Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (26 page)

Inevitably Pitt supposed that his plans had been discovered and that Villeneuve had sailed from Toulon, not to raid the West Indies but to destroy the Secret Expedition. In the flickering candlelight he sat down to write to Barham. " On returning from the House I have

¹
Corbett,
74-6;
Mahan, II,
158;
Granville, II,
65.
121

just found these papers; they are of the most pressing importance. I will not go to bed for a few hours, but will be ready to see you as soon as you please, as I think we must not lose a moment in taking measures to set afloat every ship that by any species of extraordinary exertion we can find means to man."
¹
By midday messengers were galloping to Portsmouth with special orders which the First Lord, working quietly and alone in his room, had drafted to meet the emergency. The convoy was to be stopped if possible and brought back to Cork or Plymouth, Calder was to be reinforced before Ferrol, and every serviceable ship was to be hurried out to strengthen the Western Squadron.

For two th
ings had now become of paramount importance: that the expedition which guaranteed the initiative should be saved and that any enemy design to force the Channel should be forestalled. Already Pitt's spies in Paris had reported that some such plan was .in the wind. The First Lord, therefore, warned Gardner that under no circumstances was he to allow the Western Squadron to fall below eighteen ships of the line and that all other instructions must be treated as conditional on this.

Yet even while he covered the Channel Barham never lost sight of more distant objectives. For the minds of those who controlled British naval warfare were trained by long experience to be many-dimensional. They shunned the eccentric movements into which Napoleon tried to lure them, yet still maintained their strong, delicate, moving web of protective power over the seven seas. Barham was almost the oldest of living Admirals, with a Service experience of more than sixty years. To his cool brain the problem, for all its shifting facets, remained simple. Pie had to preserve at all' times and against all chances the Western Approaches, keep open the trade routes, and defend the country's colonial and naval stations. He never forgot that all three were vital.

On May 4th, reassured by a report from one of Orde's frigates which had seen the Combined Fleet steering we
st from Cadiz throughout April 11
th and 12th, the First Lord began to revert to his original belief—never wholly abandoned—that it had gone to the West Indies. He, therefore, ordered Gardner to send away Colling-wood with the Flying Squadron to Madeira, and thence, if not stopped by later news, to Barbados. Meanwhile, keeping the privacy of his room, avoiding Board attendance and leaving every man to his job while he did his, this admirable administrator, economising in time and effort and securing a punctual discharge of all duties,-pressed on his expedient for dispatching and manning every reserve

¹
Barham, III,
81-3;
Corbett,
83-5.

or nearly completed ship the country possessed. For, no more than the Prime Minister, could he be forced back on to a permanent defensive.
¹

Then on May 9th, with the fate of the convoy still uncertain, the Government received a new blow. The provisional Treaty, signed in St. Petersburg
on April 11
th, arrived with two clauses added by the suspicious Russians by which Britain was to relinquish Malta and her maritime rights to secure a general European settlement. Pitt had already offered to restore her colonial conquests, contribute annual subsidies of more than six millions sterling and provide transports and naval protection for joint operations under a Russian Supreme Commander in southern Italy. But these additional demands were more than he or any other British statesman could concede. For if, in return for a temporary withdrawal from Hanover, Holland, Switzerland and Italy, Napoleon was to be allowed to deprive Britain of her only naval base in the Mediterranean and abrogate her right of blockade, any peace, however favourable, would become a farce. Having secured the "freedom" of the Mediterranean, the aggressor would be able to renew the war under infinitely more favourable circumstances. It w
^r
as only England's ability to extend her blockade round southern Europe that had made a Coalition against France possible. No man was ready to go further than Pitt to conciliate and hearten Russia. But there were points on which he could not yield without betraying the cause for which he was fighting.

His only hope of making St. Petersburg reconsider its opinion lay in the army which he had so boldly sent out and which was now either returning to Plymouth or, beyond reach of recall, sailing blindly into danger. The Russians, Gower reported, had been complaining of delays in its departure: perhaps, when they learnt that it had been despatched even before the. provisional treaty had been signed, they would drop their unreasonable distrust and moderate their demands. And now, hard on the St. Petersburg mail, came a still more unnerving blow. On May 14th a letter of the 3rd from the British Minister at Lisbon brought news that Villeneuve had returned to Cadiz ten days after the Malta convoy had left England. Unless it had been stopped by Barham's messenger or Nelson had providentially arrived to save it, the ark which bore the reviving hopes of Europe was by now either in enemy hands or at best sheltering precariously at Lisbon.

Even at this juncture Barham remained calm. To close the gap in Britain's sea-line off southern Spain, he decided momentarily to

¹
Corbett,
86-8, 111-14;
Mahan, II,
166;
Barham, III,
76, 81, 84-6.

strip the very Western Approaches. For if he could force a damaging action on Villeneuve off Cadiz; he would not only recover the initiative but avert the threat of invasion. On May 17th Collingwood, who had fortunately been held up at Plymouth by storms, was therefore ordered to sail with eleven of the line for Ushant and thence, with three more from the Channel Fleet, to rescue the convoy. With its escort he would then have sixteen capital ships including three three-deckers. Should the Combined Fleet refuse battle, it was to be blockaded in Cadiz; if, on the other hand—as Barham still suspected—it had gone to the West Indies, Collingwood was to follow it with twelve battleships, leaving his other six to guard the convoy. Alternatively, if Nelson had already preceded him, he was to send reinforcements after him.

