nelson 6

Wednesday April 16th, 1980

The Story of Nelson: 6

People in the Old Stone Age Guy Fawkes People in the Old Stone Age: 2 People in the Old Stone Age: 3 The New Stone Age People of the Bronze Age The Story of Nelson: 1 The Story of Nelson: 2 The Story of Nelson: 3 Florence Nightingale The Story of Nelson: 4 The Story of Nelson: 5 The Story of Nelson: 6 The Story of Nelson: 7 Christopher Columbus: 1 Christopher Columbus: 2 The Soldier Napoleon Bonaparte Napoleon’s Mother The Queen of Spain The French Revolution The Surrender of Toulon Upon Return From Italy The Armed Revolt Josephine de Beauharnais The Thin Young Man The Little Corporal The Most Famous Man in France A Proposal About Egypt Master of France Weary of War Hero of the People Emperor at 34 Danger Across the Sea Wherever Wood Can Float An Empire in Decline

FAIRBURN The place where I wrote all this rubbish

SCIENCE 1 Sept 1979 - Apr 1980

GEOGRAPHY 1 Sept 1979 - Feb 1981

TOPIC 2 The one where it all kicks off

Now this is more like it! The San Juan Expedition - about which there is a little written here and a lot written here - was a genuinely interesting, disastrous campaign undertaken by the British against the Spanish in 1780 during the American War of Independence, not long after the Spanish joined the war. Apparently the idea was to secure control of the San Juan river by seizing Spanish assets and outposts in the region and, using the area as a base, expand from there to invade and plunder the entire Spanish Empire in the Americas. Luckily for the British, our good friend Horatio Nelson, 21-year-old Captain of the HMS Hinchinbrook, was on hand to lead the campaign and they took their first prize, a Spanish outpost called Platalorma, in no time. But their next goal, a fortified settlement in the village of El Castillo called The Fortress of the Immaculate Conception, proved a little harder to conquer and, by the time the Spanish surrendered (a whole fortnight after the British first attacked), the invading force had lost most of its ammunition and provisions, plus many of its soldiers, who had fallen ill in the tropical rains to malaria, dysentery and typhoid fever. Luckily for Nelson, he was one of the first to fall ill, and got shipped away to safety before things got too miserable for him. The troops who remained to occupy the fort weren’t all quite so fortunate, however, hundreds of them dying of sickness and malnutrition over the next few months. Nelson was replaced by Lt Col Stephen Kemble who tried to advance further up the river but, after six months, no progress had been made and the British were ordered to destroy the fortress and withdraw. During that time, over 2500 men had died, making it the costliest British disaster of the American Revolutionary War. True to form though, L du Garde Peach (the author of the Ladybird book I copied this from) has totally ignored all that. He just mumbles something about how it was a bit too much for Nelson’s strength and how he was meekly taken to nice soft Jamaica to recuperate and oh my God I’m actually asleep. Thankfully, there are nice pictures in the book and on this occasion I took the time to fill an entire page with one of my own skilful forgeries. In full colour too! See if you can tell which is which: