by John Sugden
The British were right. The enemy ships under Rear Admiral Pierre Martin included the hundred and twenty-gun Sans-Culotte and three eighty-gunners and carried seven thousand French troops and a siege train for the invasion of Corsica. So sanguine were some of success that the mayor and municipality of Bastia were carried as passengers, ready to resume their civic duties as soon as the French regained control. The French had heard that Hotham’s fleet had been incapacitated by the storms and reduced to ten or so fit capital ships. Hastily they filled their ships with troops, and prepared another eighteen thousand men to follow in one hundred and thirty transports as soon as Admiral Martin had cleared the British away and established a bridgehead on Corsica. At sea, Martin soon had a crumb of success. He intercepted and captured the rehabilitated British ship of the line Berwick, as it struggled towards Hotham from St Fiorenzo. Despite this and his apparent superiority, Martin was not eager to meet the British fleet and probably hoped to sneak to Corsica while Hotham was refitting in Leghorn. If so, that hope was quickly crushed. After a furious bustle, the British got to sea at daylight on the 9th, steering for Corsica with fourteen ships of the line.46
The fate of Corsica hung in the balance as the British fleet forged ahead. Admiral Hotham flew his flag from the Britannia of one hundred and ten guns, with John Holloway, Nelson’s old associate, as his captain. One of Hotham’s ships was the Neapolitan seventy-four Tancredi, which had joined on 1 March under Captain Francesco Caraccioli. Sir William Hamilton regarded Caraccioli as ‘surely the best officer in the Neapolitan navy’, a man who had ‘distinguished himself as a gallant officer and a good seaman’ on ‘many occasions’, but scattered also through the fleet were many who would one day become Nelson’s ‘band of brothers’, among them Thomas Foley, flag captain of the St George, Fremantle and Hallowell in the Inconstant and Lowestoffe frigates, and Ralph Miller on the little Paulette. This, the first fleet action in the Mediterranean, was to be a lesson to more than one captain of the Nelson ‘school’.47
Throughout the first day the hostile French fleet remained beyond the horizon, visible only to Hotham’s lookouts, but towards noon of the 10th the Moselle signalled. The French were in the northwest, standing back towards Toulon. It appeared that far from seeking battle they were scurrying home at the first sign of trouble. On board the Agamemnon, Nelson saw Hotham’s signal for a general chase climb the mast of the flagship at noon, releasing his ships to pursue the enemy as best they could. The wind was light, and notoriously fickle in these parts, but the Agamemnon was swift and Nelson fully expected to engage the enemy. It was the chance he had been waiting for, and after giving the necessary orders he retired to his cabin to scratch a note to Fanny. It prepared her for the worst and oozed with his determination to fight, but was written in a clear, composed, well-formed hand as if death was a million miles away:
The lives of all are in the hands of Him who knows best whether to preserve it or no, and to His will do I resign myself. My character and good name is in my own keeping. Life with disgrace is dreadful. A glorious death is to be envied, and if anything happens to me, recollect death is a debt we must all pay, and whether now or in a few years hence can be but of little conesquence. 48
Back on deck, he discovered it was not to be that day. The French had caught a wind, leaving the British behind, and the chase was called off after five and a half hours. Nor could they get close to the enemy the next day, though the French appeared to have continued westwards throughout the night. But there was almost an engagement on the 12th, when daylight revealed the British becalmed some ten miles east of the enemy fleet and dangerously dispersed. The French had the advantage of a southerly breeze, and Hotham’s ships were divided into two groups, the one nearest the enemy consisting of only six ships, including the Agamemnon, all wide open to attack. Nelson’s ship was still undermanned, but he wrote to Vice Admiral Samuel Cranston Goodall on the Princess Royal, the senior officer with the smaller British division, congratulating him on being ‘so near’ the enemy and promising support, but soliciting a reinforcement of fifty or more men if they could be supplied.49
The French had a tremendous opportunity to steer between the two divisions of the British fleet and turn upon the smaller one, and for a while looked intent on doing so. Considering that they had to defeat the British fleet to achieve their objective, the subjugation of Corsica, they were unlikely to be presented with a better opportunity. Nelson saw the French making ‘a very easy sail’ towards them, but his sharp eye noticed something else too. ‘They did not appear to me to act like officers who knew anything of their profession,’ he wrote. ‘At noon they began to form a line on the larboard tack which they never accomplished. At two P.M. they bore down in a line ahead, nearly before the wind, but not more than nine sail formed.’50