These dispositions reduced the capital force before Brest to fifteen. But as it included nine three-deckers, each considered equivalent to two of the enemy's third rates, and as everything pointed to Villeneuve being either off Cadiz or in the West Indies, the risk was more apparent than real. To minimise it, Lord Gardner, temporarily commanding the Channel Fleet in Cornwallis's absence, was instructed to show himself off Brest during the few hours Colling-wood's ships were with him and so give Ganteaume. the impression that he was blockaded by twenty-nine sail of the line. There would be at least a week's delay before the deception could be discovered, by which time reinforcements would be on their way from England.
¹

Though Barham did not know it, the danger of a sortie from Brest had already passed. May 20th was the last day on which Ganteaume's revised orders permitted him to break the blockade. Since the beginning of the month he had been waiting in the Goulet: on the 18th the Admiralty heard that he was trying to get to sea. But this, like an earlier attempt in April, came to nothing. For with Gardner on the horizon no escape was possible without a fleet action. Ganteaume therefore retired to harbour to await Villeneuve. "Out every morning and in again about a couple of hours," was Midshipman Coleridge's comment on these inexplicable proceedings; " I'm sure we were always ready to give them a bout !"
²

Barham's daring dispositions were never carried out. On May 20th Missiessy's five battleships, which both Napoleon and the Admiralty supposed to be still in the West Indies, trailed back to Rochefort. One of Calder's frigates had located them off Finisterre on the 12th, but his main force had been unable to intercept them.

¹
Corbett,
115, 117-20.
⁸
Coleridge,
109-10.

Their four months' voyage had achieved nothing except a panic in the City. For a few days after his arrival in the Caribbean at the end of February Missiessy had looked like taking Dominica, but a skilful resistance by Major-General Prevost and the local militia had prevented him from consolidating h
is gains. On learning of Villene
uve's failure to escape in January, he sailed again for Europe at the end of March, a week before Rear-Admiral Cochrane arrived from England with six sail of the line in pursuit and just as Villeneuve was putting out of Toulon for the second time. Combinations at sea in the face of an enemy with interior lines were proving far m
ore difficult than Napoleon had
supposed.

On May 22nd, therefore, Gardner, learning from Calder of Missiessy's return to Rochefort, reduced the Flying Squadron by five sail to secure greater strength in the Bay. Next day Collingwood sailed south with nine battleships. At home the Government was still without news of either the Secret Expedition or the whereabouts of Villeneuve and Nelson. "There is a look of anxiety amongst Ministers," wrote Lady Elizabeth Foster on the 21st, " which gives an idea of alarm." Even Barham admitted his misgivings. So short were men and ships that he feared that by the autumn the blockade of the French and Spanish ports would have to be abandoned.

Meanwhile the great British Admiral whose disappearance had caused such anxiety had been passing through a period of strain and frustration worse than any since his chase of Napoleon in
'98.
On the night of March 31st when his frigates lost sight of Villeneuve, Nelson was waiting off the Sardinian coast for the reward of his labours. " We have had a very dull war," he told a friend, " it must now be changed for a more active one."
¹
But on the morning of April 4th he learnt that the French had again escaped him. He had no idea where they had gone and, true to his unfailing principle, refused to act till he could base action on judgment. Instead he took his station midway between Sardinia and the African.coast in order to cover that island and the vital objectives to the east. "I shall neither go to the eastward of Sicily nor to the westward of Sardinia," he wrote, "until I know something positive."

For twelve days he remained cruising between the two islands without the slightest news. Owing to a series of mischances no instructions had reached him from England of later date than November. At that time the position in India had seemed very grave, and he was therefore acutely conscious of the possibility of a new attempt on Egypt—a consciousness which Napoleon had done

¹
Nicolas, VI,
359.

all in his power to foster by troop movements and false Press reports. Knowing that St. Cyr's army in Apulia had been reinforced and that the French had demanded the expulsion of the British Ambassador from Naples, Nelson was also exceedingly anxious for Sicily. He failed—it was his only failure—to realise how rooted since the battle of the Nile was his adversary's aversion to a military expedition across waters commanded by British ships.

But, as day after day passed and the silence continued, Nelson's mind began to misgive
him. On the morning of April 10
th while cruising near Palermo he learnt by chance that a military expedition had left or was about to leave England for Malta to co-operate with a Russian force in Italy. At once his quick perception warned him of the worst. Villeneuve, evading his outlook off Cape St. Sebastian, had sailed to the west, not the east, with the express object of intercepting the convoy. It seemed inconceivable to Nelson that as Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean he had not been warned to protect it. Yet it was just the kind of muddle that British Governments made. "I am very, very miserable," he wrote to Ball at Malta.

He at once began to beat back to the west. But the wind was now dead in his teeth. In nine days he only covered two hundred miles. " My fortune seems flown away," he bemoaned. " I cannot get a fair wind or even a side wind. Dead foul!" On the 18th he learnt from a passing merchantman that the French had been seen off the Spanish coast eleven days before, sailing west: next day confirmation arrived that they had passed the Straits, been joined by the Spaniards in Cadiz and sailed again without entering the harbour.

Agonised though he was, Nelson at once made up his mind. As the Spanish Admiral Gravina had joined Villeneuve, he guessed that the object was more than a buccaneering raid against sugar islands. It must be either Ireland or the Channel. He therefore informed the Admiralty that he would make by way of Cape St. Vincent for a rendezvous west of the Scillies where his fleet could join in the defence of the British Isles. "I shall bring with me," he added, "eleven as fine ships of war, as ably commanded and in as perfect order and health, as ever went to sea."
¹
It was his one consolation.