On April 12, 1781, the Spanish opened fire on the fortress of Gibraltar. For almost two years, they had tried in vain to starve out the small British garrison. Now they resorted to more drastic measures.
The following years saw the use of fireships and floating gun platforms; desperate sorties and a grand assault; seemingly impossible tunnels and spectacular innovations in the use of artillery. The stakes were high, as Great Britain was simultaneously fighting for two of its most valuable possessions: Gibraltar in the Mediterranean and its colonies in America. For this reason, the Great Siege of Gibraltar is considered the largest battle of the American Revolutionary War.
Lasting over three years and seven months, the Siege of Gibraltar is considered the longest siege ever endured by British forces. Gibraltar is located on the northern side of the Strait of Gibraltar, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. Great Britain had conquered the peninsula, known for obvious reasons as the “Rock,” in 1704 from the Spanish, who were unable to reclaim it by either diplomatic or military means in the following decades.
But when the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, an opportunity arose. The French, who had sided with the American colonies and officially declared war on Great Britain in 1778, were faced with the problem that their fleet was too weak to fight a war overseas. Therefore, they persuaded King Charles III of Spain to come to their aid by promising to support him in the reconquest of Gibraltar and Menorca.
INF This forced Britain to fight a war on two fronts: in the Old World, Spain and France threatened its possessions directly; in the New World, it slowly lost control over its colonies. The question of how Britain divided its forces was decisive not only for the outcome of the siege but also for the outcome of the American Revolutionary War. Chapter 1: Invasion and Counterstrike Spain opened its offensive against Gibraltar on June 21, 1779.
The British governor, George Augustus Eliott , was a prudent man and had prepared for this eventuality. Around 5,400 soldiers guarded the natural fortress of Gibraltar. The Rock was surrounded by water on three sides, with impassable cliffs to the east and northeast.
Lieutenant Colonel William Green, the garrison’s chief engineer, had built state-of-the-art fortifications during the ten years before the siege. The only access from the land was secured by ramparts with a ditch, in front of which lay a flooded salt field. Several batteries on the hills above dominated the isthmus, and a long wall with bastions ran along the bay, catching any approaching ship in a hull-breaking crossfire.
It was clear to both sides that this fortress could not be stormed. It had to be slowly forced to its knees. The man who took on this task was Martín Álvarez de Sotomayor.
This experienced general sealed off Gibraltar from the outside within a few days. What made his life easier was the fact that there had already been a line of fortifications at the northern end of the isthmus since 1727, which he now manned and reinforced, while Admiral Antonio Barceló established a naval blockade. Álvarez had just enough men and ships to ensure the defenders ran low on supplies but not enough to prevent daring sailors from repeatedly breaking through to Gibraltar and bringing small amounts of provisions to the city.
This was because France and Spain were concentrating their forces on a different plan: they wanted to attack Great Britain directly to compel it to divide its forces still further. During the spring of 1779, they prepared an invasion fleet, which crossed the English Channel at the end of July. However, the expedition was doomed to fail.
There was only one minor naval engagement off Plymouth before starvation and disease weakened the invaders and forced them to retreat to the port of Brest. The French queen, Marie-Antoinette, she of cake fame! commented in disappointment: “Our fleet was not able to engage the English and has done nothing at all; it is a wasted campaign .
. . ” While England breathed a sigh of relief, Gibraltar now faced Spain’s full military might.
So far, both sides had limited themselves to reinforcing their positions, but at the end of August Eliott observed from the highest point of the Rock—from where he could survey the entire hinterland with his telescope—that the Spanish were setting up a large camp and building a mortar battery at Fort St. Philip. He now expected them to open fire any day and decided to take the initiative.
By September 12, 1779, Eliott’s engineers had completed a new battery high up on the cliff, Green’s Lodge, allowing them to take better advantage of the height. Instead of waiting for the Spanish to open fire, the defenders took action. As the Spaniards continued their work on the batteries of the northern barrier the following night, Elliot’s gunners opened fire on them.
