The Sugar Barons (56 page)

Loyalty to ‘home’ was a factor: the English in the West Indies never had the attachment to the place that those in North America developed. For them, ‘home’ remained Britain. In addition, more practical considerations would see the West India colonies fail to join the North Americans in their struggle for self-rule. In the Caribbean, the planters lived in constant fear of attack by the French (a threat removed in North America by the events of the Seven Years War), and of being overrun by their slaves, who, unlike in the north, were in a massive majority on the islands. Both threats required the support of Britain’s military. The planters were also dependent on the protected British market for their uncompetitively produced sugar.

The war brought instant hardship to the islands. To find money for its military, the British government raised the import duty on sugar, leading London merchants to withdraw credit and recall debts from the West Indies. With supplies from North America cut off and trade disrupted, plantation profits fell to their lowest levels of the century as sugar production dropped by half. Prices for essential provisions doubled during 1775, meaning that many planters could no longer pay the interest on their debts.

The greatest fear was that food shortages would lead to slave rebellion. By the end of 1775, thousands of slaves had died in Jamaica and the Leewards of malnutrition and its accompanying illnesses. The West Indians pleaded for more troops from home as a revolt broke out in Tobago in
1774, with another plot discovered in Jamaica the same year. Maroon raids on St Vincent the following year worsened the situation.

In the meantime, American privateers had been pouring into the Caribbean. There were continual losses of cargo, leading to a sharp hike in shipping and insurance costs. Against this backdrop, the popularity of the American cause waned fast. By mid-1776, most islanders were hoping for ‘the total reduction of the colonies by the Administration’.

American patriots were now being arrested. One man who ‘falsely imagining that he might declare his mind here as freely as he did in England, being a favourer of the Americans’ was executed in Antigua. Loyal petitions were sent to the King, and the inhabitants of Nevis presented British troops with 50 hogsheads of rum ‘to inspire [them] with courage to beat the Yankee Rebels’. There was a further hardening of attitudes after a slave revolt in Jamaica in 1776. For the first time on the island, skilled Creole slaves rebelled, inflamed, it was thought, by rhetoric coming out of North America, and armed by the Yankee rebels.

All the time, the North American privateers, fitted out in French West Indian ports, became more successful and bold, even launching land raids, invading Nassau in the Bahamas in 1776 and twice attacking Tobago the following year. The British responded by arming their merchant ships and attacking American trade with the neutral islands, but by February 1777 American privateers had taken some 250 British West India merchant ships, contributing to the collapse of four major West India merchant companies in London.

The situation worsened with the entry of Spain and France into the war against Britain. In September 1778, Dominica, lying between Martinique and Guadeloupe, and defended by only 46 regulars and a militia of 150 men with almost useless weapons, capitulated to a 2,000-strong expeditionary force from Martinique. The loss was compensated for by the capture by the British of St Lucia, with its matchless anchorage in what is now Rodney Bay, but in June 1779, St Vincent and then, nine days later, Grenada fell to the French.

The planters could not understand it. They regarded themselves as the source of British power and expected their defence interests to be given absolute priority. But there were something like eight times more French troops than British in the theatre. Now, it was evident that Britain had lost control of the sea. A small fleet under Admiral George Rodney reached the Caribbean two days after the surrender of Grenada, but a fresh French squadron had also arrived to restore their overwhelming superiority. After an indecisive sea battle off Grenada, the shattered British ships left to refit
in St Kitts. The fleet made a shocking sight when it landed the dead and wounded. The decks of the
Grafton
were ‘entirely covered with Blood’ and the
Prince of Wales
had ‘ninety-five Holes intirely through her Sides’. The French admiral, meanwhile, boasted that he did not intend to leave George III enough British sugar ‘to sweeten his tea for breakfast by Christmas’. Every sail on the horizon was cause for new alarms. ‘This island is in the utmost distress’, wrote a St Vincent planter from Barbados, having fled his own island shortly before its capture, ‘the necessaries of life scarce to be purchased, no credit or money, in expectation of being invaded every moment.’

