Gibraltar
Page 32
Although he was surrounded with unfixed fuses, loaded shells, composition, &c., with the most astonishing coolness, he carried out the lighted shell, and threw it where it could do little or no harm, and two seconds had scarcely passed before it disploded. If the shell had burst in the laboratory, it is almost certain the whole would have been blown up, when the loss in fixed ammunition, fuses, &c. &c. would have been irreparable, exclusive of the damage which the fortifications would have suffered from the explosion, and the lives that might have been lost. He was handsomely rewarded by the Governor.
For his quick-thinking and heroism, Hartley was actually given an award of twenty dollars.8
Preparations also continued for firing red-hot shot, and in mid-July Drinkwater noted that ‘about this period, additional forges for heating shots were established in different parts of the Garrison, with all the proper apparatus’ – by which he probably meant the specialised tools. Recent deserters confirmed that the Duc de Crillon was now in charge, that a massive army had been assembled and that the floating batteries might be ready by the end of August, but Ancell was certain that they could be destroyed: ‘there is not the least doubt but our red hot pills will effectually answer our purpose. They must be of an amazing construction if blazing twenty-four and thirty-two pounders will not burn them.’9
One setback occurred with Ince’s tunnel, because, with shifts of miners working round the clock, the build-up of smoke and dust was making the work extremely difficult. It was therefore decided to blast a ventilation hole through the cliff face itself, though in doing so, Drinkwater said, the miners overestimated the amount of gunpowder needed:
The mine was loaded with an unusual quantity of powder, and the explosion was so amazingly loud, that almost the whole of the Enemy’s camp turned out at the report: but what must their surprise be, when they observed from where the smoke issued [halfway up the cliff face]! The original intention of this opening was to communicate air to the workmen, who before were almost suffocated with the smoke which remained after blowing the different mines, but, on examining the aperture more closely, an idea was conceived of mounting a gun to bear on all the Enemy’s batteries, excepting Fort Barbara. Accordingly orders were given to enlarge the inner part for the recoil, and when finished a twenty-four pounder was mounted.10
From this fortunate accident it was realised that there was no necessity to wait until the tunnel had been driven as far as the Notch. It could be used as a gun battery now, with cannons set up in embrasures through the cliff face. This discovery was very welcome, because the work was particularly gruelling in the intense summer heat, and there was a shortage of water. Spilsbury noted: ‘Soldiers forbid to run or heat themselves ... Thermometer 88°.’ Shortly afterwards, a new order specified: ‘No one to bathe at the New Mole for dysentery’s sake.’ Much of the shipping was anchored at the New Mole, with the crews living on board, so that all kinds of waste emptied into the surrounding water, potentially making it very unhealthy. The food was also harmful, as Spilsbury described: ‘Sour crout served to the Hanoverians, but it is nearly spoilt’, while ‘Our flour is so full of weevils, &c, that a plum pudding has the appearance of a currant one.’11
In late July, two ships came from Italy with supplies and news. ‘Arrived the St Philip’s Castle and General Murray sloop of war from Leghorn; they have brought provision for the garrison, with five officers and seventy-five Corsicans,’ wrote Ancell. ‘They bring the agreeable intelligence of Admiral Rodney having defeated the French, and taken the Ville de Paris of 100 guns, with four other line of battleships.’12 After delivering the convoy to Gibraltar in January 1780, Rodney had taken up his post as commander-in-chief of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean in a continuing struggle with the French. In April 1782, a fleet of battleships commanded by the Comte de Grasse had been reinforced by a massive convoy carrying nine thousand troops, intended for an assault on Jamaica. Rodney, with a fleet of similar size, caught up with the French near a group of islands called the Saintes, between Guadeloupe and Dominica. The French were so comprehensively beaten that Rodney wrote to Sandwich at the Admiralty: ‘My Dear Lord, You may now despise all your enemies. The British fleet, under your Lordship’s auspices, has proved itself superior to that of the enemy, and given them such a blow as they will not recover.’13
For Gibraltar, this was wonderful news. Not only was such a massive British victory a boost to morale, but any reduction in the power of the French and Spanish navies might help diminish the blockade of the Rock. Eliott decided to celebrate by bombarding the Spaniards during their siesta. ‘At one o’clock all the ordnance was made to bear upon the enemy from the Royal Battery to Princess Carolina Battery,’ Walter Gordon said. ‘Our new gun boats formed the line along the New Mole booms, and fired one round each, and were answered by all the shipping in the bay, thus these expressions of joy answered also the purpose of distressing the enemy, who knew the cause of our joy, and severely felt the effects of our rejoicing. Every heart blessed the gallant Rodney; a more sincere feu de joie was never observed.’14
Amongst the private letters brought by the ships was one for William Green, telling him the devastating news that his wife Miriam had died in London a month previously, on 21 June 1782, at the age of forty-six, and had been buried in St Margaret’s, Westminster.15 Although Mrs Green had left for England eleven months earlier, she never recovered, but suffered one final tragedy – the death of her own mother in March. As Chief Engineer with a crisis looming, Green was unable to leave Gibraltar to rejoin his family.
