FIRST CAMPAIGN IN PORTUGAL.
His plan embraced three principal objects:
1º. To hold on by the sea coast, as well for the sake of his supplies as to avoid the drain upon his weak army, which the protection of magazines on shore would occasion, and also to cover the disembarkation of the reinforcements expected from England.
2º. To keep his troops in a mass, that he might strike an important blow.
3º. To strike that blow as near Lisbon as possible, that the affairs of Portugal might be quickly brought to a crisis.
Sir A. Wellesley’s Narrative. Court of Inquiry.
He possessed very good military surveys of the ground in the immediate neighbourhood of Lisbon, and he was anxious to carry on his operations in a part of the country where he could avail himself of this resource; but the utter inexperience of his commissariat staff, and the want of cavalry, rendered his movements slow, and obliged him to be extremely circumspect, especially as the insurrection, although a generous, was but a feeble effort, and its prolongation rather the result of terror than of hope. The blow had been hastily struck in the moment of suffering, and the patriots, conscious of weakness, trembled when they reflected on their own temerity.
Proceedings of the Court of Inquiry.
From the English stores Bernardim Freire had received arms and equipments complete for five thousand soldiers, yet his army at Leria did not exceed six thousand men of all arms fit for action; and besides this force, there were in all the provinces north of the Tagus only three thousand infantry, under the command of the marquis of Valladeres, half of whom were Spaniards. Hence it appears, that nothing could be more insignificant than the insurrection, nothing more absurd than the lofty style adopted by the junta of Oporto in their communications with the British ministers.
Upon the other side, Junot, who received information of the English descent in the Mondego as early as the 2d, was extremely embarrassed by the distance Thiebault. of his principal force, and the hostile disposition of the inhabitants of Lisbon. He also was acquainted with the disaster of Dupont, and exaggerated notions of the essential strength of the Portuguese insurgents were generated in his own mind and in the minds of his principal officers.