It is a striking coincidence that the year of the taking of Gibraltar was also the year of Blenheim. The superiority passed to the allies on land as well as on sea. Henceforth the French king could do less and less with his navy. Year after year the Grand Fleets poured out of the Channel in spring, and swept like a great tidal wave round the coasts of the Peninsula, and into the Gulf of Lyons. They made the capture of Barcelona, and its relief, possible. It was they who enabled General Stanhope to take Port Mahon which, together with Gibraltar, remained in our hands at the end of the war. They kept the Hapsburg cause alive in Spain for a space. Yet their operations present only a repetition of similar incidents, and enforce always the same lessons: that where the road lies over the sea, the ships only can stop it for an invader, or open it for invasion—an obvious but apparently an easily forgotten truth.
Writing in 1704, Josiah Burchett, the Secretary of the Admiralty, had occasion to acknowledge the ill success of an expedition sent to the West Indies during the reign of King William; “but,” he went on, “when had we an opportunity, or at least when was there any attempt made by us from the beginning of the last war, to this very time, where the advantage proved in any degree equal to the charge and inconveniences that did attend it? The injuries we did to the French when Sir Francis Wheeler commanded in the West Indies were inconsiderable, and what have our successes been before and after that expedition? I doubt it was found that our squadrons came home in a much worse condition than when they set forth, both as to men, and all other circumstances; and not having the good fortune to do any sensible injuries to our enemy, they (i.e. the enemy) had the satisfaction of knowing what inconveniences we involved ourselves in.” The cruises carried out after 1704 might be summed up in much the same terms. As we were then engaged against the Spaniards as well as the French, a change was made in the scope of our operations. The peculiar character of Spanish trade with the new world, in which the most valuable portion of the home-coming cargoes was the bullion brought from the mines of Mexico and Peru, gave us an opportunity to achieve one success of a kind highly profitable to the officers and men engaged. In 1709, Sir Charles Wager captured a treasure ship, and he also inflicted loss on her companion ships, which was most injurious to the Spaniards. But this action stands almost apart in a long series of cruises of little interest, and no important result.
The nature of these operations can be shown by a brief account of the first. When the war began in 1689 it was felt that the French plantations in America, and more especially those in Hispaniola, represented a portion of the enemy’s resources which it was desirable to diminish. The English officers in America were ordered to molest the French to the utmost of their ability. In order that they might be the better able to perform this duty they were reinforced by a squadron from Europe. It consisted of one third rate, seven fourth rates, one fifth rate, and of two fireships, and was commanded by Captain Lawrence Wright, an officer of some five-and-twenty years’ standing, who had been in the West Indies before. His orders were to ship the Duke of Bolton’s regiment of foot at Plymouth, and to sail for the Leeward Islands, that is the more northerly of the Lesser Antilles which stretch from the Virgin Islands to Dominica. Here he was to co-operate with Colonel Codrington, the governor, whose headquarters were at Antigua. The governor was to add what forces he could, and attacks were then to be made upon the French. Elaborate directions were given to Wright—that he was to be guided by a council of war, to act in so far as operations on shore were concerned, under the general direction of the military officers, to spare what sailors he could for operations on land, and not to send ships from his squadron without consent of the governor and council, lest the islands should be “exposed to insults.”
Thus directed, and with these limited powers, Captain Wright sailed from Plymouth on the 8th March 1690 with a number of merchant ships under his protection. Storms scattered the convoy immediately after it left the Channel, but it arrived safe at Madeira on the 2nd of April. On the 11th May it reached Barbadoes. Though only two months had passed since the squadron had left England, and it had stopped at Madeira, the crews were so sickly, presumably from scurvy, that Captain Wright was compelled to land many of his men to be cured, and could not sail till the 27th May. On the 30th of the month he reached Antigua. Colonel Codrington joined him with some soldiers, and a series of buccaneering operations was begun against the French at St. Christopher, and St. Eustatius to the west of Antigua, and at no great distance. Men were landed, forts taken, plantations plundered and burnt, negroes carried off. No attempt was made to hold the French islands, and this form of purely destructive warfare went on till about the middle of July. The hurricane months (July, August, and September) were now upon them, both sailors and soldiers were sickly, and the expedition returned to Antigua. Wright went out to Barbadoes, and there remained till the 6th October. The island lies out of the usual track of the hurricane, and that danger is considered to be “all over” in October, though there have been some notable and destructive exceptions to these rules.
