by Roy Adkins
At nine o’clock the first part of the battle had run its course, as Captain Miller related in a letter to his wife :Having now brought all our ships into battle, which you are to suppose raging in all magnificent, awful, and horrific grandeur, I proceed to relate the general events of it as I saw them. The Guerrier and Conquérant made a very inefficient resistance . . . and about 8 o’clock, I think, were totally silent. The Spartiate resisted much longer, and . . . her larboard15 guns were fired on us in the beginning with great quickness, but after the Admiral [Nelson in the Vanguard] anchored on his starboard side, it was slow and irregular, and before or about 9 o’clock she was silenced, and had also lost her main and mizzen masts: the Aquilon was silenced a little earlier, with the loss of all her masts, having the whole fire of the Minotaur on her starboard side, and, for some time, nearly half ours on her larboard bow. Le Peuple Souverain was, about the same time, entirely dismasted and silenced.21
By this point, Nelson had been wounded. Around half past eight he was on the quarterdeck16 of the Vanguard when the Spartiate fired a broad-side. He was ‘struck in the forehead by a langridge shot, or a piece of iron, and the skin being cut by it at right angles, it hung down over his face, and as it covered his eye, he was perfectly blind’‡.22 ‘Langridge’ was a general term for scrap iron, musket-balls or anything else likely to maim or kill, packed in a cylindrical tin case and fired from a cannon. As the case disintegrated on firing, the effect was like a huge shot-gun, and was frequently used to cut a swath through groups of men on an exposed deck. Nelson fell, his face covered in blood, and Captain Berry caught him in his arms as he cried out, ‘I am killed; remember me to my wife.’23 Nelson was taken below to the surgeon, Mr Jefferson, exclaiming, ‘I will take my turn with my brave followers!’24 It was the general custom for thewounded to be seen by the surgeon in the order in which they came to the cockpit, where he operated deep within the ship. Because of this, some men with minor wounds bled to death while waiting their turn. Nelson, who always took a pessimistic view when he was injured, ‘felt convinced that his wound was mortal. Mr. Jefferson assured him, on probing the wound, that there was no immediate danger. He [Nelson] would not, however, indulge any hope.’25
This was an era when naval officers of most nations, and certainly those in the British, French and Spanish navies, had a paternalistic attitude to their men and a strong sense of honour and chivalry. They led from the front, winning the respect of their crews by an exaggerated disregard for their own safety. While the sailors used any available cover to avoid the worst of the enemy’s broadsides, it was a point of honour among the officers that they paced the deck proudly in all their finery and did not flinch at the lethal showers of missiles. On board the Tonnant Captain Aristide Aubert Dupetit-Thouars certainly did not flinch. An experienced officer, he had rejoined the French Navy only a year before the battle. Under heavy fire, Dupetit-Thouars refused to surrender and had the French flag nailed to the mast17. In the hail of projectiles flying across the deck, he had one foot shot away and his leg was broken. After the lower leg was amputated, he continued to command the ship until he bled to death, and his last words were ‘Never strike the flag!’26 On his instructions his body was thrown overboard so that he would not fall into British hands.
By the time Nelson was wounded, Captain Westcott of the Majestic was dead, and several British officers were injured, including Sir James Saumarez on board the Orion, seriously wounded from a splinter in the thigh. The word ‘splinter’, given to any wooden fragments flying through the air, is misleading since it implies a very small piece of wood. Splinters were of any size, as the force of a cannonball at close range could smash pieces several feet long from any part of a wooden ship. The splinter that wounded Saumarez was the sheave (grooved wooden wheel) from a pulley block that had been smashed off a mast. Saumarez was lucky, since this splinter had already killed Mr Baird, his clerk, and severely wounded Midshipman Charles Miells, and so its momentum had been reduced, or Saumarez might have been killed outright. As it was, the blow knockedhim over and he was stunned with pain and shock, ‘but although he acknowledged it was painful, and might in the end be serious [requiring amputation to stop gangrene spreading], he could not be persuaded to leave the deck even to have the wound examined’.27 Saumarez survived without needing amputation, but after the battle the wound was so bad that he was unable to leave his ship to join the other captains for a celebration.
In the Vanguard Nelson was eventually seen by the surgeon, who, ‘having bound up and dressed the wound, requested the Admiral to remain quiet in the bread-room’.28 Nelson found this impossible - it was observed thatnothing could repress his anxious and enthusiastic disposition. He immediately ordered his secretary, Mr. Campbell, to attend him in the breadroom, that no time might be lost in writing [his dispatch] to the Admiralty. This gentleman [Campbell] . . . had been himself wounded, and beholding the blind and suffering state of the Admiral, became so much affected, that he could not write. The Chaplain was then summoned, but the eagerness and impatience of Nelson increasing, he took the pen himself, and contrived to trace some words which marked at that awful moment his devout sense of the success he had then obtained.29
The battle was not yet over, but it was already clear to Nelson which side would win.
