by John Keegan
New information soon dispelled these misapprehensions. Some came from the French press, more, and more compelling, from the gossipy academic world. A French scholar, Faujas de St. Fond, was reported from Frankfurt, in the occupied German territories, as affirming that the Armament was sailing for Egypt; had Bonaparte known of their stream of leaks he certainly must have regretted the decision to encumber the expedition with so many professional talkers. St. Fond’s indiscretion was received in London by 13 June. On the 11th a despatch from the diplomatic mission in Florence had brought an even more credible report: the French general Carvoni had revealed that the expedition, which he was to accompany, was going to Egypt and then India. Two days later the Foreign Secretary wrote to his brother, “It really looks as if Bonaparte was after all in sober truth going to Egypt; and Dundas [Secretary of War] seems to think the scheme of attacking India from thence not so impractical as it may appear. I am still incredulous as to the latter point, though as to the former I am shaken. But as Bonaparte on the 23rd was still off Toulon [wrong] and as Lord St. Vincent must have detached [Troubridge’s ships] on the 21st at latest, there is real reason to hope that Nelson may destroy all these visions.”12
NELSON RECOVERS THE SCENT
That was certainly London’s hope, but it was strictly circumscribed by its inability to communicate to the central Mediterranean either what it wanted or what it knew. On 13 June, when Lord Spencer wrote his intelligence summary to his brother, Nelson was still in the Tyrrhenian Sea, between Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily. Orders had been sent from London to India, and points in between, to sail ships towards Suez, in particular to Commodore John Blanchett, in the Leopard, 50 guns, on his way to India, to organise a small squadron in the Red Sea. It was anyone’s guess when word might reach him. It was equally difficult to estimate when either fresh orders or information might be got to Nelson. St. Vincent, off Cadiz, had instructions and good reason to stay there, blockading the Spanish and guarding the Straits of Gibraltar. He had sent all the fast sailers at his disposal to Nelson already and could spare no more. He could forward messages by neutral ships, but they were few, and his own rear link to London was tenuous and slow. He did not even know, from week to week, where Nelson was; after mid-June, when Nelson sent back the brig Transfer from Naples with despatches, he did not know at all.
Nelson, by contrast, may have known something of Udney’s intelligence from Leghorn, since his papers contain a copy of an Udney letter which he may have picked up while on his way back to the Toulon rendezvous line after the dismasting; but it tells only of the Toulon Armament’s strength, not its destination. Soon after he left Naples on 18 June, however, he got firm news that it was sailing for Malta. On 20 June, when he was in the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and the toe of Italy, the British Consul at Messina came aboard “to tell me that Malta had surrendered,” but not before he had written to the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, urging him to put the island into a state of defence, while he hurried to help.
His message left too late. Malta had already been surrendered, as Consul Udney had warned it would be on 26 April. The Knights had caved in. That should not have come as a surprise. The Sovereign Military and Hospitaller Order of St. John was no longer what it once had been. Founded originally to care for sick Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, it had become during the Crusades an order of military monks, who built and defended castles all over the crusader states. Driven under Muslim pressure step by step from Jerusalem, Acre and the island of Rhodes, the Knights eventually ended up in Malta, where they found a new vigour. In 1565, under the leadership of Grand Master de la Valette, they defeated a major Turkish effort to capture the island and push into the western Mediterranean. For the next 200 years the Knights harried the Ottoman fleet, liberating Christian galley slaves and taking Turks to be their own. There was no nonsense about loving thine enemy in the Knights’ version of the Christian creed. The catafalques of the Grand Masters, in their headquarters church in Valetta, are supported on the bronze shoulders of turbaned Turks, chained to and bowed under their burden.
Grand Master Hompesch lacked Valette’s resolution. When Bonaparte’s armada appeared on 9 June, he quickly came to terms—a pension for himself, resettlement for the remaining Knights. Such resistance as was shown came from the ordinary Maltese, though they had little love for the decayed Order. By 18 June, Bonaparte was off, having installed a French administration and garrison, proclaimed various civil and ecclesiastical reforms and thoroughly looted the churches of treasure. It was a characteristically Napoleonic irruption, not least by its alienation of the Maltese, one of the most Catholic people of Europe. Had the Knights only shown more backbone, and encouraged the islanders to prolong resistance, the outcome would have been very different. Nelson, only a hundred miles behind and pressing onward, would have caught the Armament at a total disadvantage, with its commander and amphibious force ashore and its warships dispersed about the island’s periphery. Disaster would have been unavoidable.