When the workmen withdrew, they paused, only to resume firing as soon as they ventured out of cover again. The gun emplacement on the Rock was so high up that it commanded an almost perfect view of everything happening below. It proved so effective that Green had another one built at the very top.
This was a huge undertaking, as the summit was already difficult to reach on foot, and now a 24-pounder weighing a good two tons had to be heaved up there. 150 men with pulleys toiled for four days until the gun was finally mounted. The new position overlooked the entire isthmus and was appropriately named the “Sky Battery.
” The two new batteries became even more effective when a captain of artillery, John Mercer, experimented with a new firing mode. He constructed small mortar shells and fired them from ordinary guns in order to combine their deadly explosions with the range of the cannon. After several attempts, he was able to shorten the fuses of the grenades precisely to the point where they exploded before impact and sent a hail of shrapnel down upon the enemy.
After the siege, the young artilleryman Henry Shrapnel, who had witnessed the experiments, refined these improvised grenade-cannonballs into a weapon that would revolutionize the world of artillery: the shrapnel shell. Thanks to these new batteries, the defenders were in an ideal position—anyone approaching their walls had to run a deadly gauntlet across the isthmus. The one thing that worried Eliott was that supplies were already running low.
For this reason, he asked for reinforcements from Great Britain in the hope that they would arrive before hunger and disease overwhelmed his men. Chapter 2: Hunger and Impatience The constant expectation of an attack frayed the nerves of the defenders. Although they were now firing incessantly at the enemy workmen and the Spanish guns had long been ready, the Spanish had yet to fire a single shot at the fortress itself by the end of 1779.
This was part of Álvarez’s plan. He had learned from a deserter that the defenders’ supplies were running low and had decided to let hunger and fear do his work for him. In fact, the people of Gibraltar were already struggling with the consequences of the blockade.
Firewood was becoming scarce, fresh food was running out, and an outbreak of smallpox was affecting the civilian population. Eliott refused to intervene in the market and cap prices, which meant that even simple things like bread became immensely expensive. This was a sober calculation, as the governor knew that the high profits were the only incentive for many captains to risk ships and lives running the blockade.
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The Spanish “Dons,” as the English mockingly called them, fared little better. A winter storm devastated their camp, flooded their trenches, and almost paralyzed their already sluggish supply lines. Some of them were so hungry that they ventured near the defenders to steal vegetables from their gardens in the no man’s land.
The defenders drove them off with an artillery volley. Colonel Price, who had apparently not lost his sense of humor despite all the hardships, estimated the losses of this night time battle: “by the most authentic accounts to eight cabbages and a pennyworth of parsley. ” In mid-January, the guards on the sea wall excitedly announced the arrival a large fleet.
Soon they realized it was the long-awaited relief commanded by Admiral George Brydges Rodney, the commander of the West Indies Fleet. Rodney had sailed south from Plymouth about a month earlier, sent part of his fleet to the colonies at Cape Finisterre, and then fought his way past a Spanish fleet at Cape St. Vincent on January 16 in the so-called Moonlight Battle .
When the Royal Navy entered the Bay of Gibraltar, Barcelo withdrew with his inferior blockade fleet and Rodney landed unhindered. He brought the 73rd Highland Regiment of Foot as reinforcements and so many supplies that it took several days to unload the ships. INF The presence of the Royal Navy gave the defenders some respite, but this ended immediately when Rodney set sail for the Americas in mid-February.
Spain’s attempt to starve out Gibraltar entered its second round. For almost a year now, the Spanish had done nothing but set up a military zone around the peninsula and watch as the defenders starved and battled smallpox and the typhus that had come to Gibraltar with the supplies. To undermine their morale even further, Alvarez had his troops carry out mock attacks on replicas of the defenses within sight of the Rock.
