The First Salute

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Rodney’s captures raised him another rung in reputation, especially as the spirit shown at Finisterre helped to dispel the cloud of shame of the Toulon courts-martial and more especially as the English loot amounted to over £300,000, paraded, this time through London, for the customary delight of the citizens.

  As the begetter of this happy fortune for the government, Rodney was taken up by the Pelhams—Henry Pelham, the First Minister, and his brother the Duke of Newcastle, who were the two ruling patrons of “place.” By them he was made a protégé of the governing party, and supplied with that equipment felt to be a necessity as the path to personal advancement by every man of ambition—a seat in Parliament. He was presented by Admiral Anson, overall commander of the fleet at Finisterre, to King George II, who was much impressed by Rodney’s youth, remarking, as attendant courtiers hastened to take note, that he had “not before imagine[d] that he had so young a man a captain in his navy,” to which Lord Anson replied, “I wish your Majesty had one hundred more such captains, to the terror of your Majesty’s enemies.”

  “We wish so too, my lord,” replied the King with ready repartee.

  As disciples of Robert Walpole, the Pelhams wanted an end of the war, and after the rich haul at Finisterre, fighting was nominally brought to a close at the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. The peace treaty exchanged various territories, but was in reality only a temporary truce which resolved nothing in the struggle for colonial supremacy, because the powers were reluctant to negotiate carefully for fear of prolonging the war. The boundaries of Canada and Nova Scotia and the rights of trade and navigation vis-à-vis Spain were left unsettled, and belligerence continued in the West Indies and North America.

  The next year, in 1749, with the smile of royal favor Rodney was named Captain of the Rainbow, carrying with it command of the Newfoundland station and title as Governor. In 1753, he married a sister of the Earl of Northampton, and even before taking on this domestic status he assumed what he saw as his proper place by building a handsome mansion on the grounds of an old manor house in Hampshire and, with due appreciation of the best in the business, had it landscaped by Capability Brown, just as he had selected Reynolds for his portrait. At the same time, he acquired, with rather lordly outlay for a naval captain, a private house on Hill Street in London.

  On his return to England from Newfoundland, in 1752, he had to be carried ashore at Portsmouth and turn his ship over to his lieutenant owing to a severe case of gout, the first of the many attacks of illness that were to afflict and sometimes disable him for the remaining forty years of his life. At age thirty-three he was young to be gout’s victim, but the heavy drinking of the 18th century that was a cause of the disease was even heavier on shipboard, to suppress the sickening smells and distract the boredom of long empty days at sea. As gout destroyed the health of the Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham, England’s greatest statesman of the century, it was to wreck Rodney’s eventually, too, though not until he reached 74. On his homecoming, his ill health was useful, for though ordered to sit on the court-martial of Admiral Byng in 1756, he was excused on the ground of a “violent bilious colic,” and, by an even more fortunate stroke of luck, when the execution was scheduled to take place on his own ship, the Monarch, he was transferred to the Dublin shortly before, and did not have to give the order to “fire!” to a firing squad on his own deck. Luck did not stay with him long, for in February, 1757, his wife, Jane, who had borne him two children, died in the childbirth of the third, a baby girl who survived. Without a wife, Rodney was eager again for action and was soon to find it in the “wonderful year” of 1759 in the full tilt of the Seven Years’ War, when England overcame her enemies in every encounter.

  The Seven Years’ War, fought mainly between France and Britain in rivalry for sovereignty of the seas and for colonial dominion in America and to a lesser extent in India, was the central war of the century. In America it was known as the French and Indian War. With hindsight, later historians have seen it as the first real World War because of its subsidiary conflicts in Europe in the web of territorial and dynastic disputes and tangled alliances centering around the duel of Prussia and Austria for dominance. France on Prussia’s side was opposed to England allied with Austria, with Sweden, Spain and the United Provinces variously involved.

