While there were a lot of trials going on in London, at the same time there was a great deal of business going on elsewhere that I feel it necessary to explain, dear reader. As Francisco de Miranda had warned Governor Cagigal, Viceroy Galvez was not pleased that his efforts at conquering Jamaica were sabotaged by the depletion of the Havana garrison to attack Nassau instead. Although Galvez had twice made plans for such a move himself, by the time it was executed he had hoped for the conquest of the larger and more profitable Jamaica. This was not to be, as there were only a few troops that could be spared, and Galvez did not have enough on his own to take Jamaica nor even to take East Florida, as he might have been expected to try. Perhaps if there had been a road like Interstate 10 between the east and west portions of the state, or had the state even been settled beyond its coastal areas Galvez may have made the attempt, but there was nothing to be done, despite the obvious weakness of the British in the aftermath of Yorktown, but with their navy in ascendency after the Battle of the Saintes.

So what was an angry and thwarted viceroy to do? Several options were available. The first thing he did was to take credit for the successful seizure of the Bahamas, although he had not executed the plan. The old saying is that success has 100 fathers but failure is an orphan, and that was certainly the case here. Had the attack failed, there would have been no credit and everyone would have sought to bury the incident and blame everyone else for the problem. But since the mission was successful, even those who had opposed its implementation like Galvez still sought to profit from having made such plans in the first place. Some people may cavil at this, but there is nothing to be complained about when it comes to giving credit to someone who has sound plans even if they may not want to put every plan into operation. Galvez as a Viceroy had a lot of concerns in mind. He not only sought the security of the Spanish-ruled realm based out of Mexico but also its expansion in the Gulf of Mexico with the restoration of Florida and other sugar islands.

We, looking back on history, can see this as one of the dying gasps of Spain’s attempt to increase its colonial holdings in the Americas. With the benefit of historical hindsight, we can see that Spain was an imperial power on the decline and that it was soon to lose its hold over its colonial empire in the Americas that it had held, at this time, for almost 300 years. We know that Galvez was not long for this earth and that the glory he won for Spanish arms would make him, paradoxically, a far better known and better regarded figure in the United States that he helped into being, indirectly, than he would be in the Spanish empire that he loyally served. Few Spaniards would be expected to know or care who Viceroy Galvez was, but ask a Texan if they have heard of Galveston, which was named after him, and the answer will probably be in the affirmative. The weakness of Spain would be increasingly evident in the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that were to follow, but those are properly the subject of other works. It should be noted at least in passing that at least through the end of the Civil War, Spain sought to take advantage of a distracted America to increase its power in South America and the Dominican Republic, and that Spain’s issues with the United States would be a major problem for Spain a bit more than a century later. But that is going well beyond the scope of this modest work.

Let us therefore confine ourselves, as best as possible, to the matter at hand. Galvez wanted to take credit for the successful seizure of the Bahamas from the overstretched British, and this he managed to do easily. Galvez was a well-recognized military genius who had successfully conquered several British posts at this point, including Mobile and Pensacola, both parts of West Florida at this time, and it was the conquest of Pensacola that proved to be a way that Galvez could strike back at his subordinates who had sought their own glory by acting at cross-purposes to his own plans. Juan Cagigal was accused by Galvez of having behaved with cruelty towards the captured British leader of the Pensacola garrison, and Francisco de Miranda was similarly accused of cruelty himself. Both of these subordinates found themselves imprisoned in the dungeons of Cadiz for their troubles. Juan Cagigal himself, after this point, disappears from the historical record and not a lot is available about him to the casual English-language reader. As an aside, though, the imprisonment of Francisco de Miranda would have serious consequences for the Spanish later on when he became one of the early revolutionaries in Venezuela during the Napoleonic Wars, but that is a story for other writers to discuss in more detail.

The upshot of all of this for own imprisoned Robert Woods, who was, of course, unaware of all of this dealing, as lonely prisoners are not in the best position to be aware of the Transatlantic trials of their frenemies and acquaintances, was that he remained in prison. Admiral Maxwell did not leave any records or respond to any requests for information as to why he had imprisoned Robert aside from his statements that he had done so out of disagreements concerning the defense of Nassau, but these disagreements hardly deserved prison time. As far as Robert was concerned, he was a poor and forgotten prisoner who had sought to do something right and had suffered for it, and would suffer in silence and isolation, perhaps until his days were done. He had no idea that his jailors, whether gleeful jailers as was the case with Vice Admiral Maxwell, or more reluctant ones like Cagigal and de Miranda, were themselves dealing with the threat of imprisonment (or worse), as well as he was. But we have already dwelled too much in jails in this novel, both in South Carolina as well as the Bahamas, and so it would hardly be suitable for a book like this one to spend even more space detailing the dark and lonely and dangerous condition of dungeons around the Atlantic world.

Let other pens dwell on such misery. There are writers enough that revel in writing about the terrible conditions that prisoners suffered in Newgate and other places in England, where it was a capital offense to steal a few pounds worth of goods, and where the British considered themselves to be generous to transport such criminals to the far reaches of the world in lieu of execution. Let others discuss the cruelties of the ancien regime in holding people in jail in places like the Bastille, which would become famous in their own time. Let the thousands of people who want to talk about justice write endless works discussing the horrors of the slave forts of the African coasts, with their ominous doors of no return where the people of that dark continent were taken from their homes and villages and sold by their own neighbors and other kidnappers to the tender mercies of European plantation owners and the merchants who served their interests, or to write about the local prisons where these slaves were kept when they were being traded within the lands that became the United States. There is no shortage of people who enjoy writing about prisons, and who think that a lurid description of the horrors of imprisonment will make people seek no longer to punish the criminal class for their misdeeds. I am not such a writer myself, and only mention such things in passing because we have spent enough time in prisons that I feel at some pains to point out that far much more time could have been spent there had I truly been interested in doing so. But enough of that.

Suffice it to say that while most of us in our present day will likely seek to know about prisons as little as possible, they are a place that attract a certain population that is made up of broadly two classes of people. The first of these are what may be termed the criminal class of people, who like the people in any other sort of profession are those who believe that the laws were made for other people and that what they want they have the right to do and to attain without bothering about the rights and property of others. While governments may feel it necessary for the public order to keep such people under restraint because they will not restrain themselves, there is typically no hostility between those who seek to use the power of government to control others and redistribute their property and those who do it by less elegant means. Governments and their officers are merely the best-dressed and most elegant members of the criminal class, by and large, and seek to avoid prisons (unlike their less fortunate fellow practitioners of crime) through their control of the law and institutions of power. The second class of prisoner, to which Robert Woods belonged, was that especially hated class of idealists who ran afoul of governments by exposing their vanity and insecurity. While the criminal class could be related to and understood by the governing class, political idealists who, despite a lack of interest in violence and pillage, were a far more dangerous class of people to governments, because they were alienated by the corruption around them as a matter of principle. While the criminal simply wished to obtain and enjoy ill-gotten gains, the idealist wanted to change the system to reflect some view of justice that was inimical to the maintenance of the power structure. Such effrontery has never been well-regarded by insecure and tyrannical authorities.