Chapter VI The Hector Goes to San Fernando
Written by Captain Grattan, R.N., H.M.S. ‘Hector’
As the English merchants in Prince Rupert’s Island were kicking up no end of a fuss about the stoppage of their trade with Santa Cruz, I received orders from home to take my ship to San Fernando and report on the state of affairs there; so one morning I left old ‘Spats’ comfortably anchored off Princes’ Town and toddled across. Young Wilson—my Sub-Lieutenant—has told you about that fort at the entrance to La Laguna, the fort which had been firing on our merchant steamers and stopping all trade to San Fernando, at the head of the bay, fifteen miles farther on, and as we steamed towards the gap in the high cliffs which marked the entrance, all of us on the bridge were anxious to know whether the insurgents had managed to capture it yet. We could see the little white lighthouse on the port side, the rambling white walls of the fort itself, perched high in the air, on the starboard side, and presently the yeoman of signals reported that a small cruiser, lying close inshore, was flying the Government colours—you could tell them because the stripes were vertical—so we guessed that it still remained in the President’s hands.
The heat, however, was so great that the glare from the water and the mirage from the baking rocks made it difficult to see anything distinctly, and it was not till we drew nearer that we made out a large yellow and green flag, hanging limply down over the fort itself. That settled the question.
In another quarter of an hour we were passing through the entrance, when—well, I couldn’t believe it myself, and I saw it, so can hardly expect you to believe it—the miserable sons of Ham in that fort had the colossal cheek to fire a shot across my bows.
‘Accident, my dear boy!’ I told Wilson, who was officer of the watch; ‘of course it was an accident; but I’m blowed if, before we’d got a cable length past the entrance, a second shot didn’t come along and make as neat a furrow across my fo’c’stle deck-planks as you’d see anywhere. It scattered the stokers and bandsmen basking under the awning, and I quite enjoyed their little obstacle-race into the shelter of the battery.’
‘My dear boy, they don’t mean it; but just put your helm hard a-port and go full speed astern starboard—if you please. Give ’em back a 9.2 common,2 please, Commander; they’ve only fired by accident, but accidents are bound to happen sometimes in the best-regulated ships.’ Round we swung on our heels—we just had room—and I dropped my eyeglass to laugh more easily, because that little cruiser—one of those piffling little things I’d towed out of Los Angelos six weeks ago—had hauled down her flag, and was scurrying off as fast as she could go. The poor idiots who’d had their little accident in the fort thought, I suppose, that we were running away, so didn’t ease off again, and by the time Montague, my Gunnery Lieutenant, had reported the for’ard 9.2 cleared away, and the fo’c’stle awning had been furled, we’d turned and were coming back past the fort. ‘Have your accident, Montague—as soon as you like; but I’ll only give you one, so don’t miss.’
His accident was quite a success, and when the smoke of the bursting shell had cleared away, there was a hole in the walls through which even my coxswain could have steered the galley without breaking an oar, and that yellow and green monstrosity was being hauled down with a run.
Angry! Rather not! I can’t afford to get angry; it’s bad for my gout; I’d had my accident, and proceeded on my way quite ready to apologise for my gross carelessness directly they apologised for theirs. I suppose I should have had to be angry if that shell, or whatever it was, had killed any of my people—except my coxswain, and then I should have blessed them, for he was the most exasperating idiot I’d ever known.
An hour later we came up to San Fernando—a miserable deserted-looking collection of dingy white walls and warehouses, fizzling in the awful heat, and, ’pon my word, there was another dirty little cruiser there at anchor, with the yellow and green ensign flying, calmly potting at the town—firing a gun every other minute. We could not see what damage she was actually doing, but the white walls along the sea-front were riddled with holes, and that was good enough for me.
‘Front row of the stalls, old chap,’ I told my navigator, and though he’d have walked about on his head, or shaved it, if he thought it would please me, he hadn’t a sense of humour, and looked puzzled. ‘As close to her as you can,’ I explained, ‘between her and the town;’ and there we dropped anchor, and awaited the next item on the programme. It was jolly lucky for her that she didn’t have any accidents. We hadn’t been comfortably anchored for more than five minutes before dozens of black and green flags were hoisted over the town, people began to venture out into the front street, and I had hardly gone below, when one of the signalmen came running down. ‘A boat’s pulling this way, sir, from shore, sir, with a black and green flag flying.’
