Great Siege of Gibraltar

From June 1779 to February 1783 Spain and France tried to take the Rock by blockade, bombardment and finally by storm, and failed at all three. General George Eliott's garrison was cut off for months at a stretch, kept alive by three relief convoys that had to fight their way in, and by the end was eating rationed biscuit while scurvy did more damage than Spanish shot. The climax came in September 1782, when ten specially built floating batteries, armoured and water-cooled and thought to be unburnable, were towed into position against the sea wall. The garrison fired heated shot into them; fires spread, crews abandoned or scuttled the rest, and by morning every one was burning or sunk. Britain lost the American war and kept Gibraltar, which the 1783 peace confirmed.

The siege is the reason Gibraltar's status is still argued over: Spain had spent nearly four years and an enormous sum trying to recover it by force, failed, and then conceded it again at the peace table, which is why later Spanish claims have had to rest on the 1713 treaty text rather than on possession. British memory fixed on the floating batteries almost immediately, helped by John Singleton Copley's vast canvas of the batteries' destruction, painted with portrait sittings from the officers involved and still one of the largest pictures in Britain. The Great Siege Tunnels, begun as an engineering improvisation, were extended through the Second World War into a network of many kilometres and are now the Rock's main heritage attraction, which means the siege is physically legible in a way most eighteenth century sieges are not. Historians of the American Revolutionary War have also used Gibraltar to argue that the Bourbon powers' global strategy cost them the concentration they needed elsewhere.