Forgotten Caribbean battles in the sunshine

I love the byways of history, stories not brought to the fore but still interesting in their own right. In the past month, I posted about Puritans establishing a colony on an island off the coast of Nicaragua in the 1600s.

In Wreck of 17th-Century Dutch Warship Discovered by Megan Gannon, there is the story of newly rediscovered wreck from a battle between the French and the Dutch over the island of Tobago in the Caribbean in 1677.

The wreck of a 17th-century Dutch warship has been discovered off the coast of Tobago, a small island located in the southern Caribbean. Marine archaeologists believe the vessel is possibly the Huis de Kreuningen, which was lost during a bloody fight between Dutch and French colonists.

On March 3, 1677, the French Navy launched a fierce attack against the Dutch in Tobago's Rockley Bay. European settlers coveted Tobago for its strategic location; in fact, the island changed hands more than 30 times after Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World.

The abbreviated story of this particular battle is, "Everybody dies, and every ship sinks," according to Kroum Batchvarov, an assistant professor of maritime archaeology at the University of Connecticut. Indeed, about 2,000 people were killed and up to 14 ships went down during the skirmish. But until now, none of those sunken vessels had been recovered.

[snip]

Because of the size of the cannons found at the site, the archaeologists suspect the wreck could be the 130-foot-long (40 meters), 56-gun warship Huis de Kreuningen. Only one other Dutch vessel, the flagship Bescherming, could have supported such large guns, but it survived the battle, Batchvarov said.

The French boarded the Huis de Kreuningen during the Battle of Tobago. To avoid capture, the Dutch captain, Roemer Vlacq, blew up the ship. The blaze spread and destroyed the French flagship Glorieux. Despite their major losses, the Dutch, led by commodore Jacob Binckes, were ultimately successful in holding back the French. (Years earlier, Binckes had re-captured New York for the Dutch; the city was, however, returned to England shortly after.)

Here's the wonder. These guys were one to two months sailing from their home countries, fighting to the death over specks of distant land. The ships they built (and sank) represented enormous amounts of capital. 2,000 lives were lost in countries that were then a fraction of what they are now in terms of size. Assuming half the losses were borne by the Dutch, that would be a thousand lives lost in a country of 2.1 million. In one battle. The comparison would be if we were to fight a battle in Iraq or Afghanistan and were to lose 143,000 men.

And yet, other than a few maritime history specialists, Dutch historians or historians of the Caribbean, how many people know of this battle today. When we bewail the challenges and tragedies of our times, it is useful to maintain some perspective on what has gone before.

I am currently reading Victor Davis Hanson's Wars of the Ancient Greeks. I enjoy Hanson's prose and marvel at his erudition but sometimes feel he overstates his case somewhat. In this book he identifies eight distinctive attributes of Greek war making that were distinctive from other cultures and the past and which inform western military traditions today. Looking at the Battle of Tobago, you can find support for most of those eight. In particular, there is the evidence of the Greek tradition of fully prosecuting a battle. Compared to in the past where battle was often an exercise in signalling, the Greeks held the view that if it was worth fighting, it was worth fighting to win completely. From Hanson's book:

5. Choice of decisive engagement: the preference to meet the enemy head-on, hand-to-hand in shock battle, and to resolve the fighting as quickly and decisively as possible, battle being simply the final military expression of the majority will of the citizenry. The Persians felt a destructive madness had come upon the Greeks at Marathon, and so it had, as they ran head-on into the Persian ranks, a practice frightening to behold for the easterner, as the battles at Plataea, Cunaxa, Granicus, Issus and Guagamela attest.

It is something of a paradox. Both Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Steven Le Blanc in Constant Battles make the point that pre-civilization, small unit battle between villages, tribes and hunter-gatherers were characterized by engagements that were frequently indecisive. A day spent shouting insults, some spears, arrows, clubs deployed, a couple of charges and then a retirement of both parties. Usually not more than a couple of deaths involved. But both Le Blanc and Pinker point out that these low level engagements were very frequent and that while the per battle death rate was low, the cummulative death rate over time was enormous compared to what we are accustomed to. Western warfare, as part of its Greek heritage, did become characterized by high death tolls per battle owing to a strong commitment to the idea of a decisive engagement. However, in aggregate, over time, the death tolls owing to conflict were much lower than in hunter-gatherer societies. Even the 20th century with WWI, WWI, the Russian revolution, the Chinese Revolution, etc. had much lower global death rates due to conflict than did hunter-gatherer bands.