Nelson (74 page)

Impatient for action, Nelson may not have known that he had learned the decisive lesson of the outward voyage. Instinctively he understood that though the Spaniards and British were presently allies they were not naturally so, and might one day meet in battle. For that eventuality he was astutely priming himself, measuring the strengths and weaknesses of the Spanish fleet and finding it wanting. It was information he would supplement in the years ahead and tap for his first great battle.

If the Spanish failed to impress Nelson, the French navy held no greater terrors for him. Even word that the French were installing forges in their ships so that they could fire red-hot shot did not diminish his ardour to fight them. He merely observed that ‘we must take care to get so close that the shot may go through both sides, when it will not matter whether they are hot or cold.’ Hood appreciated Nelson’s
offensive spirit. His fleet advanced upon Toulon and Marseilles in three divisions, one headed by his own
Victory
(Captain John Knight) and the others by the
Colossus
and
Agamemnon
. The admiral declared the French coast to be under close blockade. Nelson, sanguine about the efficiency of economic warfare, hoped that starvation might drive ‘these red hot gentlemen’ out to offer battle. He was a terrier straining on a leash, desperate to distinguish himself and reluctant to tolerate anything protracted or sluggish.
²³

Late on 15 July, after days crossing seas empty of French sail, the men of the
Agamemnon
heard distant firing to leeward. It came from the direction in which the
Leda
and the
Illustrious
had pursued strange sails, and everyone expected prizes in which the fleet would share. However, the next day their comrades brought in only a French corvette. They admitted that three enemy frigates had been engaged the night before but had escaped. How was it possible, Nelson grumbled? The weather had been fair, the night moonlit and clear and the British the more practised seamen. If he ever made a fortune, he complained to Fanny, it would not be through gentlemen like the captains of the
Leda
and
Illustrious
. Somewhere, in the frustration of such moments, Nelson realised that one of the most important tasks of the admiral was to instil spirit and enterprise into his captains, and to encourage them to achieve with or without immediate supervision.

Indeed, Nelson was already showing what could be done in the way of leadership on his own ship. His people were learning what was expected of them, and more or less working as a single body. William Hoste, who Nelson increasingly recognised as an unusually appreciative, bright boy, felt that moulding. His bubbling letters suggest a happy ship. ‘I like the sea very much indeed’, his father learned. ‘Captain Nelson is very well and is uncommon kind to me. I have the pleasure to inform you that Mr Weatherhead is made mate. I like him very much. We have a schoolmaster [Withers] on board. He is a very clever man.’ Nelson, said the boy, was ‘acknowledged to be one of the first captains in the service, and is universally beloved by his men and officers’. Most men liked Nelson because he liked them; even youngsters who could do little for him understood his interest in them. ‘In his navigation, you will find him equally forward,’ Nelson wrote to the Reverend Dixon Hoste of his son. ‘He highly deserves every thing I can do to make him happy . . . I love him; therefore shall say no more on that subject.’ When Hood offered Nelson the command of a seventy-four – the type of ship he had always wanted, the type
that played the major part in fleet actions – he surprised the admiral by turning it down. ‘I cannot give up my officers,’ he told Fanny.
²⁴

Conquering calms and inconstant winds, the British battleships finally closed the road into Toulon on 19 July. Hood sent in a flag of truce, ostensibly to negotiate an exchange of prisoners but in reality to spy. Sixteen French ships of the line were discovered in the outer road ready for service, and another five fitting in the harbour. Nelson supposed that once the French had put all of their ships into commission and tilted the odds in their favour, professional pride if not starvation would prompt them to test the British blockade. But though Hood’s ships braved fierce gales for several days, suffering and scattering, no such movement occurred.

Both Toulon and nearby Marseilles were, in fact, gripped by civil strife. In some parts of France the forces of counterrevolution were on the move, prompted by the extremism of the National Convention in Paris. Supporters of the crown and Church had risen in rebellion in Vendée in the west, while in Marseilles and Toulon coalitions of royalists and moderate republicans overthrew their Jacobin opponents. The Toulon fleet was divided and paralysed. Its admiral, Jean-Honoré, Comte Trogoff de Kerlessy, struggled to keep it free of the local factions, but waited in vain for instructions from his government.

