Lords of the Nile

by Jonathan Spencer

  However, despite the Mamluks’ bravery, and the rousing of the common people who came to defend the gates of Cairo, in the end, Bonaparte’s tactics and discipline won the day, and Cairo fell. Seeing the inevitable end, Ibrahim and the Ottoman Pasha rode straight for Sinai, pursued by their army, beginning the long road to seeking reinforcements from Acre, beyond Syria.

  Hazzard’s capture by the Maaza is not inconceivable, as not all Bedouin tribes knew other clans’ loyalties or the grand scheme of alliances, or which Europeans were a threat – perhaps in a way they all were. But Colonel Lacroix was a genuine threat: an administrative paper-pusher and despot who later nearly cost the savants their lives and their works – more of that in the years to come. But there is no greater real-life hero of that moment than the gallant Jacques Cavalier of the 1st Cavalry, who defied Lacroix and later saved the savants from an uncertain fate – but here with fictional licence he steps into the breach for Hazzard, for honour, and the name of France – as do the men of Achille Caron, the Alpha-Oméga.

  Bonaparte’s triumph lasted only a week and a half, in which time he concentrated on tracking down Ibrahim’s army and the remnants of Murad’s cavalry – he had, in a way like Derrien, forgotten about the fleet. Despite his earlier orders to disperse the battle-fleet to Corfu, Admiral Brueys had stayed in Aboukir Bay. Bonaparte later claimed he had sent orders on at least three separate occasions, but had received no reply. When he heard the fleet was still loitering, the young and beloved Captain Jullien carried Bonaparte’s order personally, with a detachment of the elite 75th Invincibles, and rode to Alexandria. He never made it past Alqam.

  To the horror of the French, the men of the 75th had been routed and they later found Jullien’s body thrown into the Nile. We can only wonder if some unknown hand had been at work to prevent all messengers from reaching the ports: Hazzard, providing Nelson with the ‘tethered goat’ for his tigers. Meanwhile, Brueys and his captains argued whether to set sail or cable the battle-fleet in line in Aboukir Bay while they continued to unload materiel. Brueys demanded the latter, and the others bowed to his resolve.

  It is a matter of record that on the 1st of August 1798, Captain Hallowell of HMS Swiftsure and Captain Ball of Alexander went in to reconnoitre Alexandria while the main body of Nelson’s squadron headed for Aboukir Bay. In that time, Hallowell logged contact with a Turkish merchantman who provided him with a rough chart of the shoals in the bay – whether this Turk was Lt Wayland and the Volpone we can only guess.

  It is also a matter of record that Sir Thomas Troubridge’s HMS Culloden, trailing behind the attack squadron, made the turn into the bay too sharply and ran aground on the rocks of the small island at the tip of the promontory – and came under fire from the small fortress tower on the headland. It was Captain Thompson of HMS Leander who turned back to tow Sir Thomas off the rocks – but, try as he might, it didn’t work, and Culloden remained under fire.

  There is no record of 9 Company, or any detachment of marines, assaulting French artillery positions ashore. But it is documented that at some point in the battle the cannon-fire from the fort stopped abruptly. No one knows why. I like to think it was Lt Marmaduke Wayland who saved the day. Hallowell warned Wayland that the battle at sea was all that would be remembered, and he’s right. However, true to his duty, Wayland refused to abandon Nelson’s squadron to the potential threat of French batteries, and went ashore. As Wayland told Hallowell, and as all marines can attest, ‘It’s what we do.’

  The Battle of the Nile is possibly one of the best documented victories of the Royal Navy beside Trafalgar. The actions of the ships described here are accurate insofar as they assist the story, though much is left out. In the first moments of attack, Nelson’s squadron split into separate spearheads, Captains Foley and Hood in HMS Goliath and Zealous racing each other to be first to hit the vanguard of the French line, Nelson leading a second attack on the centre.