The Corsicans who came as passengers on board the two ships to offer their services to Eliott were described by Drinkwater as ‘Signor Leonetti, nephew to Pascal Paoli, the celebrated Corsican General, with two officers, a chaplain, and sixty-eight volunteers’. Twelve Corsicans had arrived in May and been distributed amongst some of the regiments, though by the time the rest arrived a fight between two of them had already ended in a fatal stabbing. In a letter to Eliott, Sir Thomas Mann, the British envoy to Florence, explained that following the fall of Minorca to the French, he had been directed to divert to Gibraltar any provisions or supplies, including a party of Corsicans who had wanted to join the British at Minorca. He drew attention to five of them: ‘I beg leave on this occasion to recommend to your protection the following persons. Monsieur Leonetti, General Paoli’s nephew, who quitted the Great Duke’s [Grand Duke of Tuscany] service by his uncle’s order, to shew his zeal in that of His Majesty [George III]. Monsieur Catti, a very ingenious and resolute young man. Monsieur Lioncourt, Micheli and Masseria, who are all very deserving and may be of great use at the head of the Corsicans.’16
In the early eighteenth century, Corsica was ruled by the Genoese, but an independence movement had developed in opposition. In 1755, Pascale Paoli led a group of guerrillas that forced the Genoese out of the mountains and then drove them from the lowlands. France later took control of Corsica, and after losing a battle against the French in 1769, Paoli was forced to flee and went into exile in England. Consequently, many Corsicans hated the French and wanted revenge. One of the families associated with Paoli was that of the Bonapartes, who had remained in Corsica. Their son Napoleon, the future emperor of the French, was a pupil at the military school at Brienne Le Château in central France from 1779 to 1784 and must have been well aware of the siege of Gibraltar that was being talked about across Europe. Yet he was bullied as a despised Corsican by the French boys, and, although he would later lead the armies of France, as a young man he was a fervent Corsican nationalist.
On Gibraltar nobody seemed to know what to do with the Corsican volunteers, but after a few days they were formed into an independent corps under the command of Antonio Leonetti and sent to Windmill Hill, as Drinkwater related: ‘They were armed with a firelock and bayonet, each with a horse-pistol slung on the left side, and two cartridge boxes. The Governor quartered them on Wind-mill hill, and committed that post to their charge.’ This
small report highlights Drinkwater as an accurate eyewitness, because it mirrors almost exactly the official record of the stores issued to the Corsican Company: ‘Firelocks 78, pistols 78, cartouch boxes with straps and frogs 168, carbines 6, bayonets with scabbards.’17
Windmill Hill was well away from much of the bombardment, and although the garrison was maintaining an almost daily shelling of the fortifications on the isthmus, only occasional retaliation had occurred from the Spanish batteries and gunboats since late June. Instead, the besieging troops continued to prepare for a massive assault with the floating batteries. On the day after the arrival of the news of Rodney’s victory, two vessels from Faro in Portugal brought letters containing intelligence that troops were already at Cadiz waiting for embarkation, that all the boats in the vicinity were held in readiness, that the floating batteries were nearing completion and, worse still, that an attack was planned for the middle of August.18 One letter said that the attackers ‘were to have forty thousand men in camp, and the principal attack was to be made by sea, to be covered by a squadron of men of war with bomb-ketches, floating-batteries, gun and mortar-boats, &c and that the Comte d’Artois, brother to the King of France, with other great personages, was to be present at the attack’.
