The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
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Discussions about who should govern the rock expressed clearly and consistently the view that the conquest had been achieved by English troops on behalf of the rightful king of Spain: ‘England would not wish to claim that she had made a conquest’ for herself.22 Hesse hoped to use Gibraltar as the gateway into Spain: a plan to attack Catalonia, setting out by sea from Gibraltar, was approved, and King Charles III arrived in Gibraltar to implement it. There is some irony in the fact that he had now taken possession of his first few inches of Spain, when before long Gibraltar would be permanently lost to the British queen. The argument now began to be pressed that Gibraltar ‘will not protect a fleet against a superior one, but ’twill be of use and safety for single ships, or four or five men-of-war, and in that respect of great advantage to our trade’.23 The English began to see that possession of Gibraltar opened up larger possibilities for control of the western Mediterranean. The English ambassador in Lisbon, Methuen, warned that should Charles III fail in his bid for the Spanish throne, ‘England must never part with Gibraltar, which will always be a pledge of our commerce and privileges in Spain’. Propagandists in England extolled the virtues of Gibraltar, ‘situate as it were in the very centre of our business, in the very mouth of the Straits, commanding from shore to shore, and awing by our cruisers all the intercourse betwixt East France and Cádiz’.24 Hyperbole was king: Gibraltar was in fact a small, abandoned town and its dockyards were still undeveloped.
In 1711 the balance of power shifted significantly with the death of the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph I, the brother of Charles III. Charles could expect to be elected to the imperial throne, and would be able to commit even more resources from the Habsburg lands of the east into the Spanish war. But no one wanted a return to the dual empire of Emperor Charles V. It was not too difficult to lure the British government into a deal whereby Philip would be accepted as Spanish king so long as this insignificant notch in the far south of Spain (as it seemed from Paris) remained in English hands. The arguments were endless, and very complicated. At one moment the French objected on behalf of Philip V to the idea that ‘the most minutest part’ of Spain could ever be ceded to anyone else; then they started to argue about what the cession of Gibraltar actually meant – the minimalist view was that it involved no more than the castle, town and port, and no land round about, not even the rock.25 The question was, what exactly was Gibraltar?
The Treaty of Utrecht of 11 April 1713 supposedly settled all these matters. Under article 10, Philip V, now recognized by the British as king of Spain, handed over
the full and intire propriety of the Town and Castle of Gibraltar, together with the port, fortifications, and forts thereunto belonging; and he gives up the said propriety, to be held and enjoyed absolutely with all manner of right for ever, without any exception or impediment.
Catholics could exercise their religion freely within Gibraltar; but the British queen agreed, at the petition of King Philip, that Jews and Moors might not live in Gibraltar, though merchant ships from Morocco could dock there.26 The ban was only a breakable promise by the town’s new sovereign, and Jewish brokers had already arrived from Morocco in the brief interval between the seizure of Gibraltar in 1704 and the treaty of 1713. They were increasingly valued for their work in supplying the navy with food and equipment. Even so, it took several decades for the potential of Gibraltar to be realized and appreciated: complaints abounded that the rock possessed insufficient stores and inadequate facilities for the repair of ships. The Jews were joined by increasing numbers of Genoese during the eighteenth century. A distinctive society came into being, largely consisting of brokers, hawkers and ships’ chandlers; but Gibraltar was dominated by its shifting population of up to 5,000 seamen, and many of the civilian population lived in what can only be described as squalor.27
IV
The Treaty of Utrecht conferred another piece of Spanish soil on Great Britain: Minorca. British ships engaged in skirmishes with the Barbary corsairs had used it as a victualling station in the 1670s, with Spanish permission, but facilities were poor – there were no warehouses and too many rats, although ‘Bread, Wine, Hens, Eggs, all things were cheap, One piece of Eight, would buy a Sheep’.28 In 1708 the British occupied the island, but their ally Charles III was unwilling to cede its sovereignty; when the British decided to make terms with Philip V instead, the Bourbon claimant agreed to give away the island despite the disadvantages for France, a concession he rapidly came to regret.29 The duke of Marlborough recognized the importance of Minorca, to which Gibraltar could serve as a way-station – a grand strategy for the creation of permanent British bases in the Mediterranean was beginning to evolve.30 But the island’s lack of resources was an immediate problem. Once an army was camped on its shores, Minorca proved incapable of feeding everyone, for it produced barely enough grain to feed its native inhabitants, and its animals provided tough meat. Parts of the island were treeless, so supplies of wood were hard to find. It was difficult even to find billets for the troops.31 Service in hot, arid Minorca was seen as a trial. And yet, at Mahón, the island possessed the finest natural harbour in the Mediterranean: it is three miles long, and at some points over half a mile wide; its entrance is about 200 metres wide, making it difficult for enemy ships to enter the port and wreak havoc. Moreover, the entrance was protected by a solid fort, St Philip’s. As important as the harbour was the strategic value of holding a base close to southern France: the French fleet at Toulon lay 220 miles to the north-east. The commander of the British forces in Spain, Stanhope, wrote that ‘England ought never to part with the island which will give the law to the Mediterranean both in time of war and peace’, and he stressed its importance in keeping the French at bay – just as the British held Dunkirk, in order to tame the French in the English Channel, they needed to hold Minorca to tame the French in the Mediterranean.32
