On March 14, 1741, the decisive phase of the English attempts to seize Cartagena de Indias, a key Spanish post for trade with America, began. The most mythologized story about the Defense presents Blas de Lezo, a lame, one-armed and one-eyed Basque sailor, saving the American port from an English invasion of Dantesque dimensions and, at the same time, defending his honor and integrity from the evil viceroy of New Granada.
Sebastián de Eslava, whose version of events was the one that Felipe V accepted, has become the villain of the story due to his role in the fall from grace of Lezo, who was suspended from all command and urged to return to Spain “to give a reason for his conduct.” A simplified view of the facts that, without detracting from the sailor, does not correspond to reality.
Blas de Lezo he died on September 7, 1741, months after the siege but before learning of its suspension, due to injuries sustained during the battle. A cannon shot hit the table where the council of war was meeting, so that several splinters stuck into the sailor. That day, Viceroy Eslava was also present on the ship Galicia, and he too was wounded.
Eslava and Lezo both had the rank of lieutenant general, being the second most senior and the direct commander of the Navy ships, which did not mean that the viceroy was the highest authority in the plaza. Without a military governor in the city, Eslava decided, and he is honored, to personally take command of the defense when he learned that the British were heading to the Caribbean port, so Blas de Lezo remained as his subordinate. The bad relationship between the two deprived the Spanish Empire of an association that, properly calibrated, would have been even more disastrous for British interests.
The person ultimately responsible for the defense of Cartagena de Indias was a Navarrese with a long military tradition, a man who began his career at the age of fourteen in the Spanish Succession War and who in a few years accumulated a large number of titles and awards for his “ability and good judgement.” Sebastián Eslava was a voracious reader of classic works and knowledgeable about the great campaigns of Antiquity, which he tried to apply to his time. Landing and siege operations became his specialty over the years.
Like Blas de Lezo, Eslava was a man of iron, an enemy of flattery and without mincing words. When the clash with England was raising the temperature, Felipe V assigned the Navarrese, like someone who throws an explosive bomb, to one of the fundamental points of Spanish America. By Royal Certificate of August 20, 1739the King restored the Viceroyalty of New Granada and placed it in charge of “Lieutenant General Don Sebastián de Eslava, Knight of the Order of Santiago”.
Portrait of Blas de Lezo.
In Madrid it was known about the problems of governing the vast territories of northern South America from Lima, so in 1740 this viceroyalty was reestablished, which included Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and Ecuadorafter years before it had been suspended due to economic straits.
Sebastián de Eslava received the position at the proposal of the Minister of the Navy and the Indies José de la Quintana for “his good judgment, experienced capacity and disinterested conduct, of competent age to visit those provinces, of providential genius to give rules and records and new establishments” . Today, Eslava, who would end up being Minister of War in the following reign, is considered one of the viceroys who initiated the Bourbon reforms in America, an enlightened man with knowledge of natural sciences and the intelligence to know that sieges are won by military devices and not brute force.
two strong personalities
How do you explain Jesus Dolado and Eduardo Robles in his book ‘Sebastián Eslava: A hero stolen from Spain’ (Galland Editorial Books), three years before Eslava’s appointment, Blas de Lezo had already been assigned to defend the coasts of Cartagena de Indias. In a matter of two months, the Basque repelled two British attacks on this square and began to improve the fortresses, which did not prevent Eslava from finding Cartagena de Indias in 1740 “without any state of defense and without troops or to cover the sentinel posts.” ».
In January of that year, Sebastián de Eslava left Spain together with 1,308 men belonging to the second battalions of the regiments of Spain, Granada and Aragón. The Navarrese and the Basque soon honored the old quarrels between the Navy and the Spanish Army when establishing a new defense against Admiral Edward Vernon, who planned to attack Cartagena de Indias with all his forces. That’s how he tells it Allan J. Kuethe y Juan Marchena in the work «Soldiers of the King. The Bourbon army in colonial America on the eve of Independence»:
“It didn’t take long for problems to arise, even before Vernon and his army arrived. Don Blas de Lezo, a man seasoned at sea and accustomed to directing his ships from an indisputable authority, was forced to put foot on land, and send a good part of his men and the cannons of his ships to cover positions on the wall, because there was nothing to do it with. Lezo immediately competed with Eslava, with the governor, with the heads of the infantry battalions and, given his arrogance, with every Cartagena who came within range, whom he always looked over his shoulder ».
