by Roy Adkins
In short, all the batteries had been designed to give the maximum range to their guns, combined with a strong defence against bombardment. They were massive works that had required a vast amount of labour and materials, and had cost a great deal in expenditure and lives.
Once the workmen had dismantled everything, preparations were made for lighting fires to destroy the timber construction of all the batteries and approaches, as well as the gun carriages:
the Artillery Officers instantly ordered their people to fix their faggots and devils, to the different parts where the materials were collected, and on the signal given at St. Carlos every man set fire to his faggot and devil, and the wind springing up, about that time, made it communicate very rapidly and successfully to the whole, soon after which Captn. Whitham reported to ... Ross that the business was perfectly completed, and that the blowing up of the magazines might soon be expected.16
Devils, Ancell said, were incendiary devices, comprising an ‘inflammable composition bound in small bundles, which, after the bands of the fascines are cut, are stuck in between the openings’.17
By now, Eliott had arrived at St Carlos battery, and John Heriot, in a report he later published to accompany a painting of the sortie, said that Eliott was seen ensuring that those wounded on both sides were cared for, including the Spanish captain of artillery:
Amongst them, and almost expiring, he found an elegant young man, who was known by his uniform to be a Captain of the Spanish Artillery. The General spoke to him with the tenderness which such a scene naturally inspires in a brave mind, and assuring him of all possible assistance, ordered him to be removed, as the fire was spreading rapidly to the spot where he lay. The Spaniard endeavoured to raise himself from the ground, and with the most expressive action, feebly articulated, ‘No, Sir, no—leave me—Let me perish amidst the ruins of my post.’ An officer remained near him a few minutes, until he expired.18
The Spanish officer’s name was Don Joseph Barboza, and Heriot said that ‘he had commanded the guard of the St. Carlos Battery, and gallantly maintained his ground, until his men, finding themselves overpowered, threw down their arms, and deserted him. He reproached their baseness, and exclaiming, “at least one Spaniard shall die honourably”—rushed down from the top of his work amongst the attacking column, and fell where he was found, at the foot, and in front of the battery which he guarded.’19
The soldiers were so buoyed up by their success that they desperately wanted to attack the Spanish Lines next, but this was too risky, as Spanish reinforcements might arrive any moment from their camp. Instead, the men were ordered to return to Gibraltar, particularly as the fires were taking hold and gunpowder trails were being laid to the magazines. Although Ross was in command, he was not aware that Eliott was present until accosted by him as the troops were preparing to retreat. Eliott asked him what he thought of the business and ‘if it was not something extraordinary that they should have gained the enemy’s works so easily?’ Heriot recorded that Ross, in his astonishment, could only reply that ‘the most extraordinary thing was to see him there’.20
The fortifications were burning fiercely and illuminating the Rock. Ancell said that ‘in a few minutes the isthmus appeared an entire blaze, from the fire of their consuming batteries, and the reflection of the light was so great, that a person could have read upon our batteries. Thus successful, the whole body gave three huzzas, which consequently must sensibly aggravate and vex the foe.’21 Having given Boyd the message that Eliott had gone out with the troops, Horsbrugh was waiting to find out what was happening, and at last the fires shed light on the events in the distance:
The grandeur of this morning’s scene cannot possibly be described, when the blaze of the works all on fire first presented to our view the parties busily employed in that important service. The troops under arms regularly formed in excellent order to support the advanced Corps and working parties and ready to march on any other service they might be ordered, which being contrasted with a variety of other objects – grand of themselves – but heightened by the noise of the cannon and mortar on both sides, mingled with the explosions of the magazines of powder and shells blowing up at different times, rendered the whole truly great and magnificent and much exceeds my power of description.22
While they marched back to Gibraltar, Eliott shouted out excitedly: ‘Look round, my boys, and view how beautiful the rock appears, by the light of this glorious fire.’ Boyd’s journal was also enthusiastic with praise: ‘At half past 4 o’clock our troops returned to the Garrison, with the trophies of honour and victory, which they had with an undaunted courage so nobly obtained as true Britons for their king and country, at the utmost hazard of their lives.’ The troops themselves may have regarded the produce in the gardens as more tangible trophies, because ‘almost every man was seen with a cabbage or cauliflower, taken from the Land-Port Gardens’.23
