Nelson

by John Sugden

  Sir Gilbert was a genial, worldly man, but the testier tone his letters adopted in April betrayed a dwindling patience with General D’Aubant. He had long since addressed a ‘secret and confidential’ letter to the minister of war seeking the general’s immediate recall. ‘We are at this moment entirely ignorant whether he proposes to stir or not,’ carped Sir Gilbert, ‘and I am internally convinced that nothing will move him but the fear . . . of Lord Hood’s separate success.’ At home the recipient, Henry Dundas, thought Hood part of the problem. He hurried out a new military commander with orders to repair the damage between the services, but was careful to ensure that his instructions clearly made him independent of the imperial admiral.75

  While the wheels of the administration turned slowly, in Corsica the final appeals were being made to General D’Aubant. On 18 April, Hood and Elliot jointly invited the general to attack the heights. Now, however, the gulf between the commanders was wider than ever. Hood had been commandeering any army supplies he could find in the ships without a by-your-leave, and the appeal itself was laced with acid sarcasm:

  If you had happened, in the course of the last fortnight, to have visited the ground or observed the operations of His Majesty’s troops at this place, which is within four hours’ walk of your headquarters, whatever your first opinion may have been concerning this expedition or whatever it may still be of its ultimate success, you would have had an opportunity of satisfying yourself beyond a doubt that the enemy may be effectually annoyed . . .76

  Neither this, nor the statement that D’Aubant would be held to blame for ‘the evils’ that flowed from a delay in the capture of Bastia, moved the general. He was as unyielding as the rocky Corsican heights. Whatever their differences his officers also rallied behind him in a meeting of 22 April, and reaffirmed the judgement that ‘with the whole of our force we were unequal to the taking of Bastia’. On 1 May Hood tried again, and for the last time. Even ‘a show of an intention’ to attack the upper posts might distract the French, he suggested. The general’s reply was as specious as it was final. When Hood read that ‘a mere show’ of attacking would only ‘lessen the respect in which the enemy should ever be kept to hold [off] a British force’, he must have realised that there could be no meeting of minds.77

  With the enemy in sight Captain Nelson was rarely depressed for long. His warrior spirit was soon returning, and he searched for new and more effective sites for his artillery. At the end of April he established batteries upon the ridge above Cabanelle, where poor Clark had been hit, shifting two eighteen-pound carronades and twelve- and nine-pound cannons up horrific gradients. ‘The work of getting up guns to this battery was a work of the greatest difficulty, and which never in my opinion would have been accomplished by any other than British seamen,’ Nelson said proudly. Manned by Lieutenant Andrews and five sailors, and protected by soldiers and Corsican skirmishers, the fresh pieces opened fire on May Day. No sooner had they spoken than Nelson had his men dragging a big twenty-four and a howitzer to another part of the ridge. By 8 May three cannons, two carronades and a howitzer were barking from above the Cabanelle. Stationed only a mile from the citadel, their fire also gained from the greater elevation and was soon ‘sorely’ mutilating the French defences.78

  On 15 May the British captured a boat attempting to bring gunpowder from Capraia to Bastia, and on board was a brother of Jean-Baptiste Galeazzini, the mayor of the besieged town. As Hood interrogated the prisoner aboard the Victory it became obvious that the citizens of Bastia lived in dread of their town being sacked by wild and uncontrollable partisans. To rule out a massacre the mayor’s brother offered to act as an intermediary, and to send the town his disheartening news that their gunpowder was no longer coming. Suddenly events began to move quickly.

  On the 19th someone excitedly drew Nelson’s attention to a flag of truce ascending the Victory, and during the dying afternoon boats began flitting between the fleet and town. Something was afoot, but with the guns silent and waiting, Nelson, Villettes and their sweatstained followers could only sit tense and expectant.

  Then suddenly enemy officers were striding out of the Cabanelle to shake hands with the besiegers. After forty-five days it was over. Despite self-doubts and the forebodings of ‘Fiorenzo wiseheads’ Bastia had fallen.79

  XIX

  A LONG AND HAZARDOUS SERVICE

  Nelson, by valour led to deathless fame,

  All toils surmounted, and all foes o’ercome,

  Braved every danger, calm and undismay’d,

  Whilst some new triumph marked each step he made.

  Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

  1

  ON 24 May a tired but excited Captain Nelson made an entry in his journal. ‘At daylight this morning the most glorious sight an Englishman, and which I believe none but an Englishman, could experience was to be seen. Four thousand five hundred men laying down their arms to less than 1,000 English [British] soldiers. Our loss of men in taking this town containing upwards of 14,000 inhabitants, and [which] fully inhabited would contain 25,000, was the smallest possible to be conceived.’1

  It was a magnification, of course, though perhaps an excusable one, for the capture of Bastia was a triumph plucked from professional pessimism. After the formal capitulation on the 22nd, Nelson saw his foes yield their outposts and then the citadel, and watched thousands of French soldiers and their Corsican auxiliaries tramp grimly to the mole head to ground their muskets and board the transports waiting to ship them home. He had transmitted the heartfelt thanks of Admiral Hood to all the men who had served ashore.

  The British had fired twenty thousand round shot and shells during the siege, and expended a thousand barrels of powder, but in terms of manpower it had been an inexpensive conquest. Only sixty men had been killed or wounded. The casualties included seven from the Agamemnon, one of them Lieutenant Andrews, who retired to Leghorn to heal his wounds. By comparison the enemy had suffered 743 casualties, as noted most of them dead, and yielded four thousand five hundred prisoners, a figure that presumably included the wounded. Nearly eighty artillery pieces, substantial supplies, and La Flêche corvette as well as the town itself, the largest in Corsica, also graced the triumph.2

  There were those in the army who felt discomfited by a victory that confounded their predictions of a more protracted or bloody struggle. A competent soldier, Lieutenant Colonel Moore, was reduced to joining an incompetent one, General D’Aubant, in sneering from the sidelines. At times they had implied that the capture of Bastia was beyond the present means of the combined services, and increasingly they exonerated their inaction by disparaging Nelson’s bombardment and insisting that it added nothing to the naval blockade but a waste of ammunition. Their remarks about the siege have sometimes been accepted as objective statements; but in one sense Moore and D’Aubant’s professional reputations rested more easily with a failure of the siege than its successful outcome.

  It was true, of course, that the bombardment ran down munitions, though we can imagine Nelson scoffing that those who did not fight always conserved ammunition. The end of the siege left reserves of powder particularly low. The fleet was in need of twelve hundred barrels, while at the arsenal at Gibraltar, which had sent six hundred barrels of powder to Hood, the reserves were uncomfortably low. It was also true that the siege was an inadequate substitute for the attack that should have been made from the heights, and made for heavier work than Nelson expected. But to argue, as some historians have done, that the bombardment added nothing to the situation is merely to imbibe Moore’s wilful negativity. The dearth of food, produced solely by the blockade, seems to have been the most immediate cause of the town’s surrender, but there is nothing surprising about that. In many, if not most, sieges that end in a negotiated surrender the lack of food and water are key issues, as they had been in Nelson’s previous military operation in Nicaragua, but that hardly entitles other contributions to be dismissed. Evidence from inside Bastia suggests considerable structura
l damage, heavy and rising casualties and a serious shortage of gunpowder produced by the firing. In fact, both St Michel’s flight from the town and its final surrender were partly justified by the lack of powder. It is reasonable to presume that the total package, including the strain of living under fire and fears of the town being stormed by ferocious Corsicans, influenced the result. Calvi’s fall, no less than Bastia’s, would be precipitated by the exhaustion of food and ammunition.3

