A Night of Terror: January, 1809

by Jonathan Hopkins

17th January, 1809. And from French-held Northern Spain, a beleaguered army was on its way home.

Amid scenes reminiscent of a much later conflict - the evacuation of their expeditionary force at Dunkirk - the British, having marched through Spain in hope, boarded a fleet of ships in Corunna harbour under the very noses of their French antagonists.

An enemy twice as strong had been kept at bay over hundreds of miles of Iberia’s most inhospitable mountain country before a desperate rearguard action, which cost the lives of commander-of-the-forces, Sir John Moore, and hundreds of his men, gave the remaining troops enough time to embark before they were overwhelmed, and they set off in convoy across the Bay of Biscay toward the English Channel.

Relief at escaping Spain must have been immense, though most soldiers’ morale remained at a low ebb. Not realising how badly they were outnumbered at the very end, many could not understand why they had been forced to flee a campaign where, even when suffering both hunger and bitter cold, they had beaten the enemy in every engagement fought.

But whatever their thoughts, they could not escape the fact that the army was a shadow of its former self. Their transport ships, blown on increasingly strong south-westerly winds which scattered the fleet, were packed to the gunwales; holds and decks overflowing, with untended sick and wounded lying alongside their healthy but underfed comrades.

In such squalid confines it was inevitable that typhus and dysentery would run amok, so much so that when the early transports made landfall on the south coast of England, at first locals could not believe the shivering, unshaven scarecrows ferried to shore were really British soldiers.

But that was in the future.

Most of the army’s cavalry horses were shot prior to departure simply because there was not enough hold space in the returning convoy to embark them as well as the men.

Already stretched by the importance of patrolling the Channel, North Sea, Mediterranean and Americas amongst others, the navy was so desperate for ships that inexperienced or incompetent masters were among those whose vessels were leased for the expedition. Alexander Gordon (15th Hussars) reported that one vessel carrying his regiment was almost wrecked when the master mistook the glow of the Needles lighthouse for a star, until he was persuaded of his error by a landlubber, the regimental paymaster.

In fact by the 20th of January the weather had eased slightly, only for the gales to return with a vengeance the following day. Crammed into the Dispatch transport were around seventy men of the 7th Hussars, including three of their officers, together with 34 horses. In the early hours of 22nd January (between 2am and 4am, depending on the source) and running for Falmouth, she struck a chain of shoals to the south of that port known as ‘The Manacles’ - in old Cornish Maen Eglos, or 'Church Stones'.

It’s difficult to imagine the full horror of what happened next. The grinding, tearing sound of timber on rocks as the vessel came to a sudden and unexpected stop would have reverberated right through the ship. Men asleep in their hammocks were thrown out. Scrambling about inside what was in effect a pitch-black slowly-disintegrating wooden box, disoriented and terrified, who knows what went through their minds as the sea slowly smashed the transport to pieces?

Northern end of Coverack Cove on an ebb tide, showing where The Manacles come ashore. The mound visible on the promontory is apparently where the horses were buried

Once the ship foundered, the horses on board were lost. They would have been lowered into the hold using block and tackle, a laborious process which meant that even had the ship struck the coast rather than being out at sea there was no way to get the animals out.

So the wreck would have been filled with screaming men and panicked horses until, eventually, the raging sea quieted them all. Of the hundred-odd souls aboard the Dispatch, only six survived; five hussar privates and one of the regimental farriers. Officers Major Cavendish, Captain Duckenfield, and Lieutenant Waldegrave all perished.

Two hours later, and further north, a second vessel - the Royal Navy sloop Primrose - on its way to Spain with dispatches, struck The Manacles with the loss of 126 lives. The sole survivor was a boy who had lashed himself to the stump of a mast, from where he was rescued by intrepid locals, by now alerted to the disasters, who launched small boats in the hope of saving at least some lives.



Base of the tower and main doorway of St Keverne Church. Its tall spire (not visible here, sorry)
could be seen from the sea in daylight and acted as an aid to navigation.

Washed ashore at Coverack and further along the rocky coast, casualties were buried in mass graves in the churchyard at nearby St Keverne. Men of the 7th were originally commemorated by a plaque on the church wall which read:


When Britain sends at liberty's command
Her ready youth to free a stranger land,
She bears her slain in triumph to the shore,
And the proud parent shows the wounds before.
But when her sons, each form of danger past,
Strain their glad eyes to view her bills at last;

If then the tempest rolls the foaming flood,
And her own ocean 'whelms her bravest blood,
When there a Bukenfield(sic), a Cavendish here,
And youthful Waldegrave press a wat'ry bier;

Their mourning comrades feel a moisten'd cheek,
And bid the marble their dumb sorrow speak.
Tyranti the barrier of thy rage, the deep
Aids thy fierce boast, and English mothers weep.

