CHAPTER XXXIII

A breach being made in the walls, our soldiers give the assault, and

take the place without opposition—our sailors at the same time, become

masters of all the other strengths near Bocca Chica, and take

possession of the harbour—the good consequence of this success—we move

nearer the town—find two forts deserted, and the Channel blocked up

with sunk vessels; which however we find means to clear—land our

soldiers at La Quinta—repulse a body of militia—attack the castle of

St. Lazar, and are forced to retreat with great loss—the remains of our

army are re-embarked—an effort of the Admiral to take the town—the

economy of our expedition described

Having cannonaded the fort during the space of four hours, we were all

ordered to slip our cables, and sheer off; but next day the engagement

was renewed, and continued from the morning till the afternoon, when

the enemy’s fire from Bocca Chica slackened, and towards evening was

quite silenced. A breach being made on the other side, by our land

battery, large enough to admit a middle-sized baboon, provided he could

find means to climb up to it, our general proposed to give the assault

that very night, and actually ordered a detachment on that duty.

Providence stood our friend upon this occasion, and put it into the

hearts of the Spaniards to abandon the fort, which might have been

maintained by resolute men till the day of judgment against all the

force we could exert in the attack. And while our soldiers took

possession of the enemy’s ramparts without resistance, the same good

luck attended a body of sailors, who made themselves masters of Fort

St. Joseph, the fascine batteries, and one Spanish man-of-war; the

other three being burnt or sunk by the foe, that they might not fall

into our hands. The taking of these forts, in the strength of which the

Spaniards chiefly confided, made us masters of the outward harbour, and

occasioned great joy among us, as we laid our accounts at finding

little or no opposition from the town: and indeed, if a few great ships

had sailed up immediately, before they had recovered from the confusion

and despair that our unexpected success had produced among them, it is

not impossible that we might have finished the affair to our

satisfaction, without any more bloodshed; but this step our heroes

disdained as a barbarous insult over the enemy’s distress, and gave

them all the respite they could desire, in order to recollect

themselves. In the meantime, Mackshane, taking the advantage of this

general exultation, waited on our captain, and pleaded his own cause so

effectually that he was re-established in his good graces; and as for

Crampley, there was no more notice taken of his behaviour towards me

during the action. But of all the consequences of the victory, none was

more grateful than plenty of fresh water, after we had languished five

weeks on the allowance of a purser’s quart per day for each man in the

Torrid Zone, where the sun was vertical, and the expense of bodily

fluid so great, that a gallon of liquor could scarce supply the waste

of twenty-four hours; especially as our provision consisted of putrid

salt beef, to which the sailors gave the name of Irish horse; salt

pork, of New England, which, though neither fish nor flesh, savoured of

both; bread from the same country, every biscuit whereof, like a piece

of clockwork, moved by its own internal impulse, occasioned by the

myriads of insects that dwelt within it; and butter served out by the

gill, that tasted like train oil thickened with salt. Instead of small

beer, each man was allowed three half-quarterns of brandy or rum, which

were distributed every morning, diluted with a certain quantity of his

water, without either sugar or fruit to render it palatable, for which

reason, this composition was by the sailors not ineptly styled

Necessity. Nor was this limitation of simple element owing to a

scarcity of it on board, for there was at this time water enough in the

ship for a voyage of six months, at the rate of half-a-gallon per day

to each man: but this fast must, I suppose, have been enjoined by way

of penance on the ship’s company for their sins; or rather with a view

to mortify them into a contempt of life, that they might thereby become

more resolute and regardless of danger. How simply then do those people

argue, who ascribe the great mortality among us, to our bad provision

and want of water; and affirm, that a great many valuable lives might

have been saved, if the useless transports had been employed in

fetching fresh stock, turtle, fruit, and other refreshments from

Jamaica and other adjacent islands, for the use of the army and fleet!

seeing it is to be hoped, that those who died went to a better place,

and those who survived were the more easily maintained. After all, a

sufficient number remained to fall before the walls of St. Lazar, where

they behaved like their own country mastiffs, which shut their eyes,

run into the jaws of a bear, and have their heads crushed for their

valour.

But to return to my narration. After having put garrisons into the

forts we had taken, and re-embarked our soldiers and artillery (a piece

of service that detained us more than a week), we ventured up to the

mouth of the inner harbour, guarded by a large fortification on one

side, and a small redoubt on the other, both of which were deserted

before our approach, and the entrance of the harbour blocked up by

several old galleons, and two men-of-war that the enemy had sunk in the

channel. We made shift, however, to open a passage for some ships, that

favoured a second landing of our troops at a place called La Quinta,

not far from the town, where, after a faint resistance from a body of

Spaniards, who opposed their disembarkation, they encamped with a

design of besieging the castle of St. Lazar, which overlooked and

commanded the city. Whether our renowned general had nobody in his army

who knew how to approach it in form, or that he trusted entirely to the

fame of his arms, I shall not determine; but, certain it is, a

resolution was taken in a council of war, to attack the place with

musketry only. This was put in execution, and succeeded accordingly;

the enemy giving them such a hearty reception, that the greatest part

of their detachment took up their everlasting residence on the spot.