Nelson, however, was misreading the signs. On Wednesday, 20 June, when he had written to Grand Master Hompesch from off Messina, he promised to be at Malta by the 22nd. So he was, or nearly. He was still convinced, however, that Sicily was the French objective and that Malta was to be used only as a base for its capture. His thoughts, therefore, misled him. He was shortly misled by objective misinformation.
Early in the morning of 22 June, when he had promised to be at Malta but was actually just south of Cape Passaro, the south-east point of Sicily nearest the island, he was brought fresh news of the French from two different sources in quick succession. The first came from Hardy, who came aboard Vanguard from Mutine at 6:25 a.m. to report stopping a brig from Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, on the Adriatic coast), with the news that Malta had fallen. The second was a sighting report from Leander of four strange ships to the east-south-east.
Nelson now decided, uncharacteristically, to consult his captains as to what to do. His conferences before Trafalgar would launch the legend of the “Band of Brothers”; but then he was expressing what he intended to do, telling not asking. Yet by 1798 he had already acquired a reputation for decisiveness. It was odd that at this moment he felt the need for moral support. Still, it was a highly complex situation. The Ragusan brig had told that Malta had fallen the previous Friday, and the French fleet sailed the following day, 15 and 16 June respectively. It was now the 22nd. Nelson must have calculated that, if the French had gone to Sicily, they would have arrived, and news could not have failed to reach him of their arrival in the intermediate six days. As there was no news, they had gone somewhere else. Given the current direction of the wind, which was westerly, the Armament was most likely to be heading east, which might mean towards the Dardanelles and the Black Sea but almost certainly meant Egypt. It was a compelling conclusion; but he needed reassurance.
The four captains for whom he sent were senior and trusted—Saumarez of the Orion, Troubridge of the Culloden, Darby of the Bellerophon and Ball of the Alexander. In Vanguard’s cabin, he put to them the following assessment: “with this information [of the “strange ships” and from the Ragusan brig] what is your opinion? Do you believe under all circumstances which we know that Sicily is [Bonaparte’s] destination? Do you think we had better stand for Malta, or steer for Sicily? Should the Armament be gone for Alexandria [Egypt] and got safe there our possessions in India are probably lost. Do you think that we had better push for that place?”
He got a variety of answers. Berry, of the Vanguard itself, was for going to Alexandria, Ball agreed that the French were heading for Alexandria, Darby thought that probable, Saumarez and Troubridge emphasised the importance of protecting Alexandria, without stating an opinion about the French destination. Still, collectively, they made Nelson’s mind up, with regrettable consequences.
Resolved now to press on at best speed to Egypt, Nelson dealt peremptorily with the sighting reports of the “strange ships.” His own sent to follow them kept up a
stream of signals. At 5:30 a.m. Culloden reported that they were running, with the wind behind them. At 6:46 a.m. Leander signalled “strange ships are frigates,” and Orion repeated it to the flagship so that there could be no mistake. Four frigates made a sizeable force, likely to be part of a larger one. It was not an unreasonable guess that they might belong to the Armament. Soon after 7 a.m., however, Nelson ordered the “chasing ships” to be called back. His thoughts, which he was outlining at the time to his five captains in Vanguard’s cabin, admitted only two lines of decision: to go back to Sicily or make for Malta; alternatively, to race to Egypt, with the favourable wind. He did not raise, perhaps even to himself, the option of disposing the fleet in scouting formation and running down the course taken by the “strange ships” to see if they were in company with others. Captain Thomas of the Leander clearly could not understand and scarcely bear his superior’s refusal to follow up such an obvious pointer to the enemy’s whereabouts. At 8:29 a.m. he signalled again, “ships seen are frigates.” Nelson was unmoved. Leander, Orion and Culloden were obliged to rejoin the fleet which crowded on sail for Alexandria.
