Trafalgar

by Nicholas Best

  The English would stop at nothing, in the view of the Grand Army. It was even rumoured that they had resorted to germ warfare, landing bales of cotton impregnated with disease on the coast. A notice to that effect had been posted in Boulogne and the other ports in March:

  Remain at your posts, Citizens, and increase your vigilance.

  The English, unable to conquer us by force, are employing their last resource: the Plague.

  Five bales of cotton have just been thrown upon our coast.

  All are hereby forbidden to approach any boats or objects that may be cast on shore. Let patrols be instantly afoot; let them be accompanied by customs-house officers.

  But nothing had been found except an old hammock, the source of the alarm. It had not been impregnated with plague and nobody had died. The English were not that heinous.

  Yet they remained active along the coast – increasingly so as August turned to September and the nights began to draw in. If the invasion was going to come this year, it would have to come sooner rather than later, with autumn fast approaching. The Grand Army knew it, and was expecting to put to sea at any moment. The British knew it, too, and were determined to prevent it by any means within their power.

  They had decided to attack Boulogne. The decision had been taken at Walmer to launch a pre-emptive strike against the invasion flotilla. It was a tall order, with the flotilla so heavily defended, but the English were not deterred. It was imperative to attack the French and knock them off balance before they could put to sea. Doubly imperative after the reports of Napoleon at Boulogne and the imminent threat of invasion.

  The attack was set for early October. It would not be a conventional operation – Boulogne was too well prepared for that. Lord Nelson himself had been one of several commanders who had failed to breach the harbour’s defences by conventional means, losing so many men in the attempt that posters had been put up in British ports accusing him of butchery. But where a frontal assault could never succeed, a less orthodox approach just might. Unmanned fireships, for instance, or the new explosive torpedoes that Robert Fulton had been secretly constructing all summer. It was a dirty way to fight, in the view of many naval officers, but it was better than doing nothing with the French about to invade.

  In the last days of September, a strike force of British ships slipped quietly across the Channel and converged on Boulogne from several different directions. The force was equipped with fireships, explosive devices and torpedo-catamarans. Its orders were to sail into Boulogne after dark and attack the line of warships protecting the invasion barges. The attack was scheduled for the night of 2 October.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE BOULOGNE RAID

  The plan was to send in the fireships under cover of darkness and release them close to the row of French guardships, leaving the tide to do the rest. Torpedo-catamarans would be released as well, and a number of forty-gallon casks filled with explosives. The aim was to test Fulton’s new weapons against the flotilla, to see how they performed under operational conditions.

  The plan had been carefully thought out, but it got off to an awkward start. For reasons best known to himself, Admiral Lord Keith saw no need to conceal his intentions from the French. For several days before the assault, he allowed British ships to assemble in plain view of Boulogne, anchoring five miles out while they gathered for the attack. Perhaps he thought a show of force was a good idea with an invasion in the offing. Whatever the reason, it was obvious to the French, studying the sudden appearance of so many English ships through their telescopes, that something untoward was about to happen.

  Abraham Crawford, the teenage midshipman aboard the Immortalité, could hardly believe what he was seeing.

  There was a great display of our force before Boulogne, amounting to between fifty and sixty vessels of all kinds, for no object that I can conceive, except to put the enemy on his guard, and give him timely notice of our intentions. Besides the Monarch, Lord Keith’s flagship, this force consisted of two or three ships of fifty and sixty-four guns, four or five frigates, a few sloops of war, and the remainder of bombs, armed ships and gun-brigs. Besides these there were a few sloop-rigged vessels, prepared as fire, or rather explosion vessels . . . not exceeding, I think, four or five. These vessels were filled with combustibles and powder, and supplied with explosive machinery similar to that which was fitted to the carcasses or coffers.

