The Years of Endurance (51 page)

But the French had not sailed from Malta on June 16th. They had appeared off the island on t
he 9th
and summoned its international custodians, the Knights of St. John, to surrender. The scene had been carefully set: the Maltese had no stomach for their

¹
Mahan,
Nelson,
I,
328.
"If
they
have
concerted
a
plan
with
Tippoo Sahib
to
have
vessels
at
Suez,
three
weeks
at
this
season
is
a
common
passage to
the
Malabar
coast,
where
our
India
possessions
would
be
in
great
danger."
—Ibid.,
I,
334.

rich and obese masters' cause, the island was swarming with French agents and traitors, and the Knights, comfortably set in their ways and undermined by subtle propaganda, were divided as to the advisability of resistance. After three days' discussion they surrendered, and Bonaparte, whose besieging armada would otherwise have fallen an easy prey for Nelson on the 22nd, took possession of Valetta—" the strongest place in Europe." Here he remained for nearly a week, helping himself to the accumulations of seven centuries of luxurious and cultured living. Then, leaving a strong garrison behind him to hold the strategic half-way house to France, he sailed on the 19th for Alexandria after making arrangements to dispose of the booty.

So it came about that Nelson's look-outs on June 22nd saw the sails of French frigates on the far horizon. But Nelson did not stop to investigate them, for he guessed that they could not belong to Bonaparte's main fleet which, according to his own information, had left Malta six days before. Had he possessed any frigates of his own, he would soon have discovered his error. But to have pursued the French with his battle fleet alone would have led him nowhere, for they would inevitably have lured him away from his real quarry, the great ships and transports. So instead he kept on his course. Sho
rtly
afterwards darkness fell, and during the night, which was hazy, the British line of battle, swift, compact and intent, passed unknowing through the converging track of the French expedition. The sound of the British minute guns firing through the mist caused the French Admiral to sheer away to the northward in the direction of Crete. Had dawn come half an hour earlier it would have revealed him and his helpless transports
flagrante delicto.
But by sunrise on the 23rd the last French sails were just below the horizon.

That was one of the decisive moments of the world's history. A long train of events had brought the two fleets to that place at that hour, of which the most important were Bonaparte's dynamic ambition and Nelson's zeal for duty. Had they clashed the result would have been certain: the elite and cadre of the Grande Armee would have found a watery grave seventeen years before Waterloo and its terrible chieftain would either have shared it or become a prisoner of the English. For superior though they were on paper— in size and gun power though n
ot in numbers—the French battle
ships would have been no match on the open sea for the British. Old and shamefully neglected during their long-enforced sojourn in port, destitute of marine stores and crowded with useless soldiers, they could never have withstood those lean, stripped, storm-tested dogs of war from St. Vincent's fleet. Their crews, drawn from the lawless dregs of the Revolutionary ports, had had little training in gunnery or manoeuvre. Nelson's knew exactly what to do. Thanks to the Cabinet's bold resolution, to St. Vincent's discipline and self-abnegation, above all to Nelson's inspired fixity of purpose, the blundering, persistent patience of Pitt's England seemed on the afternoon of June 22nd, 1798, about to be rewarded. Bonaparte, epitomising the Revolutionary weakness for desperate gambling, had staked everything on Britain's not being able to send a fleet to the Mediterranean. And now at the moment that he was reaching out to grasp the prize of the Orient, the British Fleet crossed his path. . . .

Crossed it and vanished. The Corsican's star had proved too strong and bright for the clumsy purpose of England. But Bonaparte's fortune did not only he in his star. With all his genius, he could not understand why his Admirals trembled so at the thought of encountering a British fleet in mid-ocean. He had 40,000 soldiers with him: he had only to close and let them board the English corsairs. With England's many dangers nearer home there could not be many of them. He had never seen the destructive power of a British man-of-war in action: could not, battle-scarred though he was, conceive it. Not destiny—whic
h had still to obliterate his b
right name—but an error of Britain had saved him. Lack of frigates alone robbed Nelson of a victory that should have been Trafalgar and Waterloo in one. Again and again St. Vincent had pleaded with the Admiralty for more frigates: pleaded in vain. He had had to send his brilliant subordinate into the Mediterranean with too few, and these—now vainly seeking him—had failed him. Treasury parsimony, the unpreparedness of a peace-loving people, above all the needs of restless, ill-treated Ireland, had all contributed to this fatal flaw. It was to cost Britain and the civilised world seventeen more years of war, waste and destruction.

.···.·

So it came about that on the 23 rd the two fleets, having converged, passed out of reach of one another, Brueys with his mo-

mentous freight edging cumbrously northwards towards the greater security of Crete, Nelson with every inch of canvas spread direct for Alexandria hoping to catch Bonaparte before he could disembark. " We are proceeding," wrote Captain Saumarez of the
Orion,
" upon the merest conjecture only, and not on any positive information. Some days must now elapse before we can be relieved from our cruel suspense."
¹
On the sixth day Nelson reached Alexandria and to his unspeakable chagrin found the roads empty. No one had seen anything of Bonaparte's armada, though the sleepy Turkish authorities were making languid preparations to repel it and threatening to decapitate any belligerent who dared to land in their country.
²
Still believing in his false information that
the
French had left Malta on the 16th, it never occurred to Nelson that they had not yet covered the distance. Without waiting he at once put to sea again, steering for the Syrian coast in hope of news of a landing at Aleppo or an attack on the Dardanelles.

