Nelson (95 page)

Despite the failing wind the British bore down in a rough line of battle, steering between the French divisions, and just after seven the leading seventy-fours, the
Bedford
(Captain Davidge Gould) and the
Captain
(Captain Samuel Reeve), opened fire on the
Ça Ira
and
Censeur
with their starboard broadsides. The risks Fremantle and Nelson had taken engaging the
Ça Ira
the previous day were now demonstrated, as the guns of the two cornered Frenchmen cruelly mauled the approaching ships. In very little time the
Bedford
and
Captain
were disabled and knocked out of the battle. But behind them came the rest of the British fleet, led by three seventy-fours, the
Illustrious
(Captain Thomas Lenox Frederick),
Courageux
(Captain Augustus Montgomery) and
Princess Royal
(Captain J. C. Purvis and Vice Admiral Goodall). The weaker
Agamemnon
followed, and Nelson was close enough to mark again the French habit of firing aloft. The battered
Captain
lay ‘like a log on the water, all her sails and rigging shot away’.
⁶²

With the leading ships out of the fight, the
Illustrious
,
Courageux
,
Princess Royal
and
Agamemnon
headed the British line, but while
their starboard guns bore upon the
Ça Ira
and
Censeur
their attention was also drawn to larboard. The French main body had picked up a wind, turned to rescue their comrades, and begun advancing towards the British on the opposite tack with the powerful
Duquesne
at their head. It was then that a ‘false manoeuvre’ on the part of the French cost them dearly. Admiral Martin, who had transferred to
La Minerve
, one of his frigates, had signalled the attack even though his line was reduced to eleven capital ships, but the captain of the
Duquesne
misunderstood his superior’s intention. Instead of steering north and to leeward of Hotham’s fleet, interposing the French line between their besieged stragglers and the enemy, the
Duquesne
led Martin’s ships to windward, firing from their larboard batteries at the masts of the British van from about eight o’clock. Hotham’s front ships were therefore able to engage the enemy on both sides, simultaneously firing at close range upon the
Ça Ira
and
Censeur
to starboard and over a greater distance to larboard as the main French line came within range. Powder smoke soon wreathed a thunderous cannonade heard miles away in Genoa, with some belligerents firing almost blindly through the stinking, man-made fog. The
Courageux
was firing on the
Ça Ira
for fifteen minutes after she had struck, and had to be told to stop by Goodall on the
Princess Royal
.
⁶³

The battle was particularly fierce to leeward of the British line, where the trapped French ships fought with astonishing determination. The sails, rigging and yards of the
Illustrious
were riddled with shot, she lost her fore topmast, and her mainmast fell, carrying the mizzen mast with it and crashing hard upon the poop deck, fracturing its stout wooden beams. Though ninety of his men were killed and wounded and the debris had dismantled many guns, Captain Frederick kept firing until the end of the fight. Behind her the
Courageux
was similarly served. Her main and mizzen masts were toppled, her fore topmast severely damaged and she suffered forty-eight casualties; eventually she had to be taken in tow by Fremantle’s
Inconstant
. It was fortunate for the British van that the French line to larboard posed no serious challenge. It sheered off to windward, exchanging only a few broadsides with the
Illustrious
and
Courageux
, and more distantly with the
Princess Royal
,
Agamemnon
and other ships, before high-tailing it from the conflict and abandoning its embattled colleagues to their fates. Two more French ships, the
Victoire
and the
Timoleon
, had been damaged in the brief cannonade, and Martin judged his force too weak to challenge Hotham again.

Nelson joined the attack on the
Ça Ira
and
Censeur
, and both surrendered a little after eleven o’clock after more than three hours of punishment. The
Ça Ira
lay like a stricken whale, strewn with ropes and wreckage, her masts down and guns silenced, while the mainmast of the brave
Censeur
had also been felled. The
Illustrious
and
Courageux
had done the greatest damage, but their boats had been shot to pieces and Goodall hailed Nelson to ask him to take possession of the prizes and raise the English colours. It was not unfitting. Lieutenant Andrews, who led a party over water littered with the remains of the conflict, was ‘as gallant an officer as ever stepped’, while the
Agamemnon
, by its action the previous day, had been the key instrument of the victory.

