The tropics--Passengers on board--Account of the Darien
Canal--Planters' complaints--West Indian history--The Spanish
conquest--Drake and Hawkins--The buccaneers--The pirates--French and
English--Rodney--Battle of April 12--Peace with honour--Doers and
talkers.
Another two days and we were in the tropics. The north-east trade blew
behind us, and our own speed being taken off from the speed of the wind
there was scarcely air enough to fill our sails. The waves went down and
the ports were opened, and we had passed suddenly from winter into
perpetual summer, as Jean Paul says it will be with us in death. Sleep
came back soft and sweet, and the water was warm in our morning bath,
and the worries and annoyances of life vanished in these sweet
surroundings like nightmares when we wake. How well the Greeks
understood the spiritual beauty of the sea! [Greek: thalassa klyzei
panta tanthropon kaka], says Euripides. 'The sea washes off all the woes
of men.' The passengers lay about the decks in their chairs reading
story books. The young ones played Bull. The officers flirted mildly
with the pretty young ladies. For a brief interval care and anxiety had
spread their wings and flown away, and existence itself became
delightful.
There was a young scientific man on board who interested me much. He had
been sent out from Kew to take charge of the Botanical Gardens in
Jamaica--was quiet, modest, and unaffected, understood his own subjects
well, and could make others understand them; with him I had much
agreeable conversation. And there was another singular person who
attracted me even more. I took him at first for an American. He was a
Dane I found, an engineer by profession, and was on his way to some
South American republic. He was a long lean man with grey eyes, red
hair, and a laugh as if he so enjoyed the thing that amused him that he
wished to keep it all to himself, laughing inwardly till he choked and
shook with it. His chief amusement seemed to have lain in watching the
performances of Liberal politicians in various parts of the world. He
told me of an opposition leader in some parliament whom his rival in
office had disposed of by shutting him up in the caboose. 'In the
caboose,' he repeated, screaming with enjoyment at the thought of it,
and evidently wishing that all the parliamentary orators on the globe
were in the same place. In his wanderings he had been lately at the
Darien Canal, and gave me a wonderful account of the condition of things
there. The original estimate of the probable cost had been twenty-six
millions of our (English) money. All these millions had been spent
already, and only a fifth of the whole had as yet been executed. The
entire cost would not be less, under the existing management, than one
hundred millions, and he evidently doubted whether the canal would ever
be completed at all, though professionally he would not confess to such
an opinion. The waste and plunder had been incalculable. The works and
the gold that were set moving by them made a feast for unclean harpies
of both sexes from every nation in the four continents. I liked
everything about Mr. ----. Tom Cringle's _Obed_ might have been
something like him, had not _Obed's_ evil genius driven him into more
dangerous ways.
There was a small black boy among us, evidently of pure blood, for his
hair was wool and his colour black as ink. His parents must have been
well-to-do, for the boy had been in Europe to be educated. The officers
on board and some of the ladies played with him as they would play with
a monkey. He had little more sense than a monkey, perhaps less, and the
gestures of him grinning behind gratings and pushing out his long thin
arms between the bars were curiously suggestive of the original from
whom we are told now that all of us came. The worst of it was that,
being lifted above his own people, he had been taught to despise them.
He was spoilt as a black and could not be made into a white, and this I
found afterwards was the invariable and dangerous consequence whenever a
superior negro contrived to raise himself. He might do well enough
himself, but his family feel their blood as a degradation. His children
will not marry among their own people, and not only will no white girl
marry a negro, but hardly any dowry can be large enough to tempt a West
Indian white to make a wife of a black lady. This is one of the most
sinister features in the present state of social life there.
Small personalities cropped up now and then. We had representatives of
all professions among us except the Church of England clergy. Of them we
had not one. The captain, as usual, read us the service on Sundays on a
cushion for a desk, with the union jack spread over it. On board ship
the captain, like a sovereign, is supreme, and in spiritual matters as
in secular. Drake was the first commander who carried the theory into
practice when he excommunicated his chaplain. It is the law now, and the
tradition has gone on unbroken. In default of clergy we had a
missionary, who for the most part kept his lips closed. He did open them
once, and at my expense. Apropos of nothing he said to me, 'I wonder,
sir, whether you ever read the remarks upon you in the newspapers. If
all the attacks upon your writings which I have seen were collected
together they would make an interesting volume.' This was all. He had
delivered his soul and relapsed into silence.