Of all the naval battles of the period, this one was unusual because few eyewitness accounts by ordinary seamen have survived. Officers were more likely to keep diaries and journals, and to write their memoirs in later life, but the letters to family and friends at home, which so often give a glimpse of the experiences of the sailors, were lost - thrown overboard with the code books when the Leander, carrying dispatches to England, was captured by the Généreux, one of the ships that escaped from the battle. John Nicol in the Goliath did write his memoirs, and he recorded helping the gunner in the powder magazine make up cartridges for the guns, away from the action, which was something he regretted: ‘I would, if had I my choice, been on the deck; there I would have seen what was passing and the time would not have hung so heavy; but every man does his duty with spirit, whether his station be in the slaughterhouse or the magazine.’30 The ‘slaughterhouse’ was what seamen called the middle section of the gun deck, where enemy fire tended to be concentrated and where the greatest damage and highest number of casualties usually occurred. By contrast, the vulnerable magazines where the gunpowder was stored were the most protected parts of the ship, usually below the waterline. Having been sealed off from the rest of the ship as much as possible, the magazines were always hot, stuffy and dark, but especially so on an August night off the Egyptian coast. No lantern could be allowed inside, and the magazines were illuminated by light cupboards or light rooms in which lanterns were placed so that they shone through thick glass windows into the magazine, so preventing the risk of explosion. The walls of the magazine were painted white to maximise the effect of the lanterns, but even so the light was dim.
Nicol complained that ‘I saw as little of this action as I did of the one on the 14th February [1797] off Cape St Vincent . . . Any information we got was from the boys and women who carried the powder.’31 The presence of women in navy ships at sea was against regulations, but many captains allowed the wives of petty officers to live on board, and during any fighting they either helped as ‘powder monkeys’, carrying gunpowder cartridges to the guns, or else assisted the surgeon as nurses. Nicol recalled that ‘the women behaved as well as the men, and got a present for their bravery from the Grand Signior . . . I was much indebted to the gunner’s wife, who gave her husband and me a drink of wine every now and then, which lessened our fatigue much. There were some of the women wounded, and one woman belonging to Leith [in Scotland] died of her wounds, and was buried on a small island in the bay. One woman bore a son in the heat of the action; she belonged to Edinburgh.’32
It was not unusual for women to give birth during a battle, as the noise and stress of the situation tended to induce labour. Nor was it unusual for the wom
en to have their children with them on board ship. For the previous major battle off Cape St Vincent, where Nicol had also missed seeing the action, it has been calculated that at least twenty-three women and twenty children were in the British ships, but it is not known exactly how many women were on board the ships in Aboukir Bay. In the Orion there was at least one: Ann Hopping, wife of the second gunner, Edward Hopping, who is known to have earned money as a seamstress, working for Captain Sir James Saumarez. She had also been at Cape St Vincent, where she had helped her husband serve out cartridges from the magazine. She was now twenty-nine and had two young daughters, although it is uncertain if they were on board as well. Towards the end of her life (when better known as Nancy Perriam), Ann’s memories of this battle at Aboukir were written down, and she recalled:When the order to ‘Clear for action’ was given, she had just begun a flannel shirt for Sir James Saumarez. During the action she served out powder and also assisted the surgeons in the Cockpit. She was standing by when the surgeon took out from the socket [amputated] the arm of a midshipman . . . a protégé of Sir James Saumarez. During the operation the poor child never uttered a groan, and when it was finished he turned his head towards her and said, ‘Have I not borne it like a man?’ The words were scarcely uttered when a cold shiver seized him, and in an instant his young soul had entered the land of immortal life.33
On board the Goliath, as well as the gunner’s wife mentioned by Nicol, at least four other women were present: Ann Taylor, Elizabeth Moore, Sarah Bates and Mary French. Three were wives of seamen, and Mary French was the wife a marine. All four men were killed in the battle. Afterwards Captain Foley took the unusual step of entering these women in the muster book, ‘being the widows of men Slain in fight on the 1st Augt 1798 victualled at ⅔ds allowance by Captains order, in consideration of their assistance in Dressing and attending on the Wounded’.34 These women were provided with victuals from the ship’s stores until 30 November, ‘their further assistance not being required’35. This provision for widows was most unusual. Another widow, Christiann White, later wrote to Nelson asking for help:Your petitioner Christiann White has taken the liberty to lay her case before your Lordship, that I lost my husband in your glorious action of the 1st of August 1798 at the Nile, and during the action I attended the surgeon in dressing the wounded men, and likewise attended the sick and wounded during the passage to Gibraltar which was 11 weeks on board his Majesty’s ship Majestic, where we lost the Honourable Captain Westcott, and as for myself was left a widow and with 2 children to the mercy of God. Your petitioner humbly hopes that your Lordship will consider her worthy of your notice.36
In theory, widows of seamen who died on active service were entitled to the men’s back pay and a small pension, but relatively few women received these as the bureaucratic process of claiming was so complicated. The way that the pension fund was financed was even more arcane. Every naval ship’s muster book carried a number of ‘widow’s men’, usually in the proportion of two for every hundred men in the crew, and the pay of these imaginary crew members was set aside as a contribution to the fund. In addition the personal belongings of a man who died at sea were usually auctioned off to other crew members, with the money going to the next of kin, and for famous battles that caught the public imagination subscriptions were raised to support widows and orphans, but for relatives of men killed in the many minor battles and skirmishes, or by accident or disease, support for dependants was haphazard. On top of this, the lack of regular and reliable communications meant that it could be months or even years before a widow found out that her husband was dead.