  Many have debated whether Foley saw the chart given to Hallowell or whether he simply used his instinct – whichever it was, he judged the distance between the shore and Guerrier, the foremost in the French line, and guided the fast-moving 74-gun Goliath between Guerrier’s nose and the submerged shoals, raking the Guerrier as he passed. He then turned sharply and moved down the French line on their largely unprepared portside. He was followed by Hood and Saumarez in the Zealous and Orion and others. This effectively spelt the end of the French, trapping their static line of battle in a crossfire as more British ships closed in on the seaward side. Each of Nelson’s captains anchored opposite a chosen opponent and pounded them for the next four hours until they burned, sank or surrendered. Worse still for the French, there was an onshore breeze, i.e., the wind was blowing from the sea towards the shore, leaving them helpless: they could not escape.

  History has not condemned Nelson, the hero of the Nile, for leaving Alexandria the way he did – it has been put down to pure chance, the necessity to revictual driving him on to the Greek islands. However, in so doing, Nelson allowed Bonaparte to land his army and, in the space of just thirty days, conquer Egypt.

  The Secretary of War, Lord Melville, the former General Sir Henry Dundas, was the only senior figure at the Admiralty who argued with the First Sea Lord, the Earl Spencer, that the French would try to use Egypt as a springboard to India. Nelson suspected this too. But rather than preventing the French from landing, Melville wanted to leave them to it: he wrote that if a French army were stranded in the desert, at least he would know where it was.

  With that in mind we must ask whether Melville played any part in Nelson’s departure from Alexandria, or whether it was truly just bad timing. Every passing merchantman seemed to know the fleet was headed for Egypt, yet after that initial abortive reconnaissance of Alexandria, Nelson seems to have doubted their word, or refused simply to wait. Commentators often quote his need for resupply, but given the threat of enemy action, it could be argued that British ships would have stayed on station far beyond the need to revictual – and if need became dire, they would have demanded provisions from Alexandria. Instead, Nelson felt the best course was to sail as far away as possible in the opposite direction to the usual sea-routes that would have been followed by any fleet coming from the western Mediterranean.

  History quite rightly remembers Nelson for his courage and faith in his captains – Hazzard’s remark that they were the band of brothers to Henry V at Agincourt was exactly how Nelson saw them, ‘we few, we happy few’. But Hazzard reminds us that, in his haste, Nelson left a population of hundreds of thousands of poor and wretched to face the firestorm of invasion with no aid whatsoever. All Nelson had to do was wait at Alexandria, and he did not. Whether Hazzard, or an officer like him, watched Nelson burn a sealed order we shall never know.

  British sea captains of the period were motivated and aggressive, with arguably the best trained seamen and gunners at their command. Even with his meagre squadron, Nelson would have cut Bonaparte’s fleet to pieces, ignoring the guns of the protective battleships and striking straight for the heart of the convoy, blazing his way through the vulnerable transports. The death-toll would have been appalling: tens of thousands of helpless French troops and their supplies would have been lost. It could have meant the destruction of Nelson’s squadron, but it would certainly have been the end of the French expedition, the end of any hopes for French Egypt, and certainly the end of Bonaparte. All Nelson had to do was wait. And he did not.

  Whether Lewis could conceive of a scheme whereby British arms would ‘permit’ the French to conquer an entire nation and construct a feature as complex as a canal at Suez – so that Britain could later take it from them – would have been child’s play to perfidious Albion and the nameless double-thinkers of Room 63.

  Sir William Sidney Smith will join us once again – hero of the Royal Navy and the army, Smith soon took over from the wounded Nelson as senior commander in the Levant. Smith’s report to Hazzard concerning the battle is accurate for the time. Only be
tween sixty and seventy survivors emerged from the flagship Orient – and a young woman really did give birth on HMS Goliath during the battle. Tales abound: a boy of barely ten, a ‘powder-monkey’, was found sitting on a powder locker, staring, but stone dead, killed by shock. Brueys was standing on the quarterdeck when a cannon-ball crashed through the railing and whipped away one of his legs. Likewise, Du Petit-Thouars, Captain of the Tonnant, was cut in half by a cannon-round, but miraculously was still sufficiently conscious to be propped on a cask to direct the fight. The expression ‘nailing one’s colours to the mast’ comes from his determined defiance and devotion to duty.

