The presence of the Royal Navy in the Caribbean had effectively ended by about 1900, to use a convenient date. Ships were stationed there, and are there still, even since the end of political responsibilities, but there could be no pretence that British power was being exercised. To emphasise the withdrawal, the naval base at Antigua closed in 1889, and that at Port Royal in Jamaica closed in 1903, exactly spanning the period in which the power of the United States expanded to replace that of Great Britain. The British empire in the Caribbean technically lasted until the 1960s, but only because it was, in effect, propped up by the United States and its naval power. Symbolically the last colony, Belize, has been guaranteed its independence by the United States. When the island of Grenada seemed to be falling under a home-grown communist government, the United States, without informing Britain, peremptorily invaded.

The lingering presence of a single ship (used as a counter-smuggling patrol vessel as much as anything else) in the past half-century is curiously balanced by the early presence of occasional English ships in the sea at the very start of English involvement. The odd royal ship reached the region from early in the sixteenth century, usually by mistake or as part of a semi-piratical raid against Spanish silver and bases and ships. It is difficult, for example, to know how to classify the exploits of Sir Francis Drake: were they official, or private, or piratical, or privateering? It was only in the period of the Commonwealth that an official English naval presence, during the conquest of Jamaica, could be said to be there, and soon after that, this official presence faded before the resurgence of buccaneering – Edward Morgan, like Drake, might have a personal official appointment, but, like Drake, he scarcely acted as anything but a buccaneer. He remained one at heart all along.

So we may date the navy's official presence and power in the Caribbean from the 1650s, but its first charismatic commander was Admiral Benbow about 1700. From then on it was a dominating force until after about 1850, when the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty was the premonitory mark of decline – premonitory both of the fading of the navy's presence in the Caribbean and of the overall decline of the empire everywhere.