Eslava had a harsh character, while Blas de Lezo, a brilliant strategist who had already had problems with other commanders
Eslava had a harsh character, while Blas de Lezo, a brilliant strategist who had already had problems with other commanders, was very bad at putting himself under the orders of “terrestrial knights.” His diary shows the low opinion he had of all the actors involved in the defense of Cartagena de Indias, despite the fact that among them there were soldiers of accredited prestige such as Eslava himself or the colonel of Engineers Carlos Souvillard Desnauxresponsible for the defensive framework.
«Some studies maintain as a dogma everything said by Lezo in his diary and what is expressed by the other protagonists is branded as a flawed, despised or simply ignored opinion. The truth is that reading these newspapers leaves no doubt about the high self-esteem in which Lezo had himself”, point out Jesús Dolado and Eduardo Robles.
When the third British attempt to take Cartagena de Indias materialized in March 1741, the relationship between Eslava and Blas de Lezo, both equally reckless, lived in a spiky strain and the discrepancies about the strategy to follow were constant. The enormous numerical superiority of the English did not help to reassure them.
Faced with an English fleet of 186 ships, with 23,600 men between soldiers and sailors, the Spanish defenders only had six ships and 1,905 men from the battalions brought by Eslava, the fixed battalion of Cartagena de Indias and other forces, among which were the marines under the command of Blas de Lezo. 600 Indian flecheros they were mobilized from the interior of the province to fight Vernon’s squad.
A powerful journal
A good part of the decisions that led to the victory over the English that are blamed on Blas de Lezo were actually made by Eslava, sometimes against the criteria of the Basque, who throughout the siege proved to have serious difficulties playing as a team. On March 25, Lezo and Desclaux discussed the strategy to follow. The chief of the engineers proposed a mobile defense by the outer fortresses (Saint Louis of BocachicaSanta Cruz, Manzanillo, Pastelillo, San Felipe and, ultimately, El Arrabal), while Lezo opted for a static defense and for sinking the few Spanish ships at the entrance to the bay to make it difficult for British ships to navigate.
Eslava finally ordered that the ships not sink, since it was a very complex and sterile operation if it was not done in the exact place, a decision that the Basque did not abide by. In a report that Eslava sent by Via Reservada on June 1, 1741 to jose quintanaexposed how unhelpful the Basque strategy of sinking the ships was:
«All Lezo’s interest was in sinking his ships so that they would not fall into the hands of the enemy and he would be responsible, and try to cover with the sunken hulls the channels through which Vernon would have to put his ships; but he did this with such cowardice that they sank all the ships badly, not only his own, but he also caused the sinking of nine merchant ships that were in the port, and such a ruin was useless, because those who had to break the bottom abandoned them before they could. time and so the ships did not sink where they should but where the wind took them, so that no one hindered the entry of Vernon, who arrived with his ships as far as the Bay of Souls, the port of the city».
Monument of Blas de Lezo in Cartagena de Indias.E
The passing of the weeks led to a direct clash between the Spanish commanders. Although Eslava demanded with strong words in his report to the Court that the sailor be dismissed for insubordination until he explained his behavior, Blas de Lezo was not short in the fragment of his diary that he sent to Madrid when presenting the viceroy as a coward and an incompetent:
“Nobody obeyed Eslava, she never went up to the fire, and only the marine troop saved her honor because the infantry behaved badly.”
The reality is that the Navarrese was wounded in combat and that his presence on the front line of battle at critical moments is recorded. Nor is it possible that the Marines, a minority within a Spanish force full of engineers and infantry soldiers, could play such a leading role in what was an eminently land combat. Eslava planned a defense on land, knowing that it was enough to buy time and let tropical diseases do the dirty work. Some authors speak of 18,000 casualties between dead and wounded in the British ranks, mostly due to disease.
The Navy itself recognized three centuries later that Blas de Lezo’s diary is not a very reliable source and that the combat was more of a land than naval nature. In the famous exhibition that in 2013 the Naval Museum of Madrid dedicated to ‘Blas de Lezo, the value of Mediohombre’ you could read:
«The victory over the English was possible thanks to a small contingent of forces commanded by a group of men of which Eslava was the highest authority and, therefore, must be considered as the main person responsible for the success of the contest».
Even after Lezo died, Eslava repelled a fourth British attack (the second for him) against Cartagena de Indias. In 1742, with a fleet of 56 ships under his command, Vernon suffered a new setback in Santiago de Cuba and Portobelo, after which he went to the Colombian city in April. Given the defensive design ordered by Eslava, the British admiral decided to raise anchor towards Great Britain.