Napoleon's response to the defection of his Spanish ally was prompt and predictable. Ferdinand VII was summoned to Bayonne and there made a prisoner of the French. Napoleon's brother, Joseph Buonaparte, King of Naples, was proclaimed by the Emperor as King of Spain. Every insult that could have been contrived seemed to be offered to the patriotic feelings of the Spanish people. They had gained little by their alliance with France and had lost much. Now they were to be reduced to the state of a satellite power, under a foreign army of occupation and under the rule of a foreign puppet.
After a fortnight's refit at Gibraltar, the Imperieuse put to sea again on 18 June 1808, Cochrane having received "orders from Lord Collingwood to assist the Spaniards by every means in my power". Five days later, the frigate passed close to Almeria, where Cochrane had seized the French munition ship and her convoy four months previously. This time, he hoisted Spanish colours as well as English, acknowledging the enthusiasm of the townspeople who watched him pass. Two days later, he anchored off Cartagena, the scene of some of his "recent hostile visits". But this time, a party of senior Spanish officers came out in a boat to welcome the Imperieuse, and Cochrane was invited ashore by the Governor. He and his men received an enthusiastic welcome in the hot streets of the port, the crowds shouting for Cochrane, King George, and England. At every landfall along the Catalan coast, the same cheers and flag-waving greeted him in "one continued expression of good feeling".8
Of course, the French had not withdrawn from the area, indeed they were hastily reinforcing their positions against the attacks of Spanish troops, who were known as guerrillas even when uniformed and in regular formations. At Barcelona, Cochrane cruised just out of range of the shore-batteries, which none the less opened fire on the Imperieuse. By way of reply, he hoisted English and Spanish colours, with the French tricolour flying lower down in a position of defeat. Then, for good measure, he fired a derisive 21-gun salute to the enemy shore-batteries. This provoked a storm of salvoes, the plumes of spray rising just short of the frigate as she continued to cruise, tantalisingly, beyond their range. Cochrane went through his repertoire of insults, goading the French batteries into reply, as they used up the powder and shot which were soon to be in critically short supply.
During the exchanges, Cochrane attended to the most important matter of all. Standing on the frigate's quarterdeck, he surveyed the town and harbour of Barcelona carefully through his spy-glass. The streets were empty, except for the blue uniformed groups of infantry patrols and the white of the French cavalry. But the roof tops were crowded with the inhabitants who watched the skirmish and, conspicuously, did not cheer on the French gunners. It was common knowledge that the French under General Duhesme had entered Barcelona in February and were now an army of occupation. But even the 100,000 men whom Napoleon had sent to Spain were too few to police a country of such size. Cochrane concluded his survey, which confirmed that the French position in Catalonia depended on concentrations of troops in such towns and cities as Barcelona, supplied and reinforced from France by means of the coastal road. It was the challenge of which he had dreamed.
