There to westward and south-westward of us lay the French, broken into three fragments. On the surface of the water there was something which was pure horror to all whose eyes were compelled to see it. Shoals of sharks—which alone among God’s creatures the sailor tortures without remorse, the loathsome brute which loiters to profit by his misfortune—had collected to feed on the corpses thrown overboard, or the living who had fallen with fragments of rigging. They were leaping over one another, and ravening at their prey. From them the eyes of our men turned to the scattered fragments of the French fleet. They were three in number. Vaudreuil with the rear had been turned to the west. Two miles south of him seven ships were huddled round the flag. Four miles to the south-east of him again was Bougainville. His course had taken him into the dead calm under the high land of Dominica. The English had themselves broken into three in dividing the enemy, but they had streamed up to windward. They could unite, and had it in their power to select the point of attack. Between the two fleets lay the dismasted hulks of the César and the Glorieux, the vessels astern of which the French line had been cut, rolling helpless on the water.
For an hour or so our advantage of position was not available. The thunder of so many guns had beaten down the wind. Conquerors and conquered lay bound by the calm. A little after mid-day a gentle breeze arose, and the English streamed down on the enemy. The signal for the line of battle was hauled down, and we advanced in no order, as needing none against a foe already shattered. It has always been the weakness of the French to be enslaved by rules, and to become panic-stricken when these break down. There was panic among them now. Signal after signal was hoisted in vain by their admiral. Bougainville, tied by ill-will as much as by the calm, did nothing; Vaudreuil did little. The English as they felt the wind—all of them, that is, whose rigging had not been too severely cut up—pressed upon the enemy, steering, by a natural impulse and without express orders, to where the mighty bulk of the Ville de Paris and the flag of Grasse pointed out the great prize. The crippled Glorieux was the first of the enemy to surrender. A gallant attempt to save her was made by the French frigate Richmond, commanded by Captain Mortemart, a gentleman, as his name shows, of a good house. He offered to take the crippled liner in tow, but Trogoff de Kerlessi would not allow his gallant countryman to sacrifice himself and his ship in vain. The English were closing round. Trogoff cut the cable, telling Mortemart to save himself, and then surrendered his shattered vessel, as a brave man might, without dishonour. There was some honour in defeating enemies of that stamp. The César hauled down her colours soon after. The Hector and the Ardent fell next. This last was a most welcome prize. She had been taken from the English by the great combined fleet of Frenchmen and Spaniards which cruised at the mouth of the Channel in 1779. She alone had pushed out from among Bougainville’s squadron to the help of her admiral, and was close to him when she struck. Her captain’s name was Gouzillon. The last of the French prizes to be taken was the Ville de Paris. The light winds made our movements slow, and our ships only came up with her when the afternoon was wearing on. They tackled her to port and to starboard, but the admiral fought as a man fights who wishes to atone by heroism for all faults. His cartridges were used up, and it was necessary to hoist powder-barrels out of the hold, and serve out the powder with the ladle. The solid fog of smoke between decks choked the lanterns by which the men worked below. Still, until nearly six he had not surrendered. Then, with the feeling which caused Francis I. at Pavia to refuse to give up his sword till he could hand it to the Viceroy of Naples, the alter ego of a sovereign and in some sort his equal, he looked about for a flag-officer to whom to surrender. At that moment Samuel Hood bore down on him in the Barfleur. She had been long becalmed, and it had been necessary to get the boats out to tow her into the breeze. Now she was pressing on to lay alongside the Ville de Paris. Grasse turned towards her, firing a gun of salute. Hood concluded that his old friend of the fights off Martinique and St. Kitts wished to surrender to him. He returned the salute, ranged up alongside, and the two admirals fought a space for honour’s sake. There was no want of cartridges on board the Barfleur. Her guns were cold. Her men were fresh. Her terrible fire speedily overpowered the languid answer of the Ville de Paris, whose crew, diminished by a half, were fighting hopelessly in the dark of the smoke with guns which they could only slowly feed with powder. After a few minutes Grasse concluded that enough had been done. There were but three unwounded men on his upper-deck, of whom he was one. More men had been slain in his ship than in the whole British fleet. There were not two square feet of his upper works unshattered by shot. His rigging was a wreck. At six o’clock he hauled down the Fleur de Lys with his own hands. A few minutes later he stepped into the cutter which shot alongside him from the Barfleur, and was taken a prisoner to Hood. By Hood he was taken to Rodney, and so ended a career which might have finished with honour if he had not later disgraced himself by ignoble attempts to throw the blame of defeat on his captains.
