View of the attack on Martinique showing the
disposition of the troops and batteries of guns, from: Richard Gardiner. An
account of the expedition to the West Indies, against Martinico: with the
reduction of Guadelupe, and other the Leeward Islands, subject to the French
King, 1759. Birmingham: printed by John Baskerville; London: for G Steidel, at
the Crown and Bible, Maddox-Street, Hanover-Square.
Privateering and smuggling were also big issues in the West
Indies. The principal reason that the French sugar islands showed more profit
than the British ones was because of contraband between the French islands and
British North America. The highly valued rum of Rhode Island was made from
French molasses brought in clandestinely; in a word, the American colonists
could smuggle in molasses more cheaply from the French West Indies than they
could buy it from British sources on the open market. So, in addition to a cheaper
labour supply and greater areas of fertile soil, the French had a ready market
for their product in British North America, and this was vital to the economic
life of the islands, since the French bought food and lumber with the
contraband revenue. Molasses from the French West Indies was banned in France
to protect native manufacturers of brandy, so without the North American market
the island French would have been hard pressed, and could certainly not have
basked in the reputation of being the richest and most prosperous colonies of
any empire in the world. Faced with this situation, the British West Indies
would have gone under but for the monopoly they enjoyed in Britain itself and
the great expansion of the home market. But here was one of those ‘contradictions’
that would manifest itself immediately after the Seven Years War in the
struggle between home country and North American colonists. In flat
contradiction of mercantilism, the economic interests of Britain and her North
American colonies were divergent. From the colonists’ point of view, the French
supremacy in the islands was desirable. From the metropolitan point of view it
was vital that the British colonies in the West Indies survived, since Jamaica
alone bought more British manufactures than Virginia and Maryland combined.
Quite apart from the direct economic interests at stake in
the islands, Pitt had to weigh two other, even more important, factors. First
was the general military, naval and strategic implication of the West Indies,
for his new bearing in foreign policy meant moving away from simple commerce
protection and the destruction and harrying of enemy commerce towards an
outright war of conquest. The general strategic position held by the British in
the West Indies was unpromising, for the imperatives of geography favoured the
French. At the beginning of the Seven Years War four nations shared the
Caribbean islands. Spain possessed Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Bahamas and
the eastern half of Hispaniola which they named Santo Domingo (the modern
Dominican Republic). The Dutch Republic had Curaçao and shared the Virgin
Islands with the British, who additionally had Jamaica, Barbados, St Kitts,
Nevis, Antigua and Montserrat. France occupied the western half of Hispaniola
(modern Haiti) and most of the other islands as far south as Grenada, including
their cynosures of Martinique and Guadeloupe. There were in addition a number
of officially neutral islands – St Lucia, St Vincent and Dominica (not to be
confused with the Dominican Republic) – which were in fact dominated by the
French on Martinique.
The British islands were awkwardly distributed, with Jamaica
far to the leeward of the rest and Barbados, the most windward island, with no
harbour fit for a naval station. Since 1745 the Royal Navy had maintained two
stations, one at Jamaica, the other in the Leeward Islands. The French, on the
other hand, had their two bases in much more favourable strategic niches: one
on the north coast of Santo Domingo dominating the windward passage into the
Caribbean, and the other in Martinique. This strategic superiority was
reinforced by trade routes. British merchant navy vessels, making for two
widely separated landfalls, parted company before entering the Caribbean and
were particularly vulnerable as they sailed into the waters to the windward of
Barbados and Antigua respectively. French privateers preyed mercilessly on
English shipping on both outward and homeward journeys and on vessels plying
between the entrepots with a particular fondness for the Antigua passage.
Martinique and Guadeloupe were notorious nests of privateers, the indented
coastlines making them perfect for predatory raids. British small cruisers were
not strong enough to attack these corsairs inland, as their headquarters were
too far up the tropical ‘fjords’ for warships to reach them. The French
meanwhile were relatively secure, since their islands all lay to the windward
of the British base in each area. The Royal Navy’s task was particularly
onerous since it additionally had to protect trade between the British West
Indies and North America. Naval commanders tried to use the convoy system to
counterattack the French threat, and employed a threefold seaborne strategy.
