John Masters

by The Rock

  October 19: Lord Howe has arrived with a fleet, the third since the siege began. A civilian passenger in the fleet, a Jew returning from London, told Captain Witham that Lord George Germain and others would dearly like to exchange Gibraltar for some other place, but the public will have their heads if they do, so great an impression has our defense made, especially when considered against the universal defeat and disaster everywhere. Two more regiments, the 25th and 59th, came with the fleet, but without their baggage, extra clothes, or wives. Also many more military artificers, who are sorely needed. An ensign of the 97th tried for defrauding a Jew inkeeper.

  October 20: The fleet sailed yesterday, with Captain Curtis aboard to carry the Governor's own account of our great victory to London before anyone else can; and of course this will result in honors and advancement to the captain. Dysentery prevalent. Saw Abigail at New Jerusalem today, and we spoke normally, though carefully. I think the siege is over and want to get out.

  October 21: Two soldiers have killed each other in a quarrel. They were not drunk, which is a bad sign. Three dogs suspected of hydrophobia shot. All stray dogs to be shot—the Governor's order. The enemy fleet sailed after Lord Howe, but though 47 to his 33, they failed to engage him in the strait. Half the garrison were on Windmill Hill watching and saw the Spanish Admiral Cordova manage to avoid battle: a remarkable feat of seamanship on his part, a naval lieutenant beside me growled. The French have struck camp, leaving only the Spanish.

  October 26: A Spanish colonel taken at sea, and much wined and dined by the Governor, has revealed much that was mysterious to us about the recent assault. The floating batteries were the invention of a French engineer called d'Arcon, who submitted the idea years ago when it was known all over Europe that King Charles would give the richest rewards to any who would help him recover Gibraltar. His plan was approved by the kings of France and Spain near two years ago now, and the building began last February. But this was before the Duc de Crillon was appointed to the chief command. As soon as he was apprized of the plan, the noble Duc saw that all the honor and glory attending the fall of this fortress would go to M. d'Arcon, and not to him. So before leaving Madrid to come south he inscribed a letter recording that M. d'Arcon's plan was disastrous and that he, the Duc, was only putting it into effect because the king ordered him to. Of this letter he left several copies with friends in Madrid, with instructions to make it public the instant that the attack with the floating batteries had been made. The Spanish colonel showed the Governor a copy of the Duc's letter, and indeed in it the Duc clearly stated that all the glory—or, of course, all the blame—would belong to M. d'Arcon. It is now clear why the floating batteries were left on their own, without help from the fleet or army: because that noble Duc and the Spanish admiral were interested only in seeing M. d'Arcon fail.... The colonel also said that the naval arrangements had caused much ill feeling. Admiral Barcello, who has borne the brunt of the war here for many years and has dedicated his life to returning Gibraltar to the Spanish crown, was left with only his gunboats. Admiral Moreno, in command of the floating batteries, complained that he was no more than a hired boatman for M. d'Arcon's attempts to force him to engage his ships in a battle against the British. When the Talla Piedra, one of the floating batteries, caught fire, the Prince of Nassau at once took its only boat and rowed ashore.

  October 28: More news from the captured colonel. The enemy had designed special boats with prows that could drop down so that infantry on board might run ashore dryshod with small cannon. But these were never used. In Spain when the news of the defeat spread, people were saying, this is as bad as the defeat of our Invincible Armada. King Charles' throne is shaking.

  November 3: The rest of us may consider the siege over, but not the Governor. He has ordered experiments with shell fillings and fuses to continue in Poca Roca Cave, which has been a military laboratory for many months now.

  December 4: More than 900 sick in hospitals and quarters of scurvy, flux, and unknown fevers. Without the excitement of battle the soldier's life is an empty one. Sickness or death, even self-inflicted, are a welcome change.

  December 23: It is rumored that peace was signed between England and the American colonists last month. One hundred and fifty wives of the 25th and 59th arrived yesterday, and 17 of them straight to the venereal sickness ward. A soldier of the 72nd dead by throwing himself off the Rock Gun, a dreadful fate. Five more deserted. I have the trots and am sick and weary. No house but ours showed Chanukah lights this year, though three or four others are standing and there was permission. Abigail did it.