From a Puerto Rico merchant I learnt that, if the English colonies were
in a bad way, the Spanish colonies were in a worse. His own island, he
said, was a nest of squalor, misery, vice, and disease. Blacks and
whites were equally immoral; and so far as habits went, the whites were
the filthier of the two. The complaints of the English West Indians were
less sweeping, and, as to immorality between whites and blacks, neither
from my companions in the 'Moselle' nor anywhere afterward did I hear or
see a sign of it. The profligacy of planter life passed away with
slavery, and the changed condition of the two races makes impossible any
return to the old habits. But they had wrongs of their own, and were
eloquent in their exposition of them. We had taken the islands from
France and Spain at an enormous expense, and we were throwing them aside
like a worn-out child's toy. We did nothing for them. We allowed them no
advantage as British subjects, and when they tried to do something for
themselves, we interposed with an Imperial veto. The United States,
seeing the West Indian trade gravitating towards New York, had offered
them a commercial treaty, being willing to admit their sugar duty free,
in consideration of the islands admitting in return their salt fish and
flour and notions. A treaty was in process of negotiation between the
United States and the Spanish islands. A similar treaty had been freely
offered to them, which might have saved them from ruin, and the Imperial
Government had disallowed it. How, under such treatment, could we
expect them to be loyal to the British connection?
It was a relief to turn back from these lamentations to the brilliant
period of past West Indian history. With the planters of the present it
was all _sugar_--sugar and the lazy blacks who were England's darlings
and would not work for them. The handbooks were equally barren. In them
I found nothing but modern statistics pointing to dreary conclusions,
and in the place of any human interest, long stories of constitutions,
suffrages, representative assemblies, powers of elected members, and
powers reserved to the Crown. Such things, important as they might be,
did not touch my imagination; and to an Englishman, proud of his
country, the West Indies had a far higher interest. Strange scenes
streamed across my memory, and a shadowy procession of great figures who
have printed their names in history. Columbus and Cortez, Vasco Nunez,
and Las Casas; the millions of innocent Indians who, according to Las
Casas, were destroyed out of the islands, the Spanish grinding them to
death in their gold mines; the black swarms who were poured in to take
their place, and the frightful story of the slave trade. Behind it all
was the European drama of the sixteenth century--Charles V. and Philip
fighting against the genius of the new era, and feeding their armies
with the ingots of the new world. The convulsion spread across the
Atlantic. The English Protestants and the French Huguenots took to sea
like water dogs, and challenged their enemies in their own special
domain. To the popes and the Spaniards the new world was the property of
the Church and of those who had discovered it. A papal bull bestowed on
Spain all the countries which lay within the tropics west of the
Atlantic--a form of Monroe doctrine, not unreasonable as long as there
was force to maintain it, but the force was indispensable, and the
Protestant adventurers tried the question with them at the cannon's
mouth. They were of the reformed faith all of them, these sea rovers of
the early days, and, like their enemies, they were of a very mixed
complexion. The Spaniards, gorged with plunder and wading in blood,
were at the same time, and in their own eyes, crusading soldiers of the
faith, missionaries of the Holy Church, and defenders of the doctrines
which were impiously assailed in Europe. The privateers from Plymouth
and Rochelle paid also for the cost of their expeditions with the
pillage of ships and towns and the profits of the slave trade; and they
too were the unlicensed champions of spiritual freedom in their own
estimate of themselves. The gold which was meant for Alva's troops in
Flanders found its way into the treasure houses of the London companies.
The logs of the voyages of the Elizabethan navigators represent them
faithfully as they were, freebooters of the ocean in one aspect of them;
in another, the sea warriors of the Reformation--uncommissioned,
unrecognised, fighting on their own responsibility, liable to be
disowned when they failed, while the Queen herself would privately be a
shareholder in the adventure. It was a wild anarchic scene, fit cradle
of the spiritual freedom of a new age, when the nations of the earth
were breaking the chains in which king and priest had bound them.
