Rodney 21

Rodney 21

Whatever Rodney’s motives may have been, the misfortune which Hood had

foretold actually happened on April 28th. Grasse turned up to the north

of Martinique with twenty sail of the line and a great convoy. Hugging

the land closely he slipped along the shore inside of the English

squadron. Hood had been reinforced and could dispose of nineteen sail,

but he was to leeward in the westerly current and the treacherous light

breezes which prevail under the land. He could not work up to windward.

Grasse was joined by the four ships in Fort Royal, which gave him a

great superiority of force. There followed on the 29th and 30th two days

of confused and distant fighting. The French admiral declared that the

English admiral ran away. The English admiral asserted in good set terms

that the bragging Frenchman would not come down like a man. After an

immense outlay of powder and shot, Hood, finding that the enemy had

united his forces, that one of his own ships was in a sinking state, and

that all were in want of stores, gave up the now impossible blockade,

and hastened to join Rodney in the north.

 

With this misfortune all our superiority of position and numbers

vanished away. Rodney was thoroughly savage, and hinted pretty

intelligibly that Hood had manœuvred so as to fulfil his own

prophecy--a monstrous charge, which he did not venture to press. It is

to be hoped for his honour that his conscience pricked him. Whether he

or Hood was right as to the best way of meeting Grasse, there can, I

should imagine, be only one opinion on the question whether his conduct

during these months was worthy of his renown or of his actions before

and afterwards. At a time when a great hostile force was approaching the

station committed to his care, the proper place for an English admiral

was at sea and at the head of his fleet. He should not have remained on

shore with the auctioneer’s hammer in his hand superintending the sale

of his booty amid surroundings redolent of the redoubted Sir Henry

Morgan. His health was indeed bad, but it did not prevent him from

putting to sea when informed of the arrival of Grasse. Besides, if it

had been so shaken as to make him incapable of command, he was all the

more bound not to interfere with the officer whom he left in the post of

danger and honour. On the whole, one has to come back to the view that

Rodney’s eyes had been dazzled and his better nature corrupted for the

time by the fairy gold poured out before him at St. Eustatius.

 

During the two and a half months which remained before the return of the

hurricane season everything went wrong. The English admirals met on May

9th between Montserrat and Antigua. It was necessary to take Hood’s

battered ships into harbour in the latter island to refit. While they

were so occupied the French were busy. Grasse was, no doubt, a less wary

and skilful tactician than Guichen. He had faults of character which

proved his ruin--faults which may be all collected under that

untranslatable French word _suffisance_; but he was a clever officer. In

Bouillé he had an ally of extraordinary energy. The two combined to

carry out an aggressive campaign against our islands. While Rodney was

refitting at Antigua, a double expedition sailed from Fort Royal. The

larger part, under Grasse and Bouillé, was to attempt the recapture of

Santa Lucia; the smaller, under a M. de Blanchelande, was to go south to

Tobago. The attack on Santa Lucia failed, thanks, in part, to Rodney’s

foresight in fortifying Pigeon Island; thanks also to the accidental

arrival of several English frigates, whose captains landed their men to

reinforce the garrison. Bouillé disembarked his soldiers and attacked in

his usual fiery style, but our fortifications round Gros Islet Bay were

too strong, and the guns on Pigeon Island kept the French fleet off.

Finding that the island could not be mastered so soon as they expected,

Grasse and Bouillé re-embarked their men, and followed Blanchelande to

Tobago.

 

In the meantime Rodney was hurrying south from Antigua. He was met at

sea by news of the retreat of the French from Santa Lucia, but did not

learn their course. Concluding that they would probably steer for

Barbadoes, which had not yet recovered the effects of the great

hurricane, he hastened there at once. On his arrival he was greeted by a

despatch from Captain Fergusson, the Governor of Tobago, reporting the

appearance of Blanchelande with the smaller French expedition.

Rear-Admiral Drake was at once sent off with six sail to help defend the

island. Soon after he had gone came news that the whole French fleet was

on its way to Tobago. For a time there was great fear for Drake, but he

discovered his danger in time and avoided it by speedy retreat. When he

had rejoined the Admiral, the whole English force sailed for Tobago, and

arrived in time to be too late. After a gallant resistance, Fergusson,

who was well supported by the planters, had been compelled to surrender.

 

Rodney found the French at sea, standing to the north along the string

of little islands called the Grenadines, between Grenada and St.

Vincent. They were somewhat superior in force, but he expressed his

readiness to fight. No battle, however, took place. According to Rodney

the French manœuvred to draw him to leeward of St. Vincent, with the

intention of getting between him and Barbadoes. According to Grasse,

the English admiral, who being to eastward had the wind, made use of his

advantage to avoid a battle. The French showed no eagerness to fight for

their part. During the night they went back to Tobago. When Rodney

discovered that they had vanished his fears for Barbadoes revived, and

he returned there at once. Grasse after a short stay at Tobago returned

to Fort Royal, and so ended that campaign.

