Blas de Lezo

Blas de Lezo was the Spanish admiral who held Cartagena de Indias in March, April and May 1741 against a British fleet of 186 ships and 27,000 men, the largest amphibious expedition mounted before the twentieth century, with six ships of the line, some three thousand soldiers and militia and the walls. He had lost his left leg at Velez-Malaga in 1704, his left eye at Toulon in 1706 and the use of his right arm at Barcelona in 1714, and the sailors called him Patapalo, peg-leg, and Mediohombre, half a man. He was a Basque from Pasajes, went to sea in the French service as a boy in the War of the Spanish Succession, and spent the years between the wars hunting corsairs in the Mediterranean and convoying the silver fleets, with a spell commanding the Pacific squadron out of Callao. In 1737 he was sent to Cartagena, the port through which the silver of New Granada and Peru went home, as commander of its galleons, and when the war over Jenkins's ear began he set about the defences with the viceroy Eslava, with whom he quarrelled about everything. Vernon, who had taken Portobelo in 1739 with six ships and had medals struck for the capture of Cartagena before he reached it, arrived in March 1741. The forts at the harbour mouth fell in a fortnight, Lezo sank his own ships across the inner channel and drew the defence back to the fort of San Felipe on the hill above the city, and the British assault on it in the night of 20 April, made with scaling ladders that proved too short for a ditch Lezo had deepened, was cut down on the slope with some six hundred dead. Yellow fever did the rest: the British lost several thousand men to it in the following weeks, and Vernon sailed away in May, blaming the army. The medals had to be withdrawn. Lezo died in Cartagena in September, of the fever or of a wound, unrewarded and under the viceroy's complaints to Madrid, and his grave was lost; the statue outside the fort was put up two centuries later, and the Spanish navy has named ships for him since. Lawrence Washington, who served under Vernon in the siege, named his Virginia estate Mount Vernon.

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