In short, Nelson was measuring the French fleet and finding it wanting. He was absolutely right. Despite unsteady government finances, France had invested large sums in her navy since the Seven Years War, and won a significant victory on the Chesapeake in 1781, when the Royal Navy was repulsed and a British army forced to surrender. But stubborn problems remained, including shortages of skilled manpower, uncertain supplies of naval stores and a tendency to adopt defensive and defective tactics. Furthermore, to these long-standing weaknesses the revolution brought new strains. The view that legitimate political sovereignty was vested in the popular will, rather than executive authority, eroded respect for the navy both without and within. Revolutionary governments failed to protect the service from abuse by local communes and Jacobin clubs, and politicised sailors challenged their officers and reduced ships to chaos. By 1792 most of the established officers of the French navy had quit the troubled service in despair, abandoning its upper ranks to swarms of relatively unskilled upstarts. Rear Admiral Martin was forty-three when he sailed to meet Hotham, but two years before he had been a mere lieutenant, and partly owed his elevation to his ardent Jacobinism. The National Convention, which governed France between 1792 and 1795, had tried to restore order in the fleet, but difficulties were compounded by the policy of keeping ships in port. Cooped up, barely putting out before running back again, the French were incapable of developing disciplined, well-knit and practised crews. The professional seamen among them were denied the handson experience they needed to create efficient teamwork, and the amateurs swept in to make up numbers had no means of learning a new trade. If French fleets sailed, even with a sufficiency of ships, they lacked the basic human resources to fight the British on equal terms. No one doubted that men of the highest calibre could be found in those fleets, but as a whole the personnel lacked skills, experience, discipline and confidence.51
Now those problems showed. About three miles from Goodall’s division, the French abandoned the attack; their ships hauled their wind on the larboard tack, threw away their advantage and retired. Though Hotham united his ships in battle order later in the day, the wind continued to abort action, and darkness found both fleets off Genoa, standing to the southward under a fresh breeze.
On 13 March, Nelson’s first ‘happy moment’ finally occurred.
As the first light filtered over the water, the French were seen about four leagues to windward in the southwest, their sails full in a brisk breeze. Again, with the wind in their favour, they might have attacked, but betrayed no such inclination. Their only interest, it seemed, was flight, and once more the British admiral signalled a general chase. Undermanned as she was, the Agamemnon was soon nimbly outperforming its larger consorts, and cutting through the squally weather after the retreating fleet. At seven or eight o’clock something happened. Two of the big French eighty-gunners, the Ça Ira and La Victoire, collided. The main and fore topmasts of the Ça Ira cracked, and plunged down, hanging with a trail of wood, rope and canvas over her leeward side, and acting as a drag upon the ship. Though men threw themselves into clearing the wreckage, Captain Louis-Marie Coudé found his ship lagging behind and heeling over so much that most of his lower-de
ck guns on one side were unable to bear.
The Ça Ira was a huge opponent, the biggest two-decker in the world, and ‘large enough to take Agamemnon in her hold’. On board her quota of the troops embarked for the reconquest of Corsica had raised her manpower to at least one thousand and sixty men, three times that of the Agamemnon, which had only 344 hands at their quarters, including Nelson himself. In terms of fire power the Ça Ira was the equal of a three-decker, its eighty-four guns including a formidable lower-deck armament of French thirty-six-pounders. Against that Nelson’s ship could dispose only sixty-four guns, the largest of them mere twenty-four-pounders. Moreover, when the larger French pound is also taken into the balance (a Gallic thirty-six was equal to thirty-nine English pounds), the Ça Ira’s advantage in weight of metal fired over the Agamemnon was something like two to one. It was a terrific superiority, and it was compounded by the French ship’s use of red-hot shot and the close proximity of other powerful antagonists, including the gigantic hundred and twenty-gun Sans-Culotte and the seventy-four-gun Jean Bart. 52
At nine-fifteen the British frigate Inconstant of thirty-six guns headed the chase and came close enough to the Ça Ira to open fire on her, like an impudent coyote yapping at the heels of a buffalo. The Inconstant was not a happy ship. Captain Fremantle had been accused of cruelty and had had to suppress a mutiny; five of its ringleaders were still awaiting trial. Now, however, the ship acquitted herself magnificently in a duel with a massively superior opponent. Under normal circumstances a frigate would not have tangled with any ship of the line, let alone a monster like the Ça Ira. But Fremantle realised that the wreckage pulling the French ship over to leeward was immobilising her starboard broadside, and though her men were frantically clearing the debris away he had a brief opportunity to attack. Fremantle knew he could not fight the Ça Ira for long, but if he damaged and delayed her he could buy time for British ships of the line to come up.
