First Salute (20 page)

The plunder of the island, packed in 34 merchant vessels, was sent home at the end of March and the Admiralty informed that a “very rich convoy” was sailing for England escorted by four ships of war: the
Vengeance
, of 74 guns, the former Dutch
Mars
, of 62 guns (renamed the
Prince Edward
), and two others, of 38 and 32 guns, all under the command of Commodore, later Admiral, Hotham, who “has my orders to be extremely attentive to their preservation.” Meanwhile “the enemy’s four line-of-battleships and four large frigates which still continue at Guadeloupe and Martinique are well watched. Every trick that can be devised has been attempted to induce General Vaughan and myself to
leave this island in hopes of retaking it by a
coup de main
and thereby recover the stores.…” The treasonable merchants “will make no scruple to propagate every falsehood their debased minds can invent.…”

Despite all precautions, the precious convoy was lost. Having received correct intelligence of its departure and what it contained, the French had sent one of their leading admirals, La Motte Piquet, with a squadron of six major ships of the line, including one of 110 guns and two of 74, plus additional frigates to watch for it. They sighted it May 2, off the Scilly Isles, and gave hot pursuit. Admiral Hotham signaled to his convoy to disperse and save themselves, but the faster French warships gained on the merchantmen and captured twenty-two of them, the larger part. Outnumbered by and inferior to the French, Hotham could not or did not defend his charge to the bitter end; except for a few ships that escaped to Ireland, the rich plunder, valued at £5 million, went to the French. As one of the captains who had served under Rodney in the mismanaged fight of April 17 that so enraged the Admiral, and who, with no love lost between them, had later asked without success to be transferred to another command, Hotham felt no devotion to his commanding officer. While Rodney would certainly have been aware of ill feeling, he entrusted Hotham with the convoy because his ship was the
Vengeance
, strongest and largest of Rodney’s squadron.

At the same time, the Admiralty, having in its turn learned that La Motte Piquet had left the French naval base at Brest and was at sea, had sent out ships to intercept him or, alternatively, to detach frigates to meet Hotham and instruct him to return via the North of Scotland and Ireland, the old escape route of the Spanish Armada. But the searchers, after cruising for two weeks, failed to find the Eustatius convoy and send it out of danger. They put back to port in England without bringing home the expected treasure, to the sharp disappointment of ministers who would have welcomed a great prize to show off as a gain for the administration. Instead, Lord Sandwich in a letter to the King had to confess a sorry naval failure in what he calls “this unpleasant affair.”

For Rodney, who after dividing with General Vaughan would have stood to gain a one-sixteenth share, or an estimated £150,000 pounds, the disappointment was considerably deeper. Lost too was the more important prize of St. Eustatius itself. It was recaptured by the French in November, 1781, a month after the British loss of America at Yorktown. Rodney and General Vaughan had determined to make its defenses
impregnable “to secure this important conquest to Great Britain that she might avail herself of all its riches as atonement for the injuries it has done her.” With some savagery, he writes that he and Vaughan will leave the island “instead of the greatest emporium upon earth, a mere desert and only known by report, yet, this rock … has done England more harm than all the arms of her most potent enemies and alone supported the infamous American rebellion.…” Regarding his own expectations, he writes, “If my great convoy of prizes arrive safely in England, I shall be happy as, exclusive of satisfying all debts, something will be left for my dear children.” Concern and affection for his two daughters and his sons repeats itself in his letters as one of the more sympathetic aspects of his character. “My chief anxiety,” he wrote to his wife after his ill-fated convoy had sailed for home, “is that neither yourself nor my dear girls shall ever again be necessitous nor be under obligations to others.” The humiliations of penury, however much of his own making, sound their painful note in this letter.

Believing he had left the captured island a Gibraltar of the West Indies, with land forces on guard and repaired fortifications, Rodney sailed to Antigua and then to Barbados. When St. Eustatius was retaken by the French six months later, they found the place in ashes, empty of population. Though rebuilt and repopulated during the French occupation, it never regained its former extravagant prosperity.

