West India

Among the leading objects contemplated by the British ministry in this war was the control of the East and West Indies, particularly of the latter, as among the most important sources as well as markets of British trade. In the present day, the value of the West India islands, and of all positions in the Caribbean Sea, is chiefly military or maritime; due less to the commerce they maintain than to their relations, as coaling ports or fortified stations, to the commercial routes passing through that region. It is scarcely necessary to add that whatever importance of this character they now possess will be vastly increased when an interoceanic canal is completed. During the French revolution, however, the islands had a great commercial value, and about one fourth the total amount of British commerce, both export and import, was done with them. This lucrative trade Great Britain had gathered into her hands, notwithstanding the fact that other nations owned the largest and richest of the islands, as well as those producing the best sugar and coffee. The commercial aptitudes of the British people, the superior quality of their manufactures, their extensive merchant shipping and ingenious trade regulations, conspired to make it the interest of the foreign colonists to trade with them, even when by so doing the laws of their own governments were defied; and to a great extent the British free ports engrossed the West Indian trade, as well as that to the adjacent South and Central American coasts, known as the Spanish Main. In war, the control of a maritime region depends upon naval preponderance. When the opposing navies are of nearly equal strength, it is only by open battle, and by the reduction of one to a state of complete inferiority, that control can be asserted.

If the region contested be small and compact, as, for instance, the immediate approaches to the English Channel, the preponderance of the fleet alone will determine the control and the safety of the national commerce within its limits; but if it be extensive, the distance between centres great, and the centres themselves weak, the same difficulties arise that are felt in maintaining order in a large and sparsely settled territory on land, as has till very lately been the case in our western Territories. In such circumstances the security of the traveller depends upon the government putting down nests of lawlessness, and establishing, at fitting stations, organized forces, that can by their activity insure reasonable safety in all directions. In the War of the French Revolution, it soon, though not immediately, became evident, that the British navy could everywhere preponderate in force over its enemy; but it could not be omnipresent. The Caribbean Sea offered conditions peculiarly favorable to marauders, licensed or unlicensed; while its commercial value necessitated the preservation, and, as far as possible, the monopoly, of so fruitful a source of revenue. The presence of hostile cruisers not only inflicted direct loss, which was measured by their actual captures, but, beyond these, caused a great indirect injury by the friction and delays which the sense of insecurity always introduces into commercial transactions.