Authors: John Sugden
Over his shoulders, as Dalling traced the course of the San Juan River in Thomas Jefferys’s
West Indian Atlas
of 1775, stood the ghosts of far greater forebears. Sir Francis Drake, that tireless but chivalrous and pious plunderer of all things Spanish, had always wanted to stunt his enemy’s European ambitions by severing the flow of her silver from the New World. He had taught the English to ally themselves with Indians and escaped blacks familiar with the terrain of the main and islands, and had once planned to ascend the San Juan himself, but never achieved it. A century later a colonial conflict of astonishing ferocity had made the West Indies the refuge of pirates and buccaneers as well as the cockpit of Europe. Whether or not a formal state of war existed at home, the various colonies loosed ragged forces upon each other as if they were spurred roosters, some of them bloodying and butchering with little compassion. Between 1665 and 1670 no fewer than three armies of irregulars successfully ascended the San Juan to sack Granada, the first led by the privateer Henry Morgan. Two were launched with the support of Sir Thomas Modyford, the governor of Jamaica, whose purposes were not dissimilar to those which motivated Dalling.
Memories of the privateers and buccaneers, and their historic role in the defence of Jamaica, still lingered in Dalling’s time, but there were more immediate, and therefore more potent, inspirations. Jefferys’s
Atlas
, for instance. It portrayed the San Juan River as an ill-defended waterway across the isthmus of Panama. There were two Spanish forts, neither of any strength. The one near Lake Nicaragua contained only a hundred men, many conscripted criminals. The lake was navigable to flat-bottomed boats, and though the river contained ‘several rapid falls’, its secrets were known to the Indians.
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Also bewitching Dalling were the opinions of James Lawrie, the superintendent general of the British settlements on the Mosquito coast, which Nelson had recently visited in the
Badger
. Lawrie assured Dalling that he could raise thousands of volunteers, including blacks and Indians, and furnish sufficient small boats for an expedition up the San Juan River. Soon Dalling was concocting a plan of majestic proportions. A force would ascend the San Juan, capturing a castle the Spanish had established on it to check the incursions of buccaneers, and reach Lake Nicaragua. By erecting one or more vessels on the lake and capturing the city of Granada at its upper end they could command the entire region, receiving supplies and reinforcements from Jamaica either by the San Juan or the Bluefields and Matina rivers to the north and south of it.
Dalling’s plans went far beyond temporary conquest. From Lake Nicaragua, the British could open a way to the Pacific, seizing the towns of Leon and Realejo, and stationing a naval squadron on the western coast of the isthmus. In short, the expedition would cut Spanish America in two, severing South America from the northern provinces such as Mexico. More, controlling such a strategic portion of Central America, with a Pacific squadron to raid Spain’s vulnerable but rich west coast, Britain might also foment rebellion in the Spanish possessions, destabilising and perhaps invading Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Yucatan – maybe even Mexico and Florida. Their silver and resources could be commandeered and the regions thrown open to British commerce and exploitation. This, then, was no hit-and-run raid but a bid to control Central America and dismember Spain’s overseas empire. If it was successful, Dalling thought, Britain could offer homes in Central America to Loyalists displaced from the rebellious colonies further north, and even send an expedition to establish a permanent British foothold on the Pacific coast of North America.
It was a vast dream but Dalling was convinced that it could be
realised. He turned a deaf ear to those in the Jamaican assembly who wanted nothing to do with an idea that would strip them of men and resources in such dangerous times. The French fleet under d’Estaing had sailed for Georgia, they said, but who knew when it might return? Even Sir Peter Parker doubted the wisdom of Dalling’s plan.
But the governor was a stubborn, almost ineducable, man, as he was showing in a battle he was having with Parker over prize money. When the island’s attorney general declined to prosecute the admiral, Dalling dismissed him from his post; and far from heeding the Admiralty’s orders to reinstate the discomfited dignitary, Dalling proceeded to remove four junior judges he also deemed unsympathetic to his cause. The governor was not a man to be swayed easily, and with the Nicaraguan bit firmly between his teeth he knew no restraint. ‘Give me but the direction of a force, and that of no great extent, and I’ll be answerable to give you the domination of Spain in this part of the world,’ he wrote to the British colonial secretary on 4 February 1780. A few days later he was telling him, ‘My ideas are every day strengthened as to the feasibility with which blows of the greatest consequence may be struck with little probability of detriment on our side, nay almost with certain impunity.’