Fremantle was a man of Nelson’s stamp. He too chafed at Hotham’s supine leadership and longed for chances to show his mettle, and he did not lead the British chase by accident. As soon as he had seen the collision among the enemy ships he had cleared for action and thrown his livestock overboard to remove every impediment to his gun crews. The little Inconstant passed under the crippled lee of the French giant and fired a broadside into her, then tacked and fired another. The Ça Ira’s upper-deck guns and some of the lower tier managed an indifferent reply, cutting up the frigate’s rigging and sails, but, as the French ship’s wreckage fell away and she righted, her murderous broadside swung into position. Nevertheless, with remarkable courage Fremantle went in for a third attack, and fired another broadside. But now the Inconstant was mauled by a withering discharge from the Ça Ira, as well as a broadside from the French frigate the Vestale as she moved in to throw a tow hawser to her injured consort. With a serious hole through the Inconstant’s hull, ‘between wind and water’, and seventeen of his men killed and wounded, Fremantle finally had to forgo the unequal contest.53
His fight had not been in vain, for as the Inconstant retired she was passed to windward by the leading British ship of the line, the Agamemnon. It was about ten-fifteen, and from his quarterdeck Nelson could see that he was to windward of the oncoming British fleet and far in advance. The nearest consort was the Captain, a seventy-four under Samuel Reeve, but she was still too far away to help. Ahead, however, the lumbering Ça Ira had not only cleared away some of her wreckage and restored most of her guns to order, but was being supported. The Sans-Culotte and Jean Bart fast approached ‘about gun-shot distance on her weather bow’, while the Vestale was taking her in tow. It may have been at this point that Nelson called for an opinion from Andrews, now first lieutenant in the place of the promoted Hinton. Should he attack? We cannot be sure, but Nelson later wrote that ‘if the conduct of the Agamemnon . . . on the 13th was by any means the cause of our success on the 14th . . . [then] Lieutenant Andrews has a principal share in the merit, for a more proper opinion was never given by an officer than the one he gave me on the 13th, in a situation of great difficulty’.54
Nelson made his decision. Size, range, weight of metal and manpower were heavily against him, but speed and skill were something else, and he knew the capabilities of the Agamemnon and her crew. Grimly the sixty-four closed upon its big antagonist. Aboard her Nelson’s ‘poor brave fellows’ had been summoned to action stations by a stirring drum tattoo, and gone about their routine with effortless precision. Decks were cleared, seven unfortunate bawling bullocks were pitched into the sea to prevent them plunging about the ship in terror, galley fires were extinguished and water thrown over vulnerable inflammables. Every man stood silently to his own dreadful calling: the surgeon and his mates waiting for the mutilated casualties, the uniformed marines ready to pick off officers or snipers from the enemy decks and fighting tops, and the sweaty sailors in trousers and kerchiefs, some scrambling aloft like monkeys but most standing expectantly by their guns. Each man was schooled in his part. Gun captains stood ready to train the cannons, prick open the cartridges beneath the touchholes, and release the firing locks with their lanyards, while their crews took their allotted positions. Some waited to sponge bores or ram down cartridges, wadding and shot, while others with strong limbs and backs braced themselves at the blocks and tackle, poised to haul the heavy pieces in and out of their ports or raise or depress them with chunky wooden quoins. Juniors stood nervously by, ready to feed shot and cartridges to the guns.55
Most of the lieutenants were supervising the gun crews, but Andrews was beside Nelson on the quarterdeck with the master, John Wilson, and some of Nelson’s favourite midshipmen, who scurried about as aides, determined not to let their captain down. A fortnight later Nelson wrote of Hoste, ‘what a good young man – I love him dearly, and both him and Josiah are as brave fellows as ever walked’. They had obviously discharged their duties with credit.56
