On 12 January 1810, Leonard Beckers, a young French soldier stationed at Bordeaux, wrote a letter to his parents. “We fear that we will not remain here long,” he reported. “We will probably proceed to Spain. If that is the case, dear parents, pray for me, as I myself am already doing. We are all afraid of Spain.”1
French soldiers had good reason to be afraid of Spain. Between 1808 and 1814, close to 300,000 of them left their bones there—including Beckers, killed in action in July 1812. Ironically, the French had entered the country unopposed. In 1807, Spain, then allied with France, allowed the Emperor Napoleon’s armies free transit to invade Portugal, at that time Britain’s sole remaining continental ally. Once his troops were positioned in the peninsula, however, Napoleon could not resist the temptation to depose Spain’s decadent royal family and declare his well-meaning, ineffectual brother Joseph the new king. A national uprising ensued.
The struggle’s opening months witnessed a major French embarrassment at Bailen, in the far south, where General Pierre-Antoine Dupont surrendered an 18,000-man army corps to Spanish forces on 21 July 1808. A flood of reinforcements and a whirlwind campaign commanded by Napoleon himself restored the situation, at least militarily. By 1812, when the redeployment for the invasion of Russia sapped the strength of the French armies in Spain, the French had overrun nine-tenths of the country. But it was a barren conquest, for they had been unable to eject a British army commanded by the future Duke of Wellington from Portugal and, despite harsh reprisals, they had been unable to suppress the guerrillas who savaged their lines of communications. “The hatred [of us] was deep, ardent, and irreconcilable,” a French veteran recorded. “It could he said that the whole nation was in arms against us, and ... we held only the ground occupied by our troops.”2
Soldiers and camp followers who fell into the hands of guerrillas were routinely put to death, generally in as unpleasant a manner as their tormentors’ time and imagination allowed. Those captured by regulars fared somewhat better. Between December 1808 and March 1809 the prisoners taken at Bailen and the more than 2,000 personnel of a small naval squadron that had been trapped in Cadiz on the outbreak of war were concentrated on board seven prison hulks—old ships-of-the-line—anchored in Puntales Roads, southeast of Cadiz.5
The overcrowding was eased late in March, when 5,300 men were extracted for transfer to Cabrera, the smallest of the Balearic Islands, where most of them died. Still, life on board the hulks left much to be desired. “These great trunks of ships were immense coffins, in which living men were consigned to a slow death,” a French army surgeon who had been imprisoned in them recalled. The climate was warm and the rations unhealthy: “black army bread full of gritty particles, biscuit full of maggots, salt meat that was already decomposing, rancid lard, spoiled cod, [and] stale rice, peas, and beans.” Scurvy, diarrhea, dysentery, and typhus abounded, and prisoners died by the thousands. “1 waited my turn,” the doctor wrote. “I lived in the midst of that world of spectres, and each day I was astonished not to have decayed like them.”4
Most officers were confined on the erstwhile 64-gun ship Viella Castilla. Officers were fortunate, in that the Spanish allowed them eight reales a day to purchase provisions. “But the provisions were brought to the vessel so irregularly,” Lieutenant Gaspard Schumacher related, “and were sold at such a high price that often we had to undergo great privations.” An officer in a Swiss mercenary regiment captured at Bailen, Schumacher also suffered from seasickness. “But of all the privations we endured in that vessel, the lack of water was often the crudest. We were frequently left for two or three days without water under a burning sun.” According to his figures (and his memoirs evidence a passion for figures), 380 men died on the Viella Castilla in seven months.5
Discomfort and disease notwithstanding, some individuals fared reasonably well. The surgeon already mentioned was surprised to find that the several hundred women present—officers’ wives, cantinieres, and other camp followers— stayed healthy. “If we were to fall ill,” they asked him, “what would become of our poor men?" Their example, coupled with that of the troops who withstood the rigors of their new existence, led him to conclude that the most important factors in a prisoner’s well being were exercise and the will to live. “Today I will guarantee that a healthy and courageous man in whom a strong spirit reinvigorates the body is almost always invulnerable.” But, he added, such mental toughness usually was found only in combination with “that philosophic habitude . . . which allows one to summon up resources in any situation.”6