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Shortly, others were catching the bug. Empire, silver and fame beckoned them. ‘Enthusiasm was never carried to greater height than by those who had promised to themselves the glory of shaking Spain to her foundation,’ said Benjamin Moseley, surgeon general of Jamaica. ‘The colours of England were, in their imagination, already even on the walls of Lima.’ One of the expedition’s backers was Nelson’s prize agent, the Kingston merchant Hercules Ross, who acquired the right to supply it with provisions and handle any plunder taken.
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The excitement overruled a serious assessment of the difficulties of the enterprise, or of the amount of support it would command among the white settlers, blacks and Indians of the Mosquito coast. It had long been known that the Indians had little love for the Spaniards, and even in Morgan’s day they were reported to have been ‘driven to rebellion by cruelty, and there is no reconciling them’. But Lawrie’s claims that he could ‘arm some thousands upon the coast’ and ‘bring in the Wooliva and Valientas, almost as numerous as the Moskito men, and good pilots into [for] the Spanish country’, were to be brutally ill-founded. In fact, Lawrie, the superintendent-general of the Mosquito coast, would not even supply the quantity of small light craft that were needed to ascend such a difficult river as the San Juan.
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Not only that, but although Dalling planned to launch his expedition in January, ‘when the fine weather will permit of operations’, he underestimated the medical problems involved. He hoped that before the rainy season began in the spring the troops would have fought their way up the San Juan and reached the higher altitudes around Lake Nicaragua, where the air was reckoned cooler and wholesome. Indeed, he argued the campaign might actually invigorate soldiers who were falling sick in Jamaica. When he was later accused of denuding the island of valuable troops, Dalling declared that those dispatched to Nicaragua were ‘only of the convalescent kind, the greatest part of whom would perish here, when from the salubrity of the sea air they will probably recover and be useful there’. In this last protestation Dalling was being disingenuous, because the troops shipped to Nicaragua were not convalescents and had been mustered as fit. Nevertheless, the governor did pinpoint the importance of getting the expeditionary force out of the swamps of the Lower San Juan and up to Lake Nicaragua before the rains came. ‘Our operations must commence sometime in January,’ he told the commander of the expedition, Captain John Polson of the 60th Regiment, ‘and consequently dispatch is indispensably necessary.’
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Unfortunately his timing too proved to be fatally optimistic.
Dalling needed naval support to escort his troopships, first to the Mosquito shore, where Lawrie’s detachments and boats were to be collected, and then to the mouth of the San Juan. Once the soldiers were disembarked the navy’s job was merely to protect the estuary, guard the expedition’s back and keep the supply line open. Sir Peter Parker was not sanguine about the chances of success but Nelson was available and ideal for the job. He was desperate for action, and after his voyage on the
Badger
knew the Mosquito coast as well as any captain on the station. Horatio willingly accepted the assignment, though he shared his admiral’s doubts. ‘How it will turn out, God knows!’ he wrote to Captain Locker.
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Nelson watched the expedition assemble in Kingston and Port Royal. Once the San Juan was in British hands, the governor planned to push regular reinforcements up the river, and had more professional soldiers coming from England. But the bridgehead would have to be established by Polson. At Polson’s disposal were about three to four hundred regulars of the 60th and 79th regiments; a Loyal Irish Corps
raised by Dalling; about sixty sailors; and some two hundred Jamaican volunteers under Major James MacDonald, a detachment that included sixty or seventy Irish, a few foreigners and seamen, and blacks, Indians and mulattoes. Of these the 79th, just shipped from England, was unacclimatised. Nonetheless, the force was provisioned for six months and Polson, ‘a steady and good officer’ as well as an experienced one, was given the local rank of colonel.
