Carthagène des Indes, deux points de vue

Sur le site everything, nous trouvons deux intéressants points de vue sur la bataille de Carthagène des Indes.

La fameuse médaille frappée en Angleterre pour fêter la prise de Carthagène des Indes.

Le premier, de la part d'un Espagnol

I have been wondering to know, in English spoken forums and English history websites, if it is true that the War of Jenkins' Ear was hidden from English historians through time.

I was not surprised I read nothing more than "began with an ear cut off" and end with the beginning of the war of the Austrian succession, at every english spoken website. Of course, in that war ocurred the biggest and worse humilliation and defeat made to British navy at war.

We already know the war began with an historic ear but in fact it was an excuse. The real motive been the ambition of English businessmen for controlling the Spanish empire due to their weakened power in America after the war of the Spanish succession

The most important episode on this war was the battle of Cartagena de Indias (Colombia). For those who want to know this episode of history, it is necesary to introduce the figures of the Spanish admiral Blas de Lezo, the English admiral Edward Vernon, and the place: Cartagena de Indias, the main port for Spaniards in America.

After the Jenkin's ear episode at the British parliament, the English king George II sent a huge armada, the biggest amphibious invassion to the Battle of Normandy of 1944, composed of 186 ships, 26400 men and 3000 artillery pieces.

The king of Spain, Felipe V ordered Blas de Lezo to defend the city of Cartagena de indias from the English attack, counting for that task with only 3000 infantry soldiers and recruits and 600 indians archers.

Blas de Lezo's legend started during a long period of continuous victories over the English and Dutch navys during "the Spanish sucession war". In those combats Lezo lost one of his legs, his left eye and a shot in the shoulder leave him a useless arm as well. For all that, he was called half-man or woodleg.

Lezo prepared de port's defence for one year. British arrived at Cartagena on may 5 1741 and in march 13, the English vessels started firing with their canons to the San Luis de Bocachica castle at a rate of 62 canon shots/hour.

After a month of continous bombing, the English disembark and took Bocachica and Bocagrande castles.

Lawrence Washington, half-brother of George Washington, in charge of the 4000 Virginian colonists, spread their troops at La Popa hill. This was the time Vernon commited the mistake of sending a ship with the message of victory to Jamaica. This news were sent to Great Britain where it took an enormous relevance, and George II ordered to fabricate coins and medals conmemorating the victory at Cartagena.

So overconfident was the English admiral about the victory over the outnumbered Spaniards that in April 19 1741 Vernon decided to send their soldiers to the final assault to San Felipe fortress helped for their warships batteries. Meanwhile the Spanish sunk their remaining ships at the ports entrance to divide English troops and hinder their attack.

When they arrived to the fortress walls they realized these beeing bigger as they thought because the Spanish dag up a hole around the fortress and british ladders were too short and useless to take the Fortress.

With that advantage and the British surprised and ensnared, Spaniards opened fire over them, and abandoning their positions, charged against the British, slaughtering them and forcing the reminders to scape back to their ships.

Finally, on may 9th 1741, after 57 battle days, with no food, half of his troops and sailors dead or sick by tropical plagues, Vernon decided to sail back to Jamaica, abandoned many vessels in the way out, due to the lack of people to steer them.

The result:

In the British side:

6000 British died

only 300 of the 4000 Virginian colonist survived.

7500 were wounded or sick and most of them died later on.

50 ships were taken or sunk for the Spanish defences or the British who had not enough men to steer them.

1500 destroyed or captured canons.

At the end, about 16000 British died.

In the Spanish side:

800 died

1200 wounded or sick
6 ships sunk

350 canons temporarily taken by the enemy.



In that battle each Spanish soldier and vessel fought and defeated ten English and American colonists.

The English historians hid the battle by order of the king George II with great succes to the present day as far as we can see.

The defeated admiral Vernon was given a hero's burial with the fallacious legend: "He subdued Chagre and at Cartagena conquered as far as naval forces could carry victory."...Neither victory nor conquest, but he became a hero.

Blas de Lezo died months later for the plagues at Cartagena and was forgotten in history until now. Nobody knows his burial site.
And I can now make sure that if English speakers want to know about this crucial battle for Spanish colonies must go to Spanish history books or websites, although it is quite unknown for common Spaniards.

Some links in english:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cartagena_de_Indias

http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=YeywbYKq-NQ

http://www.pieceofeight.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10

http://members.aol.com/GlobTreasr/history.html

Carthagène des Indes, ville prise par les Français mais que les Anglais n'ont pas réussi à prendre en dépit d'une supériorité militaire écrasante.

Et voici une réponse anglaise bien argumentée.

This post is intended as a reply to the above article. Specifically I'm challenging the assertion that the War of Jenkin's Ear and specifically the Battle of Cartagena de Indias have been deliberately hidden from the English-speaking world's history books as sensationally claimed.

The battle is certainly forgotten in the British perspective, but it's definitely there in the books. One notable account is given by Sir John Fortescue in his 'History of the British Army', it also turns up as a chapter in the many books about the British navy and army and their Caribbean ventures. It's not covered that much on the Internet but there are a few sites, starting with Wikipedia, as well as Google Book previews. Try searching under 'wentworth, vernon, Cartagena'.

But basically the 18th century just isn't a popular period in British popular culture, unlike the Napoleonic or Agincourt eras. Even the era's victories get little coverage online. If you look for accounts of the 1782 'grand assault' on Gibraltar, which was like Cartagena with the roles reversed (and the British even more outnumbered) you'll find very little – and searching gives you mostly books rather than Internet write-ups. And if you try to find accounts of 'successful Cartagenas' such as the captures of Havana and Manila you'll find virtually nothing, these, like Cartagena, are forgotten in the UK.

It's true that King George did attempt to 'cover up' the battle at the time, but hiding defeats from the people was standard practise back then, in fact kings and governments have continued doing it up to today. He was, however, unsuccessful. The expedition's two commanders, Admiral Vernon and General Wentworth, were very quick to publish and distribute pamphlets blaming the debacle on the other. These were followed up by pamphlets penned by resentful veterans condemning the expedition's mismanagement.

So it was no secret then, and hasn't been since. British historians do acknowledge it, but of course don't quite see it the same way as the winning side.

Justifiably proud Spaniards view Cartagena with the winners' mythology – as the English do the Armada, Waterloo and the Battle of Britain. And when stripped of that mythology and put in the context of military history, Cartagena, though a brilliant and heroic defence, doesn't quite match up to the superhuman event some portray it as (one Spanish acquaintance of mine calls it: "The greatest victory in the history of victories in all the ages.")

There are a number of myths attached to it (besides the cover-up one), some of which are repeated in the article above - which I should add is very good and far more objective than many.

For example, the event is sometimes termed Britain's worst naval defeat, when it wasn't really a naval battle at all. The Royal Navy did suffer heavily, but due to onshore batteries surrounding them in the narrow harbour. In fact, as pompous and ridiculous as Vernon's epitaph that at Cartagena he "conquered as far as naval forces could carry victory" seems, it is essentially correct. The Royal Navy did achieve its objectives of securing the harbour and landing troops. The Spanish only had six ships, and these were soon scuttled to block the harbour.

It's on land that the 'battle', more correctly a siege, was lost. Essentially that boiled down to the failure of the 5-6000-strong landing force to capture the town before tropical diseases like yellow fever destroyed it, and the rainy season forced the fleet to depart.

And it certainly wasn't the largest amphibious assault before D-Day as suggested on some sites. The Ottoman assaults on Rhodes and Malta and the Mongol invasions of Japan are just a sample of pre-WW2 expeditions that used fleets of a comparable or larger size and carried a lot more troops than Vernon's (and Gallipoli in WW1 dwarfed them all). Even the British expeditionary force to New York at the start of the American Revolution far exceeded Vernon/Wentworth's in terms of men and munitions.

Then there is very loose interpretation of the numbers involved on both sides. Of course it's tempting to count every sailor and cabin boy as the British 'assault force'(estimates range from 23-31,000 men). But only 12,000 of these were infantry, half were British regulars and marines with the remainder made up of American militia and machete-armed Jamaican slaves. The British commanders held the latter two components of their force in utter contempt, which may explain the fact they only landed 4-6000 troops.

The major battle of Cartagena involved the British assault on San Felipe, which though not fully developed at the time was well on its way to becoming the era's largest fortification in the western hemisphere. It was a sensationally bloody failure.

British sources put the number of troops committed to the San Felipe assault at 1,400; Spanish sources, when they mention numbers at all, tend to assume the full 4-6000 strong landing force was committed. Of course some less objective Spanish sources remain studiously silent on the actual numbers involved, leaving the reader to infer there were 23,000 British soldiers swarming up the fort walls (which were held by around 600 men).

It's really no wonder that with this kind of misinformation some Spanish people feel the fact Cartagena isn't counted as one of the world's greatest victories can only be the product of some kind of Anglo-conspiracy.