THE
uneven career that brought Rodney to St. Eustatius and determined what he did there began with his entry into the Royal Navy at the age of twelve. He was the son of an old county family settled since the 13th century in Somersetshire, where they held the estate of Stoke Rodney. In the twenty generations leading down to the Admiral, his ancestors served in various military and diplomatic positions of no outstanding distinction, but fulfilling the duty expected of the landed gentry of England and establishing a record, as was said of them, of
a family of greater antiquity than fame. In the process, they acquired a ducal connection in the person of James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, who came into possession of Stoke Rodney through the marriage into the Brydges family of a daughter and heiress of an early Rodney. Chandos was a familiar at the court of George I and together with the King stood as joint godfathers to the Rodneys’ son, who was endowed with both their names, George and Brydges. Chandos’ grandson, who sueceeded
as third Duke in the period of Rodney’s maturity, remained a loyal adherent of the Hanovers and a supporter of George III and of his American policy until about 1780, when the policy’s futility became obvious enough to move the Duke gradually into opposition. He was evidently not a man impervious to change but rather one able to allow realities to penetrate. Though not belonging to one of the great Whig ruling families, Rodney could qualify as a young gentleman of “excellent connections.” Connections were the key to “place” in 18th century society, meaning a remunerative post in the official world, and “place” was of the essence, especially for a younger son, which Rodney remained until his older brother died, when the younger was about twenty.

Personal characteristics were both an aid and a drawback to his career. Slight and elegant in figure, he was more than handsome; if the portrait by Joshua Reynolds, painted at forty-two when Rodney was already a widower and a father of three, does not lie, he was frankly beautiful. With a strong sensual mouth, a broad brow and impressively large dark eyes, the face was youthful and seductive and would surely have promoted his amorous pursuits, of which the busy diarist, Sir William Wraxall, makes a point. “Two passions both highly injurious to his repose, women and play [gambling] carried him into many excesses,” Wraxall writes of his friend. According to Horace Walpole, the emperor of gossip, Rodney won the favor of the Princess Amelia, daughter of George III, and left of their liaison a “token.” The token grew to be a pretty young lady of small stature known in her circle as “
little Miss Ashe.” Indefatigable investigators who edit 18th century letters and journals maintain, based on calculation of relative ages, that Rodney was too young to have been responsible for this royal fragment. Though Rodney was loquacious, Wraxall says, and particularly given to “
making himself frequently the theme of his own discourse” and talking “much and freely upon every subject concealing nothing regardless of who was present,” he himself left no mention, as far as is recorded, of the Princess Amelia or the “token.” About his gambling, however, there is no question. He was never long absent from the gaming table at White’s, where the addiction ruled, and if his debts were not as spectacular as those of the rising political star Charles James Fox, it was only because Rodney did not have a rich father to pay them. The debts remained, and as many were owed to men in office or with political influence, they were to become stumbling blocks in his professional career, besides keeping him, combined with a spendthrift character, under tight pecuniary pressure
all his life. “
His person was more elegant,” Wraxall adds, “than seemed to become his rough profession. There was even something that approached to delicacy and effeminacy in his figure: but no man manifested a more temperate and steady courage in action.” Equally “fearless” in talk, “he dealt his censures as well as his praises … which necessarily procured him many enemies particularly in his own profession.”

The year of the Reynolds portrait was 1761, when Reynolds had burst, like Byron later, into glittering overnight celebrity. Everyone of fame and fashion, equipped with 25 guineas in hand, formed a line to his door. All of London, social, political and important, met on Reynolds’ canvases, from Admiral Anson, circumnavigator of the globe who had captured the richest Spanish treasure galleon and was afterward First Lord of the Admiralty, to sleepy Lord North, soon to endure his long confinement as reluctant Prime Minister, to exquisite duchesses in the gauzy gowns that exercised the brushes of Reynolds’ drapery painters, to the uncouth figure and sparkling talker Dr. Samuel Johnson. The full-length portrait of a hero of naval and political battle, Admiral Keppel, attracted the most attention. Standing upright in a statuary pose before a background of storm-filled sky and heaving waves, he dominated the group, but of the male portraits there was no close-up to equal the stunning head of George Rodney.

