by John Sugden
Remarkably, though for part of the time the Sans-Culotte and Jean Bart were at no great distance, on the Agamemnon’s starboard bow, they made no attempt to aid their stricken colleague, as if mesmerised by the savaging she was taking from such an undersized antagonist. But at about one in the afternoon the towing frigate hove in her stays and turned, bringing the broken Ça Ira around with her. Now prey and predator approached each other on opposite tacks, and for the first time those fearsome French broadside guns were brought to bear. The two ships passed each other ‘within half pistol-shot’, exchanging a furious fire as they did so.59
This was the most desperate moment of the fight as far as Nelson was concerned. This, if ever, was the time when the Agamemnon risked taking a terrible beating, but the flawed French tactic of firing high saved her. Though the British ship’s sails and rigging were badly damaged, most of the French shot flew right over the Agamemnon. Hardly anything hit her hull. As Nelson told his brother, ‘That Being who has ever in a most wonderful manner protected me during the many dangers I have encountered this war [is] still shielding me and my brave ship’s company. I cannot account for what I saw. Whole broadsides within half-pistol shot [range] missing my little ship, whilst ours was in the fullest effect.’60
After the ships had passed one another, Nelson fired his after guns and then hove in stays to turn her round, his ‘poor brave fellows’ serving their pieces so well that they were able to recharge and maintain an almost continuous fire. But now the Sans-Culotte and several other French ships had wore, and were under the Agamemnon’s lee bow, standing with their topgallant sails billowing to pass to leeward. Nelson had done the best he could, but he had no choice other than to leave off action. His struggle was being seen from the British fleet, and at one-fifteen Hotham signalled Nelson to disengage. The Agamemnon hauled off, and stood for her consorts, and the final shots – fired by the Sans-Culotte – failed to reach her. The French did not chase the retreating battleship. Instead they gathered in their wounded eighty-gunner and continued their retreat.
It had been a remarkable fight. Nelson lost only seven men wounded (three fatally), while the Ça Ira reportedly suffered losses of 110 men. The French ship was so badly damaged that she could not replace her missing topmasts, and remained crippled the following day, thus setting up the final round of the action. Her adversary, the Agamemnon, rejoined Hotham’s line of battle, and her men worked into the night to complete their repairs as the fleets continued westwards. Nelson was proud of his performance, but decried the failure of the other British ships of the line to support him. ‘What has happened,’ he trilled to Fanny, ‘perhaps may never happen to anyone again – that only one ship-of-the-line out of fourteen should get into action with the French fleet, and for so long a time as 21/2 hours, and with such a ship as the Ça Ira, but had I been supported, I should certainly have brought the Sans-Culotte to battle, a most glorious prospect!’ This was not entirely true, however. The log of the Captain records that she, too, engaged, exchanging shots with an unspecified enemy ship of the line and a frigate for the thirty minutes before one o’clock.61
The consummation of the intrepidity of Fremantle and Nelson occurred the following day when the battle resumed, though the French had misplaced two of their ships, one the Sans-Culotte, their only three-decker, which accidentally separated from her companions and found sanctuary in Genoa. Daybreak of 14 March saw the rest of the fleets seven or so leagues further southwest, making the best of light winds, haze and drizzling rain. The wretched Ça Ira had been unable to restore its topmasts, and was being towed by a seventy-four, the Censeur, captained by Jean-Félix Benoît. She, like the Ça Ira, was carrying part of the army destined for Corsica and was overmanned, with 921 or perhaps even a thousand men aboard. Both ships were, however, in serious trouble. They had fallen astern and to leeward of the rest of their fleet, which was struggling in light winds on the larboard tack some one and a half miles to the southwest. About three and a half miles away were the British, and when Hotham picked up a northerly breeze that put him to windward and in a good position to attack, he made for the isolated ships. The British admiral was strongly placed. At least he could cut off and capture the two Frenchmen, and he might even provoke their countrymen into offering battle to save them.