The British began to wonder whether Minorca possessed some unrealized potential. With such a good port, the island could become an entrepôt for Mediterranean trade. The Minorcans might become ‘a rich and flourishing people’ if commerce were encouraged.33 Richard Kane, the most able of the island’s lieutenant-governors, set in train major works that brought new prosperity. Marshes were drained and turned into orchards (a plum called quen, that is, ‘Kane’, is still grown on the island), and cattle were imported from North Africa in the hope of improving the size and quality of the island’s animals. Kane shared the spirit of the eighteenth-century English innovators who were leading an agricultural revolution in his homeland. By 1719 a road was completed that ran between Mahón and Ciutadella – the work took two years and the road is still known as the Camí d’En Kane, ‘the road of Mr Kane’.34 Mahón was designated as the new capital, in place of its rival Ciutadella (ancient Jamona) on the western coast. This deepened the divide between the native Minorcans, especially the island nobility, and the British authorities, who often saw the islanders as ungrateful and uncooperative: Lieutenant-Governor Murray wrote to the island magistrates, or jurats, in 1777 asking them whether they were keen to see the return of the Inquisition or the Barbary pirates, from both of which they were now protected, while the British had also lifted them out of their ancient poverty.35 Mahón itself became the focus of British efforts at improvement: new dockyards were built, and the straight streets that still characterize the town were laid out. The impress of English architecture remains visible in the sash windows of the houses, recalling the coastal towns of southern England rather than those of Spain.
All these wise projects could not, in themselves, propel Minorca into the front rank of Mediterranean trading ports; the town remained primarily a naval base. Anglo-French (and Anglo-Dutch) rivalry was fought out in trade as well as in war, and, though Britain’s Mediterranean trade held up well, the French were the market leaders during much of the eighteenth century. French cloth producers were better at meeting demand in Levantine markets, offering lighter and brighter cloths more suited to Turkish taste and climate. Englis
h trade in Turkey contracted greatly, after the successes of the previous century, with exports falling in value from £233,000 to £79,000 between 1700 and 1774. The French took the lion’s share of trade with Smyrna during the eighteenth century, by way of Marseilles, making Smyrna the principal centre of Ottoman trade with the West, though they were also very busy in Syria, Cyprus, Alexandria, Salonika, the Barbary regencies and Constantinople (allowing for interruptions, such as a severe outbreak of bubonic plague in Marseilles in 1720). British trade with the Mediterranean as a whole did rise during this period, but not as fast as with America, Africa and Asia. Moreover, trade was hampered by conflicts within the Mediterranean, whether with France or Spain. Admirable policies to make Minorca the grain store of the western Mediterranean, or to develop a local cotton industry, or to create saltpans never had much effect.36
The wish to encourage commerce had other important effects on island society. From the beginning of the British occupation, a place was found for Protestants, Jews and Greeks. The British promised to protect the rights of the Catholic Church, despite a lingering suspicion that Catholics were bound to be disloyal to the British Crown (an argument undermined by the presence in British service of large numbers of Irish Catholic soldiers). The Catholic authorities nonetheless resented Britain’s insistence that age-old institutions such as the Inquisition had no place in a territory under British rule. In 1715 and again in 1721 Governor Kane issued decrees in which he excluded foreign Catholic priests from the island and placed limits on Church courts. Eventually, Kane decided that the time had come to build Anglican churches on Minorca, which (it was pointed out) would be the first ever built within the Mediterranean. The British had never promised, as they did at Gibraltar, to exclude Jews and Moors from Minorca, and by 1781 a community of 500 Jews had come into being, with their own synagogue. The ethnic and cultural variety of Minorca was further enhanced by the arrival of a couple of hundred Greeks, though they had come from nearby: there was a Greek refugee community in Corsica. The Greeks were granted the right to build a church, but the hostile Catholics initially refused to sell them a plot of land for it, even though their religious leaders were Uniate Greeks who acknowledged papal authority but followed the Greek liturgy. After several centuries of the Inquisition, the native Minorcans had no patience with different practices, and in attempting to protect freedom of worship the British inevitably caused new tensions.37
The Minorcan elite, organized in several communities, or universitats, continued to regard the British as a morally disruptive army of occupation. Minorcan noblemen made sure that their daughters avoided contact with British officers, some of whom had an irritating habit of visiting the convents to converse with pretty nuns. In 1749 three nuns in search of romance stole away from a convent in Ciutadella and hid in the house of a British officer. They converted to Anglicanism and married British officers, to the great scandal of the native magistrates, though the governor merely issued an order that his men should not befriend the island’s nuns.38 Otherwise, social mixing between the colonial power and the islanders was limited. Yet British occupation lasted long enough to leave an imprint (literally: one import from London was a printing press). Minorcan Catalan acquired words from the shipyard: móguini for ‘mahogany’, escrú for ‘screw’, rul for ‘ruler’. Even the diet of the Minorcans took on an English flavour with its gravy, or grevi, and a juniper-flavoured spirit based on London gin. The war cry of small Minorcan children, faitim!, is derived from the English ‘fight him!’39