Lieutenant Jean Grivel, an officer captured in a battalion of naval infantry (marins de la Garde) serving with Dupont, was among those who possessed that philosophic habitude. Decades later, he remembered that “we were of an age when hope is still permitted. We found ourselves on a ship where we no longer had to fear the attacks of the populace or any particular vexation. The spectacle of a busy harbor such as we had not seen for a long time; the pleasure of listening to accounts of a multitude of adventures, each more perilous than the other, which, nevertheless, were rarely without a comic side; all this made us take our new position patiently.” He noted with approval that the chain of command was respected, the rules of hygiene generally were followed, and that his comrades devised many ways besides storytelling to enliven the time: foot races, concerts, swimming parties, theatricals, and games ranging from chess to the French equivalent of mumbletypeg. “All in all,” he concluded, “the life one led on board was scarcely intolerable.”7
Despite his comparative content, Grivel was determined to escape. At the turn of the year 1810 new prisoners brought word that a French army under Marshal Claude Victor had entered Andalusia, and late in January the prison hulks were towed into the Bay of Cadiz, north of the city. These events appeared to Grivel to create the preconditions for action. He expected that Victor’s army would reach the coast before long. Once it did, he suggested, the prisoners should await a favorable wind and tide to overpower the small Spanish guard detachment on board, cut the hulk’s cables, and attempt to ground it behind French lines. The Spanish had left the Viella Castilla her lower yards and rudder, and, although they had removed her sails and wheel ropes, the French naval personnel on board could improvise replacements from hammocks, blankets, clothing, and sacks. They would be unable to return the cannon fire to which they would be subjected by the Spanish and British warships in the harbor, but they could use the solid shot and pig iron in ballast in the hold as gravity-powered projectiles to beat off boarding parties approaching in boats.8
Grivel regarded the operation as “certainly risky, but by no means impracticable.” He discovered that most of his fellow prisoners regarded it as insane. “There were some very enlightened soldiers among them,” he recalled, “and all were accustomed to brave the usual dangers of war without flinching; but the dangers that had to be braved here deviated from the general rule.”9 Others argued that it would be wrong to hazard the lives of 900 men in a desperate gamble of which many of those men disapproved. Finally, some prisoners, mostly the older ones and (or so it seemed to Grivel) especially veteran noncommissioned officers, were simply satisfied. “It was not rare ... to hear someone say that, after all . . . the time did not count any less toward retirement, and since one had wine and sun, one could await the day when all this would be over without being downcast.”10
On 7 February 1810, the prisoners on the Viella Castilla saw a Spanish gunboat begin to fire in support of Fort Matagorda, on the tip of the peninsula separating the Bay of Cadiz from Puntales Roads.11 The French army had reached the outskirts of Cadiz. By then, Grivel had abandoned the idea of a mass escape and recruited eight seamen to seize one of the service craft that came alongside the hulk to deliver provisions and water, transport prisoners to and from military hospitals ashore, and collect corpses.12
Foreseeing that the proximity of the French army would encourage prospective escapers, on 14 February the Spanish naval officer in command of the prison ships, Captain Don Raphael Muestro, issued a stern proclamation. In future, enlisted men caught attempting to escape would be flogged around their hulk six times. At the captain’s discretion, repeat offenders might be put to death. Officers would be clapped in irons for six months and repeat offenders would be subject to the same penalties as enlisted men.13
Grivel was not deterred. On 22 February, his party overcame the crew of a service vessel and succeeded in running her ashore behind French lines. Captain Muestro responded on 18 March with a new proclamation informing the prisoners that henceforth anyone apprehended during an escape would be hanged and that for every one who made good an escape, two men from the same hulk would be hanged.14 The following month, two sailors of the Guard caught trying to seize a service craft beside the hulk Vencedor were in fact executed, albeit by firing squad. Prisoners also were ordered to go below after nightfall and whenever a boat approached their ship.
