Apocalypse 1692

by Ben Hughes

  Spragge and the Drake finally set sail on February 22, 1690.11 Accompanying the sixth rate, whose crew had been bolstered by the impressment of fifty men, were “400 volunteers in small craft,” twelve armed sloops, and the Seahorse, an armed merchantman of three hundred tons whose captain, John How, was noted for his “quarrelsome and abusive habits.”12 Having sailed for Port Royal from London, How had picked up a cargo of Madeira wine en route, but the presence of an outsized crew of ninety-two and the fact that the Seahorse was armed with thirty-six guns indicated that he had always intended to combine trade with privateering.13 Indeed, such was How’s confidence in the power of his ship that while the Seahorse and Drake were loading stores and ammunition at Port Royal, he had the audacity to quarrel with Spragge as to who should lead the expedition, “a dispute” which the Council minutes record was “amicably settled” prior to departure.14

  By early May, having learned that Laurens was at the wreck at Serranillas, Spragge set sail in pursuit. Although the French fleet had departed by the time they arrived, Spragge, How, and the captains of the sloops decided to remain. Having located the exact position of the Spanish galleon’s coral-encrusted hull, resting among several large rocks in three and a half fathoms, by the end of July they had succeeded in raising twenty-three lumps of silver, several gold beads, and some broken silver plate. Prevented from salvaging the ship’s guns and ballast by the violence of the weather, the fleet was forced to abandon the venture and return to Port Royal at the beginning of June 1690.15 On their arrival, the port captain, Reginald Wilson, duly logged the treasure they had salvaged and deducted the king’s tenth, after which Spragge, How, and the others divided the remainder. With the port flush with silver and gold, no one thought to quiz Spragge too closely as to what had become of his original mission.

  While Spragge had been wrecking, several other Jamaican ships, both privateers and a hired-government vessel, had been sent out on patrol. On March 13, two of the Jamaican privateers encountered the Conssaint, a French merchantman out of La Rochelle, near Port-de-Paix, another French privateers’ lair on the north coast of Hispaniola. Carrying a cargo of wine, brandy, and flour, the Conssaint had a crew of twenty-eight men and was armed with twelve guns. “After 4 oures engagement . . . [the English] took her and brought her here where she was condemned,” Reginald Wilson informed his patron William Blathwayt. “Their majesties 10th is about 260 l. . . . The French ship is flushing butt a good sailor and now fitted out [with the guns that they took her with] and six guns more put into her . . . [She is] now called the Loyal Jamaica,” Wilson continued. “She departed out of Port Royal harbour yesterday with a man of warr sloope bound to windward.”16 Another Jamaican sloop, the Calapatch, which Wilson had fitted out for privateering in mid-May 1690 at a cost of £105, 9s had been less successful. Accompanying a flotilla of sloops sailing to the Caymans to gather turtles for the markets of Port Royal, one evening in early June the Calapatch was intercepted by a barcolongo commanded by Laurens himself. While the turtlers fled east for Jamaica, the crew of the Calapatch exchanged shots with the French. It was a brave stand, but with Laurens’s men outnumbering them two to one, the Jamaicans were doomed. “The firing was heard continuing till eleven at night,” a report later informed the Lords of Trade, “and as this was a month [ago] . . . and nothing has been heard of this sloop [since], we conclude that Laurens has taken her.”17

  Thus did matters stand at the start of Inchiquin’s governorship. With the loss of the Calapatch and with the Drake “hardly able to float” since returning from the wreck at Serranillas, the earl found himself with just one functioning naval vessel rather than the three frigates Jamaica’s merchants deemed necessary for the island’s defense. The vessel in question was the much-maligned HMS Swan. “[She] is so bad a sailer,” Inchiquin wrote to the Lords of Trade, “that she is little better than nothing. If she should fall ten leagues to leeward I never hope to see her again. . . . I must beg for a couple of prime sailers if they be only a fifth and sixth rate, or the North side of the island will inevitably be destroyed.”18

