Nelson (128 page)

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.
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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
.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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’.
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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, if alive and not tired, to see you tomorrow,’ he had time to write to the commander-in-chief.
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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.
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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.
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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!’
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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