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As a post-captain, Nelson was actually the highest ranking officer on the expedition, but though he demanded and received full control of the flotilla and its naval and civilian personnel, his authority was confined to the sea. Polson was named overall commander-in-chief, and it was expected that Nelson would have little to do once he had disembarked the army at the mouth of the San Juan. Few reckoned with Nelson’s unusual spirit, however. Colonel Polson was to marvel at the energy and enterprise of the ridiculously young man sent to ferry his expedition around. ‘A light-haired boy came to me in a little frigate,’ he recalled later. At the time he seemed of little consequence, but ‘in two or three days he displayed himself, and afterwards . . . directed all the operations.’
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After annoying delays Nelson led the expedition to sea at six in the morning of 3 February 1780, the
Hinchinbroke
and several transports – the
Penelope
, four brigs and sloops and a tender named the
Royal George
. Stowed away were the pieces of a shallow-draft vessel intended for service on Lake Nicaragua. The convoy slipped southwest across the Caribbean, towards Providence, a small island held by the British east of the Mosquito coast. It was a peaceful voyage, although Nelson had to punish a marine and a seaman with twelve lashes each for neglect and insolence.
Providence was not the most accessible place. It was surrounded by a rugged, treacherous reef that only admitted ships to the harbour through a narrow, winding passage. On 10 February Nelson brought his squadron offshore and sent a cutter to pick up a pilot for the Mosquito coast and San Juan. As he knew, the coast of Nicaragua was tricky, spotted with small islands, shoals and protecting reefs, and the San Juan itself was dangerous and, in the words of Jefferys’s
Atlas
, ‘full of cataracts’. Yet here, right at the beginning of the adventure, the support promised by Lawrie failed. A guide, Richard Hanna, came out to join the ships. He claimed to have been up the San Juan as far as the Spanish fort, but he proved to be what one of Lawrie’s local rivals described as ‘worthless’.
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Nelson was now bound for Cape Gracias a Dios, where Lawrie’s detachments of volunteers, blacks and Indians were supposed to rendezvous. Unfortunately, in the early evening of the 11th the
Penelope
ran aground on the reef around Providence. Her master signalled distress and tried to lighten the ship by throwing all but three of his guns overboard. Nelson brought up the smaller vessels to help and sent a lieutenant and boat’s crew to supervise the unloading of powder and stores. However, the job of refloating the
Penelope
looked as if it was going to be a long one so Horatio sent word ahead to Cape Gracias a Dios, urging Lawrie to use the delay to prepare his forces for a swift embarkation. By 13 February he was fretting so much about the time being lost that he decided to go on, leaving the
Penelope
to catch up when she could, though his convoy had no sooner departed than the ship slipped off the reef into deep water. Luckily she was relatively unscathed and quickly crowded on sail to catch up with the others, but two valuable days had been lost.
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The next day Polson and Nelson met a greater disappointment at Cape Gracias a Dios. Polson was looking forward to picking up forty men of the 79th Regiment who had already been sent to this coast, as well as Lawrie’s volunteers. To encourage the volunteers he had some blank commissions to offer those who would serve as officers. But when they reached the rendezvous no forces were there to meet them. No regulars, no militia, no blacks, no Indians, no boats and no Lawrie. No one except an officer to report that the superintendent-general of the coast had not yet arrived. Lawrie was still gathering forces on the Black River to the northwest.
Nothing at all appeared to have been done about mustering the local Indians and Sandy Bay ‘samboes’ under their ambitiously named leaders King George and Julius Caesar. These peoples inhabited scattered small villages of thatched houses, hunting, fishing, gathering and practising a slash and burn horticulture, and rallying them would be a time-consuming business. But there was no alternative and Polson hurried a message to a local Indian leader named Isaac, Duke of York. Isaac was invited for talks and entreated to use his influence with King George, as well as with the chieftain of Pearl Key Lagoon, Admiral Dick Richards, who was believed to control most of the Indians south of the cape. Somehow Polson also got word to General Tempest, reportedly the principal Indian leader to the west. To all of these important people Polson sent gifts, hoping to counteract any adverse impressions that might have retarded their willingness to come forward.
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