The First Salute

  Receiving the orders at sea off Barbados on January 27, 1781, Rodney immediately prepared his ships for attack on St. Eustatius and coordinated measures with General Vaughan. He was ready to sail in three days and to appear on February 3 below Fort Orange, where, just over four years before, the Andrew Doria had received the fort’s salute to the flag of the Continental Congress. Rodney’s rampage of confiscations and evictions executed by Vaughan’s soldiers followed, leading to the accusations of Burke and Fox and to satisfaction in Tory quarters. Recording a report that 6,900 hogsheads of tobacco valued at £36,000 were stored in Eustatian warehouses before Rodney came, Captain Frederick MacKenzie—the most observant and active diarist on Clinton’s staff—gloated, “The loss of one half of it is enough to ruin all the rebel merchants in America.”

  Rodney’s successful seizure of the island confirmed his value in the otherwise shaky company of the navy. Whether to restrain or strengthen him, the Admiralty sent him a vigorous second in command, Admiral Sir Samuel Hood, who had once served as midshipman under Rodney during his early convoy duty in the Mediterranean and had been with him again as a captain in the burning of invasion boats at Havre. From service in two campaigns and acquaintance over a period of forty years, they knew each other well—perhaps too well, with some of the disrespect familiarity is said to breed. They were now joined in the critical mission to stop de Grasse from crossing the ocean to reinforce the Americans. Mutual confidence would have been useful, but relations were, at best, ambivalent.

  On being offered the post under his old chief, Hood at first wrote to the Admiralty asking to refuse, and two days later wrote again hoping it was not too late to change his mind. On his side, Rodney wrote to say, “I know no-one whatsoever that I should have wished in preference to my old friend Sir Samuel Hood.” That seemed unequivocal. But in private he is reported by one of his staff to have grumbled, “They might as well have sent me an old applewoman.” Here again was the pervasive animosity among commanders that seemed to grow from an ill-managed war.

  Rodney’s sneer is startling, in view of Nelson’s future fulsome praise of Hood in the Napoleonic Wars as “the greatest sea officer I ever knew, great in all situations which an admiral can be placed in.” As Hood was to play a significant role in coming events, this remarkable difference of opinion of him, by two persons whose judgments were both based on personal experience as his commanding officer, is a matter of interest. Nelson was habitually overkind to his officers, and in this case rated Hood more highly than he deserved; his tribute cannot apply to situations in America in which Hood, on a number of occasions, was not only not great but something less than adequate.

  “It has been difficult to find out proper flag officers to serve under you,” Sandwich informed Rodney rather tactlessly, although the difficulty, he said, was not personal but because some officers were unfit politically (which Sandwich referred to as “their factious connections”) and others because of “infirmity or insufficiency, and so we have at last been obliged to make a promotion in order to do the thing properly.” Rodney, as we have seen, professed himself well pleased by the choice of Sir Samuel Hood, although developing tensions were to break apart an old friendship and deprive the fleet at an important moment of cordial cooperation between its chiefs.

  Hood arrived expecting to lead an expedition to capture the two Dutch colonies of Surinam and Curaçao, from which he anticipated rich booty, but on the basis of a false intelligence report that a large French fleet was on its way to the West Indies, Rodney felt obliged to keep all his forces ready for defense of the islands and called off the Surinam-Curaçao expedition. This was the first of Hood’s discontents. They then fell out over preferments to two places in the navy, one of which Hood believed Rodney had promised him for his first lieutenant while Rodney now said he must first fulfill promises made to a peer’s son belonging to “one of the first families in the kingdom.” Hood wrote to the Admiralty some very nasty letters about Rodney’s “instability” and his primary desire to stay on St. Eustatius to safeguard the proceeds of his capture. The two English fellow-officers were now in greater disaccord than ever occurred between the French and Americans despite their differences.