Spanish numbers also get played down. They are often given as only 3600, but besides his regulars, marines and native auxiliaries, Admiral de Lezo also had sailors, armed townspeople and slaves. According to the Cartagena Tourist Board there were up to 6,000 defenders - fighting from well-prepared fortifications with hundreds of guns.

Taken in the context of other siege situations in history, de Lezo wasn't in too bad a position, especially as he knew he only had to delay the attackers until the onset of disease and the rainy season. He was certainly aided in this by the grotesquely incompetent Admiral Vernon, whose bickering with the oddly dithering infantry commander Wentworth wasted a lot of time they didn't have. Notably he refused to supply battery support for the assault on San Felipe on the dubious grounds the harbour was too shallow.

This meant the infantry force had to attack without artillery forcing them to storm the walls with ladders - a brave but suicidal tactic thwarted by de Lezo's digging around the walls so the ladders couldn't reach. The Spanish then appear to have launched a bayonet charge into the shattered and retreating British as they became entangled in the trenches outside the fort. I say 'appear' because a minority of modern Spanish sources present a very different account of the bayonet charge, describing it as a surprise assault on the British camp - this is an intriguing discrepancy because the latter is actually what the British defenders did to the Franco-Spanish force at Gibraltar, and it would be somewhat ironic if the two assaults had become conflated.

The article above repeats the fiction that the Spanish bayonet charge drove the British back to their ships. Not quite true, once they were clear of the killing zone of San Felipe's walls and trenches the British actually made an orderly covered retreat the long distance back to their camp. After all, they still had more than enough troops to finish the job. Or so their commanders thought. Following the assault's failure, Vernon ordered a siege and bombardment of San Felipe only to be told yellow fever had reduced the artillery and infantry to a point that it simply wasn't possible. The landing force returned to their ships and the British eventually departed, utterly defeated, their numbers halved by disease.

British battle casualties (estimates are up to about 3000 killed, up to 7000 wounded over three months fighting on land and sea - though accounts are confused regarding the ratio of battle-disease casualties) were heavy but not extraordinary for an amphibious siege assault on multiple heavily-fortified and -gunned strongholds. At Gibraltar the Franco-Spanish assault force lost a similar number in a couple of days.

It was diseases such as yellow fever that cut down the British fleet and army in the thousands, not for the first or last time during Britain's Caribbean ventures. It's no wonder British sailors and soldiers considered posting to the Caribbean to be the equivalent of a death sentence. As one historian wryly noted, had the British been successful in capturing the city they would simply have had the privilege of dying a diseased death inside its walls, as their more 'successful' compatriots did in Havana, rather than in the harbour and on the voyage back to Jamaica.

Disease also hit the Spanish side, with the heroic de Lezo succumbing soon after seeing the British off.

So it was a brilliant victory crowning the career of a brilliant man. But Britain has suffered worst defeats, and in open battle situations, and for that reason Cartagena de Indias is remembered in British perceptions more for the shocking disease toll, and is cited as a lesson in what happens when different armed branches (in this case the navy and army) don't cooperate. But in general it has been largely forgotten, just as few Spanish people are aware of the reverse event at Gibraltar despite that occurring on what is, at least rightfully, their soil.

As for the coins? Once again, reporting victories before the fact was common practice before modern communications, though in that case it went spectacularly wrong. I'll never understand why George Washington's half-brother named his estate after Vernon, he was there after all, and Vernon tried to put some of the blame on the American forces. In fact Cartagena sometimes turns up in books exploring the build-up to the American Revolutionary War, as an example of the intense ill-will between British regular troops and colonial forces.

Ultimately, in Brtish eyes, Cartagena de Indias just goes down in the long list of failed/successful imperialistic land grabs that modern Britain no longer wants to think about. Spain would pay it back in kind during the American Revolutionary War and neither side can claim moral superiority - there's no honour amongst thieves and frankly that's all colonialist and imperialist powers are.

Had Vernon been successful, what then? Perhaps Columbia would have been another Belize or Jamaica with English-speaking masters rather than Spanish, for a while at least. Both England and Spain's days in the New World were already numbered.

Ultimately my main point is that Cartagena de Indias hasn't been struck from the history books as some have sensationally claimed. It's just viewed with the loser's pragmatism rather than the winner's mythology.

L'histoire truquée par les Anglais

Cartagena de Indias, le pire désastre militaire de l'âge de la voile. Une défaite que les Anglais s'obstinent à cacher au monde.

L'histoire maritime est le domaine des Anglais et ils veillent à ce que la réputation de leur pays soit sans tache.