To the Spaniards, Drake and his comrades were _corsarios_, robbers,
enemies of the human race, to be treated to a short shrift whenever
found and caught. British seamen who fell into their hands were carried
before the Inquisition at Lima or Carthagena and burnt at the stake as
heretics. Four of Drake's crew were unfortunately taken once at Vera
Cruz. Drake sent a message to the governor-general that if a hair of
their heads was singed he would hang ten Spaniards for each one of them.
(This curious note is at Simancas, where I saw it.) So great an object
of terror at Madrid was El Draque that he was looked on as an
incarnation of the old serpent, and when he failed in his last
enterprise and news came that he was dead, Lope de Vega sang a hymn of
triumph in an epic poem which he called the 'Dragontea.'
When Elizabeth died and peace was made with Spain, the adventurers lost
something of the indirect countenance which had so far been extended to
them; the execution of Raleigh being one among other marks of the change
of mind. But they continued under other names, and no active effort was
made to suppress them. The Spanish Government did in 1627 agree to leave
England in possession of Barbadoes, but the pretensions to an exclusive
right to trade continued to be maintained, and the English and French
refused to recognise it. The French privateers seized Tortuga, an island
off St. Domingo, and they and their English friends swarmed in the
Caribbean Sea as buccaneers or flibustiers. They exchanged names,
perhaps as a symbol of their alliance. 'Flibustier' was English and a
corruption of freebooter. 'Buccaneer' came from the boucan, or dried
beef, of the wild cattle which the French hunters shot in Espanola, and
which formed the chief of their sea stores. Boucan became a French verb,
and, according to Labat, was itself the Carib name for the cashew nut.
War breaking out again in Cromwell's time, Penn and Venables took
Jamaica. The flibustiers from the Tortugas drove the Spaniards out of
Hayti, which was annexed to the French crown. The comradeship in
religious enthusiasm which had originally drawn the two nations together
cooled by degrees, as French Catholics as well as Protestants took to
the trade. Port Royal became the headquarters of the English
buccaneers--the last and greatest of them being Henry Morgan, who took
and plundered Panama, was knighted for his services, and was afterwards
made vice-governor of Jamaica. From the time when the Spaniards threw
open their trade, and English seamen ceased to be delivered over to the
Inquisition, the English buccaneers ceased to be respectable characters
and gradually drifted into the pirates of later history, when under
their new conditions they produced their more questionable heroes, the
Kidds and Blackbeards. The French flibustiers continued long after--far
into the eighteenth century--some of them with commissions as
privateers, others as _forbans_ or unlicensed rovers, but still connived
at in Martinique.
Adventurers, buccaneers, pirates pass across the stage--the curtain
falls on them, and rises on a more glorious scene. Jamaica had become
the depot of the trade of England with the western world, and golden
streams had poured into Port Royal. Barbadoes was unoccupied when
England took possession of it, and never passed out of our hands; but
the Antilles--the Anterior Isles--which stand like a string of emeralds
round the neck of the Caribbean Sea, had been most of them colonised and
occupied by the French, and during the wars of the last century were the
objects of a never ceasing conflict between their fleets and ours. The
French had planted their language there, they had planted their religion
there, and the blacks of these islands generally still speak the French
patois and call themselves Catholics; but it was deemed essential to our
interests that the Antilles should be not French but English, and
Antigua, Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada were taken and
retaken and taken again in a struggle perpetually renewed. When the
American colonies revolted, the West Indies became involved in the
revolutionary hurricane. France, Spain, and Holland--our three ocean
rivals--combined in a supreme effort to tear from us our Imperial power.
The opportunity was seized by Irish patriots to clamour for Irish
nationality, and by the English Radicals to demand liberty and the
rights of man. It was the most critical moment in later English history.
If we had yielded to peace on the terms which our enemies offered, and
the English Liberals wished us to accept, the star of Great Britain
would have set for ever.
The West Indies were then under the charge of Rodney, whose brilliant
successes had already made his name famous. He had done his country more
than yeoman's service. He had torn the Leeward Islands from the French.
He had punished the Hollanders for joining the coalition by taking the
island of St. Eustachius and three millions' worth of stores and money.
