Nelson (81 page)

The French soon marched back into Rogliano, but its capture sent a ripple of excitement through the Cape Corse peninsula. Alert to the propaganda value of his coup, Nelson wrote of it to Paoli, while on 18 February a group of Corsicans soliciting muskets and ammunition
admitted to the captain that they had only swung over ‘since the day you took Maginaggio [Rogliano]’. Of course, Nelson was not entirely green. ‘They may be good friends if it is their interest to be so,’ he told Hood, ‘but I am rather inclined to believe they will always cry, ‘Long live the conqueror!’ He knew that in wars of this kind a belief in victory was essential, and his raids were suggesting that the French could neither defend themselves nor their supporters.
¹⁴

The
Agamemnon
’s next foray took her eastwards to the island of Capraia, a possession of the neutral state of Genoa but one habitually used by French privateers and supply vessels. On 12 February ‘Mr Andrews’ (now Horatio’s first choice for dangerous excursions) explored the craggy coves and inlets with a boat and gunboat. Inside one inlet was a French dispatch boat, with many of its men, including a few soldiers, secreted ashore with levelled muskets. They opened fire as the British approached, wounding one of Andrews’s men. Hearing the shooting, Nelson put forty redcoats into a pinnace and the
Fox
cutter and personally led them inshore, aided among others by young Midshipman Hoste. The British forced their way into the cove against a splatter of musketry, replying with grape and small-arms fire of their own. Unable to outflank the French boat, which was buttressed between steep, rocky shores, Nelson made a head-on attack and captured it by boarding. The action lasted six hours and cost Nelson as many men wounded, but the prize, he discovered, could sail ‘like the wind’ and seemed likely to fetch a reasonable sum in Leghorn. On this occasion Lord Hood was less impressed. Such raids, he warned Nelson, violated neutral territory.
¹⁵

The next day Nelson intercepted a Genoese ship taking corn to Corsica, and then, after embarking supplies at Leghorn and communicating with the fleet, he arrived off L’Avisena, five miles north of Bastia, on 19 February. Paoli had reported a Ragusan ship unloading at the town, and Nelson and Fremantle were there to investigate. Again Nelson headed the shore party, supported this time by Lieutenant Andrews and Captain Clark of the 69th Regiment. Only about sixty soldiers were needed to seize the town, but the Ragusan had gone. Nelson therefore marched his men two miles south to the small town of Miomo, where they drove a weak French detachment from a tower and raised English colours over it. Once more local inhabitants crowded around excitedly, showing Nelson Paoli’s portrait as proof of their loyalty to the partisans. ‘All the people up to the walls of Bastia had declared for us,’ Nelson was told by one peasant, ‘and that
from our landing the French were prevented from coming with their gun boats and troops and burning all the revolted [rebelling] villages.’ It was a mood that needed more than example to grow, and two days later Nelson landed four hundred muskets with ammunition for the Cape Corse partisans.
¹⁶

Watching his company develop their skills and confidence made Nelson increasingly keen to broadcast its exploits, and of course to advertise his own prowess. He was beginning to understand that one way of spreading recognition was to maintain an active correspondence, apprising important parties of his work and spreading his interpretation of events. In this case the recipient was John Udny, the British consul at Leghorn. After reading of the latest successes of the
Agamemnon
, Udny wrote that Nelson was ‘the most active of His Majesty’s commanders in these seas where none are idle’.
¹⁷

But the pace of the wider campaign was quickening. The night Nelson took Miomo, he saw a fiery glow to the west, blazing red in the clear night sky over St Fiorenzo, some twelve miles away across the narrow neck of the Cape Corse peninsula. He had a good idea what it was. The French frigates
La Fortunée
and
La Minerve
had been trapped in St Fiorenzo ever since their skirmish with
Agamemnon
the previous October, and now they were most likely on fire. That meant Hood had taken the town. In fact, the port had fallen the day before Nelson captured Miomo, but rather than surrender the French survivors had fallen back across the isthmus towards Bastia. One of the captured warships,
La Fortunée
, was destroyed, the other taken into British service. As Nelson saw those distant flames over St Fiorenzo, he knew that Bastia would be next.