As early on June 29th the British sails dropped over the eastern horizon, watchers at Alexandria saw the French rise over the western. Hampered by its lack of skill, vast size and triangular course, Bonaparte's expedition, averaging only fifty miles
a day, had taken just double th
e time of its pursuer. Once more, cruelly crippled by his lack of frigates, Nelson had missed an epoch-making victory by a few hours. With nearly four hundred vessels the French had crossed the Mediterranean and had not lost a ship. With the superb arrogance of their race and revolutionary creed they boasted that the British had not dared to measure their strength against them. But, though he had still no idea how narrow had been his escape, Bonaparte wasted no ti
me before disembarking. On the 1
st of July he landed and issued a grandiloquent proclamation in the style of Mahomet calling on the Faithful to rise against the Mamelukes. On the 5th he stormed Alexandria, putting all who resisted to the sword. A fortnight later, advancing at his habitual speed across the desert, he routed the main Egyptian army under the shadow of
the
Pyramids. On the 22nd he entered Cairo. Another nation had been overwhelmed.

Meanwhile Nelson, fretting with impatience and full of remorse " for the kingdom of the Two Sicilies," had sought in vain for his

¹
Mahan,
Nelson,
I,
336.

²
Lloyd's Evening Post,
1
9t
h-21
st
Sept.,
1798.

elusive quarry in the Gulf of Alexandretta. Thence, skirting the shores of Crete, he beat back against westerly winds to Syracuse. Years later he told Troubridge that in his mortification he believed he had almost died through swelling of the vessels of the heart. To St. Vincent, to whom he wrote to ease his mind, he declared that the only valid objection he could conceive against the course he had taken was that he should not have gone such a long voyage without more certain information. " My answer is ready—* Who was I to get it from?
'...
Was I to wait patiently till I heard certain accounts ? If Egypt was their object, before I could hear of them they would have been in India. To do nothing, I felt, was disgraceful: therefore I made use of my understanding and by it I ought to stand or fall. I am before your Lordship's judgment (which in the present case I feel is the tribunal of my country) and if under all the circumstances it is decided that I am wrong, I ought, for the sake of the country, to be superseded."

Already in England men who knew nothing of the circumstances were saying that he should be. The news of his appointment had been greeted with a clamour of tongues: Collingwood wrote from Cadiz that the resignation of two senior Admirals, furious at being passed over, had interrupted all intercourse of friendship in St. Vincent's fleet, which was in consequence in a most unpleasant state.
¹
Their friends and many others naturally said that Nelson had blundered. A man not yet forty was not fit to command a fleet on so important a service. Tempers were short in England in the summer of 1798: the long suspense of the spring and the reaction when no invasion came were beginning to fray men's nerves. The Irish rebellion, suppressed after four anxious weeks by Lake's victory at Vinegar Hill, was still simmering. It was known that Bonaparte was at large and
that
Nelson had failed to find him. He might by now be in Naples or he might be sailing towards Ireland. All that was certain was that Nelson had missed him: had bungled his mission. There were demands for his recall and for the resignation of the Ministers who had appointed him.

On July
19th
,
with his water nearly exhausted, Nelson reached Syracuse, having in Ins own words gone a round of six hundred leagues with an expedition incredible and being at the end of it as ignorant of the enemy's situation as at the beginning. " The Devil's
¹
Collingwood,
70.
See
Farington,
I,
236, 244.

children," he wrote, " have the Devil's luck! " His only thought was to be off again. He suffered agonies when the governor of the port, standing on his neutrality, refused to admit more than four ships at a time for revictualling. " Our treatment is scandalous for a great nation to put up with," he wrote to Lady Hamilton, " and

the King's flag is insulted If we are to be kicked in every port of

the Sicilian dominions, the sooner we are gone the better.... I have only to pray I may find the French and throw all my vengeance on them."
¹

But when the tactful offices of the Hamiltons at the Neapolitan Court had secured an open welcome and ample supplies for the fleet,
the
essential magnanimity of the man returned. He reproached nobody but himself. " Your Lordship," he wrote to St. Vincent, " deprived yourself of frigates to make mine the first squadron in the world. . . . But if they are above water, I will find
them
out and if possible bring them to battle. You have done your part in giving me so fine a fleet, and I hope to do mine in making use of them."
²

On the 25th he was ready for sea. Disregarding the protests of the Neapolitan Prime Minister, who wished him to stand sentinel over the Sicilies, he sailed again, this time—since all intelligence showed that the French were not to the west of him—towards the Morea. With all canvas spread the great ships sped on their search
—Culloden, Theseus, Alexander
and
Swiftsure; Vanguard, Minotaur, Defence, Audacious, Zealous; Orion, Goliath, Majestic, Bellerophon.
The sea was empty, for their journeying had filled the French authorities in every port of southern Europe with dread.
³
They sailed in order of battle, in three compact divisions in case the French should be encountered at sea: two to tackle Brueys' battle fleet and the other to do the work of the missing frigates and destroy the transports.

Every day throughout the long chase the men were exercised at their guns and small arms. Whenever the weather permitted the captains went aboard the
Vanguard
to discuss with the Admiral the precise function which each was to fulfil in battle. In the