Santa Cruz, Tenerife, early May 1895.The island's capital town, Santa Cruz, looked much as it did a hundred years earlier when a young Captain Horatio Nelson had attacked it and promptly lost his left arm in the battle. The twenty-pound El Tigre Cannon that stood looking over the castle rampart proudly claimed to be the same one that nearly finished the young British Captain. The current Governor of this island paradise was a fat, bald and corpulent man called Escobar. Extremely ambitious and ruthless, Escobar enjoyed exercising his power over the people of Tenerife in this backwater posting. He modelled himself on Napoleon Bonaparte, even walking around the island's capital emulating his hero with his hat square across his face the French way. Most of the time he surveyed the bustling por
