by John Sugden
Far from being cautious, the Admiralty apparently favoured a plan to storm Cadiz to destroy or capture the shipping, dockyards and arsenal, and in April Jervis was told ‘that under the present circumstances of the war, spirited and vigorous measures, involving some degree of risk, are so far preferable to a system of caution and reserve, as to justify’ his serious consideration. The assault was proposed, not ordered, but on the supposition that Jervis might try it he was given a written order to General Stuart, who commanded the British army in Portugal. Stuart was to supply Jervis with the troops and artillery Nelson had withdrawn from Elba, and personally to superintend their use at Cadiz. Furthermore, Jervis was also furnished with an order to O’Hara for a further one thousand soldiers from Gibraltar. Seldom had government seemed so enthusiastic.46
On this occasion it seems to have been the admirals on the spot who gave the operation the thumbs down. The commander-in-chief considered attacking St Mary’s to gain control of the harbour mouth, while Nelson contemplated an even bolder assault. ‘I long to be at them,’ he wrote after reading a report that half the guns on the line wall of Cadiz were unmounted. But the place was simply too powerful. According to the British consul at nearby Faro in Portugal, there were four thousands soldiers in Cadiz. Apart from St Mary’s, the castle of St Sebastian on the point of the spit and a few mortars near the back of the town and elsewhere, the line wall towards the bay alone bristled with seventy-eight guns. An attack was not feasible. In June, Nelson was commandeering four additional howitzers and field pieces, five hundred shells, ‘cases of fixed ammunition’, artillery men, ‘a devil cart’, scaling ladders and a bomb ketch, but the idea of a direct assault on the Spanish fortifications was wilting if not already dead. It is possible that the materiel was then merely being sought for a naval bombardment and the proposed expedition to Tenerife.47
Jervis and Nelson probably thought the Admiralty proposal through, and were tempted before eventually discarding it in favour of a less risky naval bombardment. Hitherto, they had banked on their close blockade damaging Spain economically and forcing Mazarredo out to fight. Starved of incoming sea-borne supplies, the Spaniards would have to draw upon their reserves and weaken their ability to threaten Britain’s ally, Portugal. More desirable still, the Spanish fleet might be driven to risk battle, either to spare the town or to protect the expected treasure ships. Rumours of the missing treasure ships were still flying about, and Nelson supposed the mercantile community of Cadiz was in a daily lather about them.48
Unfortunately, although the blockade was rigorous it manifestly failed to move the enemy fleet, and the British admirals grew more desperate. The contest had begun in a somewhat gentlemanly fashion, with munificence shown on both sides. Jervis ordered Nelson to forewarn Mazarredo that the British would be firing salutes to honour the king’s birthday on 4 June, so that the Spanish ladies might be spared unnecessary alarm. Nelson was also in regular communication with his Iberian opposite numbers. They sent him newspapers and letters, and he gave written testimony in aid of senior Spanish admirals facing enquiries into their conduct off Cape St Vincent. Among many extravagant compliments that Nelson received from ashore were the earnest respects of Don Jacobo Stuart, late captain of the Santa Sabina. 49
Despite the niceties, however, Jervis and Nelson were not content with imprisoning the Spanish fleet. They wanted to destroy it, and Nelson at least was eager to perform before his audience at home and in the Mediterranean. Hoping for a Spanish break-out, he conscientiously monitored every suspicious movement on the part of the trapped fleet. Strange signals, furtive shifts of anchorage and uncommon comings and goings all had Sir Horatio clearing for action. With reinforcements from Jervis raising his force to ten sail of the line, he was sure that his inshore squadron alone could defeat Mazarredo. ‘There will be no fighting beyond my squadron,’ he wrote. Organising his line of battle, with his own ship naturally at its head, Nelson reassured his superior ‘that I will make a vigorous attack upon them the moment their noses are outside the Diamond . . . it will, sir, be my pride to show the world that your praises of my former conduct have not been unworthily bestowed’. When Mazarredo sat still, the British grew angrier. ‘What a despicable set of wretches they must be,’ Nelson confided to his wife.50