My coxswain—I called him the ‘Comfort’ because he was such a nuisance to me—pulled my cap out of my hands and gave it me, seized my telescope from under my arm, rubbed the bright part up and down his sleeve, and handed it back, gave me two right-hand kid-gloves from the table, and I was ready to receive anybody, the Insurgent Provisional Government, or the Queen of Sheba, on my quarterdeck. A clumsy white boat, with a huge ensign, came wobbling off, very careful to keep us between her and the little cruiser. The crew were rowing atrociously, each man pulling the time that suited him best, and it occurred to me that perhaps the Provisional Government might possibly accept the services of the Comfort for their official barge. Then they were near enough for me to see that there was a white man there, among several dark-skinned people, under the stern awning—a white man with yellow hair and his right arm in a sling, my Sub’s brother, as sure as life. I looked round and saw Wilson himself, the colour of a sheet, trying to attract the boat’s attention, and looking piteously at me, ‘Here! Hi! give me a megaphone—some one!’ I sung out. A dozen people fell over one another to get one, and I shouted through it, ‘Lay on your oars,’ and when my Sub’s brother had made them stop, I sang out, ‘Is that Gerald Wilson aboard?’
‘Yes,’ he shouted, putting his head out from under the awning. ‘Then, for goodness’ sake, don’t come aboard my ship, or I’ll have to arrest you. I’ve got your warrant on board. You can come alongside, but don’t leave your boat.’
‘Thank you,’ he shouted; and it amused me to see my Sub’s face. I believe that he was even grateful enough to stop the mids. doing physical drill early in the morning over my head on the quarterdeck. The Provisional Government—for that it actually was—did manage to get alongside, and the first man to tramp up the ladder was the Vice-President—de Costa himself. I recognised him at once from having seen him in the cathedral at Santa Cruz. Poor chap, he had on a black frock-coat and beautifully brushed tall black hat—in that awful heat too. No wonder, if it was necessary, as head of the Provisional Government, to wear it, that he looked ten years older than when I saw him last.
His face looked more yellow and flabby, and his black eyes more shifty than ever. He bowed, and I bowed, and then he waved his secretary at me—a little chap in another frock-coat and silk hat who followed him. The little chap’s patent-leather boots were giving him trouble, and he came along the quarterdeck on his toes, like a cat walking along a wall covered with broken glass. Fortunately he could speak a little English, and whilst his boss was mopping his forehead, he said, ‘Presidente de Costa thank you for coming,’ almost breaking himself in half, he bowed so low. Four or five more chaps came along, every one of them with an enormous black and green rosette in his coat. These were soldiers—two of them niggers—and very mild-looking soldiers they were, just the sort you’d imagine would hang about at headquarters, and get soft jobs where there weren’t many bullets flying round. However, I was wrong in thinking so.
They spent half an hour on board, explaining that the Dictator’s flag (Canilla’s) flew nowhere throughout the province of Leon, except over El Castellar—the fort which had had the accident two hours before—and of course swore that they were now strong enough to march on Santa Cruz itself, and intended to do so very shortly. The upshot was that they demanded official recognition from the Foreign Powers. That was the whole matter; they wanted recognition so that they could buy warlike supplies from abroad openly, for of course at the present time no Foreign Power would allow its subjects to assist them. ‘We have this policy foreign, we encourage the merchants, and we permit all trade very much of the foreign peoples, and very much the Inglesas also. Always they shall be first now that the noble Inglese ship of war visit San Fernando—the first ship to come,’ the little secretary told me.
He looked so diminutive and so important, and was evidently in such discomfort with his boots and his tight frock-coat, that I had to screw my eyeglass into my eye till it pained—I wanted to laugh so much.
