by John Sugden
Nelson chafed at his commander-in-chief’s ‘doing nothing’ policy but also blamed the Admiralty, whose new board he reckoned worse than the last. Many of Hotham’s ships were worn out, but neither replacements nor reinforcements appeared. His adversary, Vice Admiral Martin, was increasing his forces. Two line of battle ships were being built in Toulon, and six arrived from Brest, giving the French twenty capital ships to Hotham’s fourteen. The British were unequal to their many commitments. Merchantmen could not be provided with escorts, though the enemy fleet was almost able to sail at will and the seas swarmed with privateers, and safe passage could not even be guaranteed important convoys bringing military and naval supplies from Gibraltar to St Fiorenzo. Plans to support the Austrians on the riviera stalled.75
The British were outnumberd, but the battle near Genoa had confirmed Nelson’s belief that they could beat the larger enemy fleet, a belief that was only vindicated by every skirmish. In June 1795 the Dido and Lowestoffe garnered fresh laurels for the Royal Navy by defeating two superior French frigates in a classic encounter off Minorca, an event Nelson rated ‘the handsomest thing this war’. In Nelson’s opinion Hotham’s fourteen ships of the line, including two Neapolitan men-of-war, were ‘sufficient at any time to fight twenty French ships . . . However much our armies may have failed, yet our seamen are as superior to the French as ever during this war. We have never once failed, neither in single [ship] action[s] nor in a fleet.’76
All that was needed, Nelson felt, was a leader. ‘Truly sorry am I that Lord Hood does not command us,’ Nelson informed his Uncle William. ‘He is a great officer, and were he here we should not now be skulking.’ The fleet would be watching Toulon and not cruising fruitlessly off Minorca. Then sad news reached the Mediterranean. Hood had been quarrelling again, and deeply upset the first lord of the Admiralty, and he was not coming back. Nelson was thunderstruck. ‘Oh miserable board of Admiralty!’ he cried. ‘They have forced the first officer in our service away from his command.’77
The consolation was that reinforcements under Rear Admiral Robert Man of the Victory reached the fleet in June. Among them Nelson was delighted to find one of his boyhood friends from the Seahorse, Thomas Troubridge, now a post-captain and a truly masculine figure, with a strong frame and ruggedly handsome features set beneath prominent brows. Nelson liked Troubridge. With a ready intelligence, cultivated perhaps by an education at St Paul’s School, Troubridge had graduated from Mr Surridge’s classes in seamanship to serve on the flagship of Sir Richard Hughes in the East Indies, where he had participated in several skirmishes with the French fleet. His luck had varied since. Re-employed on the outbreak of war like Nelson, his frigate the Castor was captured by the French in the Atlantic and he witnessed the battle of ‘The Glorious First of June’ as a prisoner aboard one of the enemy men-of-war. Liberated by Howe’s victory, he had been appointed to the Culloden seventy-four, but had to suppress a mutiny to bring her out to the Mediterranean. There the two friends resumed their old intimacy, masters of their profession and united in a determination to defeat the French.78
Nelson shared his disappointment about Hood with Troubridge, but the reinforcements raised his spirits. Before, when the British had been outnumbered, he had known they were capable of trouncing Martin’s fleet, but now the issue of a battle would be ‘certain’. More important still, it increased the possibility of the Royal Navy winning the ‘complete victory’ he wanted. As he would famously say many years later, only numbers could annihilate.79
Nelson only needed another rendezvous with the French to be made happy. ‘God send us a good and speedy meeting!’ he said.80
It came upon him suddenly and dangerously.
9
In the evening of 4 July the Agamemnon was towed out of St Fiorenzo and got under sail, making northwards towards Genoa with the frigates Ariadne and Meleager, the Moselle sloop and Mutine cutter.
It was a relief. The previous day Nelson had been sitting in the Princess Royal as part of a court reaffirming the right of the navy to command all soldiers serving aboard their ships, including Lieutenant Gerald FitzGerald of the 11th Regiment of Foot, who had brooked such authority on the Diadem. The new task was far more appetising. The Austrian army was attempting to halt the French advance along the riviera and needed naval support. After many delays Nelson was on his way with a small force and orders to join the Inconstant and Southampton in Genoa, and to deploy the entire squadron to the detriment of the French. With alternative and senior officers at hand, Hotham honoured Nelson by the command, although the suggestion was Goodall’s. The acting commander-in-chief was not a gifted man, and wanted to be relieved of the awesome responsibility of ruling the Mediterranean, but he did his duty insofar as he could comprehend it. He knew Nelson to be the right man.81
On this occasion Captain Nelson never reached Genoa.
