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Europe and America and the Indies: British

Some of the most famous British seamen were charged by the Spaniards with piracy, and their proceedings were certainly rather irregular. The conquest of Havana, and other important points in Cuba, by the English, in 1762, was a striking feat of arms; and why they gave up the splendid booty within a year, has never been quite explained; but it cannot be said the English did not get something for what they gave.

It was from the French West Indies that the fleet sailed that helped Washington and Rochambeau at Yorktown, and caused the surrender of Cornwallis by beating back, after many broadsides, the squadron that sailed from New York for his relief, and it was a marvelous combination to bring the French from Gaudeloup to the capes of Virginia at the same time that Washington marched away from the Hudson with his French allies, to catch the southern army of England between the James and York rivers, where Cornwallis found himself after his fiery march through the Carolinas. It was necessary to plan the outlines of this expedition in Paris, and the detail at Dobb's Ferry; and at that time Paris was further from Yorktown, whether by way of New York or the Indies, than New York is now from Australia; and this holds good if we omit the wires through which the nations talk between the continents. The French, during our war of the revolution, were strong competitors with England at sea, and indeed they never gave up the primacy of the ocean to the British till after Trafalgar, and they do not entirely believe it yet; but Rodney won a victory over the French fleet in the leeward islands, almost as important as the last blow Nelson struck, and the splendid French armament that fought off the British from the capes of Virginia and made captives of a British army was no more.

The presence of the British for a year in Cuba imparted energy to the commerce of the island, and the labor of black slaves began to be productive of sugar. Indeed, slavery and sugar substantially came together, and Cuba received a large accession of valuable people from Hayti when the insurrections and massacres there relegated that supurb land a long way toward barbarism, with only the compensations of a rude form of freedom. At the turn of the centuries, when Napoleon shook up the nations, Cuba was faithful to Spain--becoming the ever faithful island--and when the Spanish-American empire fell into ruin, Cuba remained the last and richest of the gigantic inheritance bequeathed by the Italian navigator, who was rewarded by returning in chains from San Domingo, over the line on which he had sailed to make his immortal discovery.