Britain’s response was fast and decisive when Spain joined the Seven Years War on the side of France. Guarded by a naval battle squadron, regiments drawn from Britain, the American colonies, and the garrisons of captured French islands were sent to lay siege to Havana. With Havana in British hands the Flota’s route to carry the wealth of the Indies to Spain would be threatened and the Spanish economy would collapse, knocking Spain out of the war in one stroke.
That was the plan, but the British invasion force soon learned the gruesome reality of campaigning in the tropics.
In the early summer of 1762 Edward Carlisle in his fourth-rate ship-of-the-line Dartmouth is sent to scout the route to Havana through the dangerous Old Bahama Straits, and to bring in the vital American reinforcement convoys. With his growing fluency in Spanish, and his contacts in Havana, he becomes embroiled in the difficult negotiations between a besieging army weakened by disease and a proud city on the brink of a humiliating defeat.