The expectation was evident in a letter Nelson wrote to Hood the same day, in which he assessed the defences of Bastia and suggested that a thousand soldiers would be needed to take the town, besides seamen and Corsican partisans. Soon afterwards he received official word of the fall of St Fiorenzo, and sailed for Bastia, determined to find places suitable for landing men and to frustrate the enemy’s preparations to meet the inevitable attack.
¹⁸

The twenty-third of February found the
Agamemnon
,
Romulus
and
Tartar
testing Bastia’s fortifications. They closed in on a new battery of six guns that the French were feverishly throwing up a mile south of the town, close to a command post. The ships found their range with their third shot, drove the French artillerists from their posts and damaged the battery, but without enough soldiers to land Nelson was
unable to finish the job. Instead he moved north, leading his diminutive force in line-ahead formation past the formidable frontal defences of the town. As he did so the captain ordered his main topsail to be backed to reduce the
Agamemnon
’s speed and opened fire. For an hour and a half the ships and shore batteries hammered at each other, filling the air with black smoke. Nelson claimed that his ships hit two vessels at the mole, knocked down some houses and part of the mole wall, caused an explosion about the southeastern battery, and set fascines on fire. He also heard that considerable panic had ensued and that several defenders had been killed.

At the same time Nelson’s squadron was unequal to a protracted duel with the shore batteries and all three ships were damaged before they broke off the fight. The
Tartar
’s mainsail was ripped and part of a cabin smashed in, while the
Romulus
had her mainsail set on fire by red-hot shot and took a beating about the bowsprit and quarter gallery. Indeed, Captain John Sutton had had enough. The next day Fremantle found him ranting about the damage to the
Romulus
and insisting on returning to port for repairs. Sutton’s readiness to quit disappointed Nelson, but he let him go. As he explained to Fremantle, he would rather not have an officer who wanted to be somewhere else.

Nothing Nelson saw suggested that any time should be wasted making a general assault on Bastia, especially as the garrison was daily strengthening its fortifications. The influx of the soldiers expelled from St Fiorenzo was both a boon and an embarrassment to Bastia. On the one hand it increased the numbers of the defenders to some five thousand men, most from the 26th and 52nd regiments of the French line, battalions of the Bouches du Rhône and the departmental regiment of Aveyron, and detachments of Corsican volunteers. On the other hand the refugees exacerbated supply problems. Nelson’s blockade had reduced the French in St Fiorenzo to about a month’s provisions. Their defeat had cost them lives, including a company of regulars almost wiped out, but equally artillery, ammunition and food, abandoned to the British in the precipitate flight. The retreating soldiers, packing into Bastia, created temporary confusion and ultimately decisive shortages of food and ammunition.

Nelson felt that an attack ought to be made quickly, before the French could regroup and strengthen their defences. Over the next three days he renewed his efforts to disrupt enemy preparations. He found them building a new half-moon battery near a lagoon south of
the town, hoping to prevent the British landing there, and sent its gunners scurrying from the works with a few well-directed shots. Nelson’s confidence was tip-top. ‘I wish the troops were here,’ he told Hood. ‘I am sure in its present state it [Bastia] will soon fall.’ He drew the admiral’s attention to a landing place three miles north of the town. To Udny he even recklessly admitted ‘if I had five hundred troops, by laying my ship and frigate for two hours against the works, I am certain of taking it.’
¹⁹

On the 23rd, the day Nelson fought the batteries, the first British soldiers had appeared on the summit of the hills to the rear of Bastia after a smart hike from St Fiorenzo. Lieutenant General David Dundas, their commanding officer, had even watched Nelson’s engagement, though he believed ‘many’ of the captain’s ‘shots struck the land’. On his part Nelson did not miss the soldiers on the hills, and smelling a battle thought them ‘the grandest thing I ever saw.’
²⁰

But several days passed without any sign of action. The soldiers disappeared from the hills, leaving them strangely silent. For a while Horatio reassured himself that all would be well. ‘Seamen think they [the army] never mean to get forward,’ he told Fanny, ‘but I dare say they act on a surer principle.’
²¹

Unfortunately, his confidence melted. On 3 March Nelson was astonished to learn from Hood that after reconnoitring the town with his officers General Dundas had had enough. Without substantial reinforcements he considered any attack on Bastia a ridiculous folly. Far from mounting an assault, Dundas and his advance had already turned back to St Fiorenzo.

Nelson was dumbfounded.