With a final salute, Cochrane turned the stern of the frigate to the French and sailed northward along the coast, towards the enemy frontier. Each time that the Imperieuse dropped anchor, the inhabitants of such towns as Blanco and Mataro came off in small boats with presents for the crew and complaints for Cochrane about the manner in which the French were helping themselves to the possessions, the girls, and even the lives of the Catalans on the pretext that some act of "resistance" had been committed. When the Spanish guerrilla army blew up a section of the vital coast road, the French commander compelled the local inhabitants to fill in the gap with their own furniture, agricultural implements, even their clothes. Once the work had been completed, Napoleon's grenadiers destroyed the buildings of the village. Cochrane, seeing the devastation from the Imperieuse, led his marines ashore at Mataro, blew up the road in a number of new places, and located the nearest French shore-battery. It was on the cliff outside the town. Using sailors as well as marines, he attacked from the rearward slope, where the battery was undefended, drove out the gunners, and before the main body of the French army could be summoned he ran the four brass 24-pounders over the cliff and re-embarked his men safely. To add insult to all this, he quietly put his men ashore on the following day to collect the brass artillery and ferry it out to the Imperieuse. On the next day, the frigate raced the French troops to Canette, which they had left in order to deal with Cochrane at Mataro. To his delight, there were more brass cannon, hardly defended, on the cliff top. It was easy enough to seize the position, carry hawsers from the frigate to the cliff, and "hop" the guns on board by use of capstan and tackles. Then, while the French army struggled back through the heat of the Catalan summer, Cochrane noted with satisfaction, "took a party of seamen and marines on shore, and broke down or blew up the road in six different places".9
All this was excellent for morale, both English and Spanish, but Cochrane had yet to show that it could have a decisive effect on the course of the war. His chance came three days later, on 29 July 1808, when the Imperieuse anchored off Mongat, ten miles on the French side of Barcelona. General Duhesme's army had left Barcelona some time before in order to besiege the Spanish at Gerona. The siege being over, he was now marching back to the garrison at Barcelona, Mongat being the only other French fortress on his route. The fort at Mongat was quite well defended and, though Duhesme had not yet reached the town with his main body of troops, his heavy artillery had already been formed into a park at a little distance on the Gerona side.
No sooner had the Imperieuse dropped anchor, at sunset, than the local guerrilla leaders came out in a boat and promised that they had eight hundred men ready and that, with Cochrane's assistance they could take the fortress of Mongat.
As Cochrane afterwards remarked, he would have done better for himself and his men if he had kept to the business of taking prizes, but there was something about sabotage and demolition which had evidently begun to grip his imagination. Waiting until it was properly dark, he went ashore with his more experienced marines and worked with silent efficiency. The advance guard of Duhesme's force, which now formed the garrison of the fortress, woke to the sound of two massive explosions lighting the night sky on either side of them. As the summer dawn broke, they saw, towards Barcelona, a formidable gap blown in the road, as well as piles of rock from above brought down to block it still more effectively. There could be no escape nor reinforcement in that direction. Worse still, on the Gerona side, the road had been blown up between the fort and Duhesme's artillery, which now stood forlorn and immobilised. Its present position was quite useless in any defence against Cochrane.
Cochrane put to sea for the rest of the day, anchoring off Mongat again the next morning. The French infantry had spent an unhappy day calculating their position. They were cut off from help, without their heavy guns, and surrounded by eight hundred guerrillas intent not only on victory but on vengeance. As the Imperieuse anchored and Cochrane went ashore in his gig to survey the position, the guerrillas stormed a French outpost on a hill top, and put to death the survivors who fell into their hands.
Cochrane ordered the Imperieuse to open fire with broadsides against the French position. It took only a couple of these before the defenders of Mongat signalled to the frigate their wish to surrender. The guerrillas stormed the slope with great cheering. But the French had no intention of surrendering to those who were intent on personal vengeance. They had only offered to surrender to Cochrane and now proceeded to open fire again to drive back the Spanish. At length Cochrane was led through the crackle of musketry to parley with the French commander, who insisted he would not surrender to the guerrillas. Cochrane gave him a stern lecture on the barbarity with which the French had behaved, deploring "the wanton devastation committed by a military power, pretending to high notions of civilisation".
Then the second battle of Mongat began, the struggle to g
et ninety-five French prisoners down to the beach and on to the frigate without allowing them to be lynched by the guerrillas. In a bizarre sequel, ragged men and women emerged from their hiding places to join the guerrillas in cheering Cochrane's marines, while the marines themselves used fists and musket butts to beat back those guerrillas who were trying to scale the parapet of the fort and get their hands on the French prisoners. The French commander had surrendered his sword to Cochrane and the entire garrison had laid down its arms. After a good deal of argument between Cochrane and the Spanish commander, it was agreed that there would be no lynching but that, as a recompense, the guerrillas should be allowed to loot the fortress. The prisoners were duly marched down to the boats followed by the abuse of the guerrillas and the jeering of the Spanish women. When the looting was over, Cochrane set a charge under the French ammunition and the fort of Mongat went skyward in a spectacular explosion. The display attracted H.M.S. Cambrian to the scene, and Cochrane transferred some of his prisoners to her.10
The first official news of what had happened was contained in Cochrane's despatch to Lord Collingwood, which announced the bewildering but very welcome intelligence that the major French fortress between Gerona and Barcelona "surrendered this morning to his Majesty's ship under my command". The implications were considerable. General Duhesme had lost the advance guard of his force, and the whole of his artillery which he had been obliged to abandon. The road through Mongat was impassable for regular troops and he arrived at Barcelona a month late, after an arduous journey through the interior, where his column was more easily a prey to guerrilla ambushes. Cochrane in no way underestimated the abilities of the Catalans in all this, paying tribute to their "patience and endurance under privation". From the British point of view, the damage done to General Duhesme's army and the whole French presence in Spain was out of all proportion to the effort expended, which amounted to the use of one frigate for two or three days. But as Cochrane sat in his stern cabin on the night of the action, writing his despatch to Lord Collingwood, the Imperieuse was already sailing towards the marine frontier of Spain and France.11
If every English coastal town from Dover to Torbay had been at the mercy of the French fleet, the signal stations burnt, the militia routed, and local commerce threatened, this would have been comparable to the effect of Cochrane on the French coast, from Marseille to the Pyrenees, in August 1808. Day after day, the log of the Imperieuse recorded the bare details. "7.00 boats retd having destroyed the Telegraph, a battery of 2 Brass 24 pdrs & Burnt the Barracks." More specifically, Cochrane aimed at "diverting troops intended for Catalonia, by the necessity of remaining to guard their own seaboard". With evident satisfaction, he added, "It is wonderful what an amount of terrorism a small frigate is able to inspire on an enemy's coast."12
Apart from signal stations and customs houses, the marines from the Imperieuse were occupied in burning French merchant vessels, whose crews had beached them and fled at the sight of the frigate. Yet the signal stations were the principal target. As the French militia retreated before the muskets and bayonets of Cochrane's marines, they saw the red-coated "lobsters" fall indiscriminately on the building and its contents, setting fire to everything within reach. When the attack was over and the marines had embarked on the frigate again, the defenders crept back to search the debris. With relief they found half-burnt pages of official documents. Cochrane's uniformed ruffians had not known the value of such papers and had destroyed signal codes which would have been beyond price to the British commanders.
As a matter of fact, Cochrane and his men knew perfectly well what they were about. The half-burnt pages had been carefully left to reassure the French. All the vital details of the French semaphore system were first abstracted, allowing Cochrane to make a present to Lord Collingwood of the enemy's secret code. In consequence, a British frigate cruising within spy-glass range was able to pass on the movements of French naval vessels before they were known to their own commanders-in-chief.13
Cochrane's audacity and the superb ease with which he handled his frigate were repeatedly illustrated in these local attacks on the French coast. By 10 September, for instance, he had worked his way to Port Vendre near the Spanish frontier. His log shows that he was now joined by H.M.S. Spartan commanded by Captain Jahleel Brenton. A column of French infantry, with an advance guard of cavalry, was marching towards the village from Perpignan on its way to reinforce the garrisons in Spain. Even with the support of the Spartan, there was no hope of fighting the entire column as well as the shore-batteries by which Port Vendre was defended.
He assembled the ship's boys from the Imperieuse and the Spartan and, as though it were all a great practical joke, ordered them to dress in the scarlet uniforms of marines. They were then put into boats and rowed towards the Spanish side of the town, in full view of the advancing column. The white-uniformed squadrons of the French cavalry put spurs to their horses and charged through the quiet streets in a tumult of dust, in order to reach the place and repel the invaders before they could establish a defensive position ashore.