The return to the garrison should have been hazardous, the artillery officer reflected, because the Spanish forces had a real opportunity to fire on them from Fort St Philip: ‘in our retreat they fired but very little, and that little very ill directed, when they must know ... that we had a very narrow pass into the Garrison, particularly from our advanced barriers [Bayside and Forbes] to Landport, and where they might have directed all the fire of their guns and mortars’. Heriot even recorded that ‘by some over-sight, the barrier at Forbes was locked after the flank companies had returned, which might have proved of serious consequences to Hardenberg’s Regiment had the enemy attempted to annoy the retreat, as the Hanoverians were obliged ... to follow the 12th Regiment through Bay-side.’24
The Spaniards had been so certain that an attack was impossible that the commanding officer had even written his report for the guard the next day: ‘nothing extraordinary has happened’.25 Nevertheless, the Royal Artillery officer found it difficult to explain why the British troops were not fired on from the nearby forts:
the enemy had been lulled into security, for the works were not only weakly guarded, but ill defended, their surprize was so great, that, instead of attempting to repulse us, they thought of nothing but securing themselves by flight, for they totally abandoned their Lines, and retired into the two Forts [St Philip and St Barbara], and even in them they did not think themselves secured, so great must be their consternation, otherwise how is it to be accounted for their not firing upon us, even from their forts? Fort Philip particularly was only at 600 yards distance, nay much nearer to the Grenadier and Light Infantry Companies of the 72nd regiment [left column], that was posted betwixt the works and the Fort.26
In his dispatches to London, Eliott mentioned casualty figures: ‘Many of the enemy were killed upon the spot; but owing to the darkness and other circumstances, I am not enabled to inform your Lordship either of the exact number, or their particular quality.’27 The numbers were a continued topic of speculation, and Horsbrugh admitted: ‘The number of the Enemy killed is not known but cannot be considerable as it is confidently reported there were not more than 150 men in these advanced works. It is however certain that a captain of artillery and about sixteen men were killed and we suppose the rest fled to the Lines.’28 The captured Spaniards were brought back to the garrison as prisoners-of-war, including two officers, Don Vicente Vasquez Freire, a lieutenant of artillery, and a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant of the Walloon Guards, Baron von Helmstadt, who was from the Palatinate of the Rhine and had only recently joined the Spanish army. Wounded in one knee by a musket shot, he was found on the platform of St Carlos battery, and Heriot described his rescue by two artillerymen:
They took him up in their arms, and carried him out of the battery, where he must soon have perished in the flames. Unwilling to leave him upon the sands in his helpless state, they determined upon carrying him into the Garrison. They were executing their noble purpose, when they met with Lieutenant Cuppage of their own Corps, who ... himself assisted ... With every possible tenderne
ss they conveyed the wounded prisoner to the barriers, where they did not arrive till two hours after the whole detachment had arrived. During this time they had been exposed to the fire of the Enemy’s Lines, and had been reported in the Garrison as lost. Having presented themselves at the barrier, and being admitted, they passed through the different Guards amidst the mingled admiration and applause of the whole; till they reached the Garrison Hospital.29
Heriot thought that the two soldiers should be remembered for risking their lives:
To the feelings of a British officer, any eulogium upon an exercise of his humanity would wear the appearance of an insult. Generosity to a conquered Enemy is a distinguishing feature in the military character of this country ... To the two soldiers, the same considerations of delicacy do not so strongly apply as to their Officer, and it becomes the peculiar duty of the Historian to snatch from oblivion the names of two men, whose feelings were equally an honour to their profession and their species. They were named Campbell and Paton, two privates in the second Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Artillery.30
The losses on the British side were four killed, one man missing and about two dozen wounded, mainly those Hanoverians wounded by friendly fire at St Carlos battery. The missing man, Heriot related, was the soldier from the 73rd who had mortally wounded the captain of artillery. He had fallen ‘upon the top of the battery, and when the troops were ordered to retire, the flames spread with such rapidity to the spot where he lay, that it was impossible to save him. It is to be regretted that the name of this gallant soldier cannot now be ascertained.’31 Drinkwater thought it was commendable that no tools or weapons were lost, though a soldier of the 73rd did lose his plaid.
