by Sam Willis
The reasons for the Spanish fleet’s poor condition were in part economic and in part political. The Spanish economy, weak at the best of times, had been shattered by its membership of the First Coalition and the disastrous war against Revolutionary France. By 1797 the Spanish treasury had a deficit of 820 million reals. To make matters worse, Prime Minister Godoy was no friend of the Navy. Those courageous few who pointed out its deep flaws were ignored, bypassed or simply removed from office. Thus the Spanish navy found itself burdened with yet another problem; in the New Year of 1797 it was commanded by its third flag-officer in six weeks, Teniente General José de Córdoba y Ramos, a man with no experience of senior naval command. The previous incumbents had either resigned or been sacked for complaining about the shocking state of the fleet. Just how shocking it was can be judged from the fact that, when the Spanish fleet fought at St Vincent, there were less than 80 skilled hands aboard the flagship, out of a crew 900 strong.
The Stickler
The man who was hoping to find the Spanish was Admiral John Jervis, a most intriguing character. In the New Year of 1797 he was already an officer of immense experience but one with a decidedly mixed reputation. He had joined the navy as a young boy, aged only 13, in 1748, 49 years before he met the Spanish at Cape St Vincent. Almost his entire life had been lived in or around warships. He just missed the War of the Austrian Succession (1739–48) but went on to play a major role in the Seven Years War (1755–62). In 1759 he commanded the ship which led the British fleet up the St Lawrence River, an important preliminary to the subsequent capture of Quebec. During that assault he became intimate with, and was deeply impressed by, the young and impetuous General James Wolfe. Jervis then enjoyed a significant role in a number of campaigns during the War of American Independence (1775–83), including the Battle of Ushant (1778) and all three reliefs of Gibraltar (1780, 1781, 1782). In the peace that followed he finally became an MP and, broadly speaking, a supporter of the Whig Prime Minister, William Pitt, having been fiercely partisan throughout the war. His political single-mindedness and taste for faction coloured his behaviour for the rest of his life. He was utterly and aggressively committed to his own point of view and unwilling to compromise on anything, ever. An experienced and talented seaman maybe, he nonetheless leaves a distinct impression of being bigoted and thoroughly annoying.
The early years of the French Revolutionary war had provided Jervis with an extraordinary opportunity when he was sent to the West Indies, a land of treasure and vice. The war had swiftly overflowed to the Caribbean colonies, the source of both British and French wealth, and the British seized French territory as soon as they could. Several quick British victories gave Jervis the chance to make himself very rich if the rules that governed prizes, seizures and fines were followed, and wealthy beyond anyone’s wildest dreams if they were ignored. Jervis wholeheartedly and dogmatically ignored all of the rules to make himself as rich as he possibly could in as short a time as possible. His behaviour embarrassed the British, outraged the French and annoyed the Americans, whose trade became caught up in his thievery. He was even the subject of a vote of censure in the House of Commons.
One of the most important things to realise about Jervis in February 1797, therefore, is that he was ‘only’ an admiral: his curious behaviour in the Caribbean had prevented him from being elevated to a peerage, a reward which he could reasonably have expected to receive after a successful military campaign. It is certain that this episode left a deep scar upon both Jervis and his political masters who had been deeply unimpressed by his exploits. Similarly, it should be emphasised that his reputation is largely founded on events that occurred after the battle of St Vincent, the battle which gave him his title. While 1797 is famous in British naval history for that battle, it is equally notorious as the year that mutiny crippled the Channel and North Sea fleets at Spithead and the Nore. In the aftermath of the mutinies Jervis acquired a reputation for coldness, harshness and an extreme commitment to the maintenance of discipline. One of his stunts was to hang mutineers on a Sunday, which many saw as a breach of the Sabbath. Jervis believed it demonstrated the relentless nature of naval punishment and discipline on his watch; men found guilty of mutiny were hanged the next day, regardless, even, of God. His Mediterranean fleet became a byword for naval discipline.
