From Howard to Nelson, ed. by J. K. Laughton, 1899.
Major Operations in the War of American Independence, A. T. Mahan, 1913.
Sea Kings of Britain, Geoffrey Callender, 1915.
CHAPTER XI
THE NAPOLEONIC WARS: THE FIRST OF JUNE AND CAMPERDOWN
Ten years after the War of American Independence, British sea power was drawn into a more prolonged and desperate conflict with France. This time it was with a France whose navy, demoralized by revolution, was less able to dispute sea control, but whose armies, organized into an aggressive, empire-building force by the genius of Napoleon, threatened to dominate Europe, shaking the old monarchies with dangerous radical doctrines, and bringing all Continental nations into the conflict either as enemies or as allies. The dismissal of the French envoy from England immediately after the execution of Louis XVI (Jan. 21, 1793) led the French Republic a week later to a declaration of war, which continued with but a single intermission—from October, 1801, to May, 1803—through the next 22 years.
The magnitude of events on land in this period, during which French armies fought a hundred bloody campaigns, overthrew kingdoms, and remade the map of Europe, obscures the importance of the warfare on the sea. Yet it was Great Britain by virtue of her navy and insular position that remained Napoleon's least vulnerable and most obstinate opponent, forcing him to ever renewed and exhausting campaigns, reviving continental opposition, and supporting it with subsidies made possible by control of sea trade. In Napoleon's own words the effect of this pressure is well summarized: "To live without ships, without trade, without colonies, is to live as no Frenchman can consent to do." The Egyptian campaign, conceived as a thrust at British sources of wealth in the East, and defeated at the Nile; the organization of the northern neutrals against England, overthrown at Copenhagen; the direct invasion of the British Isles, repeatedly planned and thwarted at St. Vincent, Camperdown, and Trafalgar; the final and most nearly successful effort to ruin England by closing her continental markets and thus, in Napoleon's phrase, "defeating the sea by the land"—these were the successive measures by which he sought to shake the grip of sea power.
The following narrative of these events is in three divisions: the first dealing with the earlier engagements of the First of June and Camperdown, fought by squadrons based on home ports; the second with the war in the Mediterranean and the rise of Nelson as seen in the campaigns of St. Vincent, the Nile, and Copenhagen; the third with the Trafalgar campaign and the commercial struggle to which the naval side of the war was later confined. The career of Nelson is given an emphasis justified by his primacy among naval leaders and the value of his example for later times.
The effect of land events in obscuring the naval side of the war, already mentioned, is explained not merely by their magnitude, but by the fact that, though Great Britain was more than once brought to the verge of ruin, this was a consequence not of the enemy's power on the sea, but of his victories on land. Furthermore, the slow process which ended in the downfall of Napoleon and the reduction of France to her old frontiers was accomplished, not so conspicuously by the economic pressure of sea power, as by the efforts of armies on battlefields from Russia to Spain. On the sea British supremacy was more firmly established, and the capacities of France and her allies were far less, than in preceding conflicts of the century.
The French Navy Demoralized