by John Sugden
Something that gnawed at Nelson was the fear that De Vins fully intended to sit where he was and ‘lay the blame of the miscarriage of the enterprise against Nice . . . to the non-cooperation of the British fleet and the Sardinian army’. Nor was he entirely deceiving himself. Writing to the emperor, De Vins was complimentary about Nelson: ‘He speaks with great gratitude and satisfaction of Captain Nelson’s readiness on all occasions to assist him,’ said the British representative to the Viennese court. But at the beginning of September the general was also complaining that so many provisions were reaching the French by sea that the plan to starve them into retreat would have to be abandoned.29
Putting his anxieties behind him, Nelson determined that no one was going to make him a scapegoat. If the war had become bogged down, it would have to be reinvigorated. As the summer passed he came up with a plan.
5
That September two men, very different in some ways and alike in others, grumbled discontentedly about the war on the Italian riviera. History has linked their names, but here for the first time they stood in direct competition, one a sick but vainglorious naval officer and the other an excitable, ruthless, supremely ambitious Corsican in the service of France, now called from unemployment to the Bureau Topographique in Paris. At the age of twenty-six, a short but lean man of boundless energy and great intelligence, Napoleon Bonaparte was at the heart of the military planning of his adopted country.
Bonaparte was thoroughly dissatisfied with the lacklustre performance of the Army of Italy, and clamoured for more enterprise and aggression. Vado should be retaken, he said, and the French front reinforced, while further inland, on the borders of Sardinia-Piedmont and Genoa, Ceva should be occupied and a wedge driven between the Austrian forces and their Sardinian and Piedmontese allies. A new French general, Barthelemy Louis Joseph Scherer, was soon in command of the Army of Italy with orders to invigorate the war along the lines Bonaparte suggested.30
Captain Horatio Nelson of His Britannic Majesty’s ship Agamemnon had less power to stimulate reluctant allies, even as an acting commodore, but he also urged a determined offensive. His idea had been hatched with Drake and Trevor during their voyage from Vado to Genoa in July, and by August it was being openly espoused. Drawing upon his propensity for land operations, Nelson suggested amphibious operations. The military balance, he thought, might be tilted in the allied favour if his ships landed soldiers in the rear of the French army and cut its communications.
But though De Vins led his political masters to believe that he was ready to embrace any practicable proposition from Nelson, he acted otherwise in the field. Drake used ‘every argument’ he could think of to recommend the plan to the Austrian commander-in-chief, but found him ‘very lukewarm’. He promised to consider it ‘in so cold a manner’ that Drake was left in no doubt of his disinterest, and when De Vins suggested that three thousand soldiers from Corsica be used instead of Austrians his prevarication became glaringly transparent.31
Early in September, Nelson examined the coast behind the French lines as far as Nice. He noticed that the road along which the French were marching to the front and hauling many of their supplies was vulnerable to naval attack, because the mountainous interior frequently forced it to twist alongside the sea. Grasping the strategic significance of the road, Nelson was back in Vado Bay on the 12th, urging De Vins to give him five thousand men, some field pieces, and a few days’ provisions for a descent upon San Remo. San Remo was a Genoese town, but the French had occupied it during their advance and now it straggled the enemy communication line. It not only commanded the road, which was full of mules braying under provisions for the French army, but also possessed a haven for ships, one used by the tiny coasters that sneaked supplies along the shore from Nice. By seizing and occupying San Remo, Nelson contended, the allies could rupture the enemy supply system by sea and land. The captain had no doubt the job could be done, for the French had only a pair of beach camps and few cannon in the town. Once installed, an allied force could be supplied by Nelson’s ships, or taken off by them if the enemy massed to counterattack.32
But De Vins disagreed. Captain Nelson impressed him, but he had no wish to be drawn into anything risky or premature and the captain went back to Genoa to commiserate with Drake. They both decided the Austrians had no real interest in the war, and were simply posturing to get their hands on the subsidies the British government were offering allies. However, on 17 September they jointly addressed De Vins. If the general thought San Remo an unsuitable target, they offered to find transports to attack any place he preferred. De Vins wavered, and after his men successfully stormed a French outpost in the St Esprit mountains during ten furious hours on the 19th, his blood ran uncommonly fast. He talked about landing troops between Nice and the Var, and rallying five thousand peasants to his standard. He even said he would lead the sortie himself.33
For a moment it looked as if Nelson had made progress on one front, but now he needed transport ships to shift the strike force westwards. And to get those he needed the support of Admiral Hotham.