At some point this was removed and the gravesite seems to have been forgotten until a later mass burial uncovered the bodies, whereupon a descendent of the 7th Hussars previous field commander, Lt Colonel Sir Richard Hussey Vivian, provided a permanent memorial for the grave mound.



7th Hussars memorial

The dedication reads:
In Memory of
the Officers and men of H M VIIth Hussars,
interred in this plot who were lost in the
Transport Dispatch on the
Manacle rocks Janry 22nd, 1809,
on their return from the
Peninsular War.

Interestingly, dead horses washed up on shore were also interred, but further along the coast. It seems these were covered rather than buried (probably due to the presence of granite rocks not far below the surface) and this mound is still visible.

So the British were, mostly, back on home soil, but it would not be long before another army returned to Iberia, this time without loss of life on the voyage. The parallel expedition to Walcheren in the Netherlands, however, killed more than 4000 men. Not lost at sea this time, but struck down by disease.

Mother nature always has the upper hand.





Sources:

Shipwrecks of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Eras - Terence Grocott (2002)

Journal of a Cavalry Officer in the Corunna Campaign - Captain Alexander Gordon (facsimile reprint of original held by the RMA, Sandhurst)

Cannon Diggens’ Archive


~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jonathan Hopkins has a passionate interest in the Duke of Wellington's cavalry. The British army's embarkation at Corunna and subsequent loss of the Dispatch transport feature in his new novel, Leopardkill, due for release on 1st September, 2013.

More details on the author's website Cavalry Tales

GALLOPING TO INFAMY: The British Cavalry Who Fought Napoleon

by Jonathan Hopkins

‘It is occasioned entirely by the trick our officers of cavalry have acquired of galloping at everything...’

So wrote the Duke of Wellington to his second-in command, General Rowland Hill, after the combat at Maguilla in Spain during June 1812. In doing so, he set the tone for a scathing attitude toward British horsemen who fought in the Peninsular War which was to last for the next two hundred years.

And the cavalry’s many brilliant successes were all but forgotten.

Wellington was an infantryman through and through. Something of a martinet as far as obedience to his orders was concerned, he never trusted cavalry officers not to get carried away in the heat of the moment. Initiative was frowned on. To be fair, having commanded cavalry in India Wellington knew how effective they could be when properly organised and led, and how fragile when not. And in Iberia he rarely had a sufficient number for all his needs, certainly not when compared to his French counterparts.

The cavalry hadn’t started well. Many maintained the 20th Light Dragoons’ unsupported charge against fleeing French infantry at the battle of Vimeiro in 1808 was a disaster, pointing to the loss of their colonel and a 25% casualty rate (killed, wounded and captured).

They forgot that fewer than 240 men faced three times their number of French dragoons, and having been surrounded by enemy horse, conventional wisdom suggests they should all have been killed or captured. So to escape this fate and return to their lines having carried out their original orders - to drive a retreating enemy from the field - you might think the men of the 20th were due congratulations.

But no.

Part of the problem was that the army could not function without cavalry. They escorted supply columns. They scouted. They provided mounted sentries and piquets. They delivered messages. They were, in fact, the army’s early warning, intelligence and communication systems combined, as well as doing combat duty. And as such, any reduction of their number through casualties affected the capability of the whole force.

A disaster, then.

The next year, at Talavera, the 23rd Light Dragoons encountered a huge ditch, un-reconnoitred, across their charging approach to French infantry squares. Disordered and reduced in number by falls and refusals at the obstacle, once through the squares they were counter-attacked by enemy cavalry, suffering huge losses. Another disaster.

And the cavalry’s victories during Sir John Moore’s Spanish campaign of the previous winter were quickly forgotten in the race to apportion blame.

Except...the enemy brigades charged by the 23rd (together with the 1st Kings German Legion hussars) stood in square for the rest of the day, fearing more cavalry if they tried to move. This meant they couldn’t support the main French attack, which came close to breaching British lines but fizzled out for want of reinforcements.

So - not really a disaster.

Of course the cavalry’s reputation at home didn’t help them. Public disquiet at their use in peacetime as a rapid-reaction force to quell civil disturbances never endeared them to a largely lower-class infantry. The fact they were mounted, and as such enjoyed an apparent easy life compared to those forced to march, was anathema to the foot-slogging majority. And the recruiters’ mantra that ‘all the ladies love a dragoon’, widely believed, further fuelled inter-service jealousies.

Infantrymen conveniently forgot that while they had only to cook a meal and clean their muskets at the end of a march, every dragoon had that to do plus water and feed his mount and bed it down for the night. And almost as much again before he rode off in the morning.

The combat at Campo Mayor provided yet more proof of the cavalry’s seeming incompetence. British and Portuguese light dragoons routed French cavalry before capturing a column of artillery then lost all they had gained and took casualties because they strayed too far from their support troops.

