by John Sugden
Yet Don Juan d’Ayssa, the commandant of El Castillo de la Immaculada Concepción, to give it its full name, knew about the British from the refugee who had tumbled in from Bartola. He had no illusions about holding his post against a determined attack. He had some twenty cannons, twelve swivels and a mortar, but only 149 armed defenders, near half of them regulars and the rest a mixed collection that included seventeen boatmen. The eighty-six other souls in the place included artificers, a chaplain, women, children, slaves and three malefactors. It was far from a formidable list, and hearing of the British advance d’Ayssa herded his cattle into the fort, stored as much water as possible and packed his wife and two messengers into a canoe to summon help from Granada.20
Back at Bartola, Lawrie had arrived in camp at last, telling Polson that MacDonald was now fighting his way upstream with the second division of the troops. Polson sent word back, urging them forward, and upon hearing from Nelson continued his own advance. He proceeded cautiously, sending Captain Richard Bulkeley of the 79th ahead with an advance to enfilade the Spanish garrison and secure a ridge that commanded the fort from the west and south. While Bulkeley’s men slogged through the jungle, where one was attacked by a disoriented jaguar, Nelson’s boats slowly proceeded upstream and Polson’s men marched on the adjacent banks.
The eleventh of April found them making camp a few miles below the fort, hidden from it by a bend of the river. Nelson landed the stores and four four-pounders. By nightfall Bulkeley, whose force was strengthened, had seized the ridge, discovering abandoned Spanish outworks, and taken a position on the river above the castle. D’Ayssa had managed to rush one more boat up the river, but was now effectively sealed off. A sixty-man relief force and supplies from Granada failed to reach the fort. Impatient, Nelson suggested the fortifications be stormed. In hindsight some merit can be seen in the proposal, but in truth it was reckless. An assault party would have had to advance against enemy fire up a bare hill, cross a ten-foot-wide ditch and climb seventeen feet to the rampart without scaling ladders or a breach having been knocked in the walls. Polson opted for the obvious alternative. To the south and west the commanding ridge was not more than three hundred yards from the castle, and effective batteries placed on its summit would soon compel the Spaniards to surrender.21
Guns would have to be hauled up the ridge and a supply route cut. A rough back trail was eventually hacked through the jungle southwest of the landing place. Most of it was out of sight of the garrison, winding along and within the skirt of the forest and then north, either to a British base in the woods southwest of the fort or ascending the reverse slope of the ridge that overlooked the castle. The most laborious work was done at night. Late on 12 April Nelson and his seamen dragged one of the four-pounders across the open space from the river to the ridge, bullied it up the slope and prepared a platform. By daylight the weapon was grinning devilishly upon the enemy fortress from the south-southwest. It began firing at first light with what Polson described as ‘great success’. Nelson pointed the guns himself, but perhaps with less than the precision of a practised siege artillerist. Experienced siege men knew that fortifications were best weakened at the base, so that the masonry above crumbled to form an incline into the breach. Nelson seems to have fired high. Indeed, one of his first shots brought down the Spanish flagstaff and colours.22
There was more difficulty bringing the other guns to bear. All three were brought up by Polson’s men the same morning, but at first they were badly positioned and discharged to ‘little effect’. The next day one was given to Nelson, while Despard shifted the other two further along the ridge to the west of the fort. Nelson situated his new piece between his first gun and Despard’s, and the bombardment at last began to tell. By now Polson was beside himself with admiration for a young naval officer who exceeded his duty to share every tribulation. The boy who had gratuitously negotiated with Indians, led the boats upriver, stormed a lookout post and reconnoitred the fort was now erecting and fighting batteries. ‘I want words to express the obligations I owe that gentleman,’ Polson wrote to Dalling in his official dispatch. ‘He was the first on every service, whether by day or by night. There was scarcely a gun fired but was pointed by him or Lieutenant Despard . . .’23