The patriot party at home led by Fox and Burke were ill pleased with
these victories, for they wished us to be driven into surrender. Burke
denounced Rodney as he denounced Warren Hastings, and Rodney was called
home to answer for himself. In his absence Demerara, the Leeward
Islands, St. Eustachius itself, were captured or recovered by the enemy.
The French fleet, now supreme in the western waters, blockaded Lord
Cornwallis at York Town and forced him to capitulate. The Spaniards had
fitted out a fleet at Havannah, and the Count de Grasse, the French
admiral, fresh from the victorious thunder of the American cannon,
hastened back to refurnish himself at Martinique, intending to join the
Spaniards, tear Jamaica from us, and drive us finally and completely out
of the West Indies. One chance remained. Rodney was ordered back to his
station, and he went at his best speed, taking all the ships with him
which could then be spared. It was mid-winter. He forced his way to
Barbadoes in five weeks spite of equinoctial storms. The Whig orators
were indignant. They insisted that we were beaten; there had been
bloodshed enough, and we must sit down in our humiliation. The
Government yielded, and a peremptory order followed on Rodney's track,
'Strike your flag and come home.' Had that fatal command reached him
Gibraltar would have fallen and Hastings's Indian Empire would have
melted into air. But Rodney knew that his time was short, and he had
been prompt to use it. Before the order came, the severest naval battle
in English annals had been fought and won. De Grasse was a prisoner, and
the French fleet was scattered into wreck and ruin.
De Grasse had refitted in the Martinique dockyards. He himself and every
officer in the fleet was confident that England was at last done for,
and that nothing was left but to gather the fruits of the victory which
was theirs already. Not Xerxes, when he broke through Thermopylae and
watched from the shore his thousand galleys streaming down to the Gulf
of Salamis, was more assured that his prize was in his hands than De
Grasse on the deck of the 'Ville de Paris,' the finest ship then
floating on the seas, when he heard that Rodney was at St. Lucia and
intended to engage him. He did not even believe that the English after
so many reverses would venture to meddle with a fleet superior in force
and inspirited with victory. All the Antilles except St. Lucia were his
own. Tobago, Grenada, the Grenadines, St. Vincent, Martinique, Dominica,
Guadaloupe, Montserrat, Nevis, Antigua, and St. Kitts, he held them all
in proud possession, a string of gems, each island large as or larger
than the Isle of Man, rising up with high volcanic peaks clothed from
base to crest with forest, carved into deep ravines, and fringed with
luxuriant plains. In St. Lucia alone, lying between St. Vincent and
Dominica, the English flag still flew, and Rodney lay there in the
harbour at Castries. On April 8, 1782, the signal came from the north
end of the island that the French fleet had sailed. Martinique is in
sight of St. Lucia, and the rock is still shown from which Rodney had
watched day by day for signs that they were moving. They were out at
last, and he instantly weighed and followed. The air was light, and De
Grasse was under the high lands of Dominica before Rodney came up with
him. Both fleets were becalmed, and the English were scattered and
divided by a current which runs between the islands. A breeze at last
blew off the land. The French were the first to feel it, and were able
to attack at advantage the leading English division. Had De Grasse 'come
down as he ought,' Rodney thought that the consequences might have been
serious. In careless imagination of superiority they let the chance go
by. They kept at a distance, firing long shots, which as it was did
considerable damage. The two following days the fleets manoeuvred in
sight of each other. On the night of the eleventh Rodney made signal for
the whole fleet to go south under press of sail. The French thought he
was flying. He tacked at two in the morning, and at daybreak found
himself where he wished to be, with the French fleet on his lee
quarter. The French looking for nothing but again a distant cannonade,
continued leisurely along under the north highlands of Dominica towards
the channel which separates that island from Guadaloupe. In number of
ships the fleets were equal; in size and complement of crew the French
were immensely superior; and besides the ordinary ships' companies they
had twenty thousand soldiers on board who were to be used in the
conquest of Jamaica. Knowing well that a defeat at that moment would be
to England irreparable ruin, they did not dream that Rodney would be
allowed, even if he wished it, to risk a close and decisive engagement.