  A.D. 1783

  January 6: Riots in the hospital, officers were beating some women, supposedly for not discovering to them that they had the sickness before accepting relations. Two officers in arrest. The gunboats have begun their attacks again.

  January 14: Sergeant Major Ince's gallery is 370 feet long. Parties of the enemy have been driven away from the foot of the North Face. Sergeant Major Ince says they are trying to find an old tunnel made there long ago, to blow us all up. How long is this going to go on?

  January 19: The officers have put on a play. It is said to be very amusing and well performed.

  January 22: The officers' play closed by order of the Governor. He says he will not have his officers dressing up like women. The sergeant says Old Von B. likes them better in tight trousers.

  January 30: My uncle has heard from Lisbon that England is to retain Gibraltar. The French are secretly delighted. We Jews must be heartily thankful, too. Parliament voted thanks to all of us of the garrison last month, though General Ross tried to have old General Boyd excluded—a disgraceful thing. General Eliott is to be made a Knight of the Bath. The sergeant says, now we'll have to call him Old Von SIR B.

  February 2: The Spanish soldiers in their forward works began to wave white flags at noon. Some came forward shouting, "Ya somos todos amigos"—we are all friends now. We are ordered not to let them close and to be ready to fire at all times.

  February 5: It is confirmed. Peace has been signed. The war is over. No one is drunk.

  February 11: All prices down by half. Inhabitants' houses not to be used without their permission. Inhabitants not allowed to dig lime or employ soldiers to rebuild their houses.

  February 12: The Governor sent for me and told me I am to be mustered out as soon as I have compiled figures for the sick, wounded, died, and killed throughout the siege, also the quantities of ammunition fired. Cousin Abraham is out already, with a house and premises to hold for 21 years, this as a reward for volunteering. I am to get the same, the Governor says. I shall sell mine and go to England, perhaps to study, perhaps to become a merchant there.

  March 2: My work is done. Among a host of other figures I have given to the Governor, I have calculated that we fired 205,000 shot and shell during the siege, using 8.000 barrels of gunpowder. The Spanish and French fired 260.000 missiles back at us. From first to last we suffered 333 killed and 1,008 wounded in battle, only 200 of these last severely. Sickness was a much more dangerous enemy, for 1,000 of the military died of sundry diseases, of which scurvy accounted for over half. No figures were kept for the civilian population, and their sufferings are hard to estimate, since so many left the Rock; but the president of our synagogue and I myself think it was nearly 1,500 dead from all causes, in particular scurvy among the elders and smallpox among the children.

  March 3: Abigail is arranging a marriage for me with Renana Toledano. As soon as we are married, I shall take her to London.

  March 4: Drank last night with the sergeant, half the battery, and Emily. At midnight we filled a gun with hardtack and cheese and fired it toward the Spanish in case they were hungry. Captain Witham came, and we told him it went off by accident. He drank with us for an hour and said we were all rattling good fellows. We gave him three cheers when he left. The sergeant called me Mr. Hassan and said I was to count on him and the battery for anything I wanted here or in London—a house built, military s
tores stolen, anyone I don't like done in on a dark night. He cried, we're gunners, sir, British gunners, and we fought at the Great Siege of Gibraltar! A Scotchman of the 72nd crept in when he smelled the rum, and he shouted a toast in his dialect, which, when we understood, we all drank many times—"Here's ta us! Wha's like us? Damn few ... and they're a' deid!"

  Awoke with fearful head this morning, the others the same, but on parade at 10 o'clock and mustered out at 11. All the soldiers shook my hand and congratulated me, as a result I have lice again. I am released from bondage at last and cannot understand why I am weeping. It will pass.