For a while Nelson and Despard did well and brought down the merlon on the keep but on the fourth day of firing their shot ran out. Only two hundred and fifty of three hundred and fifty four-pound shot supposed to have been packed in the boats could be found. Nelson, who would enjoy a reputation for detailed planning, may have learned expensive lessons from what was swiftly becoming a fiasco. Polson had arrived to attack a fort without scaling ladders or enough shot and the British guns fell silent. As urgent messages raced downstream to summon more ammunition the attackers wasted five days worrying the garrison with small-arms fire. They wormed into positions under the hill and near the river to prevent thirsty Spaniards from scrambling down to refill water casks, and started a mine from a distance of forty yards. The idea was to undermine and blow the fort wall with explosives, but the tunnel ran into rock and got no more than seventeen yards. In reply the Spaniards fired briskly with cannons and muskets, much of it directed against an advanced British breastwork, but there were few casualties on either side. During the entire siege no more than fifteen Britons were hit by hostile fire. One of the wounded was a man from the Hinchinbroke who got drunk and ran down the ridge towards the fort in pursuit of a pig.24
On 21 April the ammunition from MacDonald’s division arrived. Polson, whose men were busy making scaling ladders, was relieved – but not for long. Instead of the two hundred four-pound shot expected, only fifty-three were counted; the rest had been lost, either shipped by mistake up branching creeks, or gone to the bottom of the river in accidents with the boats. Nelson and Despard did what they could. They pummelled the fort again, knocking down a sentry box at one of the angles, but ran out of shot in two days. MacDonald’s men had also brought a couple of short-range twelve-pound carronades but only forty shot to serve them. To achieve even the most futile of bombardments nine-pounder balls had to be loaded. First, the carronades threw their shot short. Then, when the powder charge was increased to improve range, they lost velocity and one gun was blown off its carriage.
Outright incompetence had turned the siege into a farce and already much darker clouds were gathering. On the 19th the shortfall in provisions compelled Polson to cut rations, and the following night the weather finally broke. The rains, dreaded from the beginning, had 25 come.
5
The rain poured down all that night and the next day, and for much of almost every day after that. The river was turned into a raging flood, and the camp of crude shelters was transformed into a sea of misery and mud. At night horrific flashes of lightning stabbed through the black sky. In the words of Benjamin Moseley, the surgeon-general of Jamaica, whose deputy was on the ground, the ‘horrid tempests of lightning and thunder’ constituted ‘a magnificent scene of terror unknown but in the tropic world’.26
And the men – fatigued, tormented night and day by mosquitoes, sodden, and stinted on food and medicine by the slow and uncertain communications on the river – suddenly fell sick. The Indians began to die first, but on the 24th or after the soldiers also started ‘falling down in great numbers’, seized by a crippling distemper.27
Matters were soon serious. According to Dancer, the physician with the expedition, men initially went down with tertian fevers, suffering ‘cold, hot and sweating fits’ every other day. Many patients then slid into ‘quotidian’ fever, daily attacks during which the cold fits diminished but the others became more violent and exhausting. Dancer was soon alert to warning signs. In some the stricken boils about the body or pustules at the lips and nostrils ‘generally indicated a crisis or solution of the fever’, but other patients displayed ‘a universal yellowness’ that generally indicated the end was close. In mature cases a bloody flux and ‘obstructions of the viscera, particularly of the spleen’ de
veloped, and occasionally disorientation and derangement.28
Bogged down in a mosquito-ridden river valley and the marshy estuary at the mouth of the San Juan, the expedition was probably being scourged by malignant tertian malaria and dysentery, and perhaps also typhoid fever caused by the ingestion of food and water contaminated by the human sewage upstream. Horatio Nelson was among the first to be struck down. He had not been well in Jamaica and was arguably weakened by subsequent misfortunes. Years later he told the Duke of Clarence that he had drunk from a spring in which branches of the manchineel tree had been thrown. Manchineel contained toxic substances, and was used by the Indians to tip arrows, but whether Nelson drank enough to occasion the ‘severe and lasting injury’ he claimed may be doubted. More likely the campaign through jungle, marsh and water had taken its toll.29
