However, the officers of the French fleet were uncomfortably aware of the weakness of their position, despite the fears which Gambier expressed for his own ships if he attempted a traditional attack. While he and the Admiralty hesitated, an officer of the French battleship Ocean in Aix Roads wrote that an attack upon the Ile d'Aix would be "our destruction". Gambier and his supporters later pleaded that the strength of the island, its garrison and its batteries was formidable. Only a madman of Cochrane's stamp would risk the fleet against it. "Its garrison, it is true, is 2000 men strong," wrote the officer of the Ocdan on 10 April, "but they are all conscripts who have never seen any firing, and the island is strong only in that part which protects the fleet on the N.E. side, or towards the coast of the Bay of Rochelle. There are but a few guns placed at a distance from each other and in bad condition." From a better vantage point than Gambier ever enjoyed, he confirmed Cochrane's assurance to the Admiralty that the fortress of Aix was "quite open".14
On 10 April, with the attacking force assembled and the weather favourable, Cochrane went to see Gambier and asked that he should be allowed to go in at once. To his astonishment, the admiral refused, objecting that "the fire-ships might be boarded and the crews murdered" by the French. Impatiently, Cochrane pointed out that there was a greater danger of this happening if the attack was delayed and Allemand was given time to recognise the vessels for what they were. Indeed, Gambier's objection would logically mean that no attack at all could be made against the enemy.
"If you choose to rush on to self-destruction that is your own affair," said Gambier haughtily, "but it is my duty to take care of the lives of others, and I will not place the crews of the fire-ships in palpable danger."15
Exasperated by this, Cochrane returned to the Imperieuse, which was cruising off the Aix-Boyart passage. He was depressed but not surprised to see that on the next morning Allemand had altered the formation of his fleet, so that only the bows of half his ships, rather than the sides of all of them, were offered as targets for attack. While Gambier was protesting at Cochrane's impulsive folly in "rushing on", Allemand had identified the fire-ships, as he reported in his despatch of 12 April, and had taken precautionary measures. Ahead of his battleships, his frigates awaited the attackers, behind a massive boom across the entrance of the anchorage.
On 11 April, the wind gathered strength and there was a high sea. In these conditions, Gambier at length consented to the attack being made. If he hoped that Cochrane himself would be deterred by the squally conditions, he was due to be disappointed. The flood tide that evening would be ideal for carrying the fire-ships and explosion vessels in, while making it harder for the French guard-boats to row out and forestall them. As Lord Gambier and his fleet put out to sea, where they anchored some nine miles from the scene of the action, Cochrane anchored the Imperieuse, with an explosion vessel in tow, at the seaward end of the Boyart Shoal. With the frigates Aigle, Unicorn, and Pallas, and H.M.S. Caesar standing by to pick up the returning crews of the fire-ships, all was ready for the attack. The prize was a destructive blow against the power of France, equal perhaps to Trafalgar or the Nile.
As darkness fell on the early evening of n April, the volunteer captains of the fire-ships assembled on board the Caledonia for their final orders. They were to form the second wave of the attack, going in on the flood tide soon after 8 p.m. The initial assault on the French anchorage was to be made by the explosion vessels. No one had to inquire who would be in command of them. On the first vessel, far out in front of the rest, Cochrane himself would ride into battle at the flood tide, with a ton or two of assorted explosives under his feet.
At six in the evening, Allemand from the deck of the Ocean sighted three frigates, four brigs, and three coasters coming to anchor at the far end of the Aix-Boyart channel. The weather was far from ideal for an attack but Admiral Allemand took no chances. He ordered out the ships' boats of the French fleet, fully armed, and instructed them to row for the great two-mile boom which enclosed the anchorage of Aix. This was his secret weapon. It was in the shape of a rather flat arrow-head, two miles in length and solidly constructed. On the surface it floated as a solid barrier of enormous spars lashed together and bound securely with heavy chains. But it was also anchored to the sea bed with such a weight of iron that it served almost as an impenetrable wall. No fire-ship, not even a ship of the line, would ever break through it.