As the battle continued, the fighting around the Goliath was fierce, and in the magazine Nicol was kept informed of what was happening by the powder monkeys, who ‘brought us every now and then the cheering news of another French ship having struck, and we answered the cheers on deck with heart-felt joy’.37 Even the magazine was not a completely safe haven, though, as ‘in the heat of the action, a shot came right into the magazine, but did no harm, as the carpenters plugged it up, and stopped the water that was rushing in’.38 Then, at around ten o’clock, Nicol related that ‘the Goliath got such a shake, we thought the after-part of her had blown up until the boys told us what it was’39 - the French flagship Orient had exploded.
The Orient had been under attack by the Bellerophon from about seven o’clock - an unequal contest since the Orient had 120 guns on three decks, whereas the Bellerophon had only seventy-four on two decks. Within an hour the Bellerophon’s mizzenmast and mainmast were shot away, at least sixteen guns were out of action and the ship was badly battered. The anchor cable was cut and the Bellerophon began to drift away from the battle. The Alexander took up the fight by anchoring behind the Orient and firing into the vulnerable stern, while the Swiftsure attacked the Orient’s bow. The Alexander’s broadsides started a fire in the stern cabin of the Orient that quickly spread to the upper decks and was soon out of control.
On board the Orient was Brueys’s chief-of-staff, Honoré-Joseph-Antoine Ganteaume, who later recalled ‘an explosion took place on the aft of the quarter-deck. We had already had a boat on fire, but we had cut it away, and so avoided the danger. We had also thrown a hammock, and some other things, which were in flames, overboard, but this third time, the fire spread so rapidly and instantaneously amongst the fragments of every kind, with which the poop was incumbered, that all was soon in flames.’40 Fire on board ship was something all seamen feared, because so little could be achieved with small pumps and buckets of water, but Ganteaume saw that ‘the fire pumps had been dashed to pieces by the enemy’s balls, and the tubs and buckets rendered useless. An order was given to cease firing, that all hands might be at liberty to bring water, but such was the ardour of the moment, that in the tumult, the guns of the main-deck still continued their fire. Although the officers had called all the people between decks, aloft, the flames had in a very short time, made a most alarming progress, and we had but few means in our power of checking them.’41
Once the flames were out of control, it was only a matter of time before the ship was destroyed. As the fire spread up the rigging and masts of the Orient, the effect was like a gigantic torch illuminating the battle area, and the ships nearest to the Orient began to move away to what was hoped would be a safe distance. Over a mile away, Midshipman Elliot was uncertain what ship was on fire: ‘Long after it was quite dark, perhaps about ten o’clock, we saw a ship down the line on fire - it was long before we could judge which party she belonged to - our share of the action was all but over, and we looked on with great suspense - at last, as the fire increased, we saw her three decks, which decided the point, as we had but two-deck ships. We wished to send boats down, but, on examination, had not one that could be made to swim, so shattered were they all. It was an awful sight.’42
On board the Swiftsure the Reverend Cooper Willyams had a close-up view:At three minutes past nine o’clock a fire was observed to have broken out in the cabin of L’Orient... The conflagration now began to rage with dreadful fury; still the French Admiral [Brueys] sustained the honour of his flag with heroic firmness; but at length a period was put to his exertions by a cannon ball, which cut him asunder: he had before received three desperate wounds, one on the head, two in his body, but could not be prevailed on to quit his station on the arm-chest. His Captain, Casa Bianca, fell by his side. Several of the officers and men seeing the impracticability of extinguishing the fire, which had now extended itself along the upper decks, and was flaming up the masts, jumped overboard; some supporting themselves on spars and pieces of wreck, others swimming with all their might to escape the dreaded catastrophe. Shot flying in all directions dashed many of them to pieces; others were picked up by the boats of the fleet, or dragged into the lower ports, of the nearest ships: the British sailors humanely stretched forth their hands to save a fallen enemy, though the battle at that moment raged with uncontrolled fury. The Swiftsure, that was anchored within half-pistol-shot of the larboa
rd bow of l’Orient, saved the lives of the commissary, first lieutenant, and ten men, who were drawn out of the water into the lower deck ports during the hottest part of the action. The situation of the Alexander and Swiftsure was perilous in the extreme. The expected explosion of such a ship as l’Orient, was to be dreaded as involving all around in certain destruction . . . The van of our fleet having finished for the present their part in the glorious struggle, had now a fine view of the two lines illumined by the flames of the ill-fated foe; the colours of the contending powers being plainly distinguished. The moon, which had risen, opposing her cold light to the warm glow of the fire beneath, added to the grand and solemn picture. The flames had by this time made such progress that an explosion was instantly expected, yet the enemy on the lower deck, either insensible of the danger that surrounded them, or impelled by the last paroxysms of despair and vengeance, continued to fire upon us.43