Nelson (113 page)

Some republicans had landed in Corsica in June, scrambling into the interior to hide out and foment discord, but the plan took another two months to get properly underway. Nelson and Elliot got wind of it in August, amongst others from the Caffarenas of Genoa, who saw Gentile and some of his men pass through their town on their way to Leghorn. To hear the adventurers talk of the proposed coup in Corsica ‘they think themselves already there,’ wrote Madame Caffarena. Unfortunately, there was little Nelson and the viceroy could do. Nelson reported the development to Lord Spencer and recommended extra vigilance all round. Cockburn’s forty-gun frigate
La Minerve
ran a French ship ashore and captured it on 8 September, and Elliot hired local
guardas costas
to patrol the Corsican coast, but the French were adept at slipping from one craggy cove to another and running along the shores on moonless nights.
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In fact, Bonaparte, not Nelson and Jervis, controlled this contest. Nelson’s plans were constantly unravelling and being overtaken. He had failed to halt the French on the riviera, or to reopen Tuscany and the papal territories to British ships. Then in September he was thrown further backwards, as another crucial source of succour was lost. Genoa finally broke its cosmetic neutrality and Nelson himself was made the unwitting instrument.

It had been coming for some time. With the French mastering every neighbour, and occupying the entire Genoese coast bar the city itself, the collapse of the small republic’s neutrality seemed inevitable. The Genoese ports sprinkled along the riviera had been turned into enemy strongholds, shut to British ships even in distress, and in the city only a nervous neutrality survived, with internal factions arguing for and against conciliating the invaders. Monsieur Faypoult, the French minister plenipotentiary, seemed to wield ever greater influence in Genoa, and excitable Jacobin mobs quickly gathered in the streets.

Ominous rumblings had been reaching Nelson all summer, and on 6 July Brame had forwarded a petition from worried British merchants in Genoa, recommending the deployment of a naval force. Nelson had written to Elliot for advice, and been warned to tread carefully. He had assured the traders of his readiness to help, but events tumbled too fast, one after another. At the end of August the British consulate advised the merchants to prepare to leave Genoa at a moment’s notice, while Madame Caffarena warned that an interdiction on the shipping of provisions to the British was in the offing. She suggested a ship of the line be sent. The British relied on Genoa for fresh meat, biscuit, onions and lemons – commodities essential for the wellbeing of their sailors – and the matter could not be ignored.

To make matters worse, in July the British consul, Joseph Brame, suffered a stroke, and degenerated into what proved to be terminal mental confusion; a few years would see him retire to Pisa, reduced, as Madame Caffarena said, to childhood. Fretting from Vienna, Drake worried about the sensitive documents left about the consul’s quarters, exposed to unreliable servants, and suggested Nelson store the papers on board ship. ‘What a combination of cross-grained circumstances!’ sighed Madame Caffarena. ‘The want of a minister. The consul’s want of health. The want of will. The want of power. I wish the result may be nothing worse than finding myself soon in want of brains to see the repeated insults that mushroom republic causes us!’ Nor was her lament undue, because it was just as Britain was stripped of her man on the spot that relations with Genoa reached an impasse.
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The diplomatic incident of 11 September 1796 gave Nelson more publicity than he had previously known, and ostensibly caused the breakdown of Britain’s fragile peace with Genoa. Since historians have neglected the episode, it is worth unravelling in full.

Horatio Nelson arrived in Genoa on 4 September. He had met
L’Eclair
at sea, and learned from Captain Edward Tyrrell that he had just come from Genoa, where he had been refused permission to load bullocks purchased for the fleet. The embargo Madame Caffarena had predicted was already in place, locking one hundred and seventy British oxen in the port. Nelson had been confirmed in the post of first-class commodore on 11 August, and felt his authority strengthened, but he banked on reason and a leniency he had recently shown at Leghorn, where Genoese ships had been allowed to leave without their cargoes, to count more strongly in his favour. The approach would have satisfied Drake, who advised caution and tact, but it merely opened an unrewarding, almost a humiliating, business.
⁴⁴

