by John Keegan
The report was not quite accurate. Admiral Brueys commanded 13 line-of-battle ships, but also four frigates, two brigs, two bomb vessels and a collection of smaller gunboats. It was the thirteen heavy ships that mattered, the enormous 120-gun L’Orient, three 80s and nine 74s. They were variously armed, one with 18-pounders instead of 32-pounders, and some were old, as much as fifty years old, and less strongly built than the British. Still, Victory, which was to be Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, was then forty years old. Neither age nor even weight of metal counted really among the decisive features. Seamanship, ship-handling and bloody-mindedness did. The British were masters of their craft, to a degree that the relatively inexperienced French, officers and men alike, were not; the code of revolutionary correctness had robbed the French navy of many good officers, conscription to the army of much of its manpower. The diet of victory on land in particular had sapped the French navy’s will to win. Victory at sea was not essential to France. It was crucial to the British as a people and to the Royal Navy as a service.
Bonaparte, as Sir Arthur Bryant, the great popular historian of Britain’s role in the wars of the French Revolution and Empire, was to remark, never saw and therefore could not imagine “the staggering destructive power of a British ship of the line in action.” The Royal Navy had been a ferocious instrument of war ever since the seventeenth century. Its defeat in the American War of Independence, however, had infused it with a ruthless killer instinct. It had been outraged by the French and Spanish seizure in 1780–81 of command of the sea, its birthright, as it saw it, and had not relented since the resumption of hostilities in 1793 in the determination to humble its enemies. Bonaparte, the mastermind of the Egyptian expedition, was now far from the fleet, winning new victories over feeble enemies in the interior of Egypt.* Had he been nearer, he might have sent his fleet away, to be out of danger, perhaps at Corfu, from which it could have been recalled quickly at need, and where it would have constituted a threat to Nelson’s lines of communication. The concept, however, of a “fleet in being,” affecting events by doing nothing, may have been alien to Bonaparte’s active and aggressive mind. He therefore ordered Brueys to remain in Egyptian waters but to put the fleet under the guns of Alexandria. It was then anchored in Marabout Bay, where the landings had been staged, a clearly unsatisfactory roadstead. Alexandria, however, was a difficult harbour, shallow and easily blocked. It was therefore eventually decided to transfer the ships to Aboukir Bay, nine miles to the east.
Brueys had anchored his ships in a position he thought made a successful attack by the British—which he expected—impossible. They lay in a shallow crescent formation, bows on to Aboukir Castle with Aboukir (Bequières) Island to starboard and shoal water between them and the land to port. They could be approached from only two directions: from below Aboukir Island, though the northerly wind denied the British that course; or through the gap between the island and the castle. Brueys had apparently judged the gap impracticable, believing that, even if negotiated, the water beyond was too shallow for the British to pass on either side of his ships; that is, between his line and Aboukir Island or between his line and the shoreward shoals. He had strengthened his defences by having cables run between most of his ships, which were about 175 yards apart, and by ordering springs to be attached to their anchor cables; springs, ropes taken to the capstan, could be tightened to swing the ship by the bow or stern, so that they were manoeuvrable even though at anchor. Not all the French captains, however, had attached springs by the time the battle began.
Nevertheless, the French position was formidable enough to deter a cautious enemy; but the British were not cautions, nor were they unobservant. Foley, captain of Goliath, had one of the only two charts of the coast in the fleet, and a good one; it showed the depths of water right up to the shoreline.13 More important, Foley made a snap judgement about the way the French were anchored. Nelson himself would shortly come to the same conclusion, saying to Berry, his flag captain in Vanguard, “where there was room for an enemy’s ship to swing, there was room for one of ours to anchor.”14 Foley saw that instantly as he passed the gap between the castle and the shoals and so pointed Goliath inshore, to pass round the Guerrier at the head of Brueys’ line, and so down the inside of the anchored enemy.