  The real trouble was that Rodney, burdened with supervising the disposal of the property confiscated at St. Eustatius and with arranging for its loading on thirty transports and designating the proper ships for its safe escort back to England, was miserably ill with gout and with a urinary stricture that now added its torment. His one thought in his discomfort was to obtain leave to go home for relief. He had several times written to Sandwich for leave, without avail. “The continual mental and bodily fatigue,” he wrote on March 7, “that I have experienced for this year past preys upon me so much that unless I am permitted to leave this climate during the rainy season, I am convinced it will disable me from doing my duty to His Majesty and the state in the active manner I could wish and have been used to.” He entreats Sandwich to lay before the King that “in case my health should be such at the end of this campaign as to require a northern climate to restore it he will permit my return to Great Britain during the three rainy months.” It pains him “to request one moment’s respite from the public service but I have a complaint, owing to too much activity and exertion, which I am told by my physician will absolutely require my leaving the torrid zone.…” The warm humid climate of the summer months was in fact a disease breeder. Hundreds of soldiers and sailors were too sick to move and Rodney had been warned that if his stricture were left untreated it could develop to fatality. His urgency to return to England was understandable. Sandwich replied in May that he had made Rodney’s request an “official letter” and had apparently gained for him the King’s permission for leave, but hopes that “you will not avail yourself of your permission to leave your command in the present critical situation of our affairs. The whole government, and the public in general, are satisfied while you retain your command.” The war, Sandwich asserts with the benighted self-confidence of a minister who knows nothing, nor had ever bothered to learn anything of the field or the opponent, “cannot last much longer.” About French intervention, Sandwich was relaxed and casual, offering his opinion that “it is most probable that the French fleet in your seas will go to North America in the hurricane months.…” This demonstrated a poor sense of timing, for the hurricane months were still five months off, and the French, who had heard the urgency of the American call, had no need to wait until then—nor did they. “No one can so well judge,” Sandwich concluded, “of the propriety of following them as yourself,” and he leaves Rodney to be guided “by your own feelings.” Rodney’s feelings, as confided to his wife on March 18, were simple: “I must leave this country in June at farthest.” He mentions his severe gout as the reason plus “a very painful complaint” (prostate trouble). It was at this time that he gave vent to his vengeful feelings about the traitorous traders on St. Eustatius: “I cannot express the fatigue I have suffered on this island. Had I not stayed here, every villainy would be practiced by the persons who call themselves English.” It was now, in the irritable distress of his illness, that he issued his wrathful threat to leave the island “a mere desert.” He added the sad hope that would soon miscarry: “If my great convoy of prizes arrive safe in England, I shall be happy as, exclusive of satisfying all debts, something will be left for my dear children.”

  On March 21, Sandwich forwarded an intelligence report to Rodney telling of a fleet of 25 sail about to leave from Brest, though Sandwich could not say where it was destined; probably, he suggested, to the West Indies and afterward to North America or to join the Spanish at Cádiz to “check your conquests.” His supposition was correct, if not alert, for this was de Grasse departing with his fleet on the first leg of his journey to America, which was already public knowledge. Mme. du Deffand, Walpole’s faithful correspondent on all the gossip of the French capital, had already written to him about a regiment in Saint-Simon’s command “which is one of
those destined for America. Voilà nouvelles publiques.” (This is public news.) Public as it was, the report of the enemy’s approach, which was important for Rodney to know, did not reach him until a week after de Grasse had already arrived in the Leeward Islands and had met Hood in combat.

  The Admiralty’s dispatches were sent by the cutter Swallow, evidently under an impression of speed derived from her name. Though fast for its size, a cutter, a single-masted vessel, carried only a small portion of the sail area of a frigate in which to catch the propelling winds. In contrast, the Americans, for the urgent correspondence between Rochambeau and de Grasse, used the French frigate Concorde, which zipped back and forth between Boston and the Leeward Islands in rapid transits of sixteen and eighteen days. The difference in sailing time was not simply a matter of ships but because the British, certain they knew best about everything oceanic, persisted in bucking the Gulf Stream. Flowing in a peculiar northerly circular course, the current slowed progress from Europe to the Caribbean while its swift current in the Atlantic shortened mail time from Europe to America. Traced first by whalers of Nantucket who followed the track of the whales, the course and speed of the stream was made known to Benjamin Franklin when he was Postmaster General by his cousin Captain Timothy Folger of Nantucket for use by the masters of mail packets crossing the ocean. Folger explained why American captains of merchant ships made faster time from London to Rhode Island than English captains of mail packets from London to New York. It was because American captains, advised by the whales, understood the location of the Gulf Stream and crossed over it, instead of running against it for days. From Folger’s chart and written directions instructing shipmasters how to track the stream by dropping thermometers at regular intervals and measuring the speed of surface bubbles and noticing changes in the color of the water, Franklin in 1770, before the war, offered the information to Anthony Todd, Secretary of the British Post Office. British sea captains, not inclined to take advice from American colonials and fishermen, ignored it. Franklin himself made a test on a voyage in 1776, dropping his thermometer two to four times a day from seven in the morning until eleven at night. His report on the Gulf Stream was withheld until after the war, when it could no longer help the British, but Folger’s map, the first map of the Gulf Stream, was published in 1768, before the outbreak of overt hostility and revolution.

  With the West Indies as his first concern, Sandwich wrote again to Rodney saying that unless he could intercept de Grasse before he reached Martinique, the French would have a superior number of ships, so that England must depend “on the skill and conduct of our commander in chief and the bravery of the officers and people under him,” as there was no possibility of sending him reinforcements. Expecting the French any day, Rodney detached three sail of the line to Hood with orders to cruise windward of Martinique on the lookout for the enemy. Shortly afterward, Hood was moved inshore to keep a close watch on Fort Royal, in order to prevent four French liners stationed there from emerging to add their numbers to de Grasse when he should arrive, and to prevent de Grasse from entering to take possession of the “noblest and best harbour,” as Rodney had named it. Hood did not like the inshore position and repeatedly asked Rodney to let him go back to his former place, which Rodney refused. Strong disagreements about the proper position from which to watch for and intercept the enemy added to their quarrel.