But an actual attack was also not long in coming—although it would come from an unexpected quarter. Chapter 3: Fireships and Gunboats On the night of June 6–7, the Enterprise, one of the defenders’ ships, suddenly sounded the alarm. The men who rushed to the sea wall were presented with a terrifying sight.
Nine fireships lit up the harbor and were drifting dangerously fast toward the New Mole. Admiral Barcelo had set his sights on the two largest ships of the defenders, the Panther and the Enterprise, which had repeatedly managed to escort supplies through the blockade in recent months. The guns of the sea wall opened fire immediately, but they failed to sink all the fireships.
Only at the very last moment were a handful of death-defying men able to avert the danger by towing away the remaining fireships using rowboats. Barcelo was incandescent with rage and immediately set about his next plan. Three weeks later, the defenders were again roused from their sleep by an unexpected attack.
Under cover of darkness, several guns opened fire on the Panther from the bay. The defenders returned fire, but all they could see were muzzle flashes, so the enemy kept slipping through their fingers. The troublemakers soon turned out to be gunboats.
They each had a large cannon on the bow and were rowed, which made them highly maneuverable. These boats would become a real nuisance for the defenders throughout the siege. They returned night after night to fire a few bullets at the ships or the city and then immediately retreated.
Although they caused only minor damage, they spread fear and terror—nowhere was safe in the town. Worse still was that Barcelo used the boats to close gaps in the blockade. As a result, hardly any ships made it to Gibraltar anymore.
On top of that, the Sultan of Morocco, who had constantly sent supplies to the British across the strait, switched sides in mid-July, and the tiny stream of provisions dried up almost completely. It wasn’t long before the defenders ran out of fresh food and diseases such as scurvy began to spread. Scurvy, the disease of sailors, is caused by vitamin C deficiency and leads to physical fatigue, severe pain, and inexplicable bruising, often around the mouth, famously causing teeth to come loose over time.
By mid-September, almost the entire garrison was affected; some could only drag themselves to their posts on crutches. The defenders had reached a low point. Chapter 4: Vitamin and Other Bombs In early October, a Danish merchantman on its way to the Mediterranean ventured too close to the southern end of Gibraltar.
The garrison intercepted him and found oranges, lemons, figs, and raisins in its hold—just what the scurvy-stricken people desperately needed. The soldier John Drnkwater, who wrote one of the most detailed reports of the siege, noted: “The salutary effects were almost instantaneous: in a few days, men who had been considered as irrecoverable, left their beds to congratulate their comrades on the prospect of once more becoming useful to their country. ” However, the amount of fresh fruit was small and only brought short-term relief.
On top of that, the Spanish changed their strategy in October 1780. In a night-time operation, they destroyed the wooden huts in the gardens, set fire to the defenders’ palisades, and thrust several trenches into the no man’s land. Once again, the defenders tried to slow them down by bombarding the workmen.
William Green’s wife, who lived very close to a battery, complained about the inconvenience this caused her: “It absolutely shakes my bed with violence. ” Despite Mr. Green’s great dissatisfaction with what was shaking her bed, the Spanish soon completed a new position, the St.
Carlos Battery. Eliott was concerned, recognizing that they could reach almost the entire town from there. In order to give the attackers as good as they got, the defenders strove throughout the siege to optimize their gun positions and find new methods of harassing the enemy.
They were constantly trying to improve the precision of their artillery and do greater damage. The soldier Samuel Ancell wrote: “I suppose in a few weeks[‘] more practice, [the Gunners] will be so expert in leveling a gun that should a Spaniard raise his head above the epaulement [or parapet], it will be immediately severed from his shoulders. ” As the Spanish trenches drew closer, the defenders were no longer able to reach them from the upper batteries as their guns could not be tilted forward far enough.
To solve this problem, an engineer named George Koehler came up with yet another innovation, the so-called Koehler depressing carriage . This adjustable gun carriage allowed for the guns to fire downwards and was equipped with a glider to cushion the recoil. Koehler’s carriage was the precursor of later artillery recoil systems.
