Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (27 page)

With his almost fretful care for all contingencies Nelson left five of his much needed frigates to guard the Two Scillies. Then he bent once more to the task of getting up the Mediterranean. " Extremely variable baffling winds and squally weather," wrote Jane Austen's brother in the
Canopus,
"tacking or wearing every two or three hours, the squadron very much dispersed."
²
In two successive days

¹
Nicolas, VI,
411-12;
Mahan, II.
159-60;
Nelson,
II,
287-8;
Corbe
tt,
96-8.

²
Austen,
134.

it made only fifteen miles. For nearly a month the monotonous struggle continued, while the Admiral's heart, older and more worn than in '98, all but broke. The guerdon he had sought had escaped him, his decisions—based on lifelong professional experience—had proved wrong, the country he loved was in danger which he could do nothing to avert. " O French fleet, French fleet, if I can but once get up with you, I'll make you pay dearly for all you made me suffer!" Yet, though he poured out his heart in his letters to Emma, he relaxed no effort.
"I
am not made to despair," he told Lord Melville; "what man can do shall be done."

Not till May 4th did he reach Tetuan Bay. Here all hands were set to work getting in provisions and water. On' the 5th the wind came fair and the fleet stood over to Gibraltar where it stayed only four hours. While he was waiting for the wind, Nelson weighed every item of intelligence that could indicate the whereabouts and destination of Villeneuve. He still intended to close on the Channel, yet his information was beginning to point to the French having gone to the West Indies. The most significant item was that - given by Rear-Admiral Campbell who, while serving with a ' Portuguese squadron off the Moroccan coast, had seen the Combined Fleet sailing west on April nth.
¹
The evidence was not conclusive, and Nelson could not run to the West Indies on mere surmise. Yet if he did not, and the enemy had gone there, Jamaica might easily be lost.

Before a final decision could be made the Secret Expedition had to be rescued. On his way to Gibraltar Nelson had received the orders sent in March to cover its passage to Malta. He now learnt, to his intense relief, that it was sheltering at Lisbon. After leaving Spithead on April 18th' Craig's transports had proceeded down Channel, sighting the north-west coast of Spain on April 27th. "Calm air, bright sun and a cheerful prospect of land," Lieutenant Boothby recorded in his diary; "Oh, how I long to be roving over those Spanish mountains and to be relieved from this constant see-saw!"
²
A few hours later he learnt that the Toulon fleet was out and that Orde had abandoned the blockade of Cadiz. Pitt's little army was threatened with destruction before it had struck a blow. Its loss, Boothby reflected, would be a sad damper to England.

With an unblockaded Cadiz between the convoy and Gibraltar, there was only one hope: the mouth of the Tagus. Here, on the advice of the British Ambassador at Lisbon, the transports took

1
The information cost poor Campbell his career, the French Ambassador at Lisbon insisting
on his dismissal. He di
ed as a result in poverty.—Corbe
tt,
105.

2
Boothby,
11.
A wish amply fulfilled later for himself and many of his comrades.

refuge on May 7th. General
Junot, who had just arrived on a special diplomatic mission from Napoleon, was beside himself with rage, threatening the Portuguese with war unless the transports were at once driven out to sea; at the British Embassy, where it was still believed that Villeneuve was in Cadiz, the Combined Fleet was expected hourly. Craig, however, resolved to seize the estuary forts and defend himself against all comers. From this desperate expedient—young Boothby thought it would be excellent fun—the British General and Admiral were saved next day by the arrival of the
Orpheus
frigate with the news that Villeneuve was not in Cadiz after all and that Nelson had passed Gibraltar on his way to Cape St. Vincent. With leaping hearts they at once weighed to meet him.