  This explosive machinery was at the heart of the attack. Robert Fulton had been busy in Portsmouth all summer, building catamaran-torpedoes (known also as carcasses or coffers) designed to explode on contact with the enemy. The idea of sneaking up on the French and blowing them to pieces while they slept seemed distinctly unsporting to many officers, but their objections had been overruled. The new weapons were a fact of life and Fulton had been agitating to show what he could do. Government policy was to play along with him in case he took his inventions elsewhere and sold them to Britain’s enemies. It was better to have him onside than selling his dreadful machines to anyone else.

  Fulton had driven a hard bargain with the British government. As well as a monthly salary of £200, he had negotiated a bounty of £40,000 for the first decked vessel destroyed by one of his machines, and half the value of all enemy shipping destroyed under his supervision. He only needed to sink one French ship to live like a king for the rest of his life. It was no surprise that Fulton himself was present off Boulogne, working with the task force as it waited for a suitable wind to launch his catamarans against the enemy.

  Also present, much more surprisingly, was Lord Melville, the First Lord of the Admiralty. It was not the First Lord’s job to go to sea, and most unusual for a politician to join an assault force, but nevertheless Melville was aboard Admiral Keith’s flagship the Monarch. He wanted to witness the action for himself, to form an idea of just how useful Fulton’s new weapons would be in practice.

  The attack began soon after 9 p.m., with light wind and a favourable tide. The British force advanced in three divisions. The fireships sailed towards Boulogne with an escort of gun brigs, accompanied by four or five torpedo-catamarans, each packed with forty barrels of gunpowder, activated by a clock-and-flintlock firing mechanism. The British ships also carried ten forty-gallon hogsheads crammed with a mixture of gunpowder, ballast and combustible balls. These were to be thrown overboard when they reached the enemy, rather like Second-World-War depth charges.

  The men in control of these new weapons had been specially trained for the task. The bravest of them handled the torpedo-catamarans. These coffer-like devices were called catamarans because they were carried by two parallel wooden floats, steered by a man with a paddle. He wore black clothes and a black cap pulled over his face, so as not to stand out in the dark. The torpedoes too were lined with lead to give them a low profile in the water. The man’s task was to paddle his torpedo towards the enemy and hook it on to a French ship’s anchor cable so that it would swing alongside the hull. He was then to disengage the catamaran and steer back to his own ship, hoping to be out of range before the torpedo blew up.

  But the French were ready and waiting. They had already taken the precaution of anchoring their own ships closer inshore, to make an attack more difficult. Their sentries were on full alert and they had launched a protective screen of pinnaces to patrol the approaches to Boulogne in the darkness. They soon spotted the Royal Navy. The shooting started at once, the whole shore lit up so brightly that it seemed almost like noon to the watching sailors. There was no chance now of taking the French by surprise. All they could do instead was head straight for the enemy and hope for the best.

  They did so, the fireships advancing at full speed, straight for the French line. Their passage was disputed by French gunboats. The British activated the clockwork firing mechanisms aboard the fireships, primed to go off in six to eight minutes’ time. Then they leapt into their longboats and left the ships to their fate.

  The explosions were not long in coming. They looked magnificent t
o the watching British – great columns of flame shooting hundreds of feet into the air, like meteors or fireworks. The display was spectacular, but the damage done was minimal. One fireship blew up between two French gunboats. Another passed straight through the French line and appeared to explode harmlessly beyond. A third was boarded by French sailors and blew up while they were searching it. The result was a number of French casualties, but no real harm done to the flotilla. The line of gunboats remained as steady as ever, undisturbed by the assault.

  The torpedo-catamarans had little success either, and the hogshead casks did no damage at all. They were activated by removing a pin to start the fuse – a task so dangerous that the sailors were required to keep the pin as evidence that they had actually armed the devices. John Allison, a junior officer aboard the Leopard, never received the order to keep the pins:

  I proceeded with two casks in the Leopard’s long cutter, one in the bow, the other in the stern sheets, stood inshore and made the round battery to the southward. I dropped down until I could plainly see the flotilla, and driving directly for them by the tide, at the distance of about half a cable, I took the pin out of the machine on the aftermost cask.

