Authors: John Sugden
The importance of briefing senior officers seems obvious, but it was by no means a universal or even a common practice, even by great leaders. Napoleon, for example, often exercised such a personal command of the battlefield that subordinates were left ignorant of his intentions and overdependent upon his on-the-spot instructions. The disruption of that personal chain of command in the fog of conflict caused serious problems for the egocentric emperor on the field of Waterloo. Indeed, as armies and fleets grew larger, the ability to coordinate and control grand forces, sometimes sprawled over miles of front and enmeshed in noise, confusion and smoke, became increasingly central to successful leadership. At sea, where communications were harnessed to inefficient flag-signalling systems, the problem was particularly acute. Although improved, the use of numerical flags keyed to signal books remained cumbersome and imprecise. Even when flags could be seen through the gunsmoke, they were incapable of transmitting complicated instructions quickly and they were easily misinterpreted, as the battle of Cape St Vincent had shown.
3
Nelson had his own solution to what modern military theorists call problems of ‘command and control’. From the beginning he involved his captains in the command process through a series of informal meetings in which strategy and tactics and ways and means were thoroughly aired. As later described by Berry, during these assemblies the admiral’s practice was to ‘fully develop . . . his own ideas of the different and best modes of attack, and such plans as he proposed to execute upon falling in with the enemy, whatever their position or situation might be, by day or night’. In other words he discussed what might be done in every eventuality. ‘There was no possible position in which they [the enemy] could be found that he did not take into his calculation,’ and for which he did not suggest ‘the most advantageous attack’. Because the captains had been comprehensively briefed,
understood Nelson’s intentions, and had examined the different ways of achieving them, ‘signals became almost unnecessary’ and ‘much time was saved’. Each captain was theoretically capable of using his own initiative to achieve the corporate end.
4
There was little autocratic about Nelson’s process. He valued and liked his captains, and his style of leadership was open, friendly and informal. People felt at ease with him and able to speak in the meetings. Rather than dispensing definitive decisions from above, Nelson set the parameters of debate and encouraged his officers to contribute their own information and ideas. His assemblies were not so much briefings as forums for the exchange of ideas. They were brainstorming seminars. At a time when the only universal formal officer training in the navy was confined to the seamanship tested in examining lieutenants, Nelson’s conferences were milestones in the development of professional education.
The council of war recorded by Captain Waller was the first of four summoned over a six-day period. During their deliberations every captain volunteered to lead a division in the attack on Tenerife, leaving Thomas Oldfield of the
Theseus
, and army captain of four years’ standing, to command the marines. Unusually, Nelson decided to forgo personal heroics, and agreed to coordinate the attack from the
Theseus
, as befitted an admiral, and Troubridge would command ashore. It was as good a team as the navy of 1797 could field.
In their preliminary discussions, Nelson and his captains had only an imperfect picture of the defences of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. They relied heavily upon the information of a seaman of the
Emerald
and one of Fremantle’s servants, both of whom had known the town many years before. In fact, although it was a respectable settlement, with a population of about seven thousand, compared to Bastia, where several thousand troops manned a formidable sea front commanded by powerful hill forts behind, Santa Cruz was not militarily impressive. It had no more than a skeleton garrison of barely four hundred regulars, and was heavily dependent upon an ill-equipped militia of some eight hundred men that needed time to assemble. Fewer than four hundred gunners and about one hundred and ten French sailors marooned by Hardy’s capture of
La Mutine
did not raise the armed human resources of Don Antonio Guitierrez, commandant general of the Canaries, to more than seventeen hundred men.