On the 6th October, Wright again sailed to join Codrington at Antigua, and a plan was laid for attacking the French island of Guadaloupe. It is to be noted that Wright’s crews having been sorely diminished by sickness, he had been compelled to press sailors from the merchant ships at Barbadoes. While the English squadron was collected for the purpose of attacking St. Christopher, the French privateers sailing from Hispaniola, Martinique and Guadaloupe, had been very busy. They were known to have captured numbers of our merchant ships, and the trade was threatened with ruin. Some of them cruised at their ease within sight of the shore at Barbadoes, taking the small vessels employed to bring from Virginia the bacon and maize which were the provisions needed for the negro slaves. There was even danger of famine. At Antigua, Wright was called off by orders to sail for England, and did actually come back as far as Barbadoes. Here, however, counter-orders were sent him to remain, and promises of reinforcements. In January of 1691 store ships, and one man-of-war, reached him. This addition to his force, small as it was, was yet welcome, for he had been compelled to detach vessels on convoy service, doubtless in answer to the loud outcries of the merchants. In February he again joined Codrington, and the scheme of attacking Guadaloupe was resumed. On the 27th of that month, Marie Galante, a little outlying island just south of Guadaloupe, was raided with the usual details of plunder and arson. Then a landing was effected on Guadaloupe, but in May these unworthy operations were brought to an end by the report that a French squadron had reached Martinique from Europe, and was coming on. At once the troops were re-embarked, not without signs of panic, and a council of war decided to return to Barbadoes. Wright and Codrington had come to open quarrel. At Barbadoes the naval chiefs health broke down. He resigned his command, and sailed for home. Some of the ships followed him with a convoy. Others remained in the West Indies.
Wright, who left Barbadoes amid a chorus of jeers and accusations of cowardice, may fairly be considered to have had hard measure. He was never again employed at sea, though he held some dock-yard posts. There is nothing to show that he was a man to rise above adverse circumstances, but the bare narrative of the events of the cruise given above is his best excuse. Let us look at the facts, bearing meanwhile in mind that what is to be said of them applies in different degrees, but always to some extent, to every expedition we sent to the West Indies from the beginning of the war in 1689 down to the peace of Utrecht. In the first place the material force given to the commander was inadequate to the work he had to do. It was not sufficient to capture the principal French posts, yet he was ordered to make attacks on the enemy’s territory. The inevitable result was that, while he had his ships concentrated for miserable burning and plundering raids, the French privateers cruised unchecked. The blame for this rests mainly on the Government. It repeated in the West Indies the very mistake of ordering attacks on coast towns with insufficient forces, which as we have seen it was also making in the Channel. Then these material forces, too weak in themselves to begin with, suffered from causes serious enough to have paralysed greater powers. It was a brutal and greedy generation, callously indifferent to the well-being of the men. The younger Hawkins, and Lancaster—the captain of the East India Company—had shown how to keep crews healthy on long voyages even in the tropics. We had the example of the Dutch to guide us. Yet the chiefs of the navy allowed their men to rot from scurvy and perish by fever, not from want of knowledge, which they could have acquired at once if they had looked for it, but from mere hardness of heart and selfishness. The destruction of life by disease in our fleets was everywhere great, and in the West Indies it was enormous. Of the superior officers who sailed with Admiral Nevill in 1696-1697 only one captain lived to return home. The pestiferous squalor of the lower deck avenged the sailors. At the close of Captain R. Wilmot’s expedition of 1695 one vessel was lost on the reefs of Florida, from sheer want of men to handle her sails. The sailors followed the example set them, and were affected by the spirit of their time. They found consolation for the hardships of life afloat in excesses on shore. Burchett assures us that the harbours of the West Indies were more fatal to the men than the sea.
In this atmosphere, as of a town smitten by plague where men hasten to enjoy while they can, sailors and soldiers were sent to plunder. Each soon began to suspect the other of attempting to defraud, and the passions of disappointed gamblers were added to the professional rivalry of men who in that generation were rarely honest enough to subordinate their passions to the general good of “the king’s service.” The fierce feuds of sailor and soldier flamed up in these expeditions, but the case of Admiral Benbow shows that a British admiral of that generation could not always rely on loyal and honest support even from his subordinates. Add to this, that jarring soldier and sailor elements were constantly called upon to combine in councils, and that they were both subjected to a vague check by the governors and councils of the islands. In such conditions effective operations were not possible.
