Second Battle of Porto, 1809: Wellesley's crossing of the Douro

Wellington won bigger battles than Porto, but few as quickly or as cheaply. In a single morning a river that should have stopped him was crossed with four borrowed wine barges, and the second French invasion of Portugal began to fall apart.²

Soult in Porto

After Sir John Moore's army was evacuated from Corunna in January 1809, Portugal seemed open to the French. Marshal Soult invaded from the north and took Porto, Portugal's second city, while Marshal Victor stood on the Spanish border to the east. When Wellesley returned to Lisbon on 22 April 1809 to command a new British army, Soult had got no further south than the Vouga river.³

Wellesley decided to deal with Soult first. Of his 36,000 British and Portuguese troops he left 12,000 to cover Lisbon, sent 6,000 under William Beresford east to block Soult's road toward Victor, and led about 18,000 north from Coimbra himself. An attempt to trap part of the French army south of the Douro on 10 May failed, but it pushed Soult back on Porto, and at 2 a.m. on 12 May the French blew up the bridge of boats between Vila Nova de Gaia and the city.⁴

A river with no boats

Soult felt safe. He had taken every boat he could find to the north bank, and he believed the British could only cross downstream, near the sea, after bringing boats up the coast. He kept his troops west of the city and planned an unhurried withdrawal. The Douro at Porto is broad and deep, and the city rises steeply from its northern bank; the Oxford Companion to British History says Soult thought a frontal assault impossible.⁵

On the morning of 12 May Wellesley studied the French from the garden of the convent of Serra do Pilar, on the heights of Vila Nova de Gaia. Two reports reached him. One was of a damaged ferry five kilometers upstream at Avintes, which could be repaired. The other came from his intelligence officer, Colonel John Waters: a barber who had slipped across from Porto in a skiff said four wine barges were lying unguarded on the north bank east of the city. Across the river Wellesley could see a large, isolated stone building on the heights, the Bishop's Seminary, with no sign of French troops in it.⁶

Well, let the men cross

Waters crossed in the skiff with the barber, the Prior of Amarante as a guide and some local boatmen, and came back with the four barges and word that the seminary was empty. Wellesley's reply was simply "Well, let the men cross". While a detachment under General Murray was sent upstream to cross at Avintes, the infantry of Hill's brigade began to board the barges in mid-morning, in full daylight.⁷

Within minutes a platoon of the Buffs, the 1/3rd Foot, had climbed to the seminary and secured its iron gate. Each barge load added to the garrison, and Wellesley placed three batteries in the convent gardens across the river, where their shrapnel could sweep the roads leading up to the building. The crossing point was out of sight of most of the French, and by peninsularwar.org's account a full hour passed before the alarm was raised, by which time some 600 British infantry were over.⁸

The seminary holds

Late in the morning three battalions of the 17th Light Infantry attacked the seminary. Those who got through the shrapnel were stopped by musket and rifle fire from the garden wall, the windows and the roof. As the 2/66th and 2/48th crossed to join the Buffs, three battalions of the 70th Line came on in ever more desperate attacks.⁹

Then Soult made the decisive mistake. To feed the attack he pulled out the troops guarding the quays. At once the boatmen of Porto ran to the river and took their boats across to the British side, as the Oxford Companion also records, and soon the 29th Foot and the Guards were climbing the steep streets into the heart of the city. Threatened from the flank, Soult gave up the attack on the seminary and ordered a general retreat along the road to Valongo.¹⁰

Out of Portugal

The cost was small for the British: 123 killed, wounded or missing. The French lost about 300 killed or wounded and nearly as many prisoners in the fighting for the city, and left behind more than 1,500 sick and wounded in its hospitals and some 70 guns. The victory could have been larger still. Murray, across the river at Avintes, made no attempt to cut the French road of retreat.¹¹

Soult escaped, but only by taking his men north over the mountains, and HistoryOfWar.org notes that the French lost several thousand men and most of their transport on the retreat. By 19 May they were out of Portugal. Wellesley followed as far as the Spanish border and then, with Victor on the move, turned south toward the campaign that led to Talavera. Porto was his first victory after returning to the Peninsula.¹²