Indies. The combined army numbered thirteen thousand troops accompanied by a large naval flotilla, including transports, frigates, and sixteen ships of the line. This invasion force departed Barbados on January 5, 1762, proceeding toward the initial objective of the campaign—Martinique, an island colonized by the French in 1635.28
Even though the British strove to maintain secrecy with their planning and mobilization, the French in Martinique received warning of an intended attack on that island, and took measures to strongly oppose any attempted assault. The French command readied a defense in depth, augmenting natural barriers of steep and rugged terrain with fortified outposts and redoubts that extended over the entire island. In the middle of January 1762, the British forces, including Lieutenant Montgomery and the 17th Regiment, landed on Martinique and established a beachhead. At daybreak on January 24, they opened the main offensive against stout resistance. The enemy’s outlying works were eventually stormed one by one, and survivors fled to the citadel at Fort Royal, the island’s capital. Losses of British troops in these actions amounted to 33 officers and 350 men killed or wounded. Included in these figures, the 17th Regiment had one captain wounded; three rank and file killed and sixteen wounded.
By the first of February, the British had closed around and were ready to launch an onslaught on Fort Royal itself. Reduction of several batteries on the heights overlooking the fortress cost the British another 150 casualties, but only one man from the 17th Regiment. On February 3, the French commander, observing the extensive preparations by His Majesty’s troops to force the city, now judged it prudent to surrender the fort. It consisted of about 800 regulars and militia, as 150 men were killed or wounded during the siege.
Nine days more sufficed to consolidate the British hold on the rest of the island. On February 12, after suffering over a thousand casualties, the French governor-general agreed to surrender Martinique to the British. General Monckton summed up the conduct of his troops during the campaign in one of his dispatches: “The difficulties they had to encounter, in the attack of an enemy, possessed of every advantage of art and nature, were great, and their perseverance in surmounting these obstacles furnishes a noble example of British spirit.” After the capture of Martinique, threatened garrisons on the other main islands of the French West Indies—Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent—submitted to the British without hostilities.29
Fearing that a British victory in the global conflict would jeopardize its New World possessions, Spain belatedly entered the contest in 1761, allied with France. Now that Britain had overcome France in North America and the West Indies, the British ministry decided to avail itself of the large amassment of troops then in the Caribbean area by attacking the Spaniards, as they had the French, in some of their principal settlements. Havana, Cuba, was an important Spanish seaport at this time. Since all Spanish commerce in Mexico and South America funneled through there, to take Havana would sever the lifeline between Spain and its great colonial empire. Therefore, the British resolved to start their Spanish West Indies campaign with Havana. General Monckton returned to New York, to which the British government had appointed him governor before the Martinique campaign. Gen. George Keppel, Earl of Albemarle, assumed command of the new expedition. Once again, the 17th Regiment would see combat—this time as a component of Keppel’s eleven-thousand-troop expedition.
On May 6, 1762, the military command rewarded Montgomery’s exceptional service by promoting him to captain and giving him one of the ten companies in the 17th Regiment to lead. As company commander, the new captain would be accountable for the activities and welfare of some seventy-five men assigned to his unit. During the upcoming battles, the lives of these men would depend on the correctness and timeliness of his decisions. Although Montgomery realized the heavy responsibility, he was self-assured in his abilities and welcomed the opportunity to live up to the confidence his superiors had placed in him.
The expedition, accompanied by 24 ships of the line, 22 frigates, and 150 transports, set sail from Martinique on May 6, 1762. Shortly after the armada dropped anchor off Havana on June 6, twelve ships of the line raced to the mouth of Havana Harbor to bottle up the Spanish fleet. The city was strongly fortified and garrisoned. Occupation troops numbered seventeen thousand regulars and militiamen. In addition, nine thousand armed sailors and marines were stationed on the twelve warships in the harbor. The Spanish deliberately sank three of these ships when the British squadron arrived to block their entrance into the harbor. On June 7, the British army landed unopposed approximately seven miles from Havana.
Shortly thereafter, the army divided into five brigades. The 17th Regiment, including Montgomery’s company, would take part in the siege and capture of Moro Fort. This fortress was the key position of the extensive works that protected the city and was considered by the Spanish to be impregnable. On July 4, the British batteries opened fire with forty-seven guns that had been dragged across a rough, rocky shoreline. Battleships outside the harbor, with a total of 220 cannons, kept up a continuous bombardment. The Spanish answered with their own artillery, driving away the British ships. Nevertheless, the British land batteries eventually managed to silence all the Spanish guns but two. On July 30, Montgomery and his men, together with the other troops of the brigade, captured Moro Fort by storm. The British force could now bear down on the last defenses of the city. At this point, the Spanish governor-general saw that further resistance would be useless and surrendered. On August 13, 1762, the Cross of St. George flew over the Governor’s Palace —the British had seized Havana and Cuba.30
The successful struggle of more than two months against a superior force defending fortifications that they deemed invincible was a glorious campaign for the British army. The triumph, however, exacted a heavy toll. British troop casualties totaled 520 men killed or dead from wounds received in battle, including the 17th Regiment figures of one sergeant and five men killed, two officers and two men wounded. However, the appalling statistic was the multitude of British soldiers who perished from disease—forty-seven hundred, or almost half of the expedition. The 17th Regiment fared much better, which might be attributed to its leaders— only losing four sergeants and twenty-two men to sickness.31
The tropical Cuban climate in the middle of summer took a deadly toll on the unacclimated British troops. The expedition executed its campaign under a relentlessly burning sun when there had been no rain for fourteen days. A scarcity of water compounded the problem. Because there was no fresh water source in the area of operations, drinking water had to be brought from a great distance, resulting in a precarious supply for the troops. One participant described how “excessive thirst soon caused the tongue to swell, extend itself outside the lips, and become black as in a state of mortification; then the whole frame became prey to the most excruciating agonies, til death at length intervened, and gave the unhappy sufferer relief.”32
On August 20, 1762, Montgomery and his regiment left Cuba in three transports and arrived at New York four days later. However, the debilitating effects of the rigorous campaign lingered. A chaplain who served in the operation reflected that “perhaps those were happiest who died and left their bones around Havana, for those who returned home, took with them broken strength, and a languor which lasted to their life’s end.”33 A surgeon examined members of the regiment after they landed at New York and rendered a medical report to General Amherst: “I have visited the above regiments, and am sorry to inform you of the deplorable situation they are in, . . . with dangerous fevers and fluxes, many of the men are past recovery and the rest so weak, that I fear a long time will elapse before they are again fit for service, . . . nor are the officers in a better condition; several cannot recover, and the greater number of the remainder will, for a long time, be weakly, and unfit to undergo much fatigue.”34
The 17th Regiment and other units that had been involved in the West Indies campaign entered an extensive program of rehabilitation and reorganization while in New York. On February 10, 1763, Britain, France, and Spain signed the Treaty of Paris, officially ending the Seven Years’ War. Britain had established its world supremacy with the territorial concessions that it won resulting from the conflict. Except for a few islands off Newfoundland and in the West Indies, France relinquished
