by Roy Adkins
In a court-martial at Portsmouth, Byng was found guilty of failing to do his utmost to take or destroy the French ships. He was shot by firing squad on 14 March 1757 and is best remembered through Voltaire’s 1759 novel Candide in which the hero witnesses Byng’s execution and is told that ‘in this country it is good to kill an admiral from time to time in order to encourage the others’ (‘pour encourager les autres’). In France, jubilation at the victory was expressed in songs and plays, as well as in the creation of a new culinary treat named after Port Mahon – Mahonaise sauce, now spelled mayonnaise.13 The celebration was short-lived, because at the end of the war, under the Treaty of Paris, France lost a great deal of territory, including Minorca, which was returned to Britain.
Just over a decade later, America became the focus of attention when the struggle for freedom from Britain broke out at Lexington in 1775. In an attempt to gain revenge for their losses in the Seven Years’ War, Louis XVI’s France soon sided with the rebel American colonies and agreed to supply ships, men and weapons, but once the French intervened a new wave of patriotism spread through Britain. Many militia regiments were formed as a home guard, since there was a genuine fear of Britain being invaded, while new regiments were enthusiastically recruited by private subscription, including the 72nd Regiment of Foot at Manchester. It was originally intended for America, but was actually diverted to Gibraltar, with recruiting posters boasting that this was ‘the best garrison in His Majesty’s Dominion’.14 The recruits included fifteen-year-old John Drinkwater from Latchford in Cheshire, a former pupil of Manchester Grammar School, who became an ensign. His father, also known as John Drinkwater, was a surgeon and man-midwife who practised in Salford and was one of the committee responsible for raising this regiment. All the recruits were young, and Joseph Budworth, another former pupil, wrote of his company: ‘I never saw so fine a body of men, or more undaunted soldiers ... I was the oldest man but one ... at twenty-one.’15
Although hostilities had already started, France only officially declared war on Britain in July 1778, but they needed Spanish naval ships to achieve overwhelming superiority.16 The Spaniards under Carlos III, who had become king in 1759, were initially reluctant to help the American colonists gain independence. Because Carlos III wished to regain Minorca and Gibraltar, for which an invasion of Britain was part of the strategy, they were finally persuaded by the French to unite against Britain, their common enemy. The French promised to fulfil their wishes and pledged not to sign any peace treaty with Britain or enter into a truce until everything was achieved. In April 1779 France and Spain signed a treaty at the royal palace of Aranjuez that set out the aims of both sides, and in June, after various delays, Spain declared war on Britain, marking the start of the siege of Gibraltar. Drinkwater kept a detailed journal of events throughout the conflict, and he summarised the situation with the words ‘the Fortress of Gibraltar was now become a little world of itself’.17
Although the Great Siege has no other name, it was in reality part of the American War of Independence. The actions and ambitions of France and Spain had caused that war to spill across the Atlantic into Europe, and the war zone would extend from Britain to Gibraltar, Spain and Minorca. Britain found herself virtually alone, at war with most countries in western Europe as well as America, with the Great Siege forming one of the most neglected events within the American War of Independence. No major study of the Great Siege has been published since 1965, when (coincidentally) two books were published, by Jack Russell and T.H. McGuffie.18 If France and Spain had not become entangled in this conflict, Britain would have had thousands more troops and many more warships to deploy in America, and so the outcome of the War of Independence might have been very different. As it is, the Great Siege became one of the most amazing military events in history.
CHAPTER TWO
BLOCKADE
The start of the Great Siege in 1779 was not marked by any spectacular event. There was no sudden bombardment or Spanish ground assault. Nor did a vast Spanish fleet sail into Gibraltar Bay with all guns firing. Instead, the frontier between Spain and Gibraltar was politely but firmly closed, and on either side hasty measures were taken to put the defences on a wartime footing, while engineers considered how the fortifications could be strengthened. As communications with the outside world became more difficult or were cut altogether, everyone on the Rock lost their peacetime idyll and wondered what lay ahead.
The commander of the tiny British Mediterranean fleet, Vice-Admiral Robert Duff, was based on Gibraltar. He had arrived eighteen months earlier, in January 1778, with his wife Lady Helen Duff, who described her impressions of the town to her younger brother Arthur: ‘It is the most uncommon place I ever saw and has a very striking appearance to a stranger, from the tremendous rock that hangs over it. In the streets you would think you was at a masquerade for you see people of all nations in different dresses and speaking different languages.’1 The soldiers of the garrison were largely Protestant, but children born on Gibraltar to parents of any nationality or religion became British subjects. The population was divided more by religion than race, with Protestants, Roman Catholics and Jews forming a mainly harmonious, cosmopolitan society. Ignacio Lopez de Ayala, a Spanish historian writing around this time, explained how military rule kept in check racial and religious hostility within the town itself, which measured less than a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide:
It was apprehended that amid such diversity of persons of different religions, customs, and interests, quarrels and atrocities would prevail in Gibraltar similar to those existing in other cities in Spain. But the severity of a military Government has prevented such disorders; for individuals resorting thither, being aware of the certainty of punishment awaiting offences, and that the magistrates and those in authority cannot be corrupted, find their own security best guaranteed by not disturbing that of others.2
Apart from the military presence, the Rock functioned as a trading port, greatly benefiting from its location between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, yet close to the north African shore. A small civilian population of Genoese families, originally from the Italian port of Genoa, had lived on the Rock since before the British arrived in 1704, and in the decades leading up to the Great Siege their numbers had been increased by Jews, Portuguese, Minorcans, Spaniards and British – over three thousand individuals in all, most of them crammed together inside the town. Ayala highlighted their great variety:
Almost all the maritime powers maintain Consuls at Gibraltar, commerce being there the principal occupation. The richest mercantile houses are the English; and besides the military and civil officers of the Government, there are other Englishmen, who keep inns and pursue various occupations. The Jews, for the most part, are shopkeepers and brokers ... The Genoese are traders, but the greater part of them are fishermen, sailors, and gardeners; and these, as well as the Jews, speak a language compounded of Spanish and English dialect, or jargon, common to all southern nations, not excluding the Africans.3
What is missing are references to people of colour, though there are occasional glimpses, such as forty-year-old ‘Bumper, a Negroe’ who came from Guinea and appeared in the 1777 census, as did three female ‘negroe servants’. They were Jane, thirty years old, from America, and two girls who were born on Gibraltar – Nancy, aged nine, and Betty, aged four. They were all listed as Jewish, which was a catch-all category.4
Some 5400 military men were stationed on Gibraltar, along with 1500 military wives and children, far outnumbering the civilians. At the outset of the siege, five British regiments were present – the 12th, 39th, 56th, 58th and 72nd, supplemented by three Hanoverian German regiments, men from the Royal Artillery, Royal Engineers and Soldier-Artificers, as well as a naval contingent. The rank-and-file soldiers were housed with their families in overcrowded barracks and lodgings within the fortified town or in the substantial South Barracks close to the naval hospital.5 Officers and their families could
rent houses from the inhabitants, while those more fortunate had villas with gardens on the hillside overlooking the bay. Life before the siege was tranquil and uneventful. Numerous officers who would play a prominent role in the siege had already been in Gibraltar for years. Some had their wives and children with them, while others were separated from their families or had suffered bereavement. It was a close-knit and constantly evolving world of complex lives and personalities, not always harmonious, where many of the officers were interconnected through marriage and military service.
Lieutenant-Colonel William Green was the chief military engineer responsible for the fortifications and who for years had been designing and implementing changes to the walls, gun batteries and even the natural defences, such as the steep cliff faces and the inundation, in order to prevent infantry assaults. He was a highly able officer who had been in the army since the age of twelve and had come to Gibraltar in 1760 after previous service in Newfoundland and Quebec. His wife Miriam constantly accompanied him to his various postings.6 She had spent nearly half her life on Gibraltar with him and had grown up in a family with a long tradition of military service. Her grandfather Jonas Watson had commanded the artillery at the last siege of Gibraltar in 1727 and was killed at the siege of Cartagena in South America at the advanced age of seventy-eight. Her father Justly Watson had served as a cadet engineer with his father Jonas during that same Gibraltar siege, then pursued a distinguished career as a military engineer until he was murdered in 1757 at St John’s in Newfoundland.
The Green family felt settled in Gibraltar and belonged there. They had an impressive residence in town and a beautiful new house, which they called ‘Mount Pleasant’ or simply ‘The Mount’, on the hillside south of the town. It had glorious views and, as Ayala noted, a substantial garden that Colonel Green had laid out at his own expense two years earlier, ‘well stocked with a variety of exquisite plants, shrubs, and fruit-trees’.7 Mrs Green had given birth to eight children, most of whom were raised on Gibraltar and where two had died – the toddler William-Smith and his sister Louisa-Anne who survived only three weeks. Both of them were buried inside the King’s Chapel.8 Their last child, four-year-old Charlotte, was the only one still with them on Gibraltar.
At the outbreak of hostilities in June 1779, Mrs Green was particularly upset by the sudden separation from Spain, because many of the people had been her friends. She decided to record her experiences in a journal, but could no longer bring herself to refer to the Spaniards by name:
I shall therefore from this time call them — The Enemy — whenever I have occasion to speak of them, which I shall do, as long as circumstances enables me to continue this unconnected, rough journal – and much I fear I should fall short of any style or method, were it intended for any person’s information except such of my family [and] friends who perhaps will not dislike to pass an idle hour in looking over these pages. God only knows who may have the sight of this book or who may ever see the person who now writes this, however I go on. Miriam Green.9
Gibraltar, the place that Mrs Green looked on as home, is an isolated and mountainous crag of rock, a natural fortress jutting incongruously into the sea from the coast of southern Spain. Separated from north Africa by the narrow Strait of Gibraltar (also referred to as the Straits, Streights or Gut), it is strategically located between the Bay of Gibraltar (also known as the Bay of Algeciras) and the Mediterranean Sea and is close to the Atlantic Ocean. In recent decades its shape has been altered by land reclamation and other works, but two centuries ago it measured barely ¾ mile wide and 3 miles long, with the steep, inaccessible limestone cliffs on the eastern side (the ‘back of the Rock’) rising treacherously from the Mediterranean, ruling out settlements, harbours, roads and even paths to the summit.
In the south, the peaks fell away sharply to the rugged and windswept plateaus of Windmill Hill and Europa, where the cliffs around the coast made a close approach by shipping impossible until Rosia Bay was reached on the western side. This side of the Rock, facing the Bay of Gibraltar, was much less severe in profile than the Mediterranean side, and rough paths led up the steep slopes, past fissures and caves, to the perilous knife-edge ridge that was almost 1400 feet in height.10 The traveller and antiquarian Francis Carter was a resident just before the siege: ‘The shape and face of Gibraltar rock is neither promising nor pleasing, and it is as barren as uncouth, not a tree or a shrub hardly to be seen on it above the town ... On casting an eye up this barren hill, one would not imagine any living creature could exist upon it.’11 In fact, barely two-fifths of Gibraltar was habitable, and its sole town – also known as Gibraltar – developed in the more sheltered north-western part of the promontory.
At the northern end, mountainous vertical cliffs overlooked the low and narrow sandy isthmus, much of which was transformed into an airfield in the Second World War. While the eastern and northern faces of the Rock were impossible to attack from the Mediterranean, more vulnerable parts had over the centuries been encased in fortifications, most recently by William Green and his engineers. The main defences were in the north-west, where the town faced the Spanish fortifications, with massive brick and stone walls and gun batteries, as well as ditches and a single entrance out of the town – the Landport Gate. The nearby sea gateway of Waterport led to the Old Mole and the port, which was originally the main anchorage for shipping. A mile-and-a-half to the south of the Old Mole was the New Mole (nowadays called the South Mole), just north of Rosia Bay. A monumental wall (‘Line Wall’) ran along the coastline from the town as far as Europa, with fortified outposts – bastions – protruding into the sea to give more scope for directing gun fire at different angles. At the southern end of the town, further defensive walls snaked uphill to the top of the Rock. Heavy guns were mounted not only along the walls and on the bastions, but also up the west-facing slope of the Rock and even on the very ridge.