A greater loss was that of Colonel Abraham Tovey, who commanded the Royal Artillery, but died of illness on the day his men were doing their duty in the sortie. Almost a century later, Captain Duncan, historian of the Royal Artillery, wrote:
It was the last order issued in Colonel Tovey’s name ... and as his men were parading for the sortie, and the moon was running her nightly course—his was running fast too. Before his men returned, he was dead. For nearly half a century he had served in the Royal Artillery—beginning his career as a matross in 1734, and ending it as a Lieutenant-Colonel in 1781. He died in harness—died in the command of a force of Garrison Artillery, which has never been surpassed nor equalled, save by the great and famous siege-train in the Crimea.32
Before the end of the year, his daughter Augusta Tovey, who had been left a fortune by him, married Martin Eccles Lindsay of the 73rd Regiment, by special licence issued by Eliott.33
It was only when the last of the troops were returning to the garrison that the Spaniards began to beat to arms, and at that time a massive explosion shook Gibraltar, described in Boyd’s journal: ‘at half past 5 we had the pleasure to see their grand magazine in the new works blow up in the air, by which explosion some of our shattered buildings near Landport fell, but done no further damage, our soldiers on the batteries giving 3 huzzas at [the] same time to mortify the enemy with our success.’34 At daybreak, Horsbrugh recorded,
we discovered the Lines filled with troops ... but none appeared to be advanced, nor was any attempt made by the enemy to extinguish the fire. Some few stragglers only now and then approached it, seemingly with great caution ... The fire continued to burn briskly for the greatest part of the day, with repeated explosions of powder and shots ... In the afternoon it was reported that the Commander in Chief had come down to the Lines and that one or two officers had advanced separately at different times to survey the damage, and soon afterwards retired.35
It was thought that ‘the cowardly Spaniards are so confused that they dare not attempt the least assistance to put out the fire’,36 but the real reason was surely due to the intensity of the fires.
The following morning, the 28th, the General Orders gave the countersign as ‘St Roque’, in a mocking reference to the Spanish headquarters, whose forward batteries were still burning.37 Before daybreak, Horsbrugh was woken by the pounding of heavy guns. Arriving at the Grand Battery, he was informed that a considerable explosion in one of the burning batteries had been followed by small-arms fire from the Spanish Lines. The fires had obviously ignited a store of shells, but the nervous Spaniards had assumed they were being attacked by yet another sortie. As dawn broke, the thick plumes of smoke and occasional bursts of flame showed that fires were still consuming the works over a wide area. That afternoon, Horsbrugh watched as one high-ranking Spaniard acknowledged the catastrophe: ‘several officers came from the camp and some few of them singly ventured forward to reconnoitre the demolished works. One of them after attentively surveying the general ruin, looked up to Willis’s, pulled off his hat, and made a low bow to the officers who were looking out from thence, and afterwards walked deliberately back to the Lines.’38
While the exchange of cannon fire between the garrison and Spanish Lines continued, the fires still burned, even though the next day brought wind and rain. ‘By the consuming of the wooden materials with which the batteries were constructed,’ Horsbrugh noted, ‘the sand has already sunk so considerably that we can now see some of the mortars and guns fallen from their beds, which we are persuaded are totally burnt, and as the fire blazed out at different times in the night and still sends out a great deal of smoke, it is imagined it may continue burning for some time longer.’ It took a week for the fires to die down, and to their disappointment the garrison could see that part of St Carlos battery was less badly damaged than they had hoped. Even so, Horsbrugh noted, ‘we only see one of the guns standing and one mortar on its bed, the wooden work being in all probability consumed’.39
The sortie was an incredible achievement. It had lasted only an hour and a half, but in that time countless months of work had been destroyed. One soldier who took part remarked: ‘The work of the enemy, thus destroyed, has cost them immense labour and expence, as it was most completely finished – it is supposed it must have stood them in fifteen millions of dollars.’ Ancell was of the opinion that the garrison had destroyed ‘in fifteen minutes, a work estimated at three million of dollars’, while a decade later Heriot wrote: ‘It is known as a fact, by the acknowledgment of several persons of distinction in the Spanish army, that the construction and materials of these works, destroyed by the fire, cost the enormous sum of thirteen millions of large piastres (equal to three millions sterling).’40