Not a word did they say about the little cruiser which was lying close by, waiting for a chance to pot them on their way ashore, or about the shell-marks on every wall. Not much, for that would have drawn attention to the perfectly obvious fact that they could do nothing till they had command of the sea, and also to the fact that they were absolutely without any artillery. A couple of well-fought six-pounder guns, if they’d had them, would have been quite sufficient to drive off the wretched little cruiser-gunboat kind of affair. Poor chaps! you couldn’t help seeing that they were terribly in earnest, but I couldn’t possibly give them any hopes of their Provisional Government being recognised, the most I could do was to forward their demand by ‘wireless’ to the Hercules at Princes’ Town for her to cable home. I saw them over the side, and interrupted the brothers Wilson yarning at the bottom of the gangway.
‘Ask your brother if he’ll show me round the place if I come ashore for a toddle,’ I sang out.
‘Certainly, sir; he’ll be only too pleased,’ my Sub answered.
‘If he dyed his hair I might ask your brother to dine with me to-night,’ I told him, as we watched them slowly splashing ashore; ‘I shouldn’t recognise him with his hair dyed—not officially.’
Botheration take it! I’d never said anything about that wretched hydraulic machinery I’d been bullied into bringing across. Still, you can’t talk to Provisional Governments about packing-cases, can you? However, my Sub relieved my mind on this point.
‘I told Gerald that we had a lot of things for a firm here, sir,’ he informed me. ‘He’s going to tell them.’
‘Good lad! Good boy!’ I said, and went below. The commander of the cruiser wasn’t showing any signs of calling on me, in fact he was beginning to raise steam, so I got ready for my toddle ashore.
‘Yes, please; usual leave to officers,’ I told the Commander, who hammered at my door (he always was noisy, thought it made him breezy—it didn’t), and sent the Comfort with my compliments to Dr. Watson, my Fleet Surgeon, and would he come ashore with me for a walk. He was so lazy that he wouldn’t be able to walk far, and would therefore act as a check on my Sub’s brother if he wanted to rush me over the country. I had thought of taking my Sub himself, but he couldn’t come, had to get out that hydraulic machinery.
The Comfort and five loafing sons of sea-cooks, whom the Commander had given me as my galley’s crew, pulled us ashore, and a miserable-looking place it was, a long sloping beach covered with rubbish and stinking seaweed, dead dogs here and there, and live ones, not much more healthy-looking, prowling about in search of food.
We ran alongside a crumbling wooden jetty, and Wilson was waiting for us, dressed in white duck riding gear, smart brown gaiters, and with a smart white polo helmet on his head. His arm in the sling gave just the wounded-hero appearance to complete the picture. He had a carriage waiting for us, but before we got in he pointed out a very weather-beaten pillar of granite, about five feet high, standing on the shore. ‘Pizarro landed there with thirteen men in 1522 or thereabouts to conquer this country—thirteen men, their armour, and ten horses. Just think of it!’
This pillar was one of the most sacred things in the Republic, and there was a white flag flying close to it, so that the gunboats could give it a wide berth when they shelled the rest of the town. There were traces of shell-fire everywhere, but it was astonishing to see how little actual damage had been done. ‘Five men and a little girl killed, and they’ve fired over six hundred shell into the town during the last fortnight,’ Wilson told me. There was one two-storey house close by with at least twenty holes in the side facing the harbour, and yet it seemed little the worse—rather improved, from my point of view, because the holes increased the ventilation.
The place was swarming with people, practically all were men, and nine out of ten of them had rifles slung round their necks—a ragged unkempt-looking lot of scaramouches they were, you couldn’t call them soldiers. Most of them had no equipment at all—a cotton bag to hold cartridges slung with string over their shoulders, a loose white shirt, and a ragged pair of cotton drawers, legs and feet bare, and very often nothing on their heads at all, or, if they had, a rough-plaited, wide-brimmed grass hat. Their attempts to salute, as Wilson and we drove along, were praise-worthy but ludicrous. There were shrill cries of ‘Viva los Inglesas!’ and they would have followed us if Wilson had not stopped them, but they were eminently respectful, and the slightest word he spoke seemed law to them.
