by John Sugden
It was gruelling, wintry work. On 8 January the first of six days of gales, lashing rain and awesome seas savaged the ships. ‘Such a series of bad weather I never experienced,’ observed a sodden Nelson. But while his ships were driven a little to leeward they kept their order and station. Indeed, the Corsican campaign was turning Agamemnon into the finest battleship in the Mediterranean, honing its seamanship and gunnery to perfection in daily and difficult encounters. When Hood’s fleet eventually joined him towards the end of the month Nelson’s men demonstrated their worth in another burst of blustering gales. On the 27th, when even such a seasoned blockader as the Leda parted company under signals of distress, Nelson noted in his journal the ‘appearance’ of a storm. ‘Made the ship as snug as possible,’ he wrote. ‘All night it blew such a gale as is very seldom felt. Neither canvas [n]or rope could stand it. All our sails blew in pieces. Made a great deal of water. A most amazing heavy sea. The ship under bare poles.’ When the tempest peaked it drove every ship in the fleet off the station bar two – a frigate and the Agamemnon. Nelson fell back to Leghorn for brief repairs, but must have been satisfied that the watch had been maintained in such difficult circumstances.6
Day in, day out Nelson’s ships stuck to their task, fair weather or foul, though they had their reverses. On the morning of 12 January two of the French warships, the Melpomene and Le Mignonne, broke out of St Fiorenzo and fought their way southwest into Calvi, exchanging shots with the Leda and Meleager as they did so. The French had only succeeded in shifting strength from one port to another but Nelson was disappointed. ‘I had so closely blockaded Calvi that they must have surrendered to me at discretion,’ he complained. ‘Not a vessel before got in for the six weeks I have been stationed here. This supply will keep them a week or two longer.’ Nelson exaggerated the effect of his blockade but not entirely, and Hood informed superiors that ‘repeated information’ testified that provisions in Corsica were in short supply.7
Also weighing on Nelson’s mind were disturbing rumours that the eighty-gun Duquesne and a dozen small warships and twelve thousand men were planning to dash from Nice to relieve the beleaguered Corsican garrisons. Fortunately, his squadron only had to brush with the interfering French forces from Nice once. On 17 January, Nelson sent the Leda and Amphitrite in chase of a French warship and galley trying to get into Calvi with flour and other supplies. The wind dropped, and the galley’s sweeps pulled her inshore and out of gunshot, but as the breeze improved the British worked so close to the warship, L’Armée de Italie of eighteen guns and swivels, that her crew set her on fire and jumped over the side. The British lowered boats, threw hawsers onto the stricken craft and towed it into deeper water, but the fire could not be extinguished and she was run upon a reef to burn.8
Reluctant to confine his attention to shipping, Nelson also began to launch amphibious raids upon French positions ashore. A tip-off that four hundred sacks of flour were stored at the only mill situated near St Fiorenzo led him to the first of these operations on 21 January. Nelson arrived offshore the previous evening with the Lowestoffe and the Meleager frigates in company and the Fortune gunboat. During the night the ships were in danger of being wrecked upon the rocky coast by large seas, but at six in the morning one hundred and twenty seamen and sailors were rowed to a landing place under the cover of the gunboat. A sputtering opposition was dispersed, and up to a thousand French regulars rushed by sea and land from St Fiorenzo and Bastia arrived too late. Nelson’s raiders had burned the watermill, thrown the flour into the sea and gone. In addition the British also intercepted a pair of tartans trying to ship provisions, and two days later destroyed a third vessel.9
Nelson’s operations were small-scale but significant, fine-tuning the skills of the British crews, withering the resources of the French and gathering intelligence for Hood. When the task force itself arrived on 25 January it was immediately scattered by the gales and blown towards Elba, and not until 7 February did fourteen hundred British soldiers begin splashing ashore in Mortella Bay at St Fiorenzo. The landings, supervised by Linzee, were clumsily made, according to Nelson. ‘Expedition ought to be the universal word and deed,’ he grumbled. Nevertheless, a mixed force of soldiers and sailors were soon pulling guns into place to attack the forts at St Fiorenzo while the fleet occupied the bay.10
The arrival of the fleet with large numbers of senior officers threatened Nelson’s independence, but Hood had been impressed by his services and immediately transferred his small squadron to Bastia. When St Fiorenzo fell Hood intended to advance upon Bastia, a much stronger position, and once again Nelson would prime the assault with a preliminary blockade.