The report penned by the artillery officer contained his own opinion:
This is barely credible at the first view, that the ... detachment should march out, attack, and completely destroy the enemy’s advanced works, spike all their ordnance, blow up the magazines, works that had taken them 14 months in erecting, with a very great expence and loss of men, exclusive of 16 months previous to that, in preparing the materials; those works at 1200 yards distance from the Garrison, covered and flanked by a number of pieces of cannon and mortars at only 600 yards distance [Fort St Philip], and in the front of an encampment of 10 or 12000 men, with so small a loss, but no plan could be better constructed, and the event shews it was well executed.41
Eliott’s own steward, Captain Mackay, commented: ‘thus our brave troops has executed an arduous task which all Europe will remember to the Honour of Great Britain.’42 He was not overstating the significance of the sortie, because it is still regarded as one of the most famous in military history.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MINORCA FALLS
After Baron von Helmstadt was carried to the naval hospital, the surgeons found that his shattered leg needed amputating, but he resisted. Not only was such surgery rarely successful in Spain, but this young good-looking man was betrothed to be married and ‘would rather risk his life than present himself before her with only one leg’.1 Yet amputation was the only viable treatment for a badly broken leg, as John Bell, an eminent Edinburgh surgeon, advised: ‘In besieged cities, or in the trenches before a besieged cit
y, most of the wounds are with great shot, or by bombs, or by great splinters of stone, and in such wounds, the limbs are so miserably broken, that in most of the cases, amputation is necessary.’2 The sooner the operation was performed, the better the chance of a successful outcome, limiting the time for infections to set in.
The reluctance of von Helmstadt to have his leg amputated was understandable, but Eliott was concerned and ordered several convalescent amputees into his room to show off the surgeons’ skill. Von Helmstadt relented and recovered well from the operation until a month later, on 28 December 1781, when he died of fever. Everybody on Gibraltar was upset, and the next day his body ‘was put into a coffin, covered with black cloth, and decorated with elegant white furniture, the corpse dressed in full uniform, according to the custom of Spain’.3 At noon, he was taken from the naval hospital down to the New Mole in an elaborate procession:
The Grenadiers of the 12th Regiment in caps and arms reversed. Band of music and two drummers beating the dead march. Town Major and Secretary. Two lights, crucifix, Roman Priest [Father Messa] in robes and mitre. The corpse borne by the 39th Grenadiers, and six officers the pall bearers. The Governor, Lieutenant-General de la Motte, General Picton and Commodore Curtis with a numerous train of officers, soldiers and inhabitants. Thus went the procession to the ... New Mole, where two barges waited under cartel flags to receive him, with the Governor’s secretary and Town Major, and his baggage in the other barge. The Grenadiers being drawn up on the Wharf, they fired three vollies in the air over the corpse ... The barges proceeding into the Bay until they met the Spanish cartel ... and both parties returned to their respective shores.4
With the shock of having their advance works so badly damaged in the sortie, the Spaniards were initially in a state of torpor. For some weeks, the ruins had smouldered, bursting into flames now and again. ‘They contented themselves with venting their revenge by a brisk cannonade upon the Garrison,’ Heriot said, ‘and by hanging in their Camp some of the unfortunate soldiers who had been driven from their works and escaped into their Lines.’5 On the last day of 1781, one officer calculated the cost to Spain of their shot and shells over the past year: ‘According to judges, the lowest estimate of the Enemy’s ... firings for metal and powder only, at the rate of £3 per shell, and £1 per shot, will amount to £188,721 sterling, which divide by 127, the number they have killed us, and it will appear that each man’s death will stand on their books to cost £1,486 sterling; besides adding to our magazines about 80,000 shot and shells that we have gathered up fit for service.’6