After touching at Barbadoes on his way, Rodney reached Santa Lucia on March 28th, and fought his first battle in those waters on April 17th. A variety of causes—some political, some physical—made the West Indies the great scene of naval fighting in the American War. France had been induced to help the insurgent colonists, partly from a desire for revenge, partly in the hope that she would be able to compensate herself for the losses imposed at the Peace of Fontainebleau by the conquest of the Lesser Antilles. Spain again had, not without reluctance, for it ill suited her to encourage the rebellion of colonists in America, been induced to join the alliance in the hope of recovering Jamaica and Florida, as well as of driving the English garrisons from Gibraltar and Minorca. Our possessions in the West Indies were therefore naturally an object of attack. The most effectual method of extorting both her Mediterranean outposts and her West Indian Islands would have been to attack England vigorously at home. As the allies were able to collect a fleet of over sixty sail at the mouth of the Channel in 1779, some such attack might, it would seem, have been made. The only force we could then oppose to them was about thirty line-of-battle. They had, in fact, what Napoleon longed for—the command of the Channel, and that not for twenty-four hours but for weeks; yet the capture of a stray sixty-four was all they could effect.
Why France, which has so often threatened to invade us before and since, made no attempt to do so when the enterprise had been feasible, and even easy, is a curious question. The failure of their purely naval operations is easily explained. The Spaniards, who formed nearly half the great fleet, were wretchedly inefficient; short of provisions, as ignorant of the navigation of the English Channel as they had been when Medina Sidonia blundered into it and out of it, they were, moreover, miserably sickly. They communicated the plague to their French friends, who lost four thousand men by it. Apart, however, from this particular reason for failure, there was a permanent one which weighed on our enemy. France possessed at that time no port of war on the Channel. Brest looks on to the ocean. As the prevailing winds of the Channel are from west and south-west, it behoved a fleet in the old sailing days to beware how it trusted itself inside of Portland Bill; for if it were crippled either by storm or battle it might not be able to get out. In that case there would be nothing for it but to follow the fatal route of the Armada—to steer for home round the north of Scotland and to the west of Ireland. The sea, as M. Michelet pathetically observes, hates France. It has worn her coast flat and provided England with two noble harbours right over against her, at Portsmouth and Plymouth. Looking at these unfavourable conditions, the French, from La Hogue downwards, have generally kept their fleets out of the Channel. Not being able to attack our heart, they have attacked our extremities. In the American War the particular extremity they selected was the West Indies.
To understand a general’s fighting it is necessary to get some idea of his field of battle. The lay historian commonly remembers this well enough when he is dealing with battles on shore, but whether because he does not understand them, or discourteously thinks his reader cannot, he takes no account of the conditions in sea-fights; yet they are every whit as important and as intelligible. What the hill, the river, and the wood were to Napoleon or Wellington, the wind, the current, and the lie of the land were to Rodney or Nelson. They were obstacles to be avoided or advantages to be used. Rodney’s field of battle lay in the Lesser Antilles, the long string of small islands stretching over six degrees of latitude from south to north which form the eastern division of the West Indies. The Antilles, great and less, are a vast broken reef which shuts in the gigantic lagoon called the Caribbean Sea. The eastern division, which reaches north to the Virgin Islands, has been broken small by the pressure of the ocean. From the Virgin Islands the reef turns sharp west, and its fragments become few and large—first Porto Rico is big, then San Domingo is bigger, then Cuba is the biggest. South of Cuba and in the Caribbean Sea is Jamaica. In 1780 Cuba and Porto Rico belonged to Spain, as they still do. She shared San Domingo with France, and longed to recover Jamaica from the hands of England. The Lesser Antilles were divided among England, France, and Holland. To them considerations, physical and political, limited the area of the war.
All through the year, except in the immediate neighbourhood of the land or when the hurricane is raging over them, the Antilles are swept by the easterly trade wind. According to the season of the year, or the hour of the day, the trade blows from north or south of east, but it always blows from the ocean over the Lesser Antilles and along the Greater. Narrow strips of water are shut out from it by mountains, and conflicting temperatures cause an alternation of sea breezes by day and land breezes by night in the neighbourhood of the larger islands. But the trade is the “true breeze,” the steady uniform force which in the days of sailing ships gave the law to war and to commerce. It even affected language, for in the West Indies men did not say east and west, but windward and leeward. The unceasing pressure of the wind on the water has established a surface current which flows to the west. Wind and wave together have worn the windward or easterly side of the Lesser Antilles bare. All the harbours are on the leeward or western side, looking into the Caribbean Sea. Thus wind and current alike tend to force all ships navigating the Antilles to the westward. When this pressure from the east is taken off it is by a force which suspends all his labours, whether of peace or war, and sends man crouching into the first place of safety he can find. From the end of July to the end of September are the hurricane months. While they last no sailing fleets cared to keep the sea. They lay in harbour or went elsewhere.