The battle was over, and had been over for some time; but in the opinion of many officers the pursuit should have lasted longer. If we can believe Thesiger, who wrote a few months later to his brother, Douglas pressed Rodney to follow the French through the night. Having wedged ourselves between Vaudreuil and Bougainville, it would seem that we might have followed and crushed either. The French were certainly broken into two. Part of them fled in panic to Curaçoa, six hundred miles off; others to San Domingo. But Rodney thought otherwise. He—so says Thesiger—silenced Douglas by telling him that he had already spoken too much. The captain of the fleet was beyond dispute so stung by this, or some similar, rebuke that he seriously thought of resigning his place to Fanshawe of the Ajax. He thought better of it, and was always afterwards perfectly loyal to his admiral when busybodies asked him if enough had been done. “We had a great deal to do, sir, and I think you will allow we did a great deal,” was his uniform reply. Rodney did answer the critics by giving his reasons for not pursuing. He alleged the crippled state of some of his ships, the probability that the French might reunite, the chance that the prizes might be lost, the necessity of going on to Jamaica and looking to its safety. These are, frankly, not reasons which would have satisfied Hawke, or Rodney himself twenty years before. But he was old, broken by disease, his hour of full triumph had come late, he had that day had thirteen hours of incessant strain of work and anxiety. Something must be allowed for human weakness. The pursuit was stopped and the fleet lay to for the night. The last incident of the battle was the loss of the César—a foreshadowing of what was to follow, for none of our prizes lived to reach England. After the surrender the French crew broke into disorder, and one of them, entering her spirit-room with a naked light, set fire to an unheaded cask of ratafia. The flames spread, and the César burned to the water’s edge. The English prize-crew perished in her, the lieutenant in command being seen in the stern-walk fighting the fire to the last. No boat dared approach: the sharks were swarming under the counter; and he stayed to die in the flames, at his post.
Such, as far as I have been able to realise it, was the great battle sometimes called by us “of the Saints,” but most commonly “of April 12th,” and by the French termed the battle off Dominica. The failure to pursue was a blot; but after all, as Sir Charles Douglas was wont to say, “a great deal had been done.” If we had not twenty prizes instead of five, we had destroyed at a blow the laboriously-built-up prestige of the French fleets in the New World, which was something. We had restored our own nerve and shaken the enemy’s. This result was fully shown some months later when Howe sailed on the final relief of Gibraltar. On that occasion the combined French and Spanish fleets shrank timidly from measuring themselves with a greatly inferior English force. The immediate effect of the battles was to break up the French fleet in the West Indies and to save Jamaica. Vaudreuil, who fled to San Domingo, waited only to collect as many ships as he could, and then sailed for the coast of North America. The French ships which had taken refuge at Curaçoa made no further attempt to keep the sea. It is true that during the remainder of the war, which dragged on till the beginning of 1783, the allies collected considerable fleets and continued to talk of renewing the attack on the West Indies. English Ministers, when called upon to defend the peace then made, pointed to the size of these fleets as reasons why we should accept less good terms than the nation thought we had a right to demand. But in truth the allies made no real use of those forces, and they were only quoted by English Ministers as an excuse for doing what they felt to be made necessary by the financial burden imposed by the war, and the fatigue caused by five years of fighting. Essentially the peace was a good one. We were, indeed, compelled to acknowledge the independence of the United States, and we restored Minorca and Florida to Spain; but we kept Gibraltar, we fixed our grip for ever on India, and we settled on equal terms with France. Our position was in reality intact and our spirit unbroken. That this was so was largely due to the victory of April 12th. It is therefore right that this day, and the man who commanded on it, should be remembered among the great days and the great men of the Empire.
The battle has a place all its own in the history of our navy. It marked the beginning of that fierce and headlong yet well-calculated style of sea-fighting which led to Trafalgar, and made England undisputed mistress of the sea. Perhaps a little too much has been made of the manœuvre of “breaking the line.” The value of a manœuvre in war is apt to depend on the value of the men who make it. The history of our own navy contains a convincing example of that truth. In 1811 Sir William Hoste fought an action off Lissa with a squadron of frigates against a French frigate squadron under Dubourdieu. The Frenchman deliberately imitated Nelson’s plan of attack at Trafalgar. Yet he was completely beaten, and fell in the defeat. It would seem, therefore, that something more goes to the gaining of victories than manœuvres. In truth, the English fleet won because it was infinitely superior to the French—a hundred years ahead of it, as the prisoners acknowledged. If it had not so won before, it was because it had been tied down by pedantic rules. When Rodney broke from them he gave the real superiority of our ships a chance to exert itself. That superiority he himself had helped to create. No Sir Charles Douglas, no Edmund Affleck, no Hood even, can take that glory away. For the rest, are we the poorer because we had a splendid force as well as a great commander?