  William Bailey, Boatswain, laid hold of it after it was out. I put my ear to the machinery and heard it going, then ordered it to be thrown overboard and told Mr Gilbert, Midshipman, with William Rogers (whom I had stationed forward) to take the pin out of the cask in the bow. They answered it was out. I then ordered the cask to be thrown overboard. Mr Gilbert reported to me that he heard the machinery going.

  I think they must have heard the splashing of the casks from the shore, as they commenced firing musketry immediately, the balls coming over the boats. This was the first firing that took place . . . Having only had time to have the machinery explained (which I perfectly understood) I received no instructions to preserve the pins, nor did I think it necessary.

  But none of this achieved anything. Despite all the effort that had gone into the raid, the damage to the French flotilla was negligible. Midshipman Crawford scanned the French line next morning and noticed no difference at all, although a count revealed one pinnace missing. This had been lying alongside a British fireship when it blew up. It was the only vessel sunk on the French side – not much of a return for months of British planning and preparation. In terms of tonnage destroyed, the attack had been a failure.

  In Robert Fulton’s view, this was partly because his weapons had not been used properly in action. He immediately began a programme of refinements to make them easier to handle. Even Admiral Keith, no fan of the new technology, thought they had been unlucky and might do better next time. And Lord Melville later argued that although little physical damage had been done, the Boulogne attacks had at least created panic in the Grand Army.

  Melville was putting a politician’s gloss on a failure by his department, but to an extent he may have been right. French reaction to the raid was to install an elaborate system of booms and chain cables across the harbour mouth, to frustrate any further intrusions. The new arrangements took time to set up and succeeded in putting the French on the defensive when they were supposed to be thinking about attack. With the year drawing on and winter approaching, it meant with luck that the invasion of England would now have to be postponed for several months, probably until the spring of 1805 at the earliest.

  CHAPTER 10

  SPAIN ENTERS THE WAR

  Three days after the Boulogne raid, the Royal Navy was in action again. The target this time was not the French, but four Spanish treasure ships on their way from South America to Cadiz.

  Britain was not at war with Spain, but relations between the two countries had been fraught for some time. By a treaty of 1796, the Spanish were obliged to supply a number of ships and soldiers to the French on demand. Napoleon had asked for cash instead, thus enabling Spain to remain nominally neutral in his war against Britain. The Spanish had complied with reluctance, knowing full well that whatever they did to appease Napoleon would antagonise the British. They had chosen what they hoped would be the lesser of two evils.

  The British had responded by reserving the right to treat any cash payment to Napoleon as a potential act of war. Alarmed by the growing amount of naval activity in Spanish ports, they had set out to intercept the treasure ships en route from Montevideo with a cargo of specie ultimately destined for Napoleon. A Royal Navy squadron had hurried to Cadiz to detain the ships ‘by force or otherwise’ before they could reach port.

  About 6 a.m. on 5 October, they sighted the Spanish south-west of Cape Santa Maria. Two hours later, they caught up with them and ordered the Spanish to shorten sail. Admiral Bustamente refused until the British put a shot across his bows. Captain Graham Moore of the Indefatigable then sent a boat across to ask for his surrender. Bustamente refused again, and at 9.30 a.m. the fighting began.

  A few minutes later, the Mercedes blew up, killing more than 200 people including women and children. It also killed some friends of the Spanish royal family. Two of the other Spanish ships surrendered by 10 a.m. The third made a run for it and was not captured until 1 p.m. In addition to all the lives lost, the cost to the Spanish treasury was well over £1 million – an immense sum by the standards of the day.

  The Spanish were naturally outraged. The British were no better than pirates. One Spaniard aboard the Mercedes had lost his wife, his life savings and eight of his family of nine. The British paid him compensation, but the damage had been done. Spain formally declared war on 12 December.

