The First Salute

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Lord George Germain spoke as Rodney’s principal defender, saying that Burke showed himself a “perfect stranger” to the conduct of war, as there was scarcely an island captured or a territory seized that had not suffered the same circumstances as the “unavoidable and common consequences of capture” which, however “humanity might recoil at them,” could not be prevented; that the Dutch had made the island a very depot for the use of Britain’s enemies; “that without regular supplies from this island the French could not have carried on the war,” no more so the Americans; that when Rodney, in “great distress for rigging and stores” after the storms of October, had applied to purchase rope at St. Eustatius, he had been refused on the pretext that they had very little left when in fact they had several thousand tons in their store—enough to supply all the shipping that could have needed any for years to come; that as regards the confiscations, private property had been sealed and marked to show ownership to wait for disposition by the courts; that, in short, he “found nothing to blame in the conduct of the commanders.”

  The debate swelled into the open in heated prosecution and defense. Charles James Fox, who had a lashing tongue for invective, began. With an elaborate bow to the persons and character of Sir George Rodney and General Vaughan, for whom he was sure the honorable gentleman who moved the inquiry (Mr. Burke) professed and “felt as sincere a regard as any men upon earth could possibly do,” he stated that their personal responsibility was not at issue, “but to pronounce on the great national question”—the reputation of Britain: “Would the nations of Europe wait for the slow decision of the Admiralty courts before they pronounced judgment on the case and proceeded to retaliate …? without taking the trouble to inquire … whether it was the lust of plunder or the profligate cruelty of an insatiate military or the barbarous system of a headlong government, they would instantly and justly pronounce it to be a violation of all the laws of war on the part of Great Britain and would hasten either to punish us for the horrid renewal of these savage practises which once buried England in ashes or remain with their arms across suffering us to be extirpated by those foes which our madness or impolicy had joined against us.” For this reason, Parliament must come to an immediate resolution “declaring their surprise and horror at such proceedings and condemning them in the most pointed and emphatical terms.…” He was glad to hear that the noble lord [Germain] saw nothing to condemn in the matter, for “now it was known and would be proclaimed all over Europe that ministers and not our commanders were the plunderers of St. Eustatius and the violators of the rights of war” and the army and navy [were] thus “rescued from the ignominious aspersion and the character of Sir George Rodney,” his colleague as fellow-member for Westminster, “was rescued from the obloquy which even great and good men must have otherwise thrown upon them.”

  With heavy sarcasm, Fox declared he was “happy in the generous acquittal which the noble lord had given of the navy and army. The military of this country and particularly the navy was dear to him and their fame ought to be held sacred to every British heart. It was from that virtuous body of men that the empire had derived all its respect and strength and from which it must continue to receive its security and its fame. If they by some hasty act of rapaciousness or of avarice should blacken the purity of their character and stain their former deeds, Great Britain would sink to a state from which neither their future repentance nor their gallantry could be able to raise her, a state of ignominy more dreadful than disaster since enterprise might retrieve disadvantage but not restore reputation so destroyed.” Fox’s verbal vision of reprisals and contempt of nations flowed on with its wonderful command of words matched only by the exaggeration of its sentiments, which, one would think, would have been more likely to repel his listeners than win them. Following Fox, the Lord Advocate of Scotland entered into what the rapporteur described as a serious “defence of the proceedings at St. Eustatius,” which in his mind were “justifiable on the ground of necessity, policy, and by the laws of nations,” and that it was “good policy in the commanders to destroy that magazine from which the enemy were supplied with arms against us, it was in fact their duty … that as to the laws of war, it was a principle on which Grotius, Puffendorf, Vattel and every writer agreed, that it was just to destroy not only the weapons but also the materiels of war.”

  Six more speakers carried the debate to late hours, until it was concluded by Burke with more of his magniloquent rhapsodizing. Upon the vote being taken, all the words might as well have gone unspoken. Burke’s motion for an inquiry was defeated by a safe government majority of 160–86. When the party system regulates, argument addresses the deaf.

  Rodney’s savage feelings toward the English merchants’ greed and treason were genuine and profound, as would be those of any man who sees fellow-combatants facing bullets supplied by their own countrymen. He intended to remain on St. Eustatius, he wrote to the Governor of Barbados on February 27, three weeks after taking the island, until the iniquitous “English merchants, base enough from lucrative motives to support the enemies of Great Britain, will for their treason justly merit their own ruin … till all the stores are embarked and till the Lower Town, that nest of vipers, be destroyed, and lumber sent for the use of your unfortunate island and St. Lucie.” He was not going to leave until this “iniquitous island may be no longer the mart for clandestine commerce.”

