The Directory now decided to try to sow terror along the English mainland itself. A pirate expedition was organized under an American officer, a Colonel Tate, consisting of 1,800 men recruited from prisons and among the vagabonds and beggars of France. They were dressed in black uniforms and dubbed the Black Legion. Their destination was Bristol, Britain’s great port in the west of England, which was to be looted and burnt to the ground. The expedition, on which Tate was accompanied by his mistress, set sail in February 1797 escorted by two French frigates, a corvette and a lugger. They arrived at Ilfracombe in north Devon and landed a couple of boats ashore, breaking into several houses and carrying away valuables before scuttling some of the fishing boats in the harbour. Many went barefoot or wore wooden clogs, and most got drunk on local beer and refused to obey orders. Hearing of the approach of a regiment of angry local volunteers, the little liberating force departed.
They sailed to the coast of Pembrokeshire, where once again they engaged in plundering and burning buildings. At the approach of the militia and Welsh volunteers they withdrew. Seeing a group of Welsh women spectators in their colourful red shawls, they are said to have mistaken them for a force of British regular troops, whereupon they surrendered. Tate’s mistress beat him about the head in fury. The few ships that had brought them were taken by British vessels without a fight. The experience of these two disastrous expeditions convinced the French to lay off invading the British Isles for a while.
Early in 1798, Ulster erupted in an orgy of violence. The uprising, consisting of discontented but also warring Protestants and Catholics alike, calling themselves ‘citizens’ and supporting a French-style Directory, sought self-rule from the British. People were burnt alive and lynched, houses razed. As the rebellion threatened to spread, the British forces swelled to some 60,000 men under the able and immensely experienced veteran of the American wars, General Cornwallis. In May insurrections also broke out in the counties of Dublin, Meath and Kildare. The French insisted that the time was ripe to hasten to the aid of the Irish. Tone believed his moment had at last arrived.
Even so, after their earlier experience, the French despatched only a small force, Tone arguing that it was but necessary for the French to land for the population to rise in revolt against the English. A force of 1,200 infantry and four cannon set sail accompanied by three 40-gun frigates in August. Humbert, their commander, was a tough and experienced soldier and his men were veterans from Italy and the Rhine. They reached Killala Bay in calm waters on 22 August and went ashore that evening unopposed. Humbert displayed considerable skill and determination. He defeated a small company of volunteers and occupied Killala. There at last local people began to join him. Advancing on Castlebar, some twenty miles to the south, these French professionals encountered a much larger force of militia and routed them, capturing 14 guns and taking 3,000 prisoners: about 100 British soldiers were killed.
However, four columns of British regular troops, some 4,000 men, were now on the way and Humbert soon found himself being pursued. He eluded his hunters for ten days before being surrounded at Ballinamuck, where he surrendered. Two factors had caused Humbert’s debacle: the Irish had failed to rally to him in anything like sufficient quantities, and those that had rallied were untrained and without arms; and the British had responded with the customary overwhelming force that they had used against Irish insurgents in the past.
On 16 September 1798 the French mounted a further attack from Brest, with the 74-gun Hoche, accompanied by eight 40-gun frigates and an invasion force of 3,000 with a huge amount of stores and considerable artillery, destined this time for Lough Swilly. Tone, under the alias of Smith, went along for a second time. The leader of the expedition was the experienced Commodore Bompart. Reaching Tory Island on the Irish coast on 11 October, the invading force was for once detected by British ships – a flotilla under Sir John Warren of three 74-gun ships and five frigates. The French made a run for it, and the British gave chase into a furious storm which dismasted the French flagship and so battered one of the frigates that it began to sink. One of the pursuing British ships, the Anson, was also dismasted.
Ruthlessly Bompart ordered the stricken French ship to wreck itself upon the shore, sending up rockets to distract the British and lure them to their doom on the rocks. The crippled ship disobeyed and by dawn the British flagships had caught up with the ailing Hoche. The furious firefight that ensued lasted three hours, leaving half of Hoche’s crew dead and most of its guns destroyed. Bompart struck his colours, as did three of the French frigates. A further three were captured two days later and only two made it back to port. It was a calamitous defeat for an expedition that had not even been able to land. Wolfe Tone himself was captured and later committed suicide in prison, knowing that his fate otherwise would be the gallows.
