VII - Recapitulation of the principal causes of our failure—none of which can be attributed either to the difficulty or impracticability of the Enterprise itself.

Summary

TO a person who has perused the foregoing pages much need not be said upon this subject; for, after such a series of error, of folly, and of imbecility, success, rather than failure, must have produced astonishment.

I shall however endeavour to collect into one point of view the principal causes of our miscarriage, and this with a view of proving that our want of success was not owing to the impracticability, or difficulty, of the enterprise, but to the measures pursued by its proposers and conductors.

In the 1st place the season was too far advanced when our proposals were first published; (the 9th of Nov. 1791) for if none of those unforeseen delays, which afterwards took place, had happened, we should not have been able to have taken possession of the island more than two months earlier than we actually did; which would not have been many days prior to the commencement of the rainy season; whereas the best time to have arrived at the island would have been about the middle of November, when we should have had certainly more than six months dry weather, in which to have erected habitations and cleared ground.

The next wrong step was the increasing of the number of the members of the committee, or council, to conduct the enterprize; for though I do not mean to say that any individual who was afterwards added to it was the principal cause of our failure, and much less do I mean to aver that any one of the six original proposers of the undertaking discovered either energy or talents sufficient to secure its success, yet, increasing their numbers, without adding any thing to their ability, was increasing the means, and the probability of weak measures and disunited counsels. Moreover, those who were afterwards added to it did not carry with them exactly the same views and intentions which governed the first proposers. I think therefore that it would have been much better to have left the management of the undertaking to the latter only; and the probability of succeeding would have been increased had they been reduced to three; and much more so, had one person only had the direction: for, I am fully convinced that in enterprizes of this kind the direction should be left to one. He should have full power; and should be responsible for the use of it.