The Admiral: A Romance of Nelson in the Year of the Nile

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

But now I must return to the progress of the battle. And here I may remark that in only one instance did a British ship fail to get a signal advantage of the Frenchman engaged, and that, oddly enough, was the Bellerophon, which afterwards became so historical. And she paid for her temerity in engaging a ship so tremendously her superior in number of guns as the Orient, which mounted 120 to her 74, the disparity in weight of metal being almost double as great. But she held on to the Orient like the British bull-dog that she was, till her masts and cables having been entirely shot away, she drifted out of line to the lee side of the Bay, and was saved in spite of herself.

The five ships which engaged the French on the outside, where they had concentrated their force, should naturally have suffered the most severely, as indeed the Bellerophon, the Majestic, our ship, and the Minotaur did; but the Defence, like the Zealous, bore charmed lives. She had but four men killed and eleven men wounded, though she laid herself alongside of the Peuple Souverain, almost as close as we lay to the Spartiate. Her immunity illustrated the value of the Admiral’s theory of concentrating your force on part of the enemy and risking the rest. Instead of having the fire of a second Frenchman raking her bows, as we had, she was engaged with the Frenchman which had a second English ship, the Orion, pouring broadsides into her almost undefended larboard side. The Majestic, too, which was the only ship that lost her captain, owed her great loss to fouling the Heureux as she passed on to her duel with the Mercure, which resulted in the latter’s capture.

The Zealous was wonderful. She had but one man killed and seven wounded, and preserved even her rigging so uninjured that she alone of all the fleet was in a position to chase the two unengaged French ships of the line, and the two frigates which made their escape the next morning, and yet she had been in the first of the fight.

The battle was practically won in the first few minutes. The action did not begin till forty minutes past six, and by fifty minutes past the Guerrier had been dismasted and captured, and ten minutes after that the Spartiate and the Conquérant were almost dismasted and ready to be taken possession of, while the Aquilon and the Peuple Souverain were taken possession of at half-past eight.

By the overpowering of the first three ships the fleets were ten to ten when night closed in at seven o’clock. This was partly neutralised by the Bellerophon’s drifting out of action, shortly before the Orient blew up, a good deal owing to her fire, though she was blown out of action herself.

But this in turn was neutralised by a fortunate accident. As I have mentioned, the Culloden, Alexander and Swiftsure were some miles from the rest of the fleet when the action commenced, but the former saw and at once abandoned her prize, and the latter, too, were signalled to return. The Culloden, running down the wind, naturally had the advantage of the others, which were beating up, but it was dark before any of them could approach. Now, there was not a man in all our fleet, saving the Admiral, with such a stomach for fighting as Captain Troubridge; and in his anxiety to support his chief, he did not proceed with quite the coolness of Captain Foley, of the Goliath, who led our van in rounding the shoal, and shared with the Admiral the credit of keeping such a steady and seamanlike course when every minute reduced our chance of taking up our anchorage by daylight. Captain Foley of course had daylight, and Captain Troubridge had not; but Troubridge was essentially a fighter, willing to take any number of risks in the face of an enemy. The result was that the Culloden stuck on the tail of the shoal, and lay there bumping heavily. The loss of such a formidable fighter as Captain Troubridge probably saved the Généreux and the Guillaume Tell, the two French ships of the line which got away on the following day; but he himself generously said that he believed it helped to win the battle, by letting such good men as Captain Ball and Captain Hallowell, who were certainly two of the finest captains in the fleet, sail straight on into the battle without having to feel their way—which they did, for the Culloden, hanging on the edge of the shoal and exhibiting lanterns and other signals, served as a kind of lighthouse.

It must not be supposed that men like Captain Ball and Captain Hallowell passed their stranded consort without the endeavour to tow her off, on which the little Leander of fifty guns had already been engaged for some time; but Captain Troubridge was soon convinced of the hopelessness of the task, and rightly judged that the instant arrival of three ships in the battle was of more consequence than trying to deliver his own ship. They therefore, though very unwillingly, cast off and proceeded to take their places in the line.

As I have said, the fortunate accident of their deferred arrival crushed the French centre. For when the Orient, although she had blown the Bellerophon out of action, discovered that her poop was on fire, up came two of the best ships and the stoutest captains of our Navy, not to mention the little Leander, which did yeoman’s service on that day. The Swiftsure, Captain Hallowell, at once anchored on the Orient’s starboard bow, while the Alexander, taking advantage of the defective ordering of Admiral Brueys which left five hundred yards between each pair of ships, passed under the stern of the Orient, and raking her with a terrific broadside, reserved after the English fashion till she was within a few feet, took up her position on the great ship’s inner quarter. Both English captains noted the fire on the French flagship, and training their upper guns on the spot where it was raging, effectually prevented any attempt to save the ship. With their flagship as helpless as a bee in the meshes of a couple of spiders, the misfortunes of the French did not cease, for the cables of the Peuple Souverain being shot away, she drifted from her position to the quarter of the Franklin, where she was raked by the Orion. Her drifting also left a gap of a thousand feet in front of the Franklin, of which the fifty-gun Leander took advantage with the utmost coolness, calmly anchoring across the bows of the French eighty-gun ship, and raking her with broadside after broadside. And thus the battle raged till just about ten o’clock, when the Orient, which like the Heureux and Tonnant had been completely in our power for some time, blew up.

The French ships who were on her lee had slipped their cables and drifted some minutes before this, but Captain Ball resolutely refused to budge before the destruction of the Orient was made inevitable, as a result of which portions of the burning ship fell upon the Alexander, and indeed ignited one of her ‘tops,’ which was happily extinguished.

The crew of the Orient themselves, except such as were engaged in trying to extinguish it, had not noticed it until a dense volume of black smoke suddenly burst up from below, and with it a great flare of flame, which rose from the quarter-deck, giving the ship the appearance of a volcano, and reached the mainsail. Those who were on the Alexander, which hung on to the Orient up to that minute, say they never saw anything more awful than the faces of the doomed hundreds on which the glare was reflected.