by Roy Adkins
Despite all the efforts of the British Navy, the French flotilla had now grown so large that it could no longer be accommodated within the harbour area at Boulogne and was spreading out into the adjacent area of sea, where the vessels were potentially more vulnerable to attack. Such was the determination to stop the invasion fleet in its tracks that almost any scheme was considered, including what came to be known as ‘stone ships’. As Crawford explained, ‘the harbour of Boulogne is dry at low-water, the entrance to it being shoal and narrow, and liable to be choked or obstructed by the accumulation of sand, which the north-west winds are constantly throwing in. To prevent this obstruction, the little river Liane, which flows through the harbour, was carefully kept free, and also, as at Dieppe, dammed up, having a sluice, which, when opened at low-water, suffered the whole river to rush with such force, that it swept everything before it, and kept the harbour and the channel leading to it perfectly clear.’21 It seemed a simple matter to sink some ships laden with stone at the entrance to the harbour and so render the port of Boulogne totally useless. Captain Edward Owen of the Immortalité was given charge of the operation, and Crawford noted that three vessels were prepared which were ‘old three-masted merchant-ships, in each of whose holds was built a piece of masonry, well cemented, and having the stones cramped together with iron, so as to render the whole mass more solid and durable’.22 There was an obvious flaw - even if the ships could be sunk in exactly the right position, they would be uncovered at low tide and the French could walk out to them from the shore.
Crawford was scathing in his assessment of the plan, which he felt was ill-conceived and naive:I am not prepared to say what might have been the opinion of Captain Owen with regard to the scheme; but this I know full well, that he spared no pains to put it into execution . . . But although our captain could effect much, he could not render the elements propitious, and after several abortive attempts to place the ships in a fitting situation for scuttling, which lasted a full month, and was constantly baffled by calms and contrary winds, the whole plan was abandoned. It is difficult to comprehend how any men, much less men supposed to be capable of managing the affairs of this great nation, unless stunned and bewildered by the projects of the arch-enemy, and his threats of invasion, could incur an expense so considerable, and adopt a scheme which, if practicable in the execution, might be useless and inoperative in a few tides. For what more easy than to place a few barrels of gunpowder under those masses of stone at low-water, and blow them to pieces, when, at the next tide, the little ‘Liane’ would flow as uninterruptedly as heretofore into the ocean.23
As well as blockading and harassing the French, the British ships off the Channel coast near Boulogne were also engaged in intelligence-gathering and espionage, and Crawford recorded one episode that involved his own vessel:We again proceeded off Boulogne, taking with us a gentleman, whom, as his name never transpired, I must still designate by the appellation of ‘Mr Nobody’, the cognomen by which alone he was known to the midshipmen. During the fortnight that this gentleman passed on board the Immortalité she was kept constantly close in shore, whenever the state of the tide and weather would permit, in order to give him an opportunity of pursuing certain researches upon which he seemed intent, and which, to give him his due praise, he did with the greatest earnestness and coolness, unruffled and undisturbed by the showers of shot and shells that fell around the ship, splashing the water about her at every instant. The object of this scrutiny seemed to be to ascertain, as correctly as he could, the fortifications around Boulogne, and the position and bearings of the different batteries which faced the sea, and also the exact distance at which the flotilla in the roads was anchored from the shore.24
Naval officers did not generally welcome being at the disposal of members of the Secret Service, and on this occasion, although the mission appeared successful, Crawford recalled that ‘when these purposes were accomplished, I conclude to his satisfaction, we ran back to the Downs34, where he was landed, I confess to my no small satisfaction, and, I suspect, without regret by any one on board, for his presence imposed a load of additional trouble on the ship, besides making her serve every day, whilst he was on board, as a target for our friends to amuse themselves by practising at’.25
The man Crawford only knew as ‘Mr Nobody’ was not the only secret agent at work along the French coast, and Sir Sidney Smith’s friend, Captain John Wesley Wright, was particularly active. Having left Paris without being recognised just before the renewal of war with France in May 1803, Wright continued his espionage work, gaining intelligence about Napoleon’s proposed invasion and assisting Royalist agents in their conspiracy to assassinate Napoleon and restore the Bourbon monarchy. Not everybody in the Admiralty supported Wright’s hazardous work, especially when he by-passed official channels and failed to show sufficient respect for his superior officers. As early as September 1803 Sir Thomas Troubridge, an Admiralty commissioner who had been at the Battle of the Nile, grumbled to Admiral Lord Keith that ‘Captain Wright is talking large about being sacrificed, that he was nearly taken by our not giving him a sufficient force. Now it so happened that we knew nothing of Captain Wright being in the [gun-brig] Basilisk.’26
Despite his own antagonism towards Wright, Lord Keith had only the day before informed the captain of the Speculator that ‘Captain John Wright of H.M. Navy is employed on a secret and delicate service, and I have thought fit that he should embark in H.M. armed lugger under your command; you are hereby required and directed to receive Captain Wright on board and to proceed with him from place to place as he may require, furnishing him with boats and chosen men for the accomplishment of hisobject, vigilantly attending to his safety and protection, and that of any persons who may be with him; and keeping your vessel in constant state of preparation for resisting any attack that the enemy may make upon you.’27 Doubtless to many men in the Speculator, they were carrying several ‘Mr Nobodies’.
