De Grasse's fleet was to be the chief factor in the situation, the mainspring of the movement. The preliminary dispositions had already been made. Thirteen Spanish ships of the line were at that moment waiting off Cape Haitien in San Domingo, accompanied by transports with 24,000 troops on board. They were expecting to be joined by a force of 10,000 French soldiers from Brest, escorted by five or six men-of-war which were already overdue. According to the grand plan, De Grasse with his fleet, thirty-four of the line, with store-ships and the convoy that had arrived in March, was to move out from Fort Royal, with some five or six thousand more troops on board the men-of-war, and cross over and join hands with the assemblage off San Domingo. The united armada, making up some sixty ships of the line, against which Rodney's thirty-six and the handful of ships at Port Royal could not hope to stand, were then to swoop down on Jamaica and capture it out of hand. There were only 3500 British regulars in Jamaica, and the planter militia and armed negroes were of little account. Jamaica taken, said the enemy, Barbados would fall at the first summons, and Antigua and St. Lucia would follow, making an end of the British West Indies. So confident were the enemy of success that, as it was reported, Don Bernardo Galvez, the Spanish Commander-in-Chief, had already been publicly addressed at Havana as 'Governor of Jamaica,' which island, according to the secret arrangement between the allies (already drafted), was to be Spain's share of the spoil. Rodney's fleet--the _Formidable_ and her thirty-five consorts off St. Lucia--were all that stood between the scheme and its fulfilment. Realising to the utmost what depended on him, Rodney pressed on his preparations for sea with intensified vigour, so as to be ready to fall on De Grasse immediately he left Fort Royal. [Illustration: _From Dupont's engraving of Gainsborough's portrait._] [Illustration: [Facsimile of the signature to despatch announcing the victory over De Grasse.]] During March and the early part of April--except for ten days lost in a futile attempt to cut off De Grasse's convoy from France on its way to Fort Royal--Rodney was busy refitting: a task that taxed all his energies owing to the state to which some of the ships had been reduced, short of powder, shot, sea stores of all kinds, bread, even anchors. All the fleet, too, had to be watered, which proved a slow and difficult business owing to the bad weather. 'I think,' wrote Rodney in March, 'the winter season has followed us: nothing but violent hard gales, and such a sea that half the boats of the fleet have been stove in watering, which has delayed us much in refitting.'