The cutters and small boats were to take up their defensive position just within the sheltering arm of the boom, where it lay at the mainland end of the Aix-Boyart channel. An officer of the Ocean watched them set out and saw that they had chosen almost the worst time of the tide for it. "Wind from the N.W. and blew very strong," he noted, "the sea high and the flood . .. beginning to make strong."16
Cochrane's men had a rather different problem. The flood tide was in their favour, carrying the explosion vessels and fire-ships in. But when they took to their little boats, they would have to row back at least three miles, against a tide which would be funnelling at full strength into the Aix-Boyart passage, before they could hope to be picked up by the waiting frigates or H.M.S. Caesar, which was about all that remained of Gambier's force.
On the Imperieuse there was a bustle of activity. Cochrane noticed that "it blew hard with a high sea", and then turned his attention to more important matters. Midshipman Marryat, waiting to go aboard the second explosion vessel, was encouraged to see that "the night was very dark, and it blew a strong breeze directly in upon the Isle d'Aix and the enemy's fleet". Like his companions, Marryat was prepared with a story of being from a sunken victualling vessel, if he were captured. It might mean the difference between a French prison and a firing squad.17
Cochrane went aboard the first explosion vessel, a converted coaster, accompanied by his brother, the Hon. Basil Cochrane, Lieutenant Bissel of the Imperieuse, and four seamen from his frigate who made up the volunteer crew. What Admiral Allemand saw as frigates, brigs, and coasters, was a mixture of the attack ships and the rescuers who would wait to pick up survivors. Beyond the Imperieuse, the dark outline of three rescue frigates rode at anchor. Farther out, the battleship Caesar acted as mother ship to the small boats of the fleet, which stood by to go in after the fire-ships and pick the crews out of the water.
The sloops Redpole and Lyra were anchored as far in as possible, each showing a light to mark the channel for the attackers. With the wind wailing in the rigging, and Lord Gambier waiting cautiously beyond the horizon, Cochrane cast off his explosion vessel and sailed into the attack. On the battleship Caesar, William Richardson and every man who could be spared waited in silent expectation on the crowded deck for the beginning of the great spectacle.
As Cochrane led the way, the second explosion vessel with Marryat aboard followed him. At the crucial moment, the two officers and three seamen who made up the crew had to scramble into a four-oared gig and, literally, row for their lives before the ship went up. It was not a comforting thought to Marryat, as the vessel passed between the lights of the two sloops, that the narrow shape of the little gig had earned it the sailors' nickname of "the coffin".
Leaving behind the two trim ship-rigged sloops with their guiding lights showing out to sea, Cochrane's explosion vessel drove hard towards the massive boom protecting the Aix anchorage. It was after eight o'clock and the darkness so intense that he could see nothing of AUemand's squadron which lay a mile or so ahead. But the tide and the wind were carrying the coaster forward, her hold packed with its mighty explosive charge. Judging the distance, Cochrane calculated that in another ten minutes or so she would be driven hard against the boom. He ordered his crew into the gig and remained alone on the explosion vessel. She was on course and moving with the breeze. He lit the fuse, scrambled down to join the others in the gig and ordered them to row for their lives away from the coaster. Straining against the flood-tide, they pulled for the open sea, but when they had drawn a hundred yards from the explosion ship it was realised they had left a dog
on board, the mascot of the voyage. Cochrane turned the gig about again and headed back to the vessel whose fuse was already sputtering dangerously close to the powder in the hold. He jumped aboard, snatched the dog, leapt into the gig, and once more set his men to pulling for safety as the coaster drifted in towards the boom.18
A mile away, on the French flag-ship Ocean, one of Allemand's officers came on deck at about half past eight. From the darkness of the Aix-Boyart channel he suddenly saw an apocalyptic flash and the world shook under him. The brilliance of rockets and shells ripped the night sky in every direction. He could think only of barges loaded with "shot, shells, and fire-rockets". To the English ships out to sea, the gigantic flash was followed by the sky glowing "red with the lurid glare arising from the simultaneous ignition of 1500 barrels of gunpowder". The French guard-boats which had reached the boom were now swamped or scattered by the detonation. Captain Proteau of the French frigate Indienne, one of the advance guard-ships, was close enough to see the great harbour boom ripped up from its sea-bed mooring, the heavy spars torn apart and hurled across the surface of the anchorage.19
Ten minutes later, while the burning wreckage of the first detonation drifted on the dark water, and the blue flares of the French defences rose into the sky to illuminate the scene, there was a second massive explosion, right against the remains of the boom. Captain Proteau and the frigate screen had been prepared for fire-ships, which could be boarded, or sunk, or at least fended off. But these new devices were something else, the work of a maniac who disregarded every convention of civilised warfare and apparently set as little value on his own life as on those of his enemies. The protecting boom was now shattered and the effect of the explosion vessels within the crowded anchorage would be annihilating.