‘You’re a bit of a nob here,’ I said. I wanted to say ‘my boy,’ but I’m hanged if I could. He was two or three sizes too big for me, was Gerald Wilson. I’m a pretty big boss on board my ship, but I’m hanged if I was in it compared with him on shore. I’ve cultivated the ‘for goodness’ sake, get out of my way; don’t you see it’s me’ air pretty successfully, but he’d got it to perfection, apparently without knowing it, and when he stopped the carriage, and we got out, he strode along with the chin-strap of his polo helmet over his grand square jaw—simply a blooming emperor.
He was taking us to the cathedral, on one side of the usual Plaza you find in all Spanish types of towns, and as we passed the ‘Cuartel de Infanteria,’ two or three hundred so-called troops were hurriedly forming in front of it. The trumpeter was the only chap in anything approaching a uniform.
‘Kicked out of the regulars for blowing so badly,’ Wilson said; and I didn’t doubt his word when I heard him try to sound some kind of a salute.
‘My dear chap!’ Thank goodness, I stopped myself in time and didn’t say that, but wanted to ask him if he thought it possible to knock the troops I had seen in Santa Cruz with these he had here.
There was something in his face, ‘a keep off the grass’ look, that made me, me a Post-Captain commanding one of the finest armoured cruisers in the Royal Navy, take soundings jolly carefully before I spoke to him.
He saw what I was thinking, and smiled, ‘I’m licking them into shape gradually. We’ve only just begun.’
He took us into the cathedral, a crumbling old place with a huge crack across one side—the result of an earthquake some years ago—and the cool, musty, religious gloom inside was very comforting after the dazzle and glare of the sun outside. Two little stars of light, far away at the end of the chancel, made the gloom all the more mysterious, and then, as our eyes became more accustomed, we could make out the gaudy image of the Holy Virgin, looking down, with calm patient eyes, on the high altar and its tarnished gaudy tapestry.
At the foot of the steps, below the altar-rails, many women, shrouded in black hoods, were praying before it.
‘They come here when the gunboats start firing; the cathedral is spared,’ Wilson whispered, as we tiptoed out into the glare again.
‘Where do the men go?’ I asked.
‘They carry on with their work,’ he answered; and that came with rather a ‘thump’ after seeing the men. Perhaps they were better chaps than they looked.
‘Not one shell in twenty bursts,’ he said, as an afterthought.
Then he took us across the square to the English Club, the only clean, cool-looking building there, with a shady creeper-covered verandah all round it, and long easy wicker-chairs simply inviting rest.
‘I shan’t get you away from here, doctor, I fancy,’ I said to the Fleet Surgeon, who was already streaming with perspiration, and I didn’t. He went to sleep the whole of the afternoon in one of those chairs. We always chaffed him about the book he said he was writing: ‘Clubs I have slept in.’
In the reading-room all the dear old English papers and periodicals, ten weeks old, were neatly laid on a table, and about a dozen thin, lantern-jawed Englishmen had come to welcome us. De Costa, looking nervous and uncomfortable, was there too, with his secretary (he’d changed his boots). We all had a green bitters, and I was given the longest cigar, and the best I’d smoked for many a day.
I wanted to do as Watson had already done—stretch myself on one of those long chairs on the cool verandah, with my feet up, and stay there till it was time to go aboard—but I was much too afraid of Wilson, and drove away again. ‘I’ll take it out of my Sub if his brother bullies me too much,’ I chuckled to myself as we bounced along into the country to see what preparations were being made to defend San Fernando against the army which fierce old General Zorilla was leading to attack it. Luckily the carriage had an awning, but it was horribly hot all the same.
We got out of the town, passing along shady lanes, with little palm-hidden villas standing back in the shadows of olive groves and vineyards, and gradually clattered up to some high ground, a regular tree-covered ridge, at the back of San Fernando, from which we had a grand view of the town at our feet, the square cathedral tower, the grand sweeping bend of the head of La Laguna, and, far away to the left, the faint outline of the rocks which marked its inlet—El Castellar could not be seen because of the dazzling haze and mist which hung on the water. The wretched little cruiser had just weighed, and was steaming slowly past my ship, covering her with black oily smoke. I only hoped that the Comfort, or the officer of the watch, had had the ‘savvy’ to shut my stern windows.