There was, in fact, nothing despicable about the Spanish inertia. Their admirals were in no hurry to court certain defeat, especially when peace seemed merely months away, but their inactivity encouraged the British to increase the level of violence. By the beginning of June their commander-in-chief was concluding that more serious action had become necessary, both to spur the lethargic Spaniards and to divert the minds of British sailors from the mutinies in the Channel fleet. It was time to unleash what he called ‘hot war’.51
Brutality had always been the defining feature of warfare, but the barbaric excesses of the wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had stimulated something of a reaction. The growth of rationalism and decline of intense religious conflict had encouraged men to think that the difficulties between states were better solved through negotiation than armed struggle. A more humanitarian climate, in which the idea of international law and the influence of the jurists Grotius and Vattel gained ground, tentatively nurtured principles that moderated the impact of conflict in western Europe and increased protection for non-combatants and prisoners of war. But in the new world spawned by the French Revolution, spiced by the resurgence of competing ideologies and desperate struggles for national survival, the powers retreated once again towards savagery. The relatively bloodless warfare of manoeuvre, so prevalent at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was replaced by terrifying battles of annihilation, battles in which Napoleon and Nelson would demonstrate their genius. Jervis’s plan to bombard the town of Cadiz, firing shells directly into civilian quarters rather than the shipping and fortifications, was not entirely wanton. Its purpose was to ‘irritate the inhabitants’ and ‘make them force out their fleet’, but it fitted the trend and struck some at least as shameful.52
The naval bombardment was intended to inflict psychological as well as physical damage. On 3 June, Nelson was told to leak a warning to the Spaniards that bomb vessels were being prepared to ‘lay Cadiz in ashes’. The threat only induced the enemy fleet to hunker down in a securer anchorage, but it was no idle one. On 2 July the Thunder bomb, commanded by the redoubtable Gourly and armed with a twelve-and-a-half-inch-calibre mortar and a ten-inch howitzer, arrived from Gibraltar with a detachment of artillery. With her came the Urchin gunboat fitted with a twenty-four-pounder and a small howitzer. Without delay a formidable trio got to work on 3 July: John Jackson, master of the Ville de Paris, freshly noted for destroying an enemy privateer with one of the gun launches; Lieutenant Charles Baynes, a respected artillery officer; and Captain Miller of the Theseus, whose interest in pyrotechnics would ultimately be his undoing. After carefully sounding the water towards Cadiz and assessing the blind spots of relevant Spanish batteries, they pinpointed a suitable station for the bomb vessel. The attack was scheduled for the same evening, and Nelson promised Jervis that Mazarredo would get his fill of fighting if he chose to come out; if he did not it would be ‘a warm night at Cadiz’.53
Nelson believed in personal leadership. He had learned to live with the risks of mutilation and death, and now performed acts of bravery with almost routine abandon. It was not really his job to endanger himself at the head of an attack, but he grubbed for glory on every occasion and also knew that every time he led from the front he validated his leadership among the men. They knew he was willing to face risks as great as he was asking them to face – even greater, since he took such a prominent position in the uniform of a significant officer. Thus, at about eight o’clock in the evening, Nelson took personal charge of the Thunder as it was taken in tow by some of the launches, and slid purposefully through the clear and moonlit night towards the tower of St Sebastian, within 2,500 yards of the city walls. ‘I intend, i
f alive and not tired, to see you tomorrow,’ he had time to write to the commander-in-chief.54
The advance was uncertain. Miller tried to lead the way in a boat, but the Thunder was forever steering off course, and it was about ten before it anchored, supported by the Goliath ship of the line, Terpsichore frigate, Fox cutter and a fleet of launches and barges. The Spaniards were expecting the attack. In fact, the British had advertised it themselves by their futile attempt to goad Mazarredo, and every movement of Nelson’s squadron was being hungrily scrutinised. Already the enemy batteries and an intimidating flotilla of Spanish gunboats and barges were firing briskly, but sometime before eleven the undaunted Thunder was ready to begin its uncomfortable task. Shells screeched up into the night, and then arched down towards the startled town. Some exploded in midair as their fuses burned prematurely, but others crashed angrily to earth, and the sky above Cadiz soon flickered red where fires had broken out in three places.
