Oliver Cromwell was nothing if not audacious. Having executed the king, he had now conceived a grand assault on Spain's lands in the New World. The plan was still secret, code named Western Design: its purpose, nothing less than the seizure of Spain's richest holdings. Barbados, with its new sugar wealth, would someday be merely a small part of England's new empire in the Americas, envisioned by Cromwell as reaching from Massachusetts to Mexico to Brazil.
But first, there was the small matter of bringing the existing settlements in the Americas back into step.
He had never been sure he had the stomach for the task. Now, after realizing the difficulties that lay ahead in subduing this one small island, he questioned whether he wanted any part of it.
He swabbed his brow, clammy in the sweltering heat, and wondered if all the islands of the Caribbees were like this.
Doubtless as bad or worse, he told himself in dismay. He had seen and experienced Barbados only for a day, but already he had concluded it was a place of fierce sun and half-tamed forest, hot and miserable, its very air almost a smoky green. There was little sign among the thatched-roof shacks along the shore of its reputed great wealth. Could it be the stories at home were gross exaggerations? Or deliberate lies? It scarcely mattered now. Barbados had to be reclaimed. There was no option.
On his left lay the green hills of the island, all but obscured in sudden sheets of rain; on his right the line of English warships he had ordered positioned about the perimeter of Carlisle Bay, cannons run out and primed. He had stationed them there, in readiness, at mid-morning. Then, the siege set, he had summoned his vice admiral and the other commanders to a council on board the Rainbowe.
They had dined on the last remaining capons and drawn up the terms of surrender, to be sent ashore by longboat. The island was imprisoned and isolated. Its capitulation, they told each other, was merely a matter of time.
Except that time would work against the fleet too, he reminded himself. Half those aboard were landsmen, a thrown- together infantry assembled by Cromwell, and the spaces below decks were already fetid, packed with men too sick and scurvy-ravished to stir. Every day more bodies were consigned to the sea. If the island could not be made to surrender in a fortnight, two at most, he might have few men left with the strength to fight.
The Declaration told him he could forget his dream of an easy surrender. Yet he didn't have the men and arms for a frontal assault. He knew it and he wondered how long it would take the islanders to suspect it as well. He had brought a force of some eight hundred men, but now half of them were sick and useless, while the island had a free population of over twenty thousand and a militia said to be nearly seven thousand. Worst of all, they appeared to have first-rate gunners manning their shore emplacements.
Barbados could not be recovered by strength of arms; it could only be frightened, or lured, back into the hands of England.