The Bahamas had been changing hands with remarkable ease. In May 1782, Spanish forces had taken the islands from the British without firing a shot -- the garrison simply surrendered. Saint Augustine in East Florida, however, remained stubbornly British, the Spanish deeming it too well defended to risk an assault. This left a pocket of British Loyalists in Florida with both the motive and the means to strike back. Andrew Deveaux was a veteran of the Southern theater of the Revolutionary War, a Loyalist who had fought alongside the British through the Carolina campaigns. When someone proposed retaking the Bahamas by launching from Saint Augustine, Deveaux volunteered to lead. The plan was audacious for its scale -- or rather, its lack of it. Deveaux departed with seventy followers in small boats, hoping to pick up reinforcements along the way.

Two days out of Saint Augustine, Deveaux's tiny force was joined by the Perseverance, a 26-gun privateer brigantine commanded by Thomas Dow, and the Whitby Warrior, a 16-gun brigantine carrying 120 men under Daniel Wheeler. The combined flotilla anchored off Harbour Island and Eleuthera on April 6, where Deveaux recruited another 170 volunteers from the local population. With roughly 240 men and a handful of armed vessels, he set course for New Providence and the Spanish garrison at Nassau. The force was small by any military standard, but Deveaux understood something about the Spanish position: it was isolated, under-supplied, and commanded by officers who had taken the Bahamas without a fight and may not have been eager for one.

When the flotilla drew near New Providence on April 13, Claraco dismissed it as smugglers -- a miscalculation that cost him the initiative. At dawn the following morning, a heavily armed landing party stormed ashore and seized Fort Montagu, the eastern fortification guarding Nassau's approaches, along with three Spanish guard boats. Claraco retreated into his citadel. A brief ceasefire was arranged, perhaps to negotiate, perhaps to buy time. Deveaux rescinded it the next day. On April 16, the Spanish scuttled their remaining warships rather than let them be captured, then withdrew entirely within the walls of the main fort. Two days later, they surrendered. Over 600 Spanish soldiers laid down their arms. Fifty cannon and seven ships fell into British hands. Some of the scuttled vessels were later refloated. The entire operation, from the first landing to the final capitulation, had taken five days, and not a single shot had been exchanged between the two sides during the formal engagements.

The irony was total. Britain had already secured the Bahamas through diplomacy in the preliminary talks leading to the Treaty of Paris, signed later that year. East Florida, the very place Deveaux had sailed from, was being traded away to Spain in exchange for the islands he had just captured. His military expedition was, in the strictest sense, unnecessary -- the Bahamas were coming back to Britain regardless. But Deveaux's audacity did not go unrewarded. For his efforts, he received a large portion of Cat Island, where he built a mansion at Port Howe. The ruins of that mansion can still be seen today, crumbling into the Bahamian scrub on an island that was handed to a man for capturing something that was already, on paper, his country's again. The 600 Spanish prisoners were repatriated to Cuba, and the Bahamas settled into the British colonial order that would persist for nearly two more centuries.