There was little summer in England that June and July. Cold, dry winds continued from the north, and in the House " the noise, violence and clamour of Opposition" beat about the" fallen Melville. "Think," wrote the rejoicing Creevey, "of Pitt's situation—his right hand, Melville, lopped off—a superannuated Methodist at the head of the Admiralty in order to catch the votes of Wilberforce and Co. —all the fleets of France and Spain in motion—the finances at their utmost stretch—not an official person but Huskisson and Rose to do anything at their respective offices—public business multiplied by Opposition beyond all former example—and himself more averse to business daily—disunited with Addington—having quite lost his own character with a King perfectly mad and involving his Ministry in the damnedest scrapes upon the subject of expense."2 Though more than a thousand gunboats and transports lay nine deep along the newly built quays at Boulogne, England had settled down into a state of curious apathy. She seemed content with the knowledge that Nelson had followed Villeneuve to the sugar islands. In fashionable society, "as gay, extravagant and as dissipated as ever," the
1 Corbett, no, 147-53, Mahan, II, 257.
2 Creevey, I, 36.
only serious topic of conversation was the resignation of Lord Sidmouth and the possibility of a Coalition between Pitt and Fox.1
On the last day of June an unconvoyed merchantman from Dominica brought tidings that Villeneuve had reached Martinique on May 16th. It seemed that no harm had been done beyond an attack on the Diamond Rock, and Nelson was known to be in pursuit. But unlike the public Lord Barham realised the significance of the news. As soon as the fearful Villeneuve heard of Nelson's arrival in the West Indies he would be sure to sail with all speed for Europe. He would make either for the Channel or Cadiz. By the one he would threaten the British Isles, by the other the Secret Expedition and the Mediterranean.
At that moment Cornwallis was holding Ganteaume's twenty-one battleships in Brest with twenty-two, Stirling Missiessy's returned five in Rochefort with an equal force, and Calder fourteen French and Spanish ships in Ferrol with twelve. Seven more British capital ships were in reserve in the Channel ports. Somewhere in the Atlantic Nelson's ten were in pursuit of Villeneuve's eighteen. A further eleven were on the West Indian stations, two were on their way there from Colling wood's squadron off Cadiz, and one lay on guard off Naples.2
The weakest point was in the Straits. Here Collingwood, having been reinforced on June 22nd by the Queen, had detached Bickerton with three three-deckers to escort Craig's long-delayed transports past Cartagena. With his remaining five of the line he was holding in Cadiz two Spanish first-rates and two other battleships ready for sea and an unknown number fitting out. Though without news of Villeneuve's movements, he was fully alive to his danger. "I shall have all these fellows coming from the West Indies again," he wrote,' " unless they sail from there directly to Ireland, for this Bonaparte has as many tricks as a monkey. I believe their object in the West Indies to be less conquest than to draw our ships from home." 3
Confirmed in the same belief, Barham on July 7th drew up a plan by which Cornwallis was to send ten battleships, or nearly half his force to Collingwood. But to guard against the risk of Villeneuve making for the Channel instead of Cadiz, Calder, having shown
1 "Sat till half-past three in the morning," wrote the Speaker, "upon ... the Duke of Atholl's claim for compensation in respect of his alleged loss by the inadequate price for which his rights in the Isle of Man were sold to the public in 1765. Strange proceeding to be debating twelve hours upon the inadequacy of a bargain settled forty years ago, at this time when hourly invasion is threatened." Colchester, II, 6. See also idem, II, 9, 14-15, 19; Paget Brothers, 34 ; Dudley, 28-9 ; Granville, II, 74, 87 ; H. M. C. Dropmore, VII, 283-4, 292.
2 Colchester, n, 13; Corbett, 178-9; H. M. C. Dropmore, VTI, 285-7.
3 Corbett, 175, 179-81, 185; Upcott, 77. Blockade of Brest, II, 296.
himself off Ferrol, was to stretch north-north-west across the Bay with a cloud of outlying frigates, while Cornwallis, his depleted battle strength brought up to fifteen by three fresh vessels from England, was to cruise south-south-west from Ushant to meet him. If Villeneuve attempted to raise the blockade of either Ferrol or Brest, he would thus risk an encounter with twenty-seven capital ships—a force greatly superior to his own. Napoleon's idea that his Brest or Ferrol squadron would be able to join forces with Villeneuve at the crucial point and moment was based on a misunderstanding of naval warfare. For not only would it take time for the blockaded to discover that the blockaders had gone, but any wind favourable for the former would almost certainly be foul for the homecoming fleet. In anemography as much as in geography the blockaders were acting from interior lines.
