Part 5

The Marquis de Vaudreuil was De Grasse's second in command. There was no better gentleman, from all accounts--never a nobler specimen of a French naval officer of the old school than Louis Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil. He looks it in his portrait at Versailles--a _beau sabreur_ of the sea, _ruse_, ready-witted in emergency, a 'first-class fighting man' in all respects. The son of a sailor, the grandson of a sailor, the great-grandson of a sailor, he belonged to a family that had sent its sons to serve 'on the ships of the King' ever since France had had a navy. '_Il a de l'eau de mer autour du coeur_' is an old Breton saying that applied in the case of the scions of the Norman house of De Vaudreuil. He was a year younger than De Grasse, and like his chief had once had to go through the bitter experience of having to raise his hat on the quarter-deck of a foeman's ship as he gave up his sword to a foreigner in token of surrender.[17] Like De Grasse also, De Vaudreuil had taken part in six fleet battles since the war began. He was there by his own choice. There was not a man in the fleet who had not heard how, only a little time before, De Vaudreuil had refused the King's personal offer of a lucrative colonial governorship--De Vaudreuil was a poor man--rather than be absent from what to him was the post of duty. 'I am a sailor, your Majesty,' was the fine reply, 'and in war-time a sailor's place is on the sea.'[18] No officer in the whole French navy was more personally popular than was this courtly son of old-time France--'_noble de sang, d'armes, et de nom_.'

The circumnavigator Bougainville, _chef d'escadre_, was third in command, and about to add another experience to the many he had gone through in his crowded life. Professor of mathematics, barrister, author, major of militia, diplomatist, colonel of light dragoons, A.D.C. at Quebec and on the Rhine, circumnavigator, flag-captain--there were few things within his reach that Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the clever son of a country lawyer, had not tried his hand at in his time.[19]

Of the other officers, a third almost of the _Annuaire de la Noblesse_, the Debrett of Versailles, was represented at Fort Royal. Among the senior officers alone there were four Marquises, two Viscounts, five Counts, six Chevaliers, two Barons, nineteen 'de's,' only two plain Messieurs. There was a second De Vaudreuil, the Vicomte's younger brother, the Comte de Vaudreuil, a man of another kind--a smart, hard-fighting officer, but better known for his feats of gallantry than for his feats of arms, in particular as the favoured first lover of that haughty young beauty Gabrielle Yolande de Polignac, daintiest of Court ladies of the hour, '_avec le visage d'un ange et_'--perhaps it will be kinder to say no more. The Comte de Vaugiraud was Captain of the Fleet. Baron d'Escars, of the house of Fitz-James, notorious for his fanatical hatred of Great Britain, was captain of the _Glorieux_. The Sieur de la Clochetterie, an impetuous and brilliant officer--whose name as captain of the _Belle Poule_ in her duel with the 'Saucy' _Arethusa_ at the outset of the war, the French navy still remembers--commanded the _Hercule_. Comte d'Albert de Rions, by reputation the ablest tactician in the French navy, after De Suffren, was the senior captain. A De la Charette commanded the black _Bourgogne_;[20] a De Castellan, the _Auguste_; De la Vicomte, the _Hector_; and so on. There is, indeed, as one runs down the list of the French captains at Fort Royal, quite a ring of mediaeval chivalry, of old-time romance, about their names. De Mortemart, De Monteclerc, De Saint Cesaire, De Champmartin, De Castellane-Majastre, Le Gardeur de Tilly, to take half-a-dozen other names at random--one might almost be checking off one of Bayard's _compagnies d'elite_, or calling over a muster-roll of the Lances of Du Guesclin. In the junior ranks were a De Tourville, the Vicomte de Betisy, two scions of the historic house of St. Simon, a Grimaldi, a Lascaris, a De Lauzun, a De Sevigne, a MacMahon, a Talleyrand, a De Segur, a De Rochefoucauld, a Montesquieu. Brueys d'Aigalliers, of a noble family of Languedoc, who later on took service under the Revolution, and perished fighting Nelson at the Nile, was one of the lieutenants. La Perouse, the explorer, was a _capitaine de fregate_. Bruix and Denis Decres, Napoleon's Ministers of Marine in later days, were two of the midshipmen. Magon, who fell a rear-admiral at Trafalgar, was an _enseigne de vaisseau_. L'Hermitte, Troude, Willaumez, Emeriau, Bourayne, others of Napoleon's admirals, were among the boy _volontiers d'honneur_ (naval cadets) in various ships of the Fort Royal fleet. De Grasse's personal staff comprised the Vicomte de Grasse, the admiral's nephew, the Comte de Cibon, and the Marquis de Beaulieu.

