The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  Having thus set out the dangers of an attack in alarmist tones, Gambier then typically reached an ingratiatingly ambiguous conclusion: ‘I beg leave to add that, if their Lordships are of opinion that an attack on the enemy’s ships by those of the fleet under my command is practicable, I am ready to obey any orders they may be pleased to honour me with, however great the risk may be of the loss of men and ships.’

  What neither Gambier nor Cochrane knew was that the French had their own secret defence – a 900-foot long boom made of wooden trunks held together by chains and anchored to the sea floor. Allemand had also taken other precautions: he had stationed four frigates along the boom, as well as some seventy smaller boats whose purpose was to tow any fireships away from the main fleet should they succeed – which seemed unlikely – in breaking through the boom. The ten French battleships in the front line had lowered their sails in order to lessen their chances of catching fire.

  On the morning of 10 April Cochrane went to Gambier to seek formal authorization to put his plan into action. To his astonishment, Gambier refused, citing the danger to the crews of the fireships: ‘If you choose to rash on to self-destruction that is your own affair, but it is my duty to take care of the lives of others, and I will not place the crews of the fireships in palpable danger.’ Depressed and frustrated, Cochrane returned to the Impérieuse. The following day the wind got up from the west and a heavy sea began to run. Far from being deterred by this, Cochrane saw that it presented an opportunity: the sea would favour the British, especially as the tide came in, and, although the swell would make navigation much trickier in the treacherous Channel, the French would be less on their guard, thinking the conditions too dangerous for an attack.

  Gambier, meanwhile, had had time to reflect. His explicit orders were to allow Cochrane to make the attack; and he could not continue to refuse him authority without risking injury to his own reputation. Cochrane returned on board the flagship to ask for permission; and this time it was grudgingly given.

  His ships would attack in three waves. The first would be his three explosion ships, the foremost of which he, never reluctant to place himself in intense danger at the front of the fighting, would command. The second wave would consist of the twenty fireships. Behind them were three frigates, the Pallas, the Aigle and the Unicorn, accompanied by HMS Caesar to pick up the returning crews of the explosion vessels and fireships; but they would not come close to the action at this stage.

  There were two sobering thoughts. First, the French understandably regarded fireships as a barbaric instrument of war, and would execute anyone they caught that could be identified as crewing them; the sailors were instructed to say, if caught, that they belonged to victualling ships nearby. Second, although the flood-tide to shore in this heavy swell favoured the fireships’ approach, it would make it very difficult for their crews, now in small boats, to go out against the flow and regain the safety of the rescue ships.

  Gambier, astonishingly, anchored his fleet nine miles away. It was such a distance that it could only be supposed he wanted to be able to make a break for it and escape if the French fleet came out after him – the reverse of virtually all British naval tactics for a century or more, which were based on carrying the fight to the French. The fleet would be too far to exercise the slightest influence on the initial action and, worse, it was impossible for him to see what was really going on; even signals were liable to be misinterpreted at that distance.

  Cochrane floated in on the flood tide aboard the foremost explosion vessel – itself a desperately dangerous venture, as he and his men were sitting on top of tons of explosive; one lucky shot from the French and they would be annihilated. Besides Cochrane and Lieutenant Bissel of the Impérieuse there were just four seamen. Behind him a second explosion ship followed with Midshipman Marryat – later to make a name as a great story teller – on board, commanded by a lieutenant. Cochrane had no idea there was a boom but his ship navigated successfully down the Channel at dead of night, in spite of the heavy swell, approaching as close to the distant huddle of the French fleet as he dared. Then he lit the fifteen-minute fuse of the explosives aboard. He was certainly very close to the boom when he did so; his men were already aboard the getaway gig.

  As soon as he jumped aboard, they rowed for all they were worth away from the explosion ship in the pitch darkness. According to press accounts Cochrane, hearing barking, saw a dog aboard – the ship’s mascot – and rowed back to fetch it. Certainly something delayed his departure, and the fuse, for some reason, went off after only nine minutes. Cochrane’s boat had barely managed to get clear of the ship again when it went up. He was saved by his failure to get further. If he had not gone back he would have been on the receiving end of the shower of debris that soared overhead and landed in an arc in the sea just beyond.