Over the following months Wright’s operations took him along much of the northern coastline of France, which led him to complain about the lack of British vessels keeping a close watch. In December John Markham, also of the Admiralty, wrote to Lord Keith that ‘Captain Wright writes to say that he has been some days on the enemy’s coast and met their boats coasting almost every night, and never saw one of our cruisers’28, and in March 1804 Markham again wrote to Keith that ‘As to Capt. W[right] he has long since given out that he is continually among the enemy flotilla and on their coast and that you have nothing there to stop them.’29 This did not endear Wright to the officers responsible, who were struggling to bring the blockade up to maximum efficiency with limited resources after the navy establishment had been run down during the peace.
On several occasions Wright secretly landed Royalist agents. These included the Breton General Georges Cadoudal, who had been implicated in the first attempt to assassinate Napoleon nearly three years earlier, and General Jean-Charles Pichegru, who met General Victor Moreau in Paris to finalise the new plans to overthrow Napoleon. It emerged that Moreau was willing to depose Napoleon but not install a monarchy, which threw the conspiracy into confusion. The plot began to leak out, and over 350 arrests were made, including Moreau and Pichegru in February 1804 and Cadoudal in March - they were all imprisoned in the Temple. Napoleon was convinced that the Duke d’Enghien, a contender for the royal throne, was involved. On his orders, d’Enghien was kidnapped from his home just beyond the French border at Ettenheim in the state of Baden and was brought to the castle of Vincennes outside Paris. After a peremptory trial he was shot dead on 21 March and buried in a shallow grave in the dry moat. The murder of d’Enghien caused horror throughout France and the rest of Europe. The bloodshed did not cease, because a fortnight later Pichegru was murdered in the Temple prison, though it was reported as suicide by strangulation.
In mid-March 1804, just before these murders, Captain Wright headed for the Quiberon Bay area of Brittany in the Vincejo, a brig armed with sixteen 18-pounder
carronades. Here he spent some weeks ‘without a pilot, within the enemy’s islands, in the mouths of their rivers, in the presence of an extremely superior force, continually in motion’.30 He was constantly harrassing the enemy and obtaining information, but disaster struck in May when the Vincejo was blown by an Atlantic gale into the Gulf of Morbihan, only for the wind to die down, leaving the brig defenceless just off Port Navalo. Several French gunboats began a bombardment, forcing Wright to surrender after two hours of fierce fighting.
Initially he and his crew were rowed upstream to the town of Auray, with the seamen taken to the prison and the officers to houses guarded by gendarmes. Having been recognised by a former officer in Egypt, now the Prefect of the Department of Morbihan, Wright was sent after a few days to Paris in case he could provide useful information on ‘the frightful Conspiracy which has struck all France with alarm’. 31 Just before leaving he was unexpectedly presented with a letter by the mayor of the town, in front of several other dignitaries, in which they thanked him for his immense kindness for past actions towards French citizens: ‘Yes, sir, we will never forget that it was thanks to your kind concern that Citizen Thevenard, son of the Maritime Prefect of the port of Lorient, and the crews of two French boats condemned at Rhodes to hard labour, obtained their release; even more recently in cruising our area, we have learned with feeling that you released fathers of families, old men and children that fate of war had made fall into your hands.’32
Wright related that ‘conducted by two soldiers, one by my side in the carriage, and the other upon the coach-box, I arrived in ten days’ painful journey, accompanied by my little nephew [ John Rogerson Wright] and my servant . . . the agitation of the journey had extended the inflammation of my wound to the bladder’.33 He was taken to the Temple, from which he had escaped six years previously, and was subjected to repeated interrogations about landing the Royalist agents. Moreau and Cadoudal were also still in the prison, and towards the end of May they and many others were put on trial. On the sixth day Wright was summoned to the court as a witness, but refused to answer any questions:The president, calling me by name, enjoined in a certain formula, to answer all the questions that would be asked me, without partiality, hatred, or fear. I replied, in French, that I had to observe, in the first place, that military men knew no fear; that I was a British prisoner of war; that I had surrendered by capitulation, after an action with a very superior force; and knowing my duty to my King, and to my Country, whom I loved, and to whose service I had devoted myself from my youth; and owing no account of my public services to any authority but my own government, I would not answer any one of the questions that might be put to me.34
There was much popular support for Moreau, who was sentenced to two years in prison, but was instead banished to America. Cadoudal was guillotined, along with several other conspirators, on 25 June.
