Vernon had had his eye on southeast Cuba for some time. While pooling local resources in advance of Cartagena, one of his lieutenants
captured a British privateer, pressing its “marooning” crew into the king's service. Among the harvest taken on that raid was a displaced New Englander named John Drake who had been plying the waters of the western Atlantic for over two decades and whose description of southeast Cuba changed Vernon's understanding of the goal of this campaign.
71
In a deposition obtained on board the
Boyne
as Vernon sailed for Cuba, Drake described being seized off a British trader bound for Boston by a Spanish privateer sometime in the late 1720s. Released on the island of Trinidad, Drake made for Puerto PrÃncipe, in central Cuba, where he hoped to catch a ride to Jamaica and, ultimately, home. But Cuba suited Drake just fine. Finding that he “could get a very comfortable living there by fishing,” he decided to remain, and over the course of the next decade he moved with the seasons back and forth between Puerto PrÃncipe and the eastern towns of Bayamo and Santiago. By the time he was hauled aboard Vernon's ship, Drake had more or less settled down, exchanging a third of his bounty for hunting rights in a spot on Cuba's southern coast just east of Guantánamo Bay.
72
This Caribbean Leatherstocking knew the Santiago-Guantánamo region as only a hunter-gatherer could. Having fished its rivers and traipsed its fields, Drake could calculate times and measurements down to the hour and even ankle (“farther than which even a dory cannot pass, being only ankle deep”). While debating Spanish targets back in Port Royal, Vernon had learned from another source that a frontal assault on Santiago harbor would be suicidal thanks to the harbor's tortuous, precipitous entrance, which made it easy to protect. But the source described Santiago as vulnerable to a land-based attack, and Drake's testimony convinced Vernon that Guantánamo Bay, forty miles down the coast, would make an ideal staging ground.
73
Emptying into the southwest corner of Guantánamo Bay flowed a significant river (Rio Guantánamo), navigable in twenty-five to thirty feet of water for about three miles, and in over nine feet of water for up to fifteen. From there the advancing army would have to strike out on foot, skirting the mountains that made direct progress up the coast impossible. Drake estimated that a soldier could cover the remaining sixty circuitous miles to Santiago in less than two days. “Very good” in dry weather, the
route was passable even when inundated, though the road to Santiago was “for the most part woody.” These woods would become a sticking point between Vernon and his army counterpart, General Thomas Wentworth, who feared the woods, as he feared an ambush, and who took cold comfort in Drake's description of a route “so broad that ten Men may very well go abreast.”
74
Striking in its detail, Drake's testimony is notable too for what it omits: mention of any fortifications at Guantánamo Bay, for instance, or local garrisons, or even significant settlement. A few isolated saltworks and a couple of cattle pens lined the river above where it shoaled. Roughly forty miles from the mouth of the bay lay the little village of Santa Catalina (“an hundred Houses and one Church” inhabited by “Indians and Mulattoes who lived by hunting and raising of Stock”).
75
In short, nothing in Drake's report led Vernon to conclude that this territory was anything but ripe for the picking; a few odd farms and a colored village posed no obstacle to the plan crystallizing in his mind for a new American colony.
Vernon arrived at Guantánamo that July with high hopes. What he found exceeded his expectations. It was not simply that Guantánamo afforded ready access to Santiago; nor that the bay could absorb the entire fleet; nor that it offered better protection from tropical storms than Port Royal; nor, finally, that it was ideally situated to safeguard British shipping in the heart of the Caribbean. All of this was true. What put Guantánamo over the top in Vernon's mind was its native splendor: its navigable rivers, rolling hills, and fertile plains.
Vernon spent the first week at Guantánamo Bay unpacking. Though not unnoticed by Spanish authorities, his arrival went unopposed. Spanish defenses in the vicinity of Santiago were light. Just how light became clear after the interception of a packet of letters from the Spanish governor of Santiago to the captain of the local militia acknowledging the British arrival and promising to release arms and ammunition for at most a hundred men. Later testimony from a Spanish captive put the actual number of enemy troops in the area at seventy-five, giving the British a numerical advantage of more than forty to one.