  BOOK NINE

  NELSON'S PORT

  The Jewish years 5539-5564

  AUC 2532-2557

  A.D. 1779-1804

  A.H. 1193-1219

  The unharnessed herd of dukes, counts, and mad scientists had lost, and the fairy John Bull had won. It only remained to comply with the formalities. Crillon and Eliott paid reciprocal calls, with much fulsome mutual congratulation. Crillon explained that it had all been d'Arcon's fault. The British Army pay office was said to be considering the authorization of pay for Eliott's extra staff for the first half of 1780. King George III ruled that Eliott should be made a Knight of the Bath in Gibraltar, and appointed as his representative for the investiture the lieutenant governor, Boyd ... who hated Eliott's guts, and vice versa. The ceremony was conducted under conditions which could not have been bettered in England. Continuous rain rained the ceremonial arches and dripped down the spectators' necks, and everyone got drunk. The wonderful diarist Captain Spilsbury recorded:

  Never was a worse salute performed by the Artillery they not being able to fire a salute of 21 guns from 6 they had in the field, two of them being so neglected as to have d shot in each, left at the bottom before their loading way put in, and their tubes were in general too long; a worse feu de joie fired by troops, worse weather, worse musick, worse fireworks or worse entertainment....

  The soldiery reverted to peacetime habits. Rape, murder, adultery, suicide, venereal disease, drunkenness, and indiscipline increased. The inhabitants trickled back from all over Europe.

  Abraham Hassan (a historical figure: Gamaliel Hassan is not) exchanged his house-and-premises-for-twenty-one-years for another property in perpetuity (but his collateral descendant Sir Joshua Hassan, chief Minister of Gibraltar from 1964 to 1969, has not been able to trace just where it was).

  Smuggling began again, full swing. The Spanish seized a Gibraltar boat laden with goods being smuggled into Spain; the governor demanded, and got, the boat's release. Spanish deserters and refugees from an unpopular regime crowded onto the Rock. The situation was again fully normal.

  There was now, however, a new factor in the Gibraltar equation. Strategy, commerce, politics were still there. The bitterness at Britain's usurpation was still there among the Spanish governing and aristocratic classes. But now there was also the Gibraltar Legend; for the place name had become synonymous in the hearts of the British people, and in all languages, with impregnable, defiant, reliable, unconquerable. After 1783 the cession of Gibraltar would have been regarded by most Britons as a cession of those qualities in themselves, that is, as a collapse of the national character.

  Most members of Parliament shared the general view, but a few held exactly to the contrary. In a single debate on Gibraltar one member declared: "Gibraltar ... is the most valuable and important of all the foreign territories belonging to Great Britain," while another claimed that "Gibraltar always hung like a dead weight round the neck of Great Britain."

  The siege faded into history. Sir George Eliott became Lord Heathfield and in 1790 died of palsy. Admiral Sir Roger Curtis died in 1816 without adding to his already considerable fame. The three Hanoverian regiments which went through the siege took the battle honor Gibraltar and the motto Mit Eliott Ruhm und Sieg: and this led to much astonishment in later wars when British soldiers met the descendants of these regiments, by then incorporated in the German Army, in battle and found them wearing Gibraltar on their sleeves.

  Gibraltar itself was a wreck, few houses standing and the ground so thick in cannonballs that they were still being picked up a century later. But by 1787 the population was back to 3,400, and by 1804 it was over 6,000, with the largest element being Genoese, and after them Jews and Spanish in about equal proportions. The Jews had built another synagogue, the Nefusot Yehudah on Line Wall Road, and some were among the most prominent and influential men in Gibraltar, notably Isaac Cardozo, Judah Benoliel, and Abraham Hassan the Volunteer. Just what Cardozo's business was remains a mystery; yet he was very rich, organized the first Gibraltar police, acted as agent for the governors in negotiating treaties with Moroccan beys and kings, and after the Spanish rose against the French, supplied their armies with money and clothes. Benoliel was known as the King of Gibraltar and was a friend of the priest who later became Pope Pius IX.

  If there was boredom, a sense of letdown after the Great Siege, the governors did their best to alleviate it. One, General O'Hara, nicknamed the Cock of the Rock, kept two mistresses in different establishments in a feeble attempt to outdo his father, a previous governor, who had had three, and fourteen illegitimate children by them. O'Hara also believed that if he could stand just a few feet higher on the high point of the Rock he could see into Cadiz Harbor (65 miles to the northwest). Military surveyors assured him he was mistaken, but he built a large tower up there anyway. The surveyors were right, he was wrong, and the tower was called O'Hara's Folly.