Foley had intended to anchor alongside Guerrier, into which he fired as he rounded her bow, but his crew ran out too much cable. Goliath ended up farther down the French line, opposite Conquérant and Spartiate. The mistake did not really matter, for the British ships next astern were following fast, Zealous, Audacious, Orion and Theseus. They also joined in the cannonade against Guerrier—which collected fire from all of them as they passed by and was quickly dismasted—while Theseus positioned herself to fire into both Spartiate and Aquilon; Miller of Theseus was a New Yorker, one of two North American Loyalists among Nelson’s captains.
The head of the French line was now solidly engaged by anchored opponents. Vanguard, which was following Theseus, took a different course, steering to pass on the seaward rather than inshore side of the French and to anchor opposite Spartiate, which was thus taken between two fires. Minotaur engaged Aquilon, also caught between two fires, while Defence stopped opposite Peuple Souverain, which was being fired into by Orion on the other side.
The centre of the French line was composed of the heaviest ships, Franklin, 80 guns, L’Orient, 120, and Tonnant, 80; the other 80, Guillaume Tell, was some distance away, third from rear. Darkness had fallen as the centre’s British opponents began to appear, first Majestic, which was mishandled and ended up opposite another 74 farther down, then Bellerophon, then Alexander, then Swiftsure. The last two, positioning themselves skilfully in the gaps astern of Franklin and L’Orient respectively, were able to do serious damage without suffering heavily themselves. Bellerophon, coming alongside L’Orient, suffered terrible damage and loss by choosing to engage the heaviest ship present. In an hour of fighting she lost her main and mizzen masts, while her foremast also was damaged. By ten o’clock her ordeal began to abate as fire from Swiftsure and Alexander raked the French flagship from bow and stern. They did terrible slaughter; Admiral Brueys, badly wounded, insisted on remaining on deck until struck by a shot that killed him. Below decks the spaces were full of wounded, including Captain Casabianca’s young son. They were also cluttered by flammable stores, Lieutenant Webley, of Zealous, noted when L’Orient took fire. Swiftsure’s captain ordered his crew to fire into the seat of the blaze to stop the French crew from fighting the flames. Soon it became obvious that L’Orient’s magazine would be set off, and both her British and French neighbours cut their anchor cables to reach what was hoped to be a safe distance. Alexander drifted off, so did Tonnant, Heureux and Mercure, either to anchor again or to ground in shallow water. Swiftsure, close ahead of L’Orient, was judged by its captain to be safer where it was; he calculated that the coming explosion would pass over his ship.
So it did; the enormous detonation sent the debris of broken timbers, masts, cordage and bodies hundreds of feet into the air, to rain down detritus into the waters of the bay for a mile around, while the noise, heard in Alexandria nine miles away, temporarily brought the battle to a stop. When it resumed, after a quarter of an hour, the scene of battle had been decisively altered. The disappearance of L’Orient and the shift of Tonnant, which had drifted dismasted towards the rear, left a large gap in the middle of the French line, widened by the falling away of Heureux and Mercure, which had cut their cables also and gone aground, though their crews continued to serve the guns. The French were thus in almost total disarray, with their admiral dead, flagship destroyed and surviving ships separated into two groups. In the forward group, Guerrier, whose crew had fought heroically while her captain had refused to surrender twenty times, at last struck after three hours, dismasted and devastated. Conquérant, after another valiant passage of resistance, had also at last struck. Spartiate, third in line, had surrendered after two hours, the first French ship to give up, but
with 200 dead and wounded aboard and the survivors pumping to keep the ship afloat. Aquilon surrendered a little later, with 87 dead aboard and 213 wounded. Peuple Souverain, fifth in the order of battle, had drifted out of the line, perhaps because her cables had been severed by gunfire. Franklin, still in line, had ceased to fight after being set on fire four times, the last by burning debris from the explosion of L’Orient. By early in the morning of 2 August, therefore, the French fleet consisted of a shattered and defeated van, a central void and a rear in disarray. Franklin, anchored ahead of L’Orient’s original position, did recommence fire after the great explosion but was swiftly brought to surrender. Aft of the gap, some of the French ships continued resistance for several hours, Hereux and Mercure, which had gone aground after cutting their cables, from inshore. Admiral Villeneuve, in Guillaume Tell, eventually decided, however, that it was his duty to escape, cut his cable and sailed out of the bay, followed by Généreux and the frigates Justice and Diane. He left behind the dismasted Tonnant and Timoléon, which, with heroic but pointless obstinacy, continued to work their guns into the afternoon of 2 August. Tonnant eventually hauled down her colours but Timoléon’s crew left theirs flying when they set fire to the ship and rowed ashore to escape capture.
