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The British and Provincial Conquest of Cuba: Rodney

The English must have had a period of modesty, if not timidity, for not only was Rodney not acting under urgency from home when he won his tremendous victory over the French--his activity was disapproved, and orders to be quiet were on the way when he took the responsibility for an aggression that gave his country almost unparalleled prestige, compensating her largely for the loss of the heart of North America, and winning for himself a place among the loftiest reputations in the history of naval heroes. The same nerveless faltering that surrendered Cuba was that which sought to restrain Rodney. If there had been the courage in the conduct of imperial affairs in 1762 that appeared forty years later, England might have been reinforced in the Napoleonic wars with American troops, as she was in the great French and Indian wars in the middle of the eighteenth century, and in the enterprise, the fruit of which was the futile conquest of Cuba, from which the British general and admiral sailed away laden with booty of gold and silver, and with a fleet of Spanish ships caught in the harbor of Havana. This episode reads like a romance of piracy, for when the spoil was divided, and the high officers got their share, and the dead were buried, the great fleet departed and the Spaniards held, after all, the Pearl of the Antilles. Lord Albermarle first appeared off the coast of Cuba with an enormous armament--nineteen ships of the line and six frigates and nearly two hundred transport and slave ships--and landed June 17th, 1762. The capture of Havana was the object of the expedition, but the resistance of the Spanish was resolute and the climate deadly to the troops that had been serving in northern latitudes.

The fact has not been as prominent in our histories as it should have been that, on the 28th of July, in the midst of the sickly season, when five thousand British troops and three thousand sailors were sick and despondent, scratching the burning stones to throw up the trenches from which they were besieging the Moro Castle, suffering from the frightful heat and perishing with thirst, for water was scarce, and there was daily a fearful list of deaths--when there was a dread apprehension that the season of hurricanes was coming, there arrived from New York a welcome reinforcement of twenty-three hundred men under General Lyman of Connecticut, one thousand men from that state, eight hundred from New Jersey. General Lyman and Colonel Israel Putnam had been in the Indian and French wars together, and raised the regiment of one thousand men in their state that took so decided a part in the Cuban conquest. Lyman was in command of the brigade, and Lieutenant-Colonel Putnam was acting colonel of the Connecticut regiment.