It was a glittering and gallant crowd that walked the quarter-deck with all the gay _abandon_ of their race those balmy, fragrant West Indian evenings of April 1782, while the band played 'Vive Henri Quatre!' and 'Charmante Gabrielle,' high spirited, and heedless of the coming days. What were they not going to do, '_pour en finir avec ces Anglais--betes_!' Jamaica first, _cela s'entend_! Then the sack of Barbados,--the spoil of the goldsmiths and silversmiths of Bridgetown and the mansions of the planters, whose sideboards, groaning under the weight of gold and silver plate, 'astonished and stirred the envy of every passing visitor,' as travellers had told ever since the time of old Pere Labat, 'gold and silver plate so abundant that the plunder of it would pay the cost of an expedition for the reduction of the island!' _Vive la France! Vive la Gloire!_ Light-hearted and gay, how many of them gave a thought to something else? What of those who would not live to see the coming battle through? How many of them all would kneel next Sunday three weeks to receive the _aumonier's_ blessing at early mass? Ah well!--what mattered it!--_Fortune de guerre!_ Perhaps so. Perhaps, indeed, better so--at any rate, for some of them. Those who were to fall in the coming fight were to be envied, rather, in their ending. It was better, surely, to go down there and then, to be dropped overboard in the clear, deep water alongside, eight hundred and fifty fathoms down, to sleep the last sleep beneath the lapping wavelets of the blue Caribbean, dead on the field of honour, than to survive for what was yet to come for France, to experience the fate that was to befall so many a gallant French officer who outlived the cannon thunders of Rodney's day. To be laid to rest there in those soft summer seas was at least a better fortune than to have to undergo the cruel doom that a few years later overtook so many of their messmates who outlasted the fight. Better be smashed in two by an English cannon-ball on the quarter-deck, than perish hideously in the dungeons of Draguignan, or go in the tumbrils to a death of ignominy and cold-blooded horror, clattering over the cobble-stones to the Place de Greve, while all round the mob of Paris howled and danced and cursed--the hapless lot of so many a gallant naval officer among the rest of the gentlemen of old-time France,

... those gallant fellows who died by guillotine, For honour and the fleur-de-lis and Antoinette the Queen.

It was better too, surely, than what befell so many others of those who escaped the Terror; better than to have to drag out year after year a pitiful existence as an _emigre_ in London, in squalid lodgings in Somers Town, driven, poor fellows, to earn a wretched and precarious livelihood by teaching French for a few pence a lesson, or as dancing-masters, and then after it all be put away in a cheap grave in the grimy soil of St. Pancras old churchyard. It was better than that. _Vive la Gloire! Vixerunt._ Each one has had his day--

And somewhere, 'mid the distant stars, He knows, mayhap, what glory is.

The ships were worthy of the men. The pick of the French fleet was with De Grasse--one ship of a hundred and four guns, five of eighty-four, three eighties, nineteen seventy-fours, six sixty-fours--thirty-four sail of the line altogether, besides sixteen frigates. A fine show they made with their yellow sides, belted with black at the water-line, and dark blue bulwarks, with red ports, gilded figure-heads and balustraded galleries, and gleaming brass Gribeauval guns, the newest type of ordnance from the foundries of Indret and La Ruelle. The magnificent _Ville de Paris_, 'leviathan of ships,' was De Grasse's flagship, the finest and largest first-rate in the world, the splendid present offered by the citizens of Paris to the King at the close of the Seven Years' War, as their contribution towards making good the losses that France had suffered in the war. Four and a half million livres she was said to have cost, nearly four times the price of the British _Royal George_ or the _Victory_. Seven others of the fifteen powerful men-of-war that the provinces and corporations of France, following the example of the capital, then offered to the State, were at Fort Royal, on which no money nor pains had been spared to make them equal in efficiency to the finest ships afloat.

