The Sugar Barons (16 page)

‘The Spaniards cannot oppose much’, Gage told Cromwell, ‘being a lazy, sinful people, feeding like beasts upon their lusts.’ If Cuba and Hispaniola were taken, he said, Spanish Central America would fall to England within two years (Gage would join the expedition as chaplain to the General’s regiment).

Also consulted was Thomas Modyford, in England at that time. He agreed with Gage that Spanish power was weak, and advised attacks on Guiana or Cuba. In the end, the official instructions were vague: ‘to gain an interest in that part of the West Indies in the possession of the Spaniard’. Puerto Rico and Hispaniola were suggested as first steps, to act as staging posts for attacks on the mainland. Alternatively, or in addition, the capture of Havana, ‘the back doore of the West Indies’, ‘wil obstruct the passing of the Spaniards Plate Fleete into Europe’. Cartagena should be taken as well, as this was where Cromwell wanted to situate the capital of his new empire.

With hindsight, these plans seem wildly hubristic, but on paper it looked easy. Cromwell planned a force of 3,600 regular troops from England together with the same number raised in Barbados and the English Leeward Islands. Drake had captured Santo Domingo on Hispaniola with only 1,000 men. The Spanish Antilles had seen a constant drain of settlers to the mainland, and few now had an entire population as big as the army about to descend on them. Spain had forced the English out of Providence Island in 1641, but this was something of a last gasp, and their power had become feebler since. Some fortifications had been recently repaired, but the confidence of the English naval gunners was high, having just proved their worth against the Dutch.

In the event, Spanish strength or weakness had much less to do with the dismal outcome of the ‘Western Design’ than did the quality of the English troops and of the expedition’s planning, command and logistics. Neither the naval nor the land forces commander was first rate (nor, it would turn out, truly committed Cromwellians): the sailors were under the orders of an unscrupulous careerist, Admiral William Penn, father of the founder of the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania. In charge of the army was General Robert Venables, a Parliamentary army veteran, but indecisive and incompetent. In theory Penn was subordinate to Venables; in reality it was a split command, with the inevitable risks of rivalry and confusion. Furthermore, the two military commanders also had to factor in the guidance of three civilian ‘commissioners’ who secretly reported to Cromwell on their performance and loyalty. One was Daniel Searle, the Governor of Barbados; another Edward Winslow, who had sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 and been Governor of the Plymouth Colony, and was now a highly
trusted expert on colonial affairs. The third was Gregory Butler, seemingly an old West India hand, described by one of Venables’ officers as ‘the unfittest man for a commissioner I ever knew employed’. He features little in contemporary accounts of the expedition, except for when he was so drunk during a parade that he fell off his horse.

The more junior officers were a mixed bag: some good, some awful. The private soldiers, however, were almost universally poor. The ‘home’ contingent had been recruited from the invincible New Model Army, but few officers let any but their most troublesome and feeble men go. There was also a general shortfall in the numbers required, so further recruiting was carried out by drum beat in the poorer parts of London and other cities. As was always the case, only those with little to lose came forward. Thus the English ranks were made up of ‘slothful and thievish servants’, criminals and debtors on the run.

The men recruited in the West Indies were, by all accounts, even worse. Some were small-scale farmers who, having found the Barbados acreage all snapped up, took their families with them in the hope of finding land to plant. Most, though, were the desperate and greedy; of all the migrants from Barbados to different parts of the Americas, those who went with Venables were characterised as the worst: ‘the looser sort out of hopes of plunder’, ‘old beaten runaways’. Altogether, the men were described by Venables’ wife, who accompanied her husband on the expedition, as ‘the Devils instruments … A wicked army it was, and sent out without arms or provisions.’

The last complaint would prove perhaps most damning of all. The logistics of the expedition were a disaster. As the main fleet left Portsmouth, they were supposed to be joined by at least three further vessels from London. But the barque containing most of the army’s pikes was still sitting in Deptford, as were the transports carrying horses and cavalry equipment, and, most importantly, provisions and heavy weapons in the form of siege mortars.

