Death Before Glory Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  PEN AND SWORD MILITARY

  an imprint of

  Pen and Sword Books Ltd

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

  South Yorkshire S70 2AS

  Copyright © Martin R. Howard 2015

  ISBN: 978 1 78159 341 7

  PDF ISBN: 978 1 47387 152 6

  EPUB ISBN: 978 1 47387 151 9

  PRC ISBN: 978 1 47387 150 2

  The right of Martin R. Howard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  ARMIES

  Chapter 1 Dangerous Battalions: The British Army in the West Indies

  Chapter 2 Citizens and Warriors: The French and Other Enemies

  CAMPAIGNS

  Chapter 3 The Crater of Vesuvius: Saint Domingue 1793−1794

  Chapter 4 With Spirit and Impetuosity: The Grey Jervis Expedition of 1793−1794

  Chapter 5 The Flame of Rebellion: The Uprisings of 1795

  Chapter 6 Winds of Change: The Abercromby Expeditions, the loss of Saint Domingue and the Peace of Amiens 1795−1802

  Chapter 7 An English Lake: The Short Peace and the Napoleonic Wars 1802−1815

  SOLDIERS

  Chapter 8 A Sense of Terror: Voyage and Arrival

  Chapter 9 Nancy Clarke and Susy Austin: Life in the Garrison

  Chapter 10 Muzzle to Muzzle: In Action

  Chapter 11 A Great Mortality: Disease

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  The staffs at the British Library, London, and the National Army Museum, London, have given me valuable assistance. I am grateful to Rupert Harding, Ian Robertson and Jamie Wilson for their support and advice.

  List of Illustrations

  1. Recruiting to the Army. The West Indies was an unpopular destination and recruits were often reluctant and of poor quality

  2. The capture of Tobago, 1793

  3. Lieutenant General Sir Charles Grey

  4. Vice Admiral Sir John Jervis

  5. A View of Fort Louis, Martinique

  6. The storming of Fort Louis in February 1794. Captain Faulkner leads his men across the beach

  7. Plan of the military fortifications on Morne Fortune, St Lucia, 1781. Made for Commander-in-Chief Sir John Vaughan with a list of repairs appended

  8. Batteries at the entrance of the Carenage, St Lucia. View from the La Toc battery

  9. View of the bridge over the River Gallion from Fort Matilda, Guadeloupe, 1794

  10. Victor Hugues recaptures Guadeloupe from the British in June 1794

  11. A Maroon Captain

  12. A Maroon ambush on Jamaica, 1795

  13. Lieutenant Colonel William Fitch who was killed in a Maroon ambush in 1795. The posthumous portrait shows Fitch with his sisters

  14. Toussaint Louverture

  15. Sir Ralph Abercromby

  16. Rear Admiral Christian’s fleet battling the storms of late 1795

  17. A coded letter written by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Clinton to his brother in London, 2 April 1796, Barbados. The letter describes plans for the attack on St Lucia (National Army Museum)

  18. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Clinton’s sketch-map of the operations around Castries, St Lucia, April – May 1796 (National Army Museum)

  19. Polish troops in French service fighting black troops in Saint Domingue, 1802

  20. Lieutenant General Sir George Beckwith

  21. The British capture Martinique in 1809. A crude contemporary woodcut

  22. A French view of the British attack on Martinique, 1809

  23. A Private of the 5th West India Regiment

  24. The 3rd West India Regiment in action against French troops on The Saints, 1809

  25. Idealised view of Beckwith’s capture of Guadeloupe, 1810. Compare with Beckwith’s formal portrait, Illustration 20

  26 Lieutenant Colonel Henry Clinton’s sketch-map of his voyage to the West Indies. He departed Portsmouth on 20 February 1796 and arrived at Barbados on 20 March (National Army Museum)

  27. A street scene in St Pierre, Martinique, 1794

  28. A typical market of the West indies

  29. The Torrid Zone or Blessings of Jamaica

  30. French graveyard near Castries, St Lucia

  List of Maps

  1. The West Indies in 1793

  2. Tobago

  3. Martinique

  4. Saint Domingue

  5. St Lucia

  6. Guadeloupe and The Saints

  7. Grenada

  8. St Vincent

  9. Dominica

  10. Jamaica

  11. Puerto Rico

  12. Surinam

  ARMIES

  Chapter 1

  Dangerous Battalions: The British Army in the West Indies

  Britain’s eighteenth-century army had three distinct functions. Beyond its obvious war role, it policed the population at home and garrisoned territories abroad. There were always regiments stationed in far flung places including the West Indies, which had British troops in attendance throughout the century. The absence of a national conscription system limited the size of the army and this impinged on the size of the Caribbean garrison which remained small for most of the period. Sporadic fighting might lead to reinforcements, but when peace intervened a ‘paltry handful of all-but-forgotten and neglected regulars’ was left to guard the islands. These troops were much criticised by their contemporaries. Indeed the British soldier was despised and distrusted by most of his countrymen and under-appreciated by his military and political masters. In 1761, Guadeloupe’s governor, Campbell Dalrymple, anticipated Wellington’s notorious verdict in describing his soldiers as ‘the scum of every county, the refuse of mankind’. During periods of inactivity the wretched West Indian garrison was dissipated by a lethal combination of fever and boredom. Conversely, when there was fighting to be done the private soldier might suddenly rediscover his motivation and regimental pride. At the storming of Mount Tartenson on Martinique in 1762, the troops were commended for their gallantry which was such ‘… to do honour to their Country and ever distinguish them as Britons.’1

