The tropics—­Passengers on board—­Account of the Darien Canal—­Planters’ complaints—­West Indian history—­The Spanish conquest—­Drake and Hawkins—­The buccaneers—­The pirates—­French and English—­Rodney—­Battle of April 12—­Peace with honour—­Doers and talkers.

Another two days and we were in the tropics.  The north-east trade blew behind us, and our own speed being taken off from the speed of the wind there was scarcely air enough to fill our sails.  The waves went down and the ports were opened, and we had passed suddenly from winter into perpetual summer, as Jean Paul says it will be with us in death.  Sleep came back soft and sweet, and the water was warm in our morning bath, and the worries and annoyances of life vanished in these sweet surroundings like nightmares when we wake.  How well the Greeks understood the spiritual beauty of the sea! [Greek:  thalassa klyzei panta tanthropon kaka], says Euripides.  ’The sea washes off all the woes of men.’  The passengers lay about the decks in their chairs reading story books.  The young ones played Bull.  The officers flirted mildly with the pretty young ladies.  For a brief interval care and anxiety had spread their wings and flown away, and existence itself became delightful.

There was a young scientific man on board who interested me much.  He had been sent out from Kew to take charge of the Botanical Gardens in Jamaica—­was quiet, modest, and unaffected, understood his own subjects well, and could make others understand them; with him I had much agreeable conversation.  And there was another singular person who attracted me even more.  I took him at first for an American.  He was a Dane I found, an engineer by profession, and was on his way to some South American republic.  He was a long lean man with grey eyes, red hair, and a laugh as if he so enjoyed the thing that amused him that he wished to keep it all to himself, laughing inwardly till he choked and shook with it.  His chief amusement seemed to have lain in watching the performances of Liberal politicians in various parts of the world.  He told me of an opposition leader in some parliament whom his rival in office had disposed of by shutting him up in the caboose.  ’In the caboose,’ he repeated, screaming with enjoyment at the thought of it, and evidently wishing that all the parliamentary orators on the globe were in the same place.  In his wanderings he had been lately at the Darien Canal, and gave me a wonderful account of the condition of things there.  The original estimate of the probable cost had been twenty-six millions of our (English) money.  All these millions had been spent already, and only a fifth of the whole had as yet been executed.  The entire cost would not be less, under the existing management, than one hundred millions, and he evidently doubted whether the canal would ever be completed at all, though professionally he would not confess to such an opinion.  The waste and plunder had been incalculable.  The works and the gold that were set moving by them made a feast for unclean harpies of both sexes from every nation in the four continents.  I liked everything about Mr. .  Tom Cringle’s Obed might have been something like him, had not Obed’s evil genius driven him into more dangerous ways.

There was a small black boy among us, evidently of pure blood, for his hair was wool and his colour black as ink.  His parents must have been well-to-do, for the boy had been in Europe to be educated.  The officers on board and some of the ladies played with him as they would play with a monkey.  He had little more sense than a monkey, perhaps less, and the gestures of him grinning behind gratings and pushing out his long thin arms between the bars were curiously suggestive of the original from whom we are told now that all of us came.  The worst of it was that, being lifted above his own people, he had been taught to despise them.  He was spoilt as a black and could not be made into a white, and this I found afterwards was the invariable and dangerous consequence whenever a superior negro contrived to raise himself.  He might do well enough himself, but his family feel their blood as a degradation.  His children will not marry among their own people, and not only will no white girl marry a negro, but hardly any dowry can be large enough to tempt a West Indian white to make a wife of a black lady.  This is one of the most sinister features in the present state of social life there.

Small personalities cropped up now and then.  We had representatives of all professions among us except the Church of England clergy.  Of them we had not one.  The captain, as usual, read us the service on Sundays on a cushion for a desk, with the union jack spread over it.  On board ship the captain, like a sovereign, is supreme, and in spiritual matters as in secular.  Drake was the first commander who carried the theory into practice when he excommunicated his chaplain.  It is the law now, and the tradition has gone on unbroken.  In default of clergy we had a missionary, who for the most part kept his lips closed.  He did open them once, and at my expense.  Apropos of nothing he said to me, ’I wonder, sir, whether you ever read the remarks upon you in the newspapers.  If all the attacks upon your writings which I have seen were collected together they would make an interesting volume.’  This was all.  He had delivered his soul and relapsed into silence.