But Barham's ingenious expedient was unnecessary. On the night of the 7th a sloop from the West Indies anchored at Plymouth. All next day, while the Admiralty clerks were drafting the requisite orders, her captain was posting up the Exeter road. Towards midnight his post-chaise rattled over the Charing Cross cobblestones and drew up at the Admiralty door. He brought urgent dispatches from Nelson.
The story contained in Captain Bettesworth’s wallet was one unrelenting pursuit, expectation, frustration and renewed pursuit. Nelson had covered the 3200 miles from the Straits to Barbados in little more than three weeks—an almost record average of 135 miles a day. With the trade wind astern blowing steady and strong, there had been little for the sailors to do except to steer. Only on the barnacled old Superb, with studding sail booms lashed to the yards and her crew and captain working while others slept, had the strain of the past two months continued unabated. Officers and men were on short allowance, but no one minded, for after two years of endurance and waiting they believed they were about to meet the enemy. "We are all half starved," wrote one of them, "and otherwise much inconvenienced by being so long away from port, but our recompense is that we are with Nelson."
At five o'clock on the afternoon of June 4th the Fleet reached Barbados. A fast sloop, sent ahead, had already brought news of its coming. Since Villeneuve's arrival three weeks before, the island had been in a state of intense excitement: "a horseman does not come up quick to the door day or night," wrote Lady Nugent, from Jamaica, "but I tremble all over."1 At the moment Bridgetown was
1 Nugent, 301.
agog with a message from Brigadier-General Brereton at St. Lucia that the Combined Fleet had been seen on May 29th steering south towards Trinidad.
All through the night of his arrival, at the urgent entreaty of the local Commander-in-Chief, Nelson embarked troops. By ten next morning he was on his way to Trinidad, taking with him two battleships of Cochrane's which he had found in the port. Five hours later he made the signal, "Prepare for Battle." As before the Nile every captain knew what was expected of him, for during the Atlantic crossing the tactics to be employed had been repeatedly discussed. No man could do wrong, the Admiral had told them, who laid his ship close on board the enemy and kept it there till the business was over. For though the Combined Fleet was nearly twice as large as his own, Nelson was confident he could annihilate it. "Mine is compact, theirs unwieldy," he wrote, "and, though a very pretty fiddle, I don't believe that either Gravina or Villeneuve know how to play upon it."1
At Tobago, sighted on June 6th, there was no word of the enemy. Next day, as the Fleet approached the Dragon's Mouth, the British outposts on Trinidad, mistaking its sails for Villeneuve's, fired the blockhouses and withdrew into the woods: at the sight, expectation in the oncoming ships hardened into certainty, only to be dashed by an empty roadstead. Brereton's intelligence had proved false. Without wasting an hour Nelson put about for Grenada and the North. Next day he learnt that his unsuspecting quarry, having captured the Diamond Rock on June 3rd, was still at Martinique on the 5th. Had he kept his course for that island—less than a hundred miles distant from Barbados—he would have encountered him on the very spot where Rodney had beaten De Grasse a quarter of a century before. " But for Gener
al Brereton's damned information," he wrote to his friend, Davison, " Nelson would have, been, living or dead, the greatest man that England ever saw."
Meanwhile Villeneuve had been in as great a state of apprehension as the planters he had come to ruin. On his arrival at Martinique on May 13th he had found that Missiessy had returned to France. Hoping daily for Ganteaume's appearance and the signal for his own return, he dared not commit himself to any major operation. One June 4th, after three thousand of his men had gone down with sickness, there arrived from France not Ganteaume but Magon with two battleships and orders to await the Brest Fleet for five more weeks and then, if there was still no sign of it, to sail for Ferrol,
1 Corbett, 164; Clarke and McArthur, n, 408; Austen, 136-8; Nicolas, VI, 443; Fortescue. V, 257; Mahan, II, 161; Nelson, II, 298-9.
release the French and Spanish force held there by Calder, and with thirty-three sail of the line make for the Straits of Dover. There, he was assured, the Emperor would be waiting with the Grand Army.
