23

HERE WAS GRANADA

AT 3:00 P.M. ON NOVEMBER 24, THE DAY AFTER THE GRANADA SANK the Once de Abril, the Allied army launched three simultaneous attacks on the city of Granada, from three different directions. General Belloso, the Allied commander in chief, had learned that William Walker had left Granada on the twentieth, taking most of his army with him on a lake steamer to La Virgen. Walker, determined to keep the Transit Route open, intended to attack Rivas with 650 men, to drive out General Canas’s Costa Ricans and the several hundred Nicaraguans under old General Maximo Jerez, who had joined him there to hold the city. According to Allied intelligence, Walker had left General Henningsen at Granada with just 440 troops, and Belloso had seized his chance to take Walker’s capital, marching the Allied army east from Masaya during the morning of November 24. Spreading around the perimeter of the city, the Allies cut off all escape routes other than the lake.

The Allies knew that Henningsen had his headquarters at the Granadine Plaza. A mile-long avenue, the Calzada, led from the plaza to the lake. Churches dominated the avenue—the vast La Parroquia Church at the entrance to the Calzada, its massive towers soaring into the sky; the Esquipulas Church a little way down the avenue; then the Guadalupe Church, halfway between plaza and lake. To reach the lakeside wharf and escape via steamer, Henningsen’s men would have to use this avenue. Belloso’s plan of attack called for his troops to cut the Calzada and seal off Henningsen in the center of the city. General Tomás Martinez and his Nicaraguans attacked in the direction of the Jalteva Plaza to the west. General Paredes’s Guatemalans advanced toward the San Francisco Convent north of the Granadine Plaza. Belloso’s own Salvadorans pushed toward the Guadalupe Church. The attack on the Guadalupe was the one that mattered most.

At the Jalteva, Martinez’s attacking troops melted away in the face of heavy fire from Major Schwartz’s artillery. As five hundred Guatemalans attacked the San Francisco Convent, Major Cal O’Neal’s younger brother, a lieutenant, was killed in the defense. A distraught Cal O’Neal, barefoot, bareheaded, and in shirtsleeves, mounted his horse and led thirty-two picked men in a mad charge that took the regrouping Guatemalans by surprise and drove them back in confusion. When Henningsen finally succeeded in recalling O’Neal’s men, they returned through streets piled with Guatemalan dead. The convent remained in ARN hands.

At the Guadalupe Church, it was a different story; engineer Captain Hesse and twenty-two Americans were overrun and killed by hundreds of Salavadorans. Belloso achieved his objective—in seizing the Guadalupe, he sealed the Calzada and trapped Henningsen inside the city. For good measure, the Salvadorans advanced up the Calzada and also occupied the undefended Esquipulas Church, tightening the net around Henningsen. Meanwhile, Captain Grier, the Granada police chief, who occupied the tumbled-down Spanish fort at the dockside with twenty-seven policemen, was cut off.

With Henningsen at the plaza were more than three hundred able-bodied fighting men, a score of Guatemalan prisoners of war, a dozen black Jamaican crew members from a lake steamer who had been stranded in the city, plus seventy wounded and seventy American women and children. Many of the women were the wives of American officers, ladies such as Edward Kewen’s wife, who was nursing the wounded. Another nurse was the attractive actress wife of Edward Bingham, an actor and producer whose American theatrical company was unlucky enough to be performing in Granada at the time of the Allied attack. Bingham and the other actors joined the defense.

From the lake steamer San Carlos, Walker peered through the darkness, trying to make out what was happening in Granada a mile away. It was the night of November 25. For two days, Henningsen had fought off every Allied attack. Intending to break out of the city via the lake, he had driven the enemy from the Esquipulas Church in his path down the lake avenue, burning buildings behind him as he went—for Walker had instructed him to destroy Granada.