  The explosion was awesome. Cochrane vividly described the scene:

  For a moment, the sky was red with the lurid glare arising from the simultaneous ignition of 1,500 barrels of powder. On this gigantic flash subsiding, the air seemed alive with shells, grenades, rockets, and masses of timber, the wreck of the shattered vessel; whilst the water was strewn with spars shaken out of the enormous boom, on which, on the subsequent testimony of Captain Proteau, whose frigate lay just within the boom, the vessel had brought up before she exploded. The sea was convulsed as by an earthquake, rising in a huge wave on whose crest our boat was lifted like a cork and as suddenly dropped into a vast trough, out of which, as it closed on us with a rush of a whirlpool, none expected to emerge. The skill of the boat’s crew however overcame the threatened danger, which passed away as suddenly as it had arisen, and in a few minutes nothing but a heavy rolling sea had to be encountered, all having become silence and darkness.

  The boom lay in pieces. The second ship passed through its broken fragments some ten minutes later, and the decision was taken to detonate it and abandon ship in the same way. Another tremendous explosion shattered the peace of the night sky. The third explosion ship had, however, been pushed away from the scene by the Impérieuse because a fireship had come too close, and there was a risk of all three blowing up together. Marryat was ordered to go aboard the fireship and steer it away, a heroic action, after which Cochrane asked him laconically whether he had felt warm.

  To Cochrane’s disappointment the fireships were badly handled. As he rowed back to the Impérieuse, three or four passed him, being towed by small rowing boats towards their destination. But the towing boats of some seventeen others had abandoned them about four miles out to sea, judging the risk too great, and most drifted harmlessly ashore. The whole spectacle, however, had been enough to cause havoc among the French fleet. Their first experience of the attack had been the ear-shattering explosion and conflagration aboard Cochrane’s ship, followed by another even closer to hand. Then the night sky had been lit up by the spectacle of twenty blazing vessels, some close, others out to sea, in a massive attack to destroy the French fleet.

  Their first assumption was that the fireships coming towards them were also explosion vessels, and in the small space of water of the Aix anchorage, the French ships of the line manoeuvred desperately to avoid them, while both wind and tide drove them relentlessly towards the shore. The flagship Océan was the first to run aground. According to one of its officers:

  At 10.00 we grounded, and immediately after a fireship in the height of her combustion grappled us athwart our stern; for ten minutes she remained in this situation while we employed every means in our power to prevent the fire from catching the ship; our fire engines and pumps played upon the poop enough to prevent it from catching fire; with spars we hove off the fireship, with axes we cut the chains of the grapplings lashed to her yards, but a chevaux de frise on her sides held her firmly to us. In this deplorable situation we thought we must have been burned, as the flames of the fireship covered all our poop. Two of our line-of-battle ships, the Tonnerre and Patriote, at this time fell on board of us; the first broke our bowspri
t and destroyed our main chains. Providence afforded us assistance on this occasion. At the moment the fireship was athwart our stern, and began to draw forward along the starboard side, the Tonnerre separated herself from us, and unless this had happened the fireship would have fallen into the angle formed by two ships and would infallibly have burnt them. The fireship having got so far forward as to be under our bowsprit, we left it there some time to afford the two ships above mentioned time to get far enough away to avoid being boarded by this fireship. While this fireship was on board of us we let the cocks run in order to wet the powder, but they were so feeble that we could not do that.

  Some fifty of the Océan’s men fell into the water and drowned. In the confusion the French ships made towards the coastal mud-flats and the Palles Shoal off the Île Madame; they got too close. The tide was on the turn and now ebbing fast: the Océan was joined aground by the Aquilon, Tonnerre, Ville de Varsovie and Calcutta, with their hulls stranded like ducks’ bottoms out of the water.