  The other defensive force at the governor’s disposal was the militia. In the early 1690s legislation requiring all residents to serve meant that some five to six thousand foot and two thousand horse could be mustered at any given time.19 Officers invariably came from the island’s landowning class, with the higher ranks awarded almost exclusively to the plantocracy. Thomas Sutton was colonel of the regiment raised in Clarendon; Council member Nicholas Lawes was colonel at Liguanea; and Peter Beckford was colonel of the one thousand strong Port Royal regiment—the largest on the island. Opinions on the quality of the service varied. Numbering some three hundred horse and one thousand foot, the Clarendon militia had a reputation for being “sharp and stout soldiers,” according to John Taylor, who also noted that they were known for practicing their marksmanship by shooting daily at targets.20 Inchiquin, on the other hand, thought the militia “despicable,” complaining in a letter to the Lords of Trade that as they were “much dispersed and divided . . . little . . . [wa]s to be expected from them.”21

  In mid-October Inchiquin received more bad news. The crew of the Loyal Jamaica, the French merchantman taken off Port-de-Paix in May and since converted into a privateer, had mutinied. “Throwing off all manner of obedience,” they “did factiously . . . and Rebelliously depose their . . . Capt [John Harrison] from his lawful command and turned him on shoare” before “carry[ing] away the said Shipp with intent . . . to turne Pyrates,” the Council notes surmised.22 Inchiquin was determined to exact retribution. “For the prevention of such evill practices for the future,” the governor’s proclamation of October 15 announced, “[the Council] have commanded out the ship Lyon under the command of Coll Thomas Hewetson for this their Majesties special service.”23 Hewetson, it may be remembered, was the adventurer who had aided Coddrington’s troops at St. Martin in February and had since been employed by the asiento agent, Santiago Castillo, to transship slaves from the Dutch colony of Curaçao to the Spanish Main. The mutineers of the Loyal Jamaica proved too wily for Hewetson. Having evaded their pursuer, they crossed the Atlantic, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and sailed northward along the coast of East Africa into the Red Sea, a rich hunting ground for those of their profession. The next mention of the Loyal Jamaica comes in 1692 when the ship appeared off the coast of Virginia. Referred to locally as the “Red-Sea men,” the former pirates were welcomed at Charles Town (now Charleston) where they used their ill-gotten gains to establish themselves as planters and escape prosecution for their crimes.24

  THE FULL MOON that rose over Jamaica on the night of October 18, 1690, ushered in one of two annual rainy seasons. Continuing day and night “with great violence,” a downpour which lasted a fortnight drenched the island.25 In the Cockpit Country, whose tangled landscape provided Cudjoe and his maroons with refuge from the bounty hunters sent to search for them, torrential streams gouged the earth from the rock, carried it down the mountain sides, and deposited it in the plains below where it would sustain the following year’s sugar crop. In Port Royal the rains brought sickness. Interned in one of the town’s two jails, Gabriell Pitt, a mariner, composed his will. “Being sick and weak in body” but “of sound and perfect mind and memory,” Pitt left half of his meager estate to his “loving wife” Anne, charged his friend Walter Earle with taking care of his burial, and left the rest to his “loving children.”26 On board HMS Swan, which had been at anchor in the roads ever since returning from Cartagena with a load of Spanish pieces of eight in mid-September, illness had also taken hold. Jonathon Rodgers was discharged from duty on October 26, able seaman Jonathon Anderson succumbed the next day, and on October 28, the frigate’s captain, Thomas Johnson, died.27 With Johnson’s death, the Swan lost its greatest asset. A “diligent man of good carriage” and previous Caribbean experience, the captain had been popular with the island’s Council.28 His replacement was anything but. The younger son of Baron Bergavenny, the Honourable E
dward Neville was a “lazy” wastrel, prone to “idleing on shore.”29