Nelson memorialised the Genoese senate, and gave the document to James Bird, the stricken consul’s son-in-law and temporary interpreter. On the 5th Bird delivered it to Castiglione’s own house, but no reply appeared and the next day Nelson collected Bird and personally waited upon the secretary of state. Castiglione uneasily explained that the memorial was with the government and a response was expected shortly. But another empty day passed, and on 8 September Nelson demanded to speak to the newly elected doge. The audience took place at six the same evening. Nelson had Bird read a statement explaining that the shipping of the oxen did not breach Genoese regulations, as had been claimed, and that the animals were effectively being sequestrated. The doge spread his hands. He respected the British, of course, but Genoa was a small, weak country sitting between powerful belligerents, and the interdiction did not rest with him. He was mildly curious that so young a man as Nelson enjoyed such a formidable reputation, and asked the commodore to set his complaint on yet another piece of paper and he would seek an answer. The statement went in promptly the following day, and another on the 10th in which Nelson went so far as to say that if no reply to this note was received he would send expresses to Drake and Jervis. They would withdraw British ships from Genoa and proceed on the assumption that the city had illegally confiscated British property. While impatiently awaiting a response to his ultimatum, Nelson met the British merchants in Brame’s office and promised to do what he could. Nevertheless, he warned them that the impending war with Spain might weaken naval cover and necessitate an evacuation of Genoa at any time.
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The doge did press the senate, but it would not give way,
and speciously justified the embargo by claiming local shortages of meat. The
Captain
secured some wood, sheep and water, even a little fresh beef, but no live oxen, and Nelson concluded that only reprisals against Genoese ships and cargoes might force concessions. Unfortunately, the French army spoke more loudly than His Majesty’s ships, a point immediately to be driven home.

During the night of 10 September a soldier and two sailors belonging to the
Captain
jumped ship and made off in a stolen boat. At daylight the
Captain
stood out of the mole, and at about eight-thirty Nelson lowered his barge and pinnace and sent them off under Berry and Noble to hunt the deserters. Drawing a blank about the mole at Genoa, the boats began pulling towards the adjoining haven of St Pierre d’Arena, three hundred yards from the city walls.

A tower and battery, known as ‘the lanthorn battery’, commanded St Pierre d’Arena, the colours above it pronouncing the port a possession of the republic and a neutral haven open to all ships. But as with so many other supposedly neutral ports, the French had made it their own, hauling four guns to some commanding ground and using the anchorage as a military depot. According to Nelson, that day the beach was strewn with shells, shot, guns, carriages and muskets, and the French flag was flying. A French bombard also happened to be at anchor, laden with guns and ammunition for Bonaparte’s army.

What happened next depends upon which version is believed.