But...hang on - why weren’t the reserve cavalry and artillery close behind? That’s what ‘support’ is supposed to mean. Surely this was a failure by Beresford, in overall command of the operation, and nothing to do with the cavalry themselves. Wasn’t it?

No - it was another cavalry disaster.

Widespread criticism following this action resulted in a protracted war of words between Beresford and Robert Ballard Long, the cavalry commander, continuing even after Long’s death and well beyond Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo.

Unfortunately, as another infantryman, Beresford was not truly familiar with the way cavalry operated. Not surprising, since the training even regimental cavalry officers’ received at home was often rudimentary due to government apathy and the difficulty finding large enough tracts of open country in which to practice manoeuvring extended bodies of horsemen. As a consequence, few men had much experience of controlling cavalry brigades. That officers’ favourite, the ‘charge at the gallop’, was commonly practiced by individual squadrons but rarely by whole regiments. And in any case, ground conditions on campaign often meant such charges were better carried out at a trot rather than any faster pace, so horses did not arrive in front of the enemy tired out. You still needed to get back to your own lines afterwards.

Copyright MOD

Henry Paget proved himself a capable cavalry leader with Moore’s ill-fated expedition, and might have remained in overall command of the cavalry had he not eloped with Wellington’s sister-in-law. The only other suitably qualified candidate, John Gaspard Le Marchant, was belatedly sent to the Peninsula in 1811. Regrettably he was killed the following year leading a charge of heavy dragoons which destroyed three French infantry brigades at the battle of Salamanca.

Surprisingly, no-one criticised that feat as a disaster!

There are plenty of other examples where poor command decisions and officer inexperience led to unfortunate outcomes. At Maguilla, the subject of Wellington’s ire, the cavalry were desperately unlucky to be caught out by well-controlled French counter-attacks. But their commander, John Slade (who may be familiar to some readers for his actions during the retreat to Corunna) tried to blame the reverse on everyone but himself and it was that, as much as anything, which damned him. Of course Slade commanded Hill’s cavalry brigade, so plenty of mud stuck to the horsemen themselves.

Despite appearances to the contrary, horses are quite delicate animals. Those serving in the Peninsula had first to suffer a sea voyage, which might be short or protracted, through calm seas or storms, before being expected to quickly adapt to both a very different climate and food which varied wildly in type, quality and availability. Not surprisingly, disease and starvation killed many animals, as did the army itself: at Corunna, for example, when not enough transports arrived to take all surviving cavalry horses home.

So just as with the soldiery, in the Peninsula War far more horses died from causes other than as battlefield casualties.

To give just one example of attrition rates, the 14th Light Dragoons record that after disembarking with an original complement of 720, they lost 1,564 horses in the Peninsula between 1809 and 1814. Remounts, captured animals and transferees from other regiments made up the balance. (Ian Fletcher, Galloping at Everything, 1999)

Replacement troop horses were provided by the government. Better-trained animals were expensive and supplies dwindled as the war dragged on, with the result that many arrived having never experienced gunfire and panicked or otherwise misbehaved in action. Even officers, who were expected to supply their own horses, suffered in this respect. Colonel Taylor, killed in the 20th’s charge at Vimeiro, was riding a mare that repeatedly tossed its head and refused to settle, according to one observer.

No wonder some cavalrymen found difficulty in controlling their mounts one-handed (reins in the left, sabre in the right) amid the noise and confusion of battle. Of course, that was their fault, too.

Despite impressive performances on the Coa, at Fuentes d’Onoro, Albuera, Los Santos, Usagre, Villagarcia, Salamanca and Vittoria, the cavalry’s reputation for flagrant indiscipline on the field of battle refused to go away. It would be useful to have some insight from a private dragoon as to how all this negative comment affected his comrades on campaign. Sadly, few such diaries exist, probably because apart from the illiteracy rife in that period, the men were kept so busy they rarely had time to write. As expected given their greater numbers, far more
accounts from ‘in the ranks’ are by infantrymen.

Paradoxically, it’s not as if the foot-sloggers had no disasters of their own. Infantry brigades suffered massacres at Barossa and Albuera, and heavy losses at Talavera, Fuentes d’Onoro and Badajoz. They took part in failed sieges. They committed robbery, rape and murder during retreats, to Corunna and from Burgos.

Yet the largest dose of vitriol is always reserved for the cavalry, who were simply trying their best in difficult circumstances.

Do you think that’s fair? No - nor do I.

Jonathan Hopkins works as a saddle fitter and chairs a BHS affiliated riding club in his spare time. His novel Walls of Jericho is the first in a proposed series charting the adventures of two young dragoons with the British army in Portugal and Spain.

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