While the Grand Fleets were cruising, often unopposed and never effectually checked by the French, while the colonial expeditions sailed year after year to fail, or at the best to achieve half successes, by their own defects rather than from the strength of their enemy, the allies suffered severely at sea from the enterprise of the corsairs who won for France nearly all the glory and profit she gained from these naval wars. This side of the struggle is of peculiar, indeed it may be said to be of contemporary, interest. French writers are fond of dwelling on the success of their privateers in the later seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries. They argue that it proves their national aptitude for swift destructive attacks on trade, and draw the deduction that if ever war breaks out again between them and us, they must revert to the methods of the men who, if they could not disturb the movements of the great allied fleets, did at least make the conflict costly to English and Dutch commerce. It is their belief that if they can only do what those adventurers did on a somewhat larger scale, then England, which is far more dependent on trade than she then was, and is now under the obligation to import large quantities of food, which was not then the case, will find her superiority in fleets of no avail. We are looking then at what concerns us directly when we turn our attention to the doings of the French corsairs between 1689 and 1712.
Owing to a combination of circumstances the guerrillero, or partisan war of the sea, was then conducted in exceptionally favourable conditions. When they have been detailed, and the results reached have been summed up, we shall be in a position to judge how far those conditions, favourable as they were to the corsairs, were also of advantage to our enemy. This failure of the French fleet had a double effect. French coasting trade conducted in small vessels, fitted to hug the shore and take refuge under coast batteries, went on, disturbed, but not destroyed. But French oversea commerce was almost wholly suspended. Thus numbers of men were thrown out of employment, and the shipowners were driven to look elsewhere for profit. Both were inevitably turned to privateering. We had seen the same consequence ensue in Elizabeth’s reign, when the Spanish war interrupted our chief oversea trade. Again, so soon as the great fleets had no longer to be manned for cruising, the king had a strong motive to find other employment for his sailors and his officers. Therefore he allowed them to go on privateering voyages, and even hired out his vessels for the purpose or entered into partnership with the owners. Here again our own Elizabethan precedent was closely, if unconsciously, followed. Similar causes produced similar results, and as Elizabeth became the partner of “adventurers” on plundering expeditions to the West Indies, or to Cadiz, so King Louis entered into contracts with his armateurs for similar ventures. Finally, the French leaders of that generation were of much the same stamp as our Elizabethans. M. de Pointis, the Chevalier de Saint Pol, the Count de Forbin, Jean Bart, and Duguay-Trouin were the French equivalents of Raleigh, Cumberland, Drake, Frobisher, and Hawkins. Some of them won their way to social position, and the royal service, by good fighting in the privateers. Others were king’s officers lent for the work.
While Tourville kept the sea, the share of the privateers in the war was small, and the harm they did very trifling in comparison to the injury inflicted on the Smyrna convoy by the French fleet in 1693. Only a part of their total later activity in the war directly concerned us. Jean Bart, a Fleming of the Flemish town of Dunkirk, cruised mainly against the Dutch in the North Seas. The two greatest single achievements of the French privateers, the capture of Carthagena by M. de Pointis in the reign of King William (1697), and the capture of Rio de Janeiro by Duguay-Trouin in the reign of Queen Anne (1711), were directed against the Spaniards and the Portuguese respectively. They were very similar to Drake’s raid on the West Indies in 1585. The Dunkirk privateers preyed on our commerce after their town had become French, as they had done while it formed part of the Low Country possessions of the King of Spain. We blockaded it with indifferent success. Other ports also sent out their corsairs. Our chief interest is with the Breton town of St. Malo, and with the activity of its hero Réné Duguay-Trouin. He used other ports, Dunkirk or Rochelle occasionally, and Brest often. He co-operated with other men, notably with the Count of Forbin, but St. Malo was his headquarters and also the typical corsair town, while he was the central dominating figure of the corsair war. Jean Bart died in the middle of the conflict. Forbin had other activities. Saint Pol, Nesmond, and many more who could be named, were subordinate. Following the scheme of this book, I take him as the characteristic illuminative example.