For purposes of commerce warfare the French navy had suffered the withdrawal of many of its smaller fighting vessels and large numbers of its best seamen, attracted into privateering by the better promise of profit and adventure. As a result of this warfare, about 3500 British merchantmen were destroyed, an average of 500 a year, representing an annual loss of 2-1/2 per cent of all the ships of British register. But in the meantime the French merchant marine and commerce had been literally swept off the seas. In 1799 the Directory admitted there was "not a single merchant ship on the seas carrying the French flag." French imports from Asia, Africa, and America in 1800 amounted to only $300,000, and exports to $56,000, whereas England's total export and import trade had nearly doubled, from 44-1/2 million pounds sterling in 1792 to nearly 78 million in 1800. It is true that, owing to the exigencies of war, the amount of British shipping employed in this trade actually fell off slightly, and that of neutrals increased from 13 to 34%. But the profits went chiefly to British merchants. England had become the great storehouse and carrier for the Continent, "Commerce," in the phrase engraved on the elder Pitt's monument, "being united with and made to flourish by war."[1]
[Footnote 1: Figures on naval losses from Gravière, Guerres Maritimes, Vol. II, ch. VII, and on commerce, from Mahan, French Revolution and Empire, Vol. II, ch. XVII.]
REFERENCES
See end of Chapter XIII, [page 285].
CHAPTER XIII
THE NAPOLEONIC WAR [Concluded]: TRAFALGAR AND AFTER
The peace finally ratified at Amiens in March, 1802, failed to accomplish any of the purposes for which England had entered the war. France not only maintained her frontiers on the Scheldt and the Rhine, but still exercised a predominant influence in Holland and western Italy, and excluded British trade from territories under her control. Until French troops were withdrawn from Holland, as called for by the treaty, England refused to evacuate Malta. Bonaparte, who wished further breathing space to build up the French navy, tried vainly to postpone hostilities by threatening to invade England and exclude her from all continental markets. "It will be England," he declared, "that forces us to conquer Europe." The war reopened in May of 1803.
With no immediate danger on the Continent and with all the resources of a regenerated France at his command, Bonaparte now undertook the project of a descent upon England on such a scale as never before. Hazardous as he always realized the operation to be—it was a thousand to one chance, he told the British envoys, that he and his army would end at the bottom of the sea—he was definitely committed to it by his own threats and by the expectation of France that he would now annihilate her hereditary foe.
Napoleon's Plan of Invasion
An army of 130,000 men, with 400 guns and 20 days' supplies, was to embark from four ports close to Boulogne as a center, and cross the 36 miles of Channel to a favorable stretch of coast between Dover and Hastings, distant from London some 70 miles. The transport flotilla, as finally planned, was to consist of 2000 or more small flat-bottomed sailing vessels with auxiliary oar propulsion-chaloupes and bateaux canonnières, from 60 to 80 feet over all, not over 8 feet in draft, with from two to four guns and a capacity for 100 to 150 men. Large open boats (péniches) were also to be used, and all available coast craft for transport of horses and supplies. Shipyards from the Scheldt to the Gironde were soon busy building the special flotilla, and as fast as they were finished they skirted the shores to the points of concentration under protection of coast batteries. Extensive harbor and defense works were undertaken at Boulogne and neighboring ports, and the 120 miles from the Scheldt to the Somme was soon bristling with artillery, in General Marmont's phrase, "a coast of iron and bronze."