From a Puerto Rico merchant I learnt that, if the English colonies were in a bad way, the Spanish colonies were in a worse.  His own island, he said, was a nest of squalor, misery, vice, and disease.  Blacks and whites were equally immoral; and so far as habits went, the whites were the filthier of the two.  The complaints of the English West Indians were less sweeping, and, as to immorality between whites and blacks, neither from my companions in the ‘Moselle’ nor anywhere afterward did I hear or see a sign of it.  The profligacy of planter life passed away with slavery, and the changed condition of the two races makes impossible any return to the old habits.  But they had wrongs of their own, and were eloquent in their exposition of them.  We had taken the islands from France and Spain at an enormous expense, and we were throwing them aside like a worn-out child’s toy.  We did nothing for them.  We allowed them no advantage as British subjects, and when they tried to do something for themselves, we interposed with an Imperial veto.  The United States, seeing the West Indian trade gravitating towards New York, had offered them a commercial treaty, being willing to admit their sugar duty free, in consideration of the islands admitting in return their salt fish and flour and notions.  A treaty was in process of negotiation between the United States and the Spanish islands.  A similar treaty had been freely offered to them, which might have saved them from ruin, and the Imperial Government had disallowed it.  How, under such treatment, could we expect them to be loyal to the British connection?

It was a relief to turn back from these lamentations to the brilliant period of past West Indian history.  With the planters of the present it was all sugar—­sugar and the lazy blacks who were England’s darlings and would not work for them.  The handbooks were equally barren.  In them I found nothing but modern statistics pointing to dreary conclusions, and in the place of any human interest, long stories of constitutions, suffrages, representative assemblies, powers of elected members, and powers reserved to the Crown.  Such things, important as they might be, did not touch my imagination; and to an Englishman, proud of his country, the West Indies had a far higher interest.  Strange scenes streamed across my memory, and a shadowy procession of great figures who have printed their names in history.  Columbus and Cortez, Vasco Nunez, and Las Casas; the millions of innocent Indians who, according to Las Casas, were destroyed out of the islands, the Spanish grinding them to death in their gold mines; the black swarms who were poured in to take their place, and the frightful story of the slave trade.  Behind it all was the European drama of the sixteenth century—­Charles V. and Philip fighting against the genius of the new era, and feeding their armies with the ingots of the new world.  The convulsion spread across the Atlantic.  The English Protestants and the French Huguenots took to sea like water dogs, and challenged their enemies in their own special domain.  To the popes and the Spaniards the new world was the property of the Church and of those who had discovered it.  A papal bull bestowed on Spain all the countries which lay within the tropics west of the Atlantic—­a form of Monroe doctrine, not unreasonable as long as there was force to maintain it, but the force was indispensable, and the Protestant adventurers tried the question with them at the cannon’s mouth.  They were of the reformed faith all of them, these sea rovers of the early days, and, like their enemies, they were of a very mixed complexion.  The Spaniards, gorged with plunder and wading in blood, were at the same time, and in their own eyes, crusading soldiers of the faith, missionaries of the Holy Church, and defenders of the doctrines which were impiously assailed in Europe.  The privateers from Plymouth and Rochelle paid also for the cost of their expeditions with the pillage of ships and towns and the profits of the slave trade; and they too were the unlicensed champions of spiritual freedom in their own estimate of themselves.  The gold which was meant for Alva’s troops in Flanders found its way into the treasure houses of the London companies.  The logs of the voyages of the Elizabethan navigators represent them faithfully as they were, freebooters of the ocean in one aspect of them; in another, the sea warriors of the Reformation—­uncommissioned, unrecognised, fighting on their own responsibility, liable to be disowned when they failed, while the Queen herself would privately be a shareholder in the adventure.  It was a wild anarchic scene, fit cradle of the spiritual freedom of a new age, when the nations of the earth were breaking the chains in which king and priest had bound them.

