment he had expected. Still, he assured his father, “I have remained on Admiral Vernon’s ship … vastly to my satisfaction.”62
No record survives of Washington and Vernon’s conversation in the wardroom aboard the Boyne, but it is possible to imagine something of its content. Washington likely confirmed Vernon’s impression that all talk in the colonies was of land.63 Washington himself grew up in a family for whom land was a vehicle of wealth and advancement rather than the means of subsistence. From the year 1657, when Lawrence’s great-grandfather John Washington first appeared off the mouth of the Potomac, the Washingtons had proved themselves keen speculators and cunning bachelors, snatching up much of the tidewater’s prized real estate along with several of its most eligible brides. Augustine Washington, Lawrence’s father, was a surveyor, a vocation that afforded him firsthand knowledge not only of the Virginia countryside but also of the frontier territory west of the Appalachians. British treaties with the Indians and French delayed opening the so-called Ohio Country to colonial settlement until after Augustine had died. But Augustine was among the first colonists to tap iron deposits around Fredericksburg, Virginia, eventually trading his local mining rights for a large stake in a London mining and manufacturing firm.64
Lawrence Washington was every bit his father’s son. Exposure to the ravages of war could not distract him from the issue of the day. “I hope my Lotts are secured,” he wrote Augustine from Port Royal, “which if I return I shall make use of as my dwelling.”65 The “lotts” in question consisted of 2,500 acres along Little Huntington Creek, Virginia, which Augustine had transferred to Lawrence just before he embarked for the West Indies. Called Epsewasson at the time, Lawrence’s Virginia estate would be renamed Mount Vernon after his Port Royal interlocutor.
Besides describing his plans for Epsewasson, Lawrence likely confided to Vernon his hopes for the Ohio Country, which, judging from his activity upon returning to Virginia, was always topmost in his mind. Home by January 1743, the year his father died, Lawrence carried on in the family tradition, marrying the wealthy Anne Fairfax, forging powerful social and political alliances, and pursuing his land and iron interests back and forth across the sea.66 Lawrence’s transatlantic peregrinations paid off in 1747, when, along with a group of prominent Virginia and English investors, he founded the Ohio Company of Virgini
a, eventually winning a grant of two hundred thousand acres near present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Given the competition from like-minded colonists (Benjamin Franklin was a partner in the rival Vandalia Company; Thomas Jefferson’s father, Peter, in the Loyal Land Company), never mind the standard established by his forebears, the king’s endorsement of his land scheme could be counted a crowning success.67
But those who thought to tap the resources of the Ohio Country had to figure out a way to bring its fruit to market. It was simply too hard to carry it east over the Appalachian Mountains to the old ports of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Better to ship it down the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers, ultimately to the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico. This only raised bigger questions about access not only to the French port of New Orleans but also to regional and hemispheric shipping lanes, then largely in the control of Spain.
Here is where Vernon must have cut in. By the time Washington came to his attention at Cartagena, Vernon had been commuting between England and the West Indies off and on for forty years. Later, in Cuba, when his hopes for Guantánamo seemed to be disintegrating on the shoals of army indifference, Vernon reminded his superiors back home that his estimation of Guantánamo’s virtues was based on unrivaled knowledge of the Indies.68 Had Washington not already heard it from his father, the surveyor, he would almost certainly have learned from Vernon that plans for developing the American hinterland hinged on command of three key waterways: the Yucatán Channel, the Florida Straits, and the Windward Passage. The Mississippi River drains into the Gulf of Mexico, as everybody knows, but the Gulf of Mexico is part of a regional circulation system that governs access to its various parts. Current in the Gulf of Mexico flows clockwise, entering through the Yucatán Channel, between today’s Cancún and northwest Cuba; it exits through the Florida Straits, between north-central Cuba and the Florida Keys. In the age of sail, travel against this current was difficult, often impossible, which meant that ships accessed the Gulf of Mexico through the Caribbean Sea. The Caribbean, in turn, has many entryways but few deep passages, none deeper and more convenient to Europe and North America than the Windward Passage, home to Guantánamo Bay.
At the time Washington was hatching his land scheme, Spain dominated both the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Spain patrolled the western side of the Windward Passage from the port of Santiago; Spain’s ally, France, the eastern side from today’s Port-au-Prince. Both the Yucatán Channel and the Florida Straits were convenient to Spanish-held Havana and to Spanish Florida. Cuba, Vernon well knew, was the gravitational center around which this system churned. The country that controlled Cuba would command the trade and traffic not only of the Atlantic seaboard and North American continent, but of the Western Hemisphere itself.