As part of this terrifying programme Villeneuve was instructed to fill in his remaining time in the West Indies by capturing as many British islands as possible. With this intention he had sailed next day for Guadeloupe to embark troops for Barbuda,1 a small and, as he hoped easy, objective in the extreme north of the Leeward Islands. On his way there on June 8th, while Nelson was still three hundred miles to the south, he had the fortune to encounter a small convoy of sugar ships off the west coast of Antigua. Capturing fourteen of them, he learnt to his consternation that his terrible pursuer had anchored off Barbados four days before. From that moment the risk of missing Ganteaume in mid-Atlantic became negligible to the French Admiral compared with the infinitely more alarming risk of meeting Nelson. Ordering his frigates to take back the troops to Guadeloupe and rejoin him in the Azores, he sailed next morning for Ferrol.
When Nelson reached Antigua on the 12th he found that he was four days too late. Once more he was faced with the task of basing on a few fragmentary wisps of evidence a decision involving not only his career but the very existence of his country. If the French had gone to Jamaica and he. did not follow them, Britain's richest colony was lost; if they had gone to Europe, every ship would be needed in the Western Approaches or off Cadiz. Precipitate action would endanger the islands and two hundred sugar ships he had saved by his timely arrival; yet delay might jeopardise England herself. He was put out of his agony, just as he was about to return to Dominica, by news that the French troops, taken a week before from Guadeloupe, were disembarking. This satisfied him that Villeneuve did not intend to attack Jamaica. His last doubts were removed a few hours later by the arrival of the Netley schooner which had been escorting the captured convoy. Powerless to defend his charges against eighteen sail of the line, her young captain had kept the enemy under observation as long as he could and then returned to Antigua to report. When last seen the Combined Fleet, thirty-two strong, had been crowding away into the north-east.2
Once Nelson was sure that his enemy had sailed for Europe, his course was clear. Whether they were bound for the Bay or for Cadiz and the Straits, the protection of his station was his prior duty. " I
1 Not Barbados as supposed by Mahan.
2Corbett, 166-9; Mahan, II, 163; Nelson, II, 301; Nicolas VI, 450-5, 457-9; Naval Miscellany, III, 1
am going towards the Mediterranean after Gravina and Villeneuve," he wrote that night, " and hope to catch them." Believing that command of that sea was essential to Napoleon's scheme of world conquest, he had every hope of an action on the southern crossing, preferably close to the Straits where he could look for reinforcements. Yet even before the Netley had anchored in St. John's Road, he had despatched the Curieux sloop under Captain Bettesworth for England. With her superior speed she would be able to raise the alarm at least a week before Villeneuve could molest the British squadrons in the Bay. Another cruiser Nelson sent direct to Calder off Ferrol. At noon next day, June 13th, after little more than a week in the West Indies, he sailed himself for Gibraltar.
The news Bettesworth brought to the Admiralty on the night of July 8th contained more than Nelson's despatches. On June 19th, 900 miles north-north-east of Antigua, he had sighted the Combined Fleet standing to the northward. Its' course made it almost certain that its destination was the Bay. Roused from sleep early on the 9th, the First Lord, upbraiding his servants for not waking him sooner, dictated—Admiralty tradition has it while shaving—an order for strengthening the forces between Villeneuve and his goal. Like Nelson's, his intention was purely offensive. The enemy was at sea and must be crippled before he could reach port. It was the only way to safeguard both Britain and the Mediterranean offensive.
