Port Mahon, Minorca

Where is Port Mahon and why did the Royal Navy want it?

Port Mahon was the English name for Mahón, the main port of Minorca, an island in the Balearics between Spain and Sardinia. Today the town is usually called Maó, its Catalan name, and the island Menorca.

The town sits beside one of the finest natural harbours in Europe: a narrow inlet about five or six kilometres long and up to about 30 metres deep, with almost no tide and an entrance only about 250 yards wide.

This mattered because sailing ships could not stay at sea through a Mediterranean winter. In 1708 the British Admiralty judged Mahón the only harbour in the Mediterranean where a squadron of about twenty warships could safely spend the winter. It was also close enough to keep watch on Toulon, the French navy’s great Mediterranean base.

How did Britain capture Minorca in 1708?

Britain took Minorca during the War of the Spanish Succession, the war over who should be king of Spain. Like Gibraltar four years earlier, it was taken by forces fighting for the Habsburg claimant, Archduke Charles, against King Philip V, who was backed by France.

In September 1708 General James Stanhope brought British, Portuguese and Spanish troops to the island, carried and supported by Admiral Sir John Leake’s fleet. They landed on 14 September at the beach of Alcaufar. The next day the town officials of Mahón handed over the keys of the city. The small fort at Fornells surrendered after two British warships bombarded it for a few hours, and the old capital, Ciutadella, gave in without a fight.

Only Fort St Philip and a smaller fort beside it still held out, with a French and Spanish garrison. After a short bombardment the walls were breached, and at the end of September about 1,000 men surrendered with 100 guns. When the war ended, the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 confirmed that Britain would keep the island.

What was Fort St Philip?

Fort St Philip, in Catalan the Castell de Sant Felip, stood on the south shore at the mouth of the harbour, so that any ship coming in had to pass under its guns. It was built by Spain in the mid-1500s as a square fort with a bastion, a pointed gun platform, at each corner and a deep ditch cut into the rock.

The British made it the heart of the island’s defences. Between 1708 and 1738 they spent about £300,000 on Minorca’s fortifications.

Who ran Minorca around 1715?

The island’s official governors were great noblemen and generals who stayed in Britain. The man who actually ran it was the lieutenant governor, Richard Kane, an army officer who arrived in November 1712. He stayed, with a few breaks, until he died in Mahón in 1736, and was made governor himself in 1733. He also served at Gibraltar in the 1720s, and is said to have been in command there when the Spanish siege began in 1727.

Kane built a road right across the island from Ciutadella to Mahón. He drained marshland at the head of the harbour, brought in new crops and cattle, and regulated farming, winemaking and the island’s money. In February 1722 he moved the law courts, and with them the capital, from Ciutadella to Mahón, where the navy and the trade were.

The Minorcans were Catholic and spoke Catalan, and they kept both. They also kept their traditional rights and town councils. There was friction between British officials and the island’s Catholic clergy, but the Catholic religion stayed.

What did the Royal Navy build at Port Mahon?

From 1708 the Admiralty told Admiral Sir George Byng to develop Mahón as a base for the Mediterranean squadron. In 1711, on orders from Admiral Sir John Jennings, the navy built a hospital for sick and wounded sailors on a small island in the harbour, now called the Illa del Rei, the King’s Island.

The dockyard grew on the north shore, across the water from the town. A master shipwright was in charge there from 1711, and sources date the yard itself to between 1715 and 1724, when the Arsenal was laid out on marshy ground. Here warships could be repaired, cleaned and refitted without sailing home to England. Its big stone storehouses came later, in the 1760s.

What did Minorca trade around 1715?

Minorca was a small farming island of about 16,000 people in 1723. It could not grow enough wheat for itself, so grain was shipped in from the Atlantic and from North Africa, Sicily and Sardinia. A trade in salt at Minorca came before London’s Board of Trade between 1715 and 1718.

Vineyards spread under British rule. A British engineer reported around 1740 that the island made more than three million litres of wine a year, and that about three-quarters of it was drunk by the garrison. Kane also built warehouses and quays. Over the century, Mahón’s grain trade linked it with Barcelona, Majorca and the eastern Mediterranean.

Over the century British, Greek, Italian and Jewish merchants settled in Mahón, and a new merchant class there grew rich enough to challenge the old nobles of Ciutadella. Mahón’s privateers, ships licensed to attack enemy shipping in wartime, became famous mostly after 1739, later than the game’s years. Until the war ended in 1713 the main danger at sea was the French fleet from Toulon. Ships also had to watch for the corsairs of North Africa, from ports such as Algiers.

What happened to Port Mahon after the 1720s?

In 1756 a French army landed on Minorca and besieged Fort St Philip. Admiral John Byng, son of the George Byng who had set up the base, was sent to save it. After an indecisive battle with the French fleet he sailed back to Gibraltar, and the fort surrendered.

Byng was court-martialled for failing to do his utmost and shot by a firing squad on the deck of HMS Monarch at Portsmouth on 14 March 1757. Voltaire mocked the British for killing an admiral “to encourage the others”.

Britain got Minorca back in 1763, lost it to Spain and France in 1782, took it again in 1798, and finally returned it to Spain in 1802. British rule, the longest of the island’s foreign rulers, left its mark on Maó’s buildings.