  This was dreadful news for the British. It meant that the long Spanish coastline was now enemy territory. The declaration of war was quickly followed by a naval agreement with France whereby the Spanish undertook to equip and maintain a substantial part of Napoleon’s fleet, effectively placing their ships and ports at his disposal. The hostile shore facing the British stretched now from the Friesian Islands in the north all the way down to Corunna, and from Cadiz to the Italian border. For a Royal Navy already operating at full capacity, this was nothing less than a disaster.

  For Napoleon, however, the news was much more encouraging. With Spain now on France’s side, the number of capital ships available for the invasion of England had almost doubled overnight. The Spanish could bring more than thirty ships of the line to the task, and a navy with a long tradition of seafaring. They were a substantial fighting force, with plenty of secure anchorages along the Spanish coastline that the Royal Navy could never penetrate. It was just the fillip Napoleon needed.

  But it meant his plans would need rethinking. With so many extra ships at his disposal, he could make life much more difficult for the Royal Navy, but it would take time to organise. The death of Admiral Latouche-Tréville, the only French sailor capable of taking on Nelson, had delayed Napoleon for a while. He had toyed briefly with the idea of postponing the invasion of Britain until November, then launching a two-pronged attack on both England and Ireland in the hope that one or the other would succeed. But November was very late in the year to launch an invasion, and his fleet was still hopelessly divided between several different ports. The Royal Navy was doing its utmost to keep it that way. Better perhaps to wait now until next spring, when the Spanish fleet would be ready to sail and the British would be that much more weary, their ships much closer to breaking point. It was exhausting for the British just waiting for Napoleon, never knowing when he would come. He was costing them money by doing nothing at all.

  Napoleon decided to wait. Spring 1805 was the time. Meanwhile, he had other things on his mind. His coronation was fast approaching. He had been hoping to be crowned in November, but negotiations with the Pope had taken longer than expected, so now his big day was fixed for 2 December instead.

  For William Pitt, at 10 Downing Street, the situation was looking graver by the minute. He had not expected Spain to react so badly to the attack on the treasure ships. The incident had been intended merely as a warning, a sharp reminder to the Spanish that Britain would not sit id
ly by while they kept Napoleon’s war machine supplied. But the killing of women and children had been a dreadful mistake. If it meant that the Spanish navy was now to join forces with Napoleon, the implications for the invasion of England would be disastrous.

  The war was escalating alarmingly, with Britain still standing alone. Napoleon had plenty of enemies in Europe, but no one else had declared war. The Austrian Emperor lived in fear of him. The Russians had interests in the Mediterranean that were threatened by the French. Both these countries wanted to see France restrained and its monarchy restored. It was in their interests to form an alliance with Britain to see Napoleon off – particularly if they could persuade William Pitt to subsidise their armies with British gold, something he was very loath to do.

  All three countries had reservations about an alliance, which would be based more on dislike of Napoleon than enthusiasm for each other. The Russians were putting out feelers to London to see how things lay. Pitt was responding cautiously, not wanting to rush into anything that might cost the British money. He took the view that Napoleon would force the Russians’ hand, sooner or later. They would certainly need an alliance with Britain at some point, but on better terms than they were contemplating at the moment.

  Meantime, Pitt turned his attention to the defences of Kent and Sussex. The defences were of paramount importance now, with the Spanish fleet likely to join the invasion. On 21 October 1804, a fortnight after the capture of the treasure ships, Pitt attended a conference at Rochester with the Duke of York, General Sir David Dundas (the officer commanding the area) and General William Twiss, a Royal Engineer. The meeting gave the green light for construction of eighty-one Martello towers along the invasion coast. This was an astonishingly large number, by far the biggest defensive programme the country had undertaken since Henry VIII’s coastal forts of the 1540s. The towers were to be built along the seafront at 600-yard intervals, to a design already being tested at Woolwich, where cannon balls fired at various ranges simply bounced off the walls. Thirty million bricks were needed for the project, of which two and a half million had already been ordered. It was too late in the year to begin work now, but sites were already being leased and materials gathered together. Construction was due to begin in the spring of 1805.