 

The ill health of which Rodney had complained all through the year had

now increased on him. He had applied for leave to come home during the

hurricane months, and it had been reluctantly granted him. As it was now

June, and therefore close on the dangerous season, he began to make

ready. Hood was to be despatched with the bulk of the squadron to Sandy

Hook. Rodney himself decided to make an attempt to go there also, and

only to sail for Europe if he found himself unable to stand a northern

latitude. His old flag-ship the _Sandwich_ was so battered as to be

unfit to stand the voyage. He therefore shifted his flag to the

_Gibraltar_, which had been the _Fenix_, Don Juan de Langara’s

flag-ship. On August 1st he sailed, and after going as far north as the

latitude of the Bahamas found himself so ill as to be compelled to

renounce all intention of going on to America. He therefore steered

directly for England, and after touching at Cork, arrived at Plymouth on

September 19th.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER X

 

RODNEY’S STAY IN ENGLAND

 

 

Rodney’s return home was not what he might have hoped it would be a year

before, or what it was destined to be when he returned from his great

campaign a year later. His health was wretchedly bad, and after a very

brief stay in London he went down to Bath to recruit. His son-in-law

Mundy, who edited his correspondence rather in what Carlyle called the

rubbish shot here style, says that he was under the necessity of

consulting London surgeons for some ailment other than the gout from

which he had so long suffered. As a matter of fact it was a stricture.

At Bath the Admiral had a short interval of rest with his wife, his

daughters, and the faithful Loup. Loup, who was perhaps entitled to an

earlier mention, was a French dog whom the Admiral had brought with him

from Paris in 1778--a beast obviously of the most meritorious

intelligence and devotion. Surrounded by these dearly loved friends the

Admiral had two months of rest for his body and mind.

 

Indeed he needed consolation for the second as well as for the first.

The last campaign had on the whole gone against him, and his popularity

was not what it had been. Rodney might have dispensed with popular

applause, but he could not help seeing that his ministerial friends were

disappointed in him. There was no talk of superseding him. It was not

the wont of George the Third to throw over a faithful servant who had

been unsuccessful, and on such a point the Ministry would not go against

the wish of the King. But there were no signs given him of welcome. The

war was going against England, making the position of the Ministry

harder every day. Lord North and his colleagues could not but feel that

Rodney had of late done little to help them. When the news of the

capture of St. Eustatius came there had been talk of a peerage for the

Admiral. It was so serious that the Duke of Chandos sent him a message

through Lady Rodney offering to let him have Rodney Stoke on reasonable

terms if he wished to take his title from the ancient possession of the

family from which he claimed to descend. The talk ended in talk,

however, as later events in the West Indies went against us. The failure

at St. Vincent, the loss of Tobago under the very eyes, as the grumblers

would say, of Rodney’s fleet, the ease with which Grasse had made his

way to Fort Royal, and the impunity with which he had subsequently

ranged the West Indies in defiance as it seemed of our fleet, made a

great score against us. To this we could only set off, in the way of

actual advance, the capture of St. Eustatius and the Dutch post on the

mainland. This had seemed a brilliant success at the time, but it did

not last. When it was seen that the want of the island had neither

weakened the insurgents on the continent, nor stopped the activity of

the Yankee privateers, nor made it a whit more difficult for a French

admiral to keep the sea,--when finally it was found, as it soon was,

that the seizure of the island had made it harder than before for

Englishmen to obtain those products of the plantations which had become

necessaries to them,--the popular voice turned with its usual

versatility from loud applause to loud complaint. The outcry of the

planters in St. Kitts, and the traders whose goods had been confiscated,

found an echo in England. Their case was taken up in Parliament by the

formidable voice of Burke. Rodney therefore found himself the mark for

not a little obloquy.

 

The Admiral did not sit in silence under these attacks. He published a

selection of his letters in order to prove that his conduct at St.

Eustatius had been unimpeachable, and that he was not to blame for

subsequent failures. The person to whom he entrusted the publication of

the pamphlet turned out to be an injudicious editor, for he printed

Hood’s request to be allowed to cruise to windward of Martinique, which

of course was to put a weapon into the hands of the Admiral’s enemies.

Rodney was annoyed, but the mischief was done.

 

In December Rodney had an opportunity of answering his enemies in

Parliament. Burke moved for a committee to inquire into the

circumstances of the seizure of St. Eustatius in a vehement denunciatory

speech such as he only could deliver. The occasion called out both the

weakness and the strength of the great orator. He saw a chance of

damaging the Administration, and seized on it as a party man, in which

character he was neither better nor worse than five hundred other

honourable gentlemen. He also thought he saw that the honour of England

had been tarnished, and her interests sacrificed, by cruelty and greed.

A man must have read Burke to very little purpose who does not know that

when he was convinced he had to deal with these sins his anger was