Had simple maritime advantages guided the British counsels, it would have been sufficient to note that Jamaica was the great centre of British interests in the western Caribbean; that outward-bound ships, entering the Caribbean through the eastern, or Windward, Islands, ran down with the trade wind along the south side of Haiti, where were two harbors, Aux Cayes and Jacmel, favorable as bases for privateers; and that the homeward trade passed through the Windward Passage, between Haïti and Cuba, which was flanked by two Haïtian ports, Tiburon to the south and Mole St. Nicolas on the north. These four were, therefore, particularly dangerous to British trade, and consequently, so far as position went, particularly advantageous if in British occupation. It is true that the topographical conditions of the ground about a seaport in an enemy's country may make the occupation very hazardous, except by the employment of more men than can be had; as was the case at Mole St. Nicolas, where the fortifications of the place itself were commanded by the surrounding heights. Yet it remained in the hands of the British from 1793 to 1798; and it may be believed that their interests would have been well served by strongly garrisoning these ports. [72] At the least they would so be lost to French cruisers. Instead of this, with the idea of conquest, the wholly insufficient forces sent were pushed down to the bottom of the bight of Gonaives, and the southern coast of the island was left in the enemy's hands. It is not desirable to give in detail the history of these petty military operations, nor of the civil commotions with which they were connected. Suffice it to say, that the course of events finally threw the government into the hands of a pure negro, Toussaint L'Ouverture. He continued to hold it till the Peace of Amiens, in 1802; and with him the British, in 1798, concluded a treaty by which they finally abandoned the island. Though the scheme of conquest had failed, their interference had opened the country to British trade and caused the loss of Haïti to France, by contributing to the rise of Toussaint, the negro most capable of leading his race. He still professed fidelity to the mother-country, but he acted as one possessing independent power. The British, by the treaty, recognized the island as a neutral territory, and Toussaint, on his part, permitted them as well as neutral ships to trade with it. [73] He also prohibited the sailing of privateers from ports of Haïti, as they seriously interfered with its commerce. [74] Under his strong and wise administration the prosperity of the island greatly revived, though without attaining the proportions of former days.
The islands known as the Lesser Antilles, which extend from Porto Rico in a southerly direction to Trinidad and form the eastern boundary of the Caribbean, are, from their small size, much more dependent than is Haïti or Cuba upon the control of the sea. Though the aggregate commercial value of the whole group was far inferior to that of the French part alone of Haïti, they had a distinct military advantage which made them, in that point of view and to the West Indies, more important than Haïti itself. They were to windward of the whole Caribbean with reference to the trade winds, which blow unceasingly from east to west; and hence were much nearer in time, that supreme factor in military combinations, to the great western islands than the latter were to them. The same circumstance of the trade wind threw them across the path of vessels bound from Europe to all parts of the Caribbean, and thus facilitated the intercepting of supplies essential to the support and industries of the islands, for much of which they depended upon the mother-countries.
The largest, by far, of these islands, Trinidad, belonged in 1793 to Spain, at that time the ally of Great Britain. Its nearness to the South American continent gave it, as a distributing centre, marked commercial advantages, of which the unenterprising Spaniards made little use; but, as the trade winds blow from the north of east, it was not favorably placed for a naval station. The two next in size, and among the most fertile, Guadaloupe and Martinique, were French islands. Being in the centre of the chain and to leeward of none, except the outlying English Barbadoes, they were admirably situated for military control, and the strategic advantage of position was supplemented by the defensive strength of Fort Royal (now Fort de France), the principal harbor of Martinique; which was then, as it is now, by far the most powerful naval position in the eastern Caribbean. Besides them, France owned Santa Lucia, next south of Martinique, and Tobago. The military importance of these islands, combined with a distinct though minor commercial value, and the experience in past wars of the injury done to British commerce by privateering based upon them, made their reduction advisable to Great Britain; to whom belonged most of the other Lesser Antilles as well as the trade of the Caribbean. One of the first acts of the war, before sending a vessel to the Mediterranean or increasing the Channel fleet, was to despatch a squadron of seven sail-of-the-line to the West Indies, where there were at that time, except a few small cruisers, but two fifty-gun ships, one at Jamaica and one to windward—a thousand miles apart. No fact shows more strongly how unprepared Great Britain was for war than the naval destitution of this region, at a time when France had three or four ships-of-the-line continually in her colonies. This British squadron sailed under the command of Admiral Gardner on the 24th of March, 1793; and there was a strong expectation that Martinique and Guadaloupe, which had hoisted the old royal standard of France upon learning the deposition of Louis XVI., would place themselves under British protection. This hope was disappointed, they having already resumed their republican allegiance, and Gardner returned to England in the fall, leaving a part of his squadron behind.
It was then decided to reduce the French islands by force, and on the 26th of November Sir John Jervis, afterwards Earl St. Vincent, sailed with a small force of ships-of-war carrying seven thousand troops destined for this service. Reaching Barbadoes in January, the expedition appeared off Martinique on the 5th of February, 1794, and after a series of successful operations the island capitulated on the 22d of March. A detachment was next sent against Santa Lucia, which was surrendered on the 4th of April. On the 10th of the same month the combined naval and military forces anchored off Guadaloupe, and on the 20th this island, with its off-lying dependencies, Marie-Galante, Desirade and the Saints, also submitted. Tobago having been seized with slight resistance in April, 1793, Great Britain was now in possession of all the hostile Windward Islands, except the petty St. Martin, part of which belonged to France. A considerable detachment of troops was next sent to Mole St. Nicolas to assist the undertaking against Haïti; a reduction of the force in the Windward Islands which led to disastrous consequences, felt throughout the war by the islands and commerce of Great Britain. For on the 3d of June, when the British commanders had departed leaving a garrison in Guadaloupe, there appeared off the coast a division of ships, two being frigates and the others transports, which had left France in April, before the loss of the colonies was known. Landing without opposition, they established themselves firmly and gained possession of half the island before Jervis and Grey could appear. The struggle continued with varying fortunes during the following six months, but the British continually lost ground and wasted with yellow fever. This dire disease told likewise severely on the new French arrivals, but these found a native Creole population of nearly six thousand, the larger part of whom were faithful to the republic; whereas their enemies, out of a total original force of seven thousand, had, besides losses in battle and by disease, been obliged to spare garrisons for the captured islands and a detachment to Haïti. These causes alone would seem sufficient to account for the recapture of the island; but the utmost credit must at the same time be allowed to the French officers concerned, and especially to the commissioner of the Convention, Victor Hugues, who accompanied the expedition. This man, who had at Rochefort filled the rôle of public accuser, which in Paris gained for Fouquier Tinville a hideous immortality, seems to have embodied in himself the best and worst features of the men of the Terror, whose fate he escaped by leaving France betimes. In his report to the Convention he boasted of having put to death twelve hundred royalists in Guadaloupe. This horror partakes doubtless of the evident exaggerations discernible in the French accounts of a military operation which, not so adorned, would have been brilliant enough. Hugues's brutality is unquestionable, but to it he joined the vigor, audacity, and unscrupulous determination to succeed which carried