To the Spaniards, Drake and his comrades were corsarios, robbers, enemies of the human race, to be treated to a short shrift whenever found and caught.  British seamen who fell into their hands were carried before the Inquisition at Lima or Carthagena and burnt at the stake as heretics.  Four of Drake’s crew were unfortunately taken once at Vera Cruz.  Drake sent a message to the governor-general that if a hair of their heads was singed he would hang ten Spaniards for each one of them.  (This curious note is at Simancas, where I saw it.) So great an object of terror at Madrid was El Draque that he was looked on as an incarnation of the old serpent, and when he failed in his last enterprise and news came that he was dead, Lope de Vega sang a hymn of triumph in an epic poem which he called the ‘Dragontea.’

When Elizabeth died and peace was made with Spain, the adventurers lost something of the indirect countenance which had so far been extended to them; the execution of Raleigh being one among other marks of the change of mind.  But they continued under other names, and no active effort was made to suppress them.  The Spanish Government did in 1627 agree to leave England in possession of Barbadoes, but the pretensions to an exclusive right to trade continued to be maintained, and the English and French refused to recognise it.  The French privateers seized Tortuga, an island off St. Domingo, and they and their English friends swarmed in the Caribbean Sea as buccaneers or flibustiers.  They exchanged names, perhaps as a symbol of their alliance.  ‘Flibustier’ was English and a corruption of freebooter.  ‘Buccaneer’ came from the boucan, or dried beef, of the wild cattle which the French hunters shot in Espanola, and which formed the chief of their sea stores.  Boucan became a French verb, and, according to Labat, was itself the Carib name for the cashew nut.

War breaking out again in Cromwell’s time, Penn and Venables took Jamaica.  The flibustiers from the Tortugas drove the Spaniards out of Hayti, which was annexed to the French crown.  The comradeship in religious enthusiasm which had originally drawn the two nations together cooled by degrees, as French Catholics as well as Protestants took to the trade.  Port Royal became the headquarters of the English buccaneers—­the last and greatest of them being Henry Morgan, who took and plundered Panama, was knighted for his services, and was afterwards made vice-governor of Jamaica.  From the time when the Spaniards threw open their trade, and English seamen ceased to be delivered over to the Inquisition, the English buccaneers ceased to be respectable characters and gradually drifted into the pirates of later history, when under their new conditions they produced their more questionable heroes, the Kidds and Blackbeards.  The French flibustiers continued long after—­far into the eighteenth century—­some of them with commissions as privateers, others as forbans or unlicensed rovers, but still connived at in Martinique.

Adventurers, buccaneers, pirates pass across the stage—­the curtain falls on them, and rises on a more glorious scene.  Jamaica had become the depot of the trade of England with the western world, and golden streams had poured into Port Royal.  Barbadoes was unoccupied when England took possession of it, and never passed out of our hands; but the Antilles—­the Anterior Isles—­which stand like a string of emeralds round the neck of the Caribbean Sea, had been most of them colonised and occupied by the French, and during the wars of the last century were the objects of a never ceasing conflict between their fleets and ours.  The French had planted their language there, they had planted their religion there, and the blacks of these islands generally still speak the French patois and call themselves Catholics; but it was deemed essential to our interests that the Antilles should be not French but English, and Antigua, Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada were taken and retaken and taken again in a struggle perpetually renewed.  When the American colonies revolted, the West Indies became involved in the revolutionary hurricane.  France, Spain, and Holland—­our three ocean rivals—­combined in a supreme effort to tear from us our Imperial power.  The opportunity was seized by Irish patriots to clamour for Irish nationality, and by the English Radicals to demand liberty and the rights of man.  It was the most critical moment in later English history.  If we had yielded to peace on the terms which our enemies offered, and the English Liberals wished us to accept, the star of Great Britain would have set for ever.

