IN THE SUMMER OF 1897, GREAT BRITAIN
celebrated the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria.
The British Empire was at its zenith; British commer-
cial power had no rivals. Official chroniclers and free-
lance propagandists travelled the globe, to laud the
conquest of India, half of Africa and a string of posses-
sions stretching across the oceans.
One such traveller-historian, James Anthony
Froude, arrived in the British West Indies in the sum-
mer of 1888. He came to celebrate the Empire, but in-
stead foresaw its decay. In Trinidad he found disturb-
ing signs that British pre-eminence was threatened by
an aggressive new power. “When we arrived,” Froude
wrote, “there were three American frigates, old
wooden vessels out merely on a cruise, but heavily
sparred, smart and well set up, with the Stars and
Stripes floating carelessly at their stems, as if in these
Western seas, be the nominal dominion British, French
or Spanish, the American has a voice also and intends
to be heard.”
The Spanish-American War of 1898 fulfilled
Froude’s bitter predictions that slovenly British rule
would be replaced by a visionary and energetic chal-
lenger. One of its first historians, Robert T. Hill of the
United States Geological Survey, carried a copy of
Froude’s book with him when he visited the islands.
“Froude little dreamed,” he noted, “that in so short a
time those wooden frigates would have disappeared
from our navy, and that one of the most effective, if not
one of the largest, iron-clad navies of the world, man-
ned by these same Yankees, would be in their place,
hammering at the gates of Cuba, preliminary to the es-
tablishment of American domination in the Great An-
tilles.”
For men like Hill, the war was a mission of salvation
to release Cuba and Puerto Rico from their “unnatural
political and trade conditions.” His prescriptions,
however, were directed as much against British coloni-
alism as against Spain’s geriatric monarchy. “Every
product of these islands,” he continued, “were it not
for the political conditions, would as naturally find a
market in the United States as the magnetic needle
finds the north. . . . As Froude has said, ‘The Yankee,
whether we like it or not, is sovereign of these wat-
ers.
The British understood very well that behind this
missionary zeal was the link between commercial ex-
pansionism and naval power, which Admiral Alfred
Mahan had laid out in 1890 in his book The Influence
of Sea Power in History. Spearheaded by its new iron-
clad navy, the United States seized Puerto Rico on July
25, 1898, and occupied Cuba the same year. It took
charge of the finances of the Dominican Republic in
1905, and landed Marines there and in Haiti in 1916.
Though it held back from extending direct control to
the British islands, the long-term intentions were clear
from Secretary of War Elihu Root’s comments in 1902:
“We must certainly bring the West Indies, from the
point of Florida to the gateway of the isthmian canal,
under the political and naval control of the United
States, and must with equal certainty create special
economic relations between them and the United
States, quite different from those which they or we bear
to the rest of the world.”
British naval intelligence understood that this meant
an end to London’s long-cherished dream of control-
ling an interoceanic canal through Central America. In
1903, the United States sponsored a secessionist revo-
lution in Panama; a canal, under sole U.S. jurisdiction,
followed. The annexation of Puerto Rico and the occu-
pation of Cuba offered the United States vital naval
bases to protect Panama. For the moment, though, the
eastern sea approaches, straddled by the small Leeward
and Windward Islands, remained in colonial hands.
It took eighty years for the erosion of British power
to be complete. By that time the old wooden frigates in
Trinidad had given way to helicopter gunships and
Special Forces in Grenada. Since the invasion,
Washington has indeed tried to direct the economy of
the English-speaking Caribbean toward the U.S. mar-
ket, “as the magnetic needle finds the North.” This
issue of Report on the Americas looks at how the Yan-
kee came to be “sovereign of these waters,” and at
what cost.
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