On the 8th of May, 1798, Nelson left Gibraltar with three ships of the line and five frigates, sailing at dusk to conceal his eastward course from watching eyes. Nine days later, cruising in the Gulf of Lyons, one of his frigates captured a French corvette from Toulon whose crew under examination disclosed that the famous General Bonaparte had arrived in the port from Paris, that thousands of troops were embarking and that fifteen battleships of the line were waiting to sail.
Had it not been for the usual confusion and corruption of the Revolutionary ports they would have sailed already. Nearly 40,000
picked troops, more than three hundred transports and fifty warships had been assembled. This huge armada was laden not only with horse, foot, artillery and stores of war but with engineers, architects and professors of every science and art, " from astronomers down to washerwomen." 1 It was equipped for colonisation as well as for conquest. It was commanded by a brilliant galaxy of talent, for under Bonaparte's triumphant banner sailed Kleber, Desaix, Davout, Lannes, Murat, Bessieres, Marmont and Junot, while Brueys, with Ganteaume, Decres and Villeneuve, directed the fleet.
On the 19th, the day of Lord Edward Fitzgerald's arrest, the main division of the expedition with Bonaparte aboard weighed from Toulon, coasting north-eastwards along the Riviera shore in the direction of Genoa to gather its consorts. Nelson did not see it sail for he was still some way from the port. On the following night his flagship, the Vanguard, suffered disaster, her newly commissioned crew losing main and mizen topmasts and foremast in a sudden gale. For two days she was battered by the waves off the Sardinian coast and was only saved from total wreck by the cool daring of Captain Ball of the Alexander, who took her in tow and persisted in spite of intense danger to his own ship in bringing her under the lee of San Pietro Island.
Here on May 24th, while British sailors and Irish patriots were fighting in the village streets of Meath and Kildare, Nelson wrote to his wife to tell her of his setback. " I firmly believe that it was the Almighty's goodness to check my consummate vanity." In four days of herculean labour, the Vanguard was rigged with jury-masts and made fit for sea. Then with his three battleships Nelson sailed for the secret rendezvous where his frigates, scattered by the storm, were to have awaited him. But when he reached it on June 4th the frigates were not there. Next day, still waiting, he received momentous tidings. For Hardy in the dispatch brig Mutine arriving from Cadiz brought news not only of the errant frigates which, despairing of the Vanguard's plight, had gone to Gibraltar, but of Nelson's appointment to the command of a fleet. The opportunity for which he had waited so long had arrived.
It had come at a strange moment. Bonaparte had sailed a fortnight before and had gone no one knew where. A few days after
1 Collingwood, 69.
Nelson had left Cadiz, St. Vincent had received Spencer's instructions about sending a fleet into the Mediterranean. Though the Spaniards, under orders from Paris, made as if about to put out of Cadiz, and though a concerted movement of United Irishmen threatened a new outbreak of mutiny in the Fleet, the old Admiral never hesitated. On May 19th he dispatched Hardy with Nelson's commission. On the 21st, without even waiting for the arrival of the promised reinforcements from England, he sent his ten finest battleships and captains—the elite of the Fleet—under Troubridge to join Nelson.
On June 6th Troubridge found his new commander. It was characteristic of Nelson that he refused to transfer his flag from the storm-battered Vanguard. His other two battleships were beyond the horizon searching for the newcomers. He did not wait for them but left the fifty-gun Leander to bid them follow. His orders were couched in the broadest terms. He was to pursue the Toulon fleet and attack it wherever found. Since Britain had no base in the Mediterranean and necessity dictated, he was not to stand on ceremony with neutrals. Should they out of terror of the French refuse to grant him supplies, he was to compel them at the cannon's mouth.
His instructions gave him little clue as to Bonaparte's destination. They mentioned Naples, Sicily, Portugal and Ireland, but made no reference to Egypt. He had no reliable information as to the strength of the French battle fleet though he believed it to consist of fifteen or sixteen ships of the line. He knew even less of its whereabouts. Having no frigates he could not comb the seas for intelligence. He had only the light of his intellect to follow and the strength of his will. " Be they bound to the Antipodes," he assured Spencer, " your Lordship may rely that I will not lose a moment in bringing them to action." 1
Following the course of the French he skirted the Genoese Riviera and Italian coast. The seas were strangely empty, for the French control of the Mediterranean had banished most of its former commerce. Day after day no sail appeared on the blue horizon. Once a convoy of distant Spanish merchantmen was sighted—plunder that might have made his captains rich with prize money and bought him some fine estate in England with white Jane Austen house and trim lawns and deer park. But his mind was
1 Mahan, Nelson, I, 327.
set on his purpose and he let them pass unmolested. He dared not lose an hour.
On June 14th, while far away the fate of Ireland trembled in the balance and the rebel leaders in the green-bannered camp on Vinegar Hill waited for the tidings of French sails, Nelson obtained second-hand news from a passing ship that ten days earlier a great fleet had been seen to the west of Sicily. He accordingly sent the Mutine ahead to Naples with a letter begging Sir William Hamilton, the British Ambassador, to urge the King and his English-born Prime Minister, Acton, to shake off their subservience to the dreaded Jacobins and strike while the iron was hot. On the 17th he arrived off the port to learn what he had already suspected: that the French had gone to Malta and were either about to attack or had already attacked that island stronghold.