For two days he sailed along, detaching his ships to investigate such craft as appeared. On the 6th Captain Robert Plampin of the Ariadne spoke to the master of a Swedish brig a dozen leagues off Cape di Noli and heard that the French fleet was out again and had been seen the previous day. The information was no sooner relayed to Nelson than at about noon a cry from the masthead of the Ariadne drew Plampin’s attention to several large ships west-by-north. Nelson signalled a chase, but the Ariadne was soon reporting fifteen sail, and both sides gingerly probed for information. Two strange frigates hung in the offing, reconnoitring the British ships, while Nelson’s lookouts quickly realised that this was no merchant convoy before them, but the main French battle fleet. It was, in fact, Vice Admiral Martin with seventeen sail of the line and six frigates.
Early the next morning four large ships pushed towards the British ships under Spanish colours, but Nelson was not deceived. Calling in his cruisers, he ordered them to save themselves, and turned back towards St Fiorenzo to warn Hotham. A furious twenty-four-hour chase ensued. ‘We fear much for poor Nelson, who has led them the dance there,’ wrote Udny when the news reached Leghorn, and there were indeed some dangerous moments. Captain Charles Brisbane only escaped an enemy frigate by running the Moselle between Cape Corse and a small island, and Nelson himself did well enough until the wind failed on the morning of the 8th, not far from St Fiorenzo. The French fleet had the better of the available breeze, and for a while Nelson cleared his ship for what would have been a hopeless defence, but the wind as quickly revived and enabled the Agamemnon to flee through shallows towards St Fiorenzo. Nelson fired signal guns to alert Hotham, but the French ships quickly scurried away as the British ships frenziedly prepared for sea. They were ‘neither seamen nor officers’ snorted Nelson in disgust.82
Hotham had been taken by surprise, but got his full force out that night, twenty-three sail of the line that made what Nelson described as ‘as fine a fleet as ever graced the seas’. Martin had disappeared westwards, and Hotham went after him, flying his flag from the hundred-gun Britannia. Among his ships were the three-decked Victory and Princess Royal, bearing the flags of Man and Goodall, but the two-decked seventy-fours were the mainstay of the fleet and included the Courageux and Culloden, captained by Nelson’s friends Hallowell and Troubridge. Though sixty-fours were seen as rather weak for the line of battle, Nelson excitedly took his place determined that the Agamemnon would be among the foremost.83
The French were tracked to south of the Hyères islands on 12 July. At daylight on the following morning they were seen in an irregular line four leagues or so to leeward in the southeast, steering northwards towards the land about Fréjus Bay on the larboard tack. Acting smartly the British might have cut them off, but Hotham was moving away from the shore on the opposite tack and lost considerable time reforming his fleet in battle order on the larboard line of bearing. The Princess Royal had to signal the Agamemnon to take its proper station no less than four times. It was not until eight o’clock that Hotham decided that the enemy was intent only on escape, and signalled a general chase, freeing his captains to pursue as each wa
s able. A later signal, ordering captains to engage the enemy ships as they came up with them, increased the measure of independence allowed, but although the British ships plunged after the retiring Frenchmen under all possible sail it was too late.
