First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [134]
Rodney’s sneer is startling, in view of Nelson’s future fulsome praise of Hood in the Napoleonic Wars as “the greatest sea officer I ever knew, great in all situations which an admiral can be placed in.” As Hood was to play a significant role in coming events, this remarkable difference of opinion of him, by two persons whose judgments were both based on personal experience as his commanding officer, is a matter of interest. Nelson was habitually overkind to his officers, and in this case rated Hood more highly than he deserved; his tribute cannot apply to situations in America in which Hood, on a number of occasions, was not only not great but something less than adequate.
“It has been difficult to find out proper flag officers to serve under you,” Sandwich informed Rodney rather tactlessly, although the difficulty, he said, was not personal but because some officers were unfit politically (which Sandwich referred to as “their factious connections”) and others because of “infirmity or insufficiency, and so we have at last been obliged to make a promotion in order to do the thing properly.” Rodney, as we have seen, professed himself well pleased by the choice of Sir Samuel Hood, although developing tensions were to break apart an old friendship and deprive the fleet at an important moment of cordial cooperation between its chiefs.
Hood arrived expecting to lead an expedition to capture the two Dutch colonies of Surinam and Curaçao, from which he anticipated rich booty, but on the basis of a false intelligence report that a large French fleet was on its way to the West Indies, Rodney felt obliged to keep all his forces ready for defense of the islands and called off the Surinam-Curaçao expedition. This was the first of Hood’s discontents. They then fell out over preferments to two places in the navy, one of which Hood believed Rodney had promised him for his first lieutenant while Rodney now said he must first fulfill promises made to a peer’s son belonging to “one of the first families in the kingdom.” Hood wrote to the Admiralty some very nasty letters about Rodney’s “instability” and his primary desire to stay on St. Eustatius to safeguard the proceeds of his capture. The two English fellow-officers were now in greater disaccord than ever occurred between the French and Americans despite their differences.
The real trouble was that Rodney, burdened with supervising the disposal of the property confiscated at St. Eustatius and with arranging for its loading on thirty transports and designating the proper ships for its safe escort back to England, was miserably ill with gout and with a urinary stricture that now added its torment. His one thought in his discomfort was to obtain leave to go home for relief. He had several times written to Sandwich for leave, without avail. “The continual mental and bodily fatigue,” he wrote on March 7, “that I have experienced for this year past preys upon me so much that unless I am permitted to leave this climate during the rainy season, I am convinced it will disable me from doing my duty to His Majesty and the state in the active manner I could wish and have been used to.” He entreats Sandwich to lay before the King that “in case my health should be such at the end of this campaign as to require a northern climate to restore it he will permit my return to Great Britain during the three rainy months.” It pains him “to request one moment’s respite from the public service but I have a complaint, owing to too much activity and exertion, which I am told by my physician will absolutely require my leaving the torrid zone.…” The warm humid climate of the summer months was in fact a disease breeder. Hundreds of soldiers and sailors were too sick to move and Rodney had been warned that if his stricture were left untreated it could develop to fatality. His urgency to return to England was understandable. Sandwich replied in May that he had made Rodney