J
p.d. courtesy national maritime museum, greenwich
ules Verne made it famous. In part II, chapter VIII, of his 1869 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo deftly steers the Nautilus towards the northwestern Spanish coast and into the recesses of Vigo Bay. There, an astonished Professor Aronnax observes the “ship’s crew in their diving-dresses” probing the wrecks of long-sunken Spanish galleons. The submarine’s electric light illuminates the men as they hoist rotten barrels and crates out of the ruined hulks. All around them spill doubloons, glittering jewelry, and ingots—an “inexhaustible fishery of gold and silver.” Thus did Nemo fund his tortured cause. The “curious episode,” as Nemo called it, that inspired Verne’s treasure-hunting fantasy was the Battle of Vigo Bay, an epic clash during the early days of the War of
18
by John S. Sledge the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The conflict arose from the disagreement as to who would succeed the childless Spanish sovereign, Charles II. Before he died, Charles designated Philip of Anjou, the grandson of France’s King Louis XIV, as his heir, and Philip subsequently assumed the throne. The arrangement created a European power imbalance and pitted AustriaHungary, England, and the Dutch Republic in a Grand Alliance against France and Spain. The earliest clashes took place in Italy, where Spain had holdings, but the Alliance quickly added a naval component by targeting the Spanish city of Cádiz, reasoning that if the Alliance could secure an Iberian base and gain Portuguese support, it could project power into the western Mediterranean and threaten the critical French port of Toulon.
The fleets destined to clash at Vigo Bay began the summer of 1702 on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Securely nestled in Havana’s superb harbor was the Spanish flota—seventeen stately galleons protected by twenty-three powerful French ships of the line, along with numerous smaller frigates, schooners, and sloops in support. The galleons had spent the previous months working their way through the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, carrying three years’ worth of New Spain’s wealth in their holds. Besides silver and gold ingots and coins—only twenty percent of the cargo’s total value—they carried pearls, emeralds, amethyst, cotton, wool, tabaco, indigo, Campeche wood, cocoa, vanilla, sugar, pepper, and sarsaparilla. The galleons were under the direct command of Don Manuel de Velasco y Tejada, an experienced officer and member of the religious and military Order of Santiago, while the French warships sailed under François Louis de Rousselet, Conde de ChâteauRenault, a fearless leader who bore wounds earned chastising the Barbary pirates. Confident in their men and ships, Velasco and Château-Renault led this imposing maritime assemblage into the Florida Straits on 24 July 1702, bound for Cádiz, as yet unaware that a war was underway on the other side of the Atlantic. Forty-five hundred miles to the east, a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet lay siege to Cádiz, beginning 23 August. Admiral George Rooke, a 52-year-old British officer who had joined the Royal Navy at age twenty-two and had been promoted steadily through the ranks, headed a total of thirty English and twenty Dutch warships, accompanied by dozens of transports and 14,000 troops under the command of James Butler, the 2nd Duke of Ormond. The campaign began badly when dozens of landing craft were swamped by heavy surf, and it Admiral George Rooke (1650–1709) led the Anglo-Dutch assault on the treasure fleet at Vigo Bay on 23 October 1702 after a failed attack on Cádiz the previous month. SEA HISTORY 177, WINTER 2021–22