Battle of Fuengirola, 1810: 150 Poles and a captured British general

Fuengirola was a small fight on the edge of a big war. A British general came ashore on the coast of southern Spain with more than ten times as many men as the castle he meant to take, and the next day he was a prisoner of its garrison. The story survives in unusual detail, because both commanders, Blayney and the Polish captain Franciszek Młokosiewicz, later wrote their own accounts of it, and they disagree on almost everything except the result.²

Polish soldiers on the Spanish coast

The 4th Infantry Regiment of the Duchy of Warsaw, a Polish state allied to Napoleon, was sent to Spain in 1808 with two other Polish regiments. After the French conquered Andalusia in early 1810, General Horace Sébastiani took Málaga, and the Polish companies were split into small garrisons along the coast. Captain Ignacy Bronisz, acting battalion commander, sat inland at Alhaurín el Grande with a few hundred men and a squadron of the French 21st Dragoons. Lieutenant Eustachy Chełmicki held the hill town of Mijas with about 60 men.³

Captain Franciszek Młokosiewicz commanded the castle of Sohail above the mouth of the Fuengirola river with about 150 men. By his own account the castle was old and neglected, and his artillery was two old iron 16-pounders and two small bronze field guns.⁴

The British plan

In Gibraltar Lieutenant General Colin Campbell planned a raid on the Málaga coast to help the Spanish guerrillas and draw French troops away from the siege of Cádiz. North describes the intended trick: bombard the fort at Fuengirola to draw Sébastiani out of Málaga, then send the expedition on to the emptied port.⁵

Command went to Major General Andrew Thomas Blayney, Lord Blayney. Jonathan North, from Campbell's orders, and Mariusz Promis, following an older Polish study, list about 350 men of the 89th Foot, more than 900 of the 82nd Foot and a battalion of about 500 Italian, German and Polish deserters; Promis adds the Spanish Toledo Regiment of some 650 men. A British ship of the line, HMS Rodney, a Spanish ship of the line, frigates, brigs and gunboats escorted the transports.⁶

14 October: the landing

On the morning of 14 October the troops came ashore at Cala del Moral, a small bay a few kilometers southwest of the castle. Blayney sent an officer under a flag of truce to demand surrender, and Młokosiewicz refused to receive him. When the ships and gunboats opened fire, the Polish guns answered, and one of their first shots sank a British boat. Blayney's own report confirms it.⁷

Blayney pushed riflemen and four companies of the 89th close to the walls, but grapeshot from the castle mortally wounded Major John Grant of the 89th, and Blayney pulled back for the night. In a storm of thunder and rain his men landed a heavy carronade, field guns and a howitzer and built a battery on a hill close to the castle. The same storm covered Chełmicki. Having watched the landing from his hilltop, he led his detachment out of Mijas along a mountain path, slipped past the sleeping besiegers and reached the castle gate before dawn.⁸

15 October: the battery taken twice

At first light the battery and the ships opened fire. Part of the wall collapsed and the parapet crumbled, and Młokosiewicz again turned away a British envoy. Inland, the Spanish troops Blayney had sent to seize Mijas ran into Bronisz's column, which had marched through the night, and were driven back down the mountain. HMS Rodney then arrived with the 82nd Foot, and Blayney began to land it.⁹

Młokosiewicz struck first. When a handful of French dragoons appeared on the coast road, he sent about 90 volunteers under Chełmicki against the battery with the bayonet and followed with 40 more. The foreign battalion guarding the guns broke, and the Poles turned the captured guns on the British. Blayney rallied the 89th and retook the battery on foot, his horse having been shot under him.¹⁰

In the afternoon Bronisz's infantry and the dragoons reached the field from Mijas. Blayney hesitated, because the Poles' blue coats looked to him like Spanish uniforms, until he saw the eagle and the number 4 on their shakos. In the fight that followed he was surrounded and taken, with only nine men left around him. The rest of the landing force fell back to the beach and re-embarked under the guns of HMS Rodney and the flank companies of the 82nd, and some men drowned wading out to the boats.¹¹

How many fought, and who really won?

The numbers depend on the source. Sébastiani's report, quoted by North, counts 177 British prisoners, Blayney among them, and five captured guns. Promis, citing Polish works, gives British losses of 40 killed, 70 wounded and 177 captured, and Polish losses of 20 killed and 100 wounded. North puts the losses of the 89th alone at about 240 of the 350 men who landed. Młokosiewicz and Sébastiani's chief of staff, General Bouillé, wrote of six guns, the French dragoon captain Autié of four.¹²

One question is more than a matter of figures. Many accounts, North notes, credit the victory to Sébastiani. North and Promis, who used the Polish and French reports, both say that Sébastiani arrived only after the fighting was over and that the battle was won by the garrison and Bronisz's column. Młokosiewicz's report reached Sébastiani's vanguard on the road from Málaga.¹³

Why Fuengirola is remembered

In strategic terms the raid changed little, and North calls the battle strategically irrelevant. Its cost fell on one man. Blayney was marched off to captivity in France, and later told the story of his defeat and his journey as a prisoner in a memoir. According to Mariusz Promis, his saber is kept in the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków, where Promis saw it in 2002.¹⁴

For the Poles it was a different story. A small garrison far from home had beaten a force many times its size, and according to Promis, on 18 December 1810 Młokosiewicz, Bronisz and Chełmicki received the Legion of Honor. It joined Somosierra among the Polish feats of the war in Spain and belongs with the Polish victories against the odds. On the same date in 1793, in western France, Republican troops fought the Vendéen rebels at La Tremblaye.¹⁵