Commander Cantrell in the West Indies(251)
“What I accomplished?” Fadrique scoffed. “Now you mock me—Juan.”
“I do not—Fadrique,” responded the half-crippled captain-general with a warm and genuine smile. “Santo Domingo still stands today because of your triumph at the Battle of Vieques.”
“The Battle of Vieques, as too many are styling it, was no victory,” countered Fadrique. “It was at best, a stalemate. And we paid for it with eight galleons, two galleoncetes, and three pataches sunk or irreparable. All this while running away from a fleet we outnumbered, three ships to one, for almost three consecutive days. And you will note I do not include the losses among our ‘privateers,’ losses which numbered well over twenty hulls, when we include the actions to the south, where the Dutch escaped.” He irritably sucked in a full-cheeked swig of the red wine, as he had not done since resolving to regain his fitness and the finer form of his youth. “Another few ‘victories’ such as the one off Vieques and we shall be done for, in the New World.”
Juan shook his head. “You are wrong, Fadrique. Wrong in so many ways, I do not know where to begin enumerating them. Let us return to my first comment. Had your stratagems not repelled these so-called ‘Allied forces,’ they would have reached this city. And we have all heard what similar up-time naval rifles did to the fortifications at Hamburg last year. They were reduced to rubble in half an afternoon. Had that happened here, how many more ships would we have lost? How many thousands of men? How many slips in which we may build the ships with which we must fight this new menace? And, perhaps more importantly, how would we have fought a war against them in the Lesser Antilles when our next stronghold truly worthy of that label is Havana, far to the west? How could we have hoped to contest their further expansion, and ultimately, contain and suffocate them on the few islands they currently hold? No, my dear Fadrique, you may have lost ships, but you won the battle. Any outcome which did not end in the leveling of Santo Domingo is a strategic victory of the first order. And yours is the mind and will that produced it.”
“Well, I—”
“I am not finished, Admiral!” Juan remonstrated histrionically, his color becoming more normal. “Since I have returned to the topic of lost ships, I concede that yes, you did lose many. But you presumed that from the outset, did you not? And many of those lost used to be piratical scourges that are no longer a worry to us, are they not? You need not answer. I know the rightness of my assertions. And what did you accomplish with those losses?” Juan leaned forward and raised his wine-glass toward the man who had become a friend over the past five months. “You drove off those two steamships, and even significantly damaged one. The same ships which sunk and captured so many of our vessels at the Battle of Grenada Passage and routed all the rest. Your strategy—to bait them onward until the weather, sea, or light were unfavorable to their guns—was decisive. They did not discern it quickly enough to counteract it. They were lucky to escape, as it was.”
“Not so lucky, Juan,” Fadrique insisted, emphasizing his disagreement with a jabbed index finger. “The objective was not merely to deflect their probable strike against this city, but to inflict losses among the slower hulls in the rear of their formation. Every fluyt we sink of theirs reduces their ability to project power, to sail great distances with the troops and supplies and powder and coal that they require. It was unfortunate that we tangled with their steam behemoths at all, and see what it cost us! They were cautious enough not to give chase as ardently or swiftly as they might have,”—as I might have!—“and so we were not able to strike them at their weak point: support ships. Logistics. And now that we have tipped our hand, strategically, we must expect that they shall not give us such an easy opportunity again.” He set down the empty glass. What he really wanted to do was shatter it on the table. “The flaw was in relying upon the pirate bastards in the south. They grew too eager, sprang the trap too early. In another hour, they would have regrouped properly and been abaft the beam of the rearmost Dutch fluyt. Our foes’ escape would have been far more difficult and costly, then.”
Juan frowned, nodded sympathetically. “Do we know what happened, in the south?”
“What else? Their spleen and bloodlust got the better of them. And I was foolish not to put more of our pataches in with them. Equiluz had to hold the mountains of St. Croix in his spyglass toward the far eastern end of our ambush line. Only he was reliable enough to accomplish that. Without him there, the whole sorry lot of them would no doubt have drifted apart in a few hours. And our privateers proved indifferent at sending signals clearly and promptly.”