Nelson: The Essential Hero (28 page)

Nelson was now to be in command not of a squadron but of a fleet. His orders were explicit. He was to proceed ‘in quest of the Armament preparing by the enemy at Toulon and Genoa. . . . On falling in with the said Armament, or any part thereof, you are to use your utmost endeavours to take, sink, bum, or destroy it.’ St Vincent informed him that, in a private letter received from Lord Spencer, he had been told that Nelson was ‘perfectly justifiable in pursuing the French Squadron to any port in the Mediterranean, Adriatic, Morea, Archipelago, or even into the Black Sea’. He added his own note of encouragement that ‘thoroughly sensible of your Zeal, Enterprise, and Capacity at the head of a Squadron of ships so well appointed, manned, and commanded, I have the utmost confidence in the success of your operations’.

After sending off Hardy in the
Mutine
to look into Talamone Bay on the west coast of Tuscany south of Elba — one of the few anchorages where a large fleet could assemble - Nelson set off round the northernmost point of Corsica, Cap Corse. He wrote to Sir William Hamilton with whom he had kept up a friendly correspondence over the years asking him, in view of the good relations between Britain and the Court of Naples, for his help in ensuring water and supplies while his ships were in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Sir William could do little, for King Ferdinand was naturally enough eager to preserve an apparent neutrality, much though his Queen, Sir John Acton and the British Minister Plenipotentiary might long for the defeat of the French. He, like all other Continental observers, could hardly have failed to remark what had happened at Toulon when the royalist citizens had turned to the British nor, indeed, the fate of Austria. It was clear enough that the Whale could always move seaward and abandon its friends, while the march of the Elephant was inexorably committed.
Sub rosa
, though, as later events were to show, the inclinations of Ferdinand and his advisers towards helping the British were to be implemented - though always with an outward show of unwillingness.

On 15 June, in the form of a diary letter to St Vincent, Nelson wrote that he was off the Ponza Islands some sixty miles to the northwest of Naples. The
Mutine
had rejoined with the news that Talamone Bay was empty, while a Tunisian cruiser when interrogated said that she had spoken to a Greek merchantman which reported that she had passed through the French fleet off the northwest coast of Sicily heading eastward. This was all second-hand information, though better than none, but the absence of his frigates was sorely felt. Meanwhile Nelson sent Troubridge, who ‘possesses my full confidence, and has been my honoured acquaintance of twenty-five years standing’, into Naples aboard Hardy’s
Mutine.
The rest of the ships lay off Naples outside neutral waters while Troubridge saw Sir John Acton and Sir William Hamilton. While awaiting his return Nelson received a letter from Lady Hamilton assuring him of the best wishes of herself and the Queen of Naples in his pursuit of the French. She enclosed a letter from the Queen which she enjoined him - in high romantic vein - to kiss before returning. She ended the note in an affectionate and curiously familiar tone, seeing that she had not seen Nelson for close on five years, ‘Ever yours Emma’.

Troubridge returned with one portion of his mission incomplete: he had been unable to prevail upon the Government in Naples to secure the loan of any frigates. This was hardly surprising since any such act would have severely compromised Neapolitan neutrality. Acton, however, had provided him with a credential in the King’s name which enjoined all the governors of ports in Ferdinand’s realms to give Nelson every necessary assistance.

On 9 June, while the British were still at sea bound for Naples, Napoleon in
L'Orient
had joined the advance guard of his fleet which had been anchored off Malta for three days. As a French observer among the Knights of St John commented : ‘Malta had never seen such an enormous fleet in its waters. For miles around the sea was covered with ships of every size. Their masts looked like a huge forest.’ The. island surrendered with hardly even a token resistance, the armistice being signed on 11 June. Napoleon took up residence in Valetta, the island’s magnificent fortified capital, and drafted new regulations for the islanders in accordance with the ideas of revolutionary France, while the churches and the palaces were systematically plundered of their age-old treasures of silver, gold and precious stones. The conqueror, who commanded both the army and the fleet, could look round him with satisfaction. Over three centuries before the Grande Turke, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, had hoped ‘as universal lord, from that not unpleasant rock, to look down upon his shipping at anchor in its excellent harbour’. The Knights of St John in those days had been the foremost warriors of Christendom, and the Turkish invasion had been defeated after a siege of several months. The ambition of Suleiman was achieved by Napoleon in a matter of days.

