Nelson

by John Sugden

  The position of Calvi was majestic and intimidating. To the west jutted the rugged Cape Revellata, while north and east the town confronted a large but shallow bay. Towards the sea Calvi’s defences were formidable, with large granite walls and a powerful citadel making any frontal attack difficult in the extreme. When Stuart and Nelson arrived the small harbour was also guarded by a gunboat and the Melpomene and Le Mignonne, the last surviving frigates from the squadron that had skirmished with Nelson the previous year. More substantially, the town was backed against steep, jagged peaks, deemed to be almost inaccessible, supported by a string of back-door forts and batteries that swept around the town to the west and southwest and covered the land approaches from the rear.

  The most northerly of these rearguard fortifications was Fort San Francesco, where three eighteen- or twenty-four-pounders glinted ominously from a rock that the sea battered endlessly below. The most important was Fort Mozzello further south. Perhaps six hundred and fifty yards west of Calvi, Fort Mozzello was a pentagon, with strong stone-casemated faces mounting ten guns (variously described as eights, eighteens and twenty-fours) enclosing a central four-gun cavalier and bombproof that commanded views of both land and sea. To its right, a little north, the Mozzello was supported by an old tower with a howitzer and the Fountain battery, a fascine work of six eighteens sitting on the shoulder of a hill. On a steep rock to the left of Fort Mozzello, and about 2,200 yards to the southwest of Calvi, stood Fort Mollinochesco, its eighteen-pounder and four or five smaller guns watching protectively over the town’s communications with the interior.

  In terms of manpower Calvi was much weaker than Bastia. It quartered a battalion of light infantry, several companies of Provençal grenadiers, and the crews of a pair of frigates, in all about twelve hundred defenders. Far more than their counterparts in Bastia, they started the siege short of ammunition and food, and they had few gunners. Nevertheless, their morale remained good, and the natural defences of their mountain fastness led some to consider it almost impregnable.13

  The Lowestoffe, L’Aigle and other ships were hovering off Calvi harbour when the task force arrived, but Nelson’s ships passed on in search of a landing place. Three or four miles to the southwest they came upon Port Agro on 17 June. It was a forbidding sight, sharp-featured and dangerous to shipping, but there was no ready alternative. The ‘port’ was nothing more than the stubby, narrow outfall of a ravine that cut steeply through impressive cliffs rising almost sheer from the sea. There was no anchorage for ships, and sunken rocks rose black and menacing from the deeps offshore. With the summer winds blowing and a powerful swell rushing upon the reefs and bluffs, it was a treacherous landfall. Nelson had to keep his ships far out so his boats – longboats loaded with soldiers, artillery and equipment, towed by rowing boats – struggled for a mile to reach the inhospitable entrance to Port Agro. In miserable weather they passed inside, weaving between sharp volcanic rocks of red and yellow for another three hundred yards or so before grinding into the shallows. Supervised by Captain Cooke, one of the heroes of St Fiorenzo, the men stepped onto a rocky beach hemmed in by crags and slogged up a gruelling, boulder-strewn incline that led to a plateau a few hundred feet above. It was a grim place to land more than sixteen hundred men, but all the redcoats were ashore early in the morning of 19 June, along with bulky guns, tent equipment and stores manhandled through a heavy surf.14

  Stuart and Nelson had made a brave decision. Instead of attacking Calvi from the waterfront, and confronting its powerful frontal defences, they were coming from behind, landing at Port Agro and hauling their guns across the mountains to attack the rear of the town. The move completely wrong-footed the French, who regarded the route as impracticable. In a council of war on 23 March an engineer told their commander, Major General Raphaël Casabianca, that guns could not be dragged over such ground, and so completely was he believed that not even a corporal’s guard stood watch at Port Agro.

