A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  Nobody’s morals were overnice

  When Walpole talked of ‘a man and his price’.

  And this was a very curious transaction. The Spanish King never seems to have received any return for his investment. The sum of £95,000 keeps cropping up in all the discussions; it was owed by Spain to Britain in return for the depredations of certain guar da costas; the obligation was partially admitted, and there was a point when George II suggested that the £60,000 owed him by the South Sea Company should be set against it. It is a confused story. It is probably simpler and not wholly inaccurate to say that the issue of the war of 1739 was concerned with the right of search, and the final occasion of it was the presentation of Jenkins’ ear to the House of Commons.

  The War of Jenkins’ Ear began in 1739. A year later Frederick II of Prussia, who had ascended the throne a few weeks earlier, established a national precedent by invading Silesia without a declaration of war; the War of Jenkins’ Ear became the war of the Austrian succession. It lasted till 1748, and most of Europe became involved; the fortunes of war swayed from one side to another; each side had victories to celebrate, but at the end nobody had much to show for it except Frederick, who set out with a limited territorial aim, the acquisition of Silesia, and the glorification of himself. By the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle he was recognized as one of the most important monarchs of his day, and his army had more than held its own against Europe’s most seasoned troops.

  In the Caribbean it was a minor war, if indeed it could be called a war at all. No possessions changed hands. British and French troops never got to grips there; the campaigns between the Spanish and British fleets were languid and ineffective, and the British at the end of the war inflicted so decisive a defeat upon the French in the Atlantic – in spite of the great skill and gallantry displayed by their admiral against heavy odds – that the French did not make any further major attempt at sea.

  From such Caribbean campaigns as there were, however, the language of the English-speaking people was to receive two additions. It has often happened that a man will give his name to a certain type of action. Boycott is the readiest example. But it may be questioned whether there is another example of one man providing the vocabulary with two different words. In 1739 the British fleet made an unsuccessful attack upon Havana. Its admiral had under his command 3,600 colonial troops, one of whose junior lieutenants was called Frederick Washington. Though the attack failed, the young lieutenant was so impressed by the skill and courage of his admiral that he asked his brother George, who was building a country house in Virginia, to name it after this admiral – whose name was Vernon.

  Vernon was popular with his men. He wore a weatherworn cloak made out of grogram, and was nicknamed affectionately ‘Old Grog’. The admiral insisted that his men, as a precaution against scurvy, should drink rum and water. This beverage was nicknamed ‘grog’. Many hundreds of tourists visit Mount Vernon every day; and in a thousand bars, in winter, a hot grog will be ordered as a precaution against the cold. But scarcely a soul remembers the victor of Porto Bello.

  From the colonial aspect, the most significant incident in the war was the capture by the British of the French-Canadian fortress of Louisburg, which until then had been regarded as little more than a sneakhole for privateers. At the end of the war it was returned readily to France. But British strategists had recognized its value, and its capture in the Seven Years’ War was an important step in the conquest of Canada.

  In the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, a first attempt was made to fix the status of the four islands which were later to be known as the neutral islands, Tobago, St Lucia, Dominica and St Vincent. The situation in these islands was confused by the persistent and effective opposition of the Caribs. St Vincent and Dominica were supposed to belong to the Caribs, but in Dominica the French had bought a large section of the island from them. St Lucia, as Tobago, had been occupied by the English and the French, but ownership had never been established, and in St Lucia the Caribs were more powerful than either party. There were more French there than British, and half of those British were actually Irish.

  These islands as a whole were settled by small communities who disliked government and laws, and, in the case of St Lucia, by Frenchmen who found a lack of opportunity in Martinique. In addition to the usual minor crops, they produced hardwood timber, which was extremely important to the French sugar planters, who could not get the kind of wood they wanted from America. These islands were also useful in providing ground provisions. The French used them as an entrepôt for slaves from Barbados.

  The islands had also a strategic value. Tobago lay to the windward of Barbados and could interfere with the American and British trade. St Vincent and Dominica were of value to France since they could protect her communications between Martinique, Guadeloupe and Grenada; but it was St Lucia that was of the greatest value. It had a superb harbour and lay slightly to the windward of Martinique. It was from here that Rodney in 1782 was to develop the campaign that ended in the Battle of the Saints. He said afterward that it was the key island strategically in the Windward group.

  At Aix-la-Chapelle, Dominica and Tobago were returned to France, and St Lucia was declared a neutral island, as was St Vincent, where the Caribs had proved even more bellicose than in Grenada. They not only beat off the first French settlers, but provided a refuge for escaped Negroes, mainly from Barbados, who intermarried with them and bred a race known as Black Caribs that routed quite a large French expeditionary force. In fact, they never were subdued. In the Seven Years’ War, St Vincent was captured by the British, but the Caribs refused to admit their sovereignty; after ten years’ fighting, a peace was arranged and the Caribs were given a reserve in the north part of the island. Trouble began again during the American War of Independence, when the island was captured by the French. It was restored to Britain at the peace conference, but the Caribs had come to regard the French as allies against their resented guests. With the assistance of the French, they rose again, and there was long and bitter fighting. Eventually the residue of this fierce race was transplanted to Honduras.