Aboard the French ships Andrews found horrific devastation. Guns and wreckage were tossed about the decks and hundreds of men killed and wounded. Of some two thousand men on the French vessels, perhaps as many as eight hundred were killed and wounded – the four hundred or four hundred and fifty casualties of the
Ça Ira
having been sustained over the two days of battle. Other ‘officers’ later described the aspect to the naval historian, Edward Pelham Brenton:

The holds were filled with dead or dying men, who, as they fell at their quarters, were tumbled headlong down without any regard to their condition, and four days after the action dead bodies were [being] dragged out from the cable tiers and the wings. It was found, on enquiry, that not only were the people made drunk, but the ferocious republican officers stood behind them, and with drawn swords or pistols compelled them to fight.
⁶⁴

The
Agamemnon
herself emerged from the second day of fighting ‘very much cut up’, but she had no difficulty towing the
Censeur
away in triumph. Another seven men had been wounded, one of them the master, but overall the ship had not suffered extensive casualties, and several British ships, including the
Captain
,
Bedford
,
Illustrious
,
Courageux
and perhaps the
Princess Royal
, paid a higher ‘butcher’s bill’.
⁶⁵

Nelson paid tribute to the resistance of the
Ça Ira
and
Censeur
, but thought the rest of the French fleet, which continued its flight westwards, behaved ‘most shamefully’. Considering they had orders to invade Corsica, the French had performed lamentably.
⁶⁶

The British celebrated a victory, and both Houses of Parliament voted their thanks, but actually Hotham had achieved relatively little.

The battle did not even directly save Corsica, since the French had aborted their mission at the very sight of the British fleet, without exchanging a single shot. The most that can strategically be said for the action off Genoa is that it prompted the French National Convention to abandon temporarily their invasion project. True, the British had taken two capital ships, but they gave Hotham no lasting advantage. Before fighting Hotham the French fleet had captured the British
Berwick
, and four days after the battle of 14 March Frederick’s dismasted
Illustrious
was driven ashore and lost. In short both sides had lost two ships, and it is impossible to disagree with Elliot when he pessimistically remarked ‘The French can hardly be said to have lost by their cruise.’
⁶⁷

Yet from Nelson’s point of view the battle off Genoa was significant, perhaps more so than has generally been admitted. It was the first fleet action in which he played a crucial part, and in some respects his first naval victory, more impressive than the indecisive action with the French frigates nearly eighteen months earlier. He also profited from the experience. In fact, it arguably effected his purpose and ideas profoundly.

To begin it is necessary to consider the famous account of the battle he sent to Fanny later that March, when Hotham’s fleet was once again languishing in port:

we are idle and lay in port when we ought to be at sea [he complained]. In short I wish to be an admiral and in command of the English [British] fleet. I should very soon either do much or be ruined. My disposition can’t bear tame and slow measures. Sure I am [that] had I commanded our fleet on the 14th that either the
whole
French fleet would have graced my triumph, or I should have been in a confounded scrape. I went on board Hotham so soon as our firing grew slack in the van, and the
Ça Ira
and
Censeur
struck, to propose to him [Hotham] leaving our two crippled ships, the two prizes, and four frigates to themselves, and to pursue the enemy. But he is much cooler than myself and said, ‘We must be contented. We have done very well.’ But had we taken ten sail [of the] line and allowed the eleventh to have escaped if possible to have been got at, I could never call it well done. Goodall backed me. I got him to write to the admiral, but it would not do. We should have had such a day as I believe the annals of England never produced, but it can’t be helped.
⁶⁸