For those who scrambled up the flights of steps and paths to the ridge, the dramatic views emphasised their isolation – assuming that the visibility was not impeded by dense cloud or sea mist. They were surrounded by water, while vast tantalising swathes of Andalusia lay before them, with the coast of Morocco and the Atlas Mountains to the south, on the other side of the Straits. Gazing towards the west, the Bay of Gibraltar was defined by the coast of Spain and the hills beyond, while the small Spanish town of Algeciras, 5 miles across the bay, was clearly visible, as was San Roque to the north, the town that housed the Spanish governor. Turning to the north-east, the Mediterranean coast of Andalusian Spain curved gently towards Estepona and Marbella, with the snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains beyond, though access by land was difficult, as Francis Carter noted: ‘The coast from Gibraltar to Estepona, and for two leagues beyond it, is extremely barren, the Sierra continuing about a league from the shore: this road is not to be travelled in the winter, on account of the many rivers and arroyos [streams] you cross, which are so impestuous after the rains, as to carry loaded beasts and horses into the sea.’12 To the east, nothing but the Mediterranean Sea was visible, stretching beyond the horizon for hundreds of miles.
The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht declared that Gibraltar was ceded permanently to Great Britain with its town, castle and port, but without any territory and with no access to the adjoining countryside.13 Viewed from afar, it was easy to mistake Gibraltar for an island, but it was actually linked to Spain by a sandy isthmus between the Mediterranean and the Bay of Gibraltar – only 900 to 1700 yards wide and a few feet above sea level. After the failed thirteenth siege of 1727, the Spaniards had embarked on building a fixed barrier known as ‘the Lines’ across the northern isthmus, some 1500 yards from the Rock, leaving the legal status of the rest of the isthmus uncertain. It was supposedly neutral territory, but some of the land close to the Rock was utilised as market gardens, a cemetery and an ‘inundation’ – a salt marsh that was deliberately flooded to enhance the British fortifications. One inhabitant described it as ‘about 200 yard
s in length, and 60 in breadth. It is always kept filled with water, nearly man-height, from sluices made to let in the sea from the bay; chevaux de frize, iron hoops, and many other articles to entangle and obstruct an enemy, are also heaped in this canal.’14
The Spanish Lines comprised a curtain wall with gun emplacements at intervals and a fort at each end, designed to stop people crossing the isthmus and to prevent trade. It also posed a significant threat, as explained by Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas James of the Royal Artillery, who had lived in Gibraltar two decades before the Great Siege:
The Spaniards ... have run a line from the Mediterranean to the bay [of Gibraltar], and at each end have erected strong forts under the fire [within range] of our own cannon. The above line will be of infinite service to the Spaniards, should they ever attempt to break ground [construct attacking earthworks] against the place, as likewise the fort of the bay side [Fort St Philip], which does totally interrupt the freedom of the port, and commands it so well, that no ships can ride in the proper anchorage ... so will the fort on the Mediterranean side [Fort St Barbara] prevent our ships from enfilading their approaches.15
Guns high up on the Rock could reach the Lines, though the Spanish guns were too far away to bombard the town or fortifications with ease, because at this stage they were mounted on ordinary gun carriages and were incapable of being elevated sufficiently to reach far into Gibraltar. The nearest guns at Fort St Barbara on the Mediterranean faced the highest part of the north face of the Rock, while on the opposite shore, Fort St Philip could fire over the low-lying defences on the north-west side and reach the town. For a bombardment to be more effective, the Spaniards needed to enhance the Lines and establish gun batteries on the isthmus itself, much closer to Gibraltar. They now embarked on spending vast sums of money working towards that objective.