  The neutral islands presented a number of awkward problems. But on one principle the French and British were agreed. Each side was afraid that there might be a glut of sugar, so that neither side really wanted the islands colonized, yet neither wanted them occupied by the other. At Aix-la-Chapelle they agreed to evacuate St Lucia and St Vincent, but it was not so easy to put the process into operation. The French were quite happy as they were. The islands were largely French; they could very easily be occupied when occasion required. It was the British, not they, who kept asking when the evacuation was going to begin. In the end, the choice and chance of battle closed the argument.

  Europe was to know little peace as long as Frederick II sat on the throne of Prussia, and the war of the Austrian succession was soon followed by the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). This was a very different business. During the eight years that had passed since the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the rise of Prussian power had been so swift and formidable that a coalition to limit it was formed by France, Russia, Sweden, Saxony and Austria. Britain was Prussia’s chief ally. Spain eventually came in on the side of France. It was one of the most successful wars ever fought by either Prussia or Britain, and at the end of it both had acquired a great deal of plunder. Prussia won four major battles and in spite of the opposition kept her frontiers intact. Britain played a very minor role in the European campaigns, but laid the foundation of her empire. She captured Canada, broke the French influence in India, asserting her own there, and established her dominance in the Caribbean.

  As in the case of the War of Jenkins’ Ear, a local war had broken out in the New World a year before Frederick’s invasion of Saxony started the European conflict. The French had been acting aggressively toward the British possessions in North America, and a British squadron was sent in retaliation to intercept a convoy of French ships that was carrying troops and stores to Quebec. The commission
was successfully executed; two French line-of-battle ships, fitted out as transports, were captured, along with a large number of unprotected merchant ships, so that before the Prussian invasion the English prisons were crowded with French sailors.

  For the French it was a disastrous war. The French economy was in a crippled state, and the British government, under the vigorous leadership of the elder Pitt, concentrated on the distant areas where France was weakest. Let Frederick carry on his continental campaigns; Britain would help him with money and mercenaries. She had more to gain overseas.

  The Squadron, cooperating with Clive in the conquest of Bengal, was strengthened. Within a short time the British navy was in complete command of the Bay of Bengal and the coast of Malabar. In North America, the lessons of the war of the Austrian succession were remembered. Louisburg was recaptured and served as a base for the capture of Quebec. Further south, though an attack on Martinique was beaten off, Dominica and Guadeloupe were captured. So complete indeed was the destruction of the French marine that Britain was able to capture the island of Belle-Ile off the French coast, which she used as a base for blockading operations and found highly profitable in the eventual bargaining at the peace conference.

  This collapse of the French navy and mercantile marine had one curious result: it drove the mercantile marine to seek a livelihood on the high seas with its privateers, thus reviving the old traditions of the filibusters of Tortuga. They were exceedingly successful. It has been estimated that a tenth of Britain’s merchant fleet was captured, but this loss was more than compensated by the ruin of France’s commercial rivalry. Britain’s commercial predominance dates from that war.

  In 1761 Spain was rash enough to enter the war, in recognition of what it called ‘a family compact’ with France. A British assault was immediately launched against Havana. The Morro Castle was one of the strongest citadels in the New World. It put up a sturdy resistance. Yellow fever and dysentery laid low three-quarters of the expeditionary force, ten thousand strong, that had been landed, but the castle eventually fell. Cuba was returned to Spain at the subsequent peace treaty, but its brief occupancy by the British was of great importance to it. During those twelve months, the island was granted a number of trading concessions, some of which it managed to retain when Spain resumed her ownership, but even more important was the discovery by the English of the delights of Havana tobacco. From that time on, British appreciation of a good cigar was a most valuable factor in the island’s annual budget. In return for her honouring of the ‘family compact’, Spain received at the peace conference the city of New Orleans. As Britain acquired Florida – which, though it then geographically reached the Mississippi, consisted only of the port of Fort Augustine – France was left without a single possession on the North American continent.

  In the same campaign in which Havana fell, Martinique was at last captured; St Lucia, St Vincent and Grenada had already fallen into British hands, and St Domingue was France’s only remaining possession in the New World.

  From 1739, war was intermittent in the Caribbean, but war there in the eighteenth century was very different from the total war of the twentieth century. Each island consisted of a large agricultural area and a town or two towns protected by artillery and forts. An island could not be captured till the forts had fallen, but a raid on an island could do a great deal of damage. In 1706 the French sacked Nevis and St Kitts. St Kitts recovered quickly because of the especial fertility of its soil, but Nevis, from which over three thousand slaves were taken, was a backward island for many years; so was Montserrat, which was attacked in 1712. An important semi-absentee Jamaican landowner was to write to a friend in 1745: ‘I think as you do that the conquest of the island is out of the question, but if you and I are ruined it is the same thing to us.’ To damage an enemy’s island in wartime could be as useful as to capture it, and up to the Seven Years’ War the nations had fought not to capture islands but to destroy property.