At 9.30 p.m., while the guns from the Citadel of the Ile d'Aix maintained a fitful bombardment of the channel, the frigate H.M.S. Mediator crashed through the remains of the boom and the way to the anchorage lay open. Following her, came a flotilla of other vessels, dark and sinister at first then bursting into an outline of flame. The third explosion vessel was out of action, but the second wave of the attack, which was to be made by fire-ships, was now going in. On the Indienne and the Ocdan alike there was a horrified conviction that these were explosion vessels also. As they closed upon the anchorage, apprehension began to grow into panic.
While all this was going on, Cochrane and the occupants of a score of other "coffins" were rowing desperately against the flood-tide to get clear of the boom. When the first of the explosion vessels went up, he was still much closer to her than he had intended, partly because the fuse was so short and partly because he had gone back to rescue the dog. But it proved to be his salvation. As the roar of the explosion burst behind them, he and his oarsmen ducked down while the fragments of the blast sliced and whistled over their heads, rocketing into the sea beyond them with jets of dark water rising like fountains on every side. By an irony which he had no leisure to savour just then, Cochrane realised that if the gig had not been delayed, he and his crew would have been directly and fatally under the hail of shot and shell where it pitched into the sea.
And then, as the impact of the explosion reached the gig, "the sea was convulsed as by an earthquake". A huge wave, rising behind the gig, lifted them "like a cork", and then dropped them into a vast trough, "out of which, as it closed upon us with a rush of a whirlpool, none expected to emerge". But the boat's crew kept the little gig upright and afloat until the great swell had passed. After that, Cochrane noted, "nothing but a heavy rolling sea had to be encountered, all having again become silence and darkness". Neither the silence nor the darkness was destined to last for long. During the three-mile pull back to the Imperieuse the first fire-ships passed them, heading for Aix Roads. Since he could only go in with one wave of the attack, Cochrane had naturally chosen to lead the first and was unable to supervise the fire-ships personally. None the less, by the time that they reached the British frigates, he was able to look back and see that the first fire-ships were past the boom and among the French guard-ships. It was gratifying to see the disarray among the enemy and to see that, in the confusion, the French battleships were actually firing on their own frigates.20
The crew of the battleship Caesar had a grandstand view of the action as they waited for the ships' boats to return with the fire-ship crews they had picked up. "Shells and rockets were flying about in all directions," said Gunner Richardson, "and the blazing light all around gave us a good view of the enemy." Having turned night into day by his mortar shells and rockets, Cochrane regained the Imperieuse. There he received news of the fire-ship attack which demonstrated that the Royal Navy was as capable of folly and confusion as the French. Having gone with the explosion vessels he had left the fire-ships to others. The consequence was that only four out of the twenty had reached Aix Roads. The Imperieuse was anchored three miles from Allemand's fleet, and the captains of some fire-ships were igniting and abandoning them a mile and a half out to sea from the Imperieuse. Indeed, the frigate had the last explosion vessel in tow and the ship's company were horrified to see an abandoned fire-ship bearing down on them and their charge. The explosion vessel had to be hastily cut adrift and the frigate was hauled round by her cable, so that the fire-ship drifted harmlessly by and then grounded and burnt out on the Boyart Shoal.21
Gambier subsequently reproved Cochrane for having denounced some of the captains of the fire-ships. Certainly he swore to Captain George Wolfe of H.M.S. L'Aigle that Gambier's officers, left to their own devices, "had made such a bad business of it" that the attack was bungled. Wolfe was obliged to agree that his own frigate was "very nearly burnt by two that were badly managed". Apart from this, a man who had sailed 1500 barrels of gunpowder and detonated them 600 yards from the guns of the French fleet, according to Captain Proteau's own account, was entitled to a certain warmth of feeling over officers who prudently abandoned their attacking vessels four and half miles from the target.22
