The Confrontation at Salamanca by Geoffrey Watson

Author:Geoffrey Watson [Watson, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B00JV57JQS
Published: 2014-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

The Royal Navy, as Lord Wellington had requested, was now officially committed to waging war along the northern coast of Spain. Rear Admiral Popham sailed from El Ferrol with his squadron a week after Wellington’s army entered Salamanca.

His naval force was intended primarily to protect the transports that carried up to eleven thousand British and Spanish marines. Their task was to harass the seaports along the northern coast, capturing any that were defended inadequately and generally making life so difficult for General Caffarelli and the Army of the North, that he would be unable to send any help to Marmont in his struggle against Wellington.

Before all the units that were to make up Popham’s force could be collected together to start his campaign, Wellington had arranged an interim measure. Commodore Sir Charles Cockburn and his small squadron had been sent from the Mediterranean to co-operate with his friend Sir Joshua Welbeloved, the 1st Battalion of the Hornets and two large groups of guerrilleros.

Their purpose was also to harass the Army of the North before Popham arrived. The Hornets had the additional duty of helping the guerrilla bands of Longa and Porlier to move east and join with the guerrilleros of Espoz y Mina to reinforce the Spanish Seventh Army under General Mendizábal. It was they who would be working with Popham to cause chaos in the northeast.

In the interim, Colonel MacKay and Major Cholmondeley of the 1st Battalion of Hornets had cleared the French from the western Asturias with the assistance of Cockburn’s marines and the two bands of guerrilleros. They had completed the capture of the three towns of Avilés, Oviedo and Gijón and were tidying up, ready to move on, when Admiral Popham and his squadron arrived.

The admiral was an active and ambitious officer who had only recently hoisted his flag as Rear Admiral. It had to have been a great relief to move up from the temporary rank of commodore, that lasted only as long as the squadron for which it had been created. Once that command was redistributed or returned to the main fleet, the commodore generally resumed his rank as senior captain.

Here then was a very new rear admiral who was anxious to make his mark as a successful and energetic commander in his first independent command. His orders from the admiralty made him the senior naval officer along the Biscay coast of Spain, but because he had been unable to complete his squadron before the campaign started, he now found a junior commodore standing in for him and co-operating with a British battalion and two separate groups of guerrilla forces.

Perhaps he would have been reconciled to the situation immediately if the Hornets had not been so startlingly successful in what they had achieved. Certainly it simplified the task he had been given. It would enable him to concentrate all his energy farther east, in the heart of the territory controlled by the French Army of the North.

That was not the point. He had

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