Breaking the Line

by David Donachie

  A certain amount of ship visiting by less elevated officers kept him abreast of what Parker was doing, but it did little to cheer him, especially when it was confirmed that Parker had, indeed, sent people in to try and talk the Danes into peace. Days stretched to a week before the frigate returned, days in which Nelson fretted about the state of the ice off Revel and Kronstadt,

  ‘Seven wasted days, Hardy,’ said Nelson, as they watched the frigate, HMS Blanche, beat up towards the flagship. ‘Pray to God we do not have to pay in blood for such dawdling.’

  He and the Ghost were still watching when the flags went up to request that he come aboard.

  Nelson picked up the gloom-laden atmosphere as soon as he set foot on the deck of HMS London, only to find as he awaited Parker’s pleasure that it had been building over the last few days. Everyone wanted to impart to him the depressing news that Copenhagen might be too hard a nut to crack, and this on the flagship of a fleet supposedly preparing for battle!

  It seemed that Parker’s envoy, Nicholas Vansittart, accompanied by the charge d’affaires in Denmark, had come aboard and listed in detail to Sir Hyde Parker the strength of the defences around Copenhagen. For good measure, Vansittart had added those covering the narrow approaches that must be breached before the city and the harbour could be attacked. He had observed and counted fortress guns, anchored warships, armed hulks, gunboats and floating batteries, and described them in terms that had Parker struggling to sleep.

  Nelson knew that the cramped nature of the entrance to the Baltic provided natural defences that made an attack on Copenhagen difficult. The city stood on the eastern side of the island of Zeeland, which effectively blocked easy access to the inland sea. Before even approaching the Danish capital or the open waters of the Baltic a fleet had to pass through the Sound. This lay on the northern shore of Zeeland, a four-mile wide passage covered on both sides by the fortress cannons of Swedish Helsingborg and the Danish fort of Cronberg hard by Elsinore. The only alternative was to go south of Zeeland by the Great Belt, a laborious passage through dozens of islands and numerous sandbanks, waters so unsuitable for deep-draught warships that it would take at least three days.

  Once through the perils of the Sound, the approaches to Copenhagen ran north to south on a narrow channel between Zeeland and the outer island called Amager, which in turn led to an even narrower channel, really no more than a wide canal, that gave access to the inner harbour. This was the passage used by ships entering Copenhagen from the North Sea.

  For ships coming from the east, between those two island shores lay a wide sandbank called the Middle Ground Shoal, which created two channels, the southernmost of which, known as the King’s Deep, narrowed the eastern approach to Copenhagen to less than a mile in width. On the other side of the Middle Ground Shoal was a second navigable passage called the Holland Deep, the usual route for shipping bypassing Copenhagen going in either direction.

  Unfortunately for an attacker, the city was out of range of bombardment from the Holland Deep. Only in the King’s Deep could an attack have any effect and that was where the Danes had sited this powerful defence. Thus the option of choosing when to come in range of enemy guns was not available to the attacker. He had either to take the defence on in its own terms or risk running aground.

  A squadron of warships blocked the head of the channel that led to the city. These were covered by two strong forts sunk on piles in the shallow waters of the approach called the Trekroner and Lynetten Batteries, between them mounting some one hundred cannon. Behind lay the city walls, with the Quintus and Sixtus batteries to the east of the harbour. This was protected by a boom across the entrance thick enough to stop any warship breaching the defence, and covered by the Castellet battery that lay within the city walls. This would leave at the mercy of the Danes any vessels caught on that boom unless all their batteries had already been silenced. Running east from the Trekroner fortress lay a line of warships, backed by batteries both land-based and floating, which covered the city itself. Copenhagen lay over a narrow neck of land to the south and west.

