Nelson: The Essential Hero (31 page)

Hardy found the old port to the west of the city empty except for one old Turkish man-of-war and four frigates. The eastern harbour, known as ‘the Franks’ Port’, contained a number of merchantmen of various nationalities. That was all: no French armada, no advance guard even. Nelson had been wrong. Wherever Napoleon had been bound, it was clearly not for Alexandria. Hardy landed and made his way to the British Consul’s house. Once again fate was on the side of the French. Mr Baldwin was away, had been away according to his deputy for several weeks, and it was not known exactly when he might return. The Vice-Consul was not English, had no real powers, and could not or would not attempt to secure the necessary permission for the British squadron to enter harbour. Egypt was neutral in the war or, as a vassal state of the Sultan, was pro-French. (The ostensible object of the French, as set out by Napoleon on his arrival, was the suppression of the Mamelukes and the restoration of the Sultan’s authority.) There was nothing left for Hardy to do but make his way back through the squalid streets, the tumble of ‘mud houses, window-less except for a few holes in the walls’, conscious of a great feeling of despair.

On 28 June, the British squadron was within sight of Alexandria. Nelson, still cursing his lack of frigates, was overwhelmed by the sight of the barren harbour. He could hardly believe that his own supposition, reinforced by those of his senior captains, had been proved wrong. The French must have gone east, and where else could they have gone to but here ? It was at this point that the false or misunderstood report of the Genoese captain off Cape Passero proved so damaging. If the French had indeed been six days ahead of their pursuers they must by now either have been overhauled and engaged at sea, or be in Alexandria. The fact that they had only a three-day start, and that they had made a detour to the north, could not be known or hardly have been foreseen.

If the British Consul had been available things would have proved very different, as Nelson made clear in answer to a letter which he received from Mr Baldwin three years later. What effect would it have had, asked Baldwin, if he had been in the city when Nelson’s ships arrived? 'I should have been off Alexandria’, was the reply, ‘when the French fleet arrived, and most assuredly the Army could not have landed in the complete order it did, had an action taken place on the first of July which ... it would have done had the Turks received me as a friend instead of an enemy, for the answer I received was that neither English nor French should enter the port of Alexandria. And I believe that if you had been there to explain between me and the Turkish Government that I should have remained a few days to get some water and refreshments.’
L'Orient
, with Napoleon aboard, could well have suffered the same fate as she was to do a few weeks later. There would have been no Battle of the Pyramids. Mr Baldwin’s absence from Alexandria — so small a thing at the time - had a profound effect on European history.

Nelson’s ‘active and anxious mind’, according to Berry, ‘would not permit him to rest a moment in the same place’. It was hardly surprising that the Admiral was ‘anxious’. He was tuned to such a pitch that any inactivity seemed intolerable. The fleet was ordered to sail on to the east. It was just possible that the French had made for that old home of their crusading ancestors,
L'Outremer
as it had been called -the Holy Land and Syria. The threat to India might come from further away than he or anyone else had supposed. A great word of approbation in the Navy was ‘zealous’, and it was this quality above all which Nelson had consistently shown. It was this which now, by driving him to a further, immediate course of action, lost him the opportunity of bringing the French to battle at sea. The motto of Augustus Caesar,
Festina Lente -
‘Hasten Slowly’ - was not Nelson’s. Taking the wind on their port beam, the ships turned east along the coast and were soon passing the spacious Bay of Aboukir. It was named after an obscure Coptic Saint, Father Cyrus, and was void of shipping.

Three days later, on 1 July, while the British drew the empty coverts of the Levant, Napoleon landed in Alexandria.

Nelson
had written to George Baldwin, the Consul, on 26 June, that he had ‘reason to believe, from not seeing a Vessel, that they have heard of my coming up the Mediterranean, and are got safe into Corfu’. This was an alternative to Alexandria which he had already discussed with his captains, and it must have seemed to him now, as the fleet fruitlessly searched the East, that this was what had happened. Nevertheless, he could not presume upon it, for his earlier judgement as to their objective seemed to have been quite wrong. His confidence was shaken, but not his resolve to cover every possible square mile of the wind-freckled sea. Stretching out the fleet, using his 74s in the way he would have used those missing frigates, he headed north for the coast of Turkey, which they sighted on 4 July. Nothing. West-about, then, to comb the sea south of Crete, where they would find that at the best the wind was on their beam, and at the worst that it was heading them.