Four years after his victory, Jervis became First Lord of the Admiralty and his reputation for having an iron fist was only reinforced. He now waged war against corruption and indiscipline in the dockyards, an approach which won him few friends at the time and few admirers since. Dockyards, like ships’ companies, were sensitive bodies that required careful handling by a knowledgeable master. While Jervis knew how far he could push ships’ companies, he was comparatively ignorant of the curious culture of naval infrastructure ashore. His methods outraged the dockyard workers and drove a wedge between the Admiralty Board and the Navy Board, creating animosity and tension between those twin pillars of British seapower at a time when that relationship needed to be harmonious. On 15 March 1804, Pitt attacked the policies of St Vincent, as he now was, and declared him ‘less brilliant and less able in a civil capacity than in that of a warlike one’,4 a telling opinion that had been harboured by many politicians and professional naval officers for some years.
These, therefore, are the threads of narrative that have attached themselves to St Vincent and they almost entirely define his modern reputation. In February 1797, however, as he paced his quarterdeck enjoying the warmth of the winter sun in the latitude of Gibraltar, his mind was free of the troubles of mutiny or of administrative corruption. His Mediterranean fleet was a highly polished weapon, bristling with energy and excitement. Nelson, one of his subordinates, summed up the prevalent culture.
‘They at home do not know what this fleet is capable of performing; anything and everything ... of all the fleets I ever saw, I never saw one, in point of officers and men equal to Sir John Jervis’s, who is a commander able to lead them to glory.’5
If there was any crack in Jervis’s confidence, then it was to do with the make-up of his fleet at exactly that time and in exactly that location, because five of his 15 ships had suddenly become unavailable through a series of accidents and had been replaced by five ships from the home fleet.6 Jervis knew his own ships and his own men, and he was exceptionally proud of them, but how would these newcomers perform?
The Storms
Within four months of the treaty of San Ildefonso, the British had abandoned the Mediterranean and withdrawn their forces on Corsica and Elba to Gibraltar, which remained firmly in their hands. It would be difficult to overestimate the scale of this blow. Corsica had only been taken from the French after a very hard-fought campaign in the spring of 1794, a matter of days before The Glorious First of June. It had provided the British with territory deep in the Mediterranean from which they could launch military operations. Without it, the Mediterranean was a French and Spanish lake.
Corsica was abandoned on 2 November 1796 and the fleet arrived in Gibraltar nearly a month later after an exhausting voyage that had shown the Mediterranean at its worst. Unrelenting westerly winds and fierce squalls whipped it into a tearing, treacherous maelstrom. When Jervis eventually made it to Gibraltar, a fierce hurricane smashed his already weakened squadron, forcing it even further west. He eventually took refuge in Lisbon, dangerously short of supplies.
England, meanwhile, was gripped by the fear of Franco-Spanish invasion. In December 1796 a powerful squadron had sailed from Brest for Ireland, where they planned to establish a bridgehead for an invasion of England via the rugged but poorly policed western coasts. They were only turned back by a succession of relentless Atlantic storms. The attempted invasion rattled both the government and the public, and the navy was at the centre of contemporary criticism. Why had British seapower, celebrated for being so powerful in the aftermath of The Glorious First of June, failed to protect British coasts?
Thus in February 1797, the momentum of the w
ar was firmly with the French and Spanish, and the Royal Navy had come under serious scrutiny. Jervis found himself in a situation where risk was acceptable because it was necessary. It had been made clear in 1794 that a naval victory could unite the British in a way that nothing else could. A naval victory was now essential, if only to absorb the pressure imposed by a united France and Spain and to sustain the British through this low period of the war.
One of the ingredients of the mixture that brought about the eventual battle was mercury. Mercury was essential to 18th-century processes for the refining of silver which, in broad terms, involved crushing the ore with water, salt, magistral (an impure form of copper sulphate) and mercury. The resultant slimy mixture was either spread thinly and left in the sun or placed in heated vats to enable the mercury to form an amalgam with the silver. The Spanish economy of the time, which relied so heavily on the silver extracted from the vast silver mines in Spanish South America, was therefore equally reliant on mercury. Without it, the Spanish could not extract the silver from their mined ore.