  The defence of an island depended on its militia; regular troops were usually only resident in wartime. The militia was ordinarily small and contained a disproportionate amount of officers. The recruitment of Negroes was avoided, except in extremities. Planters, with justice, distrusted the loyalty of their slaves, who would often take advantage of a battle to escape into the hills, while invaders were reluctant to encourage slaves to revolt against their masters, even though their masters might be enemies. Their own turn might come later. In 1740, the governor of St Domingue, the Marquis de Larange, debated this problem when he was planning with the Spaniards the invasion of Jamaica. He had learned that the British intended to arm their slaves; he did not think that they would make very formidable soldiers, and he believed that he could effectively impair their efficiency by proclaiming that any slave found in arms should suffer the penalty of death, while those who surrendered themselves and their arms should receive their liberty. He did not feel, however, that ‘the laws of war and religion’ would permit him to follow the advice of a predecessor who had been prepared to offer liberty to any slave who arrived bearing the head of his master, and he was disturbed when he learned that the Spaniards in Cuba had imported a number of muskets with which to arm the Jamaican Maroons. He did not consider that a ‘very Catholic way of destroying the English’. Moreover, if the plan succeeded, ‘surely an island occupied by more than a hundred thousand Negroes would be a very disagreeable neighbour; it would provide for our own slaves a safe asylum from which we should never get them back.’

  Jamaica was indeed to find itself in precisely the same position in regard to Haiti sixty-five years later. Though France might be at war with Britain, the two countries still had common interests. Larange, when he heard that the Negroes in Jamaica had rebelled, hoped that they would be subdued.

  The judicious employment of slaves was a major problem in the West Indian wars, and each island adopted different measures. It was generally agreed that they could be used as unarmed pioneers and fatiguemen. Mulattoes and freed Negroes were in a different position. They had a stake in the colony and their loyalty could be relied upon. They were, however, reluctant to enlist, because they were afraid that if they were taken prisoner they would be sold as slaves.

  Home governments were not anxious to maintain permanent garrisons in the West Indies. They were expensive and the climate was bad. Indeed, when wars broke out, commanders were instructed to capture islands quickly, before their troops were incapacitated by fever and rum. Home governments considered that the islands should defend themselves with their own militia, and that when regular troops were stationed there the colonists should make up the difference between the rates of living at home and abroad. This was a logical demand since the cost of living was very high, the colonists concentrating on the profitable sugar crop and having to import provisions. The electoral assemblies were, however, loath to accept this responsibility. West Indian stations were not popular with the military.

  The navy was in a different position. In peacetime as well as war it was as necessary for the French and British as it was for the Spaniards to protect their own shipping and interrupt illegal dealings with their colonies. The Dutch were in a different position. Curaçao and St Eustatius had no agricultural possibilities; they were simply entrepôts, bases for trade, mainly of a devious nature, retaining their neutrality whenever the European situation permitted them. The Danes were in a similar position. They did not acquire St Croix till the middle of the century, when they developed its potentialities as a sugar island. St Thomas was mountainous and arid, but it lay in the direct line of the trade winds, a convenient landfall for westbound ships. As a neutral port it was of great use to both the Greater and Lesser Antilles. The Danes and the Dutch tried to stand apart from the main drama of the Caribbean as it was waged by the Spanish, the British and the French.

  For the belligerent nations, the problem of survival was both simplified and complicated by the fact that, owing to the prevalence of the trade wind and of the Gulf Stream,
there were only three exits from the Caribbean; the Florida Channel and the Windward and Mona passages.

  British ships to and from Jamaica had the most difficult passage. Before they reached the West Indies they would strike their latitude and then sail downwind; this course carried them along the south coasts of Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo, where Spanish guar da costas might intercept them. They had two alternatives for return, and both were difficult. The Windward Passage between Cuba and St Domingue was the nearest, but it was not easy to round the eastern tip of Jamaica against the wind. The journey could take a week. The passage was narrow, and to avoid being driven into the Bight of Léogane, between the two prongs of St Domingue, they had to keep close to the Cuban coast, where the land winds were helpful. But they were perilously near Santiago, that smugglers’ haven. If, on the other hand, they chose the Gulf Channel, they had to follow the coast of Cuba, keeping close to it at the western extremity by Cape Antonio to avoid a contrary current that very often ran from the Gulf of Mexico into the Caribbean. There were often calms off Havana, and a ship hovering there was an easy prey.

  The ships of the Lesser Antilles were in an easier position. Their only danger on the way out was a cruising privateer, and on the journey home, through the wide passage, the ships’ only danger was from a privateer from Puerto Rico. The American ships had the most difficult voyages because they had to reach Jamaica by the Windward Passage. They were exposed both ways to the maximum of danger. The French had the easiest journeys. They could sail straight across the Atlantic to Martinique; they were never at war with Spain, and their return journey through the Mona Passage was unlikely to be hindered. In peacetime the ships for St Domingue had a direct entrance and exit route to Cap Français in the north ; though in wartime Cap Français was blockaded by the ships of the Jamaica station.