The people on the Rock had been fighting for their lives for two years now. The enemy had inflicted few losses on them, but hunger, disease, and despair were slowly wearing them down. The few provisions left in the storehouses had become almost inedible, and cats and dogs had been virtually wiped out.
Slowly but surely, the defenders’ hopes were fading. What they didn’t know was that a second relief fleet was already being assembled in England. This was a decision with enormous political implications.
Vice Admiral George Darby had to abandon the blockade of the French fleet in the port of Brest in order to gather enough ships. Because of this, the French were able to send a convoy of reinforcements to the American colonies—reinforcements that were to play a decisive role in the last major battle of the Revolutionary War, the Battle of Yorktown. Darby arrived in Gibraltar on April 12, 1781.
The Spanish gunboats tried to block his way but withdrew when his warships formed a line of battle. The defenders cheered with relief when the first ships docked at the New Mole and began to unload their cargo. But just a few moments later, a menacing rumble of thunder overshadowed the cheerful mood.
The Spanish bombardment had begun. Chapter 5: The Empire Strikes Back In the first 24 hours alone, around 3,000 cannonballs and mortar shells fell on Gibraltar. Although the defenders had been almost longing for the Spanish to do something at last, the attack now hit them harder than expected.
No one had suspected that they “would attempt to obliterate soldier and civilian alike with such a degree of ferocity, death and destruction. ” Soon the first houses collapsed, fires were raging throughout the city, and people fled south to escape the hail of bullets. The garrison bravely returned fire and hurriedly unloaded one ship after another so Darby could leave on April 20.
When he set sail, Gibraltar lay in ruins. Over the next few months, the Spanish guns thundered incessantly. The only exception to the rule was a brief daily pause in hostilities exactly six hours after sunrise.
This break, Ancell wrote, “arose from a custom, pretty general in Spain, and common, I believe, in most warm climates, that of indulging themselves with a meridian nap. ” In other words, the Spaniards took a siesta! On the other hand, the gunboats disturbed the defenders’ sleep night after night.
Many of them had moved south of the city and built an improvised village of huts and tents out of reach of the Spanish batteries. In their new dwellings, however, they were exposed to the gunboats, and more than once someone lost an arm or a leg when a cannonball rolled through their tent. On seeing this, Eliott decided to fight fire with fire and had two sea mortars brought to the Old Mole, massive guns that hurled bombs of more than 100 kg over long distances.
Soon they were being fired directly into the Spanish camp, thoroughly spoiling the “Dons’” “afternoon nap”! In July, there was a sudden commotion in the Spanish camp, as many of the troops left in order to help the French in the conquest of Great Britain’s other base in the Mediterranean, Menorca. The combined army was commanded by a man with the melodious name of Louis de Berton des Balbes de Crillon, or the Duc de Crillon for short.
It landed at Punta Prima on August 19 and laid siege to the British fort, St. Philip. On November 25, news arrived in London that the American colonies and their French allies had won the Battle of Yorktown.
Britain had lost the last major clash of the Revolutionary War. Many believed the defeat was the result of the decision to support Gibraltar. They maintained that the war in America could have been won if the French reinforcements had not been allowed to pass and if more troops had been sent there.
In their eyes, Britain had sacrificed America to save Gibraltar—and now Gibraltar was also at risk, as the Spanish had advanced their positions in the fall of 1781 and established two more positions near the battery of St. Carlos: St. Pascal, and St.
Martin. They now had three large batteries that could fire far into the town. This, and a deserter’s news of a pending attack, prompted Eliott to risk a sortie.
On the evening of November 26, 1781, the governor led around 2,200 reliable men to the Old Mole amidst the greatest secrecy. From there, they advanced in three columns, the one on the right against the newly created Mahon Battery, the one in the middle against St. Carlos, and the one on the left against St.
Martin and St. Pascal. The battle was short but fierce.