According to Walker, the Legitimistas loved Granada as they would love a woman.¹ And since he could not hold her himself, Walker planned to deprive the Legitimistas of the belle of Nicaragua. Yet, Walker had come to love Granada, too. Although originally never intending to spend time there, he’d been seduced by the city and made it his capital. He even named his lone warship after the city. And now, in the same way that Cornelius Vanderbilt had sacrificed his beloved North Star to achieve his ends, Walker would sacrifice Granada.

The sky glowed red above the northern and western suburbs from Henningsen’s fires. The air was thick with smoke. Walker could make out his lone-star flag still flying above the Parochial Church, but apart from that, there was little to be seen. Walker was unaware that Henningsen was fighting on two fronts; apart from dealing with everything the Allies threw at him, Henningsen had to deal with his own men’s despondency. Surrounded, they’d lost heart and were drinking heavily; Henningsen had to drive them mercilessly. Using his Allied prisoners of war and the stranded lake-steamer crewmen as his laborers, he’d transferred the wounded, the women and children, and his dwindling stores from building to building down the avenue while his lethargic riflemen fought off the Allies. Without his artillery, he would have been overrun.

A small boat bumped alongside the lake steamer, and one of Walker’s officers boarded the San Carlos and urgently reported to his general. He’d contacted Captain Grier at the lakeside fort, taking him food and ammunition. Grier was in good spirits, although one of his men, a Venezuelan, had deserted and could reveal to the other side just how few men held the fort. Even as the officer delivered this report, firing broke out at the fort. Guatemalans launched a frontal attack while another Allied party landed from a boat in Grier’s rear. The shooting at the fort was intense, but brief. After several minutes, all was quiet. Before long, the sole survivor from Grier’s garrison took his chances in the water, which was reputedly inhabited by freshwater sharks, and swam out to the steamer. Grier and twenty-five of his men were dead, and the fort was in Allied hands.

Deeply depressed, Walker steamed back to La Virgen. Night after night over the coming days, Walker returned in the steamer, to hover off the burning city like a worried mother hen, hoping that Henningsen had reached the lake and could be evacuated.

 

 

 

Three days after the fort at the wharf fell, Henningsen managed to relocate his ever-diminishing band to the Guadalupe Church, halfway to the lake. In a prelude to an assault on the church, he’d poured dozens of artillery rounds into it. Sixty of his men then charged the church, to find that the enemy occupiers had fled. The previous day, after the Americans abandoned their last positions on the plaza, leaving every building burning, Allied troops had rushed triumphantly into the famous square. Henningsen had then set off gunpowder under one of the towers of the Parochial Church. The tower had been blown into the air intact, before crashing lethally down onto the Allied soldiers below, crushing many.

Now, in the early afternoon, two men ventured to the Guadalupe Church under a flag of truce. One was an aide to Colonel Zavala. The other was an American. The pair was brought to Henningsen, who stood, tall, spare, and haughty, with folded arms. The Guatemalan officer offered Henningsen surrender terms, which the American, Price, a deserter from Henningsen’s force, urged Henningsen’s men to accept, telling them they were surrounded by three thousand Allied troops. Henningsen responded by arresting Price and then informed the Guatemalan there could be no question of surrender, inviting the officer to take a good look at his eleven artillery pieces and his determined troops. In abandoning the plaza, Henningsen’s men had to leave behind the liquor supplies; morale had since improved dramatically. The Guatemalan also saw Henningsen’s prisoners and scores of wounded tended by resolute American women. In a sheltered corner huddled the children, pale but calm. The officer returned to his own lines.

At 3:00 P.M., the Allies launched an all-out assault on the Guadalupe. It was met by canister and grape from Henningsen’s artillery. The brave, white-clad ranks were mercilessly mowed down. The assault failed. Another, at 8:00, after dark, met the same bloody and useless end. Henningsen estimated the enemy lost one hundred men in the two unsuccessful attacks.² That night, heavy rain fell. Soon, men, women, and children in the Guadalupe began to fall ill.