Thrilled to be free of moribund superiors, the captain of the Agamemnon happily embraced his new duties. As the pulse of his life quickened with renewed purpose the last lingering charms of domesticity slipped gently into the background. The campaign generated the excitement he loved and put him at the epicentre of the naval war in the Mediterranean, opening a way to martial glory. ‘We are still in the busy scene of war,’ he told his uncle, ‘a situation in which I own I feel pleasure, more especially as all my actions have given great satisfaction to my commander-in-chief.’11
2
On the eastern coast of Corsica, at the foot of the mountainous Cape Corse peninsula jutting confidently northwards into the sea, was Bastia. It was a large town in those days, the largest in the island, containing more than eight thousand citizens, and until recently had been the Corsican capital. Nevertheless, when Nelson first gave Bastia his close attention it was unusually well stocked with corn, animals and the coal needed to heat shot because it was close to supplies in Italy. Even with British cruisers on the prowl, it was comparatively easy for small boats to run to Bastia from the neutral islands of Elba and Capraia.
Moreover, Bastia was formidably fortified. A high wall skirted the sea, punctured with twenty or more embrasures bristling with guns. Inside the harbour, behind a fine mole, nestled La Flêche, the corvette from the squadron Nelson had engaged off Sardinia, but now stripped of her cannons to strengthen the batteries ashore. The entrance to the harbour was relatively narrow, passing between a lighthouse at the end of the mole on the right and an ancient citadel with its keep on the left, the latter mounting a formidable array of artillery. As Captain Nelson’s glass swept above the lines of white houses to the low hills between the rear of the town and the mountains towering grandly behind, he also picked out four stone forts – Monte Sorrato, Lacroix, Gaetano and Straforelle, small, clumsily constructed, but for all that of considerable strength. Above those he counted three more works, perched precariously on the heights. Closer to the sea front, the approach to the town in the north was guarded by an appreciable redoubt, Camp de Cabanelle, while south of Bastia, close to malarial swamps stood a command post, Camp St Michel, supported by new batteries. If these fortifications were resolutely defended they would not be overcome without difficulty. Nelson consoled himself with a notion that only about four hundred regulars and sixteen hundred irregulars manned the town’s defences, and that provisions and supplies were daily being eroded by his blockade.12
In addition to the garrison at Bastia the French had small forces spotted about the area, especially at Rogliano, commanding Cape Corse. It seemed obvious to Captain Nelson that if the local peasantry could be convinced that the balance of power had changed and their former French masters were impotent, it would be possible to isolate the smaller enemy detachments and compel them to withdraw. In addition to his war on supplies, therefore, he encouraged resistance against the French at every point. He loosed the frigates Lowestoffe, Tartar, L’Aigle, Romulus and Dido, and Tysiphone sloop and the Fox cutter upon the enemy supply lines, while the Agamemnon concentrated upon lightning raids on outlying enemy posts, shredding the fringes of French control and encouraging the peasantry. These attacks attract little comment today, but it was the experience of numerous small successes that made the Agamemnon a crack force. The constant manipulation o
f the ship about a treacherous coastline, the lowering and raising of boats, the sallies ashore, the trust and reliance that developed in the company as each man learned his part, the solidarity forged in shared dangers, and the facility with which guns and sails were handled, all accrued skill, resolution and know-how that no French ship could achieve sitting in port.13
Nelson’s new campaign opened at the small port of Centuri. He had heard that a Genoese vessel seized by the Lowestoffe in January, but subsequently lost in the gales, had fallen into the hands of the French at Centuri. Several wine vessels were also hiding in the port, ready to sail for St Fiorenzo. On 5 February the Agamemnon, Lowestoffe (Captain William Wolseley), L’Aigle (Captain Samuel Hood) and Romulus (Captain John Sutton) blocked the entrance of Centuri, and a party of marines went ashore. The French were scattered, and four polacres destroyed in the harbour, but Nelson ordered that no inhabitants of the town were to be plundered or molested. This was a war of liberation, not conquest, and the support of the people was needed if Britain was ever to rule Corsica.