Thus the main force was compelled to wait in Barbados, scanning the horizon for the arrival of the missing arms and supplies. Weeks passed, during which the Spanish had plenty of time to be warned of the force’s presence. Venables used the wait to drill his raw troops and attempt to replace the missing equipment: horses were requisitioned at huge cost; 2,500 half-pikes were constructed using cabbage palm shafts; and 1,500 mainly rusty matchlocks borrowed from the island’s militia, though little ammunition or powder was to be found. (James Drax, never one to miss a trick, was soon applying for permission to export from England to Barbados replacement horses and weapons.)

But after eight weeks, with provisions on the island growing ever more scarce and expensive under the strain of so many extra mouths to feed, the commanders were forced to abandon the wait and set forth on 31 March 1655. Heading north-west, the armada stopped six days later at St Kitts, where a further 1,200 men were collected. Like the Barbadians, many brought their families with them. An officer from England commented that they looked ‘rather as a people that went to inhabit some country already conquered than to conquer’.

Venables now had as many as 9,000 men at his command. Unfortunately, he only had provisions (of a very low quality) for about half that number. By the time the fleet left St Kitts, the men were already on half-rations at best and weakening all the time.

Only on 9 April was Henry Whistler, a naval officer on Penn’s flagship, told that the target was Hispaniola. Two days later, with the island only 48 hours’ sailing away, a huge row broke out among the soldiers. Commissioner Winslow had solemnly announced that all plunder from the island was to be reserved for the Protector and the ‘Design’. Officers and men alike were put ‘into a Great pachon’. Thus the army had already fallen out over the spoils of a victory yet to be won. As Henry Whistler commented, ‘Wee … Ware asharing the skin before wee had Cached the foxx.’

On 12 April, the eastern end of Hispaniola was spotted by the vanguard. Alarmed reports soon came back that the shore was ‘rocky, and a great surf of sea against it … in many places we saw the beatings of the water appear afar off like the smoke of ordnance’. Suddenly the amphibious attack did not look so easy. As warning beacons appeared in sight on the coast, and the population readied themselves for the attack, the armada’s divided command squabbled about what to do next. Venables urged a direct assault on the city of Santo Domingo, the island’s capital (and the oldest Spanish city in the New World). Penn, for the navy, insisted that this was impossible, with the winds in the wrong direction and the approach treacherous. At last a landing a short way down the coast was decided upon, with the aim being to attack the city from the weaker, landward side.

On the morning of the 14
^th
, the English force headed west of Santo Domingo, steering for the mouth of the River Jaina, a short distance west of the city. But with the wind astern, and lacking an experienced pilot, the mariners took fright at running aground, and sailed past the landing point, not making shore until a spur of land nearly 40 miles from the city. Nevertheless, they found the small defences there unmanned, and some 7,000 troops landed unopposed.

As the men only had two to three days’ short rations, there was no time
to be lost. The large column moved off, along a rough road running to the east. Soon, enemy scouts were spotted, but no contact was made. Occasionally a small house would be encountered, but clearly all the inhabitants had fled, though not before taking everything they could carry, blocking wells and burning the savannah to drive away the island’s free-roaming cattle. Very soon a critical problem emerged: the men had no water bottles; the following day they found themselves crossing a wide treeless drought-stricken savannah; it was punishingly hot. ‘Our very feet scorched through our Shoes’, wrote Venables later. One of his soldiers reported: ‘Our horses and men (the sun being in our zenith) fell down for thirst.’

At one time, they found themselves in thick woods. Although the shade gave relief from the burning rays of the sun, the breeze was now gone, and the heat was more intense and oppressive than ever. No water was to be found. In desperation, men started drinking their own urine.

Then, suddenly, they found themselves in an orange grove in full fruit. The thirsty soldiers gorged themselves, and loaded up as many as they could carry. But for many, this was the final straw for their embattled constitutions. By the evening, many of the men had come down with diarrhoea.