The Agamemnon was within range of the Ça Ira by ten-twenty, but Nelson reserved his fire. He wanted to get within point-blank range of the Frenchman’s stern before raking her from one end to the other, but the enemy had better gunners than he suspected. Though the Ça Ira could only bring its stern chasers to bear on the advancing ship, it made every shot count. Blasts of smoke and flame and the thunder of guns from the crippled Frenchman opened the contest, blowing holes through the Agamemnon’s sails, and splintering masts, spars and rigging aloft. Nelson must have been relieved. As they so often did, the French were firing high, hoping to damage his mobility, but this was not the most effective way to fight. If the Agamemnon lost her masts she would be paralysed and cut to pieces by the French ships, but most of the enemy shot screamed into thin air to splash harmlessly astern.
Chillingly silent, the Agamemnon crept closer without deigning to reply, her guns peering menacingly from her ports and their crews listening for the command. Nelson was still not as close as he wanted, but after twenty-five minutes under the Ça Ira’s guns he had had enough. He ordered Mr Wilson to put the helm a-starboard and the driver and after sails to be braced up and shivered. This made the bow of the ship fall off, and swung her broadside towards the towering stern of the Ça Ira. The guns roared along the whole of the Agamemnon’s side, recoiling savagely against their tackle, and sending ball after ball into the enemy ship. It was no amateur broadside, but a performance no other ship in the Mediterranean could have surpassed. These gunners had practised again and again, at sea and ashore, and fired tens of thousands of shot and shells in Corsica only the year before. The rate and accuracy of their fire were awesome, and they discharged their guns double-shotted, loading two round shot instead of one to increase the power of each broadside. It was a practice that sacrificed range and accuracy for velocity, but at this distance it did not matter; gunners like these did not miss. They directed a full broadside straight into the Ça Ira’s most vulnerable target – her stern and quarter – smashing through the after cabins, throwing wood and glass everywhere, and ploug
hing along the decks with terrific force, hurling guns off carriages, filling the air with hideous flying splinters and butchering men.
After the first broadside, Nelson ordered the after sails to be braced up and the helm put a-port so that the Agamemnon recovered its sailing position. Then he went after the Ça Ira again, and as he closed he repeated his earlier manoeuvre, sending another broadside into the French stern and quarter. The seamanship and gunnery of the British ship now told with devastating effect. The Ça Ira, her mobility crippled by the loss of her topmasts, was also fettered by the towing frigate, which kept her head forward. Not only that but unknown to Nelson she was ‘miserably manned in point of seamen’. Only about fifty of her crew were able seamen, a few more ‘ordinary seafaring people’, and the mass of her enormous complement raw conscripts and soldiers. The officers were little better, if Elliot, who later entertained them at his table, is to be believed. He excepted the captain as ‘an intelligent fellow’, but thought his juniors ‘such ragamuffins as have seldom been seen out of France’. Lady Elliot was so repelled by their appearance and manners that she sat silent for two hours, nursing an opinion that the ship’s second officer could have passed for Bluebeard. During the battle the men of the Ça Ira fought bravely, but without discipline, order or skill.57
For two hours it went on. Held fast by her frigate, the Ça Ira was unable to turn to train her formidable broadside upon the diminutive assailant hammering volley after volley into her stern and quarters, and skipping about ‘with as much exactness as if she had been turning in to Spithead’. Only a few stern guns could reply, and their futile fire was wide of the mark. Slowly the French ship was turned into ‘a perfect wreck’. Her sails were shredded and her mizzen topmast, mizzen topsail and cross jackyards shot away. As parts of her wooden walls imploded, her decks were bloodied by dead, wounded and dying men.58