Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (29 page)

Once Nelson was sure that his enemy had sailed for Europe, his course was clear. Whether they were bound for the Bay or for Cadiz and the Straits, the protection of his station was his prior duty. " I

¹
Not Barbados as supposed by Mahan.

²
Corbett,
166-9;
Mahan, II,
163;
Nelson, II,
301;
Nicolas VI,
450-5, 457-9;
Naval Miscellany,
III,
1

am going towards the Mediterranean after Gravina and Villeneuve," he wrote that night, " and hope to catch them." Believing that command of that sea was essential to Napoleon's scheme of world conquest, he had every hope of an action on the southern crossing, preferably close to the Straits where he could look for reinforcements. Yet even before the
Netley
had anchored in St. John's Road, he had despatched the
Curieux
sloop under Captain Bettesworth for England. With her superior speed she would be able to raise the alarm at least a week before Villeneuve could molest the British squadrons in the Bay. Another cruiser Nelson sent direct to Calder off Ferrol. At noon next day, June 13th, after little more than a week in the West Indies, he sailed himself for Gibraltar.

The news Bettesworth brought to the A
dmiralty on the night of July 8
th contained more than Nelson's despatches. On June 19th, 900 miles north-north-east of Antigua, he had sighted the Combined Fleet standing to the northward. Its' course made it almost certain that its destination was the Bay. Roused from sleep early on the 9th, the First Lord, upbraiding his servants for not waking him sooner, dictated—Admiralty tradition has it while shaving—an order for strengthening the forces between Villeneuve and his goal. Like Nelson's, his intention was purely offensive. The enemy was at sea and must be crippled before he could reach port. It was the only way to safeguard both Britain and the Mediterranean offensive.

To this end Barham sacrificed the blockade of Rochefort. It was the only way in which he could give Calder the additional strength to attack without weakening Cornwallis off Brest. " If we are not too late," he wrote to the latter, "I think there is a chance of our intercepting the Toulon Fleet. Nelson follows them to Cadiz, and if you can immediately unite the Ferrol and Rochefort squadrons and order them to cruise from thirty to forty leagues to the westward and stretch out with your own fleet as far and continue six or eight days on that service and then return to your several posts, I think we shall have some chance of intercepting them. Official orders will follow as fast as possible. Time," he added, "is everything." There was not enough even to copy the letter into the Secret Order Book. By nine o'clock the Admiralty messengers were galloping once more down the Portsmouth and Plymouth roads.
¹

Far away other horses were dragging the jolting berlin of an impatient Emperor over the rough tracks of Savoy. Napoleon had left Turin on the morning of the 8th on the first stage of the journey

¹
Barham, III,
257-9;
Mahan, II,
168-9.

which was to take him by way of Boulogne to Kent and London. Three daj's later, as he paused at Fontainebleau after covering five hundred miles in sixty hours, Cornwallis's frigates were leaving Ushant with urgent orders for Calder and Stirling. On the night of the 12th the latter's five battleships slipped away from their post off Rochefort; by the 15th they had joined Calder, who sailed at once for his appointed station. Here on July 22nd, three hundred miles to the west of Ferrol and beyond reach of the Franco-Spanish squadron he had so lately been blockading, Calder encountered the Combined Fleet. The British had used their interior lines to good advantage.

There was a gentle swell running out of the west and a heavy mist. The British Admiral had fifteen battleships, four of them three-deckers, to Villeneuve's twenty two-deckers. As, however, the latter were suffering from the effects of a storm and were crowded with sick, the odds were if anything in Calder's favour. But the weather was so thick that the rival fleets could not engage till five in the evening, and the gunners had great difficulty in seeing their targets, aiming for the most part at the enemy's gun flashes. By nightfall two of the Spanish ships had been captured, while a British three-decker, the
Windsor Castle,
had lost her mainmast.

Next day both Admirals claimed a victory. Since the British had taken two prizes and were still barring Villeneuve's way to Ferrol, Calder's claim was the better founded. But it was not the victory Barham had planned. Despite his assurance to the Admiralty that he was about to renew the action, neither that day nor the next did Calder make any further attempt to engage. He contented himself with securing his prizes. The battle of Finisterre, as it became called from the nearest landfall, was like that of the First of June —an intercepting action in mid-Atlantic in which a British Admiral forgot his principal objective for a secondary. Howe—that fine old fighter—in his anxiety to beat the enemy's battle fleet, omitted to intercept the grain convoy on which the fate of France depended. Calder, in his fear of a junction between Villeneuve and the Ferrol squadron, failed to strike the shattering blow that would have freed his country from danger.

"A
braver officer never stepped between stem and stern than . Bobby Calder," wrote one who knew him. But Ins mind did not match his courage.
¹
He had expected to find only seventeen instead of twenty capital ships in the Combined Fleet, and, after the first

¹
Gardner,
101.
Four years before St. Vincent, who never suffered any fool gladly, however brave, had written to him: "The energy and precision with which you pursued the wrong scent . . . never will be exceeded. . . . The
Prince of Wales
cannot be spared, but there can be no objection to your having a respite."—Sherrard,
171.

encounter, the thought of almost as many in his rear was too much for him.
"I
could not hope to succeed without receiving great damage," he reported. "I had no friendly port to go to and, had the Ferrol and Rochefort squadrons come out, I must have fallen an easy prey. They might have gone to Ireland. Had I been defeated it is impossible to say what the consequences might have been."
¹

As a result the opportunity of crippling the Combined Fleet was lost. It remained at large—a menace both to England's security and to Pitt's plans for the offensive. Six days after the battle, aided by the weather, it crept into Vigo Bay. From here, leaving behind three damaged ships, it sailed again on the 31st, and on August 2nd, with Calder temporarily driven to leeward by a south-westerly gale, entered Ferrol unperceived.