The West Indies were then under the charge of Rodney, whose brilliant successes had already made his name famous.  He had done his country more than yeoman’s service.  He had torn the Leeward Islands from the French.  He had punished the Hollanders for joining the coalition by taking the island of St. Eustachius and three millions’ worth of stores and money.  The patriot party at home led by Fox and Burke were ill pleased with these victories, for they wished us to be driven into surrender.  Burke denounced Rodney as he denounced Warren Hastings, and Rodney was called home to answer for himself.  In his absence Demerara, the Leeward Islands, St. Eustachius itself, were captured or recovered by the enemy.  The French fleet, now supreme in the western waters, blockaded Lord Cornwallis at York Town and forced him to capitulate.  The Spaniards had fitted out a fleet at Havannah, and the Count de Grasse, the French admiral, fresh from the victorious thunder of the American cannon, hastened back to refurnish himself at Martinique, intending to join the Spaniards, tear Jamaica from us, and drive us finally and completely out of the West Indies.  One chance remained.  Rodney was ordered back to his station, and he went at his best speed, taking all the ships with him which could then be spared.  It was mid-winter.  He forced his way to Barbadoes in five weeks spite of equinoctial storms.  The Whig orators were indignant.  They insisted that we were beaten; there had been bloodshed enough, and we must sit down in our humiliation.  The Government yielded, and a peremptory order followed on Rodney’s track, ‘Strike your flag and come home.’  Had that fatal command reached him Gibraltar would have fallen and Hastings’s Indian Empire would have melted into air.  But Rodney knew that his time was short, and he had been prompt to use it.  Before the order came, the severest naval battle in English annals had been fought and won.  De Grasse was a prisoner, and the French fleet was scattered into wreck and ruin.

De Grasse had refitted in the Martinique dockyards.  He himself and every officer in the fleet was confident that England was at last done for, and that nothing was left but to gather the fruits of the victory which was theirs already.  Not Xerxes, when he broke through Thermopylae and watched from the shore his thousand galleys streaming down to the Gulf of Salamis, was more assured that his prize was in his hands than De Grasse on the deck of the ‘Ville de Paris,’ the finest ship then floating on the seas, when he heard that Rodney was at St. Lucia and intended to engage him.  He did not even believe that the English after so many reverses would venture to meddle with a fleet superior in force and inspirited with victory.  All the Antilles except St. Lucia were his own.  Tobago, Grenada, the Grenadines, St. Vincent, Martinique, Dominica, Guadaloupe, Montserrat, Nevis, Antigua, and St. Kitts, he held them all in proud possession, a string of gems, each island large as or larger than the Isle of Man, rising up with high volcanic peaks clothed from base to crest with forest, carved into deep ravines, and fringed with luxuriant plains.  In St. Lucia alone, lying between St. Vincent and Dominica, the English flag still flew, and Rodney lay there in the harbour at Castries.  On April 8, 1782, the signal came from the north end of the island that the French fleet had sailed.  Martinique is in sight of St. Lucia, and the rock is still shown from which Rodney had watched day by day for signs that they were moving.  They were out at last, and he instantly weighed and followed.  The air was light, and De Grasse was under the high lands of Dominica before Rodney came up with him.  Both fleets were becalmed, and the English were scattered and divided by a current which runs between the islands.  A breeze at last blew off the land.  The French were the first to feel it, and were able to attack at advantage the leading English division.  Had De Grasse ’come down as he ought,’ Rodney thought that the consequences might have been serious.  In careless imagination of superiority they let the chance go by.  They kept at a distance, firing long shots, which as it was did considerable damage.  The two following days the fleets manoeuvred in sight of each other.  On the night of the eleventh Rodney made signal for the whole fleet to go south under press of sail.  The French thought he was flying.  He tacked at two in the morning, and at daybreak found himself where he wished to be, with the French fleet on his lee quarter.  The French looking for nothing but again a distant cannonade, continued leisurely along under the north highlands of Dominica towards the channel which separates that island from Guadaloupe.  In number of ships the fleets were equal; in size and complement of crew the French were immensely superior; and besides the ordinary ships’ companies they had twenty thousand soldiers on board who were to be used in the conquest of Jamaica.  Knowing well that a defeat at that moment would be to England irreparable ruin, they did not dream that Rodney would be allowed, even if he wished it, to risk a close and decisive engagement.  The English admiral was aware also that his country’s fate was in his hands.  It was one of those supreme moments which great men dare to use and small men tremble at.  He had the advantage of the wind, and could force a battle or decline it, as he pleased.  With clear daylight the signal to engage was flying from the masthead of the ‘Formidable,’ Rodney’s ship.  At seven in the morning, April 12, 1782, the whole fleet bore down obliquely on the French line, cutting it directly in two.  Rodney led in person.  Having passed through and broken up their order he tacked again, still keeping the wind.  The French, thrown into confusion, were unable to reform, and the battle resolved itself into a number of separate engagements in which the English had the choice of position.

