It was one of the peculiar malfunctions of technology that shore batteries on the islands were generally of inadequate caliber and range to knock out a ship approaching with hostile intent. One is moved to wonder why, if a 10-pounder gun could be mounted on the rolling deck of a sailing vessel, the same or larger could not be mounted on land? The fact is that the blind parsimony of the defense kept the shore batteries usually too few in number to equal in firepower the heavy guns of a ship of the line. When one of these big ships engaged in an exchange with shore batteries, it was more likely to knock out the land guns than vice versa. The guns of Fort Orange, like those of other islands, can still be seen mounted in the courtyard of the fort pointing right down at the harbor. If they could not defend against a landing force, what were they for? Silent, technology has no answer.
Rodney’s troops were disembarked and a summons issued to the island’s Governor for “instant surrender,” within an hour, “of the island of St. Eustatius and its dependencies with every thing in and belonging thereto for the use of his said Majesty. If any resistance is made you must abide by the consequences.” With only one Dutch warship in port and no prepared defenses against Rodney’s heavy guns and his land force of 3,000, de Graaff had no choice. After firing two rounds from the fort as a show of resistance for the honor of Admiral Bylandt, representing the Dutch Navy in the harbor, he yielded St. Eustatius. Fifty armed American merchantmen in the roadstead with no chance to prepare for battle were taken. Their papers supplied more evidence, Rodney wrote, of the importance of St. Eustatius in assistance to the rebels. “All their rigging, sails, cannon powder, ammunition and stores of all kinds were sent from this island without whose assistance American navigation could not possibly have been supported,” again making his point that St. Eustatius had been essential to the colonial rebellion. Two thousand American seamen and merchants on the island wanted to fight but, being cut off from food by the British troops, had to join in the surrender and were made prisoner. British capture and occupation were effected February 3, 1781.
“I most sincerely congratulate their Lordships,” Rodney wrote in reporting the success of the enterprise to the Admiralty, “on the severe blow the Dutch West India Company and the perfidious magistrates of Amsterdam have sustained by the capture of this island.” He hoped it “would never be returned to the Dutch as it has been more detrimental to England than all the forces of her enemies and alone had contributed to the continuance of the American war.”
The “surprise and astonishment of the governor and inhabitants,” he wrote further, “is scarce to be believed.” The arrival of Count Bylandt from the Admiralty of Amsterdam two days earlier had “allayed their fears of hostilities.” It might be supposed that Count Bylandt would have brought at this time a more acute warning of alarm when the prospect of war with England hung darkly over Holland. Presumably he saw no use in exciting efforts for defense when he had been given nothing to use for that purpose. In any case, the “surprise and astonishment” at a British demand for surrender was understandable, because Rodney reportedly sailed into the harbor flying the French flag, a report that lacks a verifiable eyewitness source. The deception, if true, seems a surprisingly dishonorable and unlikely procedure for an admiral of the Royal Navy, who might be expected to scorn disguise under the flag of the traditional enemy. Warriors through the ages who have talked so much about the honor and glory of combat are always quite ready to act on the dictum that all is fair in war, no matter how crooked. In fact, the use of false colors was not contrary to international law such as it existed at the time, and did not excite any umbrage. Rodney was to practice another deception when he kept the Dutch flag flying over the island for several weeks after the British occupied it, as a decoy to lead unsuspecting vessels to their capture.
Rodney descended upon Statia with devastation and confiscations that were to arouse the reproof of the Opposition at home, voiced by its supreme orator and master of outrage, Edmund Burke. To begin with, the seizing offshore of 130 merchantmen of all kinds, with their cargoes valued at £500,000, was normal enough as a prize of war. There followed the plundering of private property, in shops and houses, of naval stores and goods in the warehouses, arms and ammunition in the arsenals, crates of sugar, tobacco and rice on the beaches. The total proceeds have been valued at £3 million, excluding the captured ships. Asking for a list of merchants and their inventories, Rodney singled out the Jews, who had a small well-established community on the island, and ordered them stripped for cash or precious stones or whatever might be supposed to be secreted in their clothing. Acting out a common antipathy with unnecessary zeal, he ordered the Jews expelled on one day’s notice, without notice to their families or access to their homes. With more reason, French nationals as enemy citizens were all deported to neighboring French islands. With equal zeal Rodney pursued Governor de Graaff with penalties deserved by the “first man who insulted the British flag by taking up the salute of a pirate and a rebel, and who, during his whole administration has been remarkably inimical to Great Britain and a favourer of the American rebellion.…” Two American ships named de Graaff of 26 guns and Lady de Graaff of 18 “prove how much the Americans thought themselves obliged to him.… He has made an amazing fortune and, by all accounts, much by oppression. His plantation is seized for his Majesty” and de Graaff himself taken as an enemy prisoner to be sent with all his other household property to Great Britain. With due respect for a rich man, Rodney explained further that the Governor “will be allowed to take with him his household goods, furniture, plate, jewels, linen and all his domestic servants, and he will be conveyed to Great Britain in a good ship properly fitted for his own and his family’s reception.”