The episode brings to mind the exchanges between Admiral Nagumo and the aircrew of the cruiser Tone’s reconnaissance aircraft in the early morning of the Battle of Midway, 4 June 1942—with this difference. Then it was the admiral who was desperate to know what sort of ships the airmen had spotted, they who were slow to respond. Their first signal reported that they had sighted the enemy, their second that the enemy ships were cruisers and destroyers, no threat to Nagumo at all, only their third, sent nearly an hour after the first, that “enemy is accompanied by what appears to be a carrier,” a very serious threat indeed. Despite the differences, there is this similarity: had the commander and his reconnaissance force in each case been in tune, the enemy would have been destroyed.
Nelson might nevertheless have heeded his scouting ships had he possessed one vital piece of information: the actual date of departure of Bonaparte from Malta. The “Ragusan brig” had said Saturday, 16 June. In fact he had not left until Tuesday the 19th, and on the 22nd, when the “strange ships” were sighted, had been at sea only three days. Nelson was harder on Bonaparte’s heels than Nelson guessed; may, indeed have been only thirty miles or so behind him. That night, in the mist, the French heard bells striking and signal guns firing, which surely must have been aboard Nelson’s ships. The French Armament, however, warned by the frigates seen earlier that day, was sailing in silence, closed up tight for mutual protection. By the time day broke, Nelson had passed ahead and was over the horizon. The chance of a decisive encounter had been lost.
BACK AND FORTH
The captain of the Ragusan brig may have been mistaken; he may equally have been misunderstood. We do not know what language he spoke, perhaps Italian, perhaps Serbo-Croat, perhaps another Mediterranean tongue. As Alfred Thayer Mahan suggests in his life of Nelson, had Nelson done the interrogation himself, he might have found out more, for he was a shrewd questioner, and his intellect was sharpened by anxiety, and by constant dwelling upon the elements of the intricate problem before him; but by the time Hardy came aboard Vanguard, it was two hours since he had stopped the Ragusan, which was then beyond reach. Nelson, in any case, was in a fever to get forward. The wind was in his favour and over the next six days he made exceptional progress, sometimes covering 150 miles in twenty-four hours. On 28 June he had Alexandria in sight and he spent the night taking soundings off shore; the Royal Navy had few charts of the eastern Mediterranean. It was disquieting, however, that there was no sign of the Armament, and when Hardy returned in Mutine next morning after a passage inshore, his fears were confirmed. Hardy had failed to find the British Consul, to whom Nelson had written, and could not have done, for he was absent on leave; but the Ottoman fortress commander, who eventually appeared, told him that the French had not arrived, that the Turks were not at war with France and that the British, though they might water and store their ships, according to custom, should go away. Nelson did not linger. On the morning of Saturday, 30 June, he set sail. He had decided he had made a mistake and that the Armament had gone elsewhere, perhaps to Turkey proper. Four days later, having left Cyprus to starboard, he was in the Gulf of Antalya.
Had Nelson only contained his impatience, the French would have sailed into his hands. Twenty-five hours after he departed Alexandria, the Armament anchored to the east of the city and began to send the army ashore. This was Nelson’s second, perhaps third, even fourth near-miss. But for the gale, he might have caught Bonaparte coming out of Toulon. But for his anxiety to protect Naples, he might have devastated the Armament at Malta. But for his refusal to follow the “strange ships,” he might have slaughtered the Armament at sea on 22 June. Had he but waited a day at Alexandria, he certainly would have destroyed it, or forced its surrender, in the delta of the Nile. As it was, he was now hastening away from his quarry, while Bonaparte and a clutch of his future battle-winning marshals—Berthier, Lannes, Murat, Davout, Marmont—were being rowed ashore to take possession of Egypt, more or less at their leisure.