Nelson had won a crushing victory, in its completeness never exceeded during the days of sailing-ship warfare and equalled in naval history only by Japan’s annihilation of the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. Of the enemy’s thirteen line-of-battle ships, two had escaped, but two had blown up and the other nine had been captured in action or driven ashore. Nelson had lost none of his ships. Culloden, which had grounded during the approach, to the fire-eating Troubridge’s fury, had been floated off; Bellerophon and Majestic, the hardest hit, survived. Nelson’s casualties—he himself had suffered a nasty scalp wound early on—numbered 208 killed and 677 wounded. The French, by contrast, had surrendered more than a thousand wounded while their dead came to several thousand, a thousand in L’Orient alone.15
It was the nature of the battle that determined the scale of the slaughter; ships anchored broadside to broadside, firing into each other at point-blank range, caused ghastly carnage among their crews. Engagements in the open sea, when ships had the freedom to manoeuvre, were much less costly in human life. Yet at Copenhagen, a battle Nelson was to fight in almost identical circumstances in 1801, Danish casualties were only 476 killed, 559 wounded. A killer instinct was at work at the Nile, a determination among the British to prevail, among the French not to be overcome.
What animated the French is the harder to estimate; revolutionary fervour no doubt, certainly Bonapartist inspiration, perhaps also the determination not to return to the traditional state of inferiority prevailing before their naval renaissance in the American War of Independence. Analysis of the British mood is more straightforward. Victory was a way of life for the Nelsonian sailor. He believed all races inferior to his own, and expected to beat them, and would fight unremittingly to ensure that he did. Moreover, the fleet had been led a merry dance by Brueys for nearly three months. Cornered at last, he and his sailors became the object of their enemy’s pent-up frustration.
No one in Nelson’s fleet had been more frustrated than Nelson himself, sleeping badly, eating little, railing in every letter he wrote against the bad luck which had him in its grip. Want of frigates, want of help from those he believed owed it him, were his constant themes. He also came to believe that the fates were against him, that he had consistently made the right choices, but that some malign spirit had intervened to disappoint his best intentions. In his letter to St. Vincent, composed at the nadir of the campaign, the letter Captain Ball had urged him not to send, he had itemised his setbacks. It was written off Alexandria during his first visit, when he found the harbour empty.
The only objection I can fancy to be stated is, “you should not have gone such a long voyage without more certain information of the Enemy’s destination”: my answer is ready—who was I to get it from? The Government of Naples and Sicily either knew not or kept me in ignorance. 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 circumstances, it is decided I am wrong, I ought, for the sake of our Country, to be superseded; for, at this moment, when I know the French are not in Alexandria, I hold the same opinion as off Cape Passaro (south-east point of Sicily,
21–22 June)—viz; that under all circumstances I was right in steering for Alexandria, and by that opinion I must stand or fall.16
It is almost impossible not to sympathise with Nelson’s analysis of his own decisions and actions. He made mistakes during his seventy-three days of chase, between the great storm of 18 May and his bringing of Brueys to battle on 1 August, notably in deciding not to chase the French frigates sighted off Sicily on 22 June and in not waiting off Alexandria on the 29th when the signs were that the Turks expected trouble; had he then reined in his impatience for twenty-four hours, he would have won what might have been the most decisive naval battle in history. On the other hand, as an essay in pure intelligence operations by a commander on the spot, Nelson’s Nile campaign is difficult to fault. The restraints under which he worked are clear to enumerate: no reconnaissance force (“want of frigates”), no means of communication with land-based sources of information except by going to get it himself, no reassurance that any such information gleaned was reliable, even from friendly sources (Hamilton’s and Acton’s economy with the truth should be remembered), no access to the central intelligence resources of his own home base (three to five weeks’ delay in communication between the Mediterranean and London in the inward direction, therefore twice that two-way), no certain home intelligence even if sent. Other restraints were an active disinformation campaign conducted by the enemy (manipulation of the official press) and energetic denial of local sources of intelligence (Brueys’ commandeering of all merchant shipping encountered during the voyage to Alexandria).