The English admiral was aware also that his country's fate was in his
hands. It was one of those supreme moments which great men dare to use
and small men tremble at. He had the advantage of the wind, and could
force a battle or decline it, as he pleased. With clear daylight the
signal to engage was flying from the masthead of the 'Formidable,'
Rodney's ship. At seven in the morning, April 12, 1782, the whole fleet
bore down obliquely on the French line, cutting it directly in two.
Rodney led in person. Having passed through and broken up their order he
tacked again, still keeping the wind. The French, thrown into confusion,
were unable to reform, and the battle resolved itself into a number of
separate engagements in which the English had the choice of position.
Rodney in passing through the enemy's lines the first time had exchanged
broadsides with the 'Glorieux,' a seventy-four, at close range. He had
shot away her masts and bowsprit, and left her a bare hull; her flag,
however, still flying, being nailed to a splintered spar. So he left her
unable to stir; and after he had gone about came himself yardarm to
yardarm with the superb 'Ville de Paris,' the pride of France, the
largest ship in the then world, where De Grasse commanded in person. All
day long the cannon roared. Rodney had on board a favourite bantam cock,
which stood perched upon the poop of the 'Formidable' through the whole
action, its shrill voice heard crowing through the thunder of the
broadsides. One by one the French ships struck their flags or fought on
till they foundered and went down. The carnage on board them was
terrible, crowded as they were with the troops for Jamaica. Fourteen
thousand were reckoned to have been killed, besides the prisoners. The
'Ville de Paris' surrendered last, fighting desperately after hope was
gone till her masts were so shattered that they could not bear a sail,
and her decks above and below were littered over with mangled limbs. De
Grasse gave up his sword to Rodney on the 'Formidable's' quarter-deck.
The gallant 'Glorieux,' unable to fly, and seeing the battle lost,
hauled down her flag, but not till the undisabled remnants of her crew
were too few to throw the dead into the sea. Other ships took fire and
blew up. Half the French fleet were either taken or sunk; the rest
crawled away for the time, most of them to be picked up afterwards like
crippled birds.
So on that memorable day was the English Empire saved. Peace followed,
but it was 'peace with honour.' The American colonies were lost; but
England kept her West Indies; her flag still floated over Gibraltar; the
hostile strength of Europe all combined had failed to twist Britannia's
ocean sceptre from her: she sat down maimed and bleeding, but the wreath
had not been torn from her brow, she was still sovereign of the seas.
The bow of Ulysses was strung in those days. The order of recall arrived
when the work was done. It was proudly obeyed; and even the great Burke
admitted that no honour could be bestowed upon Rodney which he had not
deserved at his country's hands. If the British Empire is still to have
a prolonged career before it, the men who make empires are the men who
can hold them together. Oratorical reformers can overthrow what deserves
to be overthrown. Institutions, even the best of them, wear out, and
must give place to others, and the fine political speakers are the
instruments of their overthrow. But the fine speakers produce nothing of
their own, and as constructive statesmen their paths are strewed with
failures. The worthies of England are the men who cleared and tilled her
fields, formed her laws, built her colleges and cathedrals, founded her
colonies, fought her battles, covered the ocean with commerce, and
spread our race over the planet to leave a mark upon it which time will
not efface. These men are seen in their work, and are not heard of in
Parliament. When the account is wound up, where by the side of them will
stand our famous orators? What will any one of these have left behind
him save the wreck of institutions which had done their work and had
ceased to serve a useful purpose? That was their business in this world,
and they did it and do it; but it is no very glorious work, not a work
over which it is possible to feel any 'fine enthusiasm.' To chop down a
tree is easier than to make it grow. When the business of destruction is
once completed, they and their fame and glory will disappear together.
Our true great ones will again be visible, and thenceforward will be
visible alone.
Is there a single instance in our own or any other history of a great
political speaker who has added anything to human knowledge or to human
worth? Lord Chatham may stand as a lonely exception. But except Chatham
who is there? Not one that I know of. Oratory is the spendthrift sister
of the arts, which decks itself like a strumpet with the tags and
ornaments which it steals from real superiority. The object of it is not
truth, but anything which it can make appear truth; anything which it
can persuade people to believe by calling in their passions to obscure
their intelligence.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] This is the explanation of the name which is given by Dampier.