Caribbean (61 page)

When news of this appeal reached the governor, he called upon Greville Pembroke, known to be a sensible planter, to take the long trip to Glebe Quarter to investigate the charges, and if they were found to be accurate, to institute legal proceedings against Job. “But,” the governor warned, “I must remind you that not one bad word has been spoken against Job since I took office. This could be a canard.”

Greville nodded, then suggested: “Excellency, my duties at the plantation are heavy, but my younger brother John has had more experience than me in slave affairs. I would recommend that he be dispatched.” It was done, and ten minutes after his arrival at Glebe Quarter, John had Thomas Job in the town’s improvised jail. Acting upon the governor’s written orders, he ordered a jury to be convened, and listened in astonishment as the men, all white, all part of the Sugar Interest, found Job not guilty on the grounds that “it’s difficult
to control niggers without stern measures, and in our judgment Thomas did not exceed to any degree the customs of this island.”

When John heard the verdict he was so infuriated that he wanted to organize a hanging party to dispose of Job on the spot, but the clergyman advised against this, and Job went free. Next morning, assuming himself to have not only been vindicated but also authorized to resume his old ways, Job spotted a slave doing some trivial thing that he, Job, did not approve of and beat him to death in the customary manner.

A young Scotsman working for Job had had enough, and when he reported the death to the reverend, the latter summoned Pembroke to hear the details, and by a curious chance the dead slave’s name happened to be one commonly used in the islands, Cudjoe. As soon as the name was uttered, John recalled the hideous time when he had been forced to watch when Rostgaard’s Cudjoe was “racked and burned,” and he knew what course he must take.

This trial, a new one dealing with an entirely new case, was going to be different, because now John would have a white man to testify to Job’s brutal behavior. The trial was a sensation, but when the young Scot rose to testify, a plantation man in the rear of the court shouted: “Shoot that bastard!” and there were many similar displays of support for Job, but the jury, unable to ignore the solid evidence, had to bring in a verdict of guilty.

That afternoon John Pembroke, on his own recognizance, caused a gallows to be erected, and before the sun sank, Thomas Job, master fiend of Jamaica, was hanged.

Late that night Pembroke’s small boat slipped out of Glebe Quarter’s harbor and made its way homeward with the young Scot as passenger; it could have been fatal to leave him among the sugar planters, who were seething to think that one of their kind had been hanged for merely disciplining his niggers.

But when Pembroke and the Scot reached Kingston to report on the happenings at Glebe Quarter, they found that a swift horseman had beat them to the capital with a monstrously distorted account of what had transpired. Tempers were high among members of the Sugar Interest, and Pentheny Croome was organizing a gang to thrash the Scot, or worse, but John intercepted him: “Pentheny, what in the world are you doing?”

“If we let one planter be disciplined for doin’ what we all do, revolution’s upon us. The slaves’ll cut our throats in the night.”

“Pentheny, you said ‘Doing what we all do.’ Do you want to hear what he really did? Sit still and listen,” and in dispassionate tones he recited the hideous behavior at Glebe Quarter. When he had finished recounting the barbarities against the male slaves, the indecent tortures inflicted on the females and the incredible cruelty to the children, he asked quietly: “Longtime friend of my father’s, are you Two Peas in a Pod not well respected in London? Do you not occupy important positions in Parliament? Do you want Thomas Job’s behavior to cloud your reputations? And drag down the whole Sugar Interest?”

Pentheny was shaken, even more so when John bored in: “A copy of my report has gone to the king. When he asks ‘How did you handle this matter?’ are you going to say ‘We saw nothing wrong in what he did?’ Are you going to befoul your own nest?”

Pentheny swallowed hard, and said in a very small voice: “I’d like to hear from that Scot we were goin’ to hang,” and when the tales of horror were elaborated upon, Pentheny rose, moved toward the young man, and embraced him: “I need a feller like you to mind my plantation while I’m in London,” and a week later Hester Croome was back at Trevelyan, bubbling to the wives: “Wonderful young man started working for my father. I’m sort of sorry we sail for London on Friday.”

In 1738 young John Pembroke attracted his first favorable attention in London. There had been trouble with a nest of Maroons on the eastern end of Jamaica, and instead of sending an army against them, the governor dispatched Pembroke and a guard of sixteen from the Gibraltar regiment now stationed on the island. “What we hope for,” the governor said as the men marched off, “is a repetition of that lasting peace your father made with the Maroons in his district. Same assurances from us, same promises from them.”

It was a long trek across difficult terrain, and when Pembroke reached the Maroon area the former slaves did not wish to talk, but an adroit mixture of patience and pressure accomplished wonders and finally a truce was agreed upon. In 1739, John was dispatched to western Jamaica with the same commission, and again he achieved what none had been able to accomplish before, a lasting truce. The island was now pacified, and officials in London sent a dispatch to Kingston: “Advise John Pembroke, well done.”

This led to a surprising assignment, for when a fighting squadron of immense size, some hundred ships in all, anchored in Port Royal Roads under the command of a senior admiral, Edward Vernon, everyone connected with government could see that the British had at last decided to drive the Spanish from the Caribbean.