The large force, it seems, lacked a guide with local knowledge. This caused unnecessary lengthy detours and made finding water largely a matter of chance. The column, unfamiliar with local topography, was also extremely vulnerable to ambush. During the first morning, enemy horsemen appeared, then disappeared in the distance. At last an officer of the scouts unwisely gave chase to one and was not seen again. After that, occasional surprise attacks – sometimes just a volley of fire followed by a swift disappearing act – kept everyone on their guard.

Judging by eye-witness accounts, the progress of the army by the third day resembled a desperate search for food and water as much as a military advance. Every building the soldiers encountered was ransacked in an unsuccessful search for provisions. When a chapel was come across, the ‘popish trumperie’ was ‘wasted’. On one occasion, the soldiers ‘brought forth a large statue of the Virgin Mary, well accoutered, and palted here to death with oranges. Heere also they found a black Virgin Mary to enveigle the blackes to worship.’

At last, the column’s vanguard came within reach of Santo Domingo, and a detachment from the Leewards regiment was sent forward to reconnoitre the approaches to the city. Barring their way they found a small brick-built fort, an outwork to the west of the city wall, screened by a small wood.

Officers, including Venables, who was, like his men, ‘extreamly troubled
with the Flux’, made their way to the front to see for themselves. But at that point, a troop of horsemen came charging out of the wood. The English broke and ran; two officers next to Venables were killed, and the General himself, so one report goes, ‘very nobelly rune behind a tree … being soe very much prosesed with teror that he could harlie spake’. Most of his men were similarly struck and fled in disarray.

A small number, however, stood their ground, repulsed the attack and wormed their way forwards to some earthworks between the outlying fort and the city. But they had no equipment for scaling the city wall. The men, one of them wrote, were ‘fainting’. ‘The great guns from the fort gawling us much. Thus wee lay without water, ready to perish and of hunger and want of sleep, till about midnight.’ Venables, having recovered his composure, pulled them back and, against the advice of his commanders, ordered the English force to retreat to the River Jaina to regroup and re-equip.

On 19 April, after more losses on the march, a new camp was established there, and contact made with the naval force. While arguments raged among the commanders about what to do next, the spirit of the soldiers, already battered by defeat, fatigue, hunger and thirst, melted away. All the talk was of the strength of the enemy, in particular the ‘cowboys’ or ‘cow killers’ who had charged the vanguard outside the walls of Santo Domingo. For the most part, this opposition was not the decadent, pox-ridden Spaniards the Englishmen had been promised, but hardy blacks and mulattoes, tough, practised horsemen from years in the saddle rounding up – or, more exactly, slaughtering on the hoof – the island’s wild cattle. Their principal armament had clearly made a great impression: ‘Lances … a most desperate wepon, they are very sharp, and soe brod that if they strik in the bodie it makes such a larg hole that it lettes the breth out of the bodie emediatlie.’

As the troops waited for their commanders to make the next move, the initiative passed to the enemy. Men who ventured out of the camp to hunt for wild cattle to eat were almost always ambushed and stabbed to death with the dreaded lances. Outposts of the camp were raided and stragglers picked off. Soon the army was shooting at fireflies, thinking them ‘the ennimie with light maches’. Even the noise of land crabs’ legs knocking against their shells would create an alarm, and cause a large part of the army to run off into the woods.

And while the delay continued, the troops sickened further. Soon after the 19
^th
, the rains started; the men had no tents or shelter. ‘The abundant of frut that they did eate, and lieing in the raine dod case most of them to haue the Bluddie-flux’, reported Henry Whistler. ‘And now thayer harts
wore got out of thayer Dublates into thayer Breches, and wos nothing but Shiting, for thay wose in a uery sad condichon, 50 or 60 stouls in a day.’ Anyone so afflicted was soon far too weak to fight.

But Venables had not given up, despite the rapidly deteriorating state of his army. Over the next few days, their heavy weapons, consisting of a couple of artillery pieces and a single mortar, were belatedly landed, along with provisions from the fleet. Ladders were constructed for scaling the city walls, and on 24 April, the army marched once more eastwards against Santo Domingo.