76
The only significant skirmishes of the campaign occurred at the end of the second week, when a scouting party dispatched to confirm Drake's intelligence flushed the Spanish militia from its lair. For two
days the Spaniards peppered the invading army from the bushes, after which the Spaniards essentially disappeared. In their wake lay three British casualties (one fatality) and an open road to Santiago.
77
Yet the British Army never advanced. No amount of intelligence, however favorable, could compel Wentworth forward. Vernon had witnessed such foot-dragging beforeâat Cartagena, where the army's hesitation before the central citadel effectively halted that campaign. Determined to avoid another such debacle, Vernon spent the next two months trying to cajole his army counterpart, whose irresolution was evident by the second day. “I hope it will please God we shall avoid splitting on the Rock of Discord,” the admiral wrote the general, “as I think, if this be but heartily set about, it can never fail of Success.”
78
Within a week, Vernon saw so little evidence of heart among the army that he began to fear for the safety of his guide, Drake. “It cannot but be apprehended,” Vernon warned a lieutenant, that “there are some might even be glad our Guide should be destroyed.”
79
When, after nine days, neither the absence of an enemy nor the establishment of a secure camp proved any inducement to Wentworth, Vernon set off to canvass the local countryside for himself.
Descending the ladder of the
Boyne
, he boarded a longboat and headed up the Guantánamo River, his delight at what he found apparently exaggerated by his fear of losing it. “I thought it the most beautiful Prospect I ever saw,” he wrote the Admiralty back at Whitehall, “to row five Leagues up a navigable River, of about a hundred Yards wide all the Way, with green Trees on both Sides appearing like a green Fence.” Skirting Wentworth's camp, he crested a hill to come face-to-face with “the finest Plains” in the West Indies, watered “by a River the farthest navigable.” Wentworth, meanwhile, occupied a rise along the river, “as beautiful a Situation for a Town as this Country can afford, with a fertile soil behind it.”
80
Vernon was a confident, egotistical man, as his eager forging of “victory” medals suggests. Might he have confided to Washington, who remained by his side at Guantánamo Bay, his hope that such a town would one day bear his name? The sources do not say, but the similarity between this site and another back home in Virginia is uncanny and must have left a lasting impression in Washington's mind.
As days leached into weeks and Wentworth's intransigence stiffened,
relations between the admiral and the general deteriorated.
81
En route to Cuba from Jamaica, a navy captain had overheard an army officer grumbling that “the Army would not land in Cuba”; once landed, this officer was said to have remarked “that the Army would not move from the Encampment on the River Side.”
82
When, by mid-August, Wentworth had come to justify his inaction by pointing to a lack of reinforcements, Vernon called his bluff and dispatched one of his fleetest ships, the
Sea-Horse
, to the colonies to beat the bushes for more men.
83
No doubt Wentworth's numbers
were
dwindling; this was a self-fulfilling prophecy in the face of tropical disease. But talk of reinforcements was a distraction, as Wentworth himself acknowledged the next month when he allowed that no number of reinforcements would compel him on to Santiago. Over the ensuing days, excuse followed excuse until the army finally retrained its sights on, of all places, Cartagena.
Glowing accounts of Guantánamo Bay began to sweep the colonies just as Vernon came to recognize that the campaign was over. In early autumn 1741, newspapers up and down the Atlantic seaboard announced almost accurately that “Admiral Vernon was arriv'd at S. Jago de Cuba, and the Land Forces had got safe ashore at a Village a small Distance from the City.”