Despite the failing wind the British bore down in a rough line of battle, steering between the French divisions, and just after seven the leading seventy-fours, the Bedford (Captain Davidge Gould) and the Captain (Captain Samuel Reeve), opened fire on the Ça Ira and Censeur with their starboard broadsides. The risks Fremantle and Nelson had taken engaging the Ça Ira the previous day were now demonstrated, as the guns of the two cornered Frenchmen cruelly mauled the approaching ships. In very little time the Bedford and Captain were disabled and knocked out of the battle. But behind them came the rest of the British fleet, led by three seventy-fours, the Illustrious (Captain Thomas Lenox Frederick), Courageux (Captain Augustus Montgomery) and Princess Royal (Captain J. C. Purvis and Vice Admiral Goodall). The weaker Agamemnon followed, and Nelson was close enough to mark again the French habit of firing aloft. The battered Captain lay ‘like a log on the water, all her sails and rigging shot away’.62
With the leading ships out of the fight, the Illustrious, Courageux, Princess Royal and Agamemnon headed the British line, but while their starboard guns bore upon the Ça Ira and Censeur their attention was also drawn to larboard. The French main body had picked up a wind, turned to rescue their comrades, and begun advancing towards the British on the opposite tack with the powerful Duquesne at their head. It was then that a ‘false manoeuvre’ on the part of the French cost them dearly. Admiral Martin, who had transferred to La Minerve, one of his frigates, had signalled the attack even though his line was reduced to eleven capital ships, but the captain of the Duquesne misunderstood his superior’s intention. Instead of steering north and to leeward of Hotham’s fleet, interposing the French line between their besieged stragglers and the enemy, the Duquesne led Martin’s ships to windward, firing from their larboard batteries at the masts of the British van from about eight o’clock. Hotham’s front ships were therefore able to engage the enemy on both sides, simultaneously firing at close range upon the Ça Ira and Censeur to starboard and over a greater distance to larboard as the main French line came within range. Powder smoke soon wreathed a thunderous cannonade heard miles away in Genoa, with some belligerents firing almost blindly through the stinking, man-made fog. The Courageux was firing on the Ça Ira for fifteen minutes after she had struck, and had to be told to stop by Goodall on the Princess Royal. 63
The battle was particularly fierce to leeward of the British line, where the trapped French ships fought with astonishing determination. The sails, rigging and yards of the Illustrious were riddled with shot, she lost her fore topmast, and her mainmast fell, carrying the mizzen mast with it and crashing hard upon the poop deck, fracturing its stout wooden beams. Though ninety of his men were killed and wounded and the debris had dismantled many guns, Captain Frederick kept firing until the end of the fight. Behind her the Courageux was similarly served. Her main and mizzen masts were toppled, her fore topmast severely damaged and she suffered forty-eight casualties; eventually she had to be taken in tow by Fremantle’s Inconstant. It was fortunate for the British van that the French line to larboard posed no serious challenge. It sheered off to windward, exchanging only a few broadsides with the Illustrious and Courageux, and more distantly with the Princess Royal, Agamemnon and other ships, before high-tailing it from the conflict and abandoning its embattled colleagues to their fates. Two more French ships, the Victoire and the Timoleon, had been damaged in the brief cannonade, and Martin judged his force too weak to challenge Hotham again.
Nelson joined the attack on the Ça Ira and Censeur, and both surrendered a little after eleven o’clock after more than three hours of punishment. The Ça Ira lay like a stricken whale, strewn with ropes and wreckage, her masts down and guns silenced, while the
mainmast of the brave Censeur had also been felled. The Illustrious and Courageux had done the greatest damage, but their boats had been shot to pieces and Goodall hailed Nelson to ask him to take possession of the prizes and raise the English colours. It was not unfitting. Lieutenant Andrews, who led a party over water littered with the remains of the conflict, was ‘as gallant an officer as ever stepped’, while the Agamemnon, by its action the previous day, had been the key instrument of the victory.