Eliott’s troops captured all three objectives and dug in. At a signal, Gibraltar’s cannons opened fire, covering the men in the trenches while they destroyed the cannons and placed incendiary devices. Soon after Eliott’s men had withdrawn, the powder magazine of the Mahon battery exploded in a thundering blast, and shortly afterwards the other positions went up in flames as well.
The sortie had been a complete success—in just one and a half hours, the garrison had undone the work of several months. Unfortunately for the defenders, the Spaniards recovered quickly. After just two months, they had repaired most of their positions, and the situation became even more dire than before.
On February 5, Menorca surrendered. Gibraltar was almost entirely isolated, its supplies were again running low, disease was rampant, and a more powerful army than ever before was assembling at its gates. Chapter 6: The Battle of the Engineers The French signaled their intentions for the final assault on Gibraltar quite openly.
They had decided on a plan they considered almost infallible and therefore had little concern for secrecy. At the heart of their strategy was a mammoth technical project contrived by the engineer Jean-Claude-Eléonor Le Michaud d’Arçon, just d’Arçon for short: he planned to build huge floating batteries in order to unleash hell on Gibraltar from the sea as well as the land before storming it from two sides. INF To thwart this plan, an engineer as capable as D’Arçon was needed—and Gibraltar had just the man in William Green.
The next phase of the siege was to be a battle of the engineers. Work on the batteries began in the spring of 1782 in the ports of Cadiz and Algeciras. D’Arçon’s men fitted ten large ships with armor almost a meter thick made of cork, plant fibers, and fresh wood, then placed all the guns on one side and covered them with a bombproof roof.
To prevent the floating batteries from catching fire, they covered them with hides and sand, which were watered via a pump system. These infernal machines could hardly be tackled by conventional means. William Green, however, had two aces up his sleeve: heated shot and a spectacular building project.
On the northeastern side of the peninsula, where the Rock was steepest, there was only enough space for a few guns, which is why the Spanish encountered less resistance there. To improve the situation, Green had his engineers create space by blasting galleries and tunnels into the hard rock. One ran from Green’s Lodge to a spur of rock called The Notch, another from the King’s Lines to the Queen’s Lines.
The construction of these tunnels was hard, slow, and dangerous work. It took over a month to dig the 25m from Green’s Lodge to the front of the cliff and install the first gun. While D’Arçon worked on his ships and Green on his tunnels, more and more troops arrived at the siege camp.
When the Duc de Crillon finally appeared with the last of the French soldiers and took command on June 21, he had more than 30,000 men at his disposal. The British high command was aware of this and sent Lord Richard Howe, the commander of the Channel Fleet, to relieve Gibraltar a third time. Meanwhile, Green focused on his second project, the heated shot.
Heated shot consisted simply of metal cannonballs that were heated in a special furnace and fired red hot. After impact, they were still hot enough to ignite any combustible material they came into contact with. This was particularly effective against ships, so Green was confident it would also work against the floating batteries.
By now, the siege of Gibraltar had become the number-one topic of discussion in Europe. Parisian theaters enacted the conquest of the peninsula, newspapers reported on the events, and tens of thousands traveled to the south of Spain to watch the spectacle of the final attack. Among them were influential men such as the young Comte d’Artois, who would later become King Charles X of France.
Soon, spectators were everywhere, the hills were covered with private boxes for the wealthy, and the siege camp was buzzing with activity. Everyone expected a rapid victory and a grand spectacle. Before the great assault began, the besiegers optimized their position one last time.
On the night of August 12–13, they drove a trench from the Mahon Battery to the southeast, closer to the Rock than ever before. The defenders struck back on September 8, torching the besiegers’ batteries with their heated shot. The tension was almost palpable—the fate of Gibraltar would be decided soon.
Chapter 7: The Grand Assault The first blow came from the sea. The besiegers’ warships sailed past Gibraltar in a line of battle, bombarding the town as they passed. This maneuver worked perfectly the first time, but when they tried to repeat it, the defenders used their heated shot, and the ships had to abandon the attack.