Meanwhile Napoleon was hurrying on his preparations for the final blow. On July 16th, six days before the battle in the Atlantic mists, he dispatched orders to await Villeneuve at Ferrol. The Admiral was not to enter the harbour but was to resume his voyage at the earliest moment, join hands with the Brest or Rochefort squadron and press up Channel to Boulogne. If confronted by overwhelming force he might retire on Cadiz, but he was first to do everythin
g possible to win the four days’
mastery of the Straits on which such vast issues depended. On the same day Captain Allemand, who had succeeded Missiessy at Rochefort, slipped out of that port with five battleships and five cruisers to make a diversion off the west coast of Ireland and join Villeneuve at a rendezvous west of Ferrol.

To distract English attention during these crucial days from the Western Approaches, Napoleon instructed Marmont to make a demonstration at Helvoetysluys. "Every moment presses," he told Berthier, "there is no longer an instant to lose." On the 20th he ordered the Grand Army to embark. Boats were available at Boulogne for more than 150,000 troops, of whom 90,000 were already at the water side.

The English were fully aware o
f these preparations. Flotillas of
barges moving under cover of shore batteries from Dunkirk to Boulogne .were under constant observation and attack by their coastal craft. "The whole of the enemy's forces is now concentrated at Boulogne, Wimereux and Ambleteuse," Keith reported on July 20th.
²
Three days later Cornwallis was ordered to reinforce the North Sea Fleet with three of his smaller battleships. Yet there was

¹
Mahan,
n,
169
; Corbett,
195-207;
Blockade
of
Brest,
II,
312.

²
Barham, III,
393.

no weakening of the Western Approaches. On July 15th Cornwallis, in obedience to Barham's instructions, had temporarily abandoned the close blockade of Brest for a week's cruise across the Bay. But he was back on the 24th, when Napoleon was still bombarding Ganteaume with angry orders to get to sea while the coast was clear. For the latter had refused to entrust his twenty battleships to the treacherous waters of the Channel with an undefeated British fleet in his rear. He had no wish to suffer the fate of the Duke of Medina Sidonia.

Indeed, Ganteaume's only reaction on finding that Brest was no longer blockaded was to suspect a trap. He had fought against the British too long not to know that in crisis they concentrated at the mouth of the Channel. Somewhere beyond the horizon, he guessed, superior strength was assembling. Though he may have anticipated his enemy's movements by a few days, he was right. Any attempt to rush the Straits of Dover in the opening days of August would almost certainly have involved Napoleon in a terrible disaster. He would have found his Moscow seven years earlier on the Kentish beaches and in the Channel waters.

For, as always in the hour of danger, the British Admirals were closing on the heart of their defensive system. Even before Calder had failed in his attempt to destroy the Combined Fleet, the movement towards Ushant had begun. On July 17th Nelson made his landfall at Cape St. Vincent, having crossed the Atlantic in thirty-four days or a fortnight quicker than the less experienced Villeneuve. Next day he passed his old friend Collingwood blockading Cadiz and on the 19th anchored in Gibraltar Bay. "No French fleet," he wrote in his diary, "nor any information about them; how sorrowful this makes me!" Still cursing General Brereton, he went ashore for the first time in two years. He still had hopes that Villeneuve, labouring in the Atlantic behind him, might attempt to re-enter the Mediterranean. But he was coming to share Colling-wood's belief that his enemy had gone to the northward.
"I
have always had an idea," the latter wrote on the 21st, " that Ireland was their ultimate destination. They will now liberate the Ferrol squadron from Calder, make the round of the Bay and, taking the Rochefort people with them, appear off Ushant, perhaps with thirty-four sail, there to be joined by twenty more. . . . Unless it be to bring their powerful fleets and armies to some great point of service—some rash attempt at conquest—they have only been subjecting them to chance of loss, which I do not believe the Corsican would do without the hope of a
n adequate reward.

The French
Government never aim at little things while great objects are in view."
¹

While the English Admirals were so accurately gauging his intentions Napoleon continued to attribute to them an almost superhuman stupidity. Even as late as July
27th,
when he learnt that the blockading squadron had disappeared on the
15th
from its beat off Ferrol, he refused to believe that this could have any connection with Villeneuve's approach, though he had learnt from his spies of the tidings brought to London by the
Curieux's
captain. "The Admiralty," he wrote, "could not decide the movements of its squadrons in twenty-four hours." He never suspected that it had resolved them in four.

On July
23rd,
having revictualled his fleet at Tetuan, Nelson weighed for the Atlantic. Two days later, while waiting for an easterly breeze off Tarifa, he received a copy of a Lisbon paper with an account of Captain Bettesworth's intelligence. The wind at that moment freshening, he sailed in such haste that he left his washing behind. He did not even pause
to exchange a word with Colling
wood as he passed Cadiz. All the way north, delayed by headwinds on the Portuguese coast, he fretted lest the enemy should do his country some injury before he could arrive.
"I
feel every moment of this foul wind," he wrote in his diary on August
3rd,
while , Barham at the Admiralty was directing orders to him at Gibraltar to return to England,
"I
am dreadfully uneasy."

On the same day Napoleon reached Boulogne. "They little guess what is in store for them," he wrote to Decres. "If we are masters of the Straits for twelve hours England is no more." Only one thing was missing—Villeneuve's fleet.
"I
can't make out why we have no news from Ferrol," he added. "I can't believe Magon never reached him. I am telling Ganteaume by telegraph to keep out in the Bertheaume Road."