CHAPTER XIII
THE END
When Rodney issued the order to cease action on the evening of April 12th, his active life had practically come to an end. He proceeded with his fleet and his prizes to Jamaica, after despatching Hood, somewhat tardily, in pursuit of the scattered French. Hood picked up two liners and a few smaller craft in the Mona Channel between Porto Rico and San Domingo. At Jamaica, Rodney was received with natural and well-deserved enthusiasm by the people whom he had saved from a great danger. He remained at Port Royal till the end of July. The work of refitting the squadron occupied him much, and was not made lighter by the condition of the dockyard, which had fallen into bad order since he had himself been on the station in 1774. He looked forward to exercising his command for some time longer—even to the end of the war. In a letter to his wife he begs her to contradict all reports that he was coming home. If he had wished to return after his victory, he might have done so with credit, for his work was done and his health had again broken down. At Port Royal he was so ill as to be compelled to hand over the command for a time to his second. He still, however, clung to his great office, and in the circumstances he cannot be blamed for being loath to retire in the presence of the enemy.
Had he known what was passing in England while he was breaking up the French fleet it is possible that a request to be relieved might have accompanied the news of his victory in the despatch-box of Lord Cranstoun, who gave up his immediate prospect of a ship in order to be the bearer of good tidings to London. If the two documents had been delivered together he would have scored a double victory over the Ministry. At the very moment that he was pressing the pursuit of the French, his recall was being decided on by the Ministry, and it would have been something to have forestalled them. Lord North had been driven from office in March, and a Whig administration had succeeded. The new Cabinet resolved to recall the Tory admiral, and it is characteristic that the officer they chose to succeed him was Admiral Pigot. Pigot was a man of no distinction, of no experience in the command of fleets, and he had been long on shore; but he had sat for years in the House and had always voted steadily with the Whigs. For these services he was chosen to bear out the laconic order which told Rodney to haul down his flag, and to him it was given to succeed the most brilliantly successful commander of the war.
By one of the most ironical pieces of ill-luck—and the best merited—which ever overtook any Administration, the news of the great victory reached England just after Pigot had sailed. Orders were at once sent off to stop him, but it was too late. He was out of sight of land on his way to the West Indies before the messenger could reach the port. There was nothing for it but to stick to their guns, to retort on their adversaries that the country had heard the news of the recall with indifference however loudly it cried out after receiving the news of the victory (which was perfectly true), and to protest the utmost respect for the Admiral. To do it justice, the Whig Cabinet executed itself with a reasonably good grace. Burke declared in his figurative classical way that if there was a bald spot on the head of the Admiral he would gladly cover it with laurels. A committee which had been appointed to inquire into the miscarriages at St. Eustatius was discharged. It was decided that Rodney should have a barony and another pension of £2000. Sandwich, who being now in Opposition could afford to be generous, declared that a barony was not enough. His own ancestor, the Admiral Montague who helped to restore Charles the Second, and was slain at Solebay, had received an earldom and more money for less than had been done by Rodney. There was truth in his criticism, but the Ministry cannot be accused of niggardly conduct if judged by the standard of the time. Titles were less lavishly given for service then than they had been before or have been since. Hawke, for example, received no title at all for the battle of Quiberon, which relieved the country from the fear of actual invasion. His barony was given him years afterwards. It does not appear that Rodney thought himself shabbily treated. He took his title from Rodney Stoke, but he did not close with the offer of the Duke of Chandos. Lady Rodney did not like the climate of Somerset, and the Admiral himself seems to have had no sentimental feelings in the matter. He was content with Hampshire, which had always been his country-quarters in England.
Rodney left the West Indies in July and reached Bristol, after a stormy passage, in September. His reception at home consoled him, if unmeasured popular applause was a consolation in such a case, for his summary recall. The country had not had many opportunities of welcoming victorious commanders in the course of this war. The good work done (and it had been much) had not been of the brilliant kind, and had too often ended in disaster. In Rodney’s case there was now no doubt. He had taken a Spanish, a Dutch, and a French admiral—the last in the midst of a great fleet and on board the finest three-decker in the world. More liners had struck to him than to any English admiral since the elder Byng scattered the Spaniards off Cape Passaro nearly seventy years before. There was no shadow on this glory, and the nation gave way to one of those bursts of enthusiasm over it and the man who bore it, in which the phlegm of the English melts like “snaw off a dyke.” From the day of his landing at Bristol till he retired from Court surfeited with praise, he was surrounded by cheering crowds; and when the applause died away it left a solid admiration and gratitude which endured to the end.