These physical conditions made the Lesser Antilles the gates of the West Indies. Whoever held them could run down whenever he chose on the Western Islands, but ships coming from the west must work up into the wind by weary tacking, or by hugging the coasts of the islands to avail themselves of every varying puff of land and sea breeze, of every reset of the currents from the headlands. Whoever was to windward had the option of attack and the choice of his course. After a little reading of the accounts of old sea-fights, one can realise how appropriate is the use of the words “up” and “down” as applied to the leeward or windward position. He who was to leeward had literally to struggle up to his enemy as a man toils up a hill. He who was to windward could stand watching the foe till some such disorder in his line as is very likely to occur among a number of ships manœuvring together, or some fault in the course taken, gave him an opportunity to rush down and charge home. Then, too, the road to and from Europe lay through the Lesser Antilles. The heartbreaking shallows, reefs, and keys of the Bahamas make the approach to the West Indies from the north dangerous now; and in the eighteenth century, when surveys and lighthouses were not, they formed an almost impassable barrier. Therefore the conquest of the Lesser Antilles was looked upon as the necessary preliminary to an attack on the Greater, and so before the French would risk an attack on Jamaica, they must first drive us out of the positions of advantage to windward.
When Rodney reached Santa Lucia in March the adversaries in the coming duel were fairly equal in force and advantage of position. M. de Guichen had arrived at Martinique a few days before with reinforcements, which gave the French a slight numerical superiority. As the possession of the islands was divided there was no marked advantage on either side. The French held Guadaloupe and Martinique, which had been restored to them at the close of the former war. They had lately captured Dominica, which lies between the two. They had also snapped up Grenada far away to the south, under the very nose of Admiral Byron. On the other hand Barrington had seized Santa Lucia and had held it in defiance of D’Estaing. This was a satisfactory offset to the loss of Dominica and Grenada. Santa Lucia lies to the south of Martinique, and a little to windward of it. At the north-west end it possesses the admirable harbour of Gros Islet Bay. From this place the French naval headquarters at Fort Royal in Martinique could be easily watched. Santa Lucia was therefore a much better station for our ships than Antigua, far to the north, which they had hitherto used, or Barbadoes, which lies out in the ocean to the east. When Rodney and Guichen began their struggle they were, as duellists should be, on fairly equal terms as to ground and sun.
How far they were equally well supplied with weapons is a question not so easy to settle. In that respect Rodney ought, if our rather complacent belief in the natural superiority of the British navy is well grounded, to have had an overwhelming advantage. As a matter of fact, however, the superiority of our fleet was by no means what it became later on, and was to remain all through the next war. The French navy was at its best, and that best was very good. On all modern principles it should have been by far the better of the two. It was much the more carefully organised and schooled. From just before the end of the Seven Years’ War till the beginning of this, the French Government had worked very hard at its fleet, and with very creditable results. The material strength of its navy was considerable. When in alliance with the Spanish, the combined force exceeded our own in mere number of available ships and guns. The education of the French naval officers was very thorough. They themselves were, for the most part, cadets de famille, younger sons of noble houses—gentlemen, in short, with the traditional gallantry of their class. Many of them belonged to families which had served “on the ships of the King” from father to son since Louis XIV established the gardes de la marine. Chateaubriand, in his Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, has left a striking picture of the class from which the French naval officers were mainly drawn, the provincial nobles, who had kept all the pride of birth, but had not been corrupted by the Court. Their names read like a roll of those who defended the bastions of the langues of France or Auvergnes at Rhodes or Valetta. Indeed, they are often the same, for the connection between the order of Malta and the French navy was close. Service in the caravans of “the Religion” counted as service in the King’s ships. The nobles of Provence, who recruited the order largely, were numerous in the navy, and some of them served in both—the Bailli de Souffren, for instance, who was by far the ablest of the French officers who appeared in this war, was a Knight of St. John. So there is a ring of romance about their names which is somewhat lacking to our own sober Bowens, Cornishes, Thompsons, and Barbers, all of which sound but flat alongside of Buor de la Charoulière, Le Gardeur de Tilly, Visdelou de Liscouel, Carcaredec, Assas-Mondardier, or Tredern de Lengerec. Among these gallant gentlemen were some of the best officers who ever served any king. They had studied their profession hard, and had thought much more of the military part of it than English naval officers. It is a fact which the reader may think creditable or not, that the technical treatises, whether on seamanship or tactics, used by English officers were mostly translated from the French. The crews of the French ships were formed either of carefully drilled landsmen, or of the fishermen who were swept into the navy by the inscription maritime. At the beginning of the war they were very well drilled and efficient.
