Spanish history 101: The Battle of Trafalgar and the man that gave no shit about his blown up leg
Now guys. If I started talking about the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) now I wouldn’t finish till next year. It has been a particular obsession of mine for many years.
(Liking to my obsession with Admiral Horatio Nelson and naval history in general.)
So I’m just gonna pinpoint a couple of details before going to the point:
1. It’s included in the context of the Napoleonic Wars and Spain had a puppet role in that conflict. Most of the country was against helping the French but PM Godoy made a pact with Napoleon.
Our Admiral Gravina, had to obey the orders of Villeneuve, sent by Napoleon. Gravina was an incredibly skilled and experienced sailor. He knew the waters, knew the British and the weather patterns of the Channel. However, Villeneuve refused to listen to advise and followed his own procedure. Which at the end made an already disadvantageous situation ten times worse.
2. Long Story short - it was a battle for the Gibraltar channel and therefore for the control of the Mediterranean, but was included in to a larger scheme by Napoleon to conquer Great Britain.
3. The Trafalgar campaign put an official end to Spain’s imperial era since it destroyed most of its fleet, but also was one of the sparks that fueled the Peninsular War.
And now I’d like to highlight a name:
Cosme Damián Churruca y Elorza
Churruca was a Basque scientist, philosopher, and navy general that during the Battle of Trafalgar commandeered the ship San Juan Nepomuceno.
Like Gravina, he knew how dark the prediction was for them so the day before the Battle he sent his brother a letter in which he stated.
“If you hear about my ship being captured, tell everyone that I’m dead.”
For him, there were only two outcomes of that battle: Victory or Death.
and here comes the METAL part:
As Churruca was commandeering his ship against six British attackers at the same time from the captain’s bridge, a cannonball came in and BLEW UP HIS LEG from the knee down.
He had a bucket full of sand brought for him, STUCK WHAT WAS LEFT OF HIS LEG IN IT TO KEEP HIMSELF UPRIGHT AND KEPT FIGHTING!!!
Finally he died from blood loss but never gave up and before his death ordered to nail the Spanish flag to the ship so in case of defeat it couldn’t be taken whole by the enemy.
Some say it was also a bucket of flour. In any case he was the most metal sailor in our history and was honored even by his adversaries after his death.
Main sources: Jose Luís Corral’s “Trafalgar”, Pérez Reverte’s “Cabo Trafalgar” and another book I read years ago which name I can’t recall + several studies.
More information about Churruca can be consulted here (in Spanish, based on Corral’s investigation) or here in English.
