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The British and Provincial Conquest of Cuba

How the Island was Invaded, and Havana Captured, After a Bloody and Deadly Siege, in the Summer of 1762, by the British, Under Lord Albemarle, Helped Just in Time by a Force of 2,300 Men from Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey, Under General Lyman and Colonel Israel Putnam, and then Returned to the Spaniards--Frightful Losses of the Invaders--Havana Looted, and a Prize Money Scandal. The Greed of The British Officers--Did the Provincial Troops Establish a Preemption Right to the Island?--Colonial and English Sympathy--Washington's Brother in the British Service in the West Indies--A Connecticut Chaplain's Journal of the Plague at Havana--Sad Fate of General Lyman.

WHEN we consider the British capacity to possess good land, and habit of holding fast all they get, and recall how highly the West Indies were esteemed by Europeans in the last century, and that Cuba was worth all the rest of the Archipelago in natural productions and exhaustless fertility, in commanding situation, military and commercial, and in commodious harbors, it is the strangest of Cuban stories that this priceless Pearl of the Antilles should have been the spoil of one of the greatest English expeditions that ever crossed the Atlantic, and handed back to Spain, as if with His Britannic Majesty's festive compliments, as an incident of a transaction not extraordinary.