Many officers in the fleet seethed at the admiral’s sluggishness, so volubly that Elliot reflected ‘in other times it might very possibly have come to a shooting bout’. Vice Admiral Sir Hyde Parker of the St George later claimed that most if not all of the French ships might have been taken if Hotham had gone about immediately. For two hours Hotham had persisted on the opposite tack, sailing away from the French, and the final signal for a general chase was not made until four hours after the enemy had first been spotted. During that time, Parker raged, the distance between the fleets had grown to five leagues, and it had become impossible to cut them off from the land. Other captains added to this chorus, and the charge got back to officers who had not been present, including Captain Collingwood and Admiral Hood, muddying Hotham’s reputation.84
In the event only a few of the British ships came up with the hindmost French vessels. Fickle winds retarded their advance, and it was noon before the Victory (Captain John Knight), Captain (Captain Reeve), Agamemnon, Cumberland (Captain Bartholomew Samuel Rowley), Defence (Captain Thomas Wells) and Culloden (Captain Troubridge) – what a lieutenant of the first of these called the six ‘fastest and best managed’ ships – got within gun shot, leaving their fellows wallowing behind. They cheered each other into action, first the Victory and Culloden and then their consorts, and for a while they were head to head with the enemy rear, their bows to the northwards, enveloped in the thick gunsmoke of mutual fire. The winds played the British false, however, fading as the brief but furious cannonade intensfied and then turning into a calm. It was impossible for the ships to close, and Nelson, who had been engaging the enemy centre and rear, complained that another ten minutes would have put him alongside an eighty-gun flagship. The highlight of the action came at about two o’clock when the French Alcide, a seventy-four battered by the Victory, Culloden and Cumberland, struck its colours, but accidentally took fire in her foretop and shortly detonated with a terrifying explosion. The British boats saved about three hundred men but another four hundred were lost.
The wind shifted, enabling the French to retreat into Fréjus Bay where it was dangerous for the British to follow. Nevertheless, at about three-thirty the Cumberland and Agamemnon were coming up with the hindmost once again, one the former British Berwick, when the signal to discontinue action was flown from the Britannia, eight miles astern. Hotham’s ship sailed badly, and may have fallen so far behind that the admiral had lost his ability to read the battle. In his view his foremost vessels ‘had approached so near to the shore that I judged it proper to call them off by signal’. But others took a different view. Goodall is said to have kicked his hat about the deck in rage, and some of his men supposedly went even further, heatedly declaring that they would no longer serve under Hotham. Nelson was equally critical. ‘The risk might have been great,’ he told Fanny, ‘but so was the object.’ His brother William got a damning account of the ‘miserable’ engagement: ‘To say how much we wanted Lord Hood at that time is to say, “Will you have all the French fleet or no action?” For the scrambling distant fire was a farce. But if one [enemy ship] fell by such a fire, what might not have been expected had our whole fleet engaged!’85
One French ship, the frigate Alceste, had made a desperate attempt to get a hawser to the injured Alcide before she surrendered, advancing under heavy British fire until the attempt was palpably forlorn. The captain’s courage astonished British opponents, but the French performance as a whole had not been impressive. Hotham’s fleet suffered little loss, a mere thirty-eight men killed and wounded and some structural damage aloft, and Nelson’s unflattering opinion of the republican navy was reinforced. Only one man on the Agamemnon had been badly wounded, and though a few French shots had struck the ship below the waterline most had damaged sails and rigging. ‘Thus,’ he told the Duke of Clarence, ‘has ended our second meeting with these gentry . . . the French admiral, I am certain, is not a wise man or an officer. He was undetermined whether to fight or run away. However, I must do him the justice to say he took the wisest step at last [running away]. Indeed, I believe this [the British] Mediterranean fleet is as fine a one as ever graced the ocean . . . The enemy will have still twenty-one sail at sea in a month, but I don’t believe they can ever beat us in their present undisciplined state.’ Others shared these conclusions around the mess tables. ‘The enemy were very badly manoeuvred, and fired without doing any execution of consequence for two hours,’ recalled the Victory lieutenant.86
More diplomatic than in days gone by, Nelson confined his reservations to private letters and remained on excellent terms with Hotham. After returning to St Fiorenzo he was dispatched once again to the riviera, sailing on 15 July with the Ariadne and Meleager frigates, the Tarleton brig and the Resolution cutter under his command. He also had the authority of a new rank, possibly an echo of the promises made by Lord Hood or maybe an acknowledgement of his part in the battle of 13 and 14 March. Whatever the case, newspapers sent by his father informed him that a general promotion of 6 June had raised him to Colonel of Marines of the Chatham Division with its welcome increment in salary.87
It was belated perhaps, but at least it preserved his chances of remaining on the station, where the French were still at large and there were battles to be fought. It also imparted some sense of progression. Nelson’s health was troubling him and he confessed to Sir Gilbert Elliot that ‘my exertions have been beyond my strength. I have a complaint in my breast which will probably bear me down.’ The ship’s surgeon, Mr Reynolds, prescribed rest, but his promotion and the independent command fed his vanity, and put him back at the forefront of the military struggle in the Mediterranean. He had found the one active theatre left within Hotham’s command.88
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Since the Corsican invasion Nelson had felt more frustrated than fulfilled, but his education had benefited. The foundations of his future successes were nearly all in place.
