The War of Wars (92 page)

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.’

The
Revenge
fired at the
Calcutta
before she realized it had already been occupied by Cochrane’s sailors. The
Aquilon
and the
Ville de Varsovie
surrendered at 5.30. The
Caesar
, under Rear-Admiral Stopford, had also joined the battle by then. At 6 p.m. the crew of the
Tonnerre
abandoned ship and set fire to her; she blew up an hour later, as did the
Calcutta
, which had been set alight by Cochrane’s men, at about 9 p.m. Six of the French ships had however escaped up the Charente. Stopford sent in hastily converted fireships after them, but these were unable to prevail against the wind, and he used them instead against other ships.

The fighting raged on through the following night. At 4 a.m., however, Gambier hoisted three lights aboard his flagship as a signal for the recall of the British ships. The two ships Cochrane had captured, the
Aquilon
and the
Ville de Varsovie
, were set alight by Stopford –
although Cochrane had hoped to bring them back as prizes. As the
Indefatigable
sailed past, Cochrane tried to persuade her captain to join him in a final attack on the French flagship, the
Océan
, but he refused. So Cochrane set off in pursuit, accompanied by a flotilla of small boats.

Gambier thereupon sent him an astonishing letter, which had to be rowed all the way to his ship:

You have done your part so admirably that I will not suffer you to tarnish it by attempting impossibilities, which I think, as well as those captains who have come from you, any further effort to destroy those ships would be. You must, therefore, join as soon as you can, with the bombs, etc, as I wish for some information, which you allude to, before I close my despatches. PS: I have ordered three brigs and two rocket vessels to join you, with which, and the bomb, you may make an attempt on the ship that is aground on the Palles, or towards Île Madame, but I do not think you will succeed; and I am anxious that you should come to me, as I wish to send you to England as soon as possible. You must, therefore, come as soon as the tide turns.

Cochrane replied curtly: ‘I have just had the honour to receive your Lordship’s letter. We can destroy the ships that are on shore, which I hope your Lordship will approve of.’ For four hours now Cochrane and his little boats had engaged the mighty
Océan
, convinced that further successes could be obtained.

But at 5 a.m. a further letter arrived from Gambier unambiguously relieving Cochrane of his command: ‘It is necessary I should have some communication with you before I close my despatches to the Admiralty. I have, therefore, ordered Captain Wolfe to relieve you in the services you are engaged in. I wish you to join me as soon as possible, that you may convey Sir Harry Neale to England, who will be charged with my despatches, or you may return to carry on the service where you are. I expect two bombs to arrive every moment, they will be useful in it.’

At last, after nearly thirty-six hours of exhausting battle, Cochrane obeyed orders and returned to the flagship. The battle-stained and
exhausted young captain confronted the impeccably dressed and pompous non-combatant admiral who had done so little to help him, and had turned what should have been an overwhelming victory into half of one. Cochrane:

begged his lordship, by way of preventing the ill-feeling of the fleet from becoming detrimental to the honour of the service, to set me aside altogether and send in Admiral Stopford, with the frigates or other vessels, as with regard to him there could be no ill-feeling: further declaring my confidence that from Admiral Stopford’s zeal for the service, he would, being backed by his officers, accomplish results more creditable than anything that had yet been done. I apologised for the freedom I used, stating that I took the liberty as a friend, for it would be impossible, as matters stood, to prevent a noise being made in England.

Gambier replied huffily: ‘If you throw blame upon what has been done, it will appear like arrogantly claiming all the merit to yourself.’ Cochrane retorted: ‘I have no wish to carry the despatches, or to go to London with Sir Harry Neale on the occasion. My object is alone that which has been entrusted to me by the Admiralty – to destroy the vessels of the enemy.’

Cochrane was peremptorily ordered to depart for England the following morning, and arrived at Spithead six days later. Even the French acknowledged the magnitude of the victory: ‘This day of the 12th was a very disastrous one: four of our ships were destroyed, many brave people lost their lives by the disgraceful means the enemy made use of to destroy our lines of defence.’ The planned French expedition to Martinique had been completely destroyed.