“If we attack at night,” said Miller while surreptitiously trying to coax his precious watch into life, “the Spaniards will be asleep!”
No one responded. Miller tapped the watch on the table and was rewarded with a ticking sound.
“How many defenders will there be?” The question was put by Captain Simms, who had skippered the O’Higgins during Cochrane’s absence.
“Two thousand?” Cochrane suggested airily.
Someone at the table took a deep loud breath. “We have three hundred men?” the man asked.
“Close to,” Cochrane smiled, then, in Spanish, he challenged anyone to suggest a better scheme for capturing the harbor. “You, Sharpe? Can you think of a way? My God, man, I’m not rigid! I’ll listen to anyone’s ideas!”
Sharpe, given a choice, would not have attacked at all. Three hundred men against two thousand were not good odds, and the odds worsened appreciably when the two thousand defenders were safely ensconced behind ditches, palisades, walls, embrasures and the wickedest array of cannonfire assembled in all South America. But it was no use expressing such defeatism to Lord Cochrane, and so Sharpe tried to find some other weakness in the Spanish defenses. “I seem to remember there was a beach here when I sailed into Valdivia.” He leaned over the map and pointed to the very tip of the headland around which the attackers would have to sail.
“The Aguada del Ingles,” offered Fraser, Cochrane’s elderly sailing master. “Aguada means a watering place,” and the old Scotsman explained that Bartholomew Sharp, a seventeenth-century English pirate, had landed on that same beach, right under the Spanish defenses, to fill his barrels from a freshwater spring.
“There’s an omen, eh, Sharpe?” Miller said happily. “Your namesake, eh?”
“It rather depends on whether he got away with it,” Sharpe said.
“Aye, he did,” Fraser said. ‘They called him a devil in his time, too.”
“Why don’t we land there ourselves,” Sharpe suggested, “and attack the forts one by one? These forts aren’t designed to defend themselves against a landward attack, and if we take Fort Ingles, then the very sight of the defeat may demoralize the other garrisons.”
There was a few seconds’ silence as the men about the table stared at the map. Part of Sharpe’s solution made sense. Most of the westernmost forts had not been built to defend against a landward attack, but merely to threaten any ship foolish enough to sail unwanted into Valdivia’s harbor, but Corral Castle and Fort Niebla were both proper fortresses, built to resist ships, artillery and infantry, and even if Cochrane’s men could tumble the defenders out of Fort Ingles, Fort San Carlos and Fort Amar-gos, they would still need to capture the far more formidable Corral Castle before they marched around the southern side of the harbor to lay siege to Fort Niebla.
Cochrane rejected Sharpe’s halfhearted ideas. “Good God, man, but think of the time you’re taking! An hour to land our men, that’s if we can land them at all, which we can’t if the surfs high, then another half hour to form up, and what are the Spaniards going to be doing? You think they’ll sit waiting for us? Christ, no! They’ll meet us on the beach with a Hail Mary of musket balls. We’ll be lucky if ten men survive! No. We’ll risk the gunfire, hoist the ensigns, and run straight for the defense’s heart!”
“If we make a land attack at night,” Sharpe persisted in his less risky plan, “then the Spanish will be confused.”
“Have you ever tried landing men on an exposed beach at night?” Cochrane demanded. “We’ll all be drowned! No, Sharpe! To the devil with caution. We’ll go for their heart!” He spoke enthusiastically but detected that others besides Sharpe doubted that the thing could be done. “Don’t you understand?” Cochrane cried passionately, “that the only reason we’ll succeed is because the Spanish know this can’t be done! They know Valdivia is impregnable, so they don’t expect anyone to be mad enough to attack. Our very chance of victory comes from their strength, because their strength is so great that they believe themselves to be unbeatable! And that belief is lulling them to sleep. Gentlemen! We shall lance their pride and bring their great forts down to dust!” He picked up one of the bottles of brandy and eased out its cork. “I give you Valdivia, gentlemen, and victory!”