‘What the general could have seen to have made a retreat necessary I cannot conceive,’ he complained. ‘The enemy’s force is 1,000 regulars and 1,000 or 1,500 irregulars.’ Nelson had assumed the army would march from St Fiorenzo and assault Bastia from the heights while the navy blockaded it at sea, and he had also picked out a place on the waterfront where men and guns could be landed to form auxiliary batteries. In his head he was still pursuing his idea of storming the town himself, with the
Agamemnon
, some frigates and five hundred or a thousand soldiers. The sea wall could be battered down, its guns silenced and troops landed to rush the town. As for the forts on the
heights above, they would hold out longer of course, but their position was truly hopeless. They would be completely – overwhelmingly – isolated. The interior was held by thousands of fierce partisans. St Fiorenzo and the road to it were in the hands of the British, and the Royal Navy controlled the harbour and all approaches to the island. Deprived of every supply, the small garrisons in the hill forts could have no reason to hold out or bombard the town once it fell into British hands. Their capitulation was inevitable. From what Nelson had heard about the state of morale in Bastia, he convinced himself that there would be no great resistance from the French.
²²

Hood’s letters shed little light on the mystery as far as Nelson was concerned. The admiral merely told him that General Dundas was ‘palsied’ and had ‘made up his mind to walk off’. These terse, un-informative phrases scarcely touched the explosive situation underneath. For at Toulon and St Fiorenzo, beyond Nelson’s ken, relations between the army and navy had been steadily disintegrating.
²³

For one thing General Dundas, who commanded the British armed forces assisting the fleet, was a ditherer. A tall, thin and crabbed Scot whose mannerisms were the amusement of the rank and file, Dundas had abilities but just what they were was becoming increasingly mysterious. Most observers credited the success at St Fiorenzo to the general’s subordinates, Moore and Koehler, who had selected the site for the crucial British battery; to Captain Edward Cooke of the Royal Navy and a detachment of seamen whose ‘extraordinary exertion’ got the guns in place; and to the common redcoats who finally stormed the Convention redoubt. Even Moore, an army man if ever there was one, berated his superior’s vacillation. Dundas, he said, was terrified of hauling up the bigger guns and unable to decide how to use the lighter ones. However, it was less indecision than the general’s ingrained pessimism that constituted the greatest handicap to a man of his uncomfortable calling. As Sir Gilbert Elliot, a mere civilian, said, he was ‘always ready to throw up the game instead of playing for it’, and twice almost abandoned the enterprise. Back home his namesake, the new minister for war, grew so tired of the general’s negativity that he delivered a metaphorical boot to the seat of his breeches by bluntly complaining that ‘you only state a difficulty, and say nothing of the means of removing it’.
²⁴

The most regrettable sequel of the combined operations at St Fiorenzo was a corrosive jealousy between the army and navy. The remarkable success of Cooke’s seamen, who had hauled guns three miles over
precipices and up steep mountain heights to accomplish what the army had declared to be ‘impossible’, was one source of resentment. Another was the way the sailors had swept into the captured port and seized choice pieces of plunder. But leadership was the root of the problem. Some sea officers were dissatisfied with ‘the old rascally general’, but Lord Hood was by far the bigger fly in the ointment. For all his strengths Hood had serious professional failings, of which arrogance and a wilful disregard for the opinions of others were notable. Those shortcomings never did more damage than in Corsica, where they inflicted a compound fracture of interservice relations.
²⁵

Determined to have his way, Hood repeatedly slighted the army officers, especially Dundas, who considered himself to be on an equal footing. Difficulties had begun in Toulon, where the general and other army officers had entreated Hood to prepare to evacuate the town only to be contemptuously ignored. The result was the last-minute bungled attempt to burn the French fleet and the loss of Britain’s naval supremacy in the Mediterranean. In Corsica the admiral’s presumptions intensified. Without consulting Dundas, Hood sent Moore and Koehler, the general’s own officers, to meet the partisans in January and personally received their report, something he later claimed proved that he was recognised as the supreme officer. During the siege of St Fiorenzo the admiral behaved as if he was the overall commander-in-chief, rather than the joint leader of a combined operation, and it was he who accepted the captured French colours. Immediately after the port’s fall he was pressing the forces towards Bastia without any regard for Dundas’s opinion.