The town and its environs themselves offered little room for manoeuvre, however. A precipitous volcanic rock pushed out of the
sea, Tenerife’s shoreline was sheer and the water deep offshore, so that landing places and anchorages were difficult to find. Most of the few beaches were black and broken and slippery underfoot and often guarded by a heavy surf. Santa Cruz, which hugged the shore of an open bay on the northeastern coast of the island, was protected to the rear by craggy mountains rising to a central ridge. Its southwestern flank was reputedly difficult to approach, without anchorages or suitable landings, and the only viable attack was from the front or northeast, where the human defences were at their strongest. The six miles of the town’s sea wall and front bristled with sixteen fortifications, some of them mere gun platforms but others towers and parapets, the whole defended by eighty-four pieces of artillery. Of these strong points the most impressive was the ancient citadel of San Cristobal, with its bell tower, a massive thirty-foot perimeter wall and corner bastions mounting ten guns. Some of these last commanded the principal landing place – a low, stone, round-headed mole that jutted prominently into the sea not far from the town square.
5
These defences were far from contemptible, and like all good commanders Nelson knew that his strongest weapon was surprise. A sudden assault, launched against an unwary or startled enemy before they could mobilise, prepare or even think, was a tactic capable of producing astonishing results. The greatest of Nelson’s disciples, Lord Cochrane, would definitively demonstrate the point in 1820, when he successfully stormed the Spanish fortresses at Valdivia in southern Chile, deemed the most impregnable in the Pacific, with only a fraction of the force Nelson brought to Santa Cruz.
Nelson’s plan was to land Troubridge’s force on the northeastern flank of the town, close to a fort known as the Paso Alto. The men would storm the fort, securing it with the heights behind, and thereby allow the ships to anchor in safety below while they turned their attention to the town about a mile away. Taken by surprise and menaced by their own guns at the Paso Alto as well as the ships, the Spaniards in Santa Cruz might be persuaded to surrender.
Some of the British ideas, such as the possibility of taking the Paso Alto quietly as well as quickly and sustaining surprise beyond the initial attack, were long shots, but Nelson understood the importance of speed and shock. Speed could give him key ground or positions before the enemy rallied. Speed forced enemies to act without thinking, and produced panic, confusion and error. And speed exploited defences that were geographically dispersed, denying the time needed to
concentrate resources and organise resistance. Nelson emphasised it in his final orders to Troubridge on 20 April. ‘
The moment you are on shore
,’ he wrote to Troubridge, ‘I
recommend
you to first attack the [Paso Alto] battery . . .’ To allow his executive officer room for individual initiative, he had crossed out the words ‘you are directed’ and replaced them with the softer word ‘recommend’. Once the fort was taken, Troubridge could ‘either’ storm the town from the flank immediately, or – if he thought best – threaten it and send in a summons. In the last case, Nelson again emphasised the need to deny the Spaniards time to organise or to regain their composure. Only thirty minutes should be allowed for the consideration of terms, and they were not to be negotiable unless ‘good cause’ required it.
6
At six o’clock in the late afternoon of Thursday 20 July the northern coast of Tenerife could be seen on a cloudy horizon ten to twelve leagues to the southwest. The squadron hove to and for two days busied itself for the attack. The landing would be launched from the frigates, which were able to work closer inshore. Boats, scaling ladders, equipment and hundreds of men were transferred to them from the ships of the line. Nelson’s
Theseus
sent her quota to the
Seahorse
, along with Captain Miller and four of the ship’s six lieutenants, Nelson remaining on board with his third and fifth lieutenants. Other men rocked across the choppy sea to the
Terpsichore
and
Emerald
.
It was about four in the afternoon of 21 July, after the admiral’s final pre-attack meeting with his captains, that Bowen’s
Terpsichore
led the crowded frigates on their journey around the northeastern tip of Tenerife to reach their station some two miles off the fort at the Paso Alto. Bowen was the only captain who knew the island and Troubridge went with him during this final approach. When the frigates got underway, trailing the additional boats they needed to make a landing, Nelson followed with the ships of the line.