  Nelson had known even before he left England that capturing the harbour was impossible. But it was not necessary: all that was needed was a fleet in the King’s Deep channel powerful enough, and close enough, to threaten to bombard the city and thus force the Danes to surrender or see their capital destroyed. Especially dangerous to the inhabitants would be the bomb ketches with heavy mortars capable of lobbing in shells to do awesome damage, but they were vulnerable to counter battery fire unless supported by ships that could subdue the response.

  But how to get capital warships, the shallow draught 64-gunners and a few of the 74’s to that point without risking destruction? They would have to pass each ship and heavy land battery in turn, surviving endless cannon fire, and still be in a fit state to take on the defences, all the while with a sandbank on their larboard quarter, which would leave them defenceless if they ran aground.

  Thus the gloom on the flagship had a sound basis, but to Nelson that was only true if you accepted everything you were told at face value and stuck rigidly to tactics and stratagems as laid down in the Fighting Instructions. All his life he had held such a set of orders to be foolish: how could a committee sitting in a room at the Admiralty decide what should and should not be done by a fighting commander at the scene of a battle?

  Probably it was the same set of mind that had Sir Hyde Parker in a funk: the fear of losing ships. Nelson hated to lose men and vessels as badly as the next naval commander, but he also knew that no one could ever hope to make successful war without risk. And he had supreme confidence in his ability to balance the advantages against the potential for loss.

  Another thought occurred to him; that Parker’s reservations might work in his favour. Nelson still saw the Russians as the greatest threat, and as far as he knew they were still stuck in the ice. If his commander in chief was reluctant to risk his ships, Nelson would only need to steel him to make the passage of the Sound then bypass Copenhagen and proceed to the Russian shore.

  What was worrying was that he was being told Parker feared even that.

  14

  In the great cabin of HMS London Sir Hyde Parker sat in uncomfortable contemplation. All his life he had sought a command like this, even when he had been in the West Indies. There, watching his wealth grow by leaps and bounds, he had prayed that the French, as they had in the American War, would send a fleet to the area. His rise in the service had been seamless, yet that acme of professional success, a victorious fleet action, had eluded him.

  There had been any number of alarms and excursions, yet no enemy topsail had appeared over the horizon to fulfil his ambitions to fight a major enemy as a commanding admiral. Action with Hotham in the Mediterranean as third-in-command signified little; some prize money, congratulations, but little in the way of public esteem: no title, no thanks from the City of London, no special sword or medals struck in his honour.

  The man waiting to see him had all that and more. Parker had observed the crowd on the day Nelson had arrived off Yarmouth, the news having spread that the Hero of the Nile was coming ashore. He had sneered at such adulation and pronounced it the province of addle-headed fools. But even as he had treated the officers present to his views, encouraging their laughter, Sir Hyde Parker had felt a stirring of jealousy. Never mind the mob, he wanted desperately to see the light of such adoration in his young wife’s eyes.

  There was no doubt in Parker’s mind that as soon as Nelson entered his cabin he would want to discuss some form of action. It was the nature of the man: it had been so when he had HMS Agamemnon and it was probably more so now that he was John Bull’s darling. Parker, too, wanted action and success; the only problem was that he had no idea how achieve it. Every avenue open to him carried with it great dangers.

  If he suffered defeat he would be ruined and that appeared a distinct possibility. Success was a Danish offer of peace without a shot fired, which was what he had anticipated,
but the Danes had rejected the last overture presented to them. Success thus moved to the need to compel them. As it stood from the papers that had been delivered to the Danish Crown Prince, regent for his mentally enfeebled father, war would be declared the moment Parker, as admiral of the aggressive fleet, fired the first shot.

  To get to any of his potential opponents he still had to pass through what he now referred to as ‘that damned Sound’, which the pilots he had brought from England told him was extremely risky: shallow water at either side of narrow channels, little chance to manoeuvre, cannon that grew more threatening every time he contemplated them – and a vision of ships under his command set afire and drifting on to an enemy shore. Or worse, sunk in shoal water that would leave their upper masts still visible to mock him and act for decades as a monument to his failure.

