Francis Hosier - Blockade of Porto Bello

Blockade of Porto Bello

In March 1726 Hosier was sent to command a squadron in the West Indies to prevent Spain from shipping its treasures home. Viscount Townshend, Secretary of State, consulted the former privateer Woodes Rogers, who was in London at the time, as to the probable means and route the Spaniards would adopt to get their treasure home. From past experience Rogers probably knew more than any other person then in England of the favoured Spanish tactics for evading detection. A report dated 10 November 1726, was delivered, in conjunction with Capt. Jonathan Denniss, to prepare Hosier for his task. At first Hosier met with success in his Blockade of Porto Bello. However, under strict orders not to attempt a capture of the town, which he could without difficulty have achieved with his 20 ships, he was forced to loiter and cruise off a mosquito infested coast. Yellow fever broke out and Hosier himself died of the fever (or as is said by some contemporary commentators "of a broken heart"), whilst on HMS Breda off Vera Cruz, as did between 3,000 and 4,000 of his sailors. Eventually, during the 1730s, the government appeasement policies of men like Walpole, and not Hosier personally, were blamed for the disaster. The episode is described as follows in Percy's Reliques of 1765.

"He (Hosier) accordingly arrived at the Bastimentos near Porto Bello, but being employed rather to overawe than to attack the Spaniards, with whom it was probably not our interest to go to war, he continued long inactive on that station, to his own great regret. He afterwards removed to Carthagena, and remained cruising in these seas, till far the greater part of his men perished deplorably by the diseases of that unhealthy climate. This brave man, seeing his best officers and men thus daily swept away, his ships exposed to inevitable destruction, and himself made the sport of the enemy, is said to have died of a broken heart. Such is the account of Smollett, compared with that of other less party writers".

Hosier was replaced by two further admirals, who likewise successively perished of tropical diseases. Hosier's body was given a temporary burial-place in the ballast of his flagship, the Breda, where it remained, a source of danger to sanitation of all on board, until it was despatched to England, late in the year, on board the snow H.M.S. Happy Return, under Commander Henry Fowkes. Presumably the body had first been embalmed. He was buried in the family vault, with much funerary pomp, at St Nicholas, Deptford on 28 February 1728. In 1739, twelve years after Hosier's death, at the start of the War of Jenkins' Ear Admiral Vernon accomplished what Hosier had failed to do, or been denied from doing, and captured Porto Bello with only six ships.