HOW THE ROYAL NAVY CONQUERED HAVANA
After five years of neutrality in the Seven Years’ War, in August 1761 Spain signed a secret pact with France that set the country on a collision course with the world’s greatest naval power
When King Charles III brought Spain into the Seven Years’ War (175663) on the side of France, Austria and Sweden, he may have hoped that his nation’s belated contribution would shift the militar y balance in France’s favour and bolster its influence in a negotiated peace settlement with Britain. But, for Spain’s prized colony of Cuba, it proved to be a disastrous decision.
The Royal Navy, sensing an opportunity to grab a valuable piece of Caribbean real estate from their colonial rivals, declared war on Spain in January 1762 and quickly set about raising an armada to cross the Atlantic and seize the wealthy city of Havana by force.
The British chose Havana for its strategic importance. Surrounded by a thick three-mile (5km) wall, the heavily fortified island capital was a busy shipbuilding hub and the meeting point for Spanish treasure fleets sailing between New Spain and Europe. By capturing it, Britain sought to challenge Spain’s long-standing dominance in the Caribbean and provide extra protection for its American colonies, recently augmented by victories against the French in Canada.
For the Spanish, the attack was a nasty surprise. Havana’s colonial authorities were still unaware that the two countries were of ficially at war when the British fleet, guided by the wily 56 -year-old Admiral George Pocock, approached the city from the east, slipping undetected through the Old Bahama Channel, a shallow strait long thought to be un-navigable by large ships. The formidable armada appeared off the Cuban coast on 6 June 1762, with over 200 ships and 12,500 men, one-third of them foot soldiers under the command of George Keppel, the Third Earl of Albemarle.
Pocock and Keppel had set out from England three months previously with a simple mission: to capture Havana’s well- defended Morro castle from the rear and subsequently turn Spain’s self-proclaimed ‘Key to the New World’ into a British colony.
This was a tall order. Cuba was an island rich in sugar and tobacco that had originally been annexed by Spain in 1511. By the 1760s Havana was the third-largest city in the Americas and home to one of the finest natural harbours in the Caribbean. Its narrow waterway was guarded by two formidable forts, with extra protec