The situation revealed itself to the British gradually. After probing towards Nice in August, Hood detailed the
Agamemnon
,
Robust
,
Romulus
and
Colossus
to maintain the watch in the Toulon area while he took the fleet to Genoa, a neutral port from which the enemy were securing supplies. No doubt Nelson enjoyed the greater freedom it gave him. Privately he complained that Hood had ‘done nothing but look into Toulon’, and relished the liberty to enforce the blockade in his own way.

However, he was increasingly conscious of the difficulties created by neutral shipping. The Mediterranean was full of small, neutral states trying to continue their business with the war raging around them. The British allowed their ships to pass in and out of Toulon and Marseilles as long as they did not transport French freight or ‘contraband’ items deemed of value to the French war effort. In practice, distinguishing between what was and was not legitimate commerce was largely beyond officers on the spot. On 16 August, Nelson seized the
Madonna di Bisson
, a snow sailing from Marseilles to Smyrna under Ragusan colours. Among her cargoes were clothes, sugar and linen that Nelson believed to be French property, but though he sent
the ship to the prize court in Leghorn he doubted that she would be condemned.

The afternoon of 18 August saw Nelson in action again, pursuing two armed ships east of Toulon into the harbour of Cavalière. A French shore battery opened fire to defend them, but the ships themselves raised neutral Genoese colours. Nelson’s suspicions remained, however, and after exchanging some shots with the French he withdrew out of range to watch what happened next. In the morning he decided to use bluff. Intercepting a Genoese brig, he sent it into the harbour with a message for the masters of the fugitive vessels. If they were truly Genoese they should come out, or face being attacked and burned at anchor. The French certainly thought the British capable of landing in force, and while some locals fled up the hillside six hundred militia marched into the settlement to resist any assault. In the event Nelson’s message alone did the trick. The two armed ships, with five or six others using the harbour, came out for examination. Nelson was sure they were ‘loaded’ with French property, but their neutral papers seemed in order and he let them go.
²⁵

Apart from pursuing ships back and forth, Captain Nelson gathered intelligence, and everything he discovered increased his animosity to the revolution. Though the people were starving, the squabbles of the political factions in Marseilles and Toulon sowed terror and murder. At the moment the more conservative republicans and monarchists had the upper hand, but the blade of the guillotine rose and fell all the same, dispatching radical opponents with a cruel and vengeful finality. The jails heaved with radical activists. Nelson was told that the people were tired of the dogma-ridden Jacobins, and that Provence might even declare itself a separate republic under the protection of Britain.

On 20 August, Hood was back and Nelson had someone else to blame for a lack of progress. Nelson vacillated between his instincts and sense. Much as he admired Hood, he thought the fleet ‘inactive’ and convinced himself that Marseilles was so short of provisions and politically divided that it would prove an easy conquest if only the British had the courage to attack. ‘We have attempted nothing,’ he said, yet ‘Marseilles must fall if we attack it.’ But at the same time he knew that even if the town was captured it could not be held without larger numbers of troops than Hood could muster.
²⁶

The admiral himself pursued a surer strategy by opening negotiations with representatives of both Marseilles and Toulon. After earlier
military disasters the National Convention was striking back hard, introducing mass conscription to hurl ragged but fervent troops against reactionary invaders and internal insurrectionists alike. As food ran low in Marseilles and Toulon, and the avenging forces of the convention threatened to enclose them, the ports turned in desperation to Hood, suggesting the British take them under their protection. Hood’s luck was remarkable. Though Louis XVII was an imprisoned child, the admiral demanded the authorities declare for the monarchy, as defined in the reformed constitution of 1791, and surrender the dockyards, ships and forts at Toulon into British keeping. Nelson impatiently watched the boats hurrying to and from the
Victory
, but on 26 August he was summoned on board the flagship himself. He could scarcely have imagined better fortune. At a single stroke and with hardly a shot fired Toulon, the second greatest French naval base – indeed the whole of France’s sea power in the Mediterranean – was about to be enclosed within the British fist.