Mercury was mined in South America but there were also significant domestic deposits in the hills of Almadén in Southern Spain. In early February 1797, the Spanish fleet was at the Mediterranean naval base of Cartagena, the closest base to the Almadén mine. Some sense of the importance attached to mercury and the fear of British attack can be gained from the fact that the entire fleet was instructed to escort four mercury ships from Malaga to Cadiz before heading north and meeting up with a French fleet. If united, the combined Franco-Spanish fleet would be in a position to dominate the Western Approaches and, theoretically at least, allow the long-planned invasion of England to be launched.
Things quickly started to unravel for Córdoba when he found himself at the mercy of the unpredictable Mediterranean winter. His fleet was blown by another storm through the Straits of Gibraltar like a cork out of a champagne bottle and left scattered deep in the Atlantic, eight days’ sail from home. Jervis was in exactly the same location, waiting for Nelson to rejoin the fleet from Elba, where he had been sent to evacuate the remaining British forces. Thus the pieces fell into place: a poorly manned, disordered Spanish fleet struggling to get back to Cadiz with its precious mercury ships and a well-disciplined British fleet, in desperate need of a victory, patrolling a few miles to the north.
The Dispatches
In the collections of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich is a very fine mid-18th-century telescope that once belonged to John Jervis and was used by him at the Battle of Cape St Vincent. It is a beautiful piece. A little over 65 centimetres long when closed, it is roughly the size and shape of a rolling pin, with at one end a sliding eyepiece made of brass and at the other a snugly fitting brass cover for the objective lens. It is very plain. There are no engravings, names, dates, waves, flowers, animals or any number of the other curious engravings that you find on nautical curiosities. It is entirely functional and thus convincingly authentic; it has been built to be looked through, not to be looked at.
It is important for two reasons. First, very few commanders-in-chief’s telescopes have survived from this era. It is a very rare, and possibly unique, example of a telescope that was used in fleet battle. More importantly, however, it raises the question of what Jervis actually saw on Valentine’s Day in 1797. His experience matters more than one might suspect because what he saw differed from what he later described in his dispatches. In fact, Jervis’s is one of the most curious battle dispatches that has ever been written. To understand why, however, one must first understand how the battle unfolded.
By two o’clock in the morning on 14 February, Jervis had already known for an hour that something curious was afoot because he had heard the sound of signal guns. Half an hour later he heard from a Portuguese frigate that the Spanish fleet was nearby, a report that was confirmed in ever-increasing detail as the day dawned. By half past six in the morning, a fleet of strange ships could just be made out with the naked eye from the decks of Jervis’s flagship and seen quite clearly through his telescope. The first thing to realise about the Battle of St Vincent, therefore, is the time. If you count 06.30 as the beginning of their contact, and you consider that the prizes were secured at sunset, then the entire day, from dawn until dusk, was taken up by the battle. A lot can happen in 12 hours of contact with the enemy and this battle was no exception.
Several stages of the battle stand out as important and several events as unique. The Spanish fleet was taken by surprise when it was discovered and was split into two significant sections. This was a godsend for any attacking admiral, as had been definitively proven by the difficulty of Howe’s attack on the well-formed French line on 1 June 1794. Then, several ships had been unable to break through and those that did had been so devastated by French fire that they had become vulnerable to counter-attack. A pre-existing gap, on the other hand, could be exploited by a skilful commander to divide the enemy fleet with comparative ease, though it demanded a high degree of seamanship from both the commander and his captains.
Thus the first part of the British attack at St Vincent entailed Jervis’s fleet, in perfect order, attacking from the north-east and cutting the Spanish fleet in two, with the larger section, containing Córdoba’s flagship, to the north and the smaller section, containing the mercury ships, of which the British were unaware, to the south. This was no easy feat. Jervis had to get his fleet in good order and then thread it through the eye of a moving needle whilst under fire. Once through, he changed course by tacking the entire fleet under the guns of the enemy, a tricky manoeuvre even on a calm day with no one else in sight and an opportunity for the Spanish to counter-attack. The Spaniards’ southern division made three spirited attempts to break Jervis’s line at this point and, though each attempt was beaten off, their efforts damaged many British ships and disrupted the British line.