  I would like to think that some marines on the ships surrounding the Orient might have seen Hazzard’s red coat boarding the enemy flagship and taken heart – there were marines already on the Peuple Souverain. When the fire broke out, the British ships redoubled their efforts, bombarding the French flagship relentlessly until their enemy was engulfed in flame. This moment was immortalised in the poem Casabianca by Frances Hemans, the famous line ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’ referring to young Ensign Giocante Casabianca, the captain’s son, who supposedly ran to the rail as the ship blazed, and looked down as the crew dived overboard – only to run back into the fire. The prosaic truth is that Casabianca and his son were most likely knocked down much earlier on in the battle. There is a theory that Casabianca set a self-destruct fuse to scupper Orient, and prevent her capture, but there is little evidence – just as likely is the theory that the cause was a certain length of quickmatch left unnoticed in the Orlop, set by persons unknown: or as Smith put it, Unknowns Extraordinary – such as a certain Marine Sergeant Jory Cook.

  The explosion of the Orient was heard in Alexandria, and as far as Rosetta, some twenty miles away. It effectively marked the end of the battle, though several of the French had not struck their colours and surrendered. After a brief silence of ten or fifteen minutes, the British began to fire once again, trying to engage the three ships in the rear under Villeneuve in the Guillaume Tell. Owing to a change in the wind, however, these last few ships managed to evade Nelson’s line and escape – an escape for which they were later heartily condemned in France despite their attempts to come to the aid of Brueys and the Orient. Villeneuve would meet Nelson once again, at Trafalgar.

  The Battle of the Nile was one of the greatest victories in British naval history. When the Earl Spencer heard the news, he fainted. The City of London commissioned presentation swords for the captains; Nelson was created a baron, and the Ottoman Sultan awarded him the Order of the Crescent.

  Hazzard, however, is the embodiment of outraged British feeling, and he stays, some small part of him claiming the ground for which he, Sarah and a thousand others so dearly paid. Among Nelson’s squadron were two hundred Austrian troops, along with at least a thousand marines, and some ten thousand serving sailors – doubtless many Marine commanders wanted to take the victory ashore and finish the job. Instead, the Royal Navy formed a blockade, and kept the French locked up in their new colony on the Nile.

  Only Hazzard and his followers remained ashore. What he did next, in his anguish and his hatred for the Admiralty, remains to be seen.

  Jonathan Spencer, 2020

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank a number of soldiers, sailors, tinkers and tailors for their considerable help and guidance in the creation of the Hazzard series, including Michael du Plessis, Alistair France, Anthony Gray, John Rawlinson and Willem Steenkamp; linguists Diana Barlow, Ian Tanti, Edwin Galea and Monica Schmalzl; interpreters and transliterators Muhammad Wafa, Essam Edgard Samné, and former Naval Intelligence officer Hassan Eltaher; my editor at Canelo, Craig Lye, and agents Mike Bryan and Heather Adams.

  And my father, who told me stories of the desert I will never forget.

  Jonathan Spencer, 2020

  About the Author

  Jonathan Spencer is from southeast London, the great-grandson of a clipper-ship captain who brought tea from China. He served in the Canadian army, studied ancient and modern history, and has lectured at universities and private associations on the subject of Napoleonic Egypt. He speaks several languages, has trained with the former Russian National Team fencing coach, and has lived and worked abroad all his life. He currently lives in the Western Cape in South Africa.

  Also by Jonathan Spencer

  The William John Hazzard series

  Napoleon’s Run

  Lords of the Nile

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Canelo

  Canelo Digital Publishing Limited

  31 Helen Road

  Oxford OX2 0DF

  United Kingdom

  Copyright © Jonathan Spencer, 2020

  The moral right of Jonathan Spencer to be identified as the creator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781800320741

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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