Next was Rogliano at the extremity of Cape Corse, an important town because of its ability to monitor the movement of ships around the north of the island. The French had installed a small garrison in an old castle and raised national colours, but on the morning of 8 February the Agamemnon and the Tartar anchored off the mole head and trained their broadsides upon the town. Here Nelson was united for the first time in battle with Thomas Francis Fremantle of the Tartar, destined to become one of his most famous captains and already displaying exceptional ability. Two days earlier the Tartar and the Fox had driven a vessel aground near Bastia, but had been prevented from taking possession by heavy fire from ashore; now Fremantle was with his commanding officer, eager to inflict another blow. Drums beat the men to their quarters and a flag of truce went ashore. Nelson urged the French commandant to declare for the monarchy, but the reply was defiant and at ten-thirty the captain personally led his boats towards the mole. Making almost no resistance, the French fled to adjacent hilltops, from which they glared banefully while Nelson secured the town and with his own hand struck the enemy colours. A liberty tree the French had planted in the middle of the town was cut down, a storehouse destroyed and eight vessels and five hundred tons of wine found at the mole set on fire. Three other ships, one of them intercepted on its way in, were removed as prizes.
The French soon marched back into Rogliano, but its capture sent a ripple of excitement through the Cape Corse peninsula. Alert to the propaganda value of his coup, Nelson wrote of it to Paoli, while on 18 February a group of Corsicans soliciting muskets and ammunition admitted to the captain that they had only swung over ‘since the day you took Maginaggio [Rogliano]’. Of course, Nelson was not entirely green. ‘They may be good friends if it is their interest to be so,’ he told Hood, ‘but I am rather inclined to believe they will always cry, ‘Long live the conqueror!’ He knew that in wars of this kind a belief in victory was essential, and his raids were suggesting that the French could neither defend themselves nor their supporters.14
The Agamemnon’s next foray took her eastwards to the island of Capraia, a possession of the neutral state of Genoa but one habitually used by French privateers and supply vessels. On 12 February ‘Mr Andrews’ (now Horatio’s first choice for dangerous excursions) explored the craggy coves and inlets with a boat and gunboat. Inside one inlet was a French dispatch boat, with many of its men, including a few soldiers, secreted ashore with levelled muskets. They opened fire as the British approached, wounding one of Andrews’s men. Hearing the shooting, Nelson put forty redcoats into a pinnace and the Fox cutter and personally led them inshore, aided among others by young Midshipman Hoste. The British forced their way into the cove against a splatter of musketry, replying with grape and small-arms fire of their own. Unable to outflank the French boat, which was buttressed between steep, rocky shores, Nelson made a head-on attack and captured it by boarding. The action lasted six hours and cost Nelson as many men wounded, but the prize, he discovered, could sail ‘like the wind’ and seemed likely to fetch a reasonable sum in Leghorn. On this occasion Lord Hood was less impressed. Such raids, he warned Nelson, violated neutral territory.15
The next day Nelson intercepted a Genoese ship taking corn to Corsica, and then, after embarking supplies at Leghorn and communicating with the fleet, he arrived off L’Avisena, five miles north of Bastia, on 19 February. Paoli had reported a Ragusan ship unloading at the town, and Nelson and Fremantle were there to investigate. Again Nelson headed the shore party, supported this time by Lieutenant Andrews and Captain Clark of the 69th Regiment. Only about sixty soldiers were needed to seize the town, but the Ragusan had gone. Nelson therefore marched his men two miles south to the small town of Miomo, where they drove a weak French detachment from a tower and raised English colours over it. Once more local inhabitants crowded around excitedly, showing Nelson Paoli’s portrait as proof of their loyalty to the partisans. ‘All the people up to the walls of Bastia had declared for us,’ Nelson was told by one peasant, ‘and that from our landing the French were prevented from coming with their gun boats and troops and burning all the revolted [rebelling] villages.’ It was a mood that needed more than example to grow, and two days later Nelson landed four hundred muskets with ammunition for the Cape Corse partisans.16