In a fever of excitement he wrote again to Hamilton. The Neapolitan King, who hated the French, whose sister-in-law had died on the scaffold in Paris, who had secretly implored British aid, had a unique opportunity to strike a blow which should save his throne, liberate Italy and shatter the dark clouds that hung over Europe. The most formidable of French generals and the flower of the French army were at his mercy. For though Nelson had with him a matchless instrument, it could only do the work of a battle fleet. To destroy the enemy, if at Malta, he needed fireships, gunboats and bomb vessels; to annihilate their transports, if at sea, he must have frigates. The Court of the Two Sicilies, if it would take its courage in its hands, could supply both. " The King of Naples may now have part of the glory in destroying these pests of the human race; and the opportunity, once lost, may never be regained."
But though the timorous Italians sent good wishes and a secret promise of supplies, they would dare no more. Nelson must beat the French before they would stir, even though their craven inertness robbed him of all chance of victory and themselves of survival. Without wasting time, though still bombarding Hamilton with letters, he pressed through the Straits of Messina and, crowding on all sail, hurried southward down the coast of Sicily heading for Malta, where he hoped to catch the enemy at anchor. On the 22nd at the southern point of Sicily off Cape Passaro the Mutine fell in with a Genoese brig and learnt from her master that the French had captured Malta from the Knights of St. John—which was true —and—which was not true—had sailed again on the 16th eastward bound.
With the instinct of genius, though his instructions had given him no inkling of it, Nelson had already divined Bonaparte's intention. A few days earlier he had written to Spencer, " If they pass Sicily, I shall believe they are going on their scheme of possessing Alexandria and getting troops to India—a plan, concerted with Tippoo Sahib, by no means so difficult as might at first view be imagined." 1 His instructions cautioned him against allowing the French to get to the west of him lest they should slip through the Straits of Gibraltar. But he reckoned that with the prevailing westerly winds Bonaparte's vast and unwieldy armada had little chance of beating back to the Atlantic. Egypt, on the other hand, would be an easy run for it. If it le
ft Malta on the 16th, it must be already nearly at Alexandria.
Nelson therefore decided to act. He called a council of his captains, but the result was a foregone conclusion. Men like himself in the prime of life—their average age was under forty—they were little given to hesitation. They endorsed his opinion that all the probabilities—the seizure of Malta, the reported equipment of the expedition, the direction of the wind and the enemy's point of sailing—pointed to Bonaparte's having gone to Egypt. The safe course was for the British to await events where they were: guarding the two Sicilies, keeping the weather gauge and making sure that the enemy could not get to westward. A lesser man than Nelson, playing for his professional career and safety from official censure, would have taken it. But to have done so would have been to abandon that for which he had set out: the annihilation of the French fleet and transports. With the stake nothing less than the future of the world, he at once set course for Alexandria.
But the French had not sailed from Malta on June 16th. They had appeared off the island on the 9th and summoned its international custodians, the Knights of St. John, to surrender. The scene had been carefully set: the Maltese had no stomach for their
1 Mahan, Nelson, I, 328. "If they have concerted a plan with Tippoo Sahib to have vessels at Suez, three weeks at this season is a common passage to the Malabar coast, where our India possessions would be in great danger." —Ibid., I, 334.
rich and obese masters' cause, the island was swarming with French agents and traitors, and the Knights, comfortably set in their ways and undermined by subtle propaganda, were divided as to the advisability of resistance. After three days' discussion they surrendered, and Bonaparte, whose besieging armada would otherwise have fallen an easy prey for Nelson on the 22nd, took possession of Valetta—" the strongest place in Europe." Here he remained for nearly a week, helping himself to the accumulations of seven centuries of luxurious and cultured living. Then, leaving a strong garrison behind him to hold the strategic half-way house to France, he sailed on the 19th for Alexandria after making arrangements to dispose of the booty.
So it came about that Nelson's look-outs on June 22nd saw the sails of French frigates on the far horizon. But Nelson did not stop to investigate them, for he guessed that they could not belong to Bonaparte's main fleet which, according to his own information, had left Malta six days before. Had he possessed any frigates of his own, he would soon have discovered his error. But to have pursued the French with his battle fleet alone would have led him nowhere, for they would inevitably have lured him away from his real quarry, the great ships and transports. So instead he kept on his course. Shortly afterwards darkness fell, and during the night, which was hazy, the British line of battle, swift, compact and intent, passed unknowing through the converging track of the French expedition. The sound of the British minute guns firing through the mist caused the French Admiral to sheer away to the northward in the direction of Crete. Had dawn come half an hour earlier it would have revealed him and his helpless transports flagrante delicto. But by sunrise on the 23rd the last French sails were just below the horizon.
