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.