For a while he struggled on, but release came suddenly. On 28 April, as Polson prepared to summon the Spaniards to surrender, more news and letters came into the camp. For Polson the most material revelation was that Kemble’s reinforcements had arrived at the mouth of the river from Jamaica. Kemble had two hundred regulars and two hundred and fifty volunteers, additional stores and two howitzers, which Dalling pronounced ‘by far the best kind of artillery’ for siege work. He also had instructions to supersede Polson in command, fortify the harbour and river of San Juan, and forward Dalling’s plans to control Lake Nicaragua, and capture Granada, Leon and Realejo. There was also a letter for Captain Nelson from Sir Peter Parker. He was to hand the Hinchinbroke to Captain Cuthbert Collingwood and immediately return to Jamaica on the sixteen-gun Victor, which had accompanied Kemble’s troops. Captain Bonovier Glover of the forty-four-gun frigate Janus had died, and Nelson was to take command. When Sir Peter had promised to find Nelson a better ship he meant it, and Horatio’s new commission was backdated to 22 March 1780. 30
At twelve noon on 28 April, Nelson set off downriver, lying pale and feeble in the bottom of an Indian boat and attended by John Tyson, his former purser from the Badger. He left his men to follow in the pinnace, and carried with him a letter from Polson to Kemble. Acknowledging the confusion upriver and the ‘flux’ ravaging the Indians and troops, Polson’s epistle was entirely frank about the crucial role Nelson and his seamen had played in the siege:
Captain Nelson’s going off directly puts it out of my power to be full on any subject, but I shall write you tomorrow by his pinnace, which he leaves for that purpose. I want words to express the praise due to Captain Nelson for the many services he did the army in coming here, and the great assistance he gave me in carrying on the siege. Hardly a gun [was fired] but was laid by him or Lieutenant Despard, and I shall miss him and his good men more than double their number of any others.31
But Polson wrote too early to transmit the really important news. On the afternoon of the day following Nelson’s departure the Spaniards surrendered their fort. Polson searched for a British flag to raise over the keep but found only one. It flew quite fittingly, though its master was gone . . . Nelson’s ‘jack’.32
The British found El Castillo de la Immaculada Concepción in a wretched condition, disease-ridden, fetid and pervaded by an ‘unsupportable’ stench from badly located privies. There were no proper sick quarters and the health of both the British and their Spanish prisoners deteriorated. When Kemble finally reached the fort on 15 May he was shocked. The soldiers were ‘in a most deplorable state’ and ‘everything’ was ‘in the greatest confusion. No part of our works destroyed, nor any preparations for defence.’ It was only ‘with difficulty’ that it was possible to find ‘one subaltern . . . to mount the castle guard’. As men fell sick they lay helplessly, some with legs swollen to ‘an enormous size’ and discharging water. Those who rallied relapsed after the slightest exertions, and the burdens on the dwindling numbers of fit or partly fit men became insuperable. The Indians and blacks, afraid of the sickness, were also disgruntled. They had been restrained from hunting, denied access to the fort and deprived of what they deemed to be legitimate plunder, especially the Spanish slaves. Muttering angrily, they simply defected.33
As Horatio descended the San Juan, he passed supplies and men moving up. Some, noticing the shocking state of the young captain, got their first intimation of what lay ahead. But the river mouth proved to be no relief. Nelson found a pestilential fort being erected at Greytown, Kemble organising his troops ashore and several transports riding in the harbour with His Majesty’s warships the Hinchinbroke, Victor, Resource and Ulysses. The old Hinchinbroke was opening at the seams, and a few desertions and a couple of floggings had been logged since Nelson had left. Much worse, disease was appearing in the ship.34
First Lieutenant George Harrison had died first, on 24 April. He was not an old man. Harrison had come to the Hinchinbroke from the Lowestoffe, and served as a master’s mate and able seaman the previous year before passing for lieutenant. Only three months before, on 14 January, he had moved up to first lieutenant, and during Nelson’s absence the ship had been his to command. So briefly an officer and gentleman, he was now buried ashore, far from home. He had learned the hard way that in the islands promotion – and death – came quick. Harrison’s place was taken by Joseph Bullen, and Peter Burns, an experienced officer, was borrowed from the Resource to support him.
