by The Rock
Before relating Gibraltar's next and critical appearance on the world stage, in a starring role, let us look at the Rock more closely in these final years of the seventeenth century.
The larger wild animals had fled, though there were still wild pig. The ape population was large, perhaps three hundred, as they had the whole Rock to roam over except for the town itself. The human population, about six thousand, was all white, and all Spanish-Catholic except for a few Genoese, some of whom lived on the east side of the Rock, round the little bay at the foot of the great sand slope. This settlement (modem Catalan Bay) was called Almadrabilla, as the Genoese worked a tunny factory there. Ferdinand and Isabella had sent prisoners into Gibraltar, partly to increase the population, but it was no longer as necessary to people the Rock as it had once been, and thieves, murderers, and runaway women no longer formed a large part of the population.
Nearly everyone lived inside the walls in the three joined "neighborhoods" which constituted Gibraltar—Villa Vieja to the north, under the Moorish castle; Barcina in the middle; Turba to the south; the whole being tucked into the northwest angle of the peninsula. The chief Moorish mosque had been converted into a church, and there were four other churches, together with a monastery, two convents, and the friars who manned the Hospital of San Juan de Dios. A public-spirited citizen had built this in 1587 in the upper part of Barcina for patients suffering from the new scourge brought back from the Americas along with tomatoes, potatoes, turkeys, and maize: syphilis.
A small chapel and shrine to Our Lady of Europa stood at the southern tip of the Rock and over the years had been richly endowed with silver crucifixes, candlesticks, and ornaments. The Nuns' Well does not seem to have been used, and there was no other settlement on the southern plateau (Tarfes Bajos, or Europa Flats).
For defense there were the Devil's Tongue Battery on the Old Mole, Tuerto Battery by the New Mole, San Joaquin Battery below the Moorish castle, facing over the isthmus, and Half Moon Battery near the foot of Charles V's Wall, plus various towers, bastions, small isolated forts, and, of course, the walls. The Governor was Diego Salinas, an able and conscientious general of artillery. To man his batteries, towers, bastions, forts, and walls he could count on 60 infantry, 6 cavalry (without horses), 140 military pensioners, and about 220 citizen militia. Many of the guns were dismounted, and for others there was no powder or shot. Blinded by the westward glare of the gold from Potosi, Spain had left its back door open.
As the unhappy King Carlos II of Spain approached his death, the maneuverings in the courts of Europe to influence the choice of his successor became more frantic and unprincipled. Carlos himself wanted to name his nephew Charles, an archduke of the Holy Roman Empire. Louis XIV wanted him to name another nephew, the Duke of Anjou, who was Louis' grandson. The wretched dying king turned to the Pope for advice. The Pope supported Louis, and Carlos gave in. On November 1, 1700, he died. Louis XIV made two famous remarks: first, to his grandson: "You are now King of Spain, but never forget that you are also a prince of France"; second, to the world at large and Spain in particular: "There are no more Pyrenees"—which, in practice, meant that Spain would be tied to the French chariot wheels for the next century, the century of England's great overseas drive.
England, Holland, and the Holy Roman Empire (its capital was Vienna) did not acquiesce in the accession of the Duke of Anjou, as Philip V, to the Spanish throne. They supported the Archduke Charles, who styled himself King Charles III. The War of the Spanish Succession began. The English and Dutch sent a combined fleet and marines to seize Cadiz. Repulsed there, they landed at Puerto Santa Maria across the bay and raped, killed, sacked, and pillaged the undefended town in a strenuous effort to win the Spanish people's affection for the Archduke Charles. Don Diego Salinas, feeling exposed and abandoned on his Rock, started pestering Madrid for more men, guns, powder, and money. Madrid made urgent and successful preparations to do nothing. The Archduke Charles' agent, Prince George of Hesse, supported by another large Anglo-Dutch fleet, set up headquarters in Lisbon, rather to the embarrassment of the Portuguese.
There have always been separatist tendencies in Spain, where at least two of the principal cultures, those of the Basques and Catalans, are alien to the Castilian tradition of the central power; and the Prince of Hesse thought he could raise Catalonia for the archduke if he landed in sufficient strength in Barcelona, its capital. The large fleet therefore sailed, made its landing, seized and held Barcelona, and waited for the popular rising. The Catalans' conspiracy failed to rise.