After midnight the Spanish gunboats and barges surged forward in a desperate attempt to arrest the bombardment. Their admirals doubted the wisdom of the attack, and apparently tried to call it off, but the order reached the flotilla commander, Don Miguel Irigoyen, too late. This was small-boat work in dangerous waters, and Nelson’s own flotilla, consisting of two boats from every ship, was dispersed to protect the Thunder. Manned by prime men with pikes, cutlasses, broad axes, pistols, muskets, sledgehammers, handspikes, clamps and ropes – in short, everything necessary for warding off or towing away Spanish vessels or killing and wounding their occupants – it had been assembled beside the Theseus and was commanded by Captain Miller.
When he saw the Spanish flotilla advancing through the darkness, Nelson ordered Miller to counterattack, but an unusual unsteadiness troubled the men in the British boats and the admiral grew impatient. Ordering his barge alongside the Thunder, Nelson manned it with the ubiquitous Captain Fremantle and eleven of his best men and was soon pulling vigorously towards the oncoming Spaniards. Inspired by the sudden intervention of their leader, some of the British tars raised a cry of ‘Follow the admiral!’ and made after him.55
A fierce, cutlass-clashing boat action was soon in full swing, every bit as impetuous and nerve-testing as the greater struggle off Cape St Vincent. Seeing the angry British moving grimly forward, the Spaniards faltered and the heads of their boats began to turn as if to flee. Miller’s ten-man pinnace ploughed into the after oars of a fifty-three-foot Spanish mortar vessel armed with a howitzer and a pair of swivels, but was held off in a nasty exchange of pistol shots and missiles. Miller narrowly escaped injury when one discharged pistol was flung with terrific force across his face. Nelson, in the meantime, attacked another mortar boat further inshore but lost it when Irigoyen ran his large barge, the San Pablo, into the starboard side of Nelson’s barge and tried to board her. Both sides flung themselves upon each other furiously. The Spaniards had thirty or so men, and outnumbered Nelson and his comrades more than two to one, but a desperate and bloody hand-to-hand melee ensued. Pistols flashed in the dark, and antagonists shouted, cursed and hacked each other down with any weapon to hand. ‘It was cut, thrust, fire and no load again – we had no time for that,’ one Briton recalled.56
John Lovell, one of Nelson’s guard, remembered that ‘the crew of the [British] barge, hardly waiting for orders, literally scrambled over Nelson, and in a few seconds possessed themselves of Don Miguel Tregoyen [Irigoyen] before Nelson had time to look round him.’ But Nelson was himself in the thick of the fight, and two years later boasted that ‘it was during’ the action ‘that perhaps my personal courage was more conspicuous than at any other . . . this was a service hand to hand with swords, in which my coxswain, John Sykes (now no more) saved twice my life’. Certainly Sykes proved his devotion to Nelson with astonishing selflessness that night. Twice he parried blows aimed at the rear admiral, and on one occasion interposed himself in the path of a slashing Spanish sabre. ‘We all saw it,’ one of his friends recalled. ‘We were witnesses to the gallant deed, and we gave in revenge one cheer and one tremendous rally.’ Sykes fell with wounds to his head, shoulders and back, and Nelson, it is said, caught him in his arms. ‘Sykes,’ he is said to have cried, ‘I cannot forget this!’57
Fremantle was among the others injured, getting ‘a good deal cut’ about the face as he boarded, and Nelson’s party would probably have been shark bait if Miller had not run his boat upon the Spaniard’s larboard side, and boarded her in support. Eighteen Spaniards were slain in the debacle, and Irigoyen, downed with at least two wounds, was made a prisoner, along with all of his men who did not swim ashore. The two Spanish boats Nelson and Miller had previously engaged were also captured, the first by a spirited boarding action led by Weatherhead from the Theseus’s launch, and the remaining enemy vessels were driven into a creek or under the walls of Cadiz. In British hands the Spaniards also left their dead and 121 prisoners, at least thirty of them fatally wounded. Ninety-one were later handed back to Mazarredo as part of an exchange. It had been a spectacular clash, and spared the Thunder to do its work, but the bombardment itself failed. The large mortar was a great disappointment. It threw the shells short and then broke down, and Nelson called off the action towards three in the morning. The results were meagre. A few buildings had been pulverised and some civilians hurt; rumour had it that a house had been demolished with the loss of a child and a woman’s arm, and that several priests had been killed in a convent. ‘That no harm,’ Nelson remarked of the latter, ‘they will never be missed.’ As a piece of terror the attack had some success, and several women apparently abandoned the town rather than face further fire, but its military value was negligible.58