The English did not take the defence of Minorca for granted. St Philip’s was one of the strongest fortresses in the British Empire, with a network of deep tunnels in which men could hide, or stores be kept dry, but there remained one overriding problem that could be resolved only by the government in London: a shortage of troops.40 This, and a lack of adequate naval support, would prove fatal to British rule (and, eventually, to himself) in 1756, when Admiral Byng realized he could not save Minorca from French invasion. The subsequent trial and execution of Admiral Byng has overshadowed the events that brought Minorca under French rule. The Seven Years War started not in the Mediterranean but on the Ohio river, where the French were attempting to build a line of forts linking Louisiana, in the south, to the Great Lakes, in the north; the effect would have been to confine the thirteen British colonies to the eastern seaboard of North America. The French sought to tie down Britain in the Mediterranean as well, turning their attention to the waters off Toulon, the seat of its Mediterranean navy. Reports reached London that the French were fitting out sixteen or seventeen men-of-war there. The British consul in Cartagena seemed to know what was going on:
I have received intelligence that 100 battalions are marching into Roussillon with great diligence, and that those troops are designed against Minorca and are to be transported thither by merchant ships now at Marseilles, and to be convoyed by all the men-of-war at Toulon.41
Initially, then, the Mediterranean was a secondary theatre of the Seven Years War, but it rapidly became obvious that the British hoped to use Minorca as a base from which to interfere with the Levant trade of the French.
The British government, partly for lack of funds, responded feebly to the French threat. Admiral Byng was a perfectly competent commander, but he knew his task was well-nigh impossible when he was assigned a squadron of only ten ships and was short of 722 men. Then there were delays while other battleships were sent to sea on missions in the Atlantic. Byng’s mission was to see if Minorca had been occupied by the French and to relieve the island, or, if it had not been attacked, he was to blockade the harbour at Toulon.42 He was barely out of Portsmouth on his way to the Mediterranean, in April 1756, when the French fleet descended on Minorca, under the naval command of the marquis de Galissonnière and the military command of the duc de Richelieu. Richelieu was the great-nephew of the brilliant and unscrupulous cardinal who had served Louis XIII; Galissonnière was a capable naval man whose career had advanced slowly (probably because he was small and hunchbacked). Galissonnière ensured that the French fleet was of the size needed for the enterprise: he had 163 transport ships for 15,000 troops. The ships of the line included the Foudroyant, with eighty-four guns, with which nothing in the British squadron (now counting fourteen ships) could compare, not even the flagship, the Ramillies.43 The French had no difficulty in landing at Ciutadella and in winning over the Minorcans, who were only too anxious to be rid of the Protestant British. There was the good road, built by Lieutenant-Governor Kane, that promised to carry these men east to Mahón, though the British sent out a workforce of Jews and Greeks who broke up its precious surface, making the progress of the French, who came with heavy cannon, very difficult. Even so, within days all the British troops held was St Philip’s Fort.44
So, by the time Byng stood off the Balearic islands, in mid-May 1756, the task that he faced was the relief of St Philip’s. At a council of war with his senior officers, he outlined the key questions that would determine his squadron’s strategy: was there any chance of relieving Minorca by an attack on the French fleet? Clearly not. Even if there were no French fleet in these waters, could Minorca be prised from French control? Again, they thought not. But if they were defeated, would Gibraltar be under threat? It would. They concluded, ‘we are unanimously of the opinion that the fleet should immediately proceed for Gibraltar’.45 The lieutenant-governor was left to defend St Philip’s Fort, which he did manfully for as long as was possible. As for Byng, he was made the scapegoat for the dilatory and parsimonious policy of the British government, which had to explain to an infuriated public why a British possession in the Mediterranean had fallen to the old enemy. After a court martial in which he defended himself ably against the accusation that he had deserted the field of battle, he was nonetheless found guilty and executed on 14 March 1757. It was certainly not his fault that Minorca was lost.46 Among those who tried to intercede for him were the duc de Richelieu, as a gallant enemy, and the duke’s correspondent Voltaire,
who in his most famous work described the arrival of Candide at Portsmouth, where he witnessed the execution of a British admiral: ‘in this country it is considered good to kill an admiral from time to time, so as to encourage the others’.
The French held Minorca for only a few years; peace with England brought the island back under British rule between 1763 and 1782, and again, after a brief Spanish interlude, between 1798 and 1802, when the struggle against Napoleon gave the island renewed strategic significance. Yet the British were never entirely at ease in Minorca, despite their awareness of the strategic advantage of a western Mediterranean base. Partly this was because they found the island dry and desolate, strangely remote despite its proximity to France, Spain and Africa (as, many centuries before, Bishop Severus had complained). Partly, too, they wondered whether they could use it as a lure, ceding it to a potential ally in the hope of creating a firm friendship with another Mediterranean power.47 Such discussions took place in 1780, and they took place with Russia. In order to understand how Russia had suddenly become a Mediterranean power it is necessary to step back a few years.