As a spy, Wright knew he was also in danger, and William Dillon, imprisoned at Verdun, commented that ‘the very circumstance of keeping him in prison whilst his officers were allowed their parole had a most suspicious appearance’.35 He added that Wright ‘was locked up in the same apartments he had formerly occupied [with Sidney Smith], and in examining the locality he found some files which had been hidden by him, and with which he intended to sever the bars of his window’.36 Several other crew members of the Vincejo were initially taken to the Temple, but were later marched to prisons in eastern France - the officers went to Verdun. Before they left him Wright warned that nothing would induce him to take his own life and ‘therefore, if you hear of my death, depend upon it I shall have been murdered. I make this statement to you that you may repeat it should you hear of my having quitted this life.’37
Sir Sidney Smith himself was still patrolling off northern France and the Dutch coast, gathering very detailed intelligence about the military build-up in the area. In March 1804 he reported:An account from Ostend . . . [is] as follows: One hundred luggers, all new, adapted for rowing, with two guns, one fore and the other aft; one hundred and forty large gaff schuyts, from about 100 to 120 tons; two hundred and sixty of smaller sort, different sizes, which makes five hundred; but exceed that number. At the west part a large camp, and another at the east side of the tower, which consists of twenty-one thousand men: they have a large quantity of artillery in the camp . . . The new harbour is full of schuyts, taken in requisition, adapted for carrying horses. The troops are much thinned on the island, there being very few in the barracks: on the island of Schowen at present there are about one thousand Dutch troops, burghers excepted, and hardly any batteries round it.38
Detailed reports concerning the preparations for the invasion of Britain continued to flow from the ships under Smith’s command, but he was frustrated at not being able to effectively attack and harass the vessels about which he reported, because they were protected by the shallow coastal waters. Warships could not sail close enough to destroy many of them, and the only craft that were effective were gunboats, but Smith had very few of these at his disposal. Worn down by the constant coastal vigil, Smith’s health deteriorated and he was advised to take shore leave, so in May 1804 he returned to England. During his leave he brooded about the problems of warfare in the shallow waters off the North Sea coast of the Low Countries, and designed a shallow-draught landing craft based on descriptions of catamarans that were brought back by South Seas explorers such as Captain Cook. The main difficulty was transporting field guns ashore to support soldiers attacking the ports, and prototypes of Smith’s designs were tested and found to solve this problem. As a result the Admiralty ordered two versions to be built: one capable of carrying a field gun and fifty soldiers that was 48 feet long, and another twice that length, both of which could float in 18 inches of water.
It would take time to build a sufficient number of landing craft to be effective, and so short-term solutions were continually considered, particularly when in August information from a secret agent in France confirmed that the invasion of Britain and Ireland was imminent. By now British newspapers were giving a running commentary on events in the Channel whenever reports of naval actions off the French coast were brought by ships returning for repairs and supplies. The proximity of the fighting greatly reduced the usual time-lag caused by the slowness of communications, so that even newspapers that appeared only once a week could keep pace. Accounts from the blockade vessels augmented the comments from actual observers on the Kent coast who often had a good view of what was happening.
The French had now perfected their defences of Boulogne, but ironically their invasion plans were in disarray. Admiral Latouche-Tréville at Toulon, who was in overall command, died suddenly on 19 August, and it proved difficult to find a replacement. After several candidates were considered, the officer eventually chosen was Vice-Admiral Pierre-Charles de Villeneuve, who had escaped from the Battle of the Nile. The British ships patrolling off the port of Boulogne continued their vigil, and Midshipman Crawford of the Immortalité reported:Whenever the state of the weather permitted, a strong division of the [French] flotilla was constantly anchored outside the harbour . . . to give regular exercise to their crews, as [well as] to brave [confront] and set the English squadron at defiance. When the tide suited they sometimes got under way, and manoeuvred, but always under the protection of their formidable batteries. A grand attack [by the British], which had been maturing for some weeks, against this part of the flotilla was ready to be put into execution in the beginning of October, the general management and conduct of which was intrusted to Sir Home Popham.39
This was originally planned as a surprise attack in September, but for some reason Lord Keith postponed it until October, much to Crawford’s amazement: ‘For several days prior to the attack 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.’40
The purpose of the attack was to de
stroy as much of the invasion flotilla as possible, and Crawford commented that the British force included ‘sloop-rigged vessels, prepared as fire, or rather explosion vessels, the number of which I forget, but 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. ’41 The attack went ahead on the evening of 3 October, but Keith’s inept approach had given the enemy all the warning they needed, as Crawford complained:The French (how could they be otherwise?) were perfectly awake to all that was going forward. The [invasion] flotilla had been moved as near to the beach as it could anchor with safety; and in addition to the precaution of mooring a boat a-head of each vessel to arrest anything floating in its progress towards the flotilla, they had alarm boats, and pinnaces rowing guard round the whole; our leading boats were, therefore, soon descried. The enemy’s sentinels hailed and discharged their muskets nearly at the same moment; and long before the carcasses could be set adrift, the whole bay was lit up by vivid flashes of musketry that was soon increased to almost noonday brightness by a blaze of artillery from the flotilla and batteries, which continued to pour heavy, though happily with few exceptions, harmless showers of grape [shot] in the direction of our boats.42