Scholars have followed Nelson in stressing the courage shown in the boat fight, and certainly the admiral, Miller and Weatherhead and their men acted in the finest traditions of the service. Their courage was beyond praise. But that said, the attack was not only savage and futile but also somewhat ineptly conducted. Mention has already been made of the Thunder’s shaky advance and her mortar’s inefficiency. More alarming was the unsteadiness shown by some of the British seamen under fire. Indeed, many of the boats that were supposed to tow Thunder and Urchin out of the combat zone after the bombardment ended actually abandoned them and tried to flee precipitately back to the covering fire of the Goliath and other ships. Miller rallied some, but resorted to enquiring ‘of every boat to what ship she belonged as a security for her behaviour’.59
At least Sir Horatio’s own losses were small. A launch was sunk by a raking shot from a Spanish gunboat, and had to be salvaged by the Culloden, and one man was killed and twenty-seven wounded. Among the latter was another of Nelson’s close followers. Thomas Ramsay, a quartermaster’s mate, was one of the oldest surviving Agamemnons, but he had followed his commander into the Captain and Theseus and boarded the Spanish ships of the line at Cape St Vincent. Here, in another desperate action, his left arm was shattered by a ‘ragged [musket] ball’, and pieces of bone were still being removed from the wound days afterwards. Within three weeks the injury putrefied and Ramsay’s arm had to be amputated above the elbow.60
A second bombardment of Cadiz was conducted on the night of 5 July, using the resuscitated Thunder (a second howitzer having replaced its defunct mortar), the Urchin and the two captured Spanish mortar vessels sinisterly renamed Terror and Strombolo. This time Miller and his assistants went five and a half miles beyond the British front line to within a mile of the town to find a position from which to attack. It was just south of the lighthouse near St Sebastian and a little west of the peninsula, where the defences were weaker. Nelson controlled the operation from the Theseus, and delegated Miller and Captains Richard Bowen and John Waller of the Terpsichore and Emerald frigates to command the boats towing the bomb and mortar vessels into action. Some stalwart reinforcements joined the attack. ‘Johnson, first lieutenant of the Emerald, is a man after your own heart,’ Jervis told Nelson. ‘Put him in a way of taking a gun boat and I will
answer he succeeds or loses his life in the attempt.’ To increase incentives the commander-in-chief promised that any lieutenant who captured an enemy gunboat would immediately become her captain.61
On this occasion the Spaniards were better prepared, and had redistributed their ships and launches. Nor did they repeat their previous mistake, and make any brave but injudicious assaults. Though the Spaniards fired sharply on the attackers, their gunboats made only one half-hearted foray towards the British, and their ships merely manoeuvred themselves into more secure positions. Yet the fresh attack, like the last, revealed unexpected weaknesses in what the British considered to be a crack force. Miller got the Urchin and the mortar boats into position, but Bowen, who commanded the bomb, anchored her earlier than Miller planned, increasing the range over which shells would have to be thrown. Furthermore, when Miller was still 450 yards short of his position, and the Spaniards discovered the attack, opening a heavy fire of shot and shell, the indiscipline and cowardice that had marred the previous engagement reappeared. Some of the small boats showed a distressing readiness to cut towropes and scatter which Miller was only partly able to parry with ‘great exertions and the strongest language’.62
Despite these difficulties Nelson’s men were soon blazing away, hurling a total of some eighty-four shells into the town with what Jervis called ‘excellent direction’. All but half a dozen appeared to hit the target, producing vast pillars of smoke in the northwestern part of Cadiz. As usual, Sir Horatio found the fighting irresistible and went forward to supervise from the Thunder. He was pleased with the bombardment, but annoyed that his small-boat flotilla gave such inadequate cover against enemy gunboats, and Miller was ordered to reform it. Most if not all of the British boats were armed with carronades, but Miller found them ‘much dispersed and many at a shameful and completely useless distance’. Again he found himself calling them in.63