The day after the Austrian attack on the 19th, Nelson submitted his request for transports to Hotham, but it ran counter to the admiral’s inclinations. In fact, Nelson’s squadron was already being pared down. Early in September, Hotham had withdrawn all of Nelson’s frigates bar the twenty-four-gun Ariadne, supported by the Moselle sloop, on the presumption that the impending arrival of a light-draught flotilla from Naples would fulfil his needs. Besieged by different claims upon his force, Hotham decided to redeploy his frigates elsewhere. Enemy privateers, dislodged from the riviera by Nelson’s ships, were haunting the approaches to Corsica, turning the Genoese island of Capraia into ‘a den of pirates’, and almost bringing unguarded British commerce to a stop. ‘No stores, or provisions and money get safe to Corsica,’ Consul Udny complained in Leghorn.34
Nor, in truth, had Nelson and Drake laid the ground for their request well. Indeed, disillusioned by the sluggish De Vins, Drake had already advised the foreign secretary that it might be ‘advisable to lessen the number of ships now cooperating with the Austrian army in order to employ them in protecting our own trade, since it is apparent that nothing further is to be expected . . . during this campaign’. If Drake had now shot himself in the foot, so too had Nelson. Only three days before writing for the transports Nelson had sent his admiral a quite different letter, suggesting that whatever might be done for De Vins was likely to be pointless. The general was unreliable, and would find one excuse or another for inactivity. Ill, tired and depressed, Nelson had spoken carelessly but the mistake might have been costly. How could Hotham take De Vins’s new request for transports seriously after receiving such a damning assessment from his man on the spot?35
Not surprisingly, his answer was in the negative. Because of ‘arrangements brought to me by the last messenger from England’ Hotham was unable to supply the transports, and ‘the very extensive plan proposed by the general must for the present be suspended’. Even worse, from Nelson’s point of view, the reductions in the naval squadron continued. The Ariadne was recalled for a ‘secret service’ and the Meleager, which Nelson had hoped would have been returned to him, was sent for caulking. In the ensuing weeks Nelson received occasional reinforcements, but it was abundantly clear that the riviera squadron was a low priority.36
Nelson was outflanked on all sides. De Vins could not act without ships Hotham would not supply, and neither seemed interested. After the general’s sudden conversion to an offensive, he relapsed into his usual torpor. Drake was ‘decidedly of opinion that this project has been brought forward for no other purpose but that of amusing us for a few weeks’. Nelson got no further with Hotham. In October he suggested that the Dromedary and Dolphin store ships be used for his amphibious operations, but when the admiral submitted the idea to his senior officers it was dismissed as ‘a wild scheme’. So little value did Hotham attach to the riviera squadron that on 10 October he temporarily withdre
w it completely. Instead of working with the allies, Nelson would reconnoitre the French fleet in Toulon. In the meantime Hotham’s main fleet remained immobile in Leghorn, ‘in readiness’.37
Nelson took a few prizes off Toulon – three in one day towards the end of October – but they offered little to sugar the pill. One of the prizes was laden with powder and gun carriages, but Nelson felt so sorry for the master–owner of another that he returned it after removing the cargo. ‘It was his all, and he was a poor man,’ Nelson wrote. There were also plenty of French fishing vessels to be had, but ‘of course’ Nelson left them alone. He was pleased to return to Vado, even though he knew he had become the token representative in an increasingly futile naval campaign.38
6
Winter approached; bitter northerly winds came, with fierce ground frosts, but still the armies watched each other. Nelson concluded they wanted ‘to see who can stand the cold longest’, but Trevor’s opinion was the surer when he told Nelson that the French, rather than the Austrians, would force a battle, and that when they did ‘no very vigorous resistance’ would be made. That was how it happened. Partly due to pressure from Bonaparte, while the Austrians slept the Army of Italy prepared for an assault.39
