The Iberian Flame

Chapter 40

The following day the general took boat across the bay and landed on the desolate swamplands of the Isla de Leon. For hours he tramped and squelched over its length and breadth, frequently taking notes of sightings of the French ships across the flats.

On the third day he began a heroic operation with long twenty-four-pounders, naked, without tackle or carriage, eleven feet of iron lying in the mud. Hawsers were looped and seized around their trunnions and led out to traces a hundred feet long on each side. From the prisons and barracks, even the street, five hundred men, under the lash, began brute hauling their immense weight, breech first, through the impassable marshes. One by one, their gun-carriages and impedimenta following on makeshift mud-rafts, they were manoeuvred to the northern tip of the Isla de Leon – directly opposite the French.

Before long a white flag of parlay appeared from Admiral Rosily.

‘No! I won’t even hear the cerdo frances,’ snarled Morla.

‘Sir, he offers to disembark his guns, to lie quietly, knowing the English cannot touch him.’

‘That’s a falsehood. He waits for as long as it takes for Murat’s battalions to reach here and rescue him. I’m no fool of his!’

The agony of hauling more guns went on.

On the fourth day before sunset another parlay was requested.

‘The French admiral will haul down his colours, render his ships incapable of combat and-’

‘He knows he’s beat!’ chuckled Morla, grimly. ‘Let him stew. By morning I’ll give him such a waking as will be heard in Madrid.’

Renzi, for the last three days sharing the general’s field tent and rations in the mire and squalor, allowed a touch of hope. Morla was playing it well. One by one the big twenty-fours had been man-hauled through the mud along a broad front, placed on their gun-carriages and positioned atop a firm built-up ground behind a breastwork.

Renzi had been counting them as they’d been brought up at such cost. By this evening there would probably be thirty.

But six massive ships with near five hundred even bigger guns and four thousand seamen and marines outnumbered the Spanish ragtag militia and sailors by at least two to one. These were still terrifying odds.

Yet at the same time Rosily would be watching the steady and careful preparations, knowing that when Morla was ready, there would be more than a score of heavy guns blasting their shot into his ships, for which there could be no real reply to the protected emplacements. It would go on, night and day, until his ships were blood-soaked ruins – or he shifted his anchorage. And that would merely bring them into range of the main forts whose great guns with red-hot shot would make short work of them.

Or they could be driven out to face the British fleet.

What would the morning bring?

At break of day there was heightened tension in the Spanish encampment. Everyone knew that Morla was this day going to bring about the climax and they went about their duties with a wary watchfulness.

It was a wan, dreary morning, the dull sky a fit backdrop to what must come.

The order was issued: at eight, all guns would open fire and cease only by direct order of the captain general.

There was no change in the aspect of the French ships. Across the water they lay unmoving, their colours aloft, drooping in the still air. At this moment Admiral Rosily must be following every movement and would know what to expect. Did he have a trick ready to play at this point?

Anything could happen from this time forward.

The order rang out: ‘Clear the guns!’

To hide preparations, fascines, bundles of brushwood, had been placed in front of each gun position. These were now removed, leaving muzzles bared in snarling menace.

It was a signal to the French captains: aboard every ship, ensigns dipped in rapid, angry jerks.

A boat put off under a white flag. Rosily’s flag-captain had come to treat for a full surrender, his battle lost before it had begun.