Nearly all the officers of the French army and navy were men of illustrious birth, intelligent, chivalric, high-bred gentlemen. In this society Jones, himself a courtly and well-educated man, found congenial companionship. He was a man of pure lips and refined bearing, fond of cultivated female society, and instinctively recoiling from all coarseness and vulgarity. He was esteemed a very valuable acquisition to the enterprise. His modest, friendly spirit, united with his unrivalled intrepidity, won the affection of the officers and the homage of the crew. The fact was also recognized that there was not, on board the fleet, a single man so intimately acquainted with those seas, and particularly with the island of Jamaica, as he was. Jones was highly pleased with the opportunity of improvement thus presented him, and with the very kind manner in which he had been received. In his journal he wrote, with characteristic modesty:
“As the Marquis d’Estaing had commanded a fleet of more than seventy sail of the line, I had the flattering hope of finding myself in the first military school in the world; in which I should be able to render myself useful, and to acquire knowledge very important for conducting great military operations.”
The squadron, consisting of ten sail of the line, left Boston on the 24th of December, 1782. The course of the ships was directed toward the mouth of Portsmouth harbor, where they were to be joined by two other ships of the line, the Auguste and the Pluton. But a severe wintry storm arose, with freezing gales and snow, and drove the squadron far away to the vicinity of the Bay of Fundy. Here the fleet was for a time in imminent danger from its proximity to the land and to vast fields of floating ice.
Many of the vessels were lost sight of in the storm. The Marquis de Vaudreuil steered to the southward, to an appointed rendezvous in the harbor of St. John, on the island of Porto Rico. As he made the land he was informed that sixteen British men-of-war, under Admiral Hood, were cruising off Cape Francois, on the look-out for him; and that a still larger naval force, under Admiral Pigot, was watching for him at Lucca, one of the extreme western towns of the island of Jamaica. England had made such ample preparation for this anticipated assault; that it was thought that the French squadron must fall a prey, either to Hood or Pigot.
Vaudreuil remained at St. John, Porto Rico, ten days, waiting the arrival of other vessels of his fleet. Here he performed all kinds of naval evolutions, as a general on land would review his army. He also found at this place a very ample supply from France, to replenish his stores. The island of Porto Rico, which lies off the eastern coast of St. Domingo, is about one hundred and thirty miles in length, by thirty miles in breadth.
The strait, but eighty miles wide, which separates it from San Domingo, is called the Mona Passage. The island was then in a state of prosperity, and it carried on very extensive commerce with France and Spain. It at that time belonged to Spain, and contained a population of about eighty thousand. The native inhabitants had all melted away. The principal city, St. John, enjoyed a very fine harbor, and had a population of about thirty thousand.
The marquis convoyed, with his fleet, sixteen French merchant vessels from the eastern to the western end of the island, along the northern coast. The general rendezvous, for the French and Spanish fleet, had been appointed, with the greatest secrecy, at a little island called Port Cabello, but a few miles off the extreme northern coast of Venezuela. Some light vessels of Admiral Hood’s squadron, which were cruising as scouts, caught sight of the French fleet in the Mona passage. They immediately ran back with the tidings that the fleet was coasting along the southern shore of the San Domingo.
But Vaudreuil suddenly turned his direction south, sailed down between two and three hundred miles to the unfrequented islands which are scattered along the northern shore of Venezuela. The little island of Port Cabello was about sixty miles west of the much better known island of Curaçoa. A great expedition of this kind is liable to innumerable hindrances. It can never succeed, unless there is some imperial, Napoleonic mind, which can appreciate all its grandeur, and at the same time can regulate all its minutest details. Such enterprises render a dictatorship, for that purpose, indispensable. A ship of war, an army, a fleet, must be under dictatorial power.
But here was a squadron of more than seventy vessels to be gathered from several ports in the United States, from wide dispersion on the cruising grounds of an intense naval warfare, from several ship-yards of Spain and France, exposed to storms, to shipwreck, to misunderstood orders, to delays in equipping the ships, to the antagonisms and jealousies of rival officers, and to meet, at an almost unknown island, thousands of miles from the place of departure of each ship.
The fleet of the Marquis de Vaudreuil was swept, by the trade winds and the strong current of the Gulf Stream, sixty miles west of Port Cabello. It required three toilsome weeks to recover this distance, beating against wind and tide. The accompanying transports, being heavily laden merchant ships, and not fleet sailors, bearing stores of provisions and ammunition and many land troops, were unable to recover the lost space, against wind and flood. After many ineffectual attempts they were compelled to relinquish the endeavor. They left the squadron, and bore away to the coast of San Domingo.