  The outcome of the war confirmed Britain’s rule of the seas, and her maritime supremacy was soon taken for granted. Horace Walpole, reporting the return of a convoy from India, could calmly assert that it sailed homeward through “the streets of our capital, the ocean.” On land, the major gain was the ceding of Canada by France and the acquisition of Florida in exchange for the return of Havana to Spain. In succinct summary, Admiral Mahan was to state the results in one sentence: The “kingdom of Great Britain had become the British empire.”

  Justifying Pitt’s confidence, British sea power during the Seven Years’ War secured an increase of trade reaching 500,000 tons, about one-third that of all Europe, carried by 8,000 merchant vessels filled with the products of new industry journeying to new markets. Convoy of delivery was sacred. Trade was power. It provided the income to maintain the fleet and 200,000 soldiers and mercenaries on British pay, including 50,000 in America. Britain’s priority was, in fact, trade and the income it provided. So much British trade traveled the sea-lanes that the inroads by French commerce raiders and privateers had no appreciable effect on the balance of the war. The West Indies, with their valuable produce, made a centerpiece of commerce directly re-represented by a number of West Indian planters who held twelve to fifteen seats in Parliament and exerted their influence through their wealth and connections rather than through numbers. The most prominent was Sir William Beckford, the largest landowner in Jamaica and twice Lord Mayor of London in the 1760s. How secondary were the colonies of North America was seen after the Revolution had become an armed struggle, when in 1778 Philadelphia was stripped of 5,000 troops for transfer to the West Indies to ward off French recapture, followed by a second convoy of four regiments to the Leewards and four more to Jamaica in 1779. When General Clinton in New York at this time was crying for reinforcements and England was scraping Ireland for recruits and mobilizing the inmates of prisons, a total of 22 battalions had been sent to the West Indies since the beginning of the American war.

  The most significant feat of the “wonderful year” of 1759 was General Wolfe’s defeat of the French at Quebec, an indirect victory of the British sea power that Pitt had believed in and prepared as the instrument that would enable England finally to prevail over France in their centuries-old struggle for supremacy. Wolfe’s 9,000 troops were transported to Canada through the British control of the sea, and before they scaled the cliffs to the plains of Abraham the way had been opened by preliminary victories at Ticonderoga and Crown Point. Even at the cost of the loss of a hero, in General Wolfe’s death in the battle on the hilltop, the victory brought a decisive result, for it was followed by the occupation of Montreal, which in turn assured the British conquest of Canada. The French were thereby eliminated from a territory that had allowed them to dispute possession of America. Facing attack on Montreal from below and from behind by General Amherst’s forces coming from Lake Ontario, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, French Governor of Canada, in September, 1759, surrendered the Province of Quebec, or New France, to the English. French presence as a Catholic power and French collusion with the Iroquois, who were hostile to the settlers of the New England colonies, were always seen by both British and Americans as factors that would hold the Colonies loyal for the sake of British protection against the threat from the north. By one of the tricks that Fate likes to use to show the vanity of human expectation, the British by their own victory at Quebec and its removal of the Catholic threat gave the Americans the freedom for rebellion.

  Although Rodney sailed in 1758 with the fleet under Admiral Boscawen that was sent against Louisburg, his vessel, the Dublin, was an unhealthy ship, with a crew laid low by an epidemic of fever. It was left behi
nd at Halifax, with the men installed in sheds hastily erected on shore by the ship’s carpenters. Owing to the Dublin’s debility, Rodney missed the assault on the great French fortress whose capture opened the way to Quebec. He joined the victors just before the surrender and sailed home with them to England. He missed, too, in November, 1759, Admiral Hawke’s crushing of the French main fleet, intended for the invasion of England, in the Battle of Quiberon Bay, on the coast of Brittany. Called “the greatest victory since the Armada” by an unidentified enthusiast, it added more laurels to the “wonderful year.” Rodney was engaged at the time on a mission against another aspect of the invasion plan, commanding a squadron ordered to destroy by means of bomb ships a flotilla of flat-bottomed boats gathered at Le Havre as landing craft. These boats were 100 feet long, capable of carrying 400 men each. Promoted in May, 1759, to Rear Admiral of the Blue (blue, white and red were colors originally indicating squadron position in the line, and carrying minor progression in grade from blue through white to red), he took his 60-gun flagship, the Achilles, with four other gunships, five frigates and six bomb ketches to bombard the harbor of Le Havre and burn its boats. While Rodney received from the shore batteries a “very brisk fire indeed,” he inflicted damage on the French boats that left all masts gone and the “boats to all appearance broken-backed” and the port itself believed ruined as a naval arsenal for any further annoyance of Great Britain during the continuance of the war. His bombardment finished off what was left of the invasion plan after the smashing of the French at Quiberon Bay.