However, to garrison the forts at Toulon, Hood desperately needed soldiers. As the
Agamemnon
was one of the fastest ships in the fleet, Nelson was ordered to carry dispatches to Sardinia and Naples. The allies were told that Toulon was expected to fall. Had he ‘5,000 or 6,000 troops’ with him, the war would soon be over, Hood wrote confidently to Sir William Hamilton, Britain’s man in Naples.
²⁷

Nelson hurried away, sailing deeper into the Mediterranean than he had ever been before, but he was lumbered with the job of escorting a Sardinian frigate to Oneglia and Sardinia and on his way also seized a vessel carrying corn from Genoa to Marseilles. A prize crew was put aboard, though it would take almost a year for the vessel to be condemned in Gibraltar. On the last day of the month Nelson was still at sea when he encountered the
Tartar
under Captain Thomas Fremantle, carrying Lord Hugh Seymour Conway with dispatches for England. They gave Horatio the latest news from the fleet.

Marseilles had fallen to the national French army, and the party that had treated with Hood crushed. Royalist refugees had streamed into Toulon, strengthening the moderates there and edging them closer to the British. Hood offered Toulon protection provided he was given control of the military and naval installations. Soon the town had declared for the monarchical form of government outlined in the French constitution of 1791 and agreed to let Hood in. The day the
Tartar
left thousands of marines and seamen were being landed to secure the dockyard and forts, and the French fleet had
been commandeered. A Spanish fleet had also arrived to support the British admiral, but his need of soldiers to man fortifications had intensified. Conway said that he had written a personal letter to Hamilton urging him to ‘hasten the Neapolitans’ and gave it to Nelson to deliver.
²⁸

Britannia’s triumph exceeded anything Nelson had imagined. Never had he supposed that the French Mediterranean fleet would be so bloodlessly and effortlessly overthrown. True, the way Hood put it the French ships were being held in trust, awaiting a restoration of the monarchy, but if the Jacobin army now massing to attack Toulon forced Hood out the British still had it in their power to destroy the port and its fleet before retiring. As Captain Nelson strolled his quarterdeck he even wondered whether Toulon might become a bridgehead for an invasion of ‘that unhappy distracted country’ in support of royalist rebels and an honourable peace? At the very least news of its fall into British hands had to inspire the allied powers to greater efforts. Nelson was personally bound for Sardinia and Naples, both of them already smarting from the threats of the French navy. Sardinia, which then governed the island of Sardinia, as well as Piedmont, Lombardy and a stretch of the riviera, had lost Nice, Villefranche, Monaco and Menton to the French, but now stood to regain ground.
²⁹

On the last day of August, Nelson landed Hood’s dispatches for John Trevor, the British minister to Sardinia, at Oneglia. He and his Sardinian consort then headed east and south, around Corsica, where French republican garrisons held the natives in subjection, and towards the Tyrrhenian Sea. Off Bastia, on the northeast coast of Corsica, Nelson sent a message to anti-French partisans ashore, telling them of the fall of Toulon. Then, on 8 September, after parting with the Sardinian frigate, he captured a Ragusan brig of ten guns on its way from Smyrna to Marseilles with French cotton. Nelson had not been having much luck with prizes. ‘All we get is honour and salt beef,’ he said, reflecting on the nineteen weeks or so his people had survived without fresh meat and vegetables. This prize seemed about to change things. He detached Lieutenant Andrews to take her into the neutral port of Leghorn for adjudication, and calculated she might make £10,000 if condemned and sold. But money was destined to elude Nelson: the ship was acquitted and released.
³⁰

He was not going to be rich, but there was that mission to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies at Naples to complete. The city and its
court were among the most fabled in Europe, and there he was to deliver a packet to His Britannic Majesty’s Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary, Sir William Hamilton.

Nelson was tired and weather-worn when he saw Naples, but he was impressed from the very beginning.