In the meantime, landing almost unopposed at Alexandria, Napoleon seemed to have his youthful dream of the East and of the great conquest well within his grasp. His tame poet, Parseval-Grandmaison (a more imposing name than his poems merited) stood at hand to record the conquests of this new Alexander. Napoleon felt the utmost confidence. His star was in the ascendant; it seemed that no judgement of his could be wrong. As he later told his friend, the politician and economist, Roederer: ‘It was by making myself a Catholic that I ended the war in the Vendee; by making myself a Moslem that I established myself in Egypt. ... If I were ruling a people of Jews, I should rebuild the Temple of Solomon.’

At the same time - and he could not disguise it - there was something arid and disillusioning about the taste of the East. ‘I am particularly disgusted with Rousseau since seeing the Orient,’ he said, ‘the uncivilised man is a dog.’ So much for all the French dreams of the ‘noble savage’! Napoleon was still young, and was learning the hard way. Personally distressing was the fact that it was while he was in Egypt that he heard that Josephine was betraying him. He, who had written his name upon history, who had at the same time written ardent love letters to her during his campaign in Italy, celebrating conquest after conquest, was a cuckold. Did he recall, one wonders, his early definition of love as ‘une sottise faite a deux’? But, as he wrote to his brother Joseph : ‘Grandeur wearies me. Sentiment has dried up, glory is dulled. At twenty-nine I have drained all the cup.’ The much older Nelson, sailing wearily back across the Mediterranean after his elusive enemy, could never have echoed those sentiments at any time in his life.

If Napoleon and Nelson had their problems, so did the French Admiral. Brueys had successfully achieved his main objective. He had brought the Army of the East safely down through the Tyrrhenian Sea and past Sicily, had landed the forces necessary to capture Malta (and had seen this most useful stepping-stone secured behind him), and had now disembarked Napoleon and his men at the required harbour. Some naval historians, intent only on the career of Nelson, have tended to ignore the skill of his naval opponent. But, if Brueys had been incompetent, could he have done what he did? Gould he by a ruse (generally attributed to Napoleon, but possibly inspired by his Admiral) have thrown Nelson so efficiently off the scent during the long run down from Malta to Egypt? There is no such thing as a great boxer unless he has proved himself against great opponents. The same thing might equally be said of admirals and generals. There would be comparatively little to Nelson’s credit if he had just defeated an inefficient admiral with an inefficient fleet. Neither Brueys nor the other officers and men under his command merit such a description.

After seeing the transports into Alexandria and disembarkation begun, Brueys had three options open to him. The first was to enter Alexandria itself. This he rejected; it is generally said on the grounds that there was insufficient water for the deeper draught of his men-of-war. But a surveying officer reported that, with a small amount of blasting, adequate entrance could be made for the fleet. Almost undoubtedly Brueys dismissed the idea for the reason that, if he were caught inside Alexandria harbour by a blockading fleet, his ships would be inextricably trapped. His second option was to retire to Corfu. But the island was a long distance away, his stores might not hold out, and - far more important - he would then leave the merchantmen and transports unprotected if the British fleet, which he now knew was in the Mediterranean, should arrive upon the scene.

The shore defences of Alexandria, he calculated, would not hold out against a determined seaborne assault. He had already seen at Valetta, in Malta, how even the strongest of bastions and walls would yield to a determined force.

Brueys’ third option, for which he has often been criticised, was to sail eastward down the coast and anchor in the Bay of Aboukir. Letters which he wrote to Napoleon at the time show him to have been indecisive, but at the same time they seem to confirm his final judgement. Until the French Army had established its supremacy in Egypt* Napoleon needed his fleet near to hand. He himself raised no objection to Brueys’ decision. It was not until after his triumph over the Mamelukes and his victorious entry into Cairo that Napoleon felt sufficiently secure to send a message to Brueys ordering him to withdraw to Corfu. The courier was killed en route (not only many Egyptians but also the desert Arabs detested this invasion of their land by ‘the Franks’ - a name they would always associate with the bloody wars of the Crusades), and the message never arrived. Brueys remained at anchor in Aboukir Bay.