  In November the rains ceased and the island’s social season began. A period of feasting and heavy drinking continued until December. Balls, parties, and horse races were held in Spanish Town, Port Royal, Old Harbour, and Withywood.30 On December 4, the Betty slaver arrived at Port Royal. Its captain, James Tucker, brought one hundred and fifty slaves from Old Calabar on the West African Coast for auction.31 Two weeks later, anxious to avoid a repeat of the recent upheavals at Sutton’s, Inchiquin and the Council passed an act with “orders for measures to keep the negroes quiet at Christmas.”32 January brought yet more rain, though without the violence of that of October. Several even complained that the rains were insufficient and the indigo harvest suffered as a result.33 January also ushered in the new harvesting cycle in the plantations, a period which would last until June. On the night of January 16, Phineas Bowjer of HMS Swan’s carpenter’s crew deserted.34 Another of the Royal African Company’s slavers, the Benjamin, arrived four nights later with “2 tons of elephants’ teeth” and one hundred and twenty-nine more slaves for the plantations.35 Meanwhile, Governor Inchiquin had also grown sick. Fearing the worst, the fifty-one-year-old composed his will. At the end of the month, as the governor was showing signs of recovery, the roads at Port Royal reverberated to the thunder of multiple salutes as the merchantmen and shore batteries commemorated the forty-first anniversary of the “horrid murder of our blessed sovereign Charles the First.”36

  February 1691 saw royal dispatches arrive from England on board the King William yacht.37 Among the orders was a warrant for the suspension of Sir Francis Watson from Council duties. On February 9, the Council noted that Inchiquin “thought fit” to appoint his son, James O’Bryan, in Watson’s stead. The governor also issued a proclamation that day. “If any person will advance money towards the maintenance of two sloops to cruise round the island for the protection of the inhabitants,” it began, “his excellency and the Council do promise that they will doe their utmost endeavours to see them reimbursed by the Assembly.” It was decreed that any seaman volunteering for service would “be paid at the rate of two pounds five shillings pr. Month,” while those impressed would receive “one pound fifteen shillings.” All would be compensated with a share of any plunder taken “above the Gunn deck” from enemy vessels. Furthermore, Inchiquin promised that any man wounded in action would be “cured at the Country’s charge and if a limb be lost to be further considered proportional to the damage.”38

  February saw the arrival of an eleven-strong merchant fleet from London. Ranging in size from the 30-ton Madeira Merchant to the 190-ton Joseph, a broad stern captained by an old hand in the Jamaica trade named John Brooks who was to play a leading role in the war against the French, the fleet brought some much-needed “provisions and stores for ye Swan friggat,” hundreds of barrels of beer, Rhine wine, Madeira, cherry brandy, spirits, cider, mum, and port, and over seven hundred tons of manufactured goods to sell on the island and in the wider Caribbean beyond.39 The long-awaited naval reinforcement was also accompanying the fleet. HMS Guernsey was a 255 ton sixth rate of one hundred and ten men, built in 1654 at the cost of £1,592. Following a major refit in 1660, the Guernsey had seen action at the battles of Lowestoft and Vågen in the Second Anglo-Dutch War and the Battle of Texel in the third, before stints in Iceland, Tangiers, and the West Indies in the late 1670s and early 1680s. The Guernsey was heavily armed. As well as a main battery of sixteen demi-culverins on the lower gun deck, the frigate carried twelve sakers and four saker cuts on the upper gun deck, and had two 3-pounders hoisted up into the tops.40 The second of the two naval vessels to arrive in Jamaica with the London fleet, the Quaker ketch, was significantly smaller. A sixth rate purchased by the navy in 1671, the Quaker had a crew of forty men, was armed with ten guns, measured fifty-four feet along its gun deck and had a displacement of just eighty tons. It had served in the Leeward Islands in the late 1670s and off the coast of Virginia in the mid-1680s.41

  Both the Guernsey and Quaker had been part of the fleet commanded by Admiral Wright which had escorted Inchiquin and the Swan to Barbados. Both had taken part in the campaigns against St. Martin, St. Bartholomew, and St. Kitts, and would have remained under Wright’s command had the admiral not received orders from London to dispatch two vessels for the defense of Jamaica.42 Unwilling to part with any of his prime sailing vessels, Wright had chosen the worst of his fleet. After inspecting the ships at Port Royal, Inchiquin expressed his disgust in a letter to William Blathwayt, the Secretary of Trade: “Its no small mortification to me after ye hopes I had . . . that such tubs should be sent,” he fumed.43 Despite Inchiquin’s reservations, the ships did have some redeeming features: the Quaker’s shallow draft would allow it to pursue enemy vessels close in shore; while the Guernsey’s captain, Edward Oakley, was a seasoned professional of thirty years’ service.44 Furthermore, in Lieutenant Edward Moses, the frigate was blessed with a first-rate junior officer who was brave to the point of recklessness and would go on to have a distinguished career.