  At the outset of the French Revolution in 1793 the British army was relatively weak, still feeling the effects of the reductions consequent on the peace of 1783. Britain was a wealthy and populous nation, but the Government was reluctant to spend money on an institution the power
of which was resented and feared by Parliament. Only when the country lurched into a new war was the army suddenly expanded causing attendant problems in discipline, administration and recruiting. The army abroad numbered little more than 18,000 men, although by 1794 the demands of the new conflict, especially in the West Indies, led to its rapid growth to a force of 42,000. Many of these men were Scots and Irish; Scotland provided a fifth of the army’s manpower and close to half of the regiments added to the line in 1794 were of Irish origin.

  The destructive nature of campaigning in the Caribbean and elsewhere meant that during the 1790s it was difficult to maintain regiments at full strength. Of the 55 regiments at home in 1796 for which we have returns, only eighteen had more than half their establishment of 950 privates and only five were even close to their full contingent. In the latter years of the wars, from 1808 onwards, the army raised men through both regular enlistment and transfer from the militia, reaching its peak in early 1814 with a strength of 230,000 operatives. The weakness of the army at the onset of hostilities in 1793 is perhaps best understood by comparing it with the force available at the end of the Peninsular War. Whereas there were only seven battalions of Guards and 74 battalions of Foot in 1793, there were 186 battalions of infantry in 1814.

  For much of the last decade of the eighteenth century Britain’s aspirations to maintain peace at home and to fight a global war meant that her precious regiments were thinly spread. A return for October 1795 shows them scattered through Britain and Ireland, the West Indies, the East Indies, America, Gibraltar, the Cape of Good Hope, Corsica and the French coast. There is not space here to detail the mechanism of the nation’s war machinery, but this infrastructure, ‘intractable and ramshackle’, was close to breaking point, military realities often subjugated to political convenience.

  Whilst the navy was flexible and powerful enough to accommodate the Government’s expansionist policies in the Caribbean and elsewhere, the army was placed under severe strain. It was not, however, at least at the start of the conflict, an institution which evoked great expectations. The period of peace prior to 1793 had, in the words of military historian J.A. Houlding, left both officers and men unprepared for action.

  …it is clear that the majority of regiments found themselves, on the eve of war, to be quite without, or almost innocent of, experience of large-scale mock action or brigade manoeuvres, to have had inadequate opportunities to conduct the training of the field days and the ‘excursions’, and to be only just adequately prepared to perform on a parade ground the regulation firings and manoeuvres together with a selection of movements drawn from the army’s store of customary practice.

  It was widely accepted as late as 1800 that the British army was at best a clumsy weapon. Lady Holland’s assertion that it was ‘harmless against an enemy in battle array’ was not much contested. Sir Henry Bunbury, a soldier of the 1790s, refers to lax discipline, the lack of system and weak numbers. ‘Never’, he declared, ‘was a kingdom less prepared for a stern and arduous conflict’.2

  There was undoubtedly some administrative corruption and neglect but the army of 1793 was not without hope. It has been argued that its shortcomings have been exaggerated to provide a convenient contrast to the later reforms of the Duke of York as commander-in-chief and the proficiency of Wellington’s Peninsular army. Improvements had already begun and in some ways the army was better prepared for the West Indian and other campaigns than it had been for earlier less demanding conflicts.

  One of the foundations of this recovery was the adoption of a new drill manual, Colonel David Dundas’s Principles of Military Movement, published in 1788. Prior to Dundas’s work the army lacked a uniform approach to tactical training. Regiments on colonial service were frequently divided into smaller units and they became inward-looking, all regimental affairs determined by the whim of the colonel. Soldiers at home were also widely dispersed in billets and distracted by their policing duties. This lack of a coherent approach was potentially exacerbated by the views of the ‘American School’ of officers who, heavily influenced by the American War, believed in a shallow two-deep line with an emphasis on skirmishing and light infantry tactics. Dundas had little faith in the American experience and his tactical manual espoused the methods of the ‘Prussian School’ with a three-deep line and well practised manoeuvres designed to resist cavalry and deliver shock. Wellington once commented that in the British army new regulations were read in the manner of an ‘amusing novel’, but the Duke of York overcame resistance and ensured the necessary uniformity. It must be understood that this took time and that, as will be discussed in a later chapter, the jungles and mountains of the Caribbean campaigns were more suited to the flexibility of the American system than the rigidity of the German approach. In the Peninsula, Wellington won his battles by combing the close-order battle drill of one system and the skirmishing light infantry of the other.