There were, however, several weak points in this force, one or two of them of a very fatal kind. The fact that the officers of the regular corps were all nobles had in some respects a bad effect. It limited their number for one thing, so that when the whole navy had in modern phrase to be mobilised, it was necessary to employ supplementary officers who did not belong to the gardes de la marine and were known as officiers blues. The France of the eighteenth century would not have been what it was if these intruders had not been regarded with a certain amount of contempt and jealousy by the nobles. This led to one kind of dispute. Then again there were jealousies in the privileged corps itself between the port of Toulon and the port of Brest, between the division of the Mediterranean and that of the ocean—or, to put it in other words, between the nobles of Provence and those of Normandy and Brittany. All these men too were so conscious that they were nobles as to somewhat forget the fact that they were officers. They thought little of their rank as compared with their common nobility. They all messed together, they thee’d and thou’d one another in the friendly second person singular. This easy good-fellowship must have been socially more pleasant than the stern subordination of an English ship, on which the captain lived apart in solitary grandeur, and the midshipmen looked up with awe to the lieutenants. But of the two, ours was the better system for discipline. In the French navy the midshipman of sixteen quarterings made no scruple of giving his opinion to his brother noble the captain, and the lieutenant who was as good a gentleman as either differed from both. There was a great deal of discussion in their ships when in an English vessel an order would have been given and obeyed.
A defect of this kind could have been amended. It would not have been equally possible to make good the poverty of the maritime population of France. That weakness was fatal, and beyond remedy. By taking immense care to drill men in peace, and by sweeping the mass of its merchant sailors into its war-ships, the French Government was able to start with an excellently appointed fleet; but it had no reserve. As the war went on, and men fell by battle or disease, they could not be replaced. It is notorious that the French navy could never make good the loss of the four thousand well-trained men carried off by the plague during the cruise of the combined fleets in 1779. Thus there was a steady loss of efficiency in their ships which grew in proportion as the number of vessels in commission increased. It was not possible to find good men to man them or trained officers to command them. To take a single instance. At the very close of the war, Sir John Jervis, then captain of the Foudroyant, eighty, took a French seventy-four, the Pegase, after a very feeble resistance. It was found that the French crew were mostly landsmen collected by hook and by crook, while she was so short of officers that an enseigne de vaisseau—a mate as we should have said then, a sub-lieutenant according to our present scale of ranks—a lad of nineteen, was the only officer on her first battery. And this was only an exceptionally bad example of what was going on all through the French navy. In the meantime the English navy, drawing its men from a vast maritime population, and entirely unlimited in its choice of officers, was steadily getting more efficient. Taken as usual somewhat unprepared at the beginning of the war, it gradually collected the flower of our seamen from merchant ships in all parts of the world. Its officers came to it in thousands, mostly from the middle class, and no consideration of birth stopped the promotion of competent men when they could be secured. Under the government of vigorous admirals the fleet was welded and trained into a ten times better force than it was when the first shot was fired. This was, however, but the natural result of the profound difference of kind which distinguished the navies. When the French King wished to have a powerful naval force, it grew because a resolute and intelligent administration built it laboriously up. A high-spirited and alert people supplied brave crews and gallant, ingenious gentlemen to command them. But the force had no native life of its own. It was what the State made it and no more. The English navy was a living force fed by the vitality of the nation. It was ever ahead of its rulers, and never passively submissive to the impulse from them. The immense advance in organisation and tactics, in armament, in gunnery, and construction, which took place in this war, was the work of the admirals and captains themselves—thought out by them, urged by them on their official masters at Whitehall, frequently made effective by them at their own risk and with their own money. The virtue which redeemed the many faults of the Admiralty was that it did leave to its commanders elbow-room and power. Between two such forces, one the mere work of the artificer, the other the living plant, there could be no doubt where the victory would ultimately rest.
That it was not decided sooner was due to the principles on which the French chose, and we were content, to fight. Whoever has taken even a slight interest in our eighteenth-century wars must have been struck by the inconclusive character of much of the naval fighting. Except where there was an overwhelming superiority of force, as in Hawke’s attack on L’Etenduère, and Rodney’s action with Don Juan de Langara, battles were mere cannonades at a less or greater distance, followed by the separation of the fleets without loss to either. At Quiberon, where our superiority in numbers was not so great, the French were flying before the storm, and in no order, when Hawke pounced on them. In this same American war there took place a round score of battles of which as much might be said. Now this was not due to want of will or spirit, but to the fact that officers on both sides played the game according to rules which made effective fighting impossible.