  On St. Eustatius, Rodney had appointed a commission to superintend disposal of the seized property and documents. The more he learned of the business operations of the traitorous British merchants, the more it fed his anger. The whole of the confiscated property “I have seized for the King and the state and I hope will go to the public revenue of my country. I do not look upon myself as entitled to one sixpence nor do I desire it. My happiness is having been the instrument of my country in bringing this nest of villains to condign punishment. They deserve scourging and they shall be scourged.” Whether or not this entire lack of interest in personal gain should be taken at face value, Rodney’s desire to bring the villains to judgment and wield the whip of their scourging was clearly what held him at St. Eustatius through the month of March and early April while his opponent was advancing toward him across the Atlantic.

  With a strong fleet of twenty ships of the line, three frigates, and a swollen convoy of 150 transports bringing supplies and men to the West Indies, de Grasse sailed from Brest on March 22 aboard his huge flagship, the three-decker Ville de Paris of 110 guns, monarch of the French fleet, and the largest ship afloat. He expected to meet Hood or Rodney in combat in the West Indies. After supplying the needy islands, he was to give what aid was necessary to Spanish forces in Cuba and Santo Domingo and then, at the approach of winter, move on to America. Joined by an East India squadron of forty merchantmen, which were slow sailors and had to be taken in tow by the warships, he reached the offshore waters of Martinique at the end of April, 1781.

  In America news came to Newport on May 8, like an arrow piercing the curtain of discouragement, that de Grasse was actually on his way, headed for the West Indies with America as his next destination. Coming just a month since Washington had confessed “We are at the end of our tether,” the news promised to give renewed life and new hope to the American fight. Ten months of impatient frustration had passed since Rochambeau and his infantry of 5,700 had come to Newport in the previous summer, held there ever since by the Americans’ lack of mobility and by Arbuthnot’s blockade outside the bay. De Ternay, the French naval commander, had died of a fever in the interim, to be succeeded in command by Count Louis de Barras, who had come via Boston bringing the report to Washington that de Grasse was on his way. A Council of War among Washington, Rochambeau and de Barras (who was unable to come) was immediately summoned to meet at Wethersfield, a town adjoining Hartford, on May 21. In the course of the discussions, Washington’s plan of campaign against New York was seemingly accepted, with reservations by the French on condition that de Grasse would cooperate in assigning his land forces to a joint offensive with the Americans. In spite of the twice-failed effort under d’Estaing for combined operations by French naval and American land forces, the conferees agreed to make the attempt again. Rochambeau, evidently sharing the opinion of a number of 20th century historians that Washington was no strategist (which fails to measure the more important quality of generalship), contradicted promptly the Wethersfield plan by writing to de Grasse on May 31 his own recommendation, that the offensive should be made at the Chesapeake. He enclosed copies of the Wethersfield agreements, saying that de Grasse must make his own judgment of the problem of the Sandy Hook shallows and suggesting that on arrival he look into the Chesapeake, and if he found no occasion for action there, to come to New York. He asked to borrow for three months the regiments arriving under Saint-Simon.

  He wrote two more letters, on June 6 and 11, reporting frankly that American affairs were in a “grave crisis.” With no money or credit, these people “are at the end of their resources.… I must not conceal from you, Monsieur, that Washington will not have half the troops he is reckoned to have and that I believe, though he is silent on that, at present he does not have 6,000 men and that M. de Lafayette does not have a 1,000 regulars with militia to defend Virginia and nearly as many on the march to join him.… And that it is therefore of the greatest consequence that you will take on board as many troops as possible, 4,000 or 5,000 will not be too many, whether you aid us in Virginia or in seizing Sandy Hook to aid us afterwards to lay siege to Brooklyn.… There, Monsieur, are the different possibilities you have in view and the actual sad picture of the affairs of this country. Whichever, I am quite persuaded you will bring us naval superiority.” In closing, he re-emphasized the need to bring troops, and money to pay them. While it was hardly a report calculated to inspire an ally to invest his fate in a losing game, it evidently had the desired effect. We do not know what de Grasse thought or felt, and can only judge by his subsequent dedication of himself and his fortune to a faltering cause not his own
. In relationship with allies and neighbors, the French can often make themselves exceedingly difficult and even disagreeable, but there was something in the destiny-filled air of 1781 that brought them to their most admirable. They were not ready, if they could help it, to let the American fight for independence be dissipated in the smoke of burned-out liberty and in the renewed imperium of their ancient rival.