The letters brought additional information about the construction of the floating batteries: ‘Ten ships were to be fortified six or seven feet thick, on the larboard side, with green timber bolted with iron, cork, junk, and raw hides, which were to carry guns of heavy metal, and be bomb-proof on the top, with a descent [sloping roof] for the shells to slide off: that these vessels, which they supposed would be impregnable, were to be moored within half gun-shot of the walls with iron chains.’19 D’Arçon’s design was intended to make the vessels unsinkable, impossible to hole with cannonballs and impossible to set on fire with red-hot shot.
On top of the reinforced hull, extra layers of protection were added, including a layer of wet sand to quench the heat of any red-hot shot that managed to penetrate the outer layers. To keep the whole of this armour wet, a network of pipes was threaded between the layers, through which water was pumped. If any red-hot shot managed to break one or more pipes, the leaking water would help douse the shot. The sloping roof was designed to deflect cannonballs and protect the gun crews. Intended to sail only as far as Gibraltar, they would have a lop-sided appearance, with one heavily armoured side designed to face Gibraltar and a less well-protected side facing the bay.
Depending on the size of the particular vessel, the floating batteries had one or two gun decks and between six and twenty-one brand-new brass guns, which were mounted on one side only – the side facing Gibraltar’s defences. The weight of the guns was balanced by ballast on the opposite side of the vessel. They were to be fully rigged with masts and sails in order to sail across the bay, but were unlikely to be very manoeuvrable and so would need to be towed into position by smaller boats. Because they were not meant to move again, the masts and sails were expendable. Once anchored, the floating batteries were designed to pound the garrison into submission, while remaining unscathed by everything fired at them. Looking back a century later, one newspaper in the shipbuilding port of Belfast commented: ‘The vessels may be said to have been in a sense unwieldy predecessors of ironclads.’20
Unknown to those on Gibraltar, the influenza they were suffering from was a widespread epidemic that was raging across Europe. In Britain, entire families had been wiped out, especially in south-east England. It now had a more serious impact on the garrison and was made more unbearable by the intense summer heat. Countless people fell ill, though Gibraltar was lucky that sufferers recovered fairly quickly. ‘Its general symptoms,’ Drinkwater related, ‘were sudden pains, accompanied with a dizziness in the head; though others were affected in a different manner. For several days near a hundred were daily taken to the Hospital; but bleeding, and a night’s rest, usually removed it. It was attributed at that time to the extraordinary heat of the atmosphere, which was unusually warm, owing to the prodigious fires made by the Spaniards on the neighbouring hills, and the stagnant state of the air.’21
Influenza was affecting the French and Spaniards at least as much as the garrison, and, like the soldiers on the Rock, they struggled on with their tasks. Among them, twenty-eight-year-old François-Silvain-Denis Houdan-Deslandes was a second lieutenant in the Bretagne Regiment. Born at Vernou, near Tours, in France, he had previously studied at military college and had been part of the successful besieging force at Minorca. According to him, they were now waiting for the arrival of two princes from the Court of Versailles before the next major stage of work on the isthmus – a new line stretching from the Mahon battery to the Mediterranean. The Comte d’Artois arrived in the evening of 12 August and the following day was guided round the Spanish Lines by the Duc de Crillon and other officers. D’Artois was the younger brother of Louis XVI of France and, in 1824, would become Charles X after the French monarchy was restored following Napoleon’s final defeat. Houdan-Deslandes said that d’Artois ‘was struck by the beauty of those great and formidable works ... The Prince made a tour of the Lines under fire from the fortress, without fear or conceit.’22 During the inspection of the Lines, fourteen-year-old Pierre Dumont was working in the stables of d’Artois in the nearby camp and recorded a near miss from a shell:
all lay flat on the ground, to shun the effects of a bomb that fell near part of the barracks where a French woman had a canteen. The woman, with two children on her arm, rushes forth, sits with the utmost sang froid on the bomb-shell, puts out the match [actually the fuse], and thus extricates from danger all that were around her. Numbers were witnesses of this incident, and his highness granted her a pension of three francs a day, and promised to promote her husband after the siege. The Duc de Crillon imitated the prince’s generosity, and ensured to her, likewise, a payment of five francs a day.23