Nelson, by contrast, was in a frenzy. “His anxious and active mind,” wrote Captain Ball, “would not permit him to rest for a moment in the same place.” Where to go? He decided first to “stretch over to the coast of Caramania” (southern Turkey), as he later wrote to Sir William Hamilton. His conclusion, made ten days earlier, that the French were going east, seems to have left him with the conviction that, if they were not in Egypt, then they must be somewhere else in the Turkish Sultan’s dominions. He had noticed the preparations the military commander at Alexandria had been making—“the Line-of-Battle Ship . . . landing her guns,” “the Turks preparing to resist,” as he later wrote to St. Vincent and Sir William Hamilton respectively—but in the absence of the French, he must have interpreted those signs as elements of a general Ottoman alert. That, or else his premature decision to depart implies an uncharacteristic moment of mental confusion, poor analysis, general jumpiness, not traits which he normally displayed.
He arrived in the Gulf of Antalya on 4 July and, seeing nothing, turned west again, heading first to cross the track of the Armament if it were still on its way to Egypt, then steering south of Crete, briefly north towards mainland Greece, eventually direct once more for Sicily, which he reached on the 20th. Off Syracuse, where he proposed to water and take on stores, he wrote three letters on 20 July, to his wife, to Sir William Hamilton, to St. Vincent. His few short words to Lady Nelson were a cri de coeur: “I have not been able to find the French Fleet . . . however, no person will say that it has been for want of activity.” To Hamilton he regretted again his “want of frigates,” from which “all my misfortune has proceeded,” and made arrangements for his letters to be forwarded to the Foreign Secretary and to St. Vincent. They, of course, had no more idea of his whereabouts than he of the French. To St. Vincent, supplementing a recapitulation and justification of his wandering since the Vanguard’s dismasting (written on 29 June, which Captain Ball had urged him not to send), he raised again the issue of lack of frigates, “to which must be attributed my ignorance of the movements of the Enemy,” and then outlined his next plan: “to get into the mouth of the Archipelago [the Aegean], where, if the Enemy are gone to Constantinople, we shall hear of them directly; if I get no information there, to go to Cyprus, when, if they are in Syria or Egypt, I must hear of them.”
He ended, however, by retailing “a report that on the 1st of July, the French were seen off Candia [Crete], but near what part of the Island I cannot learn.” Leaving Syracuse on 24 July, his last word to Hamilton was “No Frigates!—to which has been, and may again, be attributed the loss of the French Fleet.” Frigates or not, Nelson’s luck was about to change. On 28 July, when south of the Greek mainland, he sent the Culloden into the Gulf of Coron (modern Messenia, the large western inlet into the Peloponnese), from which he was brought news that “the Enemy’s Fleet had been seen steering to the S.E. from Candia about four week
s before.” The news came from the Turkish governor, who had heard, from Constantinople, that the French were in Egypt. Culloden also brought in a French brig, which hailed from Limassol in Cyprus and endorsed the Turkish governor’s report. It was further confirmed by the master of a merchantman stopped by the Alexander. Nelson’s fleet had by now stopped 41 merchant vessels during its toing and froing and would have stopped more had not the French admiral captured any stray ship he found in the Armament’s path, no doubt a fruitful counter-intelligence measure.
The visit to the Gulf of Coron effectively ended the intelligence famine. Nelson now had good reason for believing that Bonaparte was not at Corfu, the most likely destination had he headed for Greece, was not going to Constantinople and was not on the south coast of Turkey, nor in Cyprus. The Armament might possibly have landed in Syria, a term that contemporaneously embraced modern Israel and Lebanon as well, but if so, its ships would be within easy sailing distance of Alexandria and would certainly be heard of there. For Alexandria, on 29 July, he accordingly made all sail and during the next few days achieved very rapid passages; in the 24 hours of 31 July the fleet covered 161 miles, at an average speed of nearly eight knots, very fast going for line-of-battle ships.
Landfall on 1 August brought a brief repetition of the disappointment of 30 June. The harbour was empty. A short eastward cast along the coast set fears at rest. At 2:30 in the afternoon, Goliath’s signal midshipman, aloft in the foremast, spotted a crowd of masts in Aboukir Bay. Desperate to be first with the news, he slid to the deck to tell his captain but then broke a halyard as he made his flag hoist to Vanguard. So it was Zealous that got the signal first to Nelson: “Sixteen sail of the line at anchor bearing East by South.”