In fact, the British were simply unable to match the combined forces of America, France and Spain, particularly when there were invasion fears at home. The planters may have felt abandoned, but actually the opposite was the case. George III and his ministers persisted in the war in part because of their belief that the loss of the Thirteen Colonies inevitably meant the loss of the West Indies, which were seen as essential for maintaining national wealth and greatness. (In 1773, exports from Grenada alone were worth eight times those from Canada.) The defence of Jamaica was given priority over the war in America, and when the prospect of a French war had loomed, the British government had agonised over whether to abandon the mainland effort to launch offensive operations in the Caribbean. Following the declaration of war by the French, the British had given up Philadelphia, then the largest city in the United States and the capital of the Revolution, primarily to free up 5,000 troops for the conquest of St Lucia.

In December 1780, Britain gained a new enemy, declaring war on the Netherlands, having been angered by the sheltering of American privateers in Dutch ports, and in the hope of cutting off naval supplies to France. News of this reached Rodney in the Caribbean in February the following year, along with orders to capture the Dutch island of St Eustatius, which had become a major trans-shipment point for supplies, particularly gunpowder, to Washington’s army in America. The tiny island offered no resistance, and Rodney then proceeded to loot everything he could find in the crowded warehouses, regardless of whether they belonged to neutrals, or even friends.

Rodney remained at St Eustatius for three crucial months, preoccupied with the sale of the captured goods, leaving his deputy, Rear Admiral Sir Samuel Hood, to attempt to intercept a large French fleet under Vice Admiral the Comte de Grasse. When this failed, de Grasse succeeded in capturing Tobago in June.

As was usual, with the advent of the hurricane season that summer, naval operations in the West Indies came to an end. Rodney returned to England, partly because of poor health, and also to answer charges of improper conduct over the looting of St Eustatius. He sent three ships to Jamaica, and only 10, under Hood, north to the Chesapeake, where General Earl Cornwallis, the commander of the British army in the southern American colonies, had fortified himself in Yorktown and was waiting complacently for the Royal Navy to come and collect him. De Grasse, however, proceeded north with his entire fleet of 26 ships of the line.

It was a fatal miscalculation. Heavily outnumbered, even with support from the New York squadron, Hood was unable to break the French blockade of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. A second relief force was sent from New York on 19 October, but it was too late, Cornwallis having surrendered with upwards of 6,000 men the previous day to Generals Washington and Rochambeau. When he heard the news, the British Prime Minister Lord North exclaimed, ‘My God! It is all over.’

The following month, de Grasse returned to the Caribbean with the intention of sweeping the British from the West Indies. Soon he had almost achieved his mission. In January, he covered a French landing at St Kitts. After an epic siege of the redoubt at Brimstone Hill, the island surrendered on 13 February. Nevis and Montserrat fell soon afterwards. Now only Jamaica, Barbados, newly captured St Lucia and drought-stricken Antigua remained of the British West Indian empire.

The brave resistance at Brimstone Hill had, however, bought time for Rodney to return with his fleet. Sailing from England on 16 January, told by the head of the Admiralty, ‘the fate of this Empire is in your hands’, he reached Carlisle Bay in Barbados on 19 February. Hearing that de Grasse was at anchor at Fort Royal in Martinique, preparing for a descent on Jamaica with 5,400 men, Rodney headed for St Lucia, taking shelter in Gros Islet Bay (now Rodney Bay), from where Martinique was within sight. Rodney’s men worked day and night provisioning, watering and refitting the fleet.

The inhabitants of Jamaica had learned of de Grasse’s plans, which included linking up with a Spanish force from Hispaniola, and were in a state of panic. The militia had been called up, heavy taxation imposed to meet the cost of defensive preparations, and the island’s roads had been rendered impassable by felling large trees across them. Trade was at a standstill. A message from a spy on St Thomas read, ‘The attack on Jamaica makes more noise than all North America. Spain has told France that cost what it may they wish to have Jamaica.’