  The army officers of the period are too easily stereotyped as underachievers who bought their rank; some two-thirds of the commissions held in the British army were purchased. They were, admittedly, drawn disproportionately from the aristocratic, professional and landed classes and would have had to be regarded as ‘gentlemen’. However, significant numbers were of relatively modest origins and many had entered the service for life and had risen through steady and competent service. Some were ignorant of military matters but, as Bunbury points out, in the campaigns of the 1790s there was ‘no lack of gallantry’ among the officer class. The gentlemanly ideals of toughness, stoicism, fortitude and honour were well suited to the battlefield.3

  The greatest challenge for the army was recruitment. The essential problem was that there were too few recruits to bring the force up to full strength and too many recruits in the serving army. By ‘recruits’ we mean soldiers with one year’s service or less. Methods of recruitment included voluntary enlistment and coercion. The former accounted for the majority of recruits; often men were captured by the recruiting parties who toured likely areas ‘beating up’ for volunteers. The demand for new blood was relentless. Between the mideighteenth century and 1795, the erosive effect of deaths, discharges, drafts and desertion and the need for periodic top ups meant that foot regiments had to recruit 1.5% of their strength every month in peacetime and just over 2% in wartime.

  The difficulties this posed are most clearly exposed at regimental level. Historian Roger Norman Buckley quotes the case of the 68th Regiment, which suffered heavy losses in the West Indies between 1794 and 1796. The few remaining fit men were drafted into another regiment and the beleaguered unit arrived back in England in September 1796 with only ten officers and twenty-seven other ranks. Despite the efforts of 13 beating up parties the regiment was still 955 men short of its establishment of 1,000 rank and file in March 1797 and it did not start to recover until 1800.

  A poor harvest, such as occurred in the summer of 1795, might provide a fillip to the recruiting parties, the unemployed and starving driven into their hands, but more drastic means were sometimes employed to fill the ranks. Insolvent debtors and those guilty of more serious misdemeanours could escape prison and even the hangman’s noose if they ‘volunteered’ for the army. Probably more numerous among those pressed into service were men who had committed no actual crime, but who fell into the disparate group of ‘all such able bodied, idle, and disorderly persons who cannot upon examination prove themselves to exercise and industriously follow some lawful trade or employment’. Enlistment was generally for life, although from 1806 there was a scheme for limited service.

  The use of duress was likely to be necessary to recruit directly to those parts of the world which were regarded as a death sentence. Strategies for recruitment to West Indian expeditionary forces included the use of foreign auxillary formations, the embodiment of regiments of black troops and the filling up of regiments with criminals and others judged not to be gainfully employed. The number of hardened criminals in British regular regiments was almost certainly fewer than
is generally perceived. Most convicted men sent to the West Indies were only accepted into penal corps such as the Royal West India Rangers. The majority of men in the regular ranks were decent individuals forced into the army by economic circumstances.

  Michael Durey has cogently argued that many of the ‘culprits’ despatched to the Caribbean were not Englishmen awaiting trial on common law charges, but Irishmen guilty of political offences. Following the collapse of the Rebellion of 1798, the Irish Government had to tackle the problem of dealing with thousands of Irish rebel prisoners. In Dublin, the military prisons and public buildings overflowed with them. A number of solutions were suggested, none of which were straightforward. In the words of a contemporary British officer, ‘Our aversion to Blood, or putting to death a great number of people indiscriminately after they have surrendered themselves Prisoners leaves Government in a very embarrassed situation’. Drafting the rebels into the army and sending them to a deadly theatre such as the West Indies was a possible way forward, although this risked spreading disaffection in the ranks. Undersecretary John King expressed the view of many, alarmed at the prospect of a Caribbean army constituted of black soldiers ‘…and the Whites composed chiefly of prisoners and the worst of His Majesty’s subjects!’

  Despite the opposition, there was no viable alternative and between 1799 and 1804 five drafts of rebel prisoners were sent to the West Indies from Ireland, as many as 2,400 men. More may have reached the region by circuitous routes via the army depot at Chatham or Gibraltar. These were the most reluctant of all recruits, described as ‘white slaves’ by an Irish-American radical. Measures were taken to limit the deleterious effect on the wider forces in the West Indies. On the voyage out the drafts were accompanied by sizeable numbers of regular troops and on arrival they were spread thinly among as many regiments as possible. These efforts to turn the rebels into good soldiers were not entirely successful. Many of the first draft arriving at Jamaica deserted and fled into the mountains where they joined bands of natives and French and skirmished with British search parties.4