Je suis le seul à révéler qu'en plus de deux siècles, les historiens anglais, si prompts à décortiquer la moindre des campagnes de Nelson ou encore les malheurs de l'Armada d'Angleterre, se gardent bien de s'intéresser au pire désastre du XVIIIe siècle, la défaite humiliante de l'invincible armada anglaise qui, sous le commandement de lord Vernon, a fait voile vers le Nouveau Monde pour s'emparer des provinces américaines de l'Espagne.

Les Nord-Américains, qui ont perdu beaucoup de jeunes gens de bonne famille dans cette déconfiture anglaise, sont les seuls à aborder la question à travers le sort de leurs soldats.

Après avoir rappelé que sur 5000 jeunes colons anglais ayant rejoint lord Vernon, moins de 500 sont revenus, l'auteur américain Charles Winslow Hall dans son roman publié en 1898 Cartagena : or, The lost brigade; a story of heroism in the British war with Spain, 1740-1742, écrit :

Of the failure of the several expeditions under the direction of Lord Vernon, history has heretofore been remarkably silent; and for some reason, with the exception of the attempt on Cartagena, the operations of the English fleet and army in the West Indies from 1740-44, inclusive, seem to have been kept from the English public with astonishing success.

Une traduction rapide : « L'histoire [anglaise] est restée remarquablement silencieuse sur l'échec des différentes expéditions conduites par lord Vernon. A l'exception de la tentative sur Carthagène, les opérations de marine et de l'armée royales dans les Indes occcidentales entre 1740 et 1744 ont été occultées pour quelque raison au public anglais avec un succès étonnant. »

Cet ouvrage s'inscrit dans l'effort de mobilisation du public des Etats-Unis contre l'Espagne dans cette guerre de conquête et de rapine où la puissante Amérique va s'emparer de Cuba, de Porto-Rico et des Philippines.



Pour lire l'intégralité du roman de Charles Winslow Hall, cliquer ici.

Les historiens anglais remettent ça

Des chronomètres de marine exposés au musée de la Marine à Paris.

Voici un exemple typique de l'esprit insulaire des Anglais quand ils écrivent l'Histoire et plus particulièrement l'histoire maritime.

Dans cet article de Steve Connor pour The Independent, qui relate les efforts faits par les historiens de la perfide Albion pour déterminer la part du Bureau des longitudes britannique dans la découverte du chronographe de marine, l'auteur donne l'impression à ses lecteurs que l'invention de cet instrument est purement insulaire alors qu'il n'en est rien.

Les Anglais passent sous silence les travaux et résultats obtenus sur le continent, notamment en France. Des noms comme Ferdinand Berthoud ou Pierre Le Roy sont sciemment ignorés alors qu'ils ont joué un rôle critique.

Un point de vue suisse, ici.

Un point de vue français, ici.

How Britannia came to rule the waves

History has it that a clockmaker beat the scientific establishment to crack the longitude problem. But did he really?


Hero worship at the expense of historical accuracy? Surely not. It has been portrayed as the story of the lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his day despite the hindering efforts of those ranged against him, saving thousands of lives.

On the one side was John Harrison, the self-taught clockmaker from a humble Yorkshire background. On the other, the 18th Century’s wealthy elite charged with the task of presiding over the problem of longitude – the knotty task of working out how far west or east a ship has sailed.

Harrison’s story has been the subject of a best-selling book and an award-winning film but science historians believe that the true account of how the problem of longitude was solved has yet to be told.

To uncover the full story, they have started dusting off the forgotten archives of the British Board of Longitude, the panel of distinguished experts set up in 1714 to sit in judgement over proposed solutions to the Longitude Problem. The Board was responsible for awarding the £20,000 prize – equivalent to about £3m today – to the first person to come up with a way for ships to navigate safely at sea by knowing longitude.

“Think of The X Factor, but much more money and much more important,” said Professor Simon Schaffer of the University of Cambridge. He is the principle investigator on the archival research project which is being jointly conducted with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. The prize was the first time the government had used legislation to address a specific scientific problem.

In Dava Sobel’s 1995 book Longitude, and the later film based on it, carpenter’s son Harrison is depicted as the solitary virtuoso pitched against the scientific establishment of a society suffocated by class, exemplified by the eminent gentlemen who sat on the Board of Longitude.

But Professor Schaffer and his colleagues believe that the important role of the Board of Longitude in finding a solution has been largely forgotten or downplayed in the rush to promote Harrison as the unsung hero of the popular story. Far from being a force of conservatism, the board, they believe, did much to generate the climate of open inquiry that allowed pioneering scientific research to flourish – a climate that fostered Harrison’s historic achievement.