  As the first streaks of light illuminated the morning sky, Cochrane looked on the scene with deep satisfaction. His victory had been far from perfect: he had been forced to blow up the explosion ships before they could reach the fleet but they had destroyed the boom that protected the French fleet. The fireship attack had almost been a disaster: but the confusion sown by the first two explosion ships and the four fireships that had reached the enemy had been enough effectively to disperse the French fleet, run most of it aground, and place it at the mercy of the British. Complete victory lay in the offing, thanks to his imagination, and the bravery of his crews.

  At 5.48 a.m., at first light, he signalled triumphantly to the flagship, the Caledonia, some nine miles away: ‘Half the fleet to destroy the enemy. Seven on shore.’ Gambier signalled back with the answering pennant – a bare acknowledgement. Cochrane, just outside the Aix Channel, watching the floundering French fleet, waited for Gambier’s ships to approach and give him the signal to attack with his small flotilla of frigates. He wondered why there was no movement by Gambier’s ships, but watched delightedly through his telescope as four more French ships were beached.

  At 6.40 he reported this to the Caledonia. The answering pennant was hoisted and Gambier made no move. Cochrane’s notoriously short fuse was now burning to explosion point. He had just taken in a ship laden with explosives at enormous personal risk to himself and narrowly escaped with his life. He had seen his attack effectively incapacitate the entire French fleet. It was impossible for beached ships to fire broadside, indeed any guns at all. Now that they could be picked off at will, Gambier and his huge fleet were still hesitant to come in and finish them off.

  An hour later, at 7.40, Cochrane sent off another signal: ‘Only two afloat.’ The reply was the answering pennant again and the fleet made no move. Whatever the explanation he gave at the subsequent court-martial, Gambier’s motives in refusing to attack the beached French fleet were probably mixed. He had been witness to the amazing fireworks of the night before. He heartily disapproved of the whole tactic of sending in explosion ships and fireships, and disliked the impulsive and reckless Cochrane. His captains had been almost mutinous about Cochrane’s appointment.

  How could the commander-in-chief even be sure that Cochrane was telling the truth and not seeking to entice the fleet into a dangerous engagement from which it might emerge badly damaged? His duty was the protection of the fleet, and he could not put it at risk on the word of an impertinent young captain. He decided, first, not to risk his ships in the confined waters of the Aix-Boyart Channel under the guns of enemy batteries; and, second, to teach Cochrane a lesson and show who was in command. The Admiralty had ordered him to support Cochrane’s fireship attack; it had not insisted that he risk any of his own ships.

  This was to be one of the most contemptible acts of any commander-in-chief in British naval history, far eclipsing Admiral Byng’s realistic decision to surrender Minorca only half a century before – for which he had been shot. The ideal chance to move in and destroy the beached French fleet would be short-lived. The British ships would have the perfect chance to come in on the flood before the French ships floated once again. It was a small window of opportunity.

  Cochrane fumed in an agony of frustration and impotence. He signalled at 9.30: ‘Enemy preparing to move.’ Gambier was later to claim that ‘as the enemy was on shore, [I] did not think it necessary to run any unnecessary risk of the fleet, when the object of their destruction seemed to be already obtained.’ There is a small possibility that he was telling the truth – in other words that he believed the French ships to have been incapacitated by their grounding – although any sailor with more experience than Gambier would have realized that a ship beached by a tide was perfectly capable of floating off with little damage done. It is true that there was a slight element of ambiguity in the first three signals – but only to the most obtuse commander. Cochrane claimed later that he then sent another signal ‘the frigates alone can destroy the enemy’ – which allowed of no ambiguity, but was clearly impertinent. It was not, however, logged aboard the flagship. But after his 9.30 signal even Gambier could have harboured no illusions that the enemy was anything but destroyed.

