The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard

and on the River Gambia.²⁹ Encouraged by this success, Pitt turned to the West Indies, where he hoped to knock out French power and destroy French colonial wealth. William Beckford, the London-based head of Jamaica’s most politically important family, urged him to take an ill-guarded Martinique. This easy conquest, Beckford argued, would acquire for Britain an island with slaves and property worth more than £4 million or 92.1 million livres. He exhorted Pitt: “For God’s sake, attempt it without delay.”³⁰

      The minister was well aware of other strategic reasons for such a campaign. Not only did France produce more sugar at cheaper prices than Britain, but in the struggle between the two empires geography and wind patterns favored the French. Privateers sailing out of Martinique posed a serious threat to Barbados, which had no capacity for a naval harbor. Antigua, which did have a British naval station, was downwind from both Martinique and Barbados, so its ships found it impossible to shut down French privateers.³¹ Attacking Martinique would strike a major blow at the privateers and at the French sugar industry. Pitt did not, however, intend to keep his West Indian conquests. As he saw it, Martinique would be an ideal chip with which to gain back the Mediterranean island of Minorca, which the French had taken from Britain in 1756.³²

      The French were keenly aware of their naval inferiority, but Britain’s 1759 campaign in the eastern Caribbean drove home a more unsettling realization: French planters would not sacrifice themselves or their property in order to repel a British attack. In the years following the Seven Years’ War, this insight had a profound effect on politics in Saint-Domingue, as Versailles sought to build imperial patriotism in its most valuable colony. It was the example of Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1759 and 1762 that created this reaction. On 12 November 1758, Pitt sent off a large force of nine thousand men in seventy-three ships to the West Indies. The expedition was hindered by the medical complications that European troops always faced in the Caribbean. Within a month of arrival in Barbados, disease had reduced the number of men fit for service to five thousand. Within another month this force had nearly halved again to just fewer than three thousand. The primary killer was, as always, yellow fever.³³