  Despite the mountains speed was important to the task force. If the mistakes of Bastia were not to be repeated, the British had to advance rapidly before the French could fully prepare or secure strategic ground. Shifting the guns, ammunition and stores was a terrific toil, and fell originally to the seamen. About two hundred and fifty followed the redcoats ashore, almost half from the Agamemnon, and another fifty under Captains Serocold and Hallowell joined five days later. Nelson ordered his men to throw up a makeshift camp on the beach, and set them to heaving the artillery, ammunition and stores up the ravine and two more torturous miles to the Madonna, a hilltop shrine among the La Macarona rocks just southwest of the town’s perimeter defences. As if to punish their heresy the heavens opened during the first night, and the men struggled over slippery rocks with thunder crashing above and lightning stabbing through a black sky. ‘Dragging cannon up steep mountains and carrying shot and shells has been our constant employment,’ Nelson scribbled to Fanny.15

  In his journal Nelson implied that this was wholly the work of his sailors, but such was not the case. The gradients sometimes ran at forty-five degrees, and almost immediately progress became insufferably slow. Hudson Lowe, destined for fame as Napoleon’s jailer but at the time a young army officer, gleefully reported Nelson’s difficulties. ‘A party of the navy were [was] employed in endeavouring to raise one of the 26-pounders up the hill,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘They began in the morning, and by the exertions of 150 men with the assistance of double blocks, pulleys, etc., the cannon was brought the greatest way up in about twelve hours, but the carriage or truck in which it was laid having broke[n], they were obliged to leave the cannon on the road.’16

  Stuart looked on disapprovingly. The next day he suggested Nelson dispense with his pulleys and use three hundred soldiers and two hundred sailors to man-haul. ‘The navy opposed the attempt at first, upon the principle that the aid of mechanisms was necessary,’ said Lowe, ‘but the event showed the general’s superior judgement.’ Setting a hundred men to each of four ropes attached to the pieces, Nelson was able to bring three guns to the batteries by the same afternoon.

  Even with soldiers to help, the sinew-stretching work was painful, and went on day after day and night after night. One by one huge twenty-sixes and twenty-fours, eighteen-pounders, mortars and howitzers scaled heights up to one thousand feet to arrive at the Madonna, the new base camp, together with mounting platforms, ammunition, casks of powder and other stores. By 13 July, Nelson reckoned their labour equal to that of dragging a twenty-six-pound gun, with all its accountrements, ‘upwards of eighty miles’, seventeen of them up ‘a very steep mountain’. Nine days later he proudly declared that twenty-five pieces had been mounted, all but three of them manned by sailors.17

  In his letters Stuart praised ‘the efforts of Capt. Nelson’ and his men, but privately he grumbled that the soldiers were ‘working like slaves’ with the guns instead of establishing proper guard posts. His darker suspicions, primed by subordinates who filled his head with pernicious opinions of Hood, seemed to be confirmed by the frequent absence of ships offshore. Stuart felt like an old conquistador, landed upon a hostile coast with his boats burning behind him. The weather had not improved, and within a day or two of the troops being disembarked most of the ships had cut their cables and ran out to sea to avoid being wrecked upon the coast. Eventually they regrouped, but the supply line they provided was constantly endangered. The Fox cutter brought additional British and French royalist troops, raising Stuart’s force to two thousand men, and the Agamemnon, L’Aigle, Lowestoffe, Lutine and Fortune remained more or less in the offing trying to maintain supplies, but the general’s complaints about inadequate naval support grew louder.18

  The small number of men with Nelson, the wavering communications and the missing admiral all fed Stuart’s disaffection. When Hood did appear offshore to land stores and ordnance, he immediately interfered with the conduct of the siege by urging Stuart to send the French a summons to surrender. Stuart refused, ‘for deprived of his [Hood’s] c
ooperation hitherto and finding that it is not his intention to do more than hover off this coast, I am really at a loss to know what he means by joining me in sending a summons which would only discover to the people of Calvi intentions which cannot be kept too secret . . .’. In Stuart’s opinion, ‘difficulty upon difficulty here increase by Ld. H[ood] withdrawing almost every assistance from us’, and he went so far as to warn that the admiral’s interference, the product of ‘personal vanity’, could ‘occasion the loss of many brave men’.19