Ships of the line watched the French bases at Santo Domingo and Martinique; the
biggest warships patrolled the waters to the windward of Barbados and Antigua;
and small cruisers and frigates concentrated on surveillance of the privateer
nests, with particular emphasis on the Leeward Islands.
But over and above all these complex day-to-day
dispositions, Pitt had to fit the West Indies into a mosaic of global strategy
and geopolitics. In one sense the West Indies was a locus for convergent
economic interests from outside, since the lumber trade of North America and the
slave trade of West Africa both had their focus here. Overwhelmingly, fear was
the spur for, although the British seemed on paper to be winning the struggle
for the Orient – the British East India Company had factories from St Helena to
Borneo – they were uneasy about increasing French encroachments and their
burgeoning volume of trade. Fear sometimes became paranoia, with the British
imagining that the French were trying to ‘encircle’ their North American
colonies and the French apprehensive that the British would cut Canada off from
the Louisiana territory and then conquer both separately. Each area of the
world had its ‘boosters’, but Pitt considered the West Indies a more important
theatre than India. The Royal Navy’s commitment was significant: in India the
British deployed four ships of the line and three cruisers, but in the West
Indies the respective figures were twelve and twenty. Both the objective
interests and the sheer volume of trade in the Caribbean were so much greater
than on the subcontinent. It was not surprising, then, that when Pitt felt
strong enough for warfare on a truly global scale, he opened the second front
in the West Indies, not in India.
Pitt had yet another motive for his proposed West Indian
campaign. Eighteenth-century warfare was not guerre à outrance, nor would
anyone have dreamed of modern war-fighting objectives like ‘unconditional
surrender’. Newcastle constantly warned his colleague of the ruinous expense of
his projects and advised that the time would come when the financiers of the
City of London would no longer lend the government money. When that day
arrived, the resulting crisis of credit would force any conceivable government
to sue for peace terms. Pitt agreed that the enormous cost of the war alone
meant that it would have to end at the earliest plausible moment, and his
definition of a good peace was one where the French were driven from North
America altogether and British supremacy in the Mediterranean maintained. So,
although in 1759 Pitt aimed at a genuine war of conquest in the West Indies,
which marked a new departure in the Caribbean, it was not intended as a war of
permanent conquest, as the campaign in Canada was. At the peace table Pitt
needed Martinique as a powerful bargaining counter, which he could exchange for
Minorca. The obvious question then arises: if Minorca was so important, why did
Pitt not send an expedition there instead? Here we see clearly the quality of
his strategic thinking. In the first place, Minorca was a tougher nut to crack
than Martinique and, in the second, he saw an ingenious way to kill two birds
with one stone: to take out France’s equivalent of Jamaica and to achieve a
conquest which the French would be glad to have back by giving up Minorca.
Martinique, after all, was an island that exported 20,000 tons of sugar a year.
And France would be desperate to get it back in order to reinforce the tenuous
links between the St Lawrence and New Orleans, always assuming that Canada, or
New France, was still in existence as a French territory.
Painstakingly Pitt explained his thinking to his inner
Cabinet. Newcastle reiterated his opposition to widening the war on the
periphery when the military situation in Europe was so parlous and British
credit stretched almost to snapping point. It was bad enough that Britain was
fighting both on the continent and in North America, but now Pitt was proposing
warfare in the West Indies as well. Where would it all end? If Pitt was really
serious about Martinique, economies would have to be made in other theatres and
the obvious candidate for cutback was the series of ‘descents’ on the French
coast, intended to take the pressure off Frederick of Prussia. But Pitt
insisted that these attacks would have to go on, to cover the Martinique
expedition; otherwise the French could mobilise resources to strike back in the
West Indies.