On 8 April the French fleet – 37 ships of the line and a large troop convoy – left Martinique to link up with a Spanish force at Santo Domingo to invade Jamaica. As well as siege weapons, French supplies included 50,000 sets of manacles destined for Jamaica’s slaves. Rodney’s fleet, evenly matched in numbers with that of de Grasse, followed in pursuit. After four days of manoeuvring in little wind, battle was joined at seven in the morning under the lee of Dominica.

As was standard in such encounters, the two lines of vessels started the battle sailing in parallel in opposite directions, blasting their cannons in a naval artillery fight. But at the height of the battle, with visibility impaired by clouds of smoke, a shift in the wind threw both sides into confusion, and a number of British vessels tacked through the French line in three places. The unintended move brought chaos and carnage to the French, with the ships around de Grasse’s flagship, the massive 110-gun
Ville de Paris
, now surrounded and the main French fleet separated from their van and fired on from both sides. When the battle ended at about half past six in the evening, five French ships had been captured, including the
Ville de Paris
, one sunk, and the rest, according to a letter Rodney sent on to Jamaica, ‘miserably shattered’. According to a British doctor who boarded a captured enemy ship, ‘the decks were covered with the blood and mangled limbs of the dead, as well as the wounded and dying’. French naval supremacy in the theatre had been consigned to the depths, and Jamaica saved from invasion.

The ‘Battle of the Saintes’ was not materially as decisive as Rodney made out. The ‘Breaking of the Line’ had allowed much of the French fleet, previously trapped between the coast and the British, to escape to leeward. But it had a great psychological effect, with extraordinary rejoicing in England, and mutual recriminations and a series of courts martial in France. When the news reached Jamaica, the relief was immense. Church bells were rung and flags triumphantly hoisted. Two years later, Stephen Fuller would write to Rodney, now a lord, giving him the news that the Jamaica assembly had voted ‘to prepare an elegant Marble Statue of your Lordship’. The florid monument, with Rodney in Roman toga, still stands in the main square in Spanish Town. Rodney replied to Fuller’s letter, thanking the inhabitants of Jamaica and assuring them that ‘No Man has their Interest more at Heart than myself, being convinced that Jamaica is the best Jewel in the British Diadem, and that too much care cannot be taken to preserve it.’

Jamaica had been saved, and at the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which ended the Revolutionary War, St Lucia and Tobago were surrendered, but
Britain recovered its former possessions in the Caribbean. Yet the loss of the Thirteen Colonies changed everything for the sugar planters. The West India interest in London, planters on the islands, and statesmen of the new republic of the United States all agreed that trading relations had to be restarted. Stephen Fuller, in a memorial to the government, said it was required by ‘the invincible law of absolute necessity’. John Adams declared: ‘They can neither do without us, not we without them. The Creator has placed us upon the globe in such a situation that we have occasion for each other, and politicians and artful contrivances cannot separate us.’

But for London, yielding to those wishing to establish the pre-war status quo would have been the death blow to the old continental system and the Navigation Acts. Many argued that the islanders’ clamour to be given access to supplies from a now foreign source should be ignored while they continued to enjoy their peculiar century-and-a-quarter-old monopoly rights for the UK market. Here, for the first time, the powerful West India lobby looked like it could lose the battle.

However, for the first couple of years after the war, British naval commanders in the Caribbean turned a blind eye to continued trade with the North Americans. An exception was young Horatio Nelson, a frigate captain, appointed in March 1784 to command the 28-gun
Boreas
. Nelson had served in the Caribbean before. He was on the Jamaica squadron from 1777 to 1782, and in June 1779 had been appointed to Peter Beckford’s old role as post captain in charge of the batteries at Fort Charles. But he seems to have picked up little understanding of how things were done in the West Indies. ‘Our Governors and Custom-house officers pretended … they had a right to trade’, he wrote, appalled, to his brother in England. ‘I seized many of their Vessels, which brought all parties upon me; and I was persecuted from one Island to another, that I could not leave my ship.’ Although ostracised for ‘doing my duty by being true to the interest of Great Britain’, Nelson did manage to meet and marry a rich Nevis widow, Frances Nisbet, before he left the West Indies in June 1787.