The coastline of Crete disclosed nothing to the British as they beat to windward, finding that the northwesterly wind which had so happily driven them down to Egypt was no longer a friend. It was hot in July, the pitch tacky in the deck-seams, the sun and the salt wind hard on the canvas, and both officers and men seeking, below-decks, for the best place where a draught drew in, or a slant of air, caught by the sails aloft, spiralled down into their quarters. It says a great deal for Nelson, it says a great deal for his captains, and indeed for all the ships’ companies that they were not dispirited and that morale remained high. Much credit for this must go to the victualling arrangements. But, perhaps above all, it was their good fortune to be at sea, in the environment that they had made their own, which preserved their spirits and their health. As Nelson was to write later to Sir William Hamilton, after they had returned to Sicily : ‘At this moment we have not one sick man in the Fleet.’

The same could not be said for the French anchored in Aboukir Bay. They were, in any case, short by some seventeen hundred men of their proper complement of about ten thousand, and they had already found that the desert shores of Egypt provided little in the way of provisions. All this was quite apart from an actively hostile population. The principal reason for the French shortage of complement was that, on their outward voyage, the ships had been crowded with soldiers, many of whom could have helped fight the guns in action. But these were now removed to further Napoleon's military ambitions and, as E. H. Jenkins remarks in
A History of the French Navy
, ‘the seamen were often of poor quality, ill-disciplined, and in a naval sense largely untrained’. That they were later to fight so gallantly is all to their credit, and was due to a passion fired by their revolutionary zeal. At the same time, it was their misfortune that, especially when it came to gunners, the demands of the Army were set by Republican France well above those of her Navy.

The British, meanwhile, held on with all sail to the westward, endeavouring to keep between latitudes 36° and 37° North, thus covering the approaches to the Grecian archipelago, and cutting an observant swathe through the centre of the sea, as they crossed the Ionian headed for the Malta-Sicily channel. Vessels spoken to convinced them that the French had certainly not gone to Corfu, nor - as had at times been anticipated - headed north for Constantinople. They had vanished into the clear midsummer air as if by magic. There was nothing for it but to cross the empty spaces of the Ionian once again and see whether Sicily was still safe. Water and stores were already beginning to be needed urgently, and only the ancient harbour of Syracuse could provide them.

On 20 July the dazzling dried coast of Sicily confronted them, the same walls and fortress that they had passed nearly four weeks ago. Ship after ship entered a still harbour, where only a coaster or two and a scatter of fishing boats idled on the water. The great urgency was to water ship and revictual. There were obvious difficulties. The weak Kingdom of Naples did not dare to offend the French although, as has been seen, the King, and especially his Queen and his Prime Minister Sir John Acton, were pro-British and passionately anti-French. But, on the surface at least, the Governor of Syracuse could do nothing but make an official complaint about the usage of his harbour by a belligerent power. Nelson, whose nerves were strung to breaking point, remonstrated angrily in letters to Sir William Hamilton, and his Commander-in-Chief, at the treatment of the British fleet. But all this was little more than a charade, and in fact all their wants were supplied during the three days that the ships lay there at anchor.

Superficially it was a scene of confusion, to the landsman's eye at least; yet it was in fact a perfect exercise in supplying ship in an unfamiliar foreign anchorage. The long-boats plied backwards and forwards between the vessels and the shoreline of the island of Ortygia, on which stood the ancient city. The Fountain of Arethusa provided them with water, just as it had done the Greeks who had first settled there over two thousand years before. From dawn to dusk barricoes were rising and falling alongside the ships, for each vessel required about 250 tons of water, and every bit of it had to be brought aboard by manual labour. Live pigs, the carcases of bullocks, fowls in hampers, and great baskets of fresh • fruit and vegetables soared upwards suspended on tackles. ‘As no fleet has had more fag than this’, Nelson wrote to Sir William, ‘nothing but the best food and the greatest attention can keep them healthy.’