Three days after Harrison’s death William Clark, a mariner of the Hinchinbroke, died. Then, on 30 April, the last day of Nelson’s command, two more seamen, William Robertson and John Mockler, also died. Mockler was a boatswain from Waterford. He was twenty-nine years old.
Collingwood was there to take command of Nelson’s frigate but the contagion gathered strength despite all his considerable efforts. Selections from the ship’s log tell their own sad story:
1 May:
John Stockbridge departed this life.
2 May:
James Huggins, surgeon’s mate, departed this life.
3 May:
Peter Bird, seaman, died.
4 May:
James Dunn and Edward Eustace died. The number of sick increasing daily.
5 May:
John Petson died.
6 May:
Sent a party ashore to erect tents on the beach for the sick.
8 May:
Peter Greveson departed this life. Sent forty sick to the tent.
9 May:
Ninety men sick.
10 May:
Michael Burchel and James Boyle died.
14 May:
John Leonard departed this life.
16 May:
Robert Needham, Thomas Ray and William Green departed this life.
17 May:
John Alexander died. Eighty-six men exceedingly ill with fevers, fluxes and scorbutic ulcers, and the number daily increasing.
18 May:
John Williamson, seaman, died . . .
And so it went on: the young and old, brave and weak, efficient and incompetent. Hosier’s expedition had been wiped out in these waters, and Vernon’s, and now it was happening again. By the end of the year one hundred and seventy of the two hundred on Collingwood’s muster had died, and ‘scarcely any of those who had been attacked by the distemper have recovered so as to be able to serve again’. The story was a similar one aboard the other ships at San Juan. On eight or nine transports barely twenty men were fit for duty early in July; the rest were sick or dead.35
Nelson missed the worst. He gave verbal reports to Kemble, Captain Patrick Fothringham, now the senior naval officer at San Juan, and Collingwood, and transferred to the Victor (Captain Samuel Hood Walker) for his passage to Jamaica, sailing on 2 May.
But he remained long enough to hear of the capture of the fort from two Indians who arrived at the river mouth grumbling about the sickness and lack of plunder. Horatio’s frail hand managed to write two letters, one to Polson expressing satisfaction that the job had been done before the arrival of Kemble, and the other to Dalling. From the governor he received a most gratifying reply. ‘Thanks to you,
my friend, for your kind congratulations. To you, without compliment, do I attribute in a great measure the cause.’36
6
On 17 May the Victor arrived at Port Royal, and an emaciated Nelson was carried ashore in a cot and taken to the lodging house of Cuba Cornwallis, a black woman who had taken her surname from the captain who had given her her freedom. She was popular among people of every colour, and a competent nurse, and it was she, rather than John Tyson the servant, who slowly put Horatio Nelson back on his feet. The Janus, his new command, was moored at the wharf preparing for sea, but for some time Nelson fought for life and thought of home. His illness set into a pattern of remission and resurgence, and there were days when he felt able to make shaky excursions out of doors.37 He met Dalling a few times and told him about the expedition, pointing out Polson’s chronic need of boats, boatmen, provisions, ordnance stores and an artillery officer. He liked the colonel and defended him, but dwelt on Lawrie’s broken promises and explained how the delays had exhausted the campaigning season so that the rains caught them in the swampy river valley rather than the airier uplands. To his English agent he expressed some annoyance that whatever prize money accrued from the capture of the public property in Fort San Juan would probably be shared with Kemble’s detachment as well as the crews of the Resource, Victor and Ulysses, none of which had played any part in the victory.38