The following morning, accompanied by Mr. D. and Mr. B., I paid a visit to the general, who bore the old Iberian name of Lara; when a very interesting conversation took place. He was much excited by a reference to some discussions with the Governor of Gibraltar, about rebuilding the forts of St. Barbara and St. Philip, and took occasion to expatiate on the mistake of the English on the subject of Gibraltar. “By it,” he said, “you may irritate Spain, but you cannot injure her or benefit yourselves. You mistake these Straits for the Dardanelles: there is no padlock on the Mediterranean. Tarifa would command the Straits if they could be commanded: you blow up and abandon Tangier which, being to windward, might have served you, and hold Gibraltar, which can never serve you in any way, unless indeed your object be to convulse Spain, and fill her with hatred of the English name.” The gentlemen present dwelt much on the dishonourable nature of the capture of the place, and on the injury they suffered by our retention of it, and the use we made of it. One of them said it would be worth their while to give Cuba in exchange. They were surprised and delighted at hearing my opinion; but the note was changed when I referred to Ceuta.
Though I had been at Algeciras on several occasions, I now, for the first time, visited the walls. I commenced on the southern side, and I could trace them around the crest of a low flat hill. The towers are close to each other, and about twenty feet square, of solid Moorish tapia. To the north they are more remarkable. A large tower projects into the sea, and is still forty feet in height. I had to scramble over solid pieces of masonry, lying about like fragments of dislocated strata! It is not the carefully-chiselled and mathematically-adjusted blocks of the Egyptian, Persian, Greek, or Roman architecture. The materials of these walls, not their building, is the marvel. One mass, twelve feet thick, twenty-five feet high, and thirty long, has fallen fifty feet, without breaking. While examining these masses, I observed in the water large globes, and thought at first they were urns, but on closer inspection they proved to be shot, and I found one twenty inches in diameter, and weighing about seven hundred pounds. The governor was kind enough to permit me to have it carried away—indeed, he offered me one still larger from the store in the artillery-ground. These, it is true, might have been intended for the catapulta; but gunpowder was unquestionably known at the time to the Mussulmans.
Algeciras was rased immediately on its capture, and has never been restored. That event preceded, by two years, the battle of Cressy, which England gained partly by her first use of gunpowder. Was this art, then, learned at Algeciras? There were English auxiliaries in the ranks of the besiegers.
Looking on these remains, I tried to put myself in the place of our forefathers beleaguering this fortress, when, for the first time, they saw, heard, and felt this terrestrial lightning. It was not Neptune with his trident upturning the walls, but Jupiter with his bolts defending them. Algeciras, Troy-like, is memorable by its destruction. The Princes of Christendom and of Islam assembled from far and near to its siege. During this operation, the Spaniards so suffered from Gibraltar, then in the hands of the Moors, that Alonzo the Great, during whose minority it had been lost, vowed that he would retake it. After great and vain efforts, he ended his days in the camp before it. To raise money for the siege, excises were first invented. The French word Gabelle, and Gabella the Italian, come from the Spanish Al Cabala, which is from the Arabic.[37] This Bay is thus remarkable as the birthplace of two inventions, which have changed in modern times the features of war and the characters of peace. The other to which I refer is at Cressy, two centuries before that.[38]
The Chinese, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, used not merely gunpowder, but bombs, against the Moguls. Nothing can be more clear than the description of the latter in the Turkish writers quoted by D’Ohsson in his history of the Mogul conquests. From China and the Tartars, the discovery might have passed, as paper did, to the Arabs. The link was established between Pekin and the Amoor, the Amoor and the Oxus, the Oxus and Bagdad, Bagdad and Cordova. But indisputably the Saracens were working their way towards the discovery—the granulation of that composition, which was all that Friar Bacon, the pupil of the Moors, wanted to convert his crackers and squibs into cartridges.[39]
It is but natural that they should have possessed gunpowder before we did, for they anticipated us in guns. Artillery, at its very origin, attained in their hands perfection. Discoveries and practice only conduct us back to the kinds of ordnance at which they arrived per saltum and at once. Murat II. at the siege of Leodra, cast guns which carried ball of fourteen hundred weight. Such Titanic engines may still be seen at the Dardanelles, and Baron de Tott consulted respecting their use. At the battle of Chesme, in 1790, the Russian Admiral fell aboard the Turkish Admiral and drove in his guns. While the vessels were thus foul and grappling, the Turk discharged one shot from inboard; it broke through the Russian on the opposite side. She immediately filled and sank, but locked in her deadly grasp, her antagonist sank with her. They now lie side by side “full fathom five.” At that time, the armament of our heaviest vessels consisted of twenty-four pounders, and of course a “First Lord” would have scoffed at the idea of a sixty-eight or eighty-four pounder afloat.
I am afraid I should never get on if I entered on the subject of fortification; but I may say in two words, that the structures of the Moors, so long in advance of artillery, have borne unscathed its brunt. At the Gibelfar of Malaga, Tarifa, Alcala, &c., are to be found rudiments of advanced works, of glacis and counterscarp, with a regular system of flanking walls. At Estepona, I observed angular fortification, the link between the old system and the new. There are walls for the purpose of resisting artillery, twenty-five feet high and as many thick, on which the guns must have been mounted en barbette. Their Spanish pupils anticipated Vauban.[40]
This region has been fertile in destructive inventions. Gunpowder was first used for mining by the Spaniards at Baza, about 1480, superseding the old practice detailed in Timour’s Memoirs, which was, to set fire to the beams which supported the roof of the mine after it had been carried under the walls.[41]
It was in the Straits of Gibraltar, before Ceuta, that artillery was first introduced afloat, in 1518, by Don Gonzalo Zarto, in the service of Don John of Portugal.
It was at the last siege of Gibraltar that shells were thrown horizontally, and that red-hot shot were first used. But antiquity also furnishes her share of discoveries. It is not travelling too far to set down as belonging to the same list, the sling of the Balearic Islands, and the leaden bullets which, as Ælian tells us, the Romans obtained from Morocco. The battering-ram was first used at Cadiz, during the short struggle between the Phœnician colonists and their unnatural brothers of Carthage.[42] The Iberian sword borrowed by Rome, may also be recorded in presence of the first Roman colony—Carteia.