Meanwhile, the French army persevered with the siege of Cadiz. On 22 April it captured Fort Matagorda, bringing the northeastern coast of the Bay of Cadiz completely under French control. For those on board the hulks, freedom now was no more than three miles away.15 Disregarding the draconian penalties for failure, a few strong swimmers struck out for shore, and early in May a 63-year-old naval officer, Lieutenant de Vaisseau Moreau, revived Grivel’s idea of using the Viella Castilla to make a floating prison break.16
Moreau chose 16 men, mostly other naval officers and sailors of the Guard, to take part in the operation. A key recruit among the few soldiers involved was First Lieutenant Charles-Frangois Francois, an old sweat who had spent half of his 34 years in uniform. As the hulk’s storekeeper, Francois was able to supply an axe and saw that could be used to cut the anchor cables. The plotters also managed to subvert the sergeant commanding the 14-man guard detachment.17
To preserve secrecy, the group met in the hold, which also served as a workshop. A sail was stitched together and ropes were woven; two files furnished by Francois transformed the iron hoops from a water cask into 15 daggers; and materials were collected to build a kind of raft known in the French Navy as a va-et-vient (come and go) and to fashion oars. When the hulk grounded, the raft would be launched trailing a cable played out from the ship and towing several stakes. On reaching shore, one of the rafters, Major Jean-Louis Fauras of the 10th Dragoons, would hasten to obtain the assistance of Marshal Victor’s forces. The other four, sailors of the Guard, were to plant the stakes, rig the cable, and begin ferrying the prisoners from the hulk.18
On the afternoon of 15 May, Moreau informed the conspirators the time had come to act. A full moon meant there would be an unusually high tide that evening; a strong wind from the west would push the hulk toward French lines; and there even was a chance a fog might add to the cover of darkness. “The rest of the day passed in singing and drinking,” Francois recalled. “I gave wine and brandy to those who wanted it, the day being that on which we were bound to try to regain our liberty or perish.”19
The operation commenced around 2000. With the connivance of their Spanish sergeant, the off-duty members of the guard detachment were easily overcome and confined to the hold. Next came the more ticklish business of disarming the two sentinels on duty on the quarterdeck before they could give the alarm to the Spanish guard ships. Nine officers, homemade daggers concealed in their rags, suddenly converged on them. “If you offer the least resistance,” one of them said, “or say the least word, you’re dead!” The terrified sentinels dropped to their knees and were taken to join their comrades in the hold. Two Spanish-speaking French officers replaced them.20
The plotters now were in position to cut the anchor cables, an action they suspected might be opposed by some of the other prisoners. There were two cables, each two feet in diameter, one let out to port and one to starboard. An attempt to dissolve them with nitric acid failed. Two noncommissioned officers supervised by an officer then undertook to sever them with the axe and saw. Some men, attracted by the sound of the chopping, indeed did try to interfere. According to one account, a (tactfully unnamed) senior officer seized the party’s saw and tossed it overboard; in the ensuing confusion, the officer overseeing the operation finished the job with the axe. However it came about, the Viella Castilla soon was adrift. The vast majority of the prisoners, ignorant of the plot and uninvolved in its execution, were thereby confronted by a fait accompli. Almost all concluded that, no matter how ill-advised they deemed the undertaking, their best interests dictated they do everything in their power to help it succeed.22
At first the Spanish guard ships assumed the hulk had simply broken its cables. The escapers’ Spanish sergeant confirmed their supposition and asked them to send help, thereby gaining a few precious minutes. When the Spanish boats approached, they were greeted by fire from the guard detachment’s muskets. This removed any doubt of the situation on board the Viella Castilla, and the Spanish and British ships nearby replied with roundshot and grape. One of the opening salvos decapitated Lieutenant Moreau. His body and those of several other slain officers were thrown into the sea to keep the sight of them from discouraging the fainthearted.
For hours the prison ship drifted slowly eastwards, occasionally colliding with small craft anchored in its path and constantly under fire. Once the wind nearly failed, arousing apprehensions the current would carry the hulk toward Fort Puntales, a heavily armed Spanish work midway along the peninsula tipped by Cadiz, but the naval officers’ jury- rigged sail kept it on course and soon the wind freshened. “Sometimes we believed that we would he set ablaze by the flames of the bombs, sometimes we thought we could no longer resist the water that poured in,” Schumacher recorded. “Very fortunately for us, the sea was pretty rough, which made the aim of the shots fired at us uncertain.”21 It also was very fortunate for them that, unless a hit sparked an uncontrollable fire or exploded a magazine, a large wooden warship could absorb an almost endless amount of early 19th-century ordnance.