Nelson had to work, therefore, by optimising local intelligence acquisitions (particularly the interrogation of Turkish officials in the Peloponnese and merchant captains off Crete after his first passage to Alexandria), which were offset by misinformation (the report that the French had left Malta three days earlier than was the case) and by his own “understanding.”
Can we reconstruct the picture of the strategic situation Nelson must have formed in his mind once he knew that Bonaparte had sailed from Toulon after the great storm of 18 May? He early and correctly discarded the idea that Bonaparte was making for Spain, to attack Portugal, or sailing out of the Mediterranean to invade Ireland (the presence of St. Vincent’s fleet at Gibraltar nullified that threat in any case). He therefore had to picture where Bonaparte might land his army once he was certain that he was heading eastward. There were really only three destinations. The Mediterranean is not one but two seas, separated from each other by the Sicilian–Tunisian narrows, where it is only 200 miles wide. In the political circumstances of 1798, the only objectives worthwhile to the French west of the narrows were Sicily itself and its parent kingdom of Naples; the capture of Malta was an alternative aim, but only as a preliminary to a descent on Sicily/Naples. East of the narrows the objectives widened, but not irreducibly. The dead end of the Adriatic could be discounted. Its waters were already controlled either by the French, or by Austria, with which France was not at war, or by Turkey, which was not an enemy.
The rest of the eastern Mediterranean was also Turkish and it might be, as Nelson calculated, possible that the French Republic, despite a historic alliance with the Ottoman emperor, had decided to invade his territory, not to overthrow his rule but to strike through his lands against British interests farther to the east. One route, if the French were to p
ass by the Dardanelles to his capital at Constantinople, lay across Anatolia to the Persian Gulf. The other, via Alexandria, gave on to the Red Sea and so to the Indian Ocean from another direction. In either case, Britain’s rich possessions in the Indian sub-continent were the objective.
Sicily/Naples (with Malta as a subordinate target); Constantinople; Egypt: those were the three destinations which Nelson had to juggle in his mind. By 22 June, when he knew that the French had taken Malta but passed on, he had convinced himself that Bonaparte’s point of disembarkation must be Egypt. Sicily/Naples required a retrogression, which the winds and the intelligence had argued against. Constantinople was too roundabout a route to the Indian sub-continent. From Alexandria, however, the path stretched forward. After the conference with his captains aboard Vanguard on 22 June, he knew that he would find the French fleet in Egypt, and he was right. Only contingencies, and two misjudgements, denied him the decisive fruit of his intelligence assessment.
Nelson’s chase to the Nile compares well with another chase in Mediterranean waters 116 years later, when the French and British Mediterranean fleets tried to bring the German battlecruiser Goeben and its escorting cruiser Breslau to action and allowed both to escape to the Turks in Constantinople. Technology had, over a century, altered the conditions of chase greatly to the pursuers’ advantage, allowing intelligence to be passed almost instantaneously, always supposing it was accurate, which, in 1914, proved to be scarcely more so than in 1798, and discounting, too, unhelpful intervention by admiralties. The speed of pursuit had greatly increased, tripling from about 8 to over 24 knots. On the other hand, the need to refuel, often at a few days’ interval, tied ships to ports or to rendezvous with coalers, limiting their freedom of action to a degree which Nelson, taking his means of motion from the wind, would have found frustrating. Even allowing for the tendency of winds to fail or blow in the wrong direction, sailing-ship fleets had an operational autonomy not to be regained by automotive navies until the development of nuclear power.