A small army of soldiers was at Fort Royal, as well as De Grasse's fleet. There were between five and six thousand troops there, waiting under canvas for the order to embark on board the men-of-war. Bouille commanded them,--the Marquis de Bouille, the conqueror of St. Kitts and Nevis and Montserrat and Dominica and St. Eustatius, 'tiger-spring Bouille,'[21] though better known to fame, perhaps, for his share in the events of a later day, as Commandant-General of Metz and the 'last refuge of royalty.' Varennes, however, was a name that De Bouille, possibly, had as yet not heard of. Postmaster Drouet still rode in the ranks of the Conde dragoons. Some of the smartest corps in the French service were there: Regiment de Foix, dashing d'Armagnac, Artillerie de Metz, Regiments de Bearn, de Touraine, and de Monsieur, red-coated Irishmen of the Walsh and Dillon corps, half a battalion of Royal Contois, two battalions of Auxerrois, brought from York Town with De Grasse, after having witnessed the march out of the surrendered British army. One of the most striking of the great paintings on the walls of the _Galerie des Batailles_ at Versailles shows an aide-de-camp, a cocked-hatted, high-gaitered young dandy, garbed in Bourbon white with the mauve facings and silver lace of Auxerrois receiving orders from Washington just before the last attack. De Bouille's division had already its place on paper as one of the wings of the 'Army of Jamaica.'

Now we turn to Gros Islet Bay and the British fleet. Rodney's ships lay at anchor to the south of Pigeon Island, off the north-west of St. Lucia, in the roadstead in front of Gros Islet Bay, about half-a-mile off shore, a stretch of deep water extending a mile and a half. The Gros Islet, from which the bay takes its name, was the old French name for Pigeon Island. There was also a village of the name on the shore opposite the island. Seven miles along the coast to the south was the _carenage_, where ships could be hove down and repaired; now called Castries, and an important port and naval station, destined, with the opening of the Panama Canal, to become the Valetta of the West Indies. The watering place for the fleet was at Trou Gascon in the bay.

Rodney's thirty-six sail of the line in Gros Islet Bay were thus made up: five three-deckers (four of 98 guns, _Formidable_, _Barfleur_, _Prince George_, and _Duke_, and one of 90, the _Namur_), and thirty-one two-deckers (twenty of them 74's, one a 70-gun ship, and ten 64's). They were as a rule older and slower vessels than the French ships: nearly a third of them, in fact, had seen service in the Seven Years' War. In guns the British fleet mounted 2620 pieces all told, against 2526 on the French side, but the enemy's metal was considerably the heavier. Most of De Grasse's ships carried 36-pounders (French weight, equivalent to 42-pounders by British reckoning), as against the 32-pounders that were Rodney's heaviest guns. According to the British Flag Captain, Sir Charles Douglas, the difference between the fleets in weight of metal worked out at 4396 lbs. (nearly two tons) in favour of the enemy. It made the French stronger, Douglas held, by 'the weight of metal of four 84's.' That was the difference on paper. In point of fact, certain details of equipment reversed the disparity. Most of Rodney's ships had their guns fitted with locks and priming-tubes, in place of the old port-fires and powder-horns which the French still used. Also, they had been supplied with certain devices for quickening the service of the guns, increasing their rate of fire, and giving them a wider arc of training on the broadside. All that gave Rodney a very real advantage in hard-hitting power, without counting the carronades[22] or 'smashers' that most of the British ships mounted as extra to their regulation armaments.

In all respects Rodney's fleet was in the very highest order, and its discipline and general smartness left little to be desired. Thanks to the energy and skill of Dr. Blane, Rodney's Physician of the Fleet, no previous British fleet in time of war perhaps had ever been so free from sickness. In some ships there was not a man unfit to go to quarters. The _Ajax_, to name one ship, had no sick list. In the _Formidable_, out of 900 men on board, only two were unfit for duty. Before leaving Plymouth, Dr. Blane had had Teneriffe wine supplied to the flagship instead of rum, together with molasses and pickled cabbages, and the dietary had had a marvellous effect on the health of the men. For the first four months of the commission there was not a single death from sickness.[23]