There were two other minor expeditions. Another Irish freedom fighter, Napper Tandy, had set sail for Donegal on 5 September in a French brig accompanied by forty-five French soldiers and a huge volume of leaflets calling upon 30,000 men to rise up when he landed. They reached Rutland Island off Donegal ten days later and landed. But they soon heard of Humbert’s defeat and hastily re-embarked, returning unscathed a week later. On 26 October a relief expedition for Humbert arrived at last and, also learning of his failure, sailed back to Brest. They were spotted by British ships and pursued, but escaped by ditching most of their guns and equipment.
Of the three major expeditions, involving some 9,000 troops altogether, one had been beaten by the weather, another defeated on land, and another routed at sea. The promised Irish uprising had not materialized, largely because the population was too cowed, the French had arrived in too small numbers and the British were present in unexpected strength. The French had grossly underestimated the size of the task: had a much bigger army landed, the Irish might have risen up, believing they would not be left to their fate against British retribution. It was a case of too little, too late. Moreover, the French never had command of the sea and only luck had allowed five expeditions to reach Ireland unintercepted. Even a huge expedition would have faced the hazard of Atlantic gales.
Pitt believed the immediate danger was past, but that it was essential to follow up such an event by immediate steps for a union: only by guaranteeing the Irish the same government, franchise and trading privileges as England possessed would that country be freed from French subversion. It was a noble ideal, but it required full Catholic emancipation – and the King was dead set against it. Ironically, this was the issue that was to bring Pitt’s ministry to an end and topple France’s greatest enemy from power.
Chapter 28
CAPE ST VINCENT
At the beginning of 1797, the French revolutionary leaders of the Directory were formulating a far more ambitious plan for striking at England than the flanking attack through Ireland. With both the powerful Dutch and Spanish fleets now on their side, they resolved to make a rendezvous of all three fleets to create a grand armada to sweep British seapower from the Channel, inflict a crippling blow at British trade and permit an invasion force to cross. With overwhelming naval power this should not have proved too difficult. All that the three fleets had to do was to evade the British blockade, and avoid an engagement before they met up.
Britain’s predicament was therefore truly appalling. Napoleon was on his final mopping-up operation in Italy and about to inflict the blow that would knock Austria out of the war. That would leave Britain with just one ally on the entire European continent – small, loyal Portugal, which was militarily insignificant. At sea Britain had held her own, but had won no decisive triumph. The Glorious First of June had proved a huge boost to morale and badly damaged the French fleet, but that was soon repaired. The frigate captains were performing daring raids and keeping the shipping lanes open, but that was all. Meanwhile the British had been all but expelled from the Mediterranean with the fall of Corsica: only the troops that had been taken from the island to Elba remained, along with the outposts of Ma
lta, Minorca and Gibraltar.
The fate of the British was now to rest decisively in the hands of two very different men. The first was a small man with an elfin, sardonic, bitter expression, a cunning squashed rodent face at once harsh, determined and slightly humorous: Sir John Jervis, ‘Black jack’, was one of the most detested commanders in the navy, known equally for his unbending love of discipline as for his tongue-lashing of subordinates. He seemed to possess a cruel, even sadistic streak: he would make junior officers bow low before him – ‘lower, sir, lower’ – for his own amusement. He resorted frequently to the lash and the death sentence. Yet he was an excellent naval strategist – the originator of the ‘close blockade’, and was enormously tough and determined, inspiring respect as well as dislike in his men. He cared nothing for the opinion of others. He was personally incorruptible, in a service full of malpractices, and his determination to stamp them out was later to prove his undoing. At that moment he was commanding the British fleet off Spain’s western coast, bottling up the Spanish fleet at Cadiz.