“The Board of Longitude has had a pretty bad history because it has either been forgotten or condemned. Its creation was a turning point in British history, but after it was abolished in 1828 it was largely forgotten and its impact was never properly assessed,” Professor Schaffer said.

Indeed, Professor Schaffer goes as far as to suggest that British science today owes the Board a debt of gratitude rather than contempt, because in effect it laid much of the groundwork for the kind of state-funded scientific research that we now take for granted. The precedent of the Board of Longitude may indeed have led Britain to become one of the global leaders of modern science.

“It has been forgotten, I think, because we don’t like remembering how important the state is in promoting science and technology in British history. And we ignore or condemn the Board of Longitude because there is a hero in this story and his name is John Harrison.”

He added: “We still like to believe that we are a nation of enthusiastic amateurs like Harrison, making huge breakthroughs against the odds and in spite of a state hostile to scientific progress. In fact, we have a long history of state-sponsored ingenuity which made Britain into a military and technological world player. The Board is in many ways that history.”

It was a naval disaster in 1707 that led to the Board of Longitude being set up in 1714. A fleet of four large ships led by Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell foundered on the rocks of the Isles of Scilly, with the loss of nearly 2,000 lives. An investigation later concluded that it was the inability to determine longitude accurately that caused the disaster, and this led the Parliament of the day to establish a substantial Longitude Prize to be given “for such person or persons as shall discover the Longitude”.

Although it was easy to determine latitude on a ship’s rolling deck by analysing the height of the midday sun, determining longitude was far more difficult using classical astronomical techniques. Another way was to have an accurate clock that could keep the time of the home port, where the longitude is known, and compare this time with the time on board the ship – as determined by another clock set regularly to the local midday sun.

As Dava Sobel describes: “The two clock times enable the navigator to convert the hour difference into geographical separation. Since the Earth takes 24 hours to revolve 360 degrees, one hour marks 1/24 of a revolution or 15 degrees. And so each hour’s time difference between the ship and the starting point marks a progress of 15 degrees of longitude to the east or west.”

The problem in the 18th Century was getting accurate enough clocks that could work at sea. Pendulum clocks would speed up or slow down with the motions of the ship, and the lubricants used by clockmakers performed differently in various temperatures and humidities.

Harrison’s genius was to make a marine chronometer that was compact enough to take on a ship; that worked on springs rather than a pendulum; and that did not require the lubricants used by standard clockmakers. His fourth prototype, the H4 chronometer that resembled an oversized pocket watch, eventually led to him winning most of the money assigned to the Longitude Prize. But this was despite the considerable delay and fudge by the Board, which suggested the chronometer’s success in two transatlantic sea trials – when it determined longitude to within one nautical mile – was down to luck.

The popular account of the episode makes much of the role played by Reverend Nevil Maskelyne, a member of the Board and the Astronomer Royal. Maskelyne was a proponent of the lunar distance method of determining longitude. Sobel’s account portrays him as obstructive to the point of being unfair on Harrison. Indeed, Harrison had to petition both Parliament and King George III to get the full amount he rightly felt he deserved – but he never received the official award, which in fact was not given to anyone.

As part of the new investigation into the archives of the Board of Longitude, experts will also dismantle the chronometers made by Harrison in pursuit of the prize. Richard Dunn, curator of the history of navigation at the National Maritime Museum, said that it is clear from earlier work on some of the prototypes that Harrison was not working alone.

“One of the things we will be doing is taking apart the timekeepers Harrison made, which can give us an alternative version of the story. If you look inside the first clock, it quickly becomes clear that several people were involved in making it. Clearly this wasn’t just about a lone genius working by himself,” Mr Dunn said.

As for the Board, longitude was not its only scientific success. It was also involved in stimulating interest in other fields of research, such as the expeditions of Captain Cook, which led to the discovery of Australia, the invention of the sextant, the global survey of geomagnetism, the building of the first overseas astronomical observatory and the search for a North-West passage.

Professor Schafer said that we live in a culture were we prefer to see success as the achievement of a unique author rather than the fruits of collective action. Yet without the board, British science could have been very different today.

“Essentially the Board represents the germs of our national science policy,” Professor Schafer said. “State-backed science is still an issue which matters a lot now, whether it’s on stem cell research or climate change. We don’t know whether to trust it, and we don’t know how to respond when scientists and the state fall out.

“If we can find out what worked as that relationship was beginning – and why – then we will have lessons to teach from the project we are starting now.”