In 1727, the Spaniards attacked from the land side only; their navy took no part in the operations, which were exclusively directed against the North Front and the defences of the Rock from the extremity of the old Mole to Willis’s Battery. At the beginning of the siege the garrison had only sixty guns in position, the heaviest being 32-prs., and as “most of the ordnance was old and worn out, more casualties occurred from the bursting of guns than from the enemy’s fire.”[69] The Spaniards, on the other hand, brought into action ninety-two guns and seventy-two mortars, many of them the best and most modern of their day. De las Torres lost no time in opening his trenches. During the night of February 22nd-23rd five battalions of infantry, a brigade of engineers, and a thousand peasants started work on the first parallel, which ran from the Devil’s Tower on the eastern beach along the base of the Rock to the inundation. Next night two thousand of the enemy were moved northwards into ground dead to the guns of the batteries, but not to those of two British men-of-war which, under cover of the darkness, had anchored off the east of the isthmus connecting the fortress with the mainland, or, in other words, the neutral ground. As soon as it was light the sailors brought their guns to bear upon these troops, raking their ranks from end to end, while from the top of the Rock the soldiers hurled down upon the Spaniards live shell, hand-grenades, and stones. The enemy retreated in confusion and with great loss, but de las Torres, after driving away the men-of-war by an overwhelming artillery fire, threw up batteries so completely commanding the anchorage on the east of the isthmus that further flanking attacks of this nature became impossible. Under a heavy cannonade from the garrison, the Spaniards worked without intermission, and in spite of heavy and continuous rain which flooded their trenches and produced much sickness among their men, gradually completed and unmasked many formidable batteries, some of which were within a hundred yards of the Rock.