CHAPTER XIII
THE NILE
Authorities.—See Chapter XII., and La Jonquière Expedition d’Egypte.
The failure of Hoche, the defeat of the proposed combination with the Spaniards by the battle of St. Vincent, the shattering of the Dutch fleet at Camperdown, had proved that an invasion of the British Isles was a venture only to be achieved by such a combination of good fortune for the French, and bad management on our part, as no sane ruler of men could expect. Yet during eight years, including the short fallacious Peace of Amiens, the successive Governments of France, the Directory, the Consulate, and the Empire continued to make the attempt. All their efforts at sea and some of their enterprises on land were directed to that end. The expedition to Egypt in 1798 was as much a part of the invasion scheme as the raid of Humbert. It was meant to turn the flank of England by assailing her in India. The Northern Coalition of 1801 was but another plot to turn England’s flank—promoted by the French, and made possible by the help of her erratic ally, the Czar Paul. The Boulogne flotilla was to have made the direct attack. It was all one undivided story which ended in 1805—leaving behind it a heritage of madness in the shape of Napoleon’s maniacal determination to conquer England on the Continent—in other words, to make the independence and well-being of Europe incompatible with the existence of his own government. The army of England was not dissolved. It remained rather a paper than an effective force, but still in existence as a possibility and a threat. As if to emphasise their determination to strike at the heart of England, the Directory appointed Napoleon himself as general of the Army of England on the 26th October 1797. The nomination was little more than a formality. Napoleon did not even visit his command till early in February 1798, and then only in passing and on his way to Belgium. The conqueror of Italy did not need his great sagacity to see that the venture was insane with such resources as the Directory could command. In the month of May their coast defence forces led by Muskeyn were beaten in an effort to retake the Marcouf islands, off La Hougue, where England had an advance post of observation held by bluejackets and marines. Napoleon, who knew well enough that the Directory feared him as a possible military despot, was no more disposed than Hoche to play Don Quixote on the sea to please men who would gladly have seen him at the bottom of it. He turned to the great flanking movement which was to destroy England through India, leaving lesser, and less fortunate, men to tilt at windmills.
The turning movement was essentially no less a delusion than the direct attack, but it looked feasible, it offered promising vistas of glory and adventure in the East, and it gave Napoleon a field wherein he might do showy things to fascinate the French imagination, and withal bide his time. It was indeed feasible up to a certain point, because the British Mediterranean fleet was tied down to blockade Cadiz. Jervis, content with heading off and driving back the Spaniards, had retired first to Lagos, and then to Lisbon, carrying with him his four prizes, the cherished reward of the toils and perils of officers and men, to be divided in becoming proportions. What those proportions were we can learn pleasantly from the estimate made by Nelson in a letter to Lord Spencer dated 7th September, of what the shares due for three French prizes he caused to be destroyed would have come to, if he had ordered their preservation:—to the commander-in-chief £3750; to the junior admirals each £1625; to captains each £1000; to the lieutenants class each £75; to warrant officers each £50; to petty officers each £11; to seamen and marines each £2, 4s. 1d. The men had their share to a penny, and we can understand the jest of the Irish sailor who was seen saying his prayers before Trafalgar. When asked by a lieutenant if he was afraid, he answered that he was not, but was only praying that the enemy’s bullets might be distributed on the same scale as the prize money—the lion’s share to the officers. St. Vincent, as he must now be called, did not leave Lisbon till the 31st March, and then applied himself to watching the twenty-six or twenty-eight Spanish ships in the port and to that repression of the spirit of mutiny described in the previous chapter.
