The History of the First West India Regiment. Ellis Alfred Burdon

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СКАЧАТЬ by assault, and the greater part of the garrison put to the sword. Fort St. Louis, the town of Point à Pitre, and a new battery upon Islet à Cochon being afterwards abandoned, the possession of Grandeterre was complete. The reduction of Basseterre was effected on the 21st of the same month; and the company of the Carolina Corps, with other troops, being left in garrison in Guadaloupe, the general returned to Martinique.

      The British, however, were not permitted to remain long in peaceable possession of their most recent conquest; for on the 3rd of June, a considerable French armament arrived off Point à Pitre. Fort Fleur d'Épée was taken by storm, and the place not being tenable after this loss, the British crossed over to Basseterre. Several prisoners were taken by the French, and amongst them were some of the Carolina Corps, for in the return of that corps for February, 1795, dated March 1st, there is the following note: "Some of the corps are prisoners at Point à Pitre, but their number cannot be ascertained." In a later return, however, we find that they consisted of one sergeant and eight rank and file.

      On the 2nd of July, the British made an ineffectual attempt to recover Point à Pitre, and soon after established their head-quarters at Berville, in Basseterre. The camp at Berville was invested in September, and on the 6th of October it was compelled to capitulate. Thus the whole of Guadaloupe, with the exception of Fort Matilda, situated above the town of Basseterre, and which was still held by a British garrison, was recovered by the French. At the surrender of Berville, 300 French Royalists, who were in the British camp, were massacred by the orders of Victor Hugues, the French commander.

      Fort St. Charles, Basseterre, had been rechristened Fort Matilda by the British on its surrender on the 21st of April, 1794, and against it Victor Hugues now moved all his forces. The fort was commanded by Lieutenant-General Prescott with a garrison of 610 men, including the company of the Carolina Corps which had come to Guadaloupe. General Prescott, in his despatch, dated "On board H.M.S. Vanguard, at sea, December 11th, 1794," says: "To enter into a minute detail of the siege, which commenced on the 14th of October, and terminated by evacuating it on the 10th of December, would not only too much occupy your time, but might be deemed equally unnecessary. It may be sufficient to remark that on entering the fort I found it totally out of repair, the materials composing the wall-work thereof being of the worst kind, and having apparently but little lime to cement them properly. By the middle of last month the works were very much injured by the daily and frequent heavy fire of the enemy, and almost all the carriages of our guns rendered useless. These were in general in a very decayed state, but even the new ones for the brass mortars that were made during the siege gave way from the almost incessant fire we kept up; so that upon the whole, what from the nature of our defences and the small number of our garrison, we were in a very unfit state to resist the very vigorous exertions of our enemy, who began to prepare additional forces about the 20th of last month, but who, from a number of causes, and especially from heavy and continued rains, could not open their new batteries till the 6th of this month. On that day they began to fire from twenty-three pieces of cannon, four of which were thirty-six-pounders, and the rest twenty-four-pounders, and from eight mortars, two of thirteen inches and two of ten. The fire was very heavy and continued all day and night, and by it all the guns on the Gallion bastion were dismounted, and the bastion itself a heap of ruins. Every day after this grew worse until the 9th, on the evening of which day I went into the ditch accompanied by the engineer, when we were both but too well convinced of the tottering state of the works from the Gallion along the curtain, and indeed the whole, from the east to the north-east. I could not hesitate a moment about the necessity of evacuating the fort. I therefore sent off immediately to Rear-Admiral Thompson, who commanded the detachment of the squadron left for our protection, to acquaint him with the necessity of evacuating the fort next evening, and to request that he would have the boats ready to take off the garrison at seven o'clock. I kept this my design a profound secret until half-past six o'clock of the evening of the 10th, when I arranged the march of the garrison… The embarkation continued with little or no interruption, and was happily completed about ten o'clock at night, without its being discovered by the enemy, who continued firing as usual on the fort till two or three o'clock on the morning of the 11th, as we could plainly perceive from the ships. My satisfaction was great at having thus preserved my brave garrison to their king and country."

      During the siege of Fort Matilda, the Carolina Corps lost 1 killed and 3 wounded, 2 of whom afterwards died of their wounds. In the "State of the Garrison of Fort Matilda, as embarked on the 10th of December, 1794," the strength of the company of the Carolina Corps is shown as 1 captain, 1 lieutenant, 4 sergeants, and 30 rank and file. After the evacuation, this company was stationed at Martinique; so that at the close of the year 1794, two companies were in that island, and one in St. Lucia.

      CHAPTER V.

      ROYAL RANGERS, COMMANDED BY CAPTAIN MALCOLM, 41ST REGIMENT

      A: Capt. Commandant.

      B: Captains.

      C: 1st Lieutenants.

      D: 2nd Lieutenants.

      E: Sergeants Present.

      F: Drummers Present.

      G: Present fit for Duty.

      H: In Hospital.

      I: In Quarters.

      This officer is mentioned by Bryan Edwards, vol. iii. p. 452: "Lieutenant Malcolm, of the 41st Grenadiers, was appointed Town Major" (of St. Pierre, Martinique, in 1794) "in consideration of his distinguished conduct and active services at the head of a body of riflemen, which was composed of two men selected from each company of the 1st Battalion of Grenadiers. We shall have occasion to mention this officer afterwards."

      This body of riflemen, raised during the operations in Martinique, in March, 1794, must, if the above statement of its formation be correct, have been European, for there were no black troops employed in the reduction of that island, except the Carolina Corps. The corps of riflemen is not shown in any return, and it is probable that at the termination of the active operations the men rejoined their respective battalions. The Royal Rangers, shown in the return of the 1st of May, 1795, were black; for Sir John Vaughan, in a letter dated Martinique, April 25th, 1795, which gives an account of the operations in St. Lucia in that month, says: "The flank companies of the 9th Regiment and the black corps under Captain Malcolm were the troops engaged." These Royal Rangers, then, were almost certainly entirely distinct from the "body of riflemen," and the success which had attended Captain Malcolm's efforts with the first body probably led to his being employed in raising the second, about February or March, 1795. In the month of April, 1795, one company of this corps, numbering 121 of all ranks, was in St. Lucia, and the other company, 112 strong, in Martinique.

      Victor Hugues, having succeeded in ousting the British from Guadaloupe, commenced, early in 1795, active measures for the recovery of the other islands that had been wrested from France in the previous year, and the plan which was first ripened appears to have been that against St. Lucia.13 "No official and scarcely any other accounts of the event are to be found, but the invasion of this colony appears to have been effected about the middle of February… Nor can the strength of the invading force be now ascertained. That force was probably few in number, and stolen into the island in small bodies, and under cover of the night. Aided, however, by an insurrection of the slaves, people of colour, and democratical whites, it was sufficient to wrest from us the whole of the colony, with the exception of the two posts of the Carenage and the Morne Fortune."14

      Affairs remained in this situation till about the middle of April, when Brigadier-General Stewart resumed active operations, in the hope of recovering the lost ground. On the 14th of that month, he suddenly disembarked near Vieux Fort, with a force consisting of a portion of the 6th and 9th Regiments, the company СКАЧАТЬ