  Stuart was very much a land animal and there was a good deal he did not understand about the sea, despite the efforts of Nelson and Elliot to educate and conciliate him. No less than the general was Hood irritated by the damage the bad weather was doing to his communications, but his ships could not invariably maintain their positions on a dangerous lee shore. Moreover, for Hood the siege of Calvi was only one of several responsibilities demanding his attention, and he did not have large numbers of men to spare for the military operation. A year of sickness, injuries and battle casualties had wasted the strength of the Mediterranean fleet and Hood was applying to Malta and Naples for a thousand men to keep it going. ‘Nothing can equal the distress of the ships on this station,’ Captain Fremantle told his brother. Canvas and ropes were in short supply, and ‘few’ of the seventy-fours ‘have more than 400 men. I . . . have but 160 on board [my frigate] instead of 200.’20

  Another interservice crisis was looming, and only a week after landing at Calvi General Stuart was threatening to quit.

  3

  Nelson believed that such an act would be a disaster. As he watched Stuart bounding from rock to rock like a goat, oblivious of enemy fire, and examining one position after another, he had nothing but admiration. ‘No man in the expedition has undergone the fatigue of the general,’ he wrote. He was ‘an extraordinary good judge of ground’, and spared no personal effort, though he was wretchedly served by his officers and in danger of wearing himself to breaking point. So tireless was Stuart that he had to be begged to retire at night.21

  Nelson’s task was even more difficult than biographers have admitted. The military situation demanded extraordinary exertions and the thorny relationship between the services required the utmost tact. We rarely think of the forthright, opinionated and volatile Nelson as a diplomat. Reading intemperate personal letters, we are apt to forget that he was capable of more measured judgements in the line of duty, and that he reacted positively to goodwill and good work, and had a natural sympathy that enabled him to pacify and condole. The younger Hotham, who knew Nelson in Corsica, was not a great admirer. Nelson, he said, had nothing of ‘the manner of a gentleman’ in either appearance or behaviour, but he could bring people together. He was, Hotham admitted, ‘perhaps, more generally beloved by all ranks of people under him than any other officer in the service, for he had in a great degree the valuable but rare quality of conciliating the most opposite tempers and forwarding the public service with unanimity amongst men not of themselves disposed to accord’.22

  Never was that quality needed more than now. The old interservice animosities that Stuart had been sent to quench were resurfacing, threatening to pull the campaign apart, and Nelson was the only senior officer trying to keep the parties together. Moore was certainly no help. Infused with what Hood called the ‘St Fiorenzo leaven’ he intensely disliked the admiral, whom he considered ‘a mean fellow’ stinting the expedition to pamper his own vanity. It was shortly after mixing with Moore that Stuart began faithfully reproducing this opinion. Nelson wished Moore ‘100 leagues off’ and undoubtedly attributed to him the malicious ‘endeavours to poison the mind of a good man’.23

  Whatever the origins of Stuart’s bile, freely revealed to the new British Viceroy of Corsica, it specifically exempted Captain Nelson, who had ‘certainly exerted himself’. Nelson swam warily between two larger and more voracious fishes, trying to reconcile them as they snapped at each other. In the early days of the siege Hood had been ready to share Nelson’s opinion of Stuart. ‘General Stuart, most fortunately, is not only a very able officer,’ wrote the admiral, ‘but [also a] most amiable man, but he is without real assistance – such a miserable staff I believe no general ever had upon service. Happily, he has great abilities and judgement, with a will of his own.’ These words almost parodied Nelson’s, but the affair of Hood’s summons began openly dividing the senior commanders. Stuart regarded the summons as premature, and Nelson backed him and tried to bridge the rift. Hood reluctantly accepted Nelson’s arguments, though he was careful to wash his hands of the consequences (‘if things do not go altogether right no blame shall lay at my door’) and would later accuse the general of unnecessarily prolonging the siege.24

  After the summons issue Nelson’s job got trickier, but he pressed Hood to satisfy as many of Stuart’s endless demands as he could. ‘It was necessary to come to the point whether the siege should be persevered in or given up,’ he told Hood. ‘If the former, he [Stuart] must be supplied with the means, which were more troops, more seamen to work, and more ammunition.’ Hood did not consider his support tardy, and was not always hospitable to plain-speaking, but he took the point. The Victory itself supplied 5,115 cartridges and 8,000 gun wads as well as guns, stores and men. In the afternoon of 6 July, Hood also responded immediately to a request for two more eighteen-pounders, supplying them the same night, along with Lieutenant James Moutray and forty seamen to man them. The guns were mounted by daylight. Unfortunately, sickness and injury undermined every step, and by the 20th of the month Nelson’s shore party had lost more than one hundred men. Once again Stuart reinforced the sailors with soldiers, but Nelson persuaded Hood to strip the Victory and the offing frigates of every spare man and to land another three hundred sailors for service ashore.25