The second man, utterly unlike this stern, acerbic old sea salt, was at the same time given a dangerous duty to perform within the Mediterranean: to evacuate the British troops on Elba with just two frigates, the Minerve and the Blanche. His name was Horatio Nelson. As he set off on 19 December 1796, he ran into Spanish frigates at nearly midnight. He called out, ‘This is an English frigate’, and told the captain of one to surrender. A voice shouted back with a Scottish accent, ‘This is a Spanish frigate, and you may begin as soon as you please.’ The captain was a descendant of the Stuart dynasty. A furious gunbattle ensued. Nelson three times offered a ceasefire in exchange for surrender, and received the answer, ‘Not while I can fire a gun.’ After some ninety minutes the two Spanish ships struck their colours, but by then another Spanish frigate had heard the noise of the cannon and was upon Nelson. He had to cast off his prize and engage this, until with dawn he saw two huge Spanish battleships approaching. Heavily outgunned, he had no choice but to run before them for a whole day.
On eventually reaching Elba, he performed his task of taking off the island garrison, and then returned to Gibraltar on 9 January, where he learned that the Spanish fleet had slipped the blockade and was heading out into the Atlantic. He set off to join the main fleet on 11 January, but was soon pursued by two Spanish ships of the line.
At that moment one of the Minerve’s sailors fell overboard, and a boat commanded by Lieutenant Hardy was lowered to go to the rescue. The boat was quickly swept away by the tide, and Nelson had to decide whether to go to their rescue and risk coming within range of the huge ships chasing him or abandon the boat. He decided to pick up his men. The Spanish ships, seeing to their amazement the British ship backtracking (‘backing its mizzen topsail’ in the jargon) was confused, wondering whether a trap was being sprung with some as yet unseen British ships lurking over the horizon: why else would a tiny ship sail directly towards two huge ones? In turn they took in their sails and held back, while the Minerve, having picked up the little boat, returned to its former course.
Then the chase was on again. When night fell, Nelson ordered all the lights to be hidden and changed course suddenly: he thus threw off his pursuers. He was congratulating himself on the coup as the ship rolled in a gentle swell beneath the stars. Then it became apparent that the stars were rather too low – in fact on almost every side: he was in the middle of the thirty-ship Spanish fleet. He was astonished to observe it sailing south and decided it was heading for the West Indies; so he tagged along during the night to sense its direction, taking the colossal risk of detection and annihilation or capture.
Abruptly, it changed course west after Nelson had watched a barrage of signal lights being exchanged in the gloom. The Minerve skilfully, still pretending to be part of the fleet, drifted away, its lights hidden, to report on the Spanish fleet’s direction to Jervis, who was stationed off Cape St Vincent (São Vicente), on the barren south-western extremity of Portugal.
Nelson reported directly to the acerbic Jervis, and then assumed command of his own ship, the Captain. That night the signal guns of the Spanish fleet were sounding eerily off to the south-west. In the morning a thick mist blocked the view of both fleets. It was a tense moment, one that would be crucial to the war. If Britain lost, the way would be open for the enemy to command the Channel and prepare for the invasion of Britain.
The lookouts strained in the eerie murk covering the Atlantic roll. The mist suddenly lifted to reveal one of the most awesome and picturesque fleets ever assembled, a floating township of thousands of men inhabiting edifices taller than any buildings yet constructed on land. There were no fewer than twenty-seven battleships; these included the biggest ever made, the four-decker Santissima Trinidad, with no fewer than 212-guns, six three-deckers with 112 guns each, two 80-gun vessels and seventeen 74-gun ships. In terms of firepower it was perhaps the greatest armada ever hitherto assembled.
With a low swell that morning, the sight of these baroque castles gently bobbing in the western Atlantic left the British sailors that saw them speechless with awe. Nelson described the ships as ‘the finest in the world [but] the Spaniards, thank God, cannot build men’. There was a deathly calm about the whole scene, while Jervis’s fleet observed strict silence. It was as though the British had spotted an enormous and beautiful city of palaces at sea.
On paper, the strength of the Spanish fleet was overwhelming: it had a total of 2,292 guns compared with the 1,332 guns of the fifteen-strong British fleet. Yet, compared to the extremely tight formation of the latter – Nelson remarked, in a rare tribute, ‘of all the fleets I ever saw I never beheld one in point of officers and men equal to Sir John Jervis’s’ – the Spanish lines were straggly and ill-ordered, perhaps because they had never expected the British to be so near, a consequence of Nelson’s night-time feat of detection.
