Lillingston refused, and Wilmot went off in the sulks, growling:—
“Well well” says he “if you don’t think fit to join with me you may let it alone, but I am resolved to make myself amends. I won’t go to the West Indies to learn the language. I’ll take care of myself, let the King’s business go how it will.”
When the squadron reached Madeira, Wilmot endeavoured to get rid of the military officers. He seized an opportunity to sail while most of them were ashore buying provisions. A sudden gale was his pretext. Fortunately his ships were scattered in a storm; one of them came back to Madeira, and the officers were picked up. At a council of the officers of both arms, Wilmot had refused to allow Lillingston’s captain-lieutenant to sit, alleging that no officer under the rank of captain had a right to a seat. Now the captain-lieutenant, according to the military customs of the time, commanded what was counted as the colonel’s company and ranked as the senior captain. Wilmot was induced to see reason by the arguments of the commissary Murray; but Lillingston, not unfairly, quotes his conduct as an example of pure arbitrary insolence. He had turned the captain-lieutenant out of the cabin “with a rudeness that I had never seen among gentlemen.” At the Leeward Islands Wilmot was again “pleased to be very drunk,” and went the length of offering to give away commissions in Lillingston’s regiment. The military and naval elements came, in fact, to open quarrel. From the Leeward Islands this jarring expedition went on first to San Domingo, where some Spaniards, then our allies, joined us. There was delay, wrangling, and an incessant conflict between soldier and sailor. Wilmot, says Lillingston,
“loitered away six days in the Bay. During this time how his people were employed I know not, but as for himself he spent the time in diversions every day rowing about the bay in his barge with the Ladies, and attended by trumpets and all the music of the fleet in other boats to recreate himself and the women, with the pleasantness of the country.”
When at last the expedition got to its work of plundering the French settlements in Haiti, Captain Wilmot, who had been joined by various Jamaica privateers, kept ahead of the troops as they marched along on shore, and applied himself to robbing the plantations, particularly of their negroes, who were then very valuable booty. At Port de Paix the commodore made his last attempt to induce the colonel to come to an understanding for their common advantage: