Barry still had to deliver the money, and he headed to Philadelphia. But off Delaware Bay, he saw two British ships through clearings in a fog, believed he had “great reason to suppose the coast was lined with the enemy’s ships,” and didn’t want to jeopardize the money, “belonging to the public which I shall take care of.” He changed course for Rhode Island, and arrived in Newport on March 20.34
Barry’s fight with Vashon was the last of the war for the Continental navy. Barry went on to fight as senior captain and later commander in the Barbary Wars in 1794 and the Quasi-War with France in 1798 and 1799. He headed the U.S. navy starting in 1801, and earned the name, “Father of the American Navy.” He died in 1803. Parks, ships, schools, monuments, and a postage stamp commemorate his service.
Vashon led British commands in the Mediterranean, the Channel, and the Caribbean. His friend, explorer, and fellow officer, Captain George Vancouver, named what is now a Seattle bedroom community after him: Vashon Island.
PART SIX
The Mediterranean
35. “Calamity Has Come On Us”
CHARLES O’HARA’S FATHER, JAMES, WAS MINORCA’S GOVERNOR for nine years. His assignment ended when he was promoted to Gibraltar’s governorship in 1756. Charles made his own mark on Gibraltar, first as lieutenant governor thirty-six years later, then, in 1795, as governor himself until his death in 1802.
Gibraltar and Minorca were British strongholds in the Mediterranean: Gibraltar, a 2.3-square-mile peninsula guarding the northern side of the Mediterranean’s nine-mile-wide outlet to the Atlantic; Minorca, a twenty-nine-mile-long island off the Spanish coast, and two hundred forty miles south-southwest of the French naval base at Toulon. Both were Spanish until the early eighteenth century, when Spain lost a war to Britain. It agreed in the peace treaty that Britain would own the posts “with all manners of right forever, without any exception of impediment whatsoever.”1
Immediately, Spain had loser’s remorse. In 1779, the only way France could persuade Spain to enter the revolution was to promise to keep fighting until Gibraltar was again Spanish. Once it entered the war in June 1779, Spain refused to cooperate with France on any campaign that didn’t either protect its Western Hemisphere colonies or work toward seizing Gibraltar. This meant a mostly defensive campaign. “The King should preserve his fleet so as to cover the seas and guard the coasts, [and] protect trade in the Indies,” a Spanish official said. Besides, Spanish finances were as bad as those of the American rebels. “There is not a reale in the navy treasury nor any hope of receiving anything for a long while past.”2
The same month Spain declared war on Britain, it began to blockade and besiege Gibraltar, with the intent of starving it into surrender. Recovering Gibraltar obsessed Spain—as it does to this day. (“We are just one shot away from military conflict,” a British headline read during a 2013 dispute.) Minorca, in comparison, was an annoyance. Spain saw it as a privateer’s haven, and believed that eliminating its British base might help in the effort to take Gibraltar. Also, Spain was none too happy when Britain attempted to sell the island to Russia in exchange for its support.3
Spain ignored Minorca for two years. Then, in early 1781, Lieutenant General Louis de Balbe de Berton, Duc de Crillon, 64, began planning a joint Spanish-French invasion. He came from a family of honored French military men, and had fought in two Franco-Anglo wars. When, in 1762, he was passed over for command of a French military expedition, he shifted loyalties, and Spain welcomed him. “Who hath not heard of the name of Crillon?” a colleague asked Franklin rhetorically. A British general wished that Crillon “never will command an army against my Sovereign, for his military talents are as conspicuous as the goodness of his heart.”4
“Behead me,” Crillon told Spanish king Charles III, if Minorca didn’t fall within three months.5
On August 19, 1781, Crillon and 8,000 men landed at multiple locations on Minorca and, unopposed, seized most of the island and its 27,000 people. The British were so surprised that they didn’t fire on the 52-ship fleet as it sailed past fortifications. The only part of the island Crillon didn’t capture was Fort St. Philip, a stronghold that guarded the harbor of the capital, Mahón. The harbor was one of the Mediterranean’s best.
The next day, Crillon demanded that the British governor surrender St. Philip. The governor, Lieutenant General James Murray, refused. Surprised by Murray’s answer, Crillon began digging in for a siege. It took a month for the Spanish and French to amass a siege force of nearly 15,000 men and the guns and mortars needed to pummel the fort. Murray had about 2,200 men, of which one in five were invalids.6
In early September, Murray made a statement: His men raided and destroyed a Spanish battery and captured 100 men. In mid-September, the allies began a constant bombardment. Another month passed, and the enemies remained at a stalemate.
Then, Madrid ordered Crillon to bribe Murray into surrender. “In short,” Crillon told Murray through an intermediary, “your general may have what sum he pleases.” He said Spain had information that Murray was “ill-treated by some people at home . . .” Murray was offended. “The King of Spain charged you to assassinate the character of a man whose birth is as illustrious as your own. . . . I can have no further communication with you, but in arms. If you have any humanity, pray send clothing to your unfortunate prisoners in my possession.” Crillon replied: “Your letter places us each in our proper station. It confirms me in the esteem I have always had for you.”7
Using a ship that broke through the blockade, Murray told London that Crillon will find St. Philip “a harder nut to break than he imagines.” He might have been describing himself.8
Murray, 59, was a Scot, the fifth son and fourteenth child of a baron. He rose through army ranks and served in the West Indies, Colombia, Cuba, and Flanders, where he was seriously wounded in 1745. He was familiar with sieges. In 1758, then a lieutenant colonel, he commanded a brigade at the three-month siege of Louisbourg, in Nova Scotia. “Murray . . . has acted with infinite spirit,” his commander said. “The public is much indebted to him for great services in advancing . . . this siege.” After leading a wing at the British victory on the Plains of Abraham, he commanded Québec city during a winter that saw 1,000 men die from disease.9
From 1760 to 1763, he was military governor—virtually dictator—of the Québec colony, wrested from the French and with a largely Catholic, French-Canadian population. It was a difficult occupation. Murray didn’t want to alienate French residents; as a result, British settlers and merchants complained to London that he acted against their interests. By the time Murray was recalled to England, he believed the British Canadians were “the most cruel, ignorant, rapacious fanatics, who ever existed.” The French Canadians were “perhaps, the best and bravest race on the globe,” despite being “impecunious, haughty, tyrannical, contemptuous of trade and authority, [and] attached to French rule.”10
A 1766 British council of inquiry concluded that the charges against Murray were “groundless, scandalous, and derogatory.” He resumed his career, was named Minorca’s lieutenant governor in 1774, and governor in 1779. Before accepting the Minorca job, he insisted on being paid a fixed salary, rather than relying on a share of taxes and fees, which he felt would undermine his credibility. “My salary should be fixed independent of such disgraceful emoluments,” he said.11
Murray found a weak Minorca garrison. “I take the liberty to put you in mind how unequal the troops I have here are to the defense,” he told London in 1776. Three years later, he pleaded for “a reinforcement to this sickly garrison. . . . The inhabitants have suffered equally with the troops.” In another letter: “The two British regiments [here] look more like ghosts than soldiers.”12
Murray suffered personal loss while in Minorca. His ill wife returned to England and died just after reaching their home. (During the siege, he married the eighteen-year-old daughter of a British consul in Minorca.) One of his brothers died, leaving him £15,000 pounds. He wrote the estate la
wyer telling him to give the money to the dead brother’s children. He added that he wished his brother “had left me nothing and showed more attention to my [other] brother, George. . . . I wish George and my other relations had paid more attention to him. . . . You know how much they used to tease and torment him.”13
Before Crillon’s invasion, Murray put Minorca into a state of emergency that included price controls, forced sale of cattle, and searches of homes and churches. He also welcomed a small reinforcement of fifty Corsican soldiers. At the same time, he feuded with his second-in-command, Lieutenant General William Draper, who despised Murray.14
In early November 1781, Murray sent out another sortie, and like the one in September, it was successful, capturing eighty-six Spanish soldiers. A third sortie failed. By December, Murray acknowledged that his worst enemy wasn’t the allies, but scurvy, not surprising “when I consider that one-half the troops has lived eleven years on salt provisions, the other half not less than six.” In January 1782, Murray had 776 men fit for duty. Crillon increased the bombardment, firing 750 rounds an hour. “They never stopped firing, and we as well returned it,” a British officer said.15
That month, Murray’s officers began pleading with him to surrender. Murray refused. Then, on February 2, Murray told his officers, “Calamity has come on us.”16
He surrendered on February 4, and explained to London the circumstances: “The most inveterate scurvy which I believe ever had infected mortals reduced us to this situation. . . . Of the 660 able to do duty, 560 were actually tainted with the scurvy . . . A more tragic scene was never exhibited than that of the march of the garrison of St. Philip’s through the Spanish and French armies. It consisted of no more than 600 old, decrepit soldiers, 200 seamen, 120 of the royal artillery, 20 Corsicans, and 25 Greeks, Turks, Moors, Jews, etc. Such was the distressing figures of our men that many of the Spanish and French troops are said to have shed tears as they passed them.”17
Murray returned home to a court-martial, which cleared him of most charges, and praised him for “great zeal, courage, and firmness.” George III waived a reprimand for the two minor convictions. He retired in 1783 as a full general. In 1789, he wrote a Québec friend: “I, at the age of 66, enjoy perfect health and happiness, truly contented with my lot of independent mutton. . . . [I] am only anxious for the prosperity of my two delightful children and the cultivation and increase of my fields and garden.” He died five years later at his home.18
36. The Great Siege of Gibraltar
JOHN DRINKWATER, FIFTEEN, HAD NO SOONER JOINED THE BRITISH army in 1777 than he was sent to Gibraltar. By twenty, he was a captain there, but his greatest service wasn’t military: After the war, he published the journal he had kept, and that journal is the core of most accounts of the Great Siege of Gibraltar.1
Gibraltar’s location, Drinkwater said, “commanding the entrance of the Mediterranean . . . is, perhaps, more singular and curious than that of any fortress in the world.” Its bay is “commodious and seems intended by nature to command the Straits. There are opportunities, however, when a fleet may pass unobserved by the garrison, for such is the impenetrable thickness of the mists . . . that many ships have baffled the vigilance of the cruisers and gone through unnoticed.”2
A nineteenth-century officer praised Gibraltar’s fortifications as “some of the most formidable in the universe. . . . Every spot from whence a gun can be brought to bear is occupied by cannon.”3
The Gibraltar Peninsula is connected to the Spanish mainland by a low, sandy isthmus. Rising from the isthmus is the Rock, a nearly 1,400-foot high promontory that rises precipitously on its northern, Spain-facing side, and its eastern, Mediterranean side, “both naturally very steep and totally inaccessible,” Drinkwater said. On the peninsula’s west, facing the bay, is “a gradual slope, interspersed with precipices.” Ships docked within one of Gibraltar’s three “moles”—massive stone breakwaters. On the western shore, the Old Mole dated from 1309; the New Mole, from 1620. The British had built a southern mole beyond the range of Spanish guns by the time of the Great Siege.4
Also on the western shore is the town of Gibraltar. In 1779, about 3,600 civilians lived there, of whom one in seven were British. The rest were Spanish, Moroccan, and, classified separately, Jewish. For their water, they collected rain in tanks and cisterns. Summers were droughty. Growing vegetables in the rocky soil was difficult.5
Within the Rock itself are natural caves, used by people since prehistoric times. With each new war, the army expanded and modified the caves for defensive purposes.6
The siege began slowly, on June 21, 1779. Almost six miles across the bay, Spain fortified the small town and port of Algeciras. Its main naval base, however, remained in Cádiz, on the Atlantic, 100 miles from Algeciras by sea. At the Gibraltar isthmus’ northern end, Spain built trenches and gun batteries. By October, the allied garrison had grown to 14,000 Spanish and French soldiers, enough for a siege, but not enough for an assault. The allied fleet blockaded the peninsula, but, as Drinkwater noted, the blockade was porous.7
On the British side, Lieutenant General George Augustus Eliott, the governor, dug in.
Eliott, 62, a Scot, educated at the University of Leyden in Holland—common for the son of a baronet—and, during a peace between wars, at a French military college. His first war experience was fighting for the Prussian army. He later returned to England for training as a military engineer. He served in a cavalry regiment his uncle commanded, and in 1743, now a captain, was wounded in fighting on the continent.
When the Seven Years’ War began, he was married (to an heiress) and a lieutenant colonel. George III appointed him as an aide-de-camp, and he distinguished himself in battle as a cavalry commander. Toward the war’s end, the now-Major General Eliott was second-in-command of an expedition that captured Havana. He became wealthier with the prize money he earned. After a brief assignment as commander-in-chief in Ireland, London named him, in 1776, Gibraltar’s governor. He took command there in May 1777.8
He was “singular and austere in his manner,” an officer said. Others called him “sour” and “intractable.” Eliott may have been “the most abstemious man of his age,” because he never ate meat or drank strong liquor, but lived “chiefly on vegetables, puddings, and water.” He ruled his men with by-the-book discipline. In the siege’s early days, after a soldier said he’d join the Spanish army if Spain took Gibraltar, Eliott ruled the man insane, ordered his head shaven, his body blistered and bled, straight-jacketed, and fed only bread and water. He executed soldiers not only for desertion, but also for plundering, robbery, and drunkenness. He even ordered soldiers’ wives flogged for buying stolen goods. His officers chafed under him. To discourage drinking, he forced them to pay tax on liquor. He fined some officers after they not only reneged on paying debts to two Jews, but also beat them up. Eliott angered other officers for requiring goods that got through the blockade to be sold in public, rather than privately or in the black market.9
But Eliott seemed to be the right man for Gibraltar, with its 5,382-man garrison. (The garrison would grow to 7,100–7,500 men, depending on estimate, by fall 1782 as ships carrying reinforcements broke through the blockade. At the same time, the civilian population diminished when they sailed on outbound ships through the blockade.)10
When Eliott arrived, he ordered a team of military engineers to improve defenses. He cross-trained infantry so they could use artillery. As the siege began, Eliott ordered horses shot because they ate too much food. He prohibited his men from powdering their hair, because the flour they used needed to be conserved. (One rumor said that Eliott was hoarding all the flour so he could use it in his puddings.) In 1778, he started experimenting with “red-hot shot”; this involved heating cannonballs and other iron projectiles in a way that didn’t blow up your own cannon when lit. Used against wooden ships or gunpowder magazines, red-hot shot caused fires and explosions.11
As 1780 began, Gibraltar was feeling the siege’s effe
cts. “No vessel has got in here,” Eliott wrote London. “The Spanish cruisers are so vigilant, consequently no supplies—our provisions daily consuming—many inhabitants near starving.” (The British sent multiple copies of messages of such letters on different ships and boats, often belonging to Italian or Muslim entrepreneurs who ran the blockade.)12
London chose Admiral George Rodney to lead a Gibraltar expedition, hoping he would not only bring Eliott relief, but then proceed to the West Indies. Rodney didn’t disappoint. He left England on December 29, 1779, with the relief convoy, twenty-two warships, and additional frigates. About two hundred miles west of Gibraltar, a Spanish squadron half the size spotted the British sails. Thinking it was just a few warships guarding the convoy, Admiral Juan Francisco de Lángara y Huarte attacked. In night action—the “Moonlight Battle”—the British captured six Spanish warships, sank another, and made Lángara a prisoner. Rodney’s ships sailed unmolested into Gibraltar January 19–25, unloaded reinforcements and supplies, and left for the West Indies.
At the end of 1780, Eliott again was running out of food and supplies. Again, London responded with a second relief fleet, led by Vice Admiral George Darby. Darby evaded the allies en route to Gibraltar, but once he entered the harbor on April 12, 1781, his one hundred-ship fleet came under heavy fire from Spanish batteries. But, like Rodney, Darby unloaded the supplies and reinforcements, and left without major losses.
Darby’s expedition marked the start of an escalation. For the next twenty-one months, the allies would bombard Gibraltar day and night. In the first week alone, the guns killed twenty-three men and wounded seventy-five. Soon, they destroyed most of the town, although Eliott’s fortifications suffered relatively little damage.13
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