Wilson turned me round to look inland.
Sloping gently downwards at our feet was some open ground, dancing in the heat, and pigs and goats and some wretched cattle were lazily browsing there. The road in which we were standing ran down it, a broad red streak, to a sluggish stream at the bottom, crossed it by a ford, and gently rose over some more bare, parched, open ground, and was swallowed in the dark shade of a forest. Everywhere beyond, look which way I would, there was nothing but forest, stretching away in the distance in every direction till the outlines of the trees were lost in a dim confusion of mist on the horizon. The town of San Fernando, but for that bare ground on each side of the stream which swept round it, was simply built in a great clearing, and it gave me the impression that that dark motionless forest was silently awaiting the opportunity to claim its own again and swallow it up.
‘That is our first line of defence, and our last,’ he said, sweeping his arm round the horizon.
‘Sometimes, when it is not so hot, you can see the dim outlines of the mountains of Santa Cruz away over there,’ Wilson said, pointing to the north. ‘You see that road—Queen Isabella’s road they call it—it runs straight as a die for fifty miles through the trees. Three hundred years ago the Spaniards cut it through the forest, and from here to Santa Cruz you could travel by coach in five days, but now the part through the mountains has been destroyed by earthquakes.’
‘But where are your defences—your trenches?’ I asked.
‘We have none,’ he said, ‘we don’t want any. General Zorilla is marching down that road to attack us. He is a grand old man’ (‘I know him: he is,’ I said, beginning to understand), ‘and a grand soldier, but his only way through fifty miles of virgin forest is along that road. It is a big job, and he knows it. Six days ago he and his army plunged into it, and they will never leave it, for my little brown forest-men, with rifles and machetes, hover all round him. We are drawing him on, the farther he gets away from Santa Cruz, the greater difficulty he has to feed his troops—he has four thousand of them and artillery—and is already short of food, sending out strong parties to forage, but they find nothing, and we capture fifty or sixty of his men every day.
‘You see that dark mass over there?’ he pointed.
I pretended I did see it.
‘There’s a big clearing close there—just twenty-four miles from here—and his army camped in it last night. My little chaps gave them a rotten time.’
I could not help thinking of those little brown-skinned, half-naked natives, with their bags of cartridges and their rusty rifles, gliding from tree to tree, through the thick undergrowth, and never giving the regulars a moment’s rest, day or night. At night-time too! I shuddered to think of it, and began to have a most wholesome respect for those tattered ragamuffins of his.
‘How many have you?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘We have something like five thousand rifles, but whenever there is a spare rifle there are hundreds to claim it. Here come some who would be soldiers—that is, riflemen; they are taking food to the front.’
A long train of heavily laden mules came past us, ambling wearily down towards the stream, each mule led by a little native. As each passed he doffed his hat to Wilson, who stopped one of them and made him show me the machete he carried in his waistband—a long curved knife something like a bill-hook, only heavier, and not so curved and the blade broad at the end. I felt the edge; it was very keen.
‘They can cut an arm clean through at a stroke,’ he said; ‘these machetes are better than rifles—at night,’ and I shuddered again as the little man, with a grin of pride on his face, ran after his mule. It wasn’t the kind of warfare I’d been brought up to. We watched them all splashing across the ford, forcing their mules through it as they tried to stop and drink. Before the last mule had entered the forest, the head of another train began to emerge from it.
‘Those aren’t mules,’ I sang out, as they came towards us.
‘They’re horses,’ he said, and walked down towards them.
There were thirty or more thin, hungry-looking beasts, with military saddles and equipment, each led by a little native, whose eyes sparkled with pleasure as he saluted Wilson.
‘That’s good news,’ he said, after speaking to one of them; ‘we cut off a whole squadron of Zorilla’s cavalry early this morning. These are some of the horses. Look at the boots the men are wearing!’