Most of the fire-ships drifted harmlessly aground to one side or other of the French fleet, but those which got through to the anchorage managed to compound the confusion and panic among Allemand's crews. At nine o'clock, one of the attackers looking like a splendid set-piece in a firework display, crashed into the 74-gun battleship Regulus, the heavy grappling chains hooking and holding her to her victim. The crew of the Regulus hacked through the anchor cables with desperate speed and tried to drift clear of the burning hulk. As the other fire-ships cruised menacingly into the anchorage, the frigate Hortense cut her cables too and opened fire on them. Worst of all, there were three fireships closing on Allemand's flagship, Ocean. There was no time to lift the anchor. "We were obliged to cut this cable also," wrote one of her officers, "and steer so as to avoid Le Palles, the bank of rocks on which the Jean Bart was lost." Like so many well defended bases, Aix Roads offered little chance of manoeuvre, being surrounded by shoals and mud flats at very little depth, except towards the seaward channel and the mouth of the Charente.23
At 10 p.m. the Ocean herself, manoeuvring desperately to avoid the fire-ships, ran aground. It was now apparent that those fire-ships which reached their targets did so because their crews remained with them all the way, in some cases being towed by the small boats which would rescue them subsequently. It was one of these which now made straight for the helpless flagship and grappled on to her stern. There was consternation on the Ocean. Some of the French seamen played the fire pumps on their own decks to keep them wet, others tried to push the fire-ship off with spars, and a few used axes in an attempt to cut the grapplings. The rest of the French fleet tacked and drifted in the confined roads with predictable results. As the Ocean struggled with the fire-ship, the battleship Tonnerre rammed her in the bows and, when she had parted from her, the flagship was rammed by the battleship Patriote. However, her crew succeeded in working free of the fire-ship which glided forward along her starboard side and drifted away. The Ocean survived the ordeal of the night, though
losing fifty of her crew through fire, shot, and collision. "In general," wrote one of her officers, "the whole of the fleet was very lucky on this dreadful night."24
On board the Imperieuse, Cochrane saw the matter differently. The fire-ship attack had failed in itself to destroy the French, but the falling tide was now on England's side. He knew the anchorage better than any other man in Gambier's fleet, at first-hand. By midnight, all the men who could be rescued had been brought back to the frigates or the Caesar. Cochrane remained on watch. At 3.30 a.m. the next morning, 12 April, he could see that most of the French ships were broadside on to the wind and tide. It was almost too good to believe but they appeared to be grounded helplessly, and the tide was falling. The fire-ships had not destroyed them but Cochrane's explosion vessels and his general plan had worked. Confusion and panic in the confined space would drive the French captains to run their ships aground as the only escape from fire and demolition charges.25
The tide fell further. French battleships on the Palles Shoal and elsewhere heeled over as the water fell away from them. Some presented nothing more warlike than the bottom of the hull towards the English frigates. The men of the Caesar saw the flagship Ocean stranded with her stern up on a mud flat and her bows down in the water. Soon they saw the French crews begin to throw their guns overboard in order that the ships might float as soon as possible when the tide began to flood the anchorage again. Cochrane was jubilant. The next few hours would present the Royal Navy with an opportunity which even Trafalgar and the Nile could hardly have rivalled.
With the falling tide, the Imperieuse had anchored farther out, though to be within range of the French ships she would in any case have had to sail into the Aix-Boyart channel. Not doubting that Gambier would give his permission for an attack to begin, and that his lordship would follow with the rest of the fleet, Cochrane signalled the Caledonia at 5.48 a.m. "Half the fleet can destroy the enemy. Seven on shore." An answering pennant fluttered from the Caledonia's mainmast. "Very good."
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