A History of the British Army, Vol. 2 / First Part—to the Close of the Seven Years' War

by Sir J. W. Fortescue

April 24 May 5.

The horrors of that time are quite indescribable. By the care of Cathcart hospital-ships had indeed been provided for the expedition, but these had neither nurses, surgeons, cooks, nor provisions. "The men," wrote Smollett, himself a surgeon on board a man-of-war, "were pent up between decks in small vessels where they had not room to sit upright; they wallowed in filth; myriads of maggots were hatched in the putrefaction of their sores, which had no other dressing than that of being washed by themselves in their own allowance of brandy; and nothing was heard but groans and lamentations and the language of despair invoking death to deliver them from their miseries." So these poor fellows lay in this sickly, stifling atmosphere, with the raging thirst of fever upon them, while the tropical sun burnt fiercely overhead or the tropical rain poured down in a dense, gray stream, filling the air with that close clammy heat which even by a healthy man is grievous to be borne. The sailors also suffered much, though less heavily, being many of them acclimatised; and surgeons could have been spared from the men-of-war for the transports could Wentworth have been brought to ask them of Vernon, or Vernon to offer them to Wentworth. So while the commanders quarrelled the soldiers perished. Officers died as fast as the men, all discipline on the transports came to an end, and the men gave themselves up to that abandoned listlessness which was seen in Schomberg's camp in Ireland, when the bodies of dead comrades were used to stop the draughts in the tents. Day after day the sailors rowed ashore to bury their boats' loads of corpses, for there was always order and discipline in the ships of war; but the raw soldiers simply dragged their dead comrades up on deck and dropped them overboard, without so much as a shroud to their bodies or a shot to their heels. Vernon railed furiously at this nastiness, as he called it,[151] not reflecting that men untrained to the sea might know no better. So after a few hours the bodies that had sunk beneath the water came up again to the surface and floated, hideous and ghastly beyond description, about the transports, while schools of sharks jostled each other in the scramble to tear them limb from limb, and foul birds with ugly, ragged wings flapped heavily above them croaking for their share. Thus the air was still further poisoned, sickness increased, and the harbour became as a charnel-house. At length, on the 5th of May, it was resolved to return to Jamaica; and two days later the fleet sailed away from the horrors of Carthagena. By that time the men nominally fit for service were reduced to seventeen hundred, of whom not above a thousand were in a condition to be landed against an enemy.[152]

August 12 23 .
August 18 29 .

Arrived at Jamaica the commanders deliberated as to what should next be done. There were still men enough, it was thought, for a successful descent upon Cuba, though the British regiments were terribly short of officers, having lost over one hundred since they had left England. But the plague was not stayed by the removal to Jamaica. Within the month that elapsed after the abandonment of Carthagena eleven hundred men died; the strength of the British was reduced to fourteen hundred, and of the Americans to thirteen hundred, men.[153] For the next three weeks the troops continued to die at the rate of one hundred a week, the Americans, as always throughout this expedition, perishing even more rapidly than the British. At last, after long disputes, it was decided to make an attempt upon Santiago de Cuba. The fleet sailed on the 23rd of August, and on the 29th anchored on the north coast of the island, in a bay which Vernon, in honour of Prince William, named Cumberland Haven.

Then the Admiral again came forward with the same advice as he had offered at Carthagena. He urged Wentworth to take a picked force of a thousand men only, together with a thousand bearers, and with this column to make a forced march and take Santiago by surprise, the fleet meanwhile co-operating by sea. In the hands of an enterprising commander it is possible that such a plan might have succeeded; it was in fact just such a stroke as had been beloved of Drake and of the greatest of the buccaneers, but it was beyond the spirit of Wentworth. The risk indeed was great. The town lay ninety miles distant from Cumberland Haven, the only road was a path cut through the jungle, and there were rivers on the way which a few hours of rain might render impassable whether for advance or retreat. In a word Wentworth would have none of such ventures. The ill-feeling between army and navy was embittered; the troops lay idle in their camp, and, worst of all, sickness increased rather than abated at the close of the rainy season. By the middle of November there were hardly sufficient men to supply reliefs for the ordinary guards, and at the beginning of December there were less than three hundred privates fit for duty. A council of war was called, and it was decided to re-embark the troops for Jamaica, whither Wentworth, despite violent protests from Vernon, decided to accompany them.