Cochrane watched them go, and then brought the Imperieuse in to bombard the town at close range. The French batteries on the cliffs were unable to depress their guns sufficiently to fire on the frigates without hitting their own men in the streets. For an hour the bombardment continued until the beach was masked under a pall of blue-grey gunsmoke in the warm stagnant air. Using this as a screen, Cochrane then put ashore his real marines, landing them in the chaos of half destroyed buildings and fires burning beyond control. The redcoats disappeared in the smoke and the debris, heading for the cliffs, and presently there came the first sounds of a French shore-battery being demolished.
The main body of the French infantry was still advancing towards the town but was too far off to intervene. The cavalry squadrons had reached the shore, where the other "marines" were expected to land, but found nothing except several small boats, filled with ships' boys in oversized uniforms, bobbing about offshore. As the horsemen collected their wits, the first sounds of demolition reached them from Port Vendre. They turned and began to gallop back. Captain Brenton and his officers on the quarterdeck of H.M.S. Spartan foresaw catastrophe. The cavalry would return in ample time to cut off the marines from the two frigates, turning audacity into folly.
But the officers of the Spartan were about to witness a superb example of what Brenton afterwards called the "ready seamanship . . . displayed by Lord Cochrane upon this occasion". The cavalry were out of sight during most of their return gallop, but there was one stretch of coast where they would appear at full length, their white uniforms picked out against the rock behind them. The two frigates were cruising offshore at three knots with no conceivable means of engaging cavalry. Then, as the horsemen appeared against the rock, the Imperieuse responded to a sudden order. The anchor splashed down and, to Brenton's disquiet, she began to swing at the anchor cable, almost across the bows of the Spartan. As she turned in this arc, her starboard side turned, briefly, parallel with the shore. With perfect judgement of range and precisely at the moment when the cavalry was at full stretch and the ship's side facing them, every gun roared out in a hoarse cannonade and a bank of rolling smoke. When the smoke cleared, those on the quarterdeck of the Spartan saw that the squadron of cavalry had virtually ceased to exist. A few dismounted figures were scrambling clear of the debris but, as a military formation, it had been totally destroyed by the terrifying accuracy of Cochrane's fire.
There was puzzlement afterwards as to how this precision of angle, range, and timing had been achieved. Brenton, who saw it all, admitted that no captain on any quarterdeck in the world would have been able to coordinate such an attack. But Brenton had also been able to see that Cochrane was not on his quarterdeck. He had directed the whole operation from the masthead, which most Royal Navy commanders regarded as a place climbed to only by common seamen or by junior officers as a punishment. The marines destroyed such French shipping as they could find in har
bour and returned with three wounded. The damage to the ships was confined to torn rigging.14
The tactical value of such attacks was unquestioned, but their effect on French morale was of still greater consequence. The name of the loup des mers was only too well known to the inhabitants of the French Mediterranean coast and to their armies in Catalonia. Lord Brougham recalled a visit to the Tuileries after the war had ended. When he mentioned the name "Cochrane", there was "a general start and shudder" among the French leaders, an instinctive reaction of fear which was quite different to the chivalrous admiration bestowed upon such reputations as those of Nelson or Wellington.15
Lord Collingwood shared few of the reservations over Cochrane expressed by St Vincent or Keith. As the Imperieuse continued to harry the French coast during September 1808, Collingwood received news of the exploits on board his flagship, H.M.S. Ocean, which was cruising off Toulon. Writing to Wellesley Pole, Collingwood confirmed that Cochrane had not only pinned down French regiments which were otherwise intended for the Spanish war, he had actually obliged the French to withdraw 2000 troops from the garrison of Figuras in order to defend their own coasts from his attacks. "Nothing can exceed the zeal and activity with which his lordship pursues the enemy," wrote Collingwood. "The success which attends his enterprises clearly indicates with what skill and ability they are conducted." But as Cochrane's fame spread from official reports to more popular literature there was an even more important point to make, as Sir Walter Scott explained.
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