The arrival of d’Artois was the signal to push on with the siegeworks, and at daybreak on 16 August everybody on Gibraltar was astounded to see that a vast extension had been constructed overnight, in just six hours of darkness, using casks and sandbags, only 800 yards from the garrison’s batteries. Writing to General Charles Cornwallis, William Picton, colonel of the 12th, said that ‘the enemy had accomplished a most arduous task ... having carried on their advanced work, or parallel, about seven hundred yards in length, and about twelve feet in height, composed principally of sandbags, from near the Mahon battery almost to the eastern shore, with sixty-four masked embrasures in it, and two mortar batteries at the extremities’. He admitted that it was all carried out with complete secrecy and silence: ‘Although there must have been at least twelve or fifteen thousand men employed in effecting this very extensive and laborious operation ... yet the plan was ... executed with so much silence, assiduity and regularity that not even the smallest suspicion, it is believed, was entertained of any such work.’24
Houdan-Deslandes explained that on the previous evening, more than 7000 Spaniards and 2300 French converged upon different parts of the isthmus. Although there was much confusion with so many people involved, by four in the morning the French soldiers in particular had performed miracles. ‘The work of that memorable night,’ he declared, ‘is perhaps the most astonishing ever to have been done since fortresses were besieged. We built with sandbags and casks filled with sand a line that was ... a minimum height of 9 feet, whose thickness was almost everywhere 12 feet.’25 What he found most extraordinary was the absence of firing from the Rock, so that they retired in the morning with no losses. That evening saw the arrival of the Duc de Bourbon, the cousin of the Comte d’Artois.
At this critical time, one young Jewish inhabitant had already decided to join a regiment to help defend Gibraltar. The muster lists show that Abraham Hassan enlisted with the 58th Regiment on 16 August 1782. He was described as a labourer by trade, 5 feet 5 inches tall, with a brown complexion, black eyes, black hair and a long face. Up to then, he had bee
n living in Hardy’s Town with the rest of the Jewish inhabitants. His mother Hannah later declared that he was ‘the only inhabitant who voluntarily took arms in defence of this important fortress ... and cheerfully and gratuitously did the duty and shared the dangers of a private soldier as a volunteer in the 58th’.26 Everything appeared so dire that on the 18th Spilsbury remarked: ‘The parsons exhort all to do their duty.’27 That same day, Eliott recorded in his diary an unusual sequence of events: ‘About 11 o’clock this forenoon six or seven barges with crimson awnings proceeded from Algaziras to Orange Grove attended by twelve gun boats. Soon after, the barges put off with the gun boats and steered back to Algaziras. The ship of the line at Orange Grove saluted them as they passed with 24 guns.’ The barges were then saluted by all the other ships and boats, and Eliott guessed that ‘this salvo ... is on account of the arrival of a Prince’.28
What happened next was the first trial of a floating battery, in front of the Duc de Crillon, the Comte d’Artois and the Duc de Bourbon. The barges had picked up the royal party at the Orange Grove and took them to Algeciras for the event, which Drinkwater watched: ‘The barges then proceeded to the battering-ship which was anchored apart from the rest, where they remained some time, and on the company’s quitting the ship, she fired a salute of eight guns.’ In the afternoon, though, the sailing trial of the floating battery did not appear entirely successful to those watching from the Rock: ‘about three [3 p.m.], the battering-ship got under way, and sailed to the northward, past the flag-ship. She endeavoured to sail back, but in vain, and was obliged to be towed to her station by ten gun-boats.’29
There had been no attempt to hide this demonstration, which took place in full view of the garrison. So confident were the French and Spanish royal courts about the plan to destroy Gibraltar that, far from being kept secret, details were being publicised all over Europe. Gibraltar became so famous that imaginative theatrical productions were staged in Paris showing how the end would come. News of the impending attack also reached America, and Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, the future President John Adams, who was at that time a diplomat in Holland: ‘We are hoping for the fall of Gibraltar, because we imagine that will facilitate a peace; and who is not weary of the war?’30 Even more incredible was the fact that thousands of people were making their way across France and Spain, hoping to witness this wonderful spectacle personally. The exceptions were the Comte d’Artois and the Duc de Bourbon, who had come – in theory at least – as military volunteers. In this official capacity, they anticipated sharing in the glory of the capture of Gibraltar.