In August 1769 Captain John Quinland of the Ranger sloop was ordered to cruise between St Lucia and St Vincent to arrest any Black Caribs who were trading across the eight leagues of water that separated the two islands. The British authorities on the spot were particularly concerned with the traffic in arms, fearing that the mixed-race band would stiffen their resistance to the plans to develop the recently acquired volcanic island of St Vincent. On 24 August, two leagues off St Lucia, Quinland espied four large canoes or pirogues, each containing about nineteen men. The captain of the Ranger fired off a signal ordering them to bring to. The Caribs simply dropped their sails and paddled aggressively toward him. Quinland then ordered them to approach one pirogue at a time, fearing his small crew of nine sailors might be overwhelmed by these burly warriors. The Caribs paid no attention, and so Quinland instructed his men to sink their vessels. Two canoes were disabled, but the Caribs continued to swim towards him with their cutlasses between their teeth, signalling a clear intention to board the Ranger. Quinland and his crew fired away at the approaching men, bayonetting those who climbed the rigging. He killed many, he subsequently recorded in a deposition filed at Kingstown five days later, losing two of his own men in the encounter. When the wind came up, he sailed off, leaving the rest of the Caribs ‘to shift for themselves’.

The affray off the coast of St Lucia was one of a series of confrontations between the Black Caribs and the British authorities in the years 1768 and 1769. The fundamental problem was land. Under the terms of the Peace of Paris in 1763 France ceded the hitherto neutral islands of St Vincent, Dominica, Tobago and Grenada to Britain.