As we glanced at De Grasse's captains, so we may glance at the gallant fellows in whose hands rested the fate of the British Empire. They were of another class than the captains of the enemy. There were no counts or viscounts with long pedigrees and high-sounding romantic names among Rodney's captains. Few of them were of 'the offspring of the sons and daughters of fashion,' though of course some were men of birth and breeding. Rodney himself, a baronet and K.B. (distinctions won on his own account), was a man of family. Sir Samuel Hood, also a self-made baronet, was a Somersetshire parson's son. Rear-Admiral Francis Samuel Drake, the third in command, a descendant of the great Sir Francis of Elizabethan days, belonged to the ordinary country gentleman class--man for man, no doubt, as good as any nobleman of France, but as denizens of another world to a Lord Chamberlain or a master of the ceremonies. Among the captains, Lord Robert Manners, of the _Resolution_, was the Marquis of Granby's second son; the Hon. William Cornwallis, of the _Canada_, was a younger son of Earl Cornwallis; Captain Reynolds, of the _Monarch_, was heir-presumptive to the Ducie peerage; Captain Lord Cranstoun, a volunteer on board the _Formidable_, was a baron of the Scottish peerage. These four, with Sir Charles Douglas, the Captain of the Fleet, another self-made baronet (for war service), and Sir James Wallace, a knight, constituted, with the admiral and Hood, the social _elite_ of Rodney's fleet--a list that hardly comes into comparison with De Grasse's little Versailles. The bulk of the British captains were the sons of ordinary folk, sons of squires and country parsons, and old naval officers to some extent, drawn from all over the three kingdoms--the sort of men that had officered the Royal Navy for the past hundred years, the men to whom Great Britain to-day owes her place among the nations. That, indeed, is literally the case. Also, not a few of those who to-day serve His Majesty King Edward on the quarter-deck are lineal representatives of Rodney's officers who in that April week of the year 1782 were in Gros Islet Bay, watching hour by hour for the _Formidable_ to hoist the sailing-flags. It is an interesting instance of hereditary inclination--of how the naval spirit runs in families. Two-thirds of Rodney's captains, practically, are represented at the present hour in the Royal Navy by direct descendants. One has only to turn over the pages of the current Navy List to find Hoods and Inglefields and Parrys, and Graveses and Gardners, Fanshawes and Dumaresqs, a Buckner, a Blur, a Burnett, a Balfour, a Savage, a Symons, a Charrington, an Inglis, a Wallace, a Byron, a Cornish, a Truscott, a Saumarez, Knights and Wilsons, and Williamses and Wilkinsons and Thomsons, besides others, who either trace their descent directly from Rodney's captains or come of the same stock.

All in Gros Islet Bay were burning with anxiety to meet the enemy, absolutely confident of the result. About that, from the highest to the lowest, there were no two opinions. 'Their fate,' wrote Rodney himself in a letter on the 4th of April, 'is only delayed a short time, for have it they must and shall.' That was the common sentiment with all. The fleet was prepared to sail at an hour's notice. All leave was stopped. Not an officer or man was allowed out of his ship except on duty. Rodney meant that the blow, when it fell, should come, in the language of the prize-ring, as a 'knock-out' blow. It should be, to use Rodney's own words, 'the great event that must restore the empire of the seas to Great Britain.'

De Grasse was closely watched from hour to hour. Every movement at Fort Royal was signalled to the _Formidable_ practically as it was made. A chain of Rodney's frigates reported everything that De Grasse did--a line of ships that stretched across the thirty miles of sea between Gros Islet Bay and the fleet in Fort Royal. To and fro they tacked day and night, patrolling ceaselessly, observing all that passed and sending word of it along the chain. Two line-of-battle ships, the _Magnificent_ and the fast-sailing _Agamemnon_, stiffened the frigate line at the end nearest the enemy. Captain George Anson Byron, of the _Andromache_, was in command of the look-out squadron--'an active, brisk, and intelligent officer,' Rodney calls him, the second son of old John Byron, 'Foul Weather Jack.' A signal-station on Pigeon Island, set up near the edge of a steep cliff 340 feet high (nearly the height of Beachy Head), kept touch with the frigates and linked them with the battle fleet. From the look-out post the men on duty could see not only the nearer frigates of the chain, but also right across to the mountains of Martinique, and in clear weather catch the white glint of the topgallant sails of the more distant vessels in front of Fort Royal, on the far horizon and hull down. The admiral himself, we are told, used to land on Pigeon Island nearly every day, and go up to the signal station, where, under an awning made from a sail, he would sit in an arm-chair with his telescope at his eye, scanning the frigate line. On the site of Rodney's signal-station there now stands a small fort, called 'Fort Rodney,' and visitors are shown what is said to be the actual slab of rock on which the admiral's chair was placed.