While loot was being counted, Rodney ordered two warships and a frigate to chase a Dutch convoy of thirty ships, “richly loaded,” which had sailed from St. Eustatius 36 hours before his arrival. The convoy’s Dutch commander, Admiral Krull, who resisted against hopeless odds for the honor of his flag, was killed in the fight and all his convoy taken. “Not one escaped,” Rodney reported with satisfaction. Three large Dutch ships from Amsterdam and a convoy from Guadeloupe came in later and were taken, and “a squadron of five sail of the line is hourly expected.” When the squadron arrived with a man-of-war, the Mars, of 38 guns and a crew of 300, it proved no match for Rodney’s squadron. The Mars would “now be commissioned and manned, and in a few days she will cruise as a British ship of war.” He could also report the taking of five American frigates of 14–26 guns. In the first month of the Dutch war as a whole, 200 of the Dutch merchant fleet, an objective as important as St. Eustatius, were taken by the English, paralyzing Dutch shipping in the process that accelerated the decline of the Republic. Occupied on land in collecting and disposing of the island’s riches and arranging for their safe convoy to England, and in pursuing the iniquitous English merchants who had been trading with the enemy,* Rodney was not at the head of his fleet patrolling the waters to intercept possible French intervention in America. While he has borne responsibility for this fateful omission, the fault did not in fact lie with him so much as in the casual management by his government and its war ministers, who did not foresee or consider French intervention as a serious concern. At no time did they issue any orders to Rodney that a primary mission of his fleet must be at all costs to prevent French reinforcements from reaching America to aid the rebels. If he or his government had been gifted with a talent for seeing into the future, and could have anticipated the fatal effect for Britain of future French presence at Yorktown, orders to the Admiral might have been more definitive in the Spartan tone of “Come back with your shield or on it.” Rodney was given no such urgent advice because the English never seriously considered that the Americans could win the war or that French help could or would be decisive. Ministers did not act to prevent a siege of General Cornwallis’ army at Yorktown because it was a contingency they never conceived of as happening.
The objects of Rodney’s stern
est wrath were British merchants of both Statia and, particularly, St. Kitts who had been selling arms to the enemy for use against their own countrymen. He pounced upon their records in accountants’ offices, which had not been destroyed owing to the speed and surprise of the English attack, and sent them back to England to the war ministry of Lord George Germain. Two American agents of the Continental Congress, by name Isaac Gouverneur and Samuel Curzon or Courson, who had handled the purchases were sent with the papers as prisoners, in the hope of seeing them tried as traitors. Acquainted though he was with loose practice in English office, Rodney placed too much trust in government. When he needed the evidence to defend himself in court in lawsuits brought against him by the accused, the documents revealing the practices and profits of the British merchants trading with the enemy, which had been deposited with William Knox, Germain’s under-secretary for the Colonies, and would have been injurious to the government if made public, were found to have disappeared, proving the usefulness of the right “connections.” Rodney was able to produce in court only one which showed the trade at work. Goods would be shipped by English merchants across the Channel to Holland, where they would be transshipped to St. Eustatius and sold there to American agents, for use on the firing line against English soldiers. The two American agents were in fact tried for high treason, but in camera, and were afterward imprisoned. When the war in America was over, they were released and one of the two died soon thereafter. Their correspondence and business documents, which had been turned over for the trial to the House of Lords and might have proved embarrassing if not incriminating to important persons, could never be found. By this time the British surrender in America was embarrassment enough, leaving no one anxious to pursue the scandal of the traitorous merchants’ missing papers.
In gathering up the treasure of St. Eustatius, Rodney well knew that unlike a naval prize, which was customarily divided among admiral, captain, crew and shipowner after its value had been realized at an advertised auction of ship and cargo, the spoil of territory or treasure seized in the name of the nation belonged to the sovereign. Yet, eager to feel the clink of real money in his hands, he greedily or foolishly adopted the prize-court process, and advertised auction sales of the goods seized from the inhabitants. Because the sales allowed the goods to go below cost, the owners entered claims against Rodney for the deficits, creating the lawsuits that were to sour his victorious hour and harass his life thereafter.
For the moment all was glory. “Joy to you, my dear Sir George,” wrote his wife happily, “equal to what you have given your friends at home and I may say the whole nation, on your glorious successes.… Every countenance is lighted up with joy, every voice rings with your praises.… My house has been like a fair from the moment” his express arrived, on the 13th.… “Every friend, every acquaintance came.” At the drawing room on Thursday, “the attention and notice I received from their Majesties were sufficient to turn my poor brain. In the evening I went to Cumberland House, where the congratulations were equally warm and flattering.… This glorious news has been a thunderbolt to the Opposition, very few of whom appeared in the House of Commons. It is reported that you are to be made a peer.”
Equal and opposite was the shock in the Netherlands at the fall of St. Eustatius. “You can have no idea,” wrote John Adams, “of the gloom and terror that was spread by this event,” which also distressed, as Rodney was glad to report, the French West Indian islands “beyond conception. They are greatly in want of every species of provisions and stores” and he hoped “to blockade them in such a manner as, I hope, will prevent their receiving any.”