Some time past midnight a British longboat approached the hulk, at which it was directing a lively musket fire. A French-speaking officer shouted from the longboat’s bow, “Messieurs les Frangaises, don’t fire; surrender, no one will do you any harm!” This peaceful profession to the contrary, the fire from the boat did not slacken. By then the French had exhausted the guard detachment’s ammunition, but the senior officer present, Colonel Charles Joseph Buquet, one of those who had opposed an attempt to escape, had organized a human chain to carry pig iron and roundshot from the hold to the upper deck. As the boat came alongside, the prisoners 25 feet above pushed their missiles out the gunports. Cries of pain and consternation rewarded their exertions, and the boat quickly turned away.24
Finally, around 0300, the Viella Castilla grounded in 19 feet of water some 600 yards from land and well behind French lines on the eastern shore of the Bay of Cadiz. Good swimmers immediately went over the side, and Major Fauras and his sailors of the Guard launched their va-et-vient. To the horror of those watching from the hulk, the raft broke up in heavy seas. The rafters all reached shore and Fauras hastened away to seek help, but the nonswimmers found themselves stranded. “The accident caused those who did not know how to swim to pass from the sweetest hope to the bitterest despair,” wrote an anonymous memoirist, probably Major Vantal de Carrere. “Everyone thought of a way to save himself, whatever that might be. . . . Some collected planks and barrels and entrusted themselves to these frail craft; others, more rash or even more anxious to escape bondage, seized planks and let themselves go adrift. Often the current or the wind from shore drew them to the high seas instead of carrying them toward the beach. Imagine their despair!”25
Meanwhile, the Spanish and British gunboats that had trailed the Viella Castilla across the bay anchored a few hundred yards away and opened fire on their now stationary target. These ships were forced to withdraw to a more respectful range on the arrival on shore of a battery of light artillery, the first of the help the prisoners had expected from their forces. The guns soon were followed by French soldiers from an encampment about three miles away. Eventually, nearly 2,000 would line the shore to assist the men in the water. Still, the gunboats kept up a grueling fire. Francois at one point counted 11 bombs in the air. On two occasions the hulk was set ablaze, but the prisoners managed to extinguish the flames.26
In this situation, a steady stream of desperate men went over the side. Twenty-seven-year-old Second Lieutenant Charles de Sallmard of the 22nd Dragoons, a member of the ci-devant (or pre-revolutionary) nobility, and an enlisted soldier lashed four planks into a little raft and took the ends of planks for oars. “We were obliged to use our oars to beat off the poor swimmers who clung to us, causing us to sink,” Sallmard related. “At each moment the sea threw up waves that completely covered us, submerged us. We had to hold on with both hands.” No matter how hard they paddled, they were unable to come any closer to land. Worse yet, the tide already had crested; when it fell, it would sweep them into the bay. Happily, a grenadier on the beach, perceiving their predicament, swam out and threw them a line. Sallmard caught it and men ashore pulled them to safety.27
The morale of the hundreds of prisoners who remained on board the hulk soared when Major Fauras courageously swam back to assure them that rescue was imminent. “M. le marechal . . . has given orders to send some boats,” he said. “They were being loaded on wagons when 1 left.” The first wagon appeared an hour later. “It would be difficult to describe the sensations that the approach of the launch . . . produced on us,” an officer remembered. “Joy stirred all hearts; a thousand cheers went up; it was the delirium of hope realized.”28
Everyone agreed that the 20-some women and children on board should be the first into the boats, and so they were. “But,” the officer continued, “the haste with which everyone wanted to escape the rain of bombs leaving the enemy vessels caused great disorder. Everyone threw himself into the launch and tried to carry away the few effects that remained to him, nearly capsizing it by their number. Fortunately, a second craft put an end to the confusion, which could have been fatal.” Two other boats subsequently joined the rescue.29
Even after the boats began shuttling prisoners ashore, some men took their chances in the water. Francois was among them. “We jumped into the sea by the dozen,” he wrote, “without waiting our turn to be embarked, in order to escape the fire that had broken out for the third time. It could not be extinguished. I tied my clothes and some papers around my head; everything was soon wet. I was very cold and in a pretty feeble state.” He reckoned that he needed an hour to reach shore, “after having fought against the waves of a turbulent sea. Two carabiniers, Mirabeau and Berger of the 16th Light [Infantry Regiment], saved me by swimming out to meet me and leading me, half dead, to the entrenchments of the Napoleon Redoubt, where the surgeons brought me back to life.”30
Rescue operations ended about 1400 that afternoon. According to Schumacher’s predictably precise figures, 742 persons reached shore; 176 were lost. Of the officers who participated in the plot, six perished and two were wounded. The surviving members of the Spanish guard detachment were released with best wishes; two had been killed by their compatriots’ fire. In a matter of hours, the flames that had precipitated Lieutenant Francois’s departure consumed the Viella Castilla.31
French authorities gave the ex-prisoners a warm welcome. After receiving the congratulations of Marshal Victor, they were ordered to Seville, where on 22 May they passed in review before the commander of the French armies in Spain, Marshal Nicolas-Jean de Dieu Soult, who presented each man with new clothes and 200 francs. From Seville the escapers were directed to proceed to Madrid for an audience with King Joseph. The king gave everyone another 100 francs and apologized for his inability to do more. The 11 surviving members of the conspiracy received an extra 300 francs. The Spanish sergeant who had assisted them was decorated and commissioned a lieutenant in the king’s guard.32
The example of the Viella Castilla had not gone unnoticed on the other hulks. On the evening of 26-27 May, prisoners seized control of the Argonauta, a hospital ship with approximately 640 men on board, and ran it aground not far from where the Viella Castilla had struck.33 For the Spanish junta, this new embarrassment was the last straw. The remaining prisoners were transferred to Cabrera or relinquished to the Royal Navy for confinement on board hulks in British waters. There would be not more floating prison breaks in the Bay of Cadiz.34
1. Emile Fairon and Henri Heuse, eds., Letires des Grognards (Liège and Paris: Imprimerie Benard/Librairie Georges Courville, 1936), p. 46.