  While it is easy to say, and has frequently been said, that Rodney, mesmerized by the riches lying at hand on St. Eustatius, stayed too long on the island in his desire to gather them up, outrage and desire to punish the traitors were clearly as strong additional motives. “The Chief Judge of St. Kitts, Mr. Georges, is returning to expose the villainy of the English merchants who resided in this island of thieves,” he noted. “They deserve scourging and they shall be scourged,” Rodney wrote with passion to Lord George Germain, and that intention remained his abiding aim. The judge from St. Kitts “takes all their books and documents,” which Rodney had ordered to be seized and in which “all their base designs are brought to light. Fifty-seven English merchants of St. Kitts and Antigua were equally guilty.” To a commissioner of the government he writes that he had had “daily experience” of the “iniquitous practises and the treasonable correspondence” of the British merchants in this and neighboring islands by intercepting hundreds of letters, and he is “fully convinced that had it not been for their assistance the American war must have been long since finished.…” They made themselves Dutch burghers who had once been Englishmen—“Providence has ordained this just punishment.” Here the Admiral was succumbing to the luxurious temptation of equating Providence with himself.

  The plunder of the island, packed in 34 merchant vessels, was sent home at the end of March and the Admiralty informed that a “very rich convoy” was sailing for England escorted by four ships of war: the Vengeance, of 74 guns, the former Dutch Mars, of 62 guns (renamed the Prince Edward), and two others, of 38 and 32 guns, all under the command of Commodore, later Admiral, Hotham, who “has my orders to be extremely attentive to their preservation.” Meanwhile “the enemy’s four line-of-battleships and four large frigates which still continue at Guadeloupe and Martinique are well watched. Every trick that can be devised has been attempted to induce General Vaughan and myself to leave this island in hopes of retaking it by a coup de main and thereby recover the stores.…” The treasonable merchants “will make no scruple to propagate every falsehood their debased minds can invent.…”

  Despite all precautions, the precious convoy was lost. Having received correct intelligence of its departure and what it contained, the French had sent one of their leading admirals, La Motte Piquet, with a squadron of six major ships of the line, including one of 110 guns and two of 74, plus additional frigates to watch for it. They sighted it May 2, off the Scilly Isles, and gave hot pursuit. Admiral Hotham signaled to his convoy to disperse and save themselves, but the faster French warships gained on the merchantmen and captured twenty-two of
them, the larger part. Outnumbered by and inferior to the French, Hotham could not or did not defend his charge to the bitter end; except for a few ships that escaped to Ireland, the rich plunder, valued at £5 million, went to the French. As one of the captains who had served under Rodney in the mismanaged fight of April 17 that so enraged the Admiral, and who, with no love lost between them, had later asked without success to be transferred to another command, Hotham felt no devotion to his commanding officer. While Rodney would certainly have been aware of ill feeling, he entrusted Hotham with the convoy because his ship was the Vengeance, strongest and largest of Rodney’s squadron.

  At the same time, the Admiralty, having in its turn learned that La Motte Piquet had left the French naval base at Brest and was at sea, had sent out ships to intercept him or, alternatively, to detach frigates to meet Hotham and instruct him to return via the North of Scotland and Ireland, the old escape route of the Spanish Armada. But the searchers, after cruising for two weeks, failed to find the Eustatius convoy and send it out of danger. They put back to port in England without bringing home the expected treasure, to the sharp disappointment of ministers who would have welcomed a great prize to show off as a gain for the administration. Instead, Lord Sandwich in a letter to the King had to confess a sorry naval failure in what he calls “this unpleasant affair.”

  For Rodney, who after dividing with General Vaughan would have stood to gain a one-sixteenth share, or an estimated £150,000 pounds, the disappointment was considerably deeper. Lost too was the more important prize of St. Eustatius itself. It was recaptured by the French in November, 1781, a month after the British loss of America at Yorktown. Rodney and General Vaughan had determined to make its defenses impregnable “to secure this important conquest to Great Britain that she might avail herself of all its riches as atonement for the injuries it has done her.” With some savagery, he writes that he and Vaughan will leave the island “instead of the greatest emporium upon earth, a mere desert and only known by report, yet, this rock … has done England more harm than all the arms of her most potent enemies and alone supported the infamous American rebellion.…” Regarding his own expectations, he writes, “If my great convoy of prizes arrive safely in England, I shall be happy as, exclusive of satisfying all debts, something will be left for my dear children.” Concern and affection for his two daughters and his sons repeats itself in his letters as one of the more sympathetic aspects of his character. “My chief anxiety,” he wrote to his wife after his ill-fated convoy had sailed for home, “is that neither yourself nor my dear girls shall ever again be necessitous nor be under obligations to others.” The humiliations of penury, however much of his own making, sound their painful note in this letter.

  Believing he had left the captured island a Gibraltar of the West Indies, with land forces on guard and repaired fortifications, Rodney sailed to Antigua and then to Barbados. When St. Eustatius was retaken by the French six months later, they found the place in ashes, empty of population. Though rebuilt and repopulated during the French occupation, it never regained its former extravagant prosperity.