Anson took Newcastle’s side and weighed in with the argument
that the Martinique project was dangerously quixotic: too many ships would be
absent in the West Indies if the French suddenly decided to launch an invasion
of Britain. But Anson was never prepared to push really hard against Pitt once
the Prime Minister had made up his mind, so the main opposition in September
1758 continued to come from Newcastle. Things reached the point where Pitt
angrily threatened to recall all British troops from the continent if he could
not have his way over Martinique. He was surely bluffing, for he could scarcely
have made an enemy of George II and Newcastle at the same time. As a sop to
Newcastle, he promised that, aside from the expedition to West Africa which had
already been despatched, after Martinique there would be no more global
adventures. Grudgingly Newcastle acquiesced, encouraged by the change of mind
at the Admiralty. By early October Anson was telling Newcastle’s confidant Lord
Hardwicke that he foresaw few barriers to a successful outcome in the West
Indies. Anson thought the amphibious operation ingenious, and commented that
the entire venture was singularly well thought through: there was a good beach
for landing marines and failsafe plans were in place in case they had to
retreat. Yet whatever opposition there was at the highest level, there was
little in Parliament. In November the House of Commons approved a war budget of
£13 million for 1759 – the largest wartime appropriation ever granted. Horace
Walpole remarked, half-admiringly, half-acidulously: ‘You would as soon hear NO
from an old maid as from the House of Commons.’
Pitt’s great West Indian expedition finally cleared from
Portsmouth on 12 November 1758: 9,000 men and a handful of women sailed to
Barbados in seventy-three ships commanded by General Peregrine Thomas Hopson, a
favourite of George II, who liked the fact that the commander was an old man. With
a quasi-senile prejudice against young men, George II deliberately chose this
method of putting Pitt in his place for, as the gossip-monger Horace Walpole,
homosexual son of Sir Robert, put it, the choice of the elderly and reluctant
Hopson was ‘not consonant to Mr Pitt’s practice, who, considering that our
ancient officers had grown old on a very small portion of experience, which by
no means compensated for the decay of fire and vigour, chose to trust his plans
to the alertness and hopes of younger men’. Pitt had to be content to see his
choice as commander, John Barrington, occupying the second-in-command slot. It
was difficult to find adequate officers for the lesser commands, as those who
had purchased their commissions or obtained them through influence used their
prerogatives to avoid service in dangerous, disease-ridden theatres like the
West Indies. On the other hand, the high casualty rates in the Caribbean,
especially from disease, meant that a career officer could take a calculated
risk: entering as a Captain at the beginning of the year, he could be Colonel
by the end of it.
Coffee-house opinion was divided on the wisdom of this
venture, especially as it was widely known that half of the war budget was to
be borrowed and that half the tax revenues would go in servicing the debt.
Walpole, though, with his characteristic pessimism, vastly overrated the odds
against success. ‘Martinico is the general notion; a place the strongest in the
world with a garrison of ten thousand men. Others now talk of Guadeloupe,
almost as strong and of much less consequence. Of both, everybody that knows,
despairs.’ The truth was that the French had grown careless and the number of
defenders was far, far less than Walpole’s hyperbolic estimate. Guadeloupe, in
particular, was almost absurdly ill guarded, to the point where a modern
historian has commented that this island in 1759 was ‘one of the few examples
in history of a time when the best apple hung lowest on the bough’. Maybe the
French had grown over-confident because of the sheer success of their
privateering operations; of the 113 enemy ships seized by their corsairs in the
West Indies in 1758, eighty-one were prizes taken either to Martinique or
Guadeloupe.
The expedition made its way slowly across the Atlantic. The
track of the fleet was south-west from Plymouth to latitude 13° north, then due
west to Barbados, running before the trade winds. The ships were out of sight
of land from the middle of November until they anchored in Carlisle Bay, near
Bridgetown, Barbados on 3 January 1759. There were sixty-four transports, eight
ships of the line, a frigate, four bomb-ketches and a hospital ship. The idea
was that the four regiments and their naval backup would sail first to
Barbados, where Commodore John Moore would take over the naval forces. The
combined forces would next attack and take Martinique, which would then be
garrisoned. But plans began to go awry almost immediately. The fleet suffered
badly on the way over, not so much from storms but from disease: scurvy,
dysentery, smallpox and ‘shipfever’. And because the fleet had to wait to allow
stragglers to catch up – including the all-important hospital ship – it was
impossible to take the French by surprise, even if they had not already been
aware of what was about to descend on them. In fact Cardinal de Bernis, then
acting as French Foreign Minister, knew the fleet’s destination before it had
even left Portsmouth, and immediately informed the Marquise de Pompadour (whose
creature he was). Captain Gardiner, who left the classic account of the 1759
expedition to the West Indies, produced this purple passage to describe
landfall: ‘As the ships approached, the island rose gradually out of the sea
with a delightful verdure, presenting a most inviting prospect of the country
all around, which looked like a garden; the plantations were amazingly
beautiful, interspersed at little distances from each other, and adorned with
fruits of various colours.’