The possessor of these handsome features has been described by one historian as “
the most enterprising and irascible, able and bombastic, intolerant, intolerable and successful naval officer between Drake and Nelson.” This is an exciting introduction but it is, one is obliged to say, a case of historian’s hype. Irascible yes, but so was every naval commander of the time, owing no doubt to the continual test of trying to navigate as a fighting instrument a cumbersome vehicle whose motor power was the inconstant wind not subject to human control, and whose action depended on instant and expert response by a rough crew to orders governing the delicate adjustment of sails through an infinity of ropes hardly identifiable one from another. That a commander who had to bring home success in battle under these conditions should be irascible is not to be wondered at. Or it may be that there is something about commanding a ship, sail or steam—a mysterious fungus on shipboard, as it were—that brings out ill-temper. Of a great wartime admiral of another age it has been said, “He was vindictive, irascible, over-bearing, hated and feared.” Not a man of the 18th century, this was Ernest J.
King, Commander-in-Chief of American naval forces in World War II. Irritability was an occupational disease. “Intolerant and intolerable” belong in the same category, made no lighter by the foul physical conditions of life on a sailing vessel, with its reek of rotten meat and putrefied cheese, damp clothes, bilge water, open vats of urine in which the men were instructed to relieve themselves, on the theory that it would be used to retard fire, plus the smell of five or six hundred unwashed bodies packed for sleep in their hammocks below deck or rolling in rumsoaked drunkenness or in fornication with wives and doxies who were carried on board.

The stench of a ship wafted by an inshore breeze could often tell of its approach before it reached port. Reports of the bad tempers and quarrels of captains and admirals—with the exception of Nelson—are repetitious. John Paul Jones, apart from killing a mutineer who may have deserved death, carried on a furious vendetta with a captain of one of his ships—Landais of the
Alliance
—whom he accused of betrayal in combat. “His fault finding, nagging and perfectionism coupled with his unpredictable temper made him disliked by many shipmates” is the verdict of his biographer, Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison. Admiral Hyde Parker, commander at Barbados who served on several occasions with Rodney, had a “bitter choleric temper” and was called “Old Vinegar” on account of his harsh manner and speech. Richard Lestock, whose recriminations against his commanding officer, Admiral Mathews, became public after the Battle of Toulon had historic result, was “on malevolent terms” with Mathews from the start. Mathews, who had served at the court of Sardinia, was nicknamed
Il Furibondo
by the Italians because of his violent temper. Among the French it was the same. Count d’Estaing, active against the British in American waters and against Rodney in the West Indies, is called “brusque and autocratic” and not liked by officers and men, while Admiral de Grasse, the most important of all to the history of America, summoned his captains on deck to administer the “
sharpest reproaches” to express his dissatisfaction for their failure to chase and engage the enemy in an encounter off Martinique. He would rather lay down his command, he said, unless they showed better conduct in obeying signals and fulfilling their duties. Rodney’s own notorious outbreak of anger at the errors and failure by his captains in the blundered battle off Martinique in 1780—expressed in his public statement to the Admiralty, the “British flag was not properly supported”—will appear in due time. If that was irascible, it was clearly not a matter of personal temperament. “There is no set of
men who understand these matters so ill as sea officers,” lamented Lord Sandwich, suffering from his experience as First Lord of the Admiralty. “For it scarcely ever happens that after an action they do not call the whole world to hear what complaints they have to each other.” Irascibility in the navy was a recognized phenomenon, as attested in the journal of a French officer who, in describing a case of naval non-cooperation, refers casually to “the
charming maritime ill-temper.”

More damaging than irascibility to effective management of a warship was the raging political partisanship that divided officers, and obstructed the collective will to win. The furious quarrel of Whig Admiral Keppel and Tory Admiral Palliser, over claims by Palliser of failure in battle by Keppel, carried over into an explosive court-martial that tore the body politic apart, brought angry pro-Keppel mobs in assault on the Admiralty and left permanent animosities in the navy so deep that officers believed each other capable (and perhaps they were) of deliberate errors or failures in combat on purpose to injure a fellow-admiral of the opposite party. These animosities lasted throughout the period of the American war when the administration’s belief in crushing the rebellion by force was the object of the Opposition’s deepest scorn.