By his capture of St. Eustatius, Rodney reminded their Lordships, “the loss to Holland, France and America is greater than can be conceived.… The capture is immense and amounts to more than I can venture to say. All is secured for the King to be at his royal disposal.” By this time, in fact, the entry of France in the American war as an ally of the Colonies supplied most of their need of arms, so that St. Eustatius’ role was no longer crucial. Rodney’s capture of the island came too late for any larger purpose than loot.
Not a peerage but appointment as Knight Commander of the Bath was all that was forthcoming, which, considering that George III was always complaining of passive commanders and seeking bold men of action, was rather meager. Reports of Rodney’s dubious methods may have been the reason. He hopes that “if His Majesty is graciously pleased to bestow any part of it between the navy and the army, that he will dictate in what manner his gracious bounty may be bestowed, that all altercations may be prevented.”
The furor aroused by Rodney’s confiscation of British-owned property from the merchants found to have been trading with the enemy naturally reached the government’s critics at home and brought the most forceful voice of the Opposition, Edmund Burke, to his feet in the House to demand an inquiry. In denunciation, the power and passion and overflowing torrent of Burke’s rhetoric could make a man believe his own mother was an arm of Satan. His theme was “the cruelty and oppression” of Rodney’s treatment of the inhabitants of St. Eustatius which could provoke, he said, reprisals by their nations while “we were engaged in a most calamitous war in which we had many enemies and no friends.” Pursuing the happy notion that gentler methods toward the enemy instead of “pushing war to its extremes” would, Burke claimed, “soften resentment” and bring their minds to a “favourable inclination towards peace,” while neutrals “might be brought to applaud the dignity of our sentiments as a people and assist us in the conflict. But a contrary behaviour on our part was likely to provoke them to unite against us and make the protection of human nature from plunder and robbery a common cause.” For so keen a political mind and so well-informed an observer as Burke of the real behavior of states at war, this was moonshine in which it is hard to suppose that Burke believed or that it changed a single vote not already determined by party loyalty. Burke could indulge and hold the attention of the House in this kind of rhapsodizing by the force of his language and the hypnotizing magic of its flow. The terms used in declaring the Dutch war, he went on, “threatened no inhuman cruelty, no uncommon severity,” but “seemed rather to portend the short variance of old allies in which all their old friendship and affection would operate rather as the softener than the inflamer of the common calamities of war. It breathed expressions of kindness and long suffering” and its menaces “seemed to be torn by constraint from a heart bleeding under the affliction of unwilling strife.” Then the expedition against St. Eustatius was ordered close upon the “most melancholy and general disaster” of the recent hurricane, “which had involved all the islands in common suffering and common distress.” Here he had a point. “It might have been expected that the deadly serpents of war would for a time have been hushed into a calm in that quarter of the world … and would not have increased the stock of their distress.… Surely when human pride was levelled in the dust and we saw what worms we were beneath the hand of Omnipotence it became us to crawl from our holes with a feeling of brotherly love to each other; to abate a little of our rancour and not add the devastations of war to those of the hurricane. But it was not so with Great Britain.” He followed with a sobbing passage about the “unprepared, naked and defenceless” conditions of the islands, as if this were somehow Britain’s fault, adding to her guilt, and then moved to a peroration about the confiscations: “Without regard to friend or foe,” to neutrals or British subjects, “the wealth of the opulent, the goods of the merchant, the utensils of the artisan, the necessaries of the poor were seized on, and a sentence of general beggary pronounced in one moment upon a whole people. A cruelty unheard of in Europe for many years … a most unjustifiable, outrageous and unprincipled violation of the laws of nations … accompanied too with cruelties almost unheard of in the history of those barbarous times … warehouses were locked up, and access was denied to the proprietors,” depriving them of the “honest profits of their labours.… Was there known till that moment a more complet
e act of tyranny than this? … unparalleled in the annals of conquest, but it was surpassed by what followed.” The next step “was to seize upon all their letters and their private papers,” which made it impossible to apply for loans abroad … “merchants and inhabitants plundered and robbed of all that they possessed in the world and of all the hopes that they had of having their property restored.” In his compassion for the beggared merchants, living with their silver and servants and bulging warehouses, Burke seemed unmoved by their trading with the enemy. He said not a word about this aspect or the fact that the account books had been seized for that reason. Because the affair was being used to accuse the government, he made no attempt to be objective.
When, in his long speech, Burke came to Rodney’s treatment of the Jews, he showed the interest of a wide-ranging mind. Speaking of the order exiling them on one day’s notice, without their property and without wives and children, he described their vulnerability through statelessness eighty years before the Jews themselves were to formulate the nature of their problem. “If Britons are injured,” said Burke, “Britons have armies and laws to fly to for protection and justice. But the Jews have no such power and no such friend to depend on. Humanity then must become their protector and ally.” Burke perceived the problem, if not the solution in statehood. That had to wait for the next century, for Burke was not concerned with the Jewish problem but with the wrongdoing of his own government embodied by Rodney. His motion precipitated a vigorous debate about whether there was or was not a recognized law of nations.
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