Jervis then led those British ships that could still manoeuvre in an attack against the northern division of the Spanish fleet, which was doing everything in its power to reunite with the southern section. If they had been successful, they could have turned the tables on the damaged and divided British and made for Cadiz in a single body. It was at this stage that Jervis signalled the British rear division to tack, and thus to counter the attempt of the Spanish to reunite. However, Vice-Admiral Sir Charles Thompson, leader of Jervis’s rear division, failed to respond. We do not know why the signal was ignored, or perhaps missed, but we do know that Jervis was later furious with Thompson. The rest of the ships in the rear division were presented with a professional conundrum for which there was no right or wrong answer. Should they follow their divisional leader, who was clearly not following the Admiral’s instructions, or break out of their own division and act as Jervis had signalled? It was a dilemma that was frequently posed in fleet battle when smoke and limited signalling systems created confusion.
It was Nelson in the 74-gun Captain, a few ships astern of Thompson, who acted according to his Admiral’s orders rather than to the behaviour of his divisional leader. Significant time had been lost and wearing, rather than tacking, was now the most appropriate, as well as the more reliable, method of changing course and intercepting the Spanish northern division, as Jervis clearly intended. Nelson therefore wore ship and, as soon as he had broken the spell cast by Thompson’s curious behaviour, other ships followed suit and prevented the junction of the two sections of the Spanish fleet.
Nelson’s manoeuvre was particularly courageous because it brought his relatively small ship into action at the head of the British line and into the heart of the cauldron of huge ships surrounding the Spanish Admiral, who had yet to open fire. The engagement then became general and several British ships found themselves in the thick of it, particularly Thomas Frederick’s Blenheim, Horatio Nelson’s own Captain, Cuthbert Collingwood’s Excellent, Thomas Troubridge’s Culloden, George Martin’s Irresistable and James Saumarez’s Orion. And then something quite extraordinary happened: Nelson led a boarding party
from the diminutive two-decker, Third Rate HMS Captain, onto a powerful Spanish 80-gunner, the San Nicolas, and secured her as a prize. Then he did it again, this time attacking from the decks of the ship he had just captured, onto a three-decker, the 114-gun First Rate San Josef, which he also captured.
It was the first time that a British flag-officer had led a boarding party in person since Sir Edward Howard in 1513, although Howard had lost his life when he had been thrown overboard in full armour. It was also the first time in any 18th-century fleet battle that a Spanish First Rate had been captured7 and it was the first time that one captured ship had created a ‘bridge’ to another. Moreover, it had all been achieved by a man who was experiencing fleet battle for the very first time. Nelson had fought in many previous single-ship actions and amphibious operations, but he had never before experienced the unique carnage and chaos of a fleet engagement.
The British also captured another Spanish First Rate, the 112-gun Salvador del Mundo as well as another Third Rate, the 74-gun San Ysidro. Jervis saw some of these remarkable events from his quarterdeck and immediately after the battle personally congratulated Nelson; in fact, he hugged him. He knew that the British, outnumbered 27 to 15, had won a convincing victory and, more importantly, he knew how it had been achieved.
Robert Calder, Jervis’s flag captain, was given the honour of taking the dispatches back to London in the frigate Lively. Calder arrived in the Scillies on 27 February and then headed to St Ives, the sooner to reach London overland because of foul weather in the Channel. He was extremely careful to keep the news to himself and prevent any other news of the battle from reaching the public before his. Only he, his letters and his servant were allowed ashore. Calder travelled across the endless wastes of Bodmin Moor, Dartmoor and Salisbury Plain before dropping down into the Thames Valley and proceeding on to London. He arrived at the Admiralty and handed over the letter to Evan Nepean, the Secretary of the Admiralty, who had replaced Philip Stephens in March 1795.4 And this is what it said.