Cadiz was twice bombarded at night. On the 3rd and the 5th July some damage was done to shipping and to houses. Some conflicts took place with Spanish guard-boats and galleys, in one of which Nelson was in great peril. News came that a Spanish treasure-ship had taken refuge at Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and on the 15th July Nelson was detached to seize it. He had with him his flagship the Theseus, 74, the Culloden, 74, the Zealous, 74, and the Leander, 50, with the Seahorse, Emerald, and Terpsichore, 32-gun frigates, and the cutter Fox. But he was not provided with the detachment of troops he thought necessary. Mainly for want of them, the attack failed disastrously. On the 22nd July an attempt was made to occupy a height overhanging the town, but the post was too strongly held to be carried by a mere landing party. On the evening of the 24th and in the small hours of the 25th, a double direct attack on the mole, and by the Citadel, was made with the Fox and boats. The Fox was sunk by cannon-shot off the mole, and so were some of the boats with her. Nelson lost his right arm. A few officers and men struggled on to the mole only to be shot down by musketry. The attack near the Citadel was no more fortunate. Troubridge, who commanded, succeeded in landing through the surf which stove his boats, but only to find he was helpless and to be compelled to purchase leave to return to the ships by promising that no further attack should be made on the islands. We lost in all 141 men and officers shot or drowned, and 105 wounded. Nelson was compelled to return home to months of suffering. From April 1797 to May 1798 the Mediterranean was unvisited by an English naval force, the French were free to cross it in every direction to fix their grip on the Ionian Islands, their share of the plunder of Venice, and to prepare for their great venture. Jervis, who spent much of his time at Lisbon, was joined by a Portuguese squadron, but the necessity for watching the Spaniards kept him to the west of the Straits.
Therefore did it seem feasible to the French to apply themselves to the profitable task of turning the Mediterranean into “a French lake,” by seizing Egypt, and then to revenge themselves on England by making Egypt the starting place for an attack on India. Preparations were made all through the earlier part of the year, and the expedition might have sailed before it did if an alarm of renewed war with Austria had not turned the attention of the French Government to another direction. The English ministers knew that preparations were being made, but did not know for what particular purpose. It seemed not improbable, though it surely ought to have appeared unthinkable, that the fleet at Toulon was going to try to run past Jervis and make for Ireland, where rebellion had broken out. There were from thirty to forty French ships of the line at Brest and other ocean ports, and the Army of England was still in being, at least on paper. To go to see what was being done at Toulon was the obvious course.
Nelson returned from home to the fleet off Cadiz on the 29th April 1798. Lord Spencer, the First Lord of the Admiralty, guided by his own good sense and the advice of Sir Gilbert Elliot, Lord Minto, had already selected him as the officer to be entrusted with the duty of intercepting the Toulon armament. His judgment coincided with the opinion of Jervis, who spontaneously detached Nelson on a reconnaissance into the Mediterranean on the 2nd May. Nelson sailed in his flagship, the Vanguard, 74, and on the 4th he picked up, at Gibraltar, the Alexander, 74, the Orion, 74, the Emerald and Terpsichore, and the Bonne Citoyenne sloop. On the 9th he sailed for Toulon. On the 19th St. Vincent received orders from home to send twelve line-of-battle ships into the Mediterranean to destroy the French armament, and he was recommended to give the command to Nelson. He was promised reinforcements to replace the ships he detached. They reached him on the 24th, under command of Sir R. Curtis, and that night the inshore squadron watching Cadiz, was replaced, under cover of the dark, by the newcomers, and was detached up the Mediterranean so that the Spaniards should see nothing to excite their suspicions and give them news to report to the French.
In the meantime Nelson had gone ahead and had been off Cape Sicié on the 17th. He learnt from a captured privateer that a great armament was indeed in preparation, but could learn nothing of its destination. On the 21st the Vanguard was dismasted in a north-westerly gale, which had begun to blow on the 19th, and was compelled to anchor to refit at San Pietro in Sardinia. His ships had been seen at a distance by the French in Toulon, but they put to sea on the 19th by favour of the north-west wind which drove him off. The armament consisted of twelve sail of the line under Admiral Brueys d’Aigalliers, an officer of the old French royal corps. The warships were crowded with Napoleon’s troops, and accompanied by transports. The French warships as usual had been manned with difficulty, and were short-handed. Though three months’ provisions were carried for the soldiers, only two months’ were carried for the crews, a fact which had an influence on the movements of Brueys later on. Immediately after leaving Toulon the armament was joined by a convoy from Genoa on the 21st May. The north-westerly gale blew it on its course, and as it went down the eastern side of Corsica and Sardinia it was sheltered from the violence of the storm. On the 27th it was joined at the mouth of the Straits of Bonifacio by another convoy from Ajaccio, while a third from Civita Vecchia, followed a parallel course, and joined the main body off Malta on the 9th June. If the fleet of Jervis had not been tied down to watch Cadiz, it would have been easy to prevent the army for the invasion of Egypt from ever coming together. The possession of Malta, in the opinion of the French, who share the common belief of mankind that whoever holds a port commands the sea about it, would have gone far to forward their scheme for making the Mediterranean a French lake. The Order of St. John of Jerusalem, to which it belonged, had been nearly ruined by the loss of its estates in France during the Revolution, and was too poor to maintain troops. The French army took possession on the 13th June, and on the 18th sailed on its way to Egypt, leaving a garrison in the island.
