Appendix 3: The Events Surrounding the Seizure of the Schooner Mary

Abstract

As explained in the Introduction, the popular view of the Spanish Expedition derives mainly from Carlyle’s novelistic rendering of events in The Life of John Sterling (1851). Carlyle didn’t actually meet Sterling until years later, however, and since Sterling was said never to talk about the episode, we must assume that the colorful, cinematic account Carlyle created was woven out of the stories he heard from Sterling’s family, especially from his father Edward and brother Anthony. John’s second cousin Robert Boyd joined him in the campaign and became its most prominent British victim at Malaga. Carlyle seems not to have studied the Parliamentary papers from the summer of 1834 when legal action was contemplated against Robert Boyd’s “assassin,” then resident in Britain. There and in dozens of newspaper tributes, we see a very different character than the rash, impulsive, almost self-destructive “Robert Boyd” Carlyle gives us. Carlyle’s caricature of Robert Boyd parodies the stock Irishman, and Antonio Gisbert’s El fusilamiento de Torrips y sus compaheros en laplaya de Malaga (1887- 1888) in the Prado, perpetuates that stereotype, even representing Boyd with red hair (in fact it was light brown).¹ Carlyle tells a story of Boyd throwing away his commission in the Indian Army over an affront and returning to Ireland with an inheritance to spend and a craving for action. Carlyle would have us believe that Boyd discovers “in a certain neighbouring creek of the Irish coast, a worn-out royal gun-brig condemned to sale, to be had dog-cheap” which he plans to fit out and become a privateer.