  Upon his return from the fiery mission to Havre, Rodney found a new King in England. In October, 1760, George III had come to the throne. The first English-born native of the Hanover line, he was infused by belief in his own rectitude and by his mother’s prodding, “George be a King.” He wanted to be a good ruler to his country and a firm sovereign to his empire, especially to those restive Americans, so ungrateful for the war fought on their behalf against the French, as King George and most of his countrymen thought of it. American objection to being taxed for the cost of the war and for future defense was regarded as thankless ingratitude, not as a basic constitutional issue of taxation by a British Parliament in which they had no representation. Whether or not George III comprehended this view of the matter, he was determined to affirm the right of Parliament—or, as he saw it, of the Crown—to tax the Colonies, and he wanted action and active commanders.

  A critical area of defense that the King did comprehend was the West Indies. “Our Islands,” George III wrote to Lord Sandwich twenty years later, in 1779, when the American Revolution had become a war, “must be defended even at the risk of an invasion of this island.” George was given to extreme statements, and “even at the risk of invasion” was certainly not a sentiment with which ministers would have agreed. But the navy could not be everywhere at once, and if held in home waters to repel a French invasion, it could not be in sufficient strength in the Caribbean to secure the islands there. “If we lose our Sugar Islands,” the King’s letter continued, “it will be impossible to raise money to continue the war.” While this too seems extreme, it had some basis in the revenue that flowed to the government from the abundant fortunes of the rich planters and merchants of the West Indies. Sandwich agreed that as the French grasp at sea power imperiled the Sugar Islands, Britain’s principal naval effort should be made in the Caribbean. Although the state of the fleet in the Leeward Islands in 1779 was “very deplorable” and needed reinforcements, a successful operation against Martinique was “the most to be wished,” because if it were taken, the other French islands would fall and the French would feel the blow so sharply that “it would probably put an end to the war.” Sandwich also was to recommend, in this 1779 memorandum to the King, action against St. Eustatius, from which the French could supply their West Indies fleet with provisions. If French sea power could be broken in the Caribbean and French islands taken, the full force of the British Navy and Army could be turned upon America and the rebellion put down. While in 1759 the Americans had not yet taken up arms against the mother country, and the letters of the King and the First Lord reflect the strategy of a later situation, they show the overriding importance that the West Indies held in British thinking. Always wanting “bold and manly” efforts and offensive operations to thwart the French instead of the “cautious measures” of his ministers, the King, in October, 1761, the year after he ascended the throne, was happy to approve the appointment of Rodney as Commander-in-Chief at Barbados of the Leeward Island station for the purpose of conducting the naval part of a joint land and sea attack on Martinique. The most populous and flourishing of the French islands, Martinique was the largest island of the chain sometimes called the Windward and sometimes the Leeward group. The nomenclature, as one historian of the region laments, “lacked precision.” Regardless of being nominally grouped with the Leewards, Martinique dominated the windward position. At Fort Royal it had the finest harbor and, as the most flourishing of the French islands, was the capital of the French West Indies and seat of the French Governor-General and the sovereign Council with jurisdiction over all the French Antilles. Barbados, further down the chain and further into the wind, had no good harbor. The English used English Harbor on Antigua, further up the chain from Martinique.