He had been an apt pupil, intelligent, diligent and determined, driven by his own dreams of distinction and honour and a strong personality. His progress also reflected the work of many minds – of Captain Suckling, who had preached the gospel of duty; of Mr Surridge, who had taught him to handle and navigate a ship; and of William Locker, who had given him his first major lessons in command and filled his head with the glorious deeds of Hawke.
Perhaps most of all Nelson’s progress reflected his ultimate role model, Lord Hood, the very epitome of duty, determination and daring. Hood shared Nelson’s energy, aggression and self-confidence, and the two men, one a greying sea dog nearing the end of his active life, the other a zealot who commanded the future, had probably often talked about the complete victory they both wanted, and how it might be won. It is easy to believe that in Nelson’s tactics at the battle of the Nile there were distant echoes of what his old mentor had tried to do at St Kitts and Golfe Jouan. Nelson was outspoken in his admiration for Hood, ‘the best officer, take him altogether, that England has to boast of. Lord Howe certainly is a great officer in the management of a fleet, but that is all. Lord Hood is equally great in all situations that an admiral can be placed in.’ Nelson’s homage was most obvious in his criticisms of Hotham. Whenever he censured Hotham, he insisted that Hood would have acted differently – in other words, as he himself would have acted. The professional views of Hood and Nelson were therefore interchangeable, distinct from Hotham’s and as one.89
Today it is impossible to endorse Nelson’s exalted opinion of Hood, at least in every respect. Undoubtedly the admiral possessed professional courage and resolution, but we have seen how his refusal to heed advice had contributed to the disaster at Toulon and almost derailed (perhaps we should say shipwrecked) the invasion of Corsica. Even Nelson, something of a Hood protégé, had suffered from his blat
ant favouritism and failure to appreciate talent. According to Fremantle, one of Hood’s most aggrieved captains, ‘most of us are tired of serving under him’. Surprisingly, Nelson remained unusually blind to his mentor’s failings.90
Nevertheless, Nelson had seen the British fleet reach a state of professional perfection under Hood, and learned essential lessons about the importance of discipline, training and health. Rather than ‘loitering’ in port or at sea, Hood had schooled the ships in manoeuvres and battle procedures. The Agamemnon herself was a crack unit. For gales and seas, he said, his men cared nothing. Sometimes waves and winds rolled the ship violently, smashed her stern galleries, sprung masts, ripped sails from their yards, damaged the rudder or streamed her decks with water, but the company handled her beautifully, and she was at the head of every general chase. Her gunnery, seasoned on sea and land, could probably not be bettered. Even ‘worn out’ Nelson doubted there was a two-decker in the world that could have captured the Agamemnon. ‘I am sure this ship’s company feel themselves equal to go alongside any seventy-four out of France,’ he said. ‘Every man has seen so many shot fired that they are very superior to those who have not been in action.’91
Health was another legacy of Hood’s command, an important one since sick crews and efficiency did not make good partners. Of course, there would always be sick lists, especially in the Mediterranean where arduous work in feverish climates and disease-ridden ports was inseparable from life. The Agamemnon suffered brutally during her Corsican campaigns of 1794. But away from the specific damage of particularly demanding assignments, the fleet had made gains under Hood. Scurvy was practically eliminated from the fleet, partly no doubt through the aegis of the fleet physician, Dr John Harness, who came to the Mediterranean from Haslar Hospital in Portsmouth. The admiral made little use of salted provisions, and shipped live oxen and other livestock on his ships, while efforts were constantly made to procure lemons, onions and oranges as curatives. ‘No fleet ever was in better order to meet an enemy than I conceive ours to be at this moment,’ Nelson wrote soon after Hood’s departure. ‘We are remarkably healthy.’ Scurvy, he later added, was ‘not known’. In fact, before 1796, when Gilbert Blane persuaded the Admiralty regularly to issue lemon juice to the fleets, Nelson and other Mediterranean captains had been schooled in the maintenance of basic health.92