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

by Sir J. W. Fortescue

The ships lay off the bay until the next day, while Hopson thought out his plan of operations. The town and fortress of Fort Royal lies well within the bay on the northern shore, so Negro Point, which marks the entrance to the harbour to the north, was the spot selected for the landing. The ships next morning stood in and silenced two small batteries mounted at the Point, and in the afternoon the troops landed unopposed in a small bay adjacent to it. A camping ground was chosen in the only open space that could be found, between two ravines, and there the army passed the night formed up in square, to be ready against any sudden attack. At dawn of the next morning shots were heard, and the outposts reported that the enemy was advancing and entrenching a house close to the British position. The grenadiers were sent forward to dislodge them, and a smart skirmish ended in the retreat of the French. Hopson would fain have pushed more of his men into action, but the jungle was so dense that they could find no enemy. "Never was such a country," wrote the General plaintively, "the Highlands of Scotland for woods, mountains, and continued ravines are nothing to it."[306] As it was plainly out of the question to attempt to drag the heavy artillery before Fort Royal over such a country, it was decided to re-embark the troops forthwith. Nearly one hundred men had been killed and wounded in the morning's skirmish, but the embarkation was accomplished without further loss.

Jan. 18.

On the following day the fleet coasted the island northward and by evening lay off St. Pierre, the second town in Martinique, which stood nestling in a little plain at the head of a shallow bay. The men-of-war stood in on the next morning to observe the defences of the place, and the fire of the French batteries from the heights to right and left soon convinced the Commodore that the town could not be taken without such damage to his ships as would disable them for further service. It was therefore resolved that Martinique should for the present be left alone, and that the expedition should proceed to Guadeloupe, which was not only the richest of the French Islands but the principal nest of French privateers in the West Indies. So the fleet steered northward once more past Dominica, where the white flag of the Bourbons yet floated over the fort of Roseau; while a single ship was sent forward with the chief military engineer on board to reconnoitre the town of Basseterre, which lies on the western or leeward coast a few miles to north of the most southerly point of Guadeloupe.

Jan. 23.
Jan. 24.
Jan.

The engineer returned with no very encouraging report. The town though lying on an open roadstead was well fortified, and all the approaches to it along the coast were well protected, while the fort of Basseterre, situated on a lofty eminence at the southern end, was declared to be impregnable by the attack of ships alone. Moore, however, was resolute that the town could and should be taken, and at ten o'clock on the morning of the 23rd the ships of the line and bomb-ketches opened a heavy fire on the fort and batteries. In a few hours the town, crammed with the sugar and rum of the past harvest, was burning furiously, and by nightfall every battery was silenced and the town was a heap of blackened ruins. At dawn of the morrow the troops were landed, to find the elaborate lines of defence inland deserted and every gun spiked, while desultory shots from among the sugar-canes alone told of the presence of the enemy. The army encamped in Basseterre, but the firing from the cane-fields increased, and picquets and advanced posts were harassed to death by incessant alarms and petty attacks. Hopson sent a summons to the French Governor to surrender, but received only an answer of defiance. The Governor had in fact withdrawn his force some six miles from Basseterre to an impregnable position such as can be found only in a rugged, mountainous and untamed country. Each flank was covered by inaccessible hills clothed with impenetrable forest; in his front ran the river Galeon with high and precipitous banks, and beyond the river a gully so steep and sheer that the French themselves used ladders to cross it. The position was further strengthened by entrenchments and cannon. To attack it in front was impossible. The only practicable access was by a narrow road which led through dense forest upon one flank; and this was most carefully guarded. Here therefore the French commander lay, refusing to come to action but sending out small parties to worry the British outposts, in the hope that the climate would do the work of repelling his enemy for him.

Feb. 14.

Nor was he without good ground for such hope; for Hopson was in great doubt whether it would not be more expedient for him to re-embark. His own health was failing rapidly, and the men were beginning to fall down fast under the incessant work at the advanced posts and the fatigue of carrying provisions to them. From the day of landing it had been found necessary to push these advanced posts farther and farther inland and to make them stronger and stronger, until at last they embraced a circuit of fully three miles. By the end of January the men on the sick list numbered fifteen hundred, or fully a quarter of the force. Hopson sent six hundred invalids to Antigua in the hope of saving at least some of them, but therewith his efforts came to an end, nor could all the representations of Barrington stimulate him to further action. Yet new operations were by no means difficult either of conception or of execution. Guadeloupe is in reality not one island but two, being divided by a narrow strait known as the Salt River. It is very much of the shape of a butterfly with wings outspread, flying south; the western wing being known as Guadeloupe proper and the eastern as Grande Terre, while the Salt River runs in the place of the butterfly's body. Grande Terre, the most fertile part of the island, still lay open to attack, with an excellent harbour at Point à Pitre, of which the principal defence, Fort Louis, could be reached by the cannon of ships. Moore being fortunately independent of Hopson in respect of naval operations, sent ships round to Fort Louis, which speedily battered it into surrender, and installed therein a garrison of three hundred Highlanders and Marines. But even with this new base secured to him Hopson declined to move. He was indeed sick unto death, and on the 27th of February he died, leaving the command to devolve on Barrington.

March 6.
March 11.
March.

His death came none too soon, for the force was on the brink of destruction. The number of the dead cannot be ascertained, but over and above the six hundred invalids sent to Antigua there were more than sixteen hundred men on the sick list, and the remainder were succumbing so fast that sufficient men could hardly be found to do the daily duty. Barrington resolved to close this fatal period of inaction at once. The defences of the fort of Basseterre had already been repaired and rendered safe against attack, so the Sixty-third regiment was left to hold it while the remainder of the troops were embarked on board the transports. After five days of weary beating against the trade-wind a portion of the ships came to anchor before Fort Louis; but more than half of them had fallen to leeward. The next day was spent by Barrington in an open boat reconnoitring the coast, but on his return in the evening he was met by the bad news that a French squadron had been sighted to northward of Barbados and that Moore felt bound to fall back with his own squadron to Prince Rupert's Bay, Dominica, in order to cover Basseterre and the British Leeward Islands. Finally, as sickness had wrought little less havoc in the fleet than in the army, the Commodore begged for troops to make up the complement of his crews.

Few situations could have been more embarrassing than that in which Barrington now found himself. He loyally gave Moore three hundred soldiers for his ships, and watched the fleet on which his communications depended vanish from sight. Nearly if not quite half of his force had perished or was unfit for duty; while of the rest a part was isolated in Basseterre and fully one moiety was at sea, striving to beat into Point à Pitre. Fort Louis, the only strong position in which he could hope to wait in safety, was found to be untenable; and the French were already preparing to besiege it. Yet with a resolution which stamps him as no common man, he resolved despite all difficulties to begin offensive operations at once. He had at any rate transports though he had no men-of-war, and he resolved to use them; his plan being, if he failed to bring the enemy to action, to ravage the whole island and reduce it by starvation. The cultivated land in such a confusion of mountains could lie only in the valleys, and the settlements must needs lie at the mouths of those valleys where there was communication with other parts of the island by sea or by roads that followed the coast. The French had raised abundance of batteries and entrenchments to protect these settlements, but such multiplicity of defences necessarily implied dispersion of force. Barrington's troops, few though they might be, were at any rate to some extent concentrated; and it was in his power to embark men sufficient to overwhelm any one of these isolated settlements, and so to break up the defences in detail. The operations were not in fact difficult when once a man had thought out the method of conducting them, but it was precisely in this matter of thought that Hopson had failed.