  Juggling such irascible spirits as Hood and Stuart, Nelson inevitably sustained some hits himself. After 27 July, Hood more or less remained off the port, and Stuart grew suspicious of his daily communications with Nelson. He warned the captain against speaking too freely about sensitive information aboard the Victory. On the other side, Hood got short with Nelson’s tiresome requests. ‘What can you mean for applying to me for empty casks when there are a number on shore . . . and the Nancy transport is full of them?’ ranted the fiery admiral. Nelson was volcanic himself, but to his credit battened down his feelings and worked for the common good. It seemed to succeed and somehow Nelson kept the respect of both parties. ‘I am very confident all you do will be well done,’ Hood later told him.26

  Throughout the siege Nelson and Stuart were rarely far apart. They slept in the same redoubt, reconnoitred together, shared the enemy fire and confronted the same emergencies. On 27 June, for example, they were both on hand during unusually fierce fighting on their left flank, where a party of Corsicans were first driven from a dangerously exposed outpost and then recaptured it with a courageous rally. Nelson directed a couple of guns against an enemy gunboat that threatened to intervene, and Stuart deployed a corps of light infantry, but both officers were cheered by the spirit shown by their Corsican allies. The skirmish cost the partisans one of their military commanders, shot through the heart.27

  Nelson and Stuart also recognised the worth of each other, and if they never became friends in the way Nelson and Villettes became friends, at least they worked relatively harmoniously and productively as colleagues. Ultimately the general would commend ‘the assistance and cooperation of Captain Nelson’ and ‘the exertions of the navy’. Given the prevailing climate between the services, a tempest waiting to break, that itself was a small miracle.28

  4

  Calvi was France’s last stronghold in Corsica. It was surrounded and beyond outside help. Though a few boats fled the harbour by keeping to the shoreline east or west, British battleships and gunboats waited at sea and pounced upon more than a dozen craft during June and July. The French defenders of Calvi were without hope of succour, but determined to make an honourable resistance. They occupied a form
idable defensive position, deployed more than a hundred guns and displayed substantial courage.29

  Unfortunately, Stuart and Nelson came from behind, over heights they had thought proof against the passage of artillery, and began fighting their way through the ring of posts that covered the town to the west and southwest. The two British commanders formed an agreeable partnership. Stuart was the commander-in-chief, but in deciding where batteries needed to be established or when and if enemy positions should be stormed he conferred with Nelson and other officers, and the seamen ably seconded him. It was they who for the most part brought the guns and supplies up to the huge grey crags of La Macarona, usually at night, and it was they who generally erected and manned the batteries. Stuart also allocated a professional army artillerist to each gun, and Nelson found them impervious to advice. ‘They don’t seem to mind me,’ he complained when they insisted on using two wads in the bore instead of one, but he deferred to their expertise when it came to pointing the pieces.30

  Despite occasional shortages of men and spells of bad weather, Nelson had established two batteries by the end of June. One, known as the hill battery, stood 1,500 yards southwest of Fort Mozzello and a thousand northwest of Fort Mollinochesco, menacing both. The other was erected near the point of Cape Revellata and entrusted to a shadow from Nelson’s past. James Moutray was the son of Mary, Horatio’s old flame in Antigua. The ‘very fine young man’ was not quite twenty-one years old, but Nelson thought he saw the mother in his ‘amiable disposition’. Moutray had succeeded Courtenay Boyle as second lieutenant of the Speedy sloop, and got a transfer to the Victory after only a year, falling under the protective wing of Lord Hood. Apparently Hood was the youngster’s godfather, but he also respected the boy’s professional abilities and described him as a ‘most amiable and gallant officer’. He sent him to command the shore battery without any misgivings.31