2. Due de Fezensac, Souvenirs militaires de 1804 a 1814 (Paris: Librairie militaire, 1863), p. 187.
3. The military convention that Dupont negotiated with the Spanish commander, General Catanes, called for his corps to be repatriated, but the Spanish supreme junta disregarded the agreement. The French squadron, five ships-of-the-line commanded by Vice Admiral Count Rosily-Meros, was composed of refugees from the Battle of Trafalgar.
4. Toredan Larchey, ed., Les suites d'une capitulation (Paris: 1884), pp. 9-12.
5. Gaspard Schumacher, trans. by Pierre d’Hughes, Journal et souvenirs de Gaspard Schumacher, capitaine aux suisse de la garde royale (1789'1830) (Paris: Arthème Fa- yard [c. 1910J), pp. 63-64.
6. Larchey, Les suites d’une capitulation, p. 19. Original italics.
7. Jean-Baptiste Grivel, Memoires du Vice-Amiral Baron Grivel, Revolution-Empire (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1914), pp. 193-96.
8. Grivel, Mémoires, p. 210.
9. Grivel, Mémoires, p. 211.
10. Grivel, Mémoires, p. 196.
11. Charles- François François, Journal du capitaine François (1792-1830) (Paris: Carrington, 1903; reprint, Paris: Tallandier, 1984), p. 721.
12. Grivel, Mémoires, p. 218.
13. The full text appears in Larchey, Les suites d’une capitulation, pp. 158-59.
14. The full text appears in Larchey, Les suites d’une capitulation, pp. 161.
15. Schumacher, Journal et souvenirs, p. 65.
16. François, Journal, p. 740; Docteur Michel Bourrier, Combats et Coleres d’un Dragon de I’Empire (1783-1858), d’apres les memoires manuscrits de Charles Gabrielle de Sallmard de Peyrins, officier de tradition (Nice: Editions Serre, 1983), p. 146.
17. François, Journal, p. 740. The sources consulted in the preparation of this article vary considerably. The versions given here are those that appear most plausible to the author.
18. François, Journal, p. 740; J. Tranie and J. C. Carmigniani, Napoleon et la cam- pagne d’Espagne (1807'1814) (Paris: Copemic, 1978), p. 126.
19. François, Journal, p. 740.
20. François, Journal, p. 741.
21. François, Journal, p. 742; Larchey, Les suites d’une capitulation, p. 168.
22. François, Journal, p. 742.
23. i, Journal et souvenirs, pp. 66-67.
24. Larchey, Les suites d’une capitulation, p. 169; Bourrier, Combats et Colires, p. 146.
25. Larchey, Les suites d’une capitulation, p. 171; Jean Tulard, Nouvelle Bibliographic Critique des Memoires sur I’epoque napoleonienne ecrits ou traduits en franqais (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991), p. 206.
26. François, Journal, p. 744.
27. Bourrier, Combats et Coleres, p. 144.
28. Larchey, Les suites d’une capitulation, p. 172-73.
29. Larchey, Les suites d’une capitulation, p. 173.
30. François, Journal, p. 745.
31. François, Journal, p. 744; Schumacher, Journal et souvenirs, p. 67.
32. François, Journal, pp. 747-50; Schumacher, Journal et souvenirs, pp. 67-69.
33. A. Hugo, France militaire. Histoire des armees frangaises de terre et mer de 1792 a 1837 (Paris: Chez Delloye, 1837), vol. 4, p. 211.
34. Tranie and Carmigniani, Napoldon et la campagne d’Espagne, p. 126.