  At 11.00 a.m. the Admiral at last ordered his ships inshore – and then, to Cochrane’s astonishment, the fleet stopped some four miles out. Cochrane watched in utter disbelief: victory was ebbing away with the incoming tide. As he wrote: ‘There was no mistaking the admiral’s intention in again bringing the fleet to an anchor. Notwithstanding that the enemy had been four hours at our mercy, and to a considerable extent was still so, it was now evident that no attack was intended, and that every enemy’s ship would be permitted to float away unmolested and unassailed! I frankly admit that this was too much to be endured. The words of Lord Mulgrave rang in my ears, “The Admiralty is bent on destroying that fleet before it can get out to the West Indies.” ’

  Having displayed so much courage the previous night, he now took what is said to have been the bravest decision of his entire career, because it involved both defying his commander-in-chief and taking on alone the might of the French navy – although to him the risk may have seemed small as the ships were at his mercy. But they were floating off, and Gambier’s prevarications had left it almost too late even for him to attack successfully.

  In an action that compared with Nelson’s raising the telescope to his blind eye at Copenhagen, Cochrane decided to raise anchor aboard the Impérieuse and drift, stern foremost, down the perilous Aix Channel – that is, with his vulnerable rear exposed to enemy fire – straight into the midst of a dozen warships. This required superb seamanship. The idea was not to let Gambier see what he was doing until the last moment, and to be able to claim that he had floated accidentally with the tide. The shore batteries on the Île d’Oleron opened up, but the shells fell reassuringly far from the ship – as Cochrane had always predicted they would. The ones on the Île d’Aix were so ineffectual that, according to a British gunner: ‘we could not find above thirteen guns that could be directed against us in passing; and these we thought so little of that we did not return their fire.’

  However, the huge flagship Océan was now afloat again, as were four other ships, which immediately turned tail and made for the safety of the Charente estuary upon the Impérieuse’s backwards approach. The French were now so demoralized they were not prepared to take on even Cochrane’s single ship. Cochrane wrote later: ‘Better to risk the frigates or even my commission than to suffer such a disgraceful termination [of the engagement].’ At last, when he had safely emerged from the Channel, he unfurled his sails, signalling at the same time to Gambier:

  1.30 p.m. The enemy’s ships are getting under sail.

  1.40 p.m. The enemy is superior to the chasing ship.

  1.45 p.m. The ship is in distress, and required to be assisted immediately. Thus he had cleverly outwitted his admiral: he could claim that he had not been responsible for the Impérieuse’s approach to the
French fleet; and it was unheard of for a commander not to come to the help of one of his ships in distress, thus forcing Gambier’s hand.

  By two o’clock the Impérieuse was close enough to deliver a broadside into the 50-gun French magazine ship, the Calcutta, while her forecastle (forward) guns fired upon the Aquilon and her bow guns fired on the Ville de Varsovie – three ships at the same time. Captain Lafon of the Calcutta, fearing that his explosive-laden ship would blow up, climbed understandably but ignominiously out of his stern cabin window and ran away across the mud – for which he was later shot by the French.

  The Impérieuse itself came under fire. Marryat recalled graphically how a seaman in the fo’c’s’le was decapitated by a cannonball, and how another was blown in two while the spine still attached the two parts: the corpse, its reflexes still working, jumped to its feet, stared at him ‘horribly in the face’, and fell down. In fact only three members of the crew were killed and eleven wounded throughout the whole engagement – another example of the ‘reckless’ Cochrane’s meticulous care for the safety of his men. The Calcutta surrendered at 3.20 and Cochrane’s men took possession.

  Behind him, Gambier had at last been goaded into action. He sent in two battleships, the Valiant and Revenge, along with the 44-gun Indefatigable, described by Marryat: ‘She was a beautiful ship, in what we call “high kelter”; she seemed a living body, conscious of her own superior power over her opponents, whose shot she despised as they fell thick and fast about her, while she deliberately took up an admirable position for battle. And having furled her sails, and squared her yards, as if she had been at Spithead, her men came down from aloft, went to their guns, and opened such a fire on the enemy’s ships as would have delighted the great Nelson himself.’