Moore assumed command of the naval squadron, and he and
Hopson decreed ten days’ rest, revictualling and rewatering, giving the
stragglers time to arrive. But by the time the united battalions left the
Barbados rendezvous on 13 January, tropical disease had cut a swathe through
the armada and the attack force had already been reduced by one-third to little
more than 5,000 effectives. Yellow fever, smallpox and scurvy were the
principal scourges. ‘Yellow jack’ was the most dreaded disease in the
Caribbean. Borne by the Aedes mosquito, yellow fever had as its most common
symptoms headache and agonising pain followed by the vomiting of large amounts
of blood, made greasy and black by the action of the gastric juices. About half
the fever’s victims vomited themselves to death within a few days; those who
survived had immunity for life. Yellow fever had already made its presence felt
among British invaders of the Caribbean, most notably during Admiral Vernon’s
siege of Cartagena in 1741, when two-thirds of the British force besieging the
town died of it. Smallpox, a bacteriological rather than insect-borne disease,
also caused havoc. Symptoms were high temperatures, followed three days later
by purulent blisters; the patient then either died or recovered, bearing
disfiguring scars for the rest of his life. Scurvy was the usual effect of the
notorious vitamin C deficiency in the diet of the Royal Navy before the late
eighteenth century.
While profoundly worried by the growing sickness roster and
especially the yellow-fever cases, the British commander pressed on. The attack
on Martinique began on 13 January, but it soon transpired that the British had
seriously underestimated the problems of a successful assault. The island was
fringed with dangerous, rocky and rugged shores, where 300-foot cliffs often
beetled almost perpendicularly from the sea. In the interior mountains reaching
almost 5,000 feet in altitude, their lower slopes and foothills covered in
thick, mosquito-infested rain forest, posed another formidable obstacle. On the
western coast, where the British tried to land, there were thorn and cactus
forests, alternating with mangrove swamps and salt grass. Moore decided to make
his first assault on Fort Royale on the west of the island rather than on St
Pierre farther up the coast. To take Fort Royale, an invader first had to silence
the battery at Negro Point, and here the redcoated marines acquitted themselves
well, even though they were taken aback by the defenders’ novel method of
irregular warfare. The French and their mulatto soldiers hid in trees, bushes
and cane plantations, often behind entrenchments not visible to the British,
from which they directed heavy fire on an enemy that could not see them. When
they retreated, and a party of British skirmishers advanced to ‘mop up’ in the
bush, the defenders would then open a withering fire from the next of a series
of defensive positions, compelling the skirmishers to retreat. Even Highlanders
found the terrain – woods, mountains, ravines, sugar-cane plantations –
difficult and particularly the steep approach to the mountain passes
‘interrupted by broken rocks and furrowed by a variety of gullies, which were
extremely difficult to pass, and which rendered it very hazardous to make any
attempt to force it’. These conditions badly affected morale. A British
deserter later told a court martial that the reason he and his comrades quit
was because they ‘saw no enemy to fight with, and yet bullets were flying about
them from every leaf and bough they came near; that the country was afull of
ambuscades and that, if they proceeded further, they must all be cut to
pieces’.
Nevertheless, on 16 January, after a naval bombardment, the
British swarmed ashore, took the fort, spiked the guns and destroyed all
gunpowder. They then abandoned the fort and proceeded to land unopposed on the
beach at Cas Navires. Pleased with results so far, Moore then changed his mind
and decided to land a permanent garrison at Negro Point. On 17 January the
French counterattacked. The garrison at Negro Point came under heavy fire, when
British troops fanned out from the fort into the nearby woods, hoping to clear
a distinctive track towards Fort Royale, French snipers and skirmishers started
to take a heavy toll on them. In a foretaste of the conditions redcoats would
face less than twenty years later in the American War of Independence, the
British soon found themselves in a parlous state, unable to come to grips with
an elusive enemy, dropping in their tracks from heat, fatigue and shortage of
water.