  Early in May, after a period of doubt, the confidence of the Hood–Nelson party had increased. The new advanced batteries had opened fire, and the French suddenly looked shaky. With a victory looming, D’Aubant looked for a way out. On 13 May reinforcements arrived from Gibraltar. There were only six hundred of them, and they probably made a smaller difference to the comparative sizes of the opposing forces than the casualties wrought by Nelson’s siege guns had done, but they gave the general a means of saving face. On the 14th two of D’Aubant’s officers went to the Victory with an offer to collaborate. A week before Hood would have jumped at the opportunity, but now he eyed the ambassadors with scarcely veiled contempt. As far as he was concerned, they were merely cutting themselves in for a piece of credit at the end of a hard-won fight. Scathingly he told the officers that their general ‘need not give himself that trouble’.4

  Hood had not wholly mistaken his man, and when the surrender of Bastia was finally agreed D’Aubant descended like a vulture upon the spoils, appearing in force upon the heights above the town on 21 May. It was his duty, of course, to occupy the abandoned redoubts and forts, but in an extraordinary dispatch to the home secretary he had the gall to suggest that the news of his advance might have hastened the French surrender. The general had now abandoned all consistency. He asked Dundas to believe that his advance, after the enemy had agreed to capitulate, was helping to end the siege, when he had spent two months vociferously refusing to move on the grounds that such an advance was pointless. Hood gave the general no relief. The day D’Aubant’s warriors marched over the heights the admiral told him Bastia would have fallen ‘long since’ if the troops had acted properly, and warned that he now intended to attack Calvi, the last French stronghold in Corsica.5

  There were lessons for everyone, including Nelson. As he inspected the town from the inside, he marvelled at a strength he had earlier denied. It should have told him something about the need to base military decisions upon the best intelligence, but he was naturally exhilarated by his success and for the moment voiced rather the opposite conclusion. Whatever some historians have said about the capture of Bastia, the naval officers of the day, as well as many in the army, regarded it as a victory dragged from the teeth of pessimism. It certainly reinforced Nelson’s impressions of the capabilities of his seamen. As for the enemy, they had shown no spirit whatsoever, he mused. ‘I always was of opinion, have ever acted up to it, and never have had reason to alter it, that one Englishman was equal to three Frenchmen.’ It was a favourite boast, but fortunately Nelson’s tendency to loose egotistical talk was not always a true indication of his deeper reflections or actual conduct.6

  In the case of Bastia he had made mistakes, but it is difficult to deny him considerable credit. He had urged the attack, and whether blockading or besieging he had been its most energetic instrument. None reading the letters and journals of the day can doubt his strenuous commitment. Yet, remarkably, the man who profited as much as any from his labour paid it the most meagre public tribute. Admiral Hood was surely aware of Nelson’s need for recognition, as well as the sacrifices he had made to earn it, but the admiral’s public dispatch of 24 May damned his leading subordinate with faint praise and credited some of his achievements to another officer.

  In stating that Nelson ‘had the command and directions of the seamen in landing the guns, mortars, and stores’, Hood made it sound as if he had merely conducted a routine disembarkation. Nelson complained that it put him ‘in the rear’ of the action instead of its van, but there was worse. ‘Captain Hunt,’ said the admiral, ‘was on shore in the command of the batteries from the hour the troops landed to the surrender of the town.’ As worded, this was more than an astonishing remark; it was an untruth. Hunt, Nelson grumbled, ‘scarcely ever saw’ a battery, nor did he render ‘any service during the siege. If any person ever says he did, then I submit to the character of a story-teller.’ Others agreed. Some were ‘thunderstruck’ by Hood’s dispatch, and Captain Serocold even talked about publishing a correction. Others would have seen it as another example of the admiral’s favouritism; Captain Fremantle, for example, had long concluded that Hood judged actions by the man, rather than a man by his actions.7

  Hunt was also sent home with the admiral’s dispatches, a privilege that offered him further opportunities to press his claims and the right, so he said, to a gratuity reserved for those who brought news of important territorial acquisitions. Nelson understood that Hood possessed some personal reason for pushing Hunt forward, but he was understandably hurt that it had been done at his expense. The attack was ‘almost a child of my own’, he wrote. ‘The whole operations of the siege were carried on through Lord Hood’s letters to me. I was the mover of it. I was the cause of its success.’ More than ‘a little vexed’ with his admiral, Nelson, however, resolved not to quarrel. He had too much to lose, for Hood had already promised that Nelson would enjoy further opportunities for distinction at Calvi. Bottling his resentment, he consoled himself with the belief that Sir Gilbert Elliot, ‘a stranger and a landsman’, would report more accurately and ‘do me that credit which a friend and brother officer’ had denied.8

  In the meantime he wrote to the families of the four Agamemnons who had died in the fight, and prepared the rest of the company for the next siege. This time it appeared that the army would play its full part. As Bastia fell a new military commander-in-chief arrived to replace the smouldering D’Aubant. Lieutenant General the Honourable Charles Stuart was slim and handsome, a ball of energy, and a soldier to the soles of his boots. He had been twice briefed, once by his government and again by Sir Gilbert, and gave every indication of wanting a better relationship between the two services. Announcing his regret at missing the siege, Stuart generously acknowledged that the victory was ‘alone due to Lord Hood’, and spoke about a new and cordial partnership.9

  It was not going to be plain sailing, however. Stuart might have started off on the right foot but Hood was soon antagonising him, and like many brilliant military men Stuart himself was temperamental, stubborn and unbalanced. Even the level-tempered Elliot eventually found him impossible. ‘Of all the vain, haughty, absurd and wrongheaded men I ever had the ill-fortune to meet with, he is the facile princeps,’ Sir Gilbert would complain. Dealing with him was like being ‘locked up with a madman in a cell’. Fortunately, though Nelson occasionally ran afoul of Stuart’s prickly disposition, he saw the gold underneath and admired and liked the general.10

  Before the campaign against Calvi got underway, some urgent naval business intervened. The French fleet gave Vice Admiral Hotham’s squadron the slip outside Toulon and escaped into the Mediterranean. No one knew where it was going, but the probability was that the French were engaged in a last, desperate effort to save Corsica. Hood put to sea with all available ships on 7 June, the day after the news reached him in Bastia. The Agamemnon was already loaded with men and materiel for Calvi, but Nelson quickly shed her excess to catch up with the departing fleet, fancying that at last he was on the eve of a fleet action. ‘I pray God we may meet this [enemy] fleet,’ he wrote. Hood was also dead set on a decisive result, and ‘was in hopes to have taken or destroyed them . . . which I certainly should have done had not the wind failed me’ and enabled the French to slink into Golfe Jouan, west of Nice. When the British came up on 10 June the enemy ships were anchored close inshore in a strong defensive position, protected by banks and shore batteries. Hood considered whether he might double the enemy line by using the shallows to interpose some of his ships between the land and th
e French fleet – much as Nelson’s ‘band of brothers’ would do at the Nile four years later – but the manoeuvre seemed impracticable. Hood withdrew like a hungry tiger driven from a kill. Even reinforced by Hotham’s division, he could only appoint guard ships to keep the French under observation, and return to Corsica to cover the siege of Calvi.11

  Nelson was sent back to Bastia early to complete his task, and on 12 June embarked the soldiers and stores for the next campaign. He knew the capture of Calvi would be a hazardous enterprise and accepted the personal risks it promised. At Bastia he had been lucky, but this time he was sailing towards his first major injury.

  2

  The fleet of victuallers, transports and store ships swallowed 1,450 officers and men and left for Mortella Bay at St Fiorenzo under Nelson’s careful stewardship. Stuart went as far as St Fiorenzo overland, and Nelson was also sorry to leave Villettes behind. The lieutenant colonel remained in Bastia as acting governor, installed in a house always open to his naval friend. Nelson, said Villettes, had ‘a very good right’ to call it his own, and would always find board and a ‘tolerable dinner’ within its walls. Still, the captain was relieved to be serving under a new military commander-in-chief who believed in making life unsafe for the enemy. During the delay Stuart had inspected Calvi and was impatient to begin, and Nelson agreed. He was supposed to wait for Hood but to Stuart’s delight quickly got underway, and with the Dolphin and the Lutine was soon shepherding the army toward France’s last foothold on Corsica.12