1742.
March 9 20 .
May.

Still the curtain was not yet to fall on this awful drama. The military force was now so much reduced that four of the eight regiments were drafted into the other four, and only the Fifteenth, Twenty-fourth, Wolfe's, and Fraser's were left. The yellow fever continued to rage unchecked. Two hundred and fifty of the men left in hospital by Wentworth on his departure for Cuba died in a single fortnight.[154] Then in February 1742 there came a reinforcement of three thousand men, namely, one battalion of the Royal Scots, the Sixth, and the Twenty-seventh Foot. They arrived healthy, but began to sicken at once.[155] All kinds of new projects were now debated, an attack on Guatemala, on Yucatan, on Panama; but the troops continued to die at the rate of fifteen men a day, and it was of little profit to discuss plans in the presence of such a general as yellow fever. At length, after much delay, the expedition put to sea for the third time, and sailed against Porto Bello. The voyage was protracted by inclement weather to nineteen days, and at the end of those nineteen days, although none but healthy and selected men had been embarked, the Sixth regiment alone had thrown ninety-eight corpses overboard, and of the whole force nearly a thousand were sick or dead.[156] In such circumstances the enterprise was abandoned, and the expedition, once more delayed by unfavourable weather, returned again to Jamaica. There the hospitals were emptier and the graveyards fuller than at Wentworth's departure, for five hundred of the sick which he had left behind him had succumbed. The survivors who returned from Porto Bello soon filled up the hospital again, and by the end of July it was crowded with eight hundred men. One hundred and fifty of these died in August, and three hundred more were dead by the middle of October. By this time such few men as remained of the four thousand Americans had been discharged, the survivors numbering little more than three hundred, and all hope of further operations had been abandoned. The commanders indeed still met and discussed their plans with each other and with Governor Trelawny, the contention growing so hot between them that Trelawny and Sir Chaloner Ogle drew their swords upon each other, and were with difficulty prevented by Wentworth from adding to the death-roll. But when yellow fever is killing men before they can arrive within range to kill each other, councils of war are even less than ordinarily profitable. Of the regiments that had sailed from St. Helen's under Cathcart in all the pride and confidence of strength, nine men in every ten had perished.[157]

A great historian has asked, When did this Spanish war end?[158] and the answer is that it ended imperceptibly in the gradual annihilation of the contending armies by yellow fever. The French fleet was driven back to France by it, the Spaniards were left defenceless by it, the English were palsied for attack by it. There was indeed desultory fighting, not without incidents of signal gallantry, between the colonists of Carolina and Georgia and their Spanish neighbours in Florida, but the operations were too trifling to merit record in this place. The one gleam of light in the whole dark history is the heroic voyage of Anson, who had been sent round Cape Horn, with some vague idea that his fleet and Vernon's should co-operate in attacks on Central America. In Anson's fame the Army also has some faint though melancholy share, for about three hundred Chelsea pensioners, weak, aged, and infirm, were barbarously driven on board his ships, nominally to man them, but in reality only to find at sea the grave which past service should have ensured them on English soil. Whether with Anson or with Vernon, whether on the Atlantic or the Pacific, the war had nothing but failure and death for the red-coats.

It remains to say something of the human share in the catastrophe of the expedition to Carthagena. Wentworth has hitherto been made the scapegoat for every misfortune, and it is probable that he must remain so; yet the blame of the avoidable disasters must not be laid wholly to his charge. So far as he had been tried up to the time of his command he had proved himself a diligent and painstaking officer; he had been installed as Cathcart's second by Cathcart's own request, and could he have remained a subordinate would probably have done well enough. Though lacking experience of active service, in or out of the tropics, he did his best to make good the deficiency by consulting those officers who knew more than himself. He tried his hardest to work in concert with the naval officers, and never wrote home a word of complaint against Vernon until he had endured his arrogant and overbearing tone for more than a year. But his own training, like that of his men, had been mechanical only, and he could neither rise above the stiff formalities of his profession himself, nor raise his men above them. It will be seen that this same mechanical training could produce astonishing results on the familiar battlegrounds of Flanders, but it was out of place on the Spanish Main, as it was soon to prove itself out of place on the Ohio. Again, poor workman though Wentworth was, the tools to his hand were not good. He himself had only with great difficulty taught six of his regiments the rudiments of discipline in the Isle of Wight. His regimental officers were, without exception, young and inexperienced, while some few of them, who had obtained commissions through political jobbery, are described as the most abandoned wretches of the town. The American troops, which formed a third of the whole force, were incomparably worse than the worst of the English, and being made up to some extent of Irish papists were more than a little untrustworthy. Again, although the least foresight must have shown that the brunt of the work would fall upon the artillery, the gunners furnished to Wentworth were raw yokels, just caught up from the plough and wholly ignorant of their duty, while their commander was incapable, and his second a drunkard. Of the engineers it is sufficient to repeat that after the chief was killed not one could be found with the slightest knowledge of his duty. Moreover, of the eight battering cannon furnished to him one was found to be unserviceable and the rest were all of different patterns, while the shells, like the hand-grenades, were of bad quality. Again, the stores of all kinds were so unspeakably bad as to call forth the bitterest complaints from Wentworth; and beyond all doubt bad food contributed to increase the sickliness of the Army and to weaken the men against the attacks of yellow fever. In fact, the trail of the incompetent Newcastle is over the whole expedition; but these blunders and deficiencies only the less excuse Wentworth for failing to adopt a swifter and more dashing system of operations.