In the next twenty-four hours Nelson, victualling in Lagos Bay against a long voyage, reached his momentous decision. On the evening of May 9th one of Orde's frigates had reported having spoken two days before with a vessel which had left Spithead on April 27th. At that date nothing had been heard in England of Villeneuve: a homecoming convoy had also been encountered sailing across the Bay serene and unmolested. It seemed, therefore, certain that the immediate destination of the fleet which had left Cadiz on April 9th could not have been the Channel. Nelson now felt sure that it was Martinique. Next morning he wrote to Ball that his lot was cast and that he was going to the West Indies. " Although I am late, yet chance may have given them a bad passage and me a good one. I must hope for the best."
¹

Two days later the Malta convoy glided uneventfully past Cadiz and across the waters of Trafalgar Bay. During the night Boothby, taking the first watch, saw the coasts of
t
Spain and Barbary, "the moon with her immeasurable column on the waters silvering the prominent points in the dark grandeur of those newly seen and far-famed shores while the keel-ploughed deep seemed kindling with diamonds and with fire—a sight never, never to be forgotten."
²
When dawn came the Mediterranean Fleet had vanished over the horizon. Only the two battleships of the escort remained to shepherd the crowded transports eastwards into the Gut of Gibraltar.

By the 14th Nelson was at Madeira, dipping south to pick up the long,, steady trade winds to waft him to his goal. He had left one of his two three-deckers to accompany the convoy past Cartagena and twenty of his twenty-three cruisers with Rear-Admiral Bickerton to patrol the Mediterranean. Now with ten of the line and three

¹
Corbe
tt,
104-5,
^II2
;
Naval Miscellany,
III,
181-2;
Nicolas VI,
431.

²
"Nor do I know the price that could have bought this watch from me."— Boothby,
15.

frigates he was in pursuit of a fleet nearly twice as big. He knew that he was taking his professional life in his hands and that gentlemen abed in England were probably already blackguarding him for his prolonged disappearance.
¹
But he had weighed the chances carefully in the light of his professional knowledge. If he was wrong and the French had gone elsewhere, he promised the Admiralty that he would be back by the end of June—before the enemy even knew he had crossed the Atlantic. In the meantime salt beef with the French fleet, he told his friend Davison, was preferable to roast beef and champagne without.

Nelson's letter of May 14th, 1805, from Madeira set the country free from uncertainty. It reached London on June 4th. A few hours before the great Admiral's credit had been almost as low as the Government's. "I fear that your gallant and worthy chief will have much injustice done him," Lord Radstock had written to his son in the
Victory,
" for the cry is stirring up fast against him, and the loss of Jamaica would at once sink all his past services into oblivion." The general belief, shared on the other side of the Channel by a jubilant Napoleon, had been that Nelson had again gone to Egypt; Lady Bessborough opined that he supposed the French grew there. Now in a moment all this cavilling was turned into praise; England's favourite Admiral had flown to the West Indies without orders and in doing so had done the one thing every one wanted. The Combined Fleet was not at Cadiz, the invasion was off, the Secret Expedition was safe and the West Indies likely soon to be so.
²

The Government, though greatly relieved to hear of the convoy's safety, could not share the public's complacency. A week before the good news Pitt had had a most painful interview with Vorontzoff. In vain had he pointed out that peace and a British withdrawal from Malta were incompatible; that the Levant, Egypt and the Two Sicilies would be in the power of France the moment the British Fleet lost its central Mediterranean base. The Russian Ambassador, though personally sympathetic, was adamant: his instructions did not permit him to be otherwise. The interview closed with Pitt stating that, as he could not agree to Russia's new conditions, Britain would continue the war alone, and that it would be maritime. Next day Vorontzoff reported that the last hope of an alliance had gone.
³

¹
"If I fail," he told his secretary, "if they are not gone to the West Indies I shall be blamed; to be burnt in effigy or Westminster Abbey is my alternative."—Mahan,
Nelson
II,
294.

2
Colchester, II,
5-6;
Corbett,
109, 154;
Tw
o Duchesses,
224;
C.
B.
II,
100;
Holland Rose,
Pitt and Napoleon,
139;
Granville, II.

'Pitt and the Great War,
527;
Czartoryski, II,
74-6;
C. H. F. P.,
I,
338.

But on learning that his transports had reached the Mediterranean, Pitt made a last attempt. On June 7th his Foreign Secretary, Lord Mulgrave, in a conciliatory dispatch to St. Petersburg, defined the nature and justification of British sea power. Britain, he explained, was ready to surrender all her colonial conquests for the sake of an enduring peace; in the last resort she would even relinquish Malta to Russia in return for Minorca as an alternative base. But as her power and influence were essentially defensive, in wishing to retain Malta she was consulting the interests of Europe as much-as her own. Having a strong fleet and no Continental ambitions, she was the natural successor to the Knights of St. John as guardian of the common rights of Christendom in the Mediterranean. Held by a land power like Russia, Malta could not stem the ambitions of France. Britain's maritime rights, essential to maintain her fleet and keep down France's, also served a universal purpose. They could not be relinquished without removing the principal bulwark of European liberty.
¹

Yet once again Napoleon's acts did more than Pitt's arguments to revive a European coalition. Intoxicated by Austria's seeming surrender and the rift in Anglo-Russian relations, he pursued his plans for unifying Europe with his usual impatience and a complete disregard for all opinion but his own. On May 26th, 1805,
he crowned himself King of Italy in Milan Cathedral, simultaneously joining that country to his dominions and reviving the Empire of Charlemagne. European society, he wrote, must be regenerated and a superior Power must compel the lesser to live in peace. As for England, she must be expelled for ever from the Continent.

Napoleon's haste showed that he was uneasy. He knew that a Secret Expedition had put into Lisbon at the beginning of May: that something was on foot against him that he could not wholly fathom. He affected to make light of this minute British force. "My opinion is," he wrote, "that it has nothing in reason to do except take the Cape or to carry assistance to Jamaica.
...
If it is destined for Malta, nothing can prove more strongly the ineptitude of the English Cabinet; these plans of Continental operations based on detachments of a few thousand men are the plans of pigmies." Nevertheless he ordered English newspapers to be procured at all costs, particularly any that mentioned movements of ships and troops.

As at every stage of his career, the invisible restraint of sea power was goading Napoleon into precipitate action. On June 4th, in flagrant violation of his treaty with Austria, he annexed the

¹
Third Coalition,
155-8;
Corbett,
32-4;
Pitt and the Great War,
527-8.

Ligurian Republic. His reason for doing so, he explained, was to obtain ships and seamen for the defeat of England. When the news reached St. Petersburg it drove Malta utterly out of the Czar's mind. "This man," he shouted, "is insatiable and his ambition knows no bounds; he is a scourge of the world; he wants war and he shall have it." Even the Court of Vienna lost patience, tacitly abandoned appeasement and began to prepare for war.

Yet- Napoleon paid no heed. Certain that England's hour was at hand, he felt that he could deal with European repercussions after she had been crushed. By the end of June Villeneuve, having reduced her sugar islands and captured her convoys, would be on his way to release the Ferrol and Brest squadrons and force the gates of the Channel. The defenders, having dispersed their ships to save their colonies, would be speedily overwhelmed.
"A
nation that has no fortifications and no army," wrote the exultant Emperor, "is very foolish to lay itself open to an invasion by 100,000 veterans. That is the genius of the Flotilla. It is costly, but we have only to master the Straits for six hours for England to cease to exist."

For Napoleon already supposed that his naval dispositions had thrown the British into indescribable confusion. Nothing, he declared, was so short-sighted as a parliamentary Government, absorbed in Party politics and turning its attention wherever there was a noise. He felt convinced that Cochrane, deceived by false reports, had followed Missiessy to India: that the hot-headed, feather-pated Nelson had flown to Egypt. When Decres suggested that Nelson might have done the right thing after all, tactfully hinting that his very stupidity might have made him the instrument of some intelligent subordinate, he was upbraided for not having a mind fit for great operations.