Thewesternprovinceblog

Hola todos. Day 2 in Colombia! Que chévere!

To skip over mundane details I get up reasonably early, have breakfast and move my bags over to the new hostal. While I’m there I actually end up having a good chat with Mrs lady who runs the gaff and turns out she’s really into her history and there is lots here in Cartagena. She shows me a tiktok about the 1741 battle when the British Empire tried to have a crack at this place. It is all in Spanish but was highly interesting will link it in the wordpress version of this post.

After this the tour starts. This is quite fun as firstly we are loaded onto a chicken bus and off we go round the city with the tunes blasting to pick up the other guys. Once everyone is picked up all the other tourists are from other Países Latinos, so this tour was being done all in Spanish. Good stuff. 

We soon arrive at Castillo de San Felipe and after a brief photoshoot in we go. This an immense 18th century cannon fortress that was built like this to protect against pirates after the many many times this place had been extorted and sacked by pirates and privateers. Over the tour we get to climb the parapets & walk it’s tunnel system. During this time we learn some of Cartagena’s history.

So Cartagena de Indias was founded in 1533 & grew to become the principal slave port for the northern half of Spanish South America, you can see it in the people here as many of the people here are black mestizo Who descend from those who were brought here years ago. About 2/3 of Cartagenas native population is black or mestizo and the other 1/3 being white or mixed from the Spanish side.

It didn’t take long for this place to be pirated with first sacking of the city happening in 1544 by French pirates when the city didn’t have walls. The next big sack came in 1586 when Francis Drake & the lads rolled into the bay past Bocagrande & stormed and occupied for city for over a month demanding a payment of 400,000 silver ducats to leave. Drake was eventually paid to leave but the men did a lot of looting while they were there too. 

After Francis drake’s occupation a chain was set in Bocagrande to stop ships passing through the big mouth into the bay. Future attacks had to go through smaller bocachica which was easier to defend against incoming vessels.

In the 1600’s there were smaller attacks on the city until the next big sack in 1697 by the famous french pirate le Barón de pontis. He joined forces with other pirates and launched a joint assault and took the city, and then famously double crossed his allies sailing out with all the loot in the dead of night when the rest of the pirate allies were drunk or sleeping. Being cheated of their loot the pirates went on an even bigger pillaging spree unrestrained by the baron. After this they built fort San Felipe, making Cartagena de Indias the most fortified port in South America.

The last major attack on Cartagena came in 1741 when the war of Jenkins’ Ear breaks out the British empire launches a 30000 man strong expedition to conquer Cartagena against about 3-4000 Spaniards. This ends up being a classic lions led by donkeys affair for the British. They start the attack manage to take the smaller forts in and around Bocachica and at that point. At this point the commander of the navy, one Edward Vernon famously has a letter sent back to London saying something along the lines of “we’ve breached the port by the time this reaches you the Union Jack will by flying proudly over Cartagena”. Celebrations broke out in London over this news and Medallions were even forged back in Blighty over this supposed great victory.

Right after this letter is sent however things go south for the Brits. The expedition had a lot of logistical problems right off the bat that now were becoming apparent. The Brits manage to take the inner harbour and outlying forts but to capture the city they needed to take fort San Felipe which was dug in hard for an assault. In typical British piss poor planning it taken them a week to get themselves in shape for an assault because the commanders of the naval and land had contempt for one another and couldn’t agree on a concrete plan to attack the fort meanwhile food and water rations are now going bad and yellow fever and malaria is rampant in the rank and file now. It got that bad that about 1/3 of the land army had to stay in board ship to do the work of sailors who had become bedridden from mosquito borne diseases.

At some point here the only siege engineer on the expedition dies from yellow fever so nobody can build a battery to assault the fort. In the end they decide to launch a chaotic night attack trying to mount the fort with whatever gear they had on hand. This failed epically and the Spanish almost cut the assault off from retreat. The British retreat back to their ships and then after some more bickering by the war council an assessment is done concluding out of 30000 only maybe 1-2000 are capable of fighting; everyone else is either ill from tropical diseases or dystentry, scurvy etc from the now bad rations. The situation is untenable and the Spanish win the siege and the British retreat back to Jamaica. About 18000 British died in that siege and mostly from tropical diseases, only a few hundred in the actual fighting as sieges tend to go. The Mosquito is what truly saved Cartagena. 

From there Cartagena wouldn’t face any more major sieges though it would play a major role in the independence being the first province of Colombia to break off from Spain in 1811 on November 11th – it is a huge festival and biggest party in Cartagena or so I am told.

After this tour wraps up the rest of the night goes by uneventfully without any more gringo scam nonsense I am happy to say!

below you can find the link to the tiktok on the 1741 siege. It is all in Spanish though

Invicta – 1741 batalla de Cartagena