84
More detailed descriptions of Guantánamo accompanied the
Sea-Horse
north: “the finest Harbour that ever I saw,” “a pleasant Island, far exceeding all the West Indies that I have been in,” a country laden with “Cattle, Goods, and Horses,” “a place as healthy as Man can wish,” “no want of good Beef, Cabaritas, wild Hogs, Indian Corn in abundance,” “Water plenty and pure, as good as any I have seen among us”âthese just some of the images calculated to distract beleaguered colonists anticipating another long winter. “Rigg out and make the best of [your] way here,” one writer urged, “for I make no doubt but we shall in a very short time have quiet possession of the whole Place, and then first come first served; now or never for a plantation on the island of Cuba.”
85
Most recruiters appealed to individuals' private interests to raise the new troop levy. Massachusetts's new governor, William Shirley, saw in this campaign the embodiment of “the publick good.” To be sure, Guantánamo promised land to individuals
and families
“on the easiest terms yet ever were.” But as the “chief mart of Trade in the
British America,” Massachusetts had something particular to gain, namely “opening a more extensive, rich and beneficial trade for ourselves in the West Indies, than we ever yet enjoyed”âtrade sure to redound to the king's benefit, too.
86
In Shirley's and other pamphlets and proclamations from the second troop drive, the message was all “mission accomplished” and “danger over” as Guantánamo took on the character of a vacation retreat. This would be no new errand into a hostile wilderness. Construction on the new colony proceeded apace, with secure perimeters, cleared roads, and “1000 huts” already in place.
87
Unfortunately for the Americans and their supportersâfor Shirley and Washington, for Vernon and DrakeâBritish land officers did not cling to so generous an understanding of the “publick.” Colonial troops overheard the “Europeans,” as they called them, protesting being asked “to expose their lives for procuring settlements for the Americans.”
88
In a military lacking unified command, the army's opposition to this venture was enough to carry the day. As the odds of delivering this Land of Promise dwindled, Vernon consoled himself with the thought that he had at least understood the Americans correctly. “I think my inclinations have been entirely conformable to what, I believe, was the principal motive of all the American officers engaging in the service,” he wrote Whitehall, “the hopes of being settled in the West Indies, and in Cuba preferably to all other places.”
89
Weeks of butting heads with Wentworth had left Vernon dispirited and ready to return to higher latitudes. Still, the wistful admiral could do nothing but stand aside as his American dream went up in smoke. “We discerned the huts of the camp to be on fire,” he reported on November 16, 1741, “Mr. Wentworth having that morning marched down with his remaining well men, and embarked ⦠on board his Majesty's ship the
Grafton
.”
90
Cruelly, to Vernon fell the burden of completing the self-immolation. Three weeks later, on December 6, a Sunday, he set fire to a fine new fascine battery at the center of the bay and sailed out of Guantánamo, never to return.
91
The Americans, by contrast, would be back. Not these Americans, to be sure, not anytime soon, but soon enoughâbefore any rival power (including Spain) could occupy Guantánamo and exploit its riches. Very few of the original American recruits survived the expedition.
Massachusetts sent five hundred troops and returned fifty; Rhode Island sent two hundred troops and returned twentyâfigures replicated throughout the colonies.
92
Lawrence Washington was among the fortunate to return to the colonies, thus securing Edward Vernon's place in U.S. history. But Washington left Cuba with more than a new name for Epsewasson; a stubborn case of tuberculosis accompanied him home. Latent in 1743, it blossomed by the end of the decade, ultimately killing him on July 26, 1752, at the unripe age of thirty-three. It was left to Lawrence Washington's half brother, George, to transform Mount Vernon from a solemn epitaph to a bungled military campaign into a triumphant symbol of a new nation. But the more Mount Vernon became associated with its new owner, the further its connection to Guantánamo Bay receded, so that, today, Guantánamo's place in early American history is all but forgotten. Guantánamo was there at the beginning. It has been there ever since, reflecting, sometimes shaping, the aspirations and institutions of the people who like to call themselves “Americans” and of the American peoples to whom they have been so closely and controversially tied.