  When Rodney on October 21, 1761, taking up his new command, sailed from Plymouth to join the fleet in the West Indies, plans for the attack had already been made, originally by Pitt when First Minister.

  Touching at Barbados on November 22, a thirty days’ sail of the westward crossing of the Atlantic, Rodney joined the land forces of General Monckton. Together they reached Martinique on January 7, and the operation, despite the surprising strength of the defense, was a routine West Indian landing. Having “silenced the forts of the coast,” the fleet anchored in St. Pierre’s Bay with the loss of only one ship, not from enemy gunfire but from striking a reef of rocks. “We have saved all her people, all her stores, and I hope soon to get all her guns,” Rodney reported. The fleet having secured the landing and an excellent harbor, a squadron with two brigades was dispatched to the bay of Petite Anse to take up station there, and another squadron to Grande Anse. When Captain Hervey of the Dragon had silenced the battery, Rodney’s marines and seamen attacked and took possession of the fort. “On January 14th I followed with the whole fleet and army,” having again destroyed the enemy’s batteries on shore. After reconnoitering the coast here, he determined with General Monckton to attack Fort Royal on the 16th. And having “very successfully and with little loss silenced the batteries [which seemed to have registered on this occasion a more than ordinary record of uselessness], I landed General Monckton with the greatest part of his forces by sunset; and so the whole army was on shore a little after daylight next morning, without the loss of a man,” with all necessary supplies, and “all ships and transports anchored as much in safety as this coast will admit of.” Two battalions of marines of 450 men each were then landed and proceeded to ascend the heights from which they proposed to lay siege to the fort. On February 10, Rodney was able to congratulate their Lordships on the surrendering of the important citadel of Fort Royal, which had “given his Majesty’s forces possession of the noblest and best harbour in these parts.” He has also taken fourteen “of the enemy’s best privateers” and expects many more from other parts of the island to be delivered to him under the terms of the surrender. He is happy to report “the most perfect harmony” between the army and navy, each vying to serve King and country best. A lively account by an infantry officer with the land forces tells how the sailors dragged cannon and the heaviest mortars up the hills to secure the position, “and,” Rodney reported, “the service they did us, both on shore and on the water, is incredible.” Freedom from the miseries of their ships doubtless lent energy to the rugged pulling.

  The surrender of Martinique, leaving the Lesser Antilles defenseless, caused the surrender to Rodney’s fleet of three islands, Ste. Lucie lying sout
h of Martinique, St. Vincent, and Grenada at the bottom of the chain. These were valuable stations, on whose “peaceable possession” Rodney congratulated the Admiralty. Ste. Lucie, largest and considered loveliest of the British Windward Islands, which Rodney had long felt to be particularly desirable, abounded in good ports, while the “important island” of Grenada would provide a safe port in the hurricane months and a very strong citadel.

  Meanwhile Jamaica sent him an urgent call for help against an expected combined French and Spanish attack. Anticipating lucrative prizes from this venture, Rodney prepared to go to the relief of Jamaica on his own responsibility, without orders from England, even though General Monckton, more submissive to authority, was not willing to detach forces to go with him without instructions from home. Rodney informed the Admiralty of his intention, on the ground that he believed himself “authorized and obliged to succour any of His Majesty’s colonies that may be in danger,” and assuring their Lordships that he had “no other view but the good of His Majesty’s service.” The Admiralty suspected otherwise and, to Rodney’s angry disappointment, orders arrived instructing him not to pursue his design, because a secret expedition was in preparation for which “everything else must give way” and which he must assist by remaining at his station. Sullen at being deprived of an opportunity of the kind from which fellow-admirals had made fortunes, he prepared his fleet to join the forces for the coming action at Havana, fulcrum of Spanish trade. In the successful outcome at Cuba, Admiral Pocock, who commanded the naval force in the attack, did indeed come away with a fortune in prize money, while Rodney in bitterness gained nothing. In his chagrin, he quarreled with General Monckton, with whom he had worked in such “perfect harmony” at Martinique, and now claimed the General had divided the prizes taken there unfairly.