Nelson: The Essential Hero (34 page)

Surgeon Michael Jefferson examined Nelson’s head and found ‘the cranium bared for more than an inch, the wound three inches long’. While Nelson was waiting for attention, Berry had come bustling down with the happy news that
Le Spartiate
, dismasted, had just ceased firing. This was at 8.30 p.m. and not long afterwards Galwey, the First Lieutenant, who had been sent to board her, returned with the French Commander’s sword. The surgeon meanwhile had brought the edges of the wound together, applied strips of adhesive, and given Nelson a sedative. Then there was further good news -
L'Aquilon
, their other immediate opponent, had struck her colours as had
Le Souverain Peuple.
‘. . . It appeared that Victory had already declared itself in our favour.’ Nelson, after being attended to, had withdrawn

PHASE 2

The Battle of the Nile 2

himself to the darkness of the bread-room to be clear of the steady stream of wounded. Quite apart from the throbbing pain of his wound he was badly concussed. (He was to suffer from the effects of that langridge shot for many weeks to come.) Removed from all the action, cursing his luck and trying by every means in his power to get his badly damaged ship off the shoal, Troubridge in the
Culloden
was a furiously impotent spectator. The night was lit only by the flashes of the guns, the whole area obscured by dense smoke, the air shaken by the cannonades, and he could not know what fortune or what disaster might be befalling his friends. One of them, for instance, Captain Darby of the
Bellerophon
, upon whom the whole weight of
L'Orient
's firepower had fallen like the wrath of Zeus, had managed to hold out against the giant for a whole hour. This astonishing achievement singles out Darby and his ship for special distinction - almost as much as Foley for his initial thrust inboard of the anchored fleet. By nine o’clock it was clear that the first part of the battle was over. The whole of the French van was, as Captain Miller put it, ‘completely subdued’. It was now to be the turn of the centre and especially of
L'Orient.
She was heavily engaged by Captain Ball’s
Alexander,
Captain Hallowell’s
Swiftsure,
and finally by Captain Thompson’s 50-gun
Leander.
The moon had just risen, cool and impersonal, over the fiery and sulphurous arena. Nelson, having dismissed his secretary, who had been overcome by emotion on seeing the Admiral apparently blind with a bandaged head (‘He has not activity for me,’ Nelson was later to write on assigning him to another ship), had decided it was time to compose a despatch. He pushed up the bandage - he could see after all through his ‘bright eye’ - and began : ‘My Lord, Almighty God has blessed His Majesty’s Arms in the late Battle.’

Berry came down again, this time to report that the stern of the French Admiral’s flagship appeared to be on fire. Nelson, disregarding the surgeon’s orders that he must remain quiet and inactive, insisted on being helped on deck. Mistily the scene unfolded before him. Yes, there could be no doubt that fire had started aft aboard
L'Orient
! It has been said that the French had been experimenting with shot containing combustibles, but they had also been painting ship, and paint and oil in jars lay along
L'Orient'
s after-deck. Sinister yellow tongues of fire were already beginning to dart towards her mizzen-chains. Aboard the
Swiftsure,
anchored close off the flagship’s weather side, Captain Hallowell ordered every available gun to be trained upon this bright aiming-mark. The fire was spreading fast, and soon it lit up the whole night battle-scene, disclosing
Le Conquerant
,
Le Guerrier
and another French 74 already struck. Men could now see for the first time what damage had been inflicted upon their own ships and what upon those of the enemy. Already the fire, fanned by the northerly wind, was spreading fast, threatening not only
L'Orient
but the ships engaging her. It was an impressive but terrifying sight, for in those wooden ships - each one of which was a floating magazine - fire was the most terrible of enemies.

L'Orient
had been fought with consummate gallantry throughout the night’s action. Brueys had lost both legs early in the battle, but had had tourniquets applied so that he could still conduct operations from an armchair on his quarter-deck. He was seated there, giving directions for putting out the fire, when a shot from the
Swiftsure
nearly cut him in two. When his men tried to take him below he refused saying: ‘A French Admiral must die on his quarter-deck.’ He was dead before Nelson had staggered up top to survey the scene from
Vanguard.
The latter now ordered Berry to do what he could to pick up the survivors, for it was quite clear that
L'Orient
was doomed.
There
was only one boat left aboard the flagship in seaworthy condition, but she was immediately despatched under Galwey to come to the aid of the French sailors who were already beginning to throw themselves into the water to escape from the inevitable holocaust. Other boats from the British ships were to be sent to pick up survivors. Even in the middle of a fight to the death, the seaman’s code was recognised - a man in the water is a man to be rescued.