 

 

December 3 saw a force of two hundred men march out of the Costa Rican capital. Armed with Minié rifles, but unaware they’d been supplied by Yankee shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, these troops were led by Colonel Pedro Barillier, with Major Maximo Blanco as his chief of staff. Riding behind Barillier as the column headed north toward the San Carlos River was Sylvanus Spencer, bearing the rank of captain in the Costa Rican army. Beside Spencer rode George Cauty, the English soldier of fortune recruited by William Webster. Just thirty years of age, this native of Westminster, London, had accompanied the Vanderbilt arms shipment to Costa Rica; Webster himself remained behind in San José. Because of Cauty’s military record, President Mora had made him a colonel. Once the column reached the San Carlos, Spencer and Cauty would take charge.

A larger column of six hundred troops would follow in twelve days’ time, under the command of General José Joaquim Mora, the president’s brother, bringing stores, ammunition, and artillery. A rear guard of three hundred men would follow shortly after. President Mora was backing Spencer and Webster’s plan to the hilt and, unwittingly, backing Vanderbilt’s ambition to regain control of the Nicaraguan Transit.

 

 

Henningsen’s band still held out at Granada’s Guadalupe Church, surviving on horse meat and rainwater. Cholera and typhus now claimed more lives than did enemy action. Mrs. Bingham, the actor’s wife, was among the victims, dying within hours of displaying the first symptoms. Cholera was also rampant in the surrounding Allied army. One of the first to die had been Guatemalan commander General Paredes. Colonel Zavala replaced Paredes; his government promoted him to general.

On December 8, under a white flag, Zavala sent a message to Henningsen, calling on him to enter into surrender negotiations and telling him that American steamers lately arriving in Nicaragua had brought not a single recruit for Walker’s lost cause. Henningsen sent back a brief reply—he was, he said, only prepared to parley “at the cannon’s mouth.”³

Zavala had been lying. On the third, 78 recruits had reached Walker at La Virgen after coming down from San Francisco aboard the Orizaba. Two days later, the lake steamer San Carlos brought another 280 recruits to Walker—30 off the Tennessee from New York, and 250 aboard the Texas from New Orleans with Samuel A. Lockridge. A former Texas Ranger, Lockridge had been sent to New Orleans by Walker expressly to raise more recruits. Those recruits were in for a tough baptism of fire.

 

 

December 11. With Henningsen still holding the Guadalupe Church, General Belloso decided on another massed Allied attack. In the morning, the first contingent of long-awaited Honduran troops joined the Granada encirclement—two hundred men under General Florencio Xatruch, the former Legitimista colonel who’d commanded at Rivas at the end of the civil war. General Xatruch, whose friend President Guardiola had made him commander of the Honduran expeditionary army, was anxious to show General Belloso what his men could do. Belloso sent them against the Guadalupe Church.

The Allies were unaware that in the night, Henningsen had slipped most of his people into entrenchments closer to the lake. Thirty handpicked men under Lieutenant Sumpter Williamson held the church. Armed with breech-loading Sharps rifles, they took careful aim at Hondurans forming up for the attack several hundred yards away. The Hondurans thought they were out of range, but the Sharps rifle had a range of two thousand yards. When Williamson’s men opened up, Honduran farm boy conscripts fell like flies.

Honduran officers on horseback urged their men to charge. One of those officers was thirty-year-old Captain Juan Canas. The holder of a degree in philosophy, Canas had panned for gold in California before returning home to Honduras in 1851 penniless. Canas had also trained as a doctor; he needed all his medical skills this day. Around him, his men were slaughtered before they could even engage the Americans. It was estimated that half of the two hundred Hondurans were slain before the attack was called off.⁴ Captain Canas was among the survivors. In minutes, General Xatruch’s proud little Honduran command had been devastated before it could even go into action.

 

 

The lake steamer La Virgen had been anchored off the burning city since before dawn. It was December 12. The previous day, General Sanders, sent with the steamer to rescue Henningsen and his survivors from Granada, had returned to say that rescue was impossible. Walker had come to suspect that both Sanders and Hornsby were jealous of newcomer Henningsen’s appointment as a brigadier general.⁵ First Hornsby had let him down at Puente Grande, and then Sanders had failed in his mission. So Walker had come to conduct the rescue himself.

