First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [58]
While loot was being counted, Rodney ordered two warships and a frigate to chase a Dutch convoy of thirty ships, “richly loaded,” which had sailed from St. Eustatius 36 hours before his arrival. The convoy’s Dutch commander, Admiral Krull, who resisted against hopeless odds for the honor of his flag, was killed in the fight and all his convoy taken. “Not one escaped,” Rodney reported with satisfaction. Three large Dutch ships from Amsterdam and a convoy from Guadeloupe came in later and were taken, and “a squadron of five sail of the line is hourly expected.” When the squadron arrived with a man-of-war, the Mars, of 38 guns and a crew of 300, it proved no match for Rodney’s squadron. The Mars would “now be commissioned and manned, and in a few days she will cruise as a British ship of war.” He could also report the taking of five American frigates of 14–26 guns. In the first month of the Dutch war as a whole, 200 of the Dutch merchant fleet, an objective as important as St. Eustatius, were taken by the English, paralyzing Dutch shipping in the process that accelerated the decline of the Republic. Occupied on land in collecting and disposing of the island’s riches and arranging for their safe convoy to England, and in pursuing the iniquitous English merchants who had been trading with the enemy,* Rodney was not at the head of his fleet patrolling the waters to intercept possible French intervention in America. While he has borne responsibility for this fateful omission, the fault did not in fact lie with him so much as in the casual management by his government and its war ministers, who did not foresee or consider French intervention as a serious concern. At no time did they issue any orders to Rodney that a primary mission of his fleet must be at all costs to prevent French reinforcements from reaching America to aid the rebels. If he or his government had been gifted with a talent for seeing into the future, and could have anticipated the fatal effect for Britain of future French presence at Yorktown, orders to the Admiral might have been more definitive in the Spartan tone of “Come back with your shield or on it.” Rodney was given no such urgent advice because the English never seriously considered that the Americans could win the war or that French help could or would be decisive. Ministers did not act to prevent a siege of General Cornwallis’ army at Yorktown because it was a contingency they never conceived of as happening.
The objects of Rodney’s sternest wrath were British merchants of both Statia and, particularly, St. Kitts who had been selling arms to the enemy for use against their own countrymen. He pounced upon their records in accountants’ offices, which had not been destroyed owing