The distance was longer than they anticipated, but in the first hour of the 22nd the squadron closed upon its target, helped by a breeze at its back. With lights extinguished, the frigates took their positions, and filled and lowered their boats under cover of complete darkness. Nearly a thousand men gathered about the
Terpsichore
and then pulled hopefully and silently for the shore. The men were short of marines, but Nelson had dressed some of the sailors in red coats with white cross-belts and given them badges for their caps to create the impression of a greater military force. They carried their arms and scaling ladders, and sledgehammers, broad axes, wedges and spikes to batter
their way through obstacles or to manipulate and immobilise guns. Linked by towropes to prevent dispersal, the boats struggled onwards through two miles of dark, difficult sea, aiming for a beach to the southwest of the fort.
The ships of the line slipped quietly behind the frigates about three hours later, but with the exception of the light-draught mortar launch, which had advanced to support the landing, there was little likelihood that the squadron’s guns would play much of a part at the range involved. Nelson knew that the attack would depend upon those boats Troubridge was leading ashore.
Local seamen knew the area to be one of turbulent winds and strong currents, and both were against Troubridge that night. A strong gale funnelled along the Bufadero valley, northeast of the Paso Alto, and out towards the advancing boats, feeding the swell and churning the sea about them. Closer inshore, where the boats were to skirt the beach till they reached the landing place, it was calmer but the current was strong. The assault force should have landed before daylight, but dawn found it still offshore with only the leading boats close to the Paso Alto and all the men weary through heaving at their oars.
Moreover, despite all precautions against discovery the British ships had been seen by vigilant Spanish lookouts. Even as first light showed in the eastern sky lusty alarm bells and three warning cannon shots stirred the sleeping inhabitants of Santa Cruz. The commandant general soon had messengers galloping furiously inland to raise the militia, and soldiers scrambling to their posts. Some manned batteries in the town, while others joined a party of French sailors and began stumbling through the half-light along a steep, rocky, bending path that climbed up to the Altura ridge overlooking the town’s northeastern flank. The Paso Alto fort itself, though a substantial work with a semicircular front overlooking the beach, was not as formidable as the British believed. It mounted only eight guns, instead of the twenty-six Nelson had supposed, but as Troubridge’s boats approached the battery was being prepared for action.
7
Troubridge may have seen defenders running to their posts, and certainly heard the alarm from the town. From his boats the shore, gently unveiled by the departing darkness, looked awesome in the new day, its steep-sided, rugged volcanic ridges running seawards to
terminate in jagged heights. Weighing his chances, Troubridge made two decisions. The first was to call off the landing. After their gruelling pull the men were turned back.
While the boats reassembled around the frigates, Troubridge, Oldfield and Bowen went aboard the
Theseus
to report to Sir Horatio. We know from a private letter that he was disappointed, and regretted not commanding the amphibious attack himself. Troubridge, he believed, had given up too easily, and he had a point. For though Guitierrez remained calm, his militia were still coming in, his few disposable troops had many assailable points to cover and the citizens were close to panic. Merchants were stripping the custom house of their goods, and the streets thronged with donkeys and people groaning under the weight of salvaged possessions, trunks, mattresses and bags. In the growing heat of a summer day, women herded out of Santa Cruz on foot, fleeing inland to the Laguna. This, if ever, was the moment to attack, but it was a moment that had been allowed to pass.
At its first major test, Nelson’s system of drawing captains into his plans and encouraging individual initiative had actually failed. Indeed, in view of Troubridge’s seminal role in conceiving the enterprise his need to return ‘to consult with me what was best to be done’ must have struck Nelson as odd. The culture of command could not be changed overnight, however. Fremantle at Alassio and Collingwood and Saumarez at Cape St Vincent had shown how even fine captains declined to act without the specific approval of a superior officer. Now that rigidity had influenced Troubridge. It was not Nelson’s way, but nor was it his practice to reprimand honest service. He received Troubridge sympathetically, commiserated in his obvious disappointment and listened to what he had to propose. The captain of the
Culloden
had been rebuffed, but not beaten. He told Nelson that if a different landing was made, at the mouth of the Barranco de Bufadero just east of the Paso Alto, the men might yet scale the heights above the fort and force it to surrender. At least he was willing to try, even at this stage. That was his second decision.
8