Vernon and Washington prepared to depart for Cuba in late June 1741. After Cartagena, Vernon had thought to remain in Port Royal for six weeks, giving men and ships ample time to recover. But Port Royal proved no healthier than before. In six short months, twelve thousand men had been reduced to three thousand, and Vernon resolved to engage the enemy while there remained troops at his command. Havana and Vera Cruz were among the targets considered by a British council of war meeting in mid-June.69 Ultimately, it settled on Santiago de Cuba, which, if less significant than the other ports, was crucial both “to the security of British trade,” as the council put it, and to “cutting off the baneful correspondence between the Spaniards and [the French at] Hispaniola.”70
Vernon had had his eye on southeast Cuba for some time. While pooling local resources in advance of Cartagena, one of his lieutenants captured a British privateer, pressing its “marooning” crew into the king’s service. Among the harvest taken on that raid was a displaced New Englander named John Drake who had been plying the waters of the western Atlantic for over two decades and whose description of southeast Cuba changed Vernon’s understanding of the goal of this campaign.71
In a deposition obtained on board the Boyne as Vernon sailed for Cuba, Drake described being seized off a British trader bound for Boston by a Spanish privateer sometime in the late 1720s. Released on the island of Trinidad, Drake made for Puerto Príncipe, in central Cuba, where he hoped to catch a ride to Jamaica and, ultimately, home. But Cuba suited Drake just fine. Finding that he “could get a very comfortable living there by fishing,” he decided to remain, and over the course of the next decade he moved with the seasons back and forth between Puerto Príncipe and the eastern towns of Bayamo and Santiago. By the time he was hauled aboard Vernon’s ship, Drake had more or less settled down, exchanging a third of his bounty for hunting rights in a spot on Cuba’s southern coast just east of Guantánamo Bay.72
This Caribbean Leatherstocking knew the Santiago-Guantánamo region as only a hunter-gatherer could. Having fished its rivers and traipsed its fields, Drake could calculate times and measurements down to the hour and even ankle (“farther than which even a dory cannot pass, being only ankle deep”). While debating Spanish targets back in Port Royal, Vernon had learned from another source that a frontal assault on Santiago harbor would be suicidal thanks to the harbor’s tortuous, precipitous entrance, which made it easy to protect. But the source described Santiago as vulnerable to a land-based attack, and Drake’s testimony convinced Vernon that Guantánamo Bay, forty miles down the coast, would make an ideal staging ground.73 Emptying into the southwest corner of Guantánamo Bay flowed a significant river (Rio Guantánamo), navigable in twenty-five to thirty feet of water for about three miles, and in over nine feet of water for up to fifteen. From there the advancing army would have to strike out on foot, skirting the mountains that made direct progress up the coast impossible. Drake estimated that a soldier could cover the remaining sixty circuitous miles to Santiago in less than two days. “Very good” in dry weather, the route was passable even when inundated, though the road to Santiago was “for the most part woody.” These woods would become a sticking point between Vernon and his army counterpart, General Thomas Wentworth, who feared the woods, as he feared an ambush, and who took cold comfort in Drake’s description of a route “so broad that ten Men may very well go abreast.”74
Striking in its detail, Drake’s testimony is notable too for what it omits: mention of any fortifications at Guantánamo Bay, for instance, or local garrisons, or even significant settlement. A few isolated saltworks and a couple of cattle pens lined the river above where it shoaled. Roughly forty miles from the mouth of the bay lay the little village of Santa Catalina (“an hundred Houses and one Church” inhabited by “Indians and Mulattoes who lived by hunting and raising of Stock”).75 In short, nothing in Drake’s report led Vernon to conclude that this territory was anything but ripe for the picking; a few odd farms and a colored village posed no obstacle to the plan crystallizing in his mind for a new American colony.
Vernon arrived at Guantánamo that July with high hopes. What he found exceeded his expectations. It was not simply that Guantánamo afforded ready access to Santiago; nor that the bay could absorb the entire fleet; nor that it offered better protection from tropical storms than Port Royal; nor, finally, that it was ideally situated to safeguard British shipping in the heart of the Caribbean. All of this was true. What put Guantánamo over the top in Vernon’s mind was its native splendor: its navigable rivers, rolling hills, and fertile plains.
Vernon spent the first week at Guantánamo Bay unpacking. Though not unnoticed by Spanish authorities, his arrival went unopposed. Spanish defenses in the vicinity of Santiago were light. Just how light became clear after the interception of a packet of letters from the Spanish governor of Santiago to the captain of the local militia acknowledging the British arrival and promising to release arms and ammunition for at most a hundred men. Later testimony from a Spanish captive put the actual number of enemy troops in the area at seventy-five, giving the British a numerical advantage of more than forty to one.76 The only significant skirmishes of the campaign occurred at the end of the second week, when a scouting party dispa
tched to confirm Drake’s intelligence flushed the Spanish militia from its lair. For two days the Spaniards peppered the invading army from the bushes, after which the Spaniards essentially disappeared. In their wake lay three British casualties (one fatality) and an open road to Santiago.77
Yet the British Army never advanced. No amount of intelligence, however favorable, could compel Wentworth forward. Vernon had witnessed such foot-dragging before—at Cartagena, where the army’s hesitation before the central citadel effectively halted that campaign. Determined to avoid another such debacle, Vernon spent the next two months trying to cajole his army counterpart, whose irresolution was evident by the second day. “I hope it will please God we shall avoid splitting on the Rock of Discord,” the admiral wrote the general, “as I think, if this be but heartily set about, it can never fail of Success.” 78 Within a week, Vernon saw so little evidence of heart among the army that he began to fear for the safety of his guide, Drake. “It cannot but be apprehended,” Vernon warned a lieutenant, that “there are some might even be glad our Guide should be destroyed.”79 When, after nine days, neither the absence of an enemy nor the establishment of a secure camp proved any inducement to Wentworth, Vernon set off to canvass the local countryside for himself.
Descending the ladder of the Boyne, he boarded a longboat and headed up the Guantánamo River, his delight at what he found apparently exaggerated by his fear of losing it. “I thought it the most beautiful Prospect I ever saw,” he wrote the Admiralty back at Whitehall, “to row five Leagues up a navigable River, of about a hundred Yards wide all the Way, with green Trees on both Sides appearing like a green Fence.” Skirting Wentworth’s camp, he crested a hill to come face-to-face with “the finest Plains” in the West Indies, watered “by a River the farthest navigable.” Wentworth, meanwhile, occupied a rise along the river, “as beautiful a Situation for a Town as this Country can afford, with a fertile soil behind it.”80 Vernon was a confident, egotistical man, as his eager forging of “victory” medals suggests. Might he have confided to Washington, who remained by his side at Guantánamo Bay, his hope that such a town would one day bear his name? The sources do not say, but the similarity between this site and another back home in Virginia is uncanny and must have left a lasting impression in Washington’s mind.
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