Aboard the French ships Andrews found horrific devastation. Guns and wreckage were tossed about the decks and hundreds of men killed and wounded. Of some two thousand men on the French vessels, perhaps as many as eight hundred were killed and wounded – the four hundred or four hundred and fifty casualties of the Ça Ira having been sustained over the two days of battle. Other ‘officers’ later described the aspect to the naval historian, Edward Pelham Brenton:
The holds were filled with dead or dying men, who, as they fell at their quarters, were tumbled headlong down without any regard to their condition, and four days after the action dead bodies were [being] dragged out from the cable tiers and the wings. It was found, on enquiry, that not only were the people made drunk, but the ferocious republican officers stood behind them, and with drawn swords or pistols compelled them to fight.64
The Agamemnon herself emerged from the second day of fighting ‘very much cut up’, but she had no difficulty towing the Censeur away in triumph. Another seven men had been wounded, one of them the master, but overall the ship had not suffered extensive casualties, and several British ships, including the Captain, Bedford, Illustrious, Courageux and perhaps the Princess Royal, paid a higher ‘butcher’s bill’.65
Nelson paid tribute to the resistance of the Ça Ira and Censeur, but thought the rest of the French fleet, which continued its flight westwards, behaved ‘most shamefully’. Considering they had orders to invade Corsica, the French had performed lamentably.66
The British celebrated a victory, and both Houses of Parliament voted their thanks, but actually Hotham had achieved relatively little.
The battle did not even directly save Corsica, since the French had aborted their mission at the very sight of the British fleet, without exchanging a single shot. The most that can strategically be said for the action off Genoa is that it prompted the French National Convention to abandon temporarily their invasion project. True, the British had taken two capital ships, but they gave Hotham no lasting advantage. Before fighting Hotham the French fleet had captured the British Berwick, and four days after the battle of 14 March Frederick’s dismasted Illustrious was driven ashore and lost. In short both sides had lost two ships, and it is impossible to disagree with Elliot when he pessimistically remarked ‘The French can hardly be said to have lost by their cruise.’67
7
Yet from Nelson’s point of view the battle off Genoa was significant, perhaps more so than has generally been admitted. It was the first fleet action in which he played a crucial part, and in some respects his first naval victory, more impressive than the indecisive action with the French frigates nearly eighteen months earlier. He also profited from the experience. In fact, it arguably effected his purpose and ideas profoundly.
To begin it is necessary to consider the famous account of the battle he sent to Fanny later that March, when Hotham’s fleet was once again languishing in port:
we are idle and lay in port when we ought to be at sea [he complained]. In short I wish to be an admiral and in command of the English [British] fleet. I should very soon either do much or be ruined. My disposition can’t bear tame and slow measures. Sure I am [that] had I commanded our fleet on the 14th that either the whole French fleet would have graced my triumph, or I should have been in a confounded scrape. I went on board Hotham so soon as our firing grew slack in the van, and the Ça Ira and Censeur struck, to propose to him [Hotham] leaving our two crippled ships, the two prizes, and four frigates to themselves, and to pursue the enemy. But he is much cooler than myself and said, ‘We must be contented. We have done very well.’ But had we taken ten sail [of the] line and allowed the eleventh to have escaped if possible to have been got at, I could never call it well done. Goodall backed me. I got him to write to the admiral, but it would not do. We should have had such a day as I believe the annals of England never produced, but it can’t be helped.68
Although this much-published passage has been accepted at face value, it was less than a candid account of what happened. As we have seen, Nelson was prone to exaggerating his achievements, even to misrepresent them. His picture of the fiery zealot storming to Hotham in the closing stage of the battle and demanding a hot pursuit, laced with its implication of flag-rank incompetence, does not really fit the circumstances in which the fleet found itself at midday on 14 March. Hotham himself alluded to the ‘want of wind’ as the reason for the escape of so many French ships, and Captain Tyler of the Diadem agreed. ‘Nothing but its falling calm saved at least 7 or 8 being captured,’ he wrote to his wife. The captain’s log of the Diadem, among others, made several references to the wind in its account of the action. It was so slight that the British ships kept drifting out of their stations, and Tyler had to drop a jolly boat and hawser to help keep the Diadem’s head forward and her broadside towards the enemy. About noon, as the battle ended, light airs and calm were noted. Nelson chose to forget the wind in the letter to Fanny, but had been thoroughly aware of its importance. A few days before he had told his uncle that ‘had the breeze continued so as to have allowed us to close with the enemy . . . we should have destroyed their whole fleet’. And Sir William Hamilton heard the same: ‘Had the breeze only continued we should have given a decisive and destructive blow to the French fleet.’69
Nelson’s attempt to persuade Hotham to pursue the French, therefore, probably did not happen on 14 March, after the battle; it would have been thoroughly inapplicable.