The fleet reembarked its marines and sailed away. The naval commander-in-chief must have been racking his brains thinking what he could do to wipe out the setback. He had, after all, been entrusted with some sixty warships and seventy transports for many months, and what did he have to show for it?
As the fleet headed into the Strait of Gibraltar the admiral, contemplating the gray lion-rock on his starboard bow, had an idea—for his name was George Rooke. He quickly hove the fleet to off Tetuan and held a council of war. All agreed to seize Gibraltar. The fleet sailed again, and on August 1, 1704 (N.S.), anchored off the Rock. At 3 P.M. 1,800 marines of the battalions of colonels Sanderson, Villars, and Fox (later the 30th, 31st, and 32nd Foot) landed on the isthmus, cutting off Gibraltar from land contact with the rest of Spain. The Eleventh Siege had begun.
It did not last long. The prince sent a demand to the governor to surrender to him as the representative of Gibraltar's lawful sovereign, Charles III. The governor replied stoutly that they were loyal subjects of Philip V. The surrender demand was repeated and again rejected. Contrary winds prevented the fleet's moving into position until August 3, when it anchored close in and opened fire. The warships mustered about 4,000 guns and 25,000 sailors; the transports held 9,000 troops. Even if Don Diego Salinas' six cavalrymen had had horses, they could only have used them to fade more rapidly from such a bad scene.
Later that day sailors assaulted direct from the ships. Captain Jumper of the HMS Lenox led one party ashore inside the foot of the New Mole (the modem Jumper's Bastion). The Tuerto fort was blown up and 100 English sailors with it, but these were almost the only allied casualties, and next day the governor asked for an armistice while the terms of capitulation were worked out.
Some of the English ran amok, pillaging, looting, and raping—the worst excesses being committed at the Shrine of Our Lady of Europa. Here they raped a number of nuns and girls sent there from the Convent of Santa Clara in the town for safety from the bombardments. They also smashed the images, stole the relics, and defiled the sanctuary. They were Protestants—the Inquisition had taught the rest of Europe to translate "Spaniards" as "cruel fiends"—they had been a long time at sea, they were following a hallowed tradition of how the English behave in victory (some of them must have taken part in the picnic at Puerto Santa Maria): but their actions did little to advance the reputation of their country or the cause of the archduke.
On August 5 the governor signed the surrender. One of the terms was that any Spanish inhabitant of Gibraltar who took the oath of allegiance to Charles as the true king of Spain could stay and keep his house and all his possessions. Few did, and those mostly Genoese. The exodus—the fourth in Gibraltar's recorded history—began. For days the people, carrying what they could, straggled across the isthmus, past the ruins of Carteia, into the hills above the Guadarranque. Here they founded the new town of San Roque "in which is incorporated that of Gibraltar." Over the weeks the intrepid priest of St. Mary's Church, Father Juan Romero de Figueroa, smuggled church valuables and town records out to San Roque. One large image of St. Anthony is legendarily said to have been taken out on a donkey's back, clothed and supported as a sick man.
But the Key of Spain, as King Enrique IV had called Gibraltar, was in the hands of the pretender, the Archduke Charles ... for a few minutes. At the surrender ceremony the Spanish flag was lowered (a mistake of protocol, this: if Charles claimed to be King of Spain, it should have been left fl
ying) and Charles' personal standard, a modification of the imperial flag, raised.
Admiral Sir George Rooke looked at it and decided that it would not do. This was not what he had in mind when he proposed the seizure of Gibraltar. He ordered Charles' flag taken down and the English flag run up instead. Gibraltar now belonged to Queen Anne.
Bad feeling spread quickly. Some admirals stole guns, some stole wine, Dutch squabbled with English, sailors with marines. Admiral Rooke sailed out and met a French fleet off Malaga. It was a hard-fought day, and the French might have had a clear victory but for the "advice" of Louis XIV's personal representative afloat, who, of course, had to be obeyed. As it was, Rooke was very early able to prove the value of his capture, as he once more limped into the shelter of its guns to repair and refit. Then he sailed again, with all the warships and transports.