Although this much-published passage has been accepted at face value, it was less than a candid account of what happened. As we have seen, Nelson was prone to exaggerating his achievements, even to misrepresent them. His picture of the fiery zealot storming to Hotham in the closing stage of the battle and demanding a hot pursuit, laced with its implication of flag-rank incompetence, does not really fit the circumstances in which the fleet found itself at midday on 14 March. Hotham himself alluded to the ‘want of wind’ as the reason for the escape of so many French ships, and Captain Tyler of the
Diadem
agreed. ‘Nothing but its falling calm saved at least 7 or 8 being captured,’ he wrote to his wife. The captain’s log of the
Diadem
, among others, made several references to the wind in its account of the action. It was so slight that the British ships kept drifting out of their stations, and Tyler had to drop a jolly boat and hawser to help keep the
Diadem
’s head forward and her broadside towards the enemy. About noon, as the battle ended, light airs and calm were noted. Nelson chose to forget the wind in the letter to Fanny, but had been thoroughly aware of its importance. A few days before he had told his uncle that ‘had the breeze continued so as to have allowed us to close with the enemy . . . we should have destroyed their whole fleet’. And Sir William Hamilton heard the same: ‘Had the breeze only continued we should have given a decisive and destructive blow to the French fleet.’
⁶⁹

Nelson’s attempt to persuade Hotham to pursue the French, therefore, probably did not happen on 14 March, after the battle; it would have been thoroughly inapplicable.

It was probably on the 15th that Nelson confronted Hotham, angry at the admiral’s decision to fall back to port instead of returning to the chase, for it was on that day that he wrote to Goodall asking for a fresh supply of shot. ‘The enemy are fled and we are not running after them,’ he complained. He trusted that Hotham would ‘get rid’ of the prizes and ‘lame ducks’ at once and press on westwards, if for no other reason than to protect an expected British convoy.
⁷⁰

Laying aside the strict accuracy of Nelson’s letter, its significance still beams brightly from its pages. This was as clear a statement of his concept of total victory as he ever made, and one remarkably similar to that penned by Hood after Rodney’s battle of 1782. On both occasions the criticism was that a defeated fleet had been allowed to escape. Nor was Nelson unaware that Hood would have shared his opinion. ‘I wish from my heart Lord Hood was arrived,’ he told Fanny. ‘We make but a bad hand of managing our fleet.’
⁷¹

This meeting with French gentry, as Nelson put it, confirmed his view that the republican navy was grossly deficient in fighting qualities. The
Ça Ira
and
Censeur
had fought bravely, but the French fleet as a whole had been defeatist, running rather than fighting, and using all its ‘endeavours . . . to avoid an action’. Its discipline, by all that could be learned from prisoners, had been deplorable, something bewailed by the French admiral, who reported that ‘for the most part’ officers were ‘neither seconded by experience nor by sufficient capacity’. In seamanship and gunnery the enemy fleet had been transparently incompetent. The French ships had struggled to form line, collided with each other and separated. Their biggest ship, the
Sans-Culotte
, had disappeared in the night of the 13th and missed the next day’s battle completely. Their gunfire was far from accurate, and at times seemed to have been discharged ‘at random’, but when it was on target it was directed at masts and sails. It was a defensive fire, designed to cripple mobility and facilitate escape, rather than the destructive hull-smashing fire that destroyed ships and won battles. Ship for ship and gun for gun such forces were no match for their British counterparts, whose seamanship had been shaped by years at sea, and whose gunnery, both in the rates and focus of their fire, had reached levels of fearful efficiency.
⁷²

That being the case new opportunities were unfolding, and Nelson saw them plainly. It was time to bring decision to naval combat, to reach for the complete victory using more aggressive tactics. The old line-ahead formation, which had fleets of comparable power firing distant broadsides at each other, was powerful defensively. However, once respect for an enemy’s ability declined, once men with Nelson’s confidence in battle superiority rose to the fore, its rigidity could be abandoned for more adventurous close-quarter tactics capable of delivering more impressive results.

The battle off Genoa may have been a scrappy Mediterranean victory, but it played its part in the making of Britain’s most famous admiral. Watching the rival fleets joust for two days vividly exposed the gulf between the two, and alerted Nelson to the prize that awaited an admiral willing to exploit it. And more than ever, he wanted to be that admiral. ‘I almost wish myself at the head of this fleet,’ Nelson confided to Hamilton. ‘Don’t accuse me of presumption. It is only from an anxious desire to serve our country.’
⁷³