Nelson said that his boats went in solely to look for their deserters, and Berry testified that the commodore specifically told him not to board the French bombard unless he was fired upon. The situation changed only after a French battery ashore opened fire. Logs of the British ships support this interpretation. One lieutenant’s log from the
Captain
recorded, for instance, that ‘the [French] battery at St Pierre d’Arena opened their fire upon our boats, who in return brought out a French bombard’. Likewise, Summers wrote that ‘before they [the British boats] reached the shore, the French battery [fired] on them. Immediately they boarded a French ketch’. Nearby, the
L’Eclair
reported that ‘at eight the batteries from the shore fired several shot at the
Captain
’s boats as they passed; at half past eight the boats took a French tartan [bombard] in tow; they continued firing from all the batteries; at nine they fired on us’. These and other accounts, like those of Nelson and Berry, offered no doubts that the French fired the first shots.
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It was a version that was contested at the time by Genoa’s secretary
of state, who claimed that statements he saw showed the British went into St Pierre d’Arena for the express purpose of capturing the French ship. The next month the republic’s official responses to British complaints, wriggling to evade the charge that they had allowed the French to establish a military presence in the harbour, tied themselves in knots. On the one hand there were few French in St Pierre d’Arena, with four unmounted and unarmed guns on the beach, they said; but on the other, a fire was admittedly directed upon the British boats. However, said the Genoese, the French cannons only opened fire ‘subsequent’ to the capture of their ship, and the gunners knew nothing of the attack until the dislodged crew of the bombard swam ashore. An independent eyewitness, apparently an English merchant, lends some credibility to this last accusation. Nelson’s boats, he said, ‘had
begun
to carry her [the bombard] off
when
they were fired upon from the French battery, and immediately after from the Genoese batteries of the Lantern and the mole’.
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The truth was probably muddier than either admitted. Nelson had certainly adopted a strong line against Genoese harbours controlled by the French. Indeed, in a ‘statement of facts’ he gave Genoa to justify his capture of the bombard he candidly stated that wherever the French raised batteries to keep the British out, neutrality effectively ceased to exist. Both he and Elliot worked on the premise that in neutral territory thus occupied it was ‘indisputably lawful to take all vessels on that coast, and under the very guns of its forts, which would be prize at sea’.
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However, in this instance the harbour was effectively part of the city of Genoa itself, and Nelson had sworn to uphold neutrality there to the utmost extremity. The issue had arisen several times in the previous months. In March, Nelson had complained to Genoa of a French privateer boarding a ship within gunshot of the town batteries, and had been assured that any vessel breaking the neutrality of the port would be fired upon. Equally, the following month Castiglione had accused a British frigate, the
Blanche
, of following a French ship out of the harbour in order to seize it at sea, and in August he charged
L’Eclair
with intimidating a French privateer at the Genoa mole. Nelson, too, had been quick to mollify, and gave his word of honour that his ships would commit no hostile acts within gunshot of Genoa.
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Given this history, and the shaky state of British relations with Genoa that September, it is highly improbable that Nelson ordered his boats to attack or even threaten the French bombard in St Pierre
d’Arena. British records also leave no doubt that a search was being made for deserters. Nevertheless, Nelson had attacked enemy positions in Genoese ports before, and knew full well that the French normally provided an excuse by nervously firing the first shots as soon as a British force approached. He must have known that there was a good chance of that happening here, and been prepared to capture the bombard.

That morning of 11 September the French shore battery fired on Berry’s boats as they rowed into the harbour, and the furious tars attacked and carried the bombard, which turned out to be a valuable military prize. But at this point events began to slip from Nelson’s control. The Genoese batteries began bombarding the British boats and ships, first the lanthorn battery and then those at the mole. Even this did not unduly disturb Commodore Nelson, who acted as he had done near Oneglia the previous May. He ordered his men not to retaliate against the Genoese and sent an irate protest ashore, hoping to silence the town’s guns.

As the skirmish snowballed, both sides tried to reinforce their combatants. Nelson sent a launch and a cutter to help Berry, and manoeuvred the
Captain
and
L’Eclair
into supporting positions. Three or four French privateers, which rowed from the mole, were quickly driven back under the Genoese batteries by
L’Eclair
’s guns and put out of the fight. Simultaneously the
Captain
also fired some three cannon shots at the French guns in St Pierre d’Arena, and her men expended two hundred musket and pistol balls in defence of the boats. On the other hand she remained under the fire of the guns at the lanthorn and mole without returning a shot. During a period of several hours some fifty shots were flung at Nelson’s ship, passing ‘over us, under us, and on all sides of us, even to throwing the water upon our decks’. But not one hit. The French later complained that the Genoese not only delayed firing (‘we fired more than thirty times before you were disposed to oppose this violation of neutrality’) but deliberately missed their targets, and they may have been right.
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As firing continued, Nelson scribbled a ‘statement of facts’ for ‘the knowledge of every person in Genoa and its neighbourhood’, and enclosed it in a letter to Brame, calling upon him to wait ‘immediately’ upon the secretary of state. He complained of the existence of the French battery at St Pierre d’Arena and of the Genoese attack upon his ship. Not only that, but sensing matters were getting out of hand he offered Genoa a way out. Lieutenant Compton, who took
the messages ashore, was authorised to state verbally that if Genoa ceased its fire, and satisfaction was offered for the insult to His Majesty’s flag, Nelson was prepared to place the French prize in their hands. The Genoese might then appease the French by restoring to them the ship Nelson had taken. It was a clear and creditable proposition, recognising the difficult position Genoa occupied between two belligerent powers. Nothing was said of what Nelson meant by satisfaction, but an apology was obviously necessary, with perhaps the lifting of the embargo on British supplies.