American Prisoners & Britain’s Caribbean War 1780-1783

Abstract

This Research Note illustrates the American Revolution as part of a worldwide conflict through the seldom remembered British impressment and recruitment of American prisoners of war in Charleston and New York for service in Honduras and Nicaragua. Lord Charles Greville Montagu (1741-1784) had intended to recruit from the Loyalists of the South Carolina frontier, but the American Revolutionary war had by then deteriorated into a bloody civil war. Men were recruited from the prison hulks in Charleston and New York for a Central America campaign but became the defenders of Jamaica instead, and some of them later joined the post-war Black and White American Loyalist diaspora across the British Empire.