Rodney in passing through the enemy’s lines the first time had exchanged broadsides with the ‘Glorieux,’ a seventy-four, at close range.  He had shot away her masts and bowsprit, and left her a bare hull; her flag, however, still flying, being nailed to a splintered spar.  So he left her unable to stir; and after he had gone about came himself yardarm to yardarm with the superb ‘Ville de Paris,’ the pride of France, the largest ship in the then world, where De Grasse commanded in person.  All day long the cannon roared.  Rodney had on board a favourite bantam cock, which stood perched upon the poop of the ‘Formidable’ through the whole action, its shrill voice heard crowing through the thunder of the broadsides.  One by one the French ships struck their flags or fought on till they foundered and went down.  The carnage on board them was terrible, crowded as they were with the troops for Jamaica.  Fourteen thousand were reckoned to have been killed, besides the prisoners.  The ‘Ville de Paris’ surrendered last, fighting desperately after hope was gone till her masts were so shattered that they could not bear a sail, and her decks above and below were littered over with mangled limbs.  De Grasse gave up his sword to Rodney on the ‘Formidable’s’ quarter-deck.  The gallant ‘Glorieux,’ unable to fly, and seeing the battle lost, hauled down her flag, but not till the undisabled remnants of her crew were too few to throw the dead into the sea.  Other ships took fire and blew up.  Half the French fleet were either taken or sunk; the rest crawled away for the time, most of them to be picked up afterwards like crippled birds.

So on that memorable day was the English Empire saved.  Peace followed, but it was ‘peace with honour.’  The American colonies were lost; but England kept her West Indies; her flag still floated over Gibraltar; the hostile strength of Europe all combined had failed to twist Britannia’s ocean sceptre from her:  she sat down maimed and bleeding, but the wreath had not been torn from her brow, she was still sovereign of the seas.

The bow of Ulysses was strung in those days.  The order of recall arrived when the work was done.  It was proudly obeyed; and even the great Burke admitted that no honour could be bestowed upon Rodney which he had not deserved at his country’s hands.  If the British Empire is still to have a prolonged career before it, the men who make empires are the men who can hold them together.  Oratorical reformers can overthrow what deserves to be overthrown.  Institutions, even the best of them, wear out, and must give place to others, and the fine political speakers are the instruments of their overthrow.  But the fine speakers produce nothing of their own, and as constructive statesmen their paths are strewed with failures.  The worthies of England are the men who cleared and tilled her fields, formed her laws, built her colleges and cathedrals, founded her colonies, fought her battles, covered the ocean with commerce, and spread our race over the planet to leave a mark upon it which time will not efface.  These men are seen in their work, and are not heard of in Parliament.  When the account is wound up, where by the side of them will stand our famous orators?  What will any one of these have left behind him save the wreck of institutions which had done their work and had ceased to serve a useful purpose?  That was their business in this world, and they did it and do it; but it is no very glorious work, not a work over which it is possible to feel any ‘fine enthusiasm.’  To chop down a tree is easier than to make it grow.  When the business of destruction is once completed, they and their fame and glory will disappear together.  Our true great ones will again be visible, and thenceforward will be visible alone.

Is there a single instance in our own or any other history of a great political speaker who has added anything to human knowledge or to human worth?  Lord Chatham may stand as a lonely exception.  But except Chatham who is there?  Not one that I know of.  Oratory is the spendthrift sister of the arts, which decks itself like a strumpet with the tags and ornaments which it steals from real superiority.  The object of it is not truth, but anything which it can make appear truth; anything which it can persuade people to believe by calling in their passions to obscure their intelligence.