  Inactivity seemed attractive until he reread his orders, which were quite specific: he was to offer terms to the Danes, and if they were refused he must compel them to make peace by all means at his disposal before entering the Baltic and applying the same treatment to Russia and Sweden. Compel! An easy word for an Admiralty secretary to write, even easier for St Vincent to approve and to sign. For Sir Hyde Parker, anchored in the Cattegat with Sweden to the north, Denmark to the south, and the fleet of mad Tsar Paul further east, compel was anything but easy.

  ‘Show Lord Nelson in,’ he said to his flag lieutenant, ‘and ask Mr Vansittart to join us.’

  Nicholas Vansittart, sent by the British government to negotiate with the Danes, was an experienced diplomat, a handsome man of easy manner and fluidity of speech. He reported the failure of his mission, then outlined for Nelson’s benefit, using a chart spread out on Parker’s table, the defences they faced.

  Carefully, Nelson began to question Vansittart in more detail about them, and was impressed by how observant the diplomat had been – he had listed each of the vessels in the whole Danish line. Naturally the Danes had concentrated their most powerful ships, under the command of Commodore Steen Bille, at the point where an attack would come: at the entrance to the harbour, between the Trekroner and Lynetten fortresses, to face a fleet sailing south to engage. The rest of their active fleet, under the orders of Commodore Olfert Fischer, plus all the ships in the dockyard that could float and bear cannon, lay ranged along the northern shore of Amager Island, covering the neck of land that cut off the city from the waters of the Baltic. With floating batteries in between the capital ships and shore batteries behind them, their unprotected sides close to shoal water probably too shallow for the British to sail through, the Danes presented in the King’s Deep a staggered front of cannon ready to smash their enemies. Vansittart had counted both guns and men at these points too, and noted that they seemed eager for a fight.

  No wonder! They expected to face warships that had already suffered from having to sail past the squadron and guns protecting the harbour entrance. Their aim would be to compound that damage, to sink or render useless what remained of an attacking fleet seeking to escape eastwards and drive them as hulks on to the shallow sandbanks of the Middle Ground Shoal. At the very least they would expect them, wounded and unwieldy, to withdraw.

  Then Nelson turned to the situation at Elsinore, covering the four-mile wide Sound between Sweden and Denmark. If Vansittart was gloomy about the defences around Copenhagen, he was even more so about the chances of breaking through the Sound. Before Elsinore stood the fortress of Cronberg, and opposite that its Swedish counterpart, Helsingborg. He had counted every gun on the Danish side and pronounced as near suicidal the notion of entering the Baltic by that route. But as Nelson probed he felt more and more confident.

  The command at Copenhagen rested in the untrained hand of Crown Prince Frederick. He had no experience of either naval or land warfare, yet proposed to lead his fellow countrymen in a defence against elements of the most efficient fleet in the world. And those men, what of them? Sailors, yes, gunners too, but never enough to man such defences! They must be augmented by untrained artisans and labourers, as well as young, enthusiastic gentlemen.

  Nelson watched Parker’s expression grow more fearful by the minute, but he was less convinced than his chief that an approach by the Sound was so hazardous, even less that the defence of Copenhagen was so formidable. First, those who had described the artillery of Cronberg were civilians, and thus their information was suspect. Where had the Danes, a nation that had been at peace for seven decades, got all these cannon? Again, when it came to calibre, condition and the age of the weaponry, Vansittart was at a loss to give a proper description and the range of the guns was to him a mystery. Very likely the Crown Prince had scraped every fort and bastion in the land for weapons that had not been fired in years, more useful for ceremonial than battle.

  Nelson had studied the charts and knew that even if all the cannon were modern and forty-two-pounders, they could not command the whole width of the Sound, having a maximum range of some two and a half miles. So by standing to the north side of the channel, the British fleet could, apart from a few points where sandbanks threw them south, sail through without threat from Cronberg. Thus the danger lay with the Swedes at Helsingborg, and even Parker knew from intelligence reports that the fort was in poor repair, that they had fewer cannon than their Danish allies and that which they had were in poor condition. And of all the nations in this Northern Alliance the Swedes, with their well-known and long-standing antipathy to Russia, were lukewarm in their support.