That was one of the decisive moments of the world's history. A long train of events had brought the two fleets to that place at that hour, of which the most important were Bonaparte's dynamic ambition and Nelson's zeal for duty. Had they clashed the result would have been certain: the elite and cadre of the Grande Armee would have found a watery grave seventeen years before Waterloo and its terrible chieftain would either have shared it or become a prisoner of the English. For superior though they were on paper— in size and gun power though not in numbers—the French battleships would have been no match on the open sea for the British. Old and shamefully neglected during their long-enforced sojourn in port, destitute of marine stores and crowded with useless soldiers, they could never have withstood those lean, stripped, storm-tested dogs of war from St. Vincent's fleet. Their crews, drawn from the lawless dregs of the Revolutionary ports, had had little training in gunnery or manoeuvre. Nelson's knew exactly what to do. Thanks to the Cabinet's bold resolution, to St. Vincent's discipline and self-abnegation, above all to Nelson's inspired fixity of purpose, the blundering, persistent patience of Pitt's England seemed on the afternoon of June 22nd, 1798, about to be rewarded. Bonaparte, epitomising the Revolutionary weakness for desperate gambling, had staked everything on Britain's not being able to send a fleet to the Mediterranean. And now at the moment that he was reaching out to grasp the prize of the Orient, the British Fleet crossed his path. . . .
Crossed it and vanished. The Corsican's star had proved too strong and bright for the clumsy purpose of England. But Bonaparte's fortune did not only he in his star. With all his genius, he could not understand why his Admirals trembled so at the thought of encountering a British fleet in mid-ocean. He had 40,000 soldiers with him: he had only to close and let them board the English corsairs. With England's many dangers nearer home there could not be many of them. He had never seen the destructive power of a British man-of-war in action: could not, battle-scarred though he was, conceive it. Not destiny—which had still to obliterate his bright name—but an error of Britain had saved him. Lack of frigates alone robbed Nelson of a victory that should have been Trafalgar and Waterloo in one. Again and again St. Vincent had pleaded with the Admiralty for more frigates: pleaded in vain. He had had to send his brilliant subordinate into the Mediterranean with too few, and these—now vainly seeking him—had failed him. Treasury parsimony, the unpreparedness of a peace-loving people, above all the needs of restless, ill-treated Ireland, had all contributed to this fatal flaw. It was to cost Britain and the civilised world seventeen more years of war, waste and destruction.
.···.·
So it came about that on the 23 rd the two fleets, having converged, passed out of reach of one another, Brueys with his mo-
mentous freight edging cumbrously northwards towards the greater security of Crete, Nelson with every inch of canvas spread direct for Alexandria hoping to catch Bonaparte before he could disembark. " We are proceeding," wrote Captain Saumarez of the Orion, " upon the merest conjecture only, and not on any positive information. Some days must now elapse before we can be relieved from our cruel suspense." 1 On the sixth day Nelson reached Alexandria and to his unspeakable chagrin found the roads empty. No one had seen anything of Bonaparte's armada, though the sleepy Turkish authorities were making languid preparations to repel it and threatening to decapitate any belligerent who dared to land in their country.2 Still believing in his false information that the French had left Malta on the 16th, it never occurred to Nelson that they had not yet covered the distance. Without waiting he at once put to sea again, steering for the Syrian coast in hope of news of a landing at Aleppo or an attack on the Dardanelles.
As early on June 29th the British sails dropped over the eastern horizon, watchers at Alexandria saw the French rise over the western. Hampered by its lack of skill, vast size and triangular course, Bonaparte's expedition, averaging only fifty miles a day, had taken just double the time of its pursuer. Once more, cruelly crippled by his lack of frigates, Nelson had missed an epoch-making victory by a few hours. With nearly four hundred vessels the French had crossed the Mediterranean and had not lost a ship. With the superb arrogance of their race and revolutionary creed they boasted that the British had not dared to measure their strength against them. But, though he had still no idea how narrow had been his escape, Bonaparte wasted no time before disembarking. On the 1st of July he landed and issued a grandiloquent proclamation in the style of Mahomet calling on the Faithful to rise against the Mamelukes. On the 5th he stormed Alexandria, putting all who resisted to the sword. A fortnight later, advancing at his habitual speed across the desert, he routed the main Egyptian army under the shadow of the Pyramids. On the 22nd he entered Cairo. Another nation had been overwhelmed.
Meanwhile Nelson, fretting with impatience and full of remorse " for the kingdom of the Two Sicilies," had sought in vain for his
2 Lloyd's Evening Post, 19th-21st Sept., 1798.
elusive quarry in the Gulf of Alexandretta. Thence, skirting the shores of Crete, he beat back against westerly winds to Syracuse. Years later he told Troubridge that in his mortification he believed he had almost died through swelling of the vessels of the heart. To St. Vincent, to whom he wrote to ease his mind, he declared that the only valid objection he could conceive against the course he had taken was that he should not have gone such a long voyage without more certain information. " My answer is ready—* Who was I to get it from? '... Was I to wait patiently till I heard certain accounts ? If Egypt was their object, before I could hear of them they would have been in India. To do nothing, I felt, was disgraceful: therefore I made use of my understanding and by it I ought to stand or fall. I am before your Lordship's judgment (which in the present case I feel is the tribunal of my country) and if under all the circumstances it is decided that I am wrong, I ought, for the sake of the country, to be superseded."
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