Hopson began to surmise that Fort Royale might conceivably
hold out for ten days or more, during which time his own troops well might melt
away, even if they did manage to build a road to the French citadel. Only five
miles separated the British beachhead from the fort, but the intervening
country was a morass of woods, canes and ravines. The last straw was when
Hopson’s engineers reported that, to bring the citadel within cannon range,
they would have to cross a ravine. But how was that possible, Hopson asked.
Only by making a further five-mile diversion, the engineers replied. Hopson’s
calculations quickly showed him that the manpower needed to portage thirty
cannon, plus cannon balls, mortar and stores, far exceeded his own labour
force. The clincher was that there was no water on the route either. This meant
that to build a credible road to the fort so that his heavy artillery could be
deployed, Hopson would need 1,000 pioneers for road building and another 1,000
as water carriers. He was in a position remarkably similar to the one General
John Burgoyne would confront at Saratoga in 1777: short of water while being
unable to deploy his big guns. Not surprisingly, Hopson concluded that this was
mission impossible. He ordered an evacuation, having taken losses of twenty-two
dead and forty-eight wounded.
But Hopson was still unwilling to admit overall defeat on
Martinique, so he decided to probe at St Pierre instead, even though this
lacked the strategic significance of Fort Royale. On 19 January the British
fleet appeared off the commercial capital, which was built in a crescent along
the bay with the volcanic Mount Pelée (which would erupt so devastatingly on 8
May 1902) as the dramatic backdrop. HMS Rippon began shelling the town but St
Pierre’s batteries made a vigorous riposte. After exchanging fire for four and
a half hours, the Rippon was the worse for wear and in imminent danger of being
sunk. Moore withdrew her to safety and hastily conferred with Hopson. Both men
were by now pessimistic about the military possibilities on Martinique. Moore
repeated his earlier opinion that there was no strategic advantage in taking
the town, while Hopson concluded that he could not maintain a garrison there,
as it would have to be continually supplied by sea. They were not to know that
French morale was low and their resolve signally lacking; and, in general, the
British commanders overrated the problems of Martinique, which was captured
easily three years later by a British combined operation. What they should have
done was what was done in 1762: make a number of feints on the island before
delivering the main attack, thus sapping the defenders’ fighting spirit still
further; the militia’s initial enthusiasm would soon drain away and, even if he
spotted the feint, the French commander would have to disperse his forces
against his better judgement to still the laments and clamours of the planters.
Official opinion privately (there was no public censure)
blamed Hopson for the debacle at Martinique and absolved Moore, though the
Admiralty was simply rewarding him for his fawning attitude over the Byng
affair two years earlier, when Admiral John Byng had been shot for neglect of
duty after failing ignominiously to relieve Minorca. Perceptive critics outside
the establishment saw that Moore was as much to blame as Hopson. Neither man
acquitted himself well, but the bizarre events of the early years of the Seven
Years War in a sense contrived to let them off the hook. Not to press an attack
with full vigour was inevitably to invite comparison with Admiral Byng at
Minorca, who had been shot, as Voltaire said, ‘to encourage the others’. But,
on the other hand, both Moore and Hopson alleged that to tangle with the
guerrillas, snipers and sharpshooters in the ravines outside Fort Royale was to
invite Braddock’s fate at Monongahela. Fortunately for them, it was this version
of events that was endorsed by the power elite in London.
Hopson and Moore also escaped censure by pressing on to
Pitt’s secondary target of Guadeloupe, separated from Martinique by the
officially neutral (but really pro-French) island of Dominica. Guadeloupe had
many advantages for the British marauders. It was the chief producer of sugar
and molasses; it produced more cotton and coffee than any other island in the
West Indies except Jamaica; its trade was more valuable than Canada’s; it was a
nest of privateers who preyed on British shipping; once taken it would be an
invaluable base, enabling the Royal Navy to guard shipping and dominate the
Leeward Islands; it was scantily defended, with a population of just 2,000
Europeans and 30,000 blacks; and in short its loss would be an utter disaster
for France. But Guadeloupe also had many disadvantages. The heat and humidity
were terrific, with temperatures never below 70°F and more usually above 900;
malaria and dysentery were frequent in the low-lying areas (below 1,500 feet in
altitude); and it would have to be conquered before the hurricane season in
July–October. Additionally, Guadeloupe was really two islands in one. There was
the volcanic, so-called Basse Terre and, separated from it by a sea arm, the limestone
Grande Terre, with an indented coastline full of small inlets and river mouths,
the haunts of privateers. The British campaign was therefore planned as a
threefold operation: first, destroying resistance on the leeward side of Basse
Terre; secondly, crushing the enemy on Grande Terre; and finally the conquest
of the windward side of Basse Terre.