It was probably on the 15th that Nelson confronted Hotham, angry at the admiral’s decision to fall back to port instead of returning to the chase, for it was on that day that he wrote to Goodall asking for a fresh supply of shot. ‘The enemy are fled and we are not running after them,’ he complained. He trusted that Hotham would ‘get rid’ of the prizes and ‘lame ducks’ at once and press on westwards, if for no other reason than to protect an expected British convoy.70
Laying aside the strict accuracy of Nelson’s letter, its significance still beams brightly from its pages. This was as clear a statement of his concept of total victory as he ever made, and one remarkably similar to that penned by Hood after Rodney’s battle of 1782. On both occasions the criticism was that a defeated fleet had been allowed to escape. Nor was Nelson unaware that Hood would have shared his opinion. ‘I wish from my heart Lord Hood was arrived,’ he told Fanny. ‘We make but a bad hand of managing our fleet.’71
This meeting with French gentry, as Nelson put it, confirmed his view that the republican navy was grossly deficient in fighting qualities. The Ça Ira and Censeur had fought bravely, but the French fleet as a whole had been defeatist, running rather than fighting, and using all its ‘endeavours . . . to avoid an action’. Its discipline, by all that could be learned from prisoners, had been deplorable, something bewailed by the French admiral, who reported that ‘for the most part’ officers were ‘neither seconded by experience nor by sufficient capacity’. In seamanship and gunnery the enemy fleet had been transparently incompetent. The French ships had struggled to form line, collided with each other and separated. Their biggest ship, the Sans-Culotte, had disappeared in the night of the 13th and missed the next day’s battle completely. Their gunfire was far from accurate, and at times seemed to have been discharged ‘at random’, but when it was on target it was directed at masts and sails. It was a defensive fire, designed to cripple mobility and facilitate escape, rather than the destructive hull-smashing fire that destroyed ships and won battles. Ship for ship and gun for gun such forces were no match for their British counterparts, whose seam
anship had been shaped by years at sea, and whose gunnery, both in the rates and focus of their fire, had reached levels of fearful efficiency.72
That being the case new opportunities were unfolding, and Nelson saw them plainly. It was time to bring decision to naval combat, to reach for the complete victory using more aggressive tactics. The old line-ahead formation, which had fleets of comparable power firing distant broadsides at each other, was powerful defensively. However, once respect for an enemy’s ability declined, once men with Nelson’s confidence in battle superiority rose to the fore, its rigidity could be abandoned for more adventurous close-quarter tactics capable of delivering more impressive results.
The battle off Genoa may have been a scrappy Mediterranean victory, but it played its part in the making of Britain’s most famous admiral. Watching the rival fleets joust for two days vividly exposed the gulf between the two, and alerted Nelson to the prize that awaited an admiral willing to exploit it. And more than ever, he wanted to be that admiral. ‘I almost wish myself at the head of this fleet,’ Nelson confided to Hamilton. ‘Don’t accuse me of presumption. It is only from an anxious desire to serve our country.’73
8
Nelson’s part in the battle found only a modest place in Hotham’s public dispatch, but he was not dissatisfied. Earl Spencer, the new first lord of the Admiralty, had promised to serve Nelson when a ‘proper opportunity’ occurred, and he hoped that the fresh victory might be the encouragement needed.
Most of all he wanted another crack at the French, but the prevailing lethargy of Hotham’s command returned. The enemy fleet retired to Hyères and Toulon, while Hotham’s ships were soon ‘idling’ again between St Fiorenzo and Leghorn. Now a full admiral, Hotham was approaching sixty and the shaky hand of some of his letters betrayed a precarious state of health. He sometimes cruised off Minorca but seemed incapable of great exertion, and Nelson’s log brimmed with the dull minutiae of tacking and wearing ship as required. Even employed thus, he managed to impress his divisional commander, Vice Admiral Goodall of the Princess Royal, who formed a ‘high opinion’ of Nelson’s ‘bravery and activity’. When the British consul at Genoa asked Hotham to send a squadron to aid the Austrian army on the Italian riviera, it was Goodall who recommended the captain of the Agamemnon for the job.74