After this setback, the French couldn’t agree on how to proceed. D’Arçon insisted it was too early to deploy his batteries, while the Duc de Crillon wanted results at last—malicious tongues claimed it was because the high-ranking spectators were getting bored and pressed him to proceed. Two days later, before midday on September 13, 1782, the Spanish guns began a tremendous barrage, and the floating batteries left their anchorage.
INF The sudden onslaught caught the defenders flat-footed—no one had expected an attack in broad daylight, and the furnaces for the heated shot were not yet hot. As the floating batteries reached their destinations and one by one joined the cannonade, the defenders fired back from all guns. Even so, their cannonballs did little harm to D’Arçon’s ships—they simply bounced off.
Fortunately for them, the floating batteries faced some unexpected problems as well. They were not positioned correctly, and the waves made taking aim difficult, so only the two lead ships opposite the King’s Bastion could use their guns to full effect. When the defenders’ furnaces were finally hot enough, they unleashed a storm of red-hot bullets.
At first, the ferocious bombardment only kept the supporting ships at a distance, but gradually it also took its toll on D’Arçon’s floating fortresses. Every now and then, a lucky shot hit a gun hatch or got stuck in the padding, so that soon hundreds of small fires were smoldering in the ships. Around five o’clock, it became clear that the attack had indeed been somewhat hasty.
The land batteries ran out of powder, and about three hours later the floating batteries fell silent as well. Nevertheless, the defenders continued their barrage and by nightfall the first battery had gone up in flames. INF D’Arçon asked the Duc de Crillon for support, but the commander had long since given orders to abandon and destroy the batteries to prevent them from falling into enemy hands.
On the batteries, there was utter chaos. Many sailors couldn’t swim and were trapped on the burning ships. Captain Curtis, who commanded the defenders’ small fleet of gunboats, recognized their desperate plight and rescued almost 400 sailors, making him a hero to both besiegers and besieged.
Im Nevertheless, hundreds fell victim to the flames. By dawn, seven of the batteries had exploded, and three had burned to the waterline. D’Arçon’s plan had failed, and the much-heralded great assault had never even begun.
The spectators had been treated to a spectacle all right—just not the one they had bargained for. Despite the defeat, the Duc de Crillon had no intention of giving up. He had another trench constructed from the Mahon Battery to the Bay of Gibraltar and resumed the bombardment.
Eliott knew that his men wouldn’t be able to resist another assault. His last hope was Lord Howe. But there were over 250 enemy ships off Gibraltar.
Would he manage to break the blockade? Chapter 8: The Imperial Lifeline? When Richard Howe sailed into the Bay of Gibraltar on October 11, he expected to have to fight his way through a massive naval blockade.
But he was spared the battle. A heavy storm had torn apart the blockade and wrecked large parts of the blockading fleet. The remaining ships were still far superior in number, but they did not attack.
Instead, the two fleets avoided each other for several days so that Howe could send one transport after another to the New Mole. By the time he set off again for the Atlantic, Gibraltar’s stores had been filled and 1,600 fresh soldiers were manning the walls. After this setback, de Crillon’s camp shrank.
The disappointed spectators made their way home and many of the troops withdrew. Nevertheless, the back-and-forth of the blockade continued until, in early February 1783, the besiegers suddenly ceased firing and de Crillon informed Eliott that Great Britain, Spain, and France had made peace. Gibraltar had defied its besiegers.
For many Britons, the triumph left a sour taste. They were convinced that giving up Gibraltar would have saved the American colonies. Whether this was indeed the case is hard to say.
What is clear, however, is that Gibraltar went on to become Britain’s gateway to the Mediterranean. It would later open up the trade route to India via the Suez Canal, which became known as the British Imperial Lifeline. So, at least in part, Gibraltar formed the lynchpin for Britain’s role as a global player in the 19th century.