Already many of the holdings had been lost, Jamaica to the British, the future Haiti to the French, and nowhere in the eastern chain of islands did Spain regain control. At the southern tip of that string, Trinidad was nominally still Spanish, but it was being settled mostly by the French and would soon pass into British hands. However, rich Mexico and richer Peru were still Spanish, as was the Main, but to protect its hold on even these vital areas, Spain simply had to retain the key port of Cartagena, so naturally the English decided to capture it, and thus imperil all the rest of Spain’s holdings in the New World. As so often before, again the fate of the European nations would be settled in the Caribbean.

Excitement rose when English officials revealed the target: “Vernon will be off to capture Cartagena! Erase the humiliations we’ve suffered there,” and when the admiral came ashore to complete the last-minute preparations, he boasted: “This time we blast that city off the map.”

He was a colorful sea dog, fifty-seven years old, who was invariably seen in a battered green overcoat made of grogram, a rough fabric woven of silk, mohair and wool. From this he took the name “Old Grog,” and when in an effort to instill sobriety among his sailors he diluted their traditional rum ration with two quarts of water to one pint of rum, his name entered the dictionary, but in a perverse way, since originally
grog
meant
watered down
and not
rum
.

He had gained a frenzied popularity in 1739 when he boasted that Porto Bello was not invulnerable: “Give me six good ships and I guarantee I’ll capture it.” The government gave him the ships, and he won such a smashing victory, not losing a ship or any men, that bonfires were lit across England and medals struck in his honor. But sailors who had participated in “the Great Victory” whispered to anyone who would listen: “The Spanish didn’t try to defend. A few troops, an empty fort.”

Nevertheless, he was the hero of the moment, and immediately he proposed to vanquish Cartagena.

Since he would need officers to assist him when dictating the
terms of peace after the enemy surrendered, he asked the governor of Jamaica for any likely candidates, and John Pembroke’s recent heroics commended him. In the capacity of an arbiter he sailed south on 26 January 1742, and shortly found himself facing that formidable collection of islands, fortified headlands, fortress-lined narrows and inland harbor rimmed with cannon that comprised Cartagena. The story was that when King Philip II learned that the equivalent of fifty million dollars had been spent on these fortifications, he went out onto the terrace of his Escorial and looked in the direction of Cartagena: “With that much money spent, I should be able to see the fortifications from here.”

The siege and battle, one of the most crucial in the Western Hemisphere, was an unfair struggle. Admiral Vernon had collected 170 ships in all, 28,000 men, including large forced levies from ten different American colonies, and innumerable cannon. The Spaniards had only a few small ships—quickly immobilized—and perhaps 3,000 men. But they also had on their side a man known as “two-thirds of an admiral.”

Don Blas de Lezo, one of the great fighting men of history, had spent a long life battling the British navy, and always losing more than just the battle. At Gibraltar in 1704 he had lost his left leg to an English cannonball; at Toulouse, his left eye to an English sharpshooter; and in a fight off Spain, his right arm. Now, when yet one more battle against the ancient enemy loomed, he jumped about the forts without the assistance of an aide, inspecting defenses, and he lay awake at night trying to guess what Admiral Vernon with his tremendous superiority might try next. And as he tossed sleepless he sometimes chuckled as if laughing at the extremity in which he found himself: At Gibraltar, years ago when we were both young, Admiral Vernon and I faced each other in battle, and that time he won. But this is another day, another battleground, and this time I have a powerful ally, General Yellow Fever.

Even before the battle started, the fever struck, killing the valiant British general who was to have led the ground forces as they left Vernon’s ships. In the dead man’s place the admiral received one of the most inept generals in history: Brigadier General Thomas Wentworth, a flunky and a totally inept vacillator propelled into a command he did not want and could not exercise. The consequence was reported by Pembroke:

If the combined British navy and army achieved nothing but disaster, John Pembroke did somewhat better, for he attained what the English fighting man always aspired to, “a mention in dispatches,” as Admiral Vernon reported to London:

It accomplished nothing, because when General Wentworth still refused to attack, his inescapable enemy General Yellow Fever, aided by Admiral Cholera, struck his huddled troops, and the almost instantaneous loss of life was fearful. Men would fall sick as if with a mere cold, catch at their throats, and strangle. A soldier would be cleaning his rifle; the weapon would fall from his hands; he would look up in horror and fall to the ground atop it. Fifty-percent deaths in a unit was common, with the levies from the American colonies suffering up to seventy.

The sad, disgraceful day came when Admiral Vernon, still unable to budge Wentworth, who now had justification in not attacking, had to pass the order: “All troops back aboard ships. All ships back to Jamaica.” England’s mighty thrust to drive Spain from the Caribbean
had been frustrated by a courageous admiral who was only two-thirds of a man.

On the mournful sail back to Port Royal, John Pembroke moved among officers and men, gathering the firsthand information which he would later include in his well-regarded pamphlet
True Account of Admiral Vernon’s Conduct at Cartagena
, whose most often quoted paragraphs were these: