by Roy Adkins
An officer came out from the Enemy’s Lines attended by a trumpeter sounding a parley, and a soldier leading a mule, and the Town Major [Burke] being sent out to know the purport of his message was informed that the Spanish General, Don Alvarez, sent his compliments to our Governor and returned a mule which two days before had strayed to the Lines. This being notified to the Governor, he desired his compliments might be presented to the Spanish General with thanks.53
Price added that ‘the officer who brought the message, Colonel Cadalso, his aid-de-camp and Lieutenant-General to the Regiment of Bourbon, [is] known to myself and many other officers of the Garrison’ – a reminder that several officers on each side were well acquainted with each other.54
In the hardship and tedium of everyday life under siege, each incident was a potential diversion. Anything that happened within sight of the Rock passed for news, especially if it afforded the slightest amount of interest, and deserters to and from the Rock always provided some sort of story, though all too often a tragic one. Any deserters seen running across no man’s land towards the Spanish Lines from Gibraltar were fired at by the garrison soldiers on guard duty, and if they were not brought down by lead balls from muskets, then the batteries would fire explosive shells and cannonballs to try to stop them. The Spaniards might send out horsemen to pick up these deserters, but they would try to ride down their own deserters or slash them with swords. Any caught alive before they reached safety were tried, sentenced and executed. Because of the information they could give to the enemy, leniency was rare. Deserters were regarded as traitors and treated as spies. Those from the Spanish camp mainly tried to head further inland, but a minority tried to reach Gibraltar. Not all were successful, as Price himself saw in mid-December:
This morning between 8 and 9 o’clock one of the Walloon Guards attempted deserting to us off his post at the Spanish Lines. The centries fired two shots at him, one of which wounded him, for I saw him lying on the slope of the glacis in front of the 7 gun battery. Our batteries on the heights fired smartly to protect him, but in vain. Two Spanish Dragoons rushed out at the barrier of the Lines, alighted off their horses, and after wounding the bleeding wretch, put him into one of the nearest embrasures and galloped off at full speed.55
They then prepared for his execution, which Paterson witnessed:
At 4 o’clock this evening they were employed erecting a gallows on the top of the sand hills about halfway between their camp and Lines, to hang the deserter taken. This morning, a great number of people, assembled to see the execution, were fired upon by our batteries and several of them killed and wounded. They desisted from their enterprise and removed the gallows during the night near to their fascine park, where the deserter was hanged this morning [15th] in great form, the pickets of the army and Walloon Guards attended the execution.56
Drinkwater said that ‘the body, according to custom, hung till sun-set’, but Price was very much a gentleman where women were concerned and was more disconcerted by a rumour that ran through the garrison: ‘Strange as it is to relate, a Lady was seen at this melancholy spectacle who, by the number of her attendants, seemed to be the Spanish General’s wife. As I have this merely from hearsay, I am willing for the honor of the female gentleness and sensibility to reject it as an absolute fiction coined by some disappointed old bachelor inveterate against the sex.’57
Rice Price, himself a bachelor, came from Wales (Rice is a version of the Welsh name Rhys or Rees). He would eventually return there – to the Williamsfield estate at Myddfai, Llandovery – after leaving the army and marrying Ann Stewart. He had joined the 56th Regiment as an ensign at the age of thirteen, and at the start of the siege he was thirty-three years old. The 56th Regiment had been in Gibraltar since 1770, and so Price knew the place well, and he had risen to the rank of captain by the time the siege started. He was described as having ‘a mind naturally strong, and a memory unusually retentive’, to which ‘he added all the information to be acquired from extensive reading’. He was particularly fond of history and poetry (like Colonel José de Cadalso) and was appreciated for his sense of humour.58
Just after Christmas, during the night of 26 December 1779, a violent thunderstorm with strong westerly winds and torrential rain drove into the sea about 5 tons of timber and brushwood that was stacked along the banks of the Palmones and Guadaranque rivers, ready for use by the Spanish forces in their camp. Swept across to Gibraltar, it was rapidly salvaged during the morning of the 27th, to the delight of many people, including Horsbrugh:
A great quantity of brushwood, some pieces of timbers and stumps of trees, intermixed with canes and landweeds, which had been washed down the rivers by the late floods, were brought by the wind and tide close to the foot of our wall. Fourteen boatloads were taken up before it drove on shore, and the poor people being then permitted to go along under the Line Wall, they collected and brought a very considerable quantity of it, which proved of infinite service to the poorer inhabitants who had no fuel to dress their victuals.59
At about noon that same day, some of the Genoese fishermen were dragging their nets on the western beach, a little closer to Spain than normal, when without warning they were fired on by guns at Fort St Philip. Spilsbury was perhaps more accurate in saying that they were fishing for firewood. They rapidly retreated, leaving behind their nets, though one of the fishermen, Bartholome Guillasa, picked up one of the cannonballs that had fallen in the nearby market gardens and took it to Father Messa, who told him it was a 26-pounder.60 Nearly three weeks earlier, the same fort had fired at two fishing boats, and so this new firing could have been another warning, but Horsbrugh believed that the final shot was actually targeted at the garrison’s defences:
the fourth [shot] struck the retaining wall as you enter into Alls Well, broke down part of that wall and stuck. This last shot being considerably out of the line of the others, and having a much greater elevation, we therefore conjectured the first three were fired to take off our attention, and that the fourth was intended to try the range or what effect it might have against our works, or perhaps it was wantonly fired at a number of our officers and soldiers who were looking out from thence, but whatever may have been their reason for it, we return the compliment with several shot and shells at that fort.61
Up to now, the Spanish forces had fired only at shipping. This was therefore their very first shot directed at the garrison, and so Spilsbury commented: ‘Many bets lost, as it was thought they would not fire at the place.’62 Some feared that the Spaniards were about to begin the new year, 1780, with a bombardment.
On the same day as these first hostile shots at the Rock, three more deserters successfully made their escape from the Spanish Lines. One was a Dragoon, from whom Price heard that ‘there are strict orders from Court [Madrid] to carry on the blockade with all possible alertness. We are thought to be near starving and our surrendering in a month or two at most looked upon as inevitable.’ However, the blockading ships had failed to notice a packet boat come in with supplies earlier that evening, belonging to the Jewish merchant Abraham Israel. The boat had gone unnoticed to Tangier a fortnight previously, carrying dispatches and letters, and at the time ‘their safe arrival was notified to the Garrison by their making two fires at the hours agreed upon Ape’s Hill’. The vessel was now back from Barbary, loaded ‘with forty goats, some poultry, onions and oranges’.63 Without any convoy from England, Gibraltar was increasingly reliant on supplies brought by small vessels from Tangier and Tetuan that managed to evade the blockade in the dead of night. The Court at Madrid would not have been happy.
Despite a few distressed voices, Mrs Green reckoned that on Gibraltar ‘The troops are in good health and spirits, and have been so during the whole blockade.’ The mood was muted, though, and on the first day of the new year, 1780, she said with sadness: ‘We had only 8 friends at dinner by way of keeping up an old custom; the times were too bad to allow any family to entertain;
not only that but I was greatly indisposed and totally out of spirits ... Several persons called as usual this forenoon; but not near so many as on former occasions, indeed most people now began to look rather unhappy at our uncomfortable situation.’64 One soldier summed up the prevailing mood: ‘A most melancholy prospect for the inhabitants, and women and children in the army! The troops may hold out for some months longer, but, if Providence does not relieve us soon, I tremble for the approaching conflict!’65
CHAPTER SIX
MOONLIGHT BATTLE