I hadn’t noticed them before, but now I couldn’t help smiling, for the little half-naked men were shambling along with big cavalry boots on their feet, the soft leather ‘uppers’ half-way up to their knees.
‘Quaint little chaps, aren’t they? Their whole ambition is to be proper soldiers. The first thing they want is a rifle, and the next boots. They’ll wear these now till their feet are so blistered that they can’t walk with or without them.’
‘Surely Zorilla will have to fall back,’ I said, as we drove back to the town.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘My only fear is that he will break away towards El Castellar. About sixteen miles along that road there is a forest track leading there, and he may have to fall back on it; but he’ll have to leave his wagons and his guns if he does, and his reputation will be lost. He’s been ordered to attack San Fernando, and the fierce old man will do so, even if he and his two “A.D.C.’s” are the only ones left.’
We rattled past the string of captured horses, and drove down to the shore where I had landed, calling at the Club, on the way, to wake the Fleet Surgeon and bring him along.
Two big lighters were aground at the bottom of the beach, and hundreds of natives were swarming round them, wading into the water, bringing ashore the packing-cases of hydraulic machinery, and making a noise like a lot of bumble-bees as they dragged them up the sloping foreshore.
Thank goodness we’d got rid of them at last, for the Commander had been like a bear with a sore head ever since those cases had lumbered up his battery.
‘Why the dickens don’t they get rid of their rifles when they’re working?’ I asked, because most of them had rifles slung over their backs.
Wilson smiled, ‘That’s a regulation I’ve made. If a man drops his rifle for any purpose whatsoever, any man without one may pick it up and becomes a soldier and a caballero—a gentleman—and has a machete man to carry his food for him on the march. That’s why they won’t part with them!’
That was a quaint idea if you like.
My galley was waiting alongside the little tumble-down jetty, and the Comfort pushed his way through a crowd of awestruck natives to give me a signal-paper. ‘The Commander thought you’d like to see it, sir—a “wireless” from the Hercules.’
I read, ‘La Buena Presidente, under command of Captain Pelayo, left the Tyne yesterday.’
I thought it would interest Wilson, so I read it to him.
His eyes gleamed. ‘What! Captain Pelayo! That’s Captain don Martin de Pelayo—our man—a de Costa man—he’s managed to get hold of her after all,’ and he sang out some gibberish to the natives standing round. In a moment they had leapt in the air, shouting and waving their hats, and hugging each other, bolting away towards the town screaming shrilly, ‘La Buena Presidente! La Buena Presidente! Viva Capitaine Pelayo!’
I had some inkling of what had happened.
‘Don Martin was the best captain in the Navy,’ Wilson told me; ‘chucked out because he demanded ammunition for his ships. We sent him to England, and if that telegram is correct, he has managed to get hold of the big cruiser. In three months de Costa should be President of Santa Cruz.’
I could not help telling him—not officially, of course—how glad I was; and as my lazy crew pulled us aboard, the town seemed to be buzzing like a bee-hive, the bells in the cathedral ringing joyously, and green and black flags hanging over every building.
‘Your brother wants you to ride out to the front with him to-night,’ I told my Sub. ‘You can go when you like.’
As usual, the most beautifully cool crisp night followed the terrible heat of the day, and the town of San Fernando looked extremely picturesque, a mass of white roofs and clear-cut shadows, bathed in the light of a full moon. The road leading up the ridge behind the town stood out a silvery streak, and the mere thought of it, plunging into the appalling shadows of that grim forest beyond, made me shiver as I held my breath and listened for sounds of the struggle I knew must still be going on twenty miles away. Huddled together in some clearing of the forest, or strung wearily along the road, brave old Zorilla and his half-fed men were still surrounded by those fierce, silent, little forest-men with their terrible machetes, their bags of cartridges, and their rusty rifles. I turned in feeling rather creepy, and hoped that my Sub wouldn’t do anything foolhardy.
What he did he will tell you himself.
Notes
2 ‘Common’ = common shell, A thin-walled shell with a heavy bursting charge.