Our chief, not relishing this kind of complaisance in the Spaniard’s,

was wise enough to retreat on board with the remains of his army,

which, from eight thousand able men landed on the beach near Bocca

Chica, was now reduced to fifteen hundred fit for service. The sick and

wounded were squeezed into certain vessels, which thence obtained the

name of hospital ships, though methinks they scarce deserved such a

creditable title, seeing few of them could boast of their surgeon,

nurse, or cook; and the space between decks was so confined that the

miserable patients had not room to sit upright in their beds. Their

wounds and stumps, being neglected, contracted filth and putrefaction,

and millions of maggots were hatched amidst the corruption of their

sores. This inhuman disregard was imputed to the scarcity of surgeons;

though it is well known that every great ship in the fleet could have

spared one at least for this duty, an expedient which would have been

more than sufficient to remove this shocking inconvenience. But perhaps

our general was too much of a gentleman to ask a favour of this kind

from his fellow chief, who, on the other hand, would not derogate so

much from his own dignity, as to offer such assistance unasked; for, I

may venture to affirm, that by this time the Demon of Discord, with her

sooty wings, had breathed her influence upon our councils; and it might

be said of these great men (I hope they will pardon the comparison) as

of Cesar and Pompey, the one could not brook a superior, and the other

was impatient of an equal; so that, between the pride of one and

insolence of another, the enterprise miscarried, according to the

proverb, “Between two stools the backside falls to the ground.” Not

that I would be thought to liken any public concern to that opprobrious

part of the human body, though I might with truth assert, if I durst

use such a vulgar idiom, that the nation did hang on arse at its

disappointment on this occasion; neither would I presume to compare the

capacity of our heroic leaders to any such wooden convenience as a

joint-stool or a close-stool; but only to signify by this simile, the

mistake the people committed in trusting to the union of two

instruments that were never joined.

A day or two after the attempt on St. Lazar, the admiral ordered one of

the Spanish men-of-war we had taken to be mounted with sixteen guns,

and manned with detachments from our great ships, in order to batter

the town; accordingly, she was towed into the inner harbour in the

night, and moored within half a mile of the walls, against which she

began to fire at daybreak; and continued about six hours exposed to the

opposition of at least thirty pieces of cannon, which at length obliged

our men to set her on fire, and get off as well as they could in their

boats. This piece of conduct afforded matter of speculation to all the

wits, either in the army or navy, who were at last fain to acknowledge

it a stroke of policy above their comprehension. Some entertained such

an irreverent opinion of the admiral’s understanding, as to think he

expected the town would surrender to his floating battery of sixteen

guns: others imagined his sole intention was to try the enemy’s

strength, by which he should be able to compute the number of great

ships that would be necessary to force the town to a capitulation. But

this last conjecture soon appeared groundless, inasmuch as no ships of

any kind whatever were afterwards employed on that service. A third

sort swore, that no other cause could be assigned for this undertaking

than that which induced Don Quixote to attack the windmill. A fourth

class (and that the most numerous, though, without doubt, composed of

the sanguine and malicious), plainly taxed this commander with want of

honesty as well as sense; and alleged that he ought to have sacrificed

private pique to the interest of his country; that, where the lives of

so many brave fellow-citizens were concerned, he ought to have

concurred with the general without being solicited or even desired,

towards their preservation and advantage, that, if his arguments could

not dissuade him from a desperate enterprise, it was his duty to have

rendered it as practicable as possible, without running extreme hazard;

that this could have been done, with a good prospect of success, by

ordering five or six large ships to batter the town, while the land

forces stormed the castle; by these means a considerable diversion

would have been made in favour of those troops, who, in their march to

the assault and in the retreat, suffered much more from the town than

from the castle! that the inhabitants, seeing themselves vigorously

attacked on all hands, would have been divided, distracted, and

confused, and in all probability, unable to resist the assailants. But

all these suggestions surely proceeded from ignorance or malevolence,

or else the admiral would not have found it such an easy matter, at his

return to England, to justify his conduct to a ministry at once so

upright and discerning. True it is, that those who undertook to

vindicate him on the spot, asserted, that there was not water enough

for our great ships near the town: though this was a little

unfortunately urged, because there happened to be pilots in the fleet

perfectly well acquainted with the soundings of the harbour, who

affirmed there was water enough for five eighty-gun ships to lie

abreast almost up to the very walls. The disappointments we suffered

occasioned a universal dejection, which was not at all alleviated by

the objects that daily and hourly entertained our eyes, nor by the

prospect of what must have inevitably happened, had we remained much

longer in this place. Such was the economy in some ships that, rather

than be at the trouble of interring the dead, their commanders ordered

their men to throw their bodies overboard, many without either ballast

or winding-sheet; so that numbers of human carcases floated in the

harbour, until they were devoured by sharks and carrion crows, which

afforded no agreeable spectacle to those who survived. At the same time

the wet season began, during which a deluge of rain falls, from the

rising to the setting sun, without intermission, and that no sooner

ceases than it begins to thunder, and lighten with such continued

flashing, that one can see to read a very small print by the

illumination.