Crimes committed by the rank-and-file soldiers in the garrison were generally dealt with by corporal punishment. In the years since Eliott became governor, nobody had been executed, but many robberies had occurred of late, so that when Patrick Farrell of the 58th Regiment was tried and found guilty at a General Court Martial for theft from a winehouse early in the new year, he was sentenced to be hanged. The day before his execution was a Sunday, and Mrs Green was perplexed by his behaviour: ‘The man of 58th would not go to Church; or even allow our clergyman to go to him!’1 The following day, 10 January 1780, he was hanged, watched by his regiment, along with pickets from all the other regiments. Mrs Green commented: ‘The man went out at South Port at 11 o’clock, the usual ceremonies being observed. He appeared perfectly stupid, stayed but a little time at the place of execution and had refused to have any clergyman till at the hour of his suffering. He did allow of the attendance of our clergyman, owned he had often deserved such a fate, said he was bred a Quaker. An Irish Man.’2 Farrell was from Richhill in Armagh and had enlisted with the regiment at Cork almost ten years before. Once a farm worker, he was described as a man of dark complexion, dark hair, grey eyes and an extraordinary height – 6 feet 6¼ inches, about a foot taller than most of his comrades.3
The day following the execution, four shots fired from Fort St Philip were aimed at a funeral for a soldier of the 72nd Regiment that was taking place at the burial ground by the Governor’s Meadow, beyond the Rock’s northern defences. Two fell in the market gardens, one in the Governor’s Meadow and another in the inundation. ‘There was a funeral party going out at this time,’ Mrs Green related, ‘and as the burying ground is very near to where the shot fell, it greatly alarmed them. They only stayed to put the corpse hastily into the ground, and the clergyman came back as fast as his horse could bring him!’ Captain Price complained that ‘their gunnery was below contempt’.4
Even though the working parties were being constantly targeted by the garrison, nobody expected the Spanish guns to be active, because conditions in their camp and siegeworks had become terrible, due to flooding and sandstorms. Horsbrugh could see a ‘great quantity of standing water in and about the Enemy’s works, which they were endeavouring to carry off by means of drains, and the boyau and communications along the Lines appeared to have suffered a good deal from the weather’.5 Paterson also observed that the ‘high winds which we have had for this week past has drifted a great deal of sand into the enemy’s boyeaux or trench communication. In some places it is filled with water from the rain, as are their works in general in the lines, which lay so low that they cannot drain them.’6 Added to the camp’s woes, several of their large wooden huts that they were roofing with brushwood to replace their tents had recently caught fire late at night, fanned by the strong winds. Price had watched as they ‘burnt furiously for a considerable time. The drums beat to arms and the alarm was general. The blaze was so very bright that we could see for some miles around.’7 Two more Walloon deserters reported that ‘the camp is in a most wretched condition – bread scarce, water infamous, the troops sickly and heartily sick of the service’. They also claimed that a great deal of propaganda was being spread about the state of the garrison, but that if the truth was known, about six hundred men would desert.8
On 12 January, shots from Fort St Barbara hit a garrison working party using mule carts to collect stone quarried from near the Devil’s Tower, an old watchtower close to the eastern side of the North Front. Firing also took place again from Fort St Philip towards the Landport area, and one shot hit a sentry box. Mrs Green thought ‘it was supposed to be intended for the Flag Staff, as there was a great many of our artillery officers there. They also hurt a mule who was in a working cart. The Colonel [Green] was looking over the Ramp at Landport when this happened, and one of the twenty-four pounders fell within 3 feet of him!’9
Another shot went into the town. According to Father Messa, it ‘passed over the walls of Land Port and hit the roof of Antonio Quartin, which happened to be unoccupied, and only made two holes in the roof and fell in the street near the house of the carpenter, Mr. Boid.’10 Quartin’s house was in Governor’s Street, a back lane leading into the French Parade (now Governor’s Parade), and it was empty because he had gone to Spain with his wife at the start of the siege, taking with them their children. Although he had lived all his life on Gibraltar and was the clerk of the coal yard, his wife Frances was originally from Spain.11 Price said that this shot ‘went through the roof of Mr Quartine’s house and lodged in the opposite wall of the Artillery Hospital. It passed so close to Mrs. Hamilton who was crossing the street as to raise a slight contusion on the calf of her leg. This is very unlike the Spanish gallantry to injure the sacred persons of the ladies. It weighed seven and twenty pounds [and] some ounces.’12 Everyone was surprised and disturbed, because they never expected a shot to reach so far, and this first British casualty was a civilian woman, not a soldier. Drinkwater thought ‘it was singular that a female should be the first person wounded in this remarkable siege’.13 Mrs Hamilton’s husband was a merchant, and she found herself the centre of attention, which exasperated the stalwart Mrs Green:
