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By Root 953 0

to deliver Barbados where the British held 2,000 French prisoners and to recapture Ste. Lucie. Rodney saw an opportunity for a major, perhaps decisive blow. Never content with the parade tactics and ceremonious duels of his era and never a slave of Fighting Instructions, he believed in fighting for serious results. “The objective from which his eye never wandered,” as Mahan appreciates, “was the French fleet,” the organized force of the enemy at sea. This was indeed the crux. As long as French naval power had access to America as an ally and was able to furnish the rebels with men, arms and especially money, they would not be defeated. From the hour of the French alliance, British strategy should have made the blocking of France from America her primary aim. There was no cabinet decision that ever made this explicit nor orders to seagoing commanders to make it a primary concern. Ultimately the time came when the private loot of St. Eustatius and the public duty of protecting the overvalued West Indies, for which as Commander-in-Chief of the Leewards Rodney felt responsible, blurred his vision. Rodney’s eye did waver, and in a critical moment of bad judgment, strategic purpose was set aside.

Rodney’s plan for action in the West Indies in 1780 was a plan for breaking the line as envisaged by John Clerk in the harbor of Edinburgh. It was an unorthodox movement in which all of his ships at once, instead of section by section down the line, would fall upon and destroy the French center and rear before the van was engaged. The plan was explained to his captains in advance, but as it was contrary to Fighting Instructions, it was evidently not understood or else, as Rodney was later to charge, deliberately disobeyed for sinister political reasons.

Once again, the unregenerate signaling system that had not been changed for a hundred years was to ruin what could have been a decisive fleet action. On the theory that, for the sake of comprehension, flags should be kept as few and as simple as possible, the system was primitive. The rule was that signal flags should be hoisted only one at a time, so that varieties of meaning could only be indicated by adding pennants or by the flag’s position on a mast or to which mast it was attached. Given these limitations, a flag usually called by a number for one or another of the Fighting Instructions. Unless his plan were very carefully explained, which was not his habit, Rodney could not count on prompt and accurate response when discipline was lax.

On April 17, 1780, the English and French fleets sighted each other off the coast of Martinique. Gaining the wind in the morning, with his ships in close order while the French were strung out, Rodney, believing himself on the edge of a crushing victory, prepared to execute his surprise. Instead of the grand design he had laid out, the British system of signals virtually ensured that the captains would be bewildered. To indicate his intentions, Rodney had to raise signal 21, from Additional Fighting Instructions. A sport in regular tactics, signal 21 meant for each ship to bear down and steer for her opposite in the enemy line. It was made by flying the signal flag from the main topgallant mast in conjunction with firing a gun, not the most precise message when in the midst of action. The tired captains, puzzled by unorthodox maneuver, took off in individual disorder, some bearing down on the van as would have been normal, others, unsure of what to do, following each other against the wrong section in the French line, leaving their Admiral unsupported and his plan a shambles. For an hour he fought alone until his flagship was so hurt—with eighty shot in her hull, three below the waterline, with main- and mizzen-masts broken, sails gaping with holes, her main spar dangling uselessly like a broken limb—that for the next twenty-four hours she could barely be kept afloat, and Rodney had to shift to another ship of the rear division. Others of his ships were so badly damaged in the mělée that two of them sank afterward in the bay. Neither fleet having