The bombardment of the town and citadel of Basse Terre began
on 22 January. The Royal Navy had perfected bomb-ketches – sturdy fore-and-aft
vessels built with heavier frames and beams – for use against shore
installations. Each one contained at least one mortar, which could throw a bomb
on a high parabolic trajectory for a distance of two to three miles. Normal
bombs were like shells, spherical in shape and packed with powder, with the
wall of the shell given an extra thickness so that the bomb would not fall to
earth with the fuse on the downward side. British gunners were supposed to cut
the wax and gunpowder fuses in such a way that the bomb exploded on contact
with the ground or some other object, but eighteenth-century bomb-making was an
inexact science and many bombs exploded in the air. A refinement of the
ordinary bomb was the carcass, like a shell but incendiary rather than explosive.
Used both to gut buildings and as a flare to guide night artillery fire, it was
often packed with charged pistol barrels of various lengths, which fired
intermittently and irregularly, so that even experienced members of bomb squads
approached them with caution. The best ordnance evidence from 1759 suggests
that the carcasses in use during the West Indies campaign were loaded with a
mixture of wax, sulphur, nitre and gunpowder, making them inextinguishable by
water.
Even with the help of these formidable weapons, the British
at first experienced tough going. The numbers of shore batteries initially made
the spirits of the attackers quail, and the British chief of engineers gloomily
declared the place impregnable. Moore persisted and ordered a day-long
fusillade from his warships. Finally the French batteries were silenced but by
this time darkness was falling and Moore postponed the amphibious landing to
the next day. At 10 p.m. that night, the British bomb vessels began lobbing
carcasses into the town – whether through simple boredom or to keep the enemy
guessing appears uncertain. At any rate the wooden houses and laden warehouses
were soon ablaze and both citadel and town gutted. Vast amounts of sugar, rum,
tar and other produce were needlessly destroyed in a peculiarly mindless act of
vandalism. Although Moore later assured Pitt that the inferno was an accident,
the fact is that the bombing continued all night. The terrified enemy fled to
the hills from the scenes of a Hieronymus Bosch horror, even abandoning the
wounded in their panic, and a good general would have capitalised on their
confusion and demoralisation. But Hopson had his men stood to all night,
fearing a French counterattack or some underhand ruse. In the morning he
counted the cost. He had lost seventeen killed and thirty wounded; the Royal
Navy ships had been badly damaged in their rigging and because of the fire no
loot or significant prizes had been taken. Worst of all, Hopson now decided to
dig in and retrench, condemning his men to idleness, inactivity or deadening
boredom while labouring on the citadel’s fortifications.
The result was what all old West India hands would have
expected. Disease cut a swathe through the army and by 30 January 1,500 men
were on sick parade. Mosquitoes, untreated sewage, contaminated water,
back-breaking toil in the heat, incompetent surgeons and poor diet all played
their part. By early February Hopson was down to just 2,796 men fit for duty.
By mid-February eight transports cleared for Antigua bearing 600 of the most
seriously ill, the majority of whom died during the passage or soon after
arrival. Hopson sent out companies of redcoats to scour the countryside, but
the French, adopting guerrilla warfare, easily evaded them and began to harry
them with hit-and-run attacks. Every day snipers and sharpshooters became more
of a menace and on 30 January a French guerrilla group, hidden in lofty sugar
cane, showed its mettle by ambushing and killing four sailors. Emboldened by this
success, the French became over-confident and sustained a bad check on i
February, when thirty prisoners fell into British hands. Skirmish and
counter-skirmish continued but there was no decisive breakthrough. Secretly
champing at the bit over Hopson’s incompetence, Moore tried to fight his own
war by sending his cruisers out to blockade the entire island and prevent food
reaching the guerrillas. His mood grew blacker by the day as the army continued
to be decimated by disease.