A woman who keeps a milliner’s shop was standing on the opposite side of the street and was thrown down by something, striking her leg. She insisted upon it that it was the ball but that could not possibly be the case, as it was only some splinters of the roof or else some of the shell work out of the front of the house, as the least stroke of the ball would undoubtedly have broke her leg. It hurt no-one else, and she was more alarmed than any real hurt. However, it alarmed everybody.14
Family tradition was passed down in the Skinner family that Mrs Jane Skinner, who fired the first shot at the Spaniards four months previously, was also the first person to be injured by incoming shot. It supposedly happened not long after the birth of her first child, William Thomas Skinner, and his son wrote decades later that his father William ‘was born at Gibraltar in 1780, during the siege, my grandmother being the first to be wounded, by a shell bursting over the [Moorish] castle, while she was nursing her son’. If this did occur, she was not the first civilian to be wounded, because William – the first of eight children – was not born until July 1780, some six months after this attack.15
Because the garrison’s main burial ground on the isthmus was too dangerous to use, Eliott gave immediate orders for funerals there to cease. All soldiers and other inhabitants were ordered to bury their dead on part of the red sands in the south, behind the Prince of Wales lines. Elsewhere on Gibraltar, officers were buried at Southport, the Jews had their own burial ground in the south, while the King’s Chapel was reserved for noteworthy Protestant members of the garrison, and, as Colonel James described a few years earlier, ‘All the Roman Catholics are buried in the Spanish church; they put them in a deep pit, throwing a quantity of lime upon the corpse, to consume the body the sooner.’16
In the evening of this eventful day, the soldiers were told that because of shortages their weekly allowance of provisions had to be cut. ‘Disagreeable as this intelligence was,’ Drinkwater reported, ‘and particularly when we consider the distress which many experienced even with the full allowance, the men received it without the smallest appearance of discontent.’17 Ancell, though, was worried:
Our situation every day appears more alarming, there being a scarcity of almost everything in the garrison – fire-wood a cob per hundred, f
lour five rials per pound, no fresh meat except an old cow, or worn-out ox, (only one perhaps killed in a month) which is sold at four and a half and five rials per pound, fowls twenty to twenty four rials each, a goose ten dollars, a turkey twenty dollars, eggs a cob the dozen, and every other necessary in proportion.18
Now that the fishermen were being targeted by the Spaniards, the besieged population could no longer benefit from the plentiful supplies of fish and other seafood, and Mrs Upton was critical of the fishermen: ‘Though Gibraltar is surrounded by the sea, we were no better supplied with fish than with the other articles of life. The fishermen were Genoese, and they chose to catch very few, that they might have a pretence for enhancing the price:– a quantity that would dine but two persons, cost four shillings.’ Drinkwater agreed: ‘our fishermen were foreigners, and being under no regulation, they exacted, by degrees, most extravagant sums for what some months before we should have looked upon with disgust.’19
Soon after the rations were cut, on 15 January, smallpox made an unwelcome return, though as the previous outbreak had occurred only a few weeks earlier, it probably never left. This new outbreak threw Mrs Green into panic: ‘Doctor Baynes called in the forenoon and greatly alarmed me by telling us of the smallpox being again broke out! The child was a son of Captain Evelegh’s of the Corps of Engineers; this is a fine boy, about six years old. He did not seem very well when we supped there on last Tuesday evening [the 11th]. They have 2 younger girls to have this disorder. It hurt me to hear of this, as it is not a thing to be wished ... when we can only manage people in health.’20 John Evelegh, who was captain-lieutenant of the Engineers, was born at Exeter in Devon in 1740. He had been in Gibraltar since 1771 with his wife Ann. By now, they had eight children, including the oldest son, also called John, who was fourteen years old and became an ensign in the 72nd Regiment the following year. Information about three of the children is scanty, and they may have died very young. The six-year-old boy who contracted smallpox was Henry, and the two younger girls mentioned by Mrs Green were Mary Ann, aged three, and Eliott Ann, aged one, who had been named after Governor Eliott.21