The
quartering wind sat fairly in their sails - steady out of the northwest. They had left Naples on 18 June, and were headed southerly over the Tyrrhenian Sea for the Strait of Messina. Nelson still had no clear idea as to Napoleon’s objective, and could do little more than surmise, as Sir William Hamilton had already done, that the French were bound for Malta. And Malta was the stepping-stone to Sicily.

By night off their bows to starboard ‘the lighthouse of the Mediterranean’, the volcanic island of Stromboli, signalled to them that they were nearing the Lipari Islands. ‘. . . From the deck of a vessel, a glow of red light is seen to make its appearance from time to time above the summit of the mountain; it may be observed to increase gradually in intensity, and then as gradually to die away. After a short interval the same appearances are repeated, and this goes on until the increasing light of dawn causes the phenomenon to be no longer visible.’

To port of them by day they could see the pale shores of Calabria sliding past, the inland mountains shining in the blue distance. An inhospitable shore, no ports, no anchorages even, only a few scattered villages where the fishermen hauled their boats up the beach for safety during the winter or, in the calms of high summer, let them idle at their mooring-stones. The thirteen 74s, the 50-gun
Leander,
and Hardy’s brig
Mutine
swept smoothly over that historic sea, trimming their sails slightly as they altered course when the Liparis were abeam.

Nelson was in a fever of impatience. As he wrote to Sir William: ‘Were I commanding a fleet attending an army which is to invade Sicily, I should say to the general, “If you can take Malta, it secures the safety of your fleet, transports, stores &c., and insures your safe retreat should that be necessary; for if even a superior fleet of the enemy should arrive before one week passes, they will be blown

leeward, and you may pass with safety ... I repeat it,
Malta is the direct road to Sicily”
’

The letter like others reveals Nelson’s accurate appreciation of strategy. He could see, as so indeed could Bonaparte, that the island of Malta, ‘the navel of the Sea’, commanded the east-west trade routes as well as those north and south between Europe and North Africa. Nelson well knew, though he had not yet seen, the capabilities of the magnificent harbour of Valetta, from which the Knights of St John had operated so successfully for centuries. Nelson’s words also justify his claim to be ‘an old Mediterranean man’. He was well aware that in the central area of the sea the prevailing winds are northwesterly throughout the summer. The southerly wind, the unpleasantly humid sirocco, which dominates the months of spring, yields as the cooler air surges down from the north, to take the place of the hot air rising off the desert land of North Africa. A square-rigged ship, caught to the east of Malta, would have some difficulty in beating back again and, since about fifty degrees off the wind was as close as she could lay, would be ‘blown to leeward’. Had Nelson in fact come across the French fleet while it was in Malta he might have had some difficulty in conducting a conclusive action. The protecting fleet and the great convoy of merchantmen were, as we know, either watering in Grand Harbour or anchored close offshore, near the city of Valetta. The British would have had to attack from the lee side and the French would have had that all-important advantage of the weather gauge.

They were now approaching the Messina Strait and, on 20 June, the finest squadron of 74s the Mediterranean had ever seen altered course to make its run down the coast of Sicily. On their port hand, where the toe of Italy jutted out into the two-mile-wide strait, gleamed the small fishing village of Scylla, its name commemorating the Homeric monster which had snatched six sailors from the open boat of Odysseus. The rocky shore held no terror for the dark oaken sides of the pursuing ships. To starboard> however, the whirlpool of Charybdis still presented a minor hazard. In 1783, fifteen years before Nelson’s ships passed this way, the famous whirlpool had become greatly diminished owing to changes in the seabed following upon a great earthquake at Messina. Yet, even as late as 1824, one of Nelson’s successors, Admiral Smyth, could write : ‘To the undecