Cochrane (26 page)

On the
Imperieuse
there was a bustle of activity. Cochrane noticed that "it blew hard with a high sea", and then turned his attention to more important matters. Midshipman Marryat, waiting to go aboard the second explosion vessel, was encouraged to see that "the night was very dark, and it blew a strong breeze directly in upon the Isle d'Aix and the enemy's fleet". Like his companions, Marryat was prepared with a story of being from a sunken victualling vessel, if he were captured. It might mean the difference between a French prison and a firing squad.
¹⁷

Cochrane went aboard the first explosion vessel, a converted coaster, accompanied by his brother, the Hon. Basil Cochrane, Lieutenant Bissel of the
Imperieuse,
and four seamen from his frigate who made up the volunteer crew. What Admiral Allemand saw as frigates, brigs, and coasters, was a mixture of the attack ships and the rescuers who would wait to pick up survivors. Beyond the
Imperieuse,
the dark outline of three rescue frigates rode at anchor. Farther out, the battleship
Caesar
acted as mother ship to the small boats of the fleet, which stood by to go in after the fire-ships and pick the crews out of the water.

The sloops
Redpole
and
Lyra
were anchored as far in as possible, each showing a light to mark the channel for the attackers. With the wind wailing in the rigging, and Lord Gambier waiting cautiously beyond the horizon, Cochrane cast off his explosion vessel and sailed into the attack. On the battleship
Caesar,
William Richardson and every man who could be spared waited in silent expectation on the crowded deck for the beginning of the great spectacle.

As Cochrane led the way, the second explosion vessel with Marryat aboard followed him. At the crucial moment, the two officers and three seamen who made up the crew had to scramble into a four-oared gig and, literally, row for their lives before the ship went up. It was not a comforting thought to Marryat, as the vessel passed between the lights of the two sloops, that the narrow shape of the little gig had earned it the sailors' nickname of "the coffin".

Leaving behind the two trim ship-rigged sloops with their guiding lights showing out to sea, Cochrane's explosion vessel drove hard towards the massive boom protecting the Aix anchorage. It was after eight o'clock and the darkness so intense that he could see nothing of AUemand's squadron which lay a mile or so ahead. But the tide and the wind were carrying the coaster forward, her hold packed with its mighty explosive charge. Judging the distance, Cochrane calculated that in another ten minutes or so she would be driven hard against the boom. He ordered his crew into the gig and remained alone on the explosion vessel. She was on course and moving with the breeze. He lit the fuse, scrambled down to join the others in the gig and ordered them to row for their lives away from the coaster. Straining against the flood-tide, they pulled for the open sea, but when they had drawn a hundred yards from the explosion ship it was realised they had left a dog on board, the mascot of the voyage. Cochrane turned the gig about again and headed back to the vessel whose fuse was already sputtering dangerously close to the powder in the hold. He jumped aboard, snatched the dog, leapt into the gig, and once more set his men to pulling for safety as the coaster drifted in towards the boom.
¹⁸

A mile away, on the French flag-ship
Oce
an,
one of Allemand's officers came on deck at about half past eight. From the darkness of the Aix-Boyart channel he suddenly saw an apocalyptic flash and the world shook under him. The brilliance of rockets and shells ripped the night sky in every direction. He could think only of barges loaded with "shot, shells, and fire-rockets". To the English ships out to sea, the gigantic flash was followed by the sky glowing "red with the lurid glare arising from the simultaneous ignition of
1500
barrels of gunpowder". The French guard-boats which had reached the boom were now swamped or scattered by the detonation. Captain Proteau of the French frigate
Indienne,
one of the advance guard-ships, was close enough to see the great harbour boom ripped up from its sea-bed mooring, the heavy spars torn apart and hurled across the surface of the anchorage.
¹⁹

Ten minutes later, while the burning wreckage of the first detonation drifted on the dark water, and the blue flares of the French defences rose into the sky to illuminate the scene, there was a second massive explosion, right against the remains of the boom. Captain Proteau and the frigate screen had been prepared for fire-ships, which could be boarded, or sunk, or at least fended off. But these new devices were something else, the work of a maniac who disregarded every convention of civilised warfare and apparently set as little value on his own life as on those of his enemies. The protecting boom was now shattered and the effect of the explosion vessels within th
e crowded anchorage would be ann
ihilating.

At
9
.30
p.m., while the guns from the Citadel of the
Ile
d'Aix maintained a fitful bombardment of the channel, the frigate H.M.S.
Mediator
crashed through the remains of the boom and the way to the anchorage lay open. Following her, came a flotilla of other vessels, dark and sinister at first then bursting into an outline of flame. The third explosion vessel was out of action, but the second wave of the attack, which was to be made by fire-ships, was now going in. On the
Indienne
and the
Ocdan
alike there was a horrified conviction that these were explosion vessels also. As they closed upon the anchorage, apprehension began to grow into panic.

While all this was going on, Cochrane and the occupants of a score of other "coffins" were rowing desperately against the flood-tide to get clear of the boom. When the first of the explosion vessels went up, he was still much closer to her than he had intended, partly because the fuse was so short and partly because he had gone back to rescue the dog. But it proved to be his salvation. As the roar of the explosion burst behind them, he and his oarsmen ducked down while the fragments of the blast sliced and whistled over their heads, rocketing into the sea beyond them with jets of dark water rising like fountains on every side. By an irony which he had no leisure to savour just then, Cochrane realised that if the gig had not been delayed, he and his crew would have been directly and fatally under the hail of shot and shell where it pitched into the sea.

And then, as the impact of the explosion reached the gig, "the sea was convulsed as by an earthquake". A huge wave, rising behind the gig, lifted them "like a cork", and then dropped them into a vast trough, "out of which, as it closed upon us with a rush of a whirlpool, none expected to emerge". But the boat's crew kept the little gig upright and afloat until the great swell had passed. After that, Cochrane noted, "nothing but a heavy rolling sea had to be encountered, all having again become silence and darkness". Neither the silence nor the darkness was destined to last for long. During the three-mile pull back to the
Imperieuse
the first fire-ships passed them, heading for Aix Roads. Since he could only go in with one wave of the attack, Cochrane had naturally chosen to lead the first and was unable to supervise the fire-ships personally. None the less, by the time that they reached the British frigates, he was able to look back and see that the first fire-ships were past the boom and among the French guard-ships. It was gratifying to see the disarray among the enemy and to see that, in the confusion, the French battleships were actually firing on their own frigates.
²⁰

The crew of the battleship
Caesar
had a grandstand view of the action as they waited for the ships' boats to return with the fire-ship crews they had picked up. "Shells and rockets were flying about in all directions," said Gunner Richardson, "and the blazing light all around gave us a good view of the enemy." Having turned night into day by his mortar shells and rockets, Cochrane regained the
Im
perieuse.
There he received news of the fire-ship attack which demonstrated that the Royal Navy was as capable of folly and confusion as the French. Having gone with the explosion vessels he had left the fire-ships to others. The consequence was that only four out of the twenty had reached Aix Roads. The
Imperieuse
was anchored three miles from Allemand's fleet, and the captains of some fire-ships were igniting and abandoning them a mile and a half out to sea from the
Imperieuse.
Indeed, the frigate had the last explosion vessel in tow and the ship's company were horrified to see an abandoned fire-ship bearing down on them and their charge. The explosion vessel had to be hastily cut adrift and the frigate was hauled round by her cable, so that the fire-ship drifted harmlessly by and then grounded and burnt out on the Boyart Shoal.
²¹

Gambier subsequently reproved Cochrane for having denounced some of the captains of the fire-ships. Certainly he swore to Captain George Wolfe of H.M.S.
L'Aigle
that Gambier's officers, left to their own devices, "had made such a bad business of it" that the attack was bungled. Wolfe was obliged to agree that his own frigate was "very nearly burnt by two that were badly managed". Apart from this, a man who had sailed
1500
barrels of gunpowder and detonated them
600
yards from the guns of the French fleet, according to Captain Proteau's own account, was entitled to a certain warmth of feeling over officers who prudently abandoned their attacking vessels four and half miles from the target.
²²

Most of the fire-ships drifted harmlessly aground to one side or other of the French fleet, but those which got through to the anchorage managed to compound the confusion and panic among Allemand's crews. At nine o'clock, one of the attackers looking like a splendid set-piece in a firework display, crashed into the
74
-gun battleship
Re
gulus,
the heavy grappling chains hooking and holding her to her victim. The crew of the
Regulus
hacked through the anchor cables with desperate speed and tried to drift clear of the burning hulk. As the other fire-ships cruised menacingly into the anchorage, the frigate
Hortense
cut her cables too and opened fire on them. Worst of all, there were three fireships closing on Allemand's flagship,
Oce
an.
There was no time to lift the anchor. "We were obliged to cut this cable also," wrote one of her officers, "and steer so as to avoid Le Palles, the bank of rocks on which the
Jean Bart
was lost." Like so many well defended bases, Aix Roads offered little chance of manoeuvre, being surrounded by shoals and mud flats at very little depth, except towards the seaward channel and the mouth of the Charente.
²³

At
10
p.m. the
Oce
an
herself, manoeuvring desperately to avoid the fire-ships, ran aground. It was now apparent that those fire-ships which reached their targets did so because their crews remained with them all the way, in some cases being towed by the small boats which would rescue them subsequently. It was one of these which now made straight for the helpless flagship and grappled on to her stern. There was consternation on the
Oce
an.
Some of the French seamen played the fire pumps on their own decks to keep them wet, others tried to push the fire-ship off with spars, and a few used axes in an attempt to cut the grapplings. The rest of the French fleet tacked and drifted in the confined roads with predictable results. As the
Oce
an
struggled with the fire-ship, the battleship
Tonnerre
rammed her in the bows and, when she had parted from her, the flagship was rammed by the battleship
Patriote.
However, her crew succeeded in working free of the fire-ship which glided forward along her starboard side and drifted away. The
Oce
an
survived the ordeal of the night, though losing fifty of her crew through fire, shot, and collision. "In general," wrote one of her officers, "the whole of the fleet was very lucky on this dreadful night."
²⁴

On board the
Imperieuse,
Cochrane saw the matter differently. The fire-ship attack had failed in itself to destroy the French, but the falling tide was now on England's side. He knew the anchorage better than any other man in Gambier's fleet, at first-hand. By midnight, all the men who could be rescued had been brought back to the frigates or the
Caesar.
Cochrane remained on watch. At
3.30
a.m. the next morning,
12
April, he could see that most of the French ships were broadside on to the wind and tide. It was almost too good to believe but they appeared to be grounded helplessly, and the tide was falling. The fire-ships had not destroyed them but Cochrane's explosion vessels and his general plan had worked. Confusion and panic in the confined space would drive the French captains to run their ships aground as the only escape from fire and demolition charges.
²⁵