  As soon as he had finished quizzing Vansittart, Nelson was up and pacing: he could never run down an idea or fully explain a tactical notion when seated. It struck him as odd that none of Parker’s executive officers was here, his own flag captain, Otway, or the Captain of the Fleet, Dommet. Neither was Rear Admiral Graves, the third in command. That could mean only one thing: inaction, which was anathema to Nelson.

  ‘Sir, might I ask whom you see as the greatest enemy?’

  Sir Hyde Parker was thinking at that moment that the greatest enemy he faced was probably his own government but he could hardly say so. And since he had no other point to make he merely turned sad eyes on Nelson knowing that any silence he left would be quickly filled.

  ‘If I may make so bold as to speak, sir?’ Those sad eyes did not flicker, never showed the thought that he had rarely known Nelson to shut up. ‘My appreciation of our situation is that the greatest danger we face is a simultaneous action against all three of our enemies.’

  Parker reckoned he feared that more than Nelson.

  ‘We must take them piecemeal, and since the Danes have obliged us by tying their ships to the defence of their capital, and our intelligence tells us the Swedes are unprepared, it is my suggestion that we proceed at once to attack the Russians.’

  Again Parker stayed silent, listening as Nelson repeated what he had said to the officers of his own squadron, trying to impart to his commanding officer the need for haste: that the Russians were the main enemy, the unprepared Swedes not really a consideration, that the Danes would collapse with no hope of help from the Tsar, until he came to the point at which Sir Hyde felt he had to intervene.

  ‘The Russians, Lord Nelson, are on the other side of Copenhagen.’ What he meant was that they were on the other side of that damned Sound. There was another route, of course, and that was undefended. ‘Tell me, what is your appreciation of the fleet entering the Baltic by the Great Belt?’

  Nelson had to stop his immediate negative response, which was hard. Impulsive replies, however accurate, would not serve. His aim, based on a reading of Parker’s state of mind, was to get the man moving, because everything about him suggested he wanted to stay put. To go by the Great Belt, with its treacherous, shifting sandbanks and no guarantee of a wind to carry them through might take a week if things went badly. But that was better than doing nothing.

  ‘You are faced, sir, with a series of choices that I hardly need to outline.’ Nelson was thinking of whom to fight, Parker of how to get to them at the least risk
. ‘Let me say sir, that if it was my task to choose, I would not attack the Danish defences directly.’

  Nelson pointed to the chart showing the Copenhagen approaches. ‘They have arranged their ships on the assumption that we will sail from the north, our objective being the harbour. Thus their strongest vessels, well manned by proper sailors, their best-manned forts and, I dare say, the most modern cannon, are concentrated thus.’ Nelson finger was on the channel leading into the harbour. ‘It is therefore obvious that the weakest vessels, the less useful cannon, and very likely the least trained men, are ranged here, along the King’s Deep.’

  Nelson’s traced the line of that channel until he reached the open sea at the eastern end. ‘And if that is the case, then the very least in terms of ability to withstand us lie here at the end of the Middle Ground Shoal, where the King’s Deep joins with the Holland Deep.’

  Parker nodded. He still remained silent because he had yet to deduce what Nelson was getting at.

  ‘That, therefore, sir, is where we should begin any assault. If the Danes have set themselves to face an attack from the north, we should come at them from the south. Whichever way we assault their line we will be engaging in a close quarter artillery duel, and in that, even if I were to grade the Danes as good fighters, I would back our men for rate of fire. Accuracy will mean nothing compared to the ability to get off more broadsides than our opponents. I anticipate that the attack could be pressed home with some ten ships-of-the-line, naturally those with the shallowest draught.’