  With the arrival of HMS Guernsey, Inchiquin decided to take the fight to the French. On March 10, 1691, having spent most of the morning reorganizing the island militia, he announced his plan to the Council. As all three of the naval vessels at his disposal were too slow to catch the enemy at sea, Inchiquin proposed a combined operation against “[French] shipping upon ye coast of Espanola from ye Isle of Ash [Isle de Vache, or Cow Island] as farr as Port de Paix as well as [against] their settlements on shour.”45 Although Inchiquin did not make the correlation clear in his correspondence, the move was no doubt prompted by recent French reverses in the region. Stung into action by corsair attacks the previous year, the Spanish had landed two thousand six hundred men at Cape François in January 1691. After rendezvousing with seven hundred more who had marched overland from Spanish Hispaniola, the combined force had descended on the plain of Limonade, where the French had gathered to confront them. Outnumbered three to one, at first the French held their own, but when a hidden detachment of three hundred Spanish cavalry suddenly burst upon their flank, they were routed. The French commanders, along with four to five hundred of their men, were killed on the field, leaving the Spanish free to pillage the settlements of Cape François before retiring to their bases to the north.46

  Besides allocating the Swan, Guernsey, and Quaker to the expedition, Inchiquin hired five privateer sloops and the Joseph, the 28-gun merchantman which had recently arrived from London under Captain John Brooks.47 The crews of the chartered vessels were to be compensated for their efforts with a share of the prize money taken. One of the sloops appears to have been the Marlin, whose captain, George Carew, was given a further £240 “for expenses of wages and vicutalling.”48 Besides their standard complements—one hundred and fifteen men for the Swan, one hundred and ten for the Guernsey, forty for the Quaker, thirty-eight for the Joseph, and an average of just under twenty for each of the sloops, amounting to a total of four hundred “good men”—the ships were to carry five hundred militia for shore operations. Command was given to Colonel James O’Bryan, the governor’s son, who was granted the brevet rank of major general for the duration.49 Having fought alongside his son in Ireland during the Glorious Revolution, Inchiquin was confident James’s “prudence and courage” would carry the mission through.50

  The fleet spent the better part of March in preparation. Canoes were pressed to ferry water from the Rock to fill the ships’ butts, while the port captain, Reginald Wilson, supplied provisions from the government’s stores, a task costing £700, 17s. 9d.51 Captain Oakley of the Guernsey unloaded his ballast and guns and careened his ship alongside one of the wharfs at Port Royal. The frigate was then reloaded and the rigging repaired while new cables were spliced for the bower anchors and fresh sails were cut and hoisted. Finally, the provisions were loaded and the sails bent in preparation for departure.52 All the while, the ships were busy recruiting and pressing crew
to make up for the constant drain in manpower brought about by disease, accident, and desertion. On March 13, Emmanuel Castle, an ordinary seaman, ran from the Guernsey; the following day two more, Febulon Carter and Peter Gozden, followed suit, and two others fled on March 15.53 To compensate, Oakley had fifteen men pressed the following morning while a heavy rain fell across the roads and lightning flashed overhead.54 Captain Neville of the Swan was also busy. One hundred and fifty-one of the two hundred and fourteen names which had been entered in the frigate’s muster between August 1689 and March 4, 1691, had been struck out. Thirty-five had died on board, forty had deserted, and seventy-seven had been discharged, mostly due to sickness. Among the sixty-three recruited in England still present as of March 1691 were the Hodge brothers, Jonathon and Andrew, both of whom had been pressed on December 28, 1689, at the Nore. To make up the shortfall, as the Swan provisioned and watered at Port Royal between March 11 and 26, fifty new names were added to the muster.55 The expedition’s officers took advantage of the delay to sample the delights of Port Royal, none more so than Captain John Brooks of the Joseph. “[He did] not behave . . . too discretely toward the town,” Inchiquin noted. “[He] has been tried and fined for riot, but I hope that at his next coming his manner will be a little mended.”56