While the French were profiting by the delay of the English to take early measures to intercept them, Nelson was refitting at San Pietro. On the 27th May, the day on which the Ajaccio Convoy joined Brueys and Napoleon, he left San Pietro to resume his watch off Toulon. He was back on his cruising ground on the 31st to learn that the armament was gone to a destination he could not discover. On the 5th Captain Hardy, of the Mutine brig, brought him the news that Troubridge was coming with reinforcements, which would raise his command to fourteen sail. On the 7th they joined him. In a time when the movements of ships were controlled by the wind the seaman had certainties on which to calculate. Nelson knew that a fleet hampered by a swarm of transports could not have gone westward in the late north-westerly gale. Therefore he sought them on the east of Corsica and Sardinia. When off Gianute he was misinformed by a Moorish vessel, which told him that the French were at Syracuse. At Naples, on the 17th June—four days after the French had taken Malta—he learnt that the enemy had gone south past Sardinia. At Messina, on the 20th, he heard of the capture of Malta and Gozo. On the 22nd he was twelve leagues to the S.W. of Cape Passaro in Sicily, and was there told by a neutral, who had seen them at sea, that the French had left Malta on the 18th and were going to the east. Napoleon was as little a friend to delay as Nelson. He knew since the 1st June of the presence of English ships at San Pietro, and that he was liable to interruption. Knowing that he pressed on, but did not take the normal course from Malta to Alexandria. He followed a route to the north of it along the southern shore of Crete. When therefore Nelson, concluding most justly that the French would not go east except to attack Egypt, pressed on in pursuit along the shortest line, he crossed the route of his enemy, and they sailed in parallel lines. On the 25th, when the French were off Gozo di Candia, Nelson was directly to the south of them, barely sixty miles away, near Cape Dernah, in Africa. As he was not weighted by transports and was sailing on the more direct route he headed his opponent, and reached Alexandria on the 28th June to find the port empty, and the Turks wholly ignorant that they were menaced by any danger. He was in a fever of excitement. Of eager, vehement temperament, and by nature a striker of fierce strokes, he had overshot the mark, and his blow had been wasted in the air. His frigates had parted from him in the gale which dismasted the Vanguard, and had not rejoined. He was groping for his foe in the dark, and had missed him. His mind was agitated by his imagination. He saw himself, in his first important command, chosen over the heads of his seniors to meet a great crisis, and it seemed as if he had failed. He already heard in fancy the howl of disappointment which would go up in England, worded with all the ruffian fluency of the newspapers; and he loved honour—he loved popularity. Agitation clouded his sagacity. He could not consider how probable it was that his unhampered squadron had passed the enemy, how unlikely it was that they were heading for any other point than Egypt, an old object of French ambition, a post from which India could be menaced. On the 29th he hurried away to the coast of Anatolia, from the place where British interests could be injured, to one where the French could have gone only in a fit of childish folly. Forty-eight hours after he had left, and when his topsails were hardly over the horizon to the north-east, the French were seen in the west, and the invasion of Egypt began.
It was allowed to go on for a month undisturbed, and Napoleon was at liberty to gain the victories which prepared the way for his rise to despotic power in France. Nelson, meanwhile, had reached the coast of Anatolia on the 4th July, had battled his way back against head winds to Cape Passaro by the 18th, had obtained water and stores at Syracuse by the connivance of the Neapolitan Government and in defiance of its treaty with France, and had gone to sea again by the 25th, still ignorant of the whereabouts of his enemies save that they were somewhere in the Levant. On the 28th the Turkish Pasha at Coron, in the Morea, told him that they had been seen four weeks before to the south of Crete, heading to the south-east. That they had gone to Egypt did not admit of a doubt. Nelson steered once more for Alexandria, and on the 1st August the Zealous signalled that the French were at anchor in Aboukir Bay to the west of the Rosetta mouth of the Nile.