The force ashore, left to wait the inevitable counterattack, looted the empty houses, found hidden wine and brandy, and, sometimes, paid for the excesses they or their comrades had committed in the assault. The Spanish sprang into galvanic action to regain what, with a little care, they need never have lost. An army of 9,000 Spanish and 3,000 French soldiers (these latter under General Cavanne) began to gather on the mainland opposite Gibraltar, under the overall command of the Marquis of Villadarias. The British now had some 3,000 men in permanent garrison with many guns, all in working order. They dug inundations on the sandy isthmus to canalize any attack still more narrowly. On October 8, 1704, the Spanish started on their siege trenches.
Inside the besieged town and fortress of Gibraltar, then, the night of October 25, about midnight...
WEEP FOR JERUSALEM!
Rafael Santangel waited, pressed back into the angle where two houses met, outside the lower wall of the Moorish castle. It was a redcoat coming, and alone—he had seen that much as the man passed the glimmer from a lighted window lower down the ramp. It might be an officer, for few soldiers were permitted to wander round the town alone at this hour—though no one had taken much notice of the curfew while the wine lasted in the taverns.
He saw the man in silhouette against a white wall and gently put himself in balance for the thrust. It was an officer—tricomered hat, sword slung, no musket or bayonet. Quite old by the slow pace and the loud breathing. On his way up to the castle pickets probably. He passed, and Rafael stepped out, caught him under the chin with his left arm, and ripped the long knife across under his arm, opening the Englishman's throat to the bone from ear to ear. There was no cry, only a faint bubbling cough. Rafael let the body fall and stopped to wipe his knife blade on the tunic. That would show, he thought, smiling grimly. Blood was a different red.
He put on his shirt and the old jacket, glanced at his trousers to make sure they were free of blood, and slipped quickly down the ramp. He had thought once, earlier, when he began this work of vengeance, that he should shuffle to and from each murder like an old, bent man: But since the Spanish had opened their trenches any civilian caught out at night would be imprisoned and interrogated. The only hope was not to be caught.
He waited in the dark at each crossing of street or alley, then moved quickly to the next. He never stopped in the open, only in doorways. His knife was in his hand, but hidden.
The Fuentes' house was near the center of Villa Vieja. He moved quickly down the last alley, waited for a pair of patrolling sentries to pass below, then crossed the street and opened the door. This was always a bad moment, for if Amelia had not been able to open it again after Senor Fuentes had shut it for the night, or if someone had come along later and rebolted it, he would be left out all night, sure to be discovered in the morning.
But it opened. He locked it carefully and turned to go upstairs. The girl came flitting down and put a hand on his arm. She usually waited in the attic: but now she led him up and at the head of the stairs turned left instead of right There were two tiny attics up there—the left over the room where Senora Fuentes slept, the right over Amelia's room. Ever since the day of the surrender he'd been living in the one on the right. Now he followed Amelia through the low hatch into the other attic, closed it behind him, and waited till she had lit the lamp.
"What's happened?" he muttered. He saw that she had brought his clothes, mattress, basin, and bucket from the other attic.
"The English major put a Jew from Barbary to live with us," she said. "He wanted my room. I just had time to move everything across while he went back to his ship to bring his trunk."
"What's he doing?"
"Buying and selling provisions for the English, he said." Rafael sat down on a wooden chest, and she set out food on another chest. She was a strong-limbed peasant girl from Castellar, wide mouth and eyes, seventeen years old, the Fuentes' servant for four years now; but getting restive to find a man, marry, and return to her village—so Maria Cruz had told him, the last time he saw her alive.
"I got one," he said, drinking some wine. "An old officer. That makes twenty-four. Seventy-six to go." When he had found Maria Cruz's body out there by the shrine, the novice's habit around her neck, and all her young woman's secrets, which were to have been his, bared, bloody, defiled, her eyes open, the livid marks of crazed hands round her throat, he ... he...