  THE uneven career that brought Rodney to St. Eustatius and determined what he did there began with his entry into the Royal Navy at the age of twelve. He was the son of an old county family settled since the 13th century in Somersetshire, where they held the estate of Stoke Rodney. In the twenty generations leading down to the Admiral, his ancestors served in various military and diplomatic positions of no outstanding distinction, but fulfilling the duty expected of the landed gentry of England and establishing a record, as was said of them, of a family of greater antiquity than fame. In the process, they acquired a ducal connection in the person of James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, who came into possession of Stoke Rodney through the marriage into the Brydges family of a daughter and heiress of an early Rodney. Chandos was a familiar at the court of George I and together with the King stood as joint godfathers to the Rodneys’ son, who was endowed with both their names, George and Brydges. Chandos’ grandson, who sueceeded as third Duke in the period of Rodney’s maturity, remained a loyal adherent of the Hanovers and a supporter of George III and of his American policy until about 1780, when the policy’s futility became obvious enough to move the Duke gradually into opposition. He was evidently not a man impervious to change but rather one able to allow realities to penetrate. Though not belonging to one of the great Whig ruling families, Rodney could qualify as a young gentleman of “excellent connections.” Connections were the key to “place” in 18th century society, meaning a remunerative post in the official world, and “place” was of the essence, especially for a younger son, which Rodney remained until his older brother died, when the younger was about twenty.

  Personal characteristics were both an aid and a drawback to his career. Slight and elegant in figure, he was more than handsome; if the portrait by Joshua Reynolds, painted at forty-two when Rodney was already a widower and a father of three, does not lie, he was frankly beautiful. With a strong sensual mouth, a broad brow and impressively large dark eyes, the face was youthful and seductive and would surely have promoted his amorous pursuits, of which the busy diarist, Sir William Wraxall, makes a point. “Two passions both highly injurious to his repose, women and play [gambling] carried him into many excesses,” Wraxall writes of his friend. According to Horace Walpole, the emperor of gossip, Rodney won the favor of the Princess Amelia, daughter of George III, and left of their liaison a “token.” The token grew to be a pretty young lady of small stature known in her circle as “little Miss Ashe.” Indefatigable investigators who edit 18th century letters and journals maintain, based on calculation of relative ages, that Rodney was too young to have been responsible for this royal fragment. Though Rodney was loquacious, Wraxall says, and particularly given to “making himself frequently the theme of his own discourse” and talking “much and freely upon every subject concealing nothing regardless of who was present,” he himself left no mention, as far as is recorded, of the Princess Amelia or the “token.” About his gambling, however, there is no question. He was never long absent from the gaming table at White’s, where the addiction ruled, and if his debts were not as spectacular as those of the rising political star Charles James Fox, it was only because Rodney did not have a rich father to pay them. The debts remained, and as many were owed to men in office or with political influence, they were to become stumbling blocks in his professional career, besides keeping him, combined with a spendthrift character, under tight pecuniary pressure all his life. “His person was more elegant,” Wraxall adds, “than seemed to become his rough profession. There was even something that approached to delicacy and effeminacy in his figure: but no man manifested a more temperate and steady courage in action.” Equally “fearless” in talk, “he dealt his censures as well as his praises … which necessarily procured him many enemies particularly in his own profession.”

  The year of the Reynolds portrait was 1761, when Reynolds had burst, like Byron later, into glittering overnight celebrity. Everyone of fame and fashion, equipped with 25 guineas in hand, formed a line to his door. All of London, social, political and important, met on Reynolds’ canvases, from Admiral Anson, circumnavigator of the globe who had captured the richest Spanish treasure galleon and was afterward First Lord of the Admiralty, to sleepy Lord North, soon to endure his long confinement as reluctant Prime Minister, to exquisite duchesses in the gauzy gowns that exercised the brushes of Reynolds’ drapery painters, to the uncouth figure and sparkling talker Dr. Samuel Johnson. The full-length portrait of a hero of naval and political battle, Admiral Keppel, attracted the most attention. Standing upright in a statuary pose before a background of storm-filled sky and heaving waves, he dominated the group, but of the male portraits there was no close-up to equal the stunning head of George Rodney.

  The possessor of these handsome features has been described by one historian as “the most enterprising and irascible, able and bombastic, intolerant, intolerable and successfu
l naval officer between Drake and Nelson.” This is an exciting introduction but it is, one is obliged to say, a case of historian’s hype. Irascible yes, but so was every naval commander of the time, owing no doubt to the continual test of trying to navigate as a fighting instrument a cumbersome vehicle whose motor power was the inconstant wind not subject to human control, and whose action depended on instant and expert response by a rough crew to orders governing the delicate adjustment of sails through an infinity of ropes hardly identifiable one from another. That a commander who had to bring home success in battle under these conditions should be irascible is not to be wondered at. Or it may be that there is something about commanding a ship, sail or steam—a mysterious fungus on shipboard, as it were—that brings out ill-temper. Of a great wartime admiral of another age it has been said, “He was vindictive, irascible, over-bearing, hated and feared.” Not a man of the 18th century, this was Ernest J. King, Commander-in-Chief of American naval forces in World War II. Irritability was an occupational disease. “Intolerant and intolerable” belong in the same category, made no lighter by the foul physical conditions of life on a sailing vessel, with its reek of rotten meat and putrefied cheese, damp clothes, bilge water, open vats of urine in which the men were instructed to relieve themselves, on the theory that it would be used to retard fire, plus the smell of five or six hundred unwashed bodies packed for sleep in their hammocks below deck or rolling in rumsoaked drunkenness or in fornication with wives and doxies who were carried on board.