Jervis immediately spotted a weakness in the Spanish defence: the six ships at the rear were several hundred yards away from the main fleet. If he could cut through the gap, the six would be at his mercy. In an instant he signalled from his flagship, the Victory. The two perfectly ordered British lines – each ship at an equal distance from the other – quickly formed a single line with a precision of sailing and navigation remarkable in such huge vessels.
With Thomas Troubridge in the Culloden leading, they made at full canvas for the gap; the Victory was in seventh place, and Nelson’s Captain in thirteenth, nearly at the rear, a position held by Collingwood on the Excellent. The six isolated Spanish ships sought desperately to tack against the wind, to rejoin the main fleet. At about the time Culloden reached the gap, the Spanish vice-admiral’s ship, the 113-gun Principe de Asturias, had veered round into a position where it faced the seventh ship in the British line – Jervis’s own Victory – which like a spear was severing the Spanish fleet in two. A tremendous broadside from the British ship raked the Spanish one, which withdrew hastily to leeward.
Just ahead three ships from the main Spanish fleet had succeeded in slipping past the point of the British spearhead: but these nine Spanish ships, now isolated from the main fleet, were to leeward of the British and were reluctant to do battle with a far superior force: they were effectively out of the fight, and now sailed off in headlong flight. The odds between the main fleets were now much more even: eighteen Spanish ships to fifteen British ones.
As the Spanish fleet turned with the wind to try and escape past the tail of the British line, Troubridge, leading it, tacked skilfully from his south-westerly course to a northerly one, being followed by the rest of the line, describing a v-shape. Nelson in one of the two rearmost ships, spotted the Spanish manoeuvre, which would permit the whole fleet to escape, slipping past the back of the British line before Troubridge could lead it back up. The Captain threw the rulebook to the winds, steering in a reverse course around the ships immediately behind and crossing the front of Collingwood’s Excellent to try and intercept the fleeing Spanish fleet. He was set
on engaging the biggest ships leading the entire Spanish fleet in an attempt to delay them while the British fleet could come up to attack. The Excellent followed his example by breaking the line.
The flag captain of Jervis’s Victory, seeing this blatant flouting of orders, was outraged and insisted that a signal be sent to recall them: but Jervis, usually the most punctilious and disciplinarian of men, had realized what they were doing and refused. The little Captain now found the main body of the entire Spanish fleet bearing down upon itself, headed by the four-decker Santissima Trinidad, more of a moving skyscraper of the seas than a ship, flanked by two 112-gun ships, the San Josef and the Salvador del Mundo, each larger than Jervis’s own flagship, with three 80-gun ships immediately following them: the Captain seemed destined to become matchwood before these behemoths.
Undaunted, Nelson made straight for the Santissima Trinidad, all guns blazing. For nearly an hour the plucky little ship endured the simultaneous fire of six much bigger Spanish ships, but many of the Spanish shots went wide and hit other Spanish ships. Soon the Captain was reduced to a floating hulk, but Collingwood furiously engaged one of its tormentors and compelled it to surrender before moving upon the next, the San Nicholas. The Spanish fleet began to veer away, perhaps out of astonishment at the boldness of the attack by just two small ships. At that moment Troubridge’s Culloden, leading the British line on its new north-west course, reached the scene of the fighting and the battle swept past Nelson’s disabled Captain.
Even in this condition Nelson renewed the attack on the nearest ship, the 84-gun San Nicholas, which had also been dismasted. The British sailors swarmed up the remaining masts and spars of the Captain in order to drop aboard the San Nicholas’s deck, which towered above the smaller British ship; others grabbed the Spanish ship’s cable. Nelson himself broke through a window on the lower deck. The leader of the British boarders on the upper deck furiously cut down the Spaniards facing him and then enterprisingly hauled down the Spanish colours, as officers began to surrender to him.
The War of Wars Page 25