He put down the flagon and buried his face in his hands. After a time he felt the girl's hand gently on his forehead. "Do it no more, master," she said. "I saw you from the window in the moonlight. Skulking down like a thief, like a rat, in the shadows. And you to be the Count of Grazalema. Man, it is not right."
"I have sworn," he said. "One hundred lives for hers."
"At first I said 'tis good," she said. "After I saw how the devils treated the womenfolk, aye, and had one up my skirt when I was kneeling, scrubbing, but I kicked him in the balls and ran in ... But, master, 'tis not right. Your face is changing. It is not good for a great lord to want to kill."
"But it's all right for such as you?" he said, smiling, his arm round her hips.
"Aye," she said soberly. "Sometimes the likes of us has to. But not you. A lord can harm too many.... Besides, I think you must leave now."
"Never!" he said.
"That Jew will be coming and going at all hours," she said. "And he has a sharp eye.... Father Romero gave me a message to pass to you."
"What?" Rafael asked. Father Romero was the parish priest and so far still permitted to travel to and fro between Gibraltar and the new town of tents and shacks rising on the hill beyond the isthmus, where the fugitives from Gibraltar were being settled.
"Our general—I can't remember his name—"
"Villadarias."
"Yes—he is going to send many men up the back of the Rock, at night, to take the English by surprise."
"But it's all cliffs and precipices."
"Not quite, master. A few shepherds know a path. Like my uncle."
"Simeon!" Rafael exclaimed. "Yes, he'd know." Simeon Susarte was a small, wizened, forty-year-old mountain man who herded sheep and goats for their rich owners all over the Rock. Rafael remembered seeing him at a boar hunt not long before the British attack.
Amelia Susarte said, "The general, I can't remember his name, wants to send a lot of soldiers up and make a big attack, but first he wants to know what the English are doing on the upper Rock, and he wants to know whether ordinary soldiers will be able to get up the shepherds' path. So Father Romero thought you had better leave this house and live in a cave on the upper Rock somewhere where you can spy on the English. And on the fourth night from tonight my uncle will come up to the Wolf Leap with an officer, to show him that the shepherds' path is all right for soldiers. And you should meet them there two hours after midnight and tell them what you have seen."
Rafael got up and paced up and down the attic, his head hunched under the beams. Amelia shook her head and pointed down. He remembered that he was not over her bedroom now but over Senora Fuentes, who did not sleep well because she was worried about the wound her husband had received in the English attack.
He sat down again. He'd been born in his family's Gibraltar house, and as a boy, during frequent visits, he'd run all over the Rock and later hunted boar and hare and partridge. He knew it well. There were a hundred caves where a man could hide forever if he could get food and water. But he'd have to give up his campaign of vengeance for his betrothed with only twenty-four of the English gone to rot in hell for their crimes.
Amelia said, "I'll bring food and water every night."
"Once a week will be enough," he said. "But..."
" 'Tis for Spain," she said. "And you'll get back Gibraltar for the king and the Church."
"Not I," he said. "Your uncle Simeon. Then the king'll make him a count, and you and I could get married."
She turned away and said after a time, "Don't speak like that, master."
"I'm sorry," he said, remembering that his betrothed was not yet three months in the grave. "It was a bad joke.... I'll do it. I'll leave as soon as I've eaten. Now, you know the Rock, too, don't you?"
"Aye," she said. "I've often looked after the sheep with my uncle when I was a little girl." She was very subdued, her eyes red. He thought, she has run as much risk as he, hiding him, bringing him food, washing his bloody clothes, emptying the bucket that served him for a commode; and she had her normal work as well—cleaning, sewing, and washing.
"You're a good girl," he said. "I don't know how I'll ever be able to thank you for what you've done. But you'll never want as long as you live, I promise."
"Let's talk about the caves, master," she said wearily, "—and where I shall bring the food, or leave messages from Father Romero, perhaps...."
The Jew was about thirty, she thought, a strong, square-built man with a long face, black jaw, and odd pale blue eyes that gave her shivers when she thought about them. She was very much aware of him, for she was kneeling on a pad scrubbing the tiled floor of the dining room, and he was behind her, sprawled in one of the master's good chairs, looking at her legs.