On the 3rd of April Captain Byron sent in the message that the enemy's preparations for sea appeared complete. On the 5th he signalled across that he could see the French soldiers being embarked on board the men-of-war. The fateful hour was on the point of striking. Then the news that Rodney wanted came. Just before eight on the morning of Sunday, the 8th of April, the signal was seen flying at the mast-head of the nearest of the frigates: 'THE ENEMY ARE COMING OUT OF PORT.'

The whole fleet was at sea, says Dr. Blane, 'in a little more than two hours.' In rapid succession the _Formidable_ signalled, first to recall all boats and watering parties on board their ships at once, then for the fleet to 'Prepare to sail.' Following on that, at nine o'clock, according to the _Formidable's_ log, the signal was made--'Prepare for battle!' Before half-past ten all was ready. The _Formidable_ now loosed her main-topsail and fired a gun; to prepare to weigh anchor. That done, down dropped the foretopsail, and off went a second gun--'Weigh!' A quarter of an hour later--

With boats on board, with anchors weighed, The fleet rides ready in the bay.

The whole fleet was under sail and moving out to sea by a little before eleven. Rodney had started on his chase.

Before noon the rear ships were clearing Pigeon Island and Point du Cap, the northernmost headland of St. Lucia, was on the beam. The _Magnificent_ and _Agamemnon_, falling back from their advanced positions while the frigates held on ahead, now came into the fleet. De Grasse, they reported, had come out and gone off to the north-west, with thirty-five sail of the line, ten frigates, and an immense convoy of merchantmen and store-ships, numbering upwards of a hundred and fifty sail. The convoy had left Fort Royal at daybreak, some time in advance of the men-of-war, working up along the coast towards St. Pierre under a small escort.

As the British fleet gained the open sea it formed up in order of sailing, Hood's squadron leading.

Nothing could be seen of the enemy from the fleet. Not even from the mast-head was a glimpse of the French to be got. Touch, though, was well maintained by the frigates, who kept Rodney continuously informed of the course the enemy were taking. Diamond Rock, a solitary haystack-shaped mass off the Morne du Diamant, the south-western point of Martinique, began to rise on the sea-line ahead towards three o'clock. Half-an-hour later they could make out the bluff shoulder of Cape Solomon, on the southern side of Fort Royal Bay. Nothing of the enemy, though, was visible even from the mast-head of the battle-fleet, until, at eight minutes after four. Hood's ship, the _Barfleur_, flagship of the van squadron, suddenly made a signal that she saw them. Enthusiastic cheers burst out in response from ship to ship all down the line. From the _Formidable_, farther astern, they did not get their first sight of the enemy until nearly two hours later, not long before sunset. Then they sighted five strange sail on the horizon to the north-west, 'which we suppose,' says the _Formidable's_ log, 'to be part of the French fleet.' Darkness came on soon after that. 'During the night,' says Sir Charles Douglas, 'we followed them, under as much canvas as we could in prudence carry, the wind blowing very fresh at N.E. by E.'

At nine o'clock one of the headmost of the frigates, dropping back from the van, hailed the _Formidable_ to the effect that they had De Grasse's lights well in view. By midnight the enemy's signal-flares were distinctly visible from the British flagship, and an occasional signal-gun was heard. At two in the morning (the 9th of April) the _St. Albans_ dropped back alongside the _Formidable_ and hailed across that she and the _Valiant_, sailing to windward, had seen the enemy's lights. The _Formidable_ had sighted them for herself just before. Satisfied with the progress made, Rodney now brought the fleet to. Daylight was wanted for the next move.