The British men-of-war in the vicinity of
L'Orient
veered to get clear of her, only Hallowell in the
Swiftsure
holding his place. He reckoned that he was so close that the flying debris from the inevitable explosion would pass clean over his ship. John Theophilus Lee, who was serving aboard the
Swiftsure,
left a record of the events which is all the more interesting coming as it does from a midshipman of under eleven, who had already seen service at the Battle of Cape St Vincent. He wrote how
^c
. . . the ports were ordered to be lowered, the magazines and hatchways closed, and every man to go under cover, provided with wet swabs and buckets of water in order to extinguish any burning fragments which might come on board during the explosion’. Among the many wounded aboard
L'Orient
was the son of Commodore Casabianca who had lost a leg. His father, according to one account, could not be induced to leave the ship while his son was still among the wounded below and went down with him. Another version has it that both Casabianca and his ten-year-old son were in fact sighted, clinging to some wreckage, after
L'Orient
sank, but were never recovered. It was soon after ten o’clock that the fire finally reached
L'Orient
's magazines and she went up with an explosion so shattering that it was heard over ten miles away and noted by Monsieur Poussielgue in Alexandria. The sky lightened as if the door of some enormous blast-furnace had suddenly opened - and then as suddenly closed again. In the darkness that followed, timbers, masts and spars, lumps of burning debris and the pulverised bodies of men rained down on the ships around. So cataclysmic was the concussion, so deep the silence that followed after the last pieces of wreckage had thundered down, that all firing ceased throughout the two fleets as if everyone present had been stunned.

The destruction of the French flagship seems in retrospect symbolic of the fate of Napoleon’s dreams. It had also a very real and practical effect upon his plans, for
L'Orient
contained a large part of the financial resources upon which he had relied. In her hold lay quantities of bullion and precious stones extracted from the Roman State and the Swiss Republic, as well as a fortune in artistic and material terms from the loot of Malta. The remains must lie there to this day, but buried so deep beneath the silt of the shifting Nile mouth that they are almost certainly irrecoverable.

After the brief lull that followed the destruction of
L'Orient
, firing broke out once more.
Le Tonnant, Le Mercure,
and
L'Heureux
had all slipped their cables before the flagship exploded, the last two grounding in the bight of the bay, whither they were pursued and forced to strike.
Le Spartiate
had struck her colours at eleven, and
Le Franklin
at midnight. Both had scarcely a gun left that would fire, and both had been fought with the greatest courage. Admiral Blanquet-Duchayla in the dismasted
Le Franklin
had fought to the last, although wounded in the head, urging his men: ‘Fire, fire, steadily. The last shot may give us victory.’ Captain Dupetit-Thouars in
Le Tonnant
, who was almost dismembered, gave orders that he should be placed in a bran tub so that he might encourage his men to the last.

Nelson had been finally persuaded to go below; he was in no fit state to stay on deck. Had he not been seriously concussed it is possible that the follow-up of the battle would have resulted in the destruction of every single French ship. Even so, it is somewhat doubtful whether the men could have fought any longer. They had been in action for six hours and more, and were dropping at their posts. Foley's signal midshipman, Elliott, recalled that he fell asleep ‘in the act of hauling up a shroud hawser’, while Miller of the
Theseus
wrote in a letter to his wife that: ‘My people were so extremely jaded, that as soon as they had hove our sheet anchor up, they dropped under the capstan-bars and were asleep, in a moment, in every sort of posture.’

As dawn came brilliant and crystalline over the desert and the bay, the extent of the victory could be seen.
L'Orient
had disappeared, three French 74s had been captured and later burnt, and six ships-of-the-line had been captured (two of them of 80 guns). Only Rear-Admiral Villeneuve in
Le Guillaume Tell
(80 guns) and
Le Genereux,
which had been anchored at the end of the line, managed to cut their cables and escape. Villeneuve was to meet Nelson at Trafalgar. ‘The Ships of the Enemy, all but their two rear ships, are nearly dismasted,’ as Nelson wrote to St Vincent, ‘and those two, with two frigates, I am sorry to say, made their escape; nor was it, I assure you, in my power to prevent them. Captain Hood most handsomely endeavoured to do it, but I had no Ship in a condition to support
Zealous,
and I was obliged to call her in.’

Whatever anyone might say, it was the most complete victory ever recorded in naval history.

During
the strange, punch-drunk days that followed, the victors had time to collect themselves. The effort of knocking out their opponent had left them almost equally exhausted, spread-eagled on the translucent battlefield under the hot midsummer sun. The day following the battle, Nelson had signalled his captains: ‘Almighty God having blessed His Majesty’s Arms with Victory, the Admiral intends returning Public Thanksgiving for the same at two o’clock this day, and he recommends every Ship doing the same as soon as convenient.’ The French prisoners, most of whom had adopted the prevalent atheism of the Revolution, were surprised to see the ships’ companies grouped together for divine service, against a background of shattered masts and torn rigging. They were also filled with a reluctant admiration. Nelson congratulated his officers and men, desiring that ‘they will accept his most sincere and cordial thanks for their very gallant behaviour in this glorious battle’.

While they fished their spars, rigged jury masts, and attended to their own damages - as well as re-rigging such of the enemy as were capable of being sailed or towed away as prizes - the British had time to remember, in the quiet aftermath, some of the events which they, as individuals, had remarked upon in the storm of that night. Midshipman Elliott recalled how great a value to morale was the British habit of cheering as they went into action. This was something the French did not understand : ‘No other nation can cheer. It encourages us and disheartens the enemy.’ John Nicol, a cooper by trade and an ‘old man’ of forty at the time, remembered how, from his station in the powder magazine, hearing only the thud of shot, the roar of the cannonades and the howl of battle, he and the gunner were at a loss as to what was happening: ‘Any information we got was from the boys and women who carried the powder.’ This is the first mention of women being aboard during the action although, as has been said, it was not uncommon for them to be carried in men-of-war, whether they were legitimate or common-law wives. ‘I was much indebted’, he goes on, ‘to the gunner's wife who gave her husband and me a drink every now and then, which lessened our fatigue much. There were some of the women wounded and one woman belonging to Leith died of her wounds. One woman bore a son in the heat of the action; she belonged to Edinburgh.’ This was clearly one child at least who deserved the old sobriquet of ‘son of a gun’.

All of them in this curious corner of the world, far away from Europe where the main issues were to be decided, had contributed in striking a blow, the immensity of whose effect the victors could hardly visualise. In his first action in command of a fleet Nelson had all but annihilated his opponent. More than that, he had in one stroke regained command of the Mediterranean for the British : all that was now needed was for the opportunity to be seized. Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples were secured, Austria was emboldened to chance her arm once more, while Turkey and Russia were both in due course, despite their long mutual enmity, to declare against the French. India was saved, and all Bonaparte's dreams of the great conquest of the East were blown sky-high as
L'Orient.
As Monsieur Poussielgue, Controller-General of Napoleon's finances, wrote at the time, assessing the effects of the battle : The fatal engagement ruined all our hopes; it prevented us from receiving the remainder of the forces which were destined for us; it left the field free for the English to persuade the Porte to declare war against us; it rekindled that which was barely extinguished in the heart of the Austrian Emperor; it opened the Mediterranean to the Russians, and placed them on our frontiers; it occasioned the loss of Italy and the invaluable possessions in the Adriatic which we owed to the successful campaign of Bonaparte; and finally it at once rendered abortive all our projects, since it was no longer possible for us to dream of giving the English any uneasiness in India. Added to this was the effect on the people of Egypt, whom we wished to consider as friends and allies. They became our enemies, and, entirely surrounded as we were by the Turks, we found ourselves engaged in a most difficult defensive war, without a glimpse of the slightest advantage to be obtained by it.