Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle. Paula Byrne

The French prisoners were transferred to HMS Cambridge.

      There were occasional weeks of respite, when the Trent would be moored off Port Royal, Jamaica, for cleaning, caulking, rerigging, the removal of ballast, the supply of fresh water and provisions. Time spent at anchor was troublesome from the point of view of discipline. On one occasion at Port Royal a midshipman was punished for embezzlement, receiving nine lashes alongside every ship in the harbour, with a halter around his neck. Another time, Lindsay had to punish some men for insubordination, making them run the gauntlet through the ship. Then they would be off again: in April 1761 they took a Spanish sloop from Port au Prince laden with sugar; in August a Dutch schooner; in September La Donna de la Providence, bound for France – her crew were dispatched to a plantation, where they would be held until the opportunity arose for an exchange of prisoners.

      Captain Lindsay’s exploits were celebrated in the press back home in England. In January 1762 the London Chronicle printed a front-page report from Kingston in Jamaica, dated 31 October 1761 (news travelled slowly in the days before the invention of the telegraph). It announced that:

      Thursday arrived from a cruise, his Majesty’s ship Trent, John Lindsay, Esq; Commander, and brought in two prizes, said to be a Dutch schooner and sloop, both from Cape Francois, which he took in the Bite of Leogan, and were part of a fleet of about fifteen sail, who had been assisting our enemies at the Cape; they are both richly laden with indigo, etc. etc. It is reported, the poltroon commanders of these vessels, had the impudence to give out they would take the Trent; though when within sight of their enemy, they thought proper to fly away with all speed, and leave their friends a sacrifice for their presumption.5

      Clearly, Captain Lindsay was a man of courage and single-mindedness, if not reckless impulsiveness. The prizes were mounting up: every captured ship meant a bounty for the crew, and especially for the captain.

      His greatest triumph came at the siege of the castle of Morro, which stood guard over Havana Bay on the key strategic island of Cuba, held by the Spanish. Captain Goostrey of the Cambridge was shot dead in action on 1 July 1762, and Lindsay was sent to fill his place, where he ‘gave many strong proofs of his valour’.6 A painting by the naval artist Richard Paton, now in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, shows the bombardment of the castle. It gives a vivid sense of the smoke of battle, the ease with which a wooden warship might burst into flames, and the nerves of steel demanded of the captains. The Cambridge is shown flying a red ensign in the mizzen shrouds, as a signal that her captain is dead. In the foreground is a little rowing boat in which Lindsay is being taken from the Trent to the Cambridge, where he will assume command.

      At the end of July a breach was made with mines in the wall of the castle, and this enabled the British to take it by storm. The fall of Havana was now inevitable: it occurred on 11 August. In addition to stores and booty up to the value of £3 million, nine Spanish ships of the line were captured, and two on the stocks were burned. Possession would, however, be short-lived: under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the war the following year, Havana was returned to the Spanish.

      After the taking of Havana, the Trent participated in the mopping-up operation. The sick and wounded were transported for treatment, newly arriving Spanish ships – including some slave transporters – were headed off. Then in July 1763 came the order to return home. The Trent reached Spithead on 12 August, and ten days later she was moored at Long Reach. Lindsay set about stripping the ship and getting his officers ashore. After a final cleaning, he paid off the men and closed his log on Friday, 9 September. The war was over; the Trent had performed her service. She was decommissioned and scrapped, and Captain Lindsay was knighted for his gallantry.

      Despite the ending of the war, the colonies still needed to be patrolled, so before long Lindsay was back in the West Indies, in command of another ship. One senses that he couldn’t keep away. The heat and the excitement were a far cry from life in the chilly and dull Scottish Highlands. In 1768 he married a Scottish girl called Mary Milner, daughter of an MP. They had no children, although there is evidence that Lindsay sired one or possibly two illegitimate children in Scotland. His portrait was painted at around the time of his marriage by the leading Scottish society artist Allan Ramsay. He is seen in naval dress uniform, and looks not only handsome and distinguished, but somehow kind. He was soon off abroad again, this time to the East Indies.

      One entry stands out in Captain Lindsay’s log of his earlier mission to the West Indies. Amidst the chases, the boardings and the prizes, the time at anchor and the set-piece drama of the siege, there is a poignant moment of rescue. It is Saturday, 7 February 1761, and the Trent is off Curaçao, one of the southernmost Caribbean islands: ‘saw a small boat to the East. Came up with her, found in her 2 English Negroes that Run away from Martinique. One of them dy’d immediately being Starv’d.’ The surviving negro, who went by the name of Peter King, was taken aboard and well looked after. Lindsay was clearly a man of compassion as well as purpose.

      At some point in his West Indian naval adventures Lindsay met a slave woman, who was almost certainly called Maria. She would be Dido’s mother. The story told in England many years later, of which we have only a second-hand account, was that he captured a Spanish ship and took a fancy to one of the female slaves on board. We have seen from the logbook that the Trent did run down several Spanish ships. Perhaps the woman was a slave in service to a Spaniard on board that sloop heading to St Domingo with settlers, or the one coming from Port au Prince laden with sugar for Europe. We cannot, however, be certain that she was in fact on a Spanish ship, and not on one of the Dutch or French ones that Lindsay also captured. The muster rolls of the Trent include the names of many prisoners, who were held on board and victualled at two-thirds the allowance of the crew, before being transferred to other ships or put ashore. Among them were ‘Thomas a negro’, ‘James a negro’, ‘Marique’, ‘Domingeta’, ‘Sansauvie’, ‘Lanset’, ‘Greto’, ‘Adam’, and many more unnamed negroes. Tantalisingly, none of them is readily identifiable as the ‘Maria’ whom Lindsay kept as his mistress, although the prisoners from a Spanish sloop taken on 22 April 1761 did include one ‘Quainda Mairia’.

      Then again, stories of this kind are often garbled in the detail, or embellished for dramatic effect in the retelling. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the woman was actually a prize taken on dry land. Could it have been in the aftermath of the capture of Havana? In February 1763 the Trent discharged many prisoners who had been captured in Havana onto a place called Belle Island. Perhaps Maria was retained from the group and Dido conceived at this time, the association inspiring the name Belle.

      But this is speculation. All we know for sure is that the encounter between Captain Lindsay and Maria was the beginning of Dido’s story. There is evidence that Dido was about five years old late in the year 1766. This would suggest a date of birth before the siege of the castle of Morro and the surrender of Havana, and strongly suggests that Dido was conceived in the captain’s cabin aboard the Trent.

      Maria appears to have remained on board the Trent until the summer of 1763, when the vessel returned to England and was decommissioned.7 Lord Mansfield was later reported as saying that the negro woman was with child when the ship returned home, and that Dido was born in England, but a later Murray–Mansfield family tradition has it that she was born at sea. Unlikely as it may now seem, it was not uncommon for wives, mistresses and even babies to be present on Royal Navy warships in the eighteenth century.

      Captain Lindsay would have possessed a well-thumbed copy of the Regulations and Instructions relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea. Article XXXVIII of the rules for the captain or commander clearly stated that ‘He is not to carry Women to Sea, nor to entertain any Foreigners to serve in the Ship, who are Officers or Gentlemen, without Orders from the Admiralty.’8 The official navy line was that wives could come on board when a ship was in port, but not go to sea. Prior to the Battle of Trafalgar, when the ship of the line HMS Prince was in dock in Portsmouth, one eyewitness