In the year 1319, Pedro, Infante of Castile, fought the Moors at Granada. The latter were the victors, and their spoils were enormous, consisting in part of forty-three hundredweights of gold, one hundred and forty hundredweights of silver, with armour, arms, and horses in abundance. Fifty thousand Castilians were slain, and among the captives were the wife and children of the Infante. Gibraltar, then in the hands of Spain, with Tarifa and eighteen castles of the district, were offered, and refused for her ransom. The body of the Infante himself was stripped of its skin, and stuffed and hung over the gate of Granada.
The third siege occurred in the reign of Mohammed IV., when the Spanish held the [pg 91]Rock. The governor at that time, Vasco Perez de Meira, was an avaricious and dishonest man, who embezzled the dues and other resources of the place and neglected his charge. During the siege, a grain-ship fell on shore,[73] and its cargo would have enabled him to hold out a long time. Instead of feeding his soldiers, who were reduced to eating leather, he gave and sold it to his prisoners, with the expectation of either getting heavy ransoms for them, or, if he should have to surrender, of making better terms for himself. It availed him nothing, for he had to capitulate; and then, not daring to face his sovereign, Alfonso XI., he had to flee to Africa, where he ended his days.
Alfonso besieged it twice. The first time the Granadians induced him to abandon it, promising a heavy ransom; the next time he commenced by reducing the neighbouring town of Algeciras, which was defended with great energy. When the Spaniards brought forward their wheeled towers of wood, covered with raw hides, the Moors discharged cannon loaded with red-hot balls. This is noteworthy, for cannon was not used by the English till three years after, at the battle of Creçy, while it is the first recorded instance of red-hot shot being used at all.[74] It is further deserving of notice, that the very means employed at Algeciras were afterwards so successfully used at the great siege. After taking Algeciras, Alfonso blockaded Gibraltar, when the plague broke out in his camp; he died from it, and the Rock remained untaken. This was the epoch of one of those great pestilences which ravaged Europe. Fifty thousand souls perished in London in 1348 from its effects; Florence lost two-thirds of her population; in Saragossa three hundred died daily. The sixth attack on the part of the King of Fez was unsuccessful; as was that in 1436, when it was besieged by a wealthy noble—one of the De Gusmans. His forces were allowed to land in numbers on a narrow beach below the fortress, where they were soon exposed to the rising of the tide and the missiles of the besieged. De Gusman was drowned, and his body, picked up by the Moors, hung out for twenty-six years from the battlements, as a warning to ambitious nobles.
At the eighth siege, in 1462, Gibraltar passed finally into Christian hands. The garrison was weak and the Spaniards gained an easy victory. When Henry IV. learned of its capture, he rejoiced greatly, and took immediate care to proclaim it a fief of the throne, adding to the royal titles that of Lord of Gibraltar. The armorial distinctions still borne by Gibraltar were first granted by him. The ninth siege, on the part of a De Gusman, was successful, and it for a time passed into the hands of a noble who had vast possessions and fisheries in the neighbourhood. Strange to say, such were the troubles of Spain at the time, that Henry the before-named, who was known as “the Weak,” two years after confirmed the title to the Rock to the son of the very man who had been constantly in arms against him. But after the civil wars, and at the advent of Ferdinand and Isabella, there was a decided change. Isabella, acting doubtless under [pg 92]the advice of her astute husband, whose entire policy was opposed to such aggrandisement on the part of a subject, tried to induce the duke to surrender it, offering in exchange the City of Utrera. Ayala[75] tells us that he utterly refused. His great estates were protected by it, and he made it a kind of central depôt for his profitable tunny fisheries. He died in 1492, and the third duke applied to Isabella for a renewal of his grant and privileges. She promised all, but insisted that the Rock and fortress must revert to the Crown. But it was not till nine years afterwards that Isabella succeeded in compelling or inducing the Duke to surrender it formally. Dying in 1504, the queen testified her wishes as follows:—“It is my will and desire, insomuch as the city of Gibraltar has been surrendered to the Royal Crown, and been inserted among its titles, that it shall for ever so remain.” Two years after her death, Juan de Gusman tried to retake it, and blockaded it for four months, at the end of which time he abandoned the siege, and had to make reparation to those whose property had been injured. This is the only bloodless one among the fourteen sieges.
In 1540 a dash was made at the town, and even at a part of the fortress, by Corsairs. They plundered the neighbourhood, burned a chapel and hermitage, and dictated terms in the most high-handed way—that all the Turkish prisoners should be released, and that their galleys should be allowed to take water at the Gibraltar wells. They were afterwards severely chastised by a Spanish fleet.
In the wars between the Dutch and Spaniards a naval action occurred, in the year 1607, in the port of Gibraltar, which can hardly be omitted in its history. The great Sully has described it graphically when speaking of the efforts of the Dutch to secure the alliance of his master, Henry IV. of France, in their wars against Philip of Spain. He says: “Alvares d’Avila, the Spanish admiral, was ordered to cruise near the Straits of Gibraltar, to hinder the Dutch from entering the Mediterranean, and to deprive them of the trade of the Adriatic. The Dutch, to whom this was a most sensible mortification, gave the command of ten or twelve vessels to one of their ablest seamen, named Heemskerk, with the title of vice-admiral, and ordered him to go and reconnoitre this fleet, and attack it. D’Avila, though nearly twice as strong as his enemy, yet provided a reinforcement of twenty-six great ships, some of which were of a thousand tons burden, and augmented the number of his troops to three thousand five hundred men. With this accession of strength he thought himself so secure of victory that he brought a hundred and fifty gentlemen along with him only to be witnesses of it. However, instead of standing out to sea, as he ought to have done, he posted himself under the town and castle of Gibraltar, that he might not be obliged to fight but when he thought proper.
“Heemskerk, who had taken none of these precautions, no sooner perceived that his enemy seemed to fear him than he advanced to attack him, and immediately began the most furious battle that was ever fought in the memory of man. It lasted eight whole hours. The Dutch vice-admiral, at the beginning, attacked the vessel in which the Spanish admiral was, grappled with, and was ready to board her. A cannon-ball, which wounded him in the thigh soon after the fight began, left him only a hour’s life, during which, and till within [pg 93]a moment of his death, he continued to give orders as if he felt no pain. When he found himself ready to expire, he delivered his sword to his lieutenant, obliging him and all that were with him to bind themselves by an oath either to conquer or die. The lieutenant caused the same oath to be taken by the people of all the other vessels, when nothing was heard but a general cry of ‘Victory or Death!’ At length the Dutch were victorious; they lost only two vessels, and about two hundred and fifty men; the Spaniards lost sixteen ships, three were consumed by fire, and the others, among which was the admiral’s ship, ran aground. D’Avila, with thirty-five captains, fifty of his volunteers, and two thousand eight hundred soldiers, lost their lives in the fight; a memorable action, which was not only the source of tears and affliction to many widows and private persons, but filled all Spain with horror.”[76]
MOORISH TOWER AT GIBRALTAR.
England won Gibraltar during the War of the Succession, when she was allied with Austria and Holland against Spain and France. The war had dragged on with varied results till 1704, when it was determined to attack Spain at home with the aid of the Portuguese. The commanders of the allied fleets and troops—i.e., the Landgrave George of Hesse-Darmstadt, Sir George Rooke, Admiral Byng, Sir Cloudesley Shovel, Admiral Leake, and the three [pg 94]Dutch admirals—determined to attack Gibraltar, believed to be weak in forces and stores. On the 21st of July, 1704, the fleet, which consisted of forty-five ships, six frigates, besides fire and bomb-ships, came to an anchor off the Rock, and landed 5,000 men, so as to at once cut off the supplies of the garrison. The commanders of the allied forces sent, on the morning after their arrival, a demand for the surrender of Gibraltar to the Archduke Charles, whose claims as rightful King of Spain they were supporting. The little garrison[77] answered valiantly; and had their brave governor, the Marquis Diego de Salinas, been properly backed, the fortress might have been Spain’s to-day. The opening of the contest was signalised by the burning of a French privateer, followed by a furious cannonading: the new and old moles were speedily silenced, and large numbers of marines landed. The contest was quite unequal, and the besieged soon offered to capitulate with the honours of war, the right of retaining their property, and six days’ provisions. The garrison had three days allowed for its departure, and those, as well as the inhabitants of the Rock, who chose, might remain, with full civil and religious rights. Thus, in three days’ time the famous fortress fell into the hands of the allies, and possession was taken in the name of Charles III. Sir George Rooke, however, over-rode this, and pulled down the standard of Charles, setting up in its stead that of England. A garrison of 1,800 English seamen was landed. The English were, alone of the parties then present, competent to hold it; and at the Peace of Utrecht, 1711, it was formally ceded “absolutely, with all manner of right for ever, without exemption or impediment,” to Great Britain.