  Then in 1802 the Rock received its first and only royal governor, the Duke of Kent, fourth son of George III. He had been there once already, when he was banished to Gibraltar at the age of twenty-two for running away from his military training in Germany, to the fury of his father. He soon drove the regiment of which he was colonel, the 7th Fusiliers, to mutiny; but he went with them to Nova Scotia and stayed there nearly nine years, consoling himself for the Arctic exile with a Mme. de St. Laurent, who became his great and good friend for the rest of his life. She accompanied him in 1802 when the king appointed him to govern the Rock. They sailed from England in the HMS Isis, commanded by Captain Thomas Hardy, who started by grumbling about all the royal hoopla but ended much taken with the duke's charm.

  The duke discreetly installed Mme. de St. Laurent in a farm in the Guadarranque valley below San Roque, for many years known as the Duke of Kent's Farm. He visited her there when he could spare time from his work in causing more mutinies among the soldiery. The trouble was that the duke had a considerable sense of duty but no sense of proportion. His brothers, the heir apparent and the Commander-In-Chief, had told him to restore the shattered discipline of the garrison. He saw at once that the trouble was due to excessive drunkenness—there were ninety wine houses in operation—and took direct action. He closed the wine houses. The soldiers, who had no release but drink and no charming mistresses to keep their minds off the lack of alcohol, mutinied. The duke's deputy, General Barnett, was delighted—this would get the duke dismissed, he thought; and he was right. The duke was recalled "for consultation" but never replaced, so that until his death in 1820 the men actually bearing responsibility in Gibraltar were lieutenant governors. (All the Duke's elder brothers being without legitimate offspring, he was finally compelled to marry and did so in 1818, marrying a depressing German princess called Victoria Mary Louisa, sister of King Leopold I of the Belgians. They had one child: Victoria.)

  In these its last few years the eighteenth century's interminable war game was swept away by a genuine conflict, the French Revolution; and that outburst of fervor was soon harnessed to the ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte. Spain, still tied to France's chariot wheels and without a strong king (Carlos III had died in 1788) was dragged into the wars on France's side, although as usual, it was in her national interest to treat France as an enemy, not a friend.

  It is unnecessary to describe here all the maneuverings and countermaneuverings, all the treaties and breaking of treaties, all the
combinations and machinations of each side. It is enough to note that the war was fundamentally between England and France; that France at one time or another persuaded, conquered, cajoled, or threatened the whole continent of Europe onto her side; and that with this overwhelming land power, Napoleon only needed to gain control of the Channel for a short time to destroy the one nation that stood between him and world hegemony. The Rock was, as always, in a position to hinder or prevent French and Spanish naval combinations. On this depended England's existence.

  It is proper, then, that the outstanding personalities of the period should not be eccentric or royal governors but sailors. Three in particular dominated the sea war and Gibraltar.

  First in point of time was Sir John Jervis, "Black Jack" Jervis, later Earl of St. Vincent: disciplinarian, organizer, driver of men and ships. As admiral at Gibraltar he was always up at 2 A.M., made the rounds of every ship, then went to the dockyard to see that the workmen clocked in on time, then checked the supply of fresh water. Jervis won one great sea battle, trained the Mediterranean fleet into an image of himself—iron, tireless, ruthless—and made Gibraltar an efficient naval base.

  Second was Sir James Saumarez, who with a small force attacked a French squadron that had taken shelter under the guns of Algeciras. The Rock scorpions had a grandstand view (July 6, 1701) of Sir James getting rather the worst of it, as was to be expected. The French admiral ran his ships aground, and Saumarez took a hammering from the shore batteries, with one ship grounded and taken, another put out of action, and a third, his flagship, severely damaged. Saumarez limped back into Gibraltar and began a frantic refit, as the enemy would obviously try to take advantage of the British setback. Sure enough, the French refloated their ships, and a few days later HMS Superb flew in from watch off Cadiz to report that six Spanish ships of the line were on their way. They sailed into the bay soon after and next day sailed out again, escorting the French squadron. They were now also carrying many women and children from Algeciras who had thought this an easy and comfortable way to return to Cadiz.