Watching his company develop their skills and confidence made Nelson increasingly keen to broadcast its exploits, and of course to advertise his own prowess. He was beginning to understand that one way of spreading recognition was to maintain an active correspondence, apprising important parties of his work and spreading his interpretation of events. In this case the recipient was John Udny, the British consul at Leghorn. After reading of the latest successes of the Agamemnon, Udny wrote that Nelson was ‘the most active of His Majesty’s commanders in these seas where none are idle’.17
But the pace of the wider campaign was quickening. The night Nelson took Miomo, he saw a fiery glow to the west, blazing red in the clear night sky over St Fiorenzo, some twelve miles away across the narrow neck of the Cape Corse peninsula. He had a good idea what it was. The French frigates La Fortunée and La Minerve had been trapped in St Fiorenzo ever since their skirmish with Agamemnon the previous October, and now they were most likely on fire. That meant Hood had taken the town. In fact, the port had fallen the day before Nelson captured Miomo, but rather than surrender the French survivors had fallen back across the isthmus towards Bastia. One of the captured warships, La Fortunée, was destroyed, the other taken into British service. As Nelson saw those distant flames over St Fiorenzo, he knew that Bastia would be next.
The expectation was evident in a letter Nelson wrote to Hood the same day, in which he assessed the defences of Bastia and suggested that a thousand soldiers would be needed to take the town, besides seamen and Corsican partisans. Soon afterwards he received official word of the fall of St Fiorenzo, and sailed for Bastia, determined to find places suitable for landing men and to frustrate the enemy’s preparations to meet the inevitable attack.18
The twenty-third of February found the Agamemnon, Romulus and Tartar testing Bastia’s fortifications. They closed in on a new battery of six guns that the French were feverishly throwing up a mile south of the town, close to a command post. The ships found their range with their third shot, drove the French artillerists from their posts and damaged the battery, but without enough soldiers to land Nelson was unable to finish the job. Instead he moved north, leading his diminutive force in line-ahead formation past the formidable frontal defences of the town. As he did so the captain ordered his main topsail to be backed to reduce the Agamemnon’s speed and opened fire. For an hour and a half the ships and shore batteries hammered at each other, filling the air with black smoke. Nelson claimed that his ships hit two vessels at the mole, knocked down some houses and part of the mole wall, caused an explosion about the southeastern battery, and set fascines on fire. He also heard that considerable panic had ensued and that se
veral defenders had been killed.
At the same time Nelson’s squadron was unequal to a protracted duel with the shore batteries and all three ships were damaged before they broke off the fight. The Tartar’s mainsail was ripped and part of a cabin smashed in, while the Romulus had her mainsail set on fire by red-hot shot and took a beating about the bowsprit and quarter gallery. Indeed, Captain John Sutton had had enough. The next day Fremantle found him ranting about the damage to the Romulus and insisting on returning to port for repairs. Sutton’s readiness to quit disappointed Nelson, but he let him go. As he explained to Fremantle, he would rather not have an officer who wanted to be somewhere else.
Nothing Nelson saw suggested that any time should be wasted making a general assault on Bastia, especially as the garrison was daily strengthening its fortifications. The influx of the soldiers expelled from St Fiorenzo was both a boon and an embarrassment to Bastia. On the one hand it increased the numbers of the defenders to some five thousand men, most from the 26th and 52nd regiments of the French line, battalions of the Bouches du Rhône and the departmental regiment of Aveyron, and detachments of Corsican volunteers. On the other hand the refugees exacerbated supply problems. Nelson’s blockade had reduced the French in St Fiorenzo to about a month’s provisions. Their defeat had cost them lives, including a company of regulars almost wiped out, but equally artillery, ammunition and food, abandoned to the British in the precipitate flight. The retreating soldiers, packing into Bastia, created temporary confusion and ultimately decisive shortages of food and ammunition.