Throughout the day, Walker watched the city from the lake while 160 handpicked men aboard the La Virgen kept out of sight. The enemy moved troops onto the lake beach to discourage a landing, but Walker gave no sign of aggressive intent. At nine o’clock, with all lights doused, the steamer slipped away up the lake. Three miles from the city, at exactly the same point where he had landed in 1855 to take Granada, Walker sent the rescue force ashore in small boats. Walker then steamed back down the lake, to anchor again at the same spot he’d occupied previously. When the sun rose, it was as if the La Virgen had never gone away. Shortly after, a dark-skinned man swam out from shore. It was Kanaka John, one of Walker’s Originals, who’d been with Henningsen. He brought a message, telling Walker that Henningsen could not last much longer and asking that, if a rescue was contemplated, a set of lights be displayed, so that preparations could be made for a breakout. Walker immediately had the lights shown from the steamer. But the signal was invisible to Henningsen because of the pall of smoke hugging the burning city.

 

 

A little before midnight, when Major John Waters led the 160-man rescue force against an enemy barricade north of Granada, the enemy fired first. Impressively built Captain Samuel Leslie, known as “Cherokee Sam” because of his Native American blood, and a popular figure in ARN ranks, led his company in outflanking and storming the barricade. Moving on, the rescuers encountered another heavily defended barricade. Captain Higley’s company took this in bloody hand-to-hand fighting in the darkness, losing several men.

Following the Tipitapa road, Waters entered the Granada suburbs at sunup the next day, still clueless as to Henningsen’s precise whereabouts. The rescuers charged and overran another barricade, as Waters’s casualties mounted to thirteen killed and thirty wounded. When a prisoner revealed that Henningsen was dug in at the Guadalupe Church, Waters sent Captain Leslie ahead to warn Henningsen’s men not to fire on their rescuers when they arrived. As Waters carefully picked his way through the back streets, with flames all around, Leslie returned—he had reached the church and found Henningsen. Following the same route, Leslie led Waters and his men to the church. They met no resistance. Unbeknownst to Walker and his officers, General Belloso, believing that Walker’s entire army was attacking after the ferocious way the northern barricades had been stormed, ordered his army to pull out of the city and withdraw toward Masaya.

As Henningsen’s ragged, pallid survivors were welcoming their rescuers, Cherokee Sam Leslie suddenly threw up his hands and fell down dead—shot in the head by an enemy sniper. Crouching low, Waters and Henningsen conferred. During the three-week siege, Henningsen had lost 110 men killed or wounded in action and 120 to cholera and typhus. Forty men had deserted, 2 were taken prisoner. His survivors included 200 sick and wounded men, plus women and children—whose numbers had been much reduced by disease.⁶

As the two officers were talking, there was a loud explosion at the wharf, and smoke billowed into the air—before Allied troops pulled out, they blew up storage sheds they’d recently built there. Progressively, Waters’ men carried the wounded and shepherded the women and children down the avenue to the lake. At Henningsen’s insistence, his exhausted men dragged six of their artillery pieces with them. Walker, seeing the refugees coming, brought La Virgen into the wharf, and by two o’clock, rescuers and rescued were all aboard, along with Henningsen’s precious field guns.

Charles Henningsen stood by the wharf. Putnam’s Monthly, which generally had no time for Walker, would commend Henningsen: “Surrounded by the enemy, he fought with spirit and skill.”⁷ Seeing a discarded enemy lance lying nearby, the Englishman took it up and stabbed it into the ground, then jabbed a piece of leather onto the end of the lance. With a piece of charcoal from the wreckage of the burnt-out wharf sheds, he wrote: “Aqui fue Granada”—“Here was Granada.”⁸ As the steamer pulled away from the dock, Henningsen stepped over onto her deck, to be greeted by Walker.

Smoke blanketed the city as the boat churned out into the lake and then turned south for La Virgen. The rescue of the trapped Americans at Granada was complete. As was the destruction of one of the most beautiful cities in the world.