To this end Barham sacrificed the blockade of Rochefort. It was the only way in which he could give Calder the additional strength to attack without weakening Cornwallis off Brest. " If we are not too late," he wrote to the latter, "I think there is a chance of our intercepting the Toulon Fleet. Nelson follows them to Cadiz, and if you can immediately unite the Ferrol and Rochefort squadrons and order them to cruise from thirty to forty leagues to the westward and stretch out with your own fleet as far and continue six or eight days on that service and then return to your several posts, I think we shall have some chance of intercepting them. Official orders will follow as fast as possible. Time," he added, "is everything." There was not enough even to copy the letter into the Secret Order Book. By nine o'clock the Admiralty messengers were galloping once more down the Portsmouth and Plymouth roads.1
Far away other horses were dragging the jolting berlin of an impatient Emperor over the rough tracks of Savoy. Napoleon had left Turin on the morning of the 8th on the first stage of the journey
1 Barham, III, 257-9; Mahan, II, 168-9.
which was to take him by way of Boulogne to Kent and London. Three daj's later, as he paused at Fontainebleau after covering five hundred miles in sixty hours, Cornwallis's frigates were leaving Ushant with urgent orders for Calder and Stirling. On the night of the 12th the latter's five battleships slipped away from their post off Rochefort; by the 15th they had joined Calder, who sailed at once for his appointed station. Here on July 22nd, three hundred miles to the west of Ferrol and beyond reach of the Franco-Spanish squadron he had so lately been blockading, Calder encountered the Combined Fleet. The British had used their interior lines to good advantage.
There was a gentle swell running out of the west and a heavy mist. The British Admiral had fifteen battleships, four of them three-deckers, to Villeneuve's twenty two-deckers. As, however, the latter were suffering from the effects of a storm and were crowded with sick, the odds were if anything in Calder's favour. But the weather was so thick that the rival fleets could not engage till five in the evening, and the gunners had great difficulty in seeing their targets, aiming for the most part at the enemy's gun flashes. By nightfall two of the Spanish ships had been captured, while a British three-decker, the Windsor Castle, had lost her mainmast.
Next day both Admirals claimed a victory. Since the British had taken two prizes and were still barring Villeneuve's way to Ferrol, Calder's claim was the better founded. But it was not the victory Barham had planned. Despite his assurance to the Admiralty that he was about to renew the action, neither that day nor the next did Calder make any further attempt to engage. He contented himself with securing his prizes. The battle of Finisterre, as it became called from the nearest landfall, was like that of the First of June —an intercepting action in mid-Atlantic in which a British Admiral forgot his principal objective for a secondary. Howe—that fine old fighter—in his anxiety to beat the enemy's battle fleet, omitted to intercept the grain convoy on which the fate of France depended. Calder, in his fear of a junction between Villeneuve and the Ferrol squadron, failed to strike the shattering blow that would have freed his country from danger.
"A braver officer never stepped between stem and stern than . Bobby Calder," wrote one who knew him. But Ins mind did not match his courage.1 He had
expected to find only seventeen instead of twenty capital ships in the Combined Fleet, and, after the first
1 Gardner, 101. Four years before St. Vincent, who never suffered any fool gladly, however brave, had written to him: "The energy and precision with which you pursued the wrong scent . . . never will be exceeded. . . . The Prince of Wales cannot be spared, but there can be no objection to your having a respite."—Sherrard, 171.
encounter, the thought of almost as many in his rear was too much for him. "I could not hope to succeed without receiving great damage," he reported. "I had no friendly port to go to and, had the Ferrol and Rochefort squadrons come out, I must have fallen an easy prey. They might have gone to Ireland. Had I been defeated it is impossible to say what the consequences might have been."1
As a result the opportunity of crippling the Combined Fleet was lost. It remained at large—a menace both to England's security and to Pitt's plans for the offensive. Six days after the battle, aided by the weather, it crept into Vigo Bay. From here, leaving behind three damaged ships, it sailed again on the 31st, and on August 2nd, with Calder temporarily driven to leeward by a south-westerly gale, entered Ferrol unperceived.
Meanwhile Napoleon was hurrying on his preparations for the final blow. On July 16th, six days before the battle in the Atlantic mists, he dispatched orders to await Villeneuve at Ferrol. The Admiral was not to enter the harbour but was to resume his voyage at the earliest moment, join hands with the Brest or Rochefort squadron and press up Channel to Boulogne. If confronted by overwhelming force he might retire on Cadiz, but he was first to do everything possible to win the four days’ mastery of the Straits on which such vast issues depended. On the same day Captain Allemand, who had succeeded Missiessy at Rochefort, slipped out of that port with five battleships and five cruisers to make a diversion off the west coast of Ireland and join Villeneuve at a rendezvous west of Ferrol.
Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 Page 20