Gradually, De Vins was exhausting British patience. In October, Drake toured the entire Austrian front line and concluded that there was ‘nothing more to hope from General De Vins’. He was, Nelson believed, ‘afraid of an attack by sea and land’, and after some French gunboats cheekily slunk into Vado Bay during Nelson’s absence and fired on the Austrian positions, the baron became obsessed about his left flank. He kept insisting that a British ship be permanently stationed at Pietra, a few miles from Vado, where the Austrian line met the sea. Unfortunately the ground there was a quicksand, in which no anchor could hold, and the winds were treacherous. Two of Nelson’s ships were almost lost trying to satisfy De Vins, one the Moselle, which was driven to within a cable’s length of the shore by a heavy southwestern swell on 2 November and deprived of an anchor. Five more days found Nelson explaining the dangers to his ships to generals who knew nothing of seamanship. He would keep ships at Vado Bay, but agreed a system of gun signals by which they might be summoned to Pietra in emergencies, trusting that ‘the general will remember the fable of the boy and the wolf, and not call us too often’.40
In grumbling about his allies, Nelson was more than conscious that the navy had not done all he had wished. Through no fault of its own, Nelson’s squadron had failed to halt the enemy’s sea-borne supplies. For a while he had enjoyed some success, stationing two or three ships outside Genoa and others off Alassio to shut down the contraband shipping between the two, and driving many French privateers off the riviera. In August and September the Inconstant, Tartar and Moselle bottled four French warships in Genoa for a month and more, costing their government considerable sums for provisions and wages. 41
But this was a record that could not be maintained. Hotham’s economies began to bite just as the autumn gales and their dark, wild, rain-filled nights created conditions in which grain convoys could scuttle swiftly along the coast unseen. True, a pair of galliots and eight or so feluccas arrived from Naples, but they barely stirred from the Savona mole and in the little action they saw were ‘totally useless’ to Nelson. During the summer, autumn and winter of 1795 Nelson’s squadron rounded up or destroyed about thirty-five vessels of all descriptions, but some were released by the courts and scores more got through to the enemy. In late September a fierce northeasterly and driving rain blew the guard ships from Genoa, and a convoy of Greek victuallers escaped to Alassio with enough food to last the French army till Christmas. This disaster alone killed Austrian ambitions to starve the enemy into retreat, but it was followed by another – on the evening of 29 September – when a second convoy bolted for Villefranche. The Southampton and Moselle had been active off the coast, and taken two wheat ships a few days before, but they fell in with the convoy in the midst of a pitch-black tempest and were unable to stop it. Two of the merchantmen were turned back to Genoa, but the others, and the escorting French frigate Vestale, which suffered considerable damage and twenty casualties, got away. The Southampton limped back to Genoa with her mizzen mast gone, her main and fore rigging cut up, and her topsail halyards and other equipment damaged. Soon she had to sail to Corsica for repairs.42
The ease with which ships clinging to the coastal shallows could slip by the British cruisers further out was personally brought home to Nelson in the small hours of 3 November, when the distant beam of the Villefranche lighthouse indicated that the Agamemnon was between San Remo and Nice. Lieutenant Spicer roused Nelson from his hammock at three in the morning, and told him that the watch had seen a substantial vessel standing offshore ahead. When Nelson reached the quarterdeck it was still unidentifiable but clearly visible in the moonlight. Suddenly the vessel wore and made sail, trying to cross the bows of the British ship in an obvious effort to get to safer waters inshore. Nelson had a bow gun fired, but when the ship sailed silently on he called for a volley of musketry and a salvo from his main deck guns. After much of the stranger’s ‘furniture’ had been shot away she surrendered, and was boarded by a party under Spicer. The prize was Genoese, but her master had no pass and admitted he was shipping supplies to the French.
It soon became clear that the vessel was only one of many, and at daylight Nelson saw the rest of the convoy running along the land under Genoese and Greek colours. Sailing inshore at night without lights they had almost reached their destinations before being discovered, and now scuttled for the safety of Alassio, Languelia and other supposedly neutral ports. Nelson was unable to impede them, and almost lost the one prize he had taken. At noon the wind dropped, and a French war galley was rowed out of Alassio to try to recapture the prize as it lay becalmed some way astern of the Agamemnon. Nelson’s boats hurried reinforcements to his prize crew, and their fire forced the galley to retire, but towards evening a second attempt to retake the prize, by two Alassio gunboats, also had to be beaten off. Nelson eventually took his prize in tow and got underway for Vado, but it was no matter for celebration. Yet another convoy had successfully run the blockade and something like one hundred supply ships were sheltering snugly beneath the batteries in Alassio.43
The trouble was that Nelson needed at least a dozen frigates, sloops and brigs, and perhaps as many cutters, to stop the coastal trade, and they were simply not available. There was an opportunity to strike the supply ships en masse in Alassio Bay, and again Nelson appealed to Hotham. With three ships of the line and eight to ten frigates he could attack Alassio, as he had done before, and capture the victuallers wholesale. But instead of a green light, Nelson received the news that Hotham had struck his flag on 1 November and gone home, handing the fleet over to Vice Admiral Sir Hyde Parker as a caretaker commander-in-chief.
Few in the fleet were sorry to see Hotham go, but there was less agreement about his replacement. Nelson did not rate Parker, and would have preferred Admiral Goodall. Goodall liked Nelson, and had recommended him for the riviera command in the first place. He had expected to succeed Hotham on an acting basis, and refused to serve under Parker. Writing a generous farewell to Nelson, and no doubt to others in his confidence, Goodall quit the fleet. Nelson realised that he would have got far more from Goodall than Parker, but he renewed his request for reinforcements and received a half-hearted response. On 8 November the new acting commander-in-chief sent the Dido and Meleager to the riviera with two cutters, but they arrived too late.44
The climax of the campaign had come and gone before they appeared.
7
Nelson had only four ships to meet that crisis – his own Agamemnon, the Flora frigate under Captain Robert Middleton, and the Moselle sloop and Speedy brig. Though based at Vado they also attempted to cruise off Cape di Noli near Pietra to instil confidence in the allied army but none was there when the French finally made a powerful onslaught on the Austrian front at Loano. The weather was appal
ling, and a snowstorm postponed the French attack for a week. When it came on 23 November the Flora, Moselle and Speedy had been blown away by dangerous gales, the first two back towards Leghorn and the last towards Corsica, while the Agamemnon herself had been drawn to Genoa by a sudden emergency in that quarter.
Nelson had responded to a summons sent by Drake on 12 November. He was needed ‘to overawe the crew of La Brune, which is become extremely riotous’, and to deal with a threat to De Vins’s rear. The Agamemnon found Genoa gripped by growing Jacobin sentiment. Drake’s house was having to be protected by a state guard, and when he and Nelson dined with the Sardinian minister on the 16th a carriage pointedly returned the captain to his boat at the lanthorn battery before dark. The Austrian chargé d’affaires and their local military commanders, as well as the Sardinian minister, were alarmed by the activities of the French frigate La Brune at the Genoa mole. It appeared that on 10 November La Brune and a number of privateers had embarked three hundred men and carried them nine miles west to Voltri, where an Austrian command post situated twenty miles behind De Vins’s lines was seized with its corn supply and £10,000 worth of Genoese livres belonging to the Austrian commissary. The French were quickly expelled by an allied counterattack from Savona, and lost their commander among others captured, but remained unchastened. Indeed, back in Genoa they plundered a Sardinian salt magazine within the town limits and raised seven hundred adventurers for another foray. Rumour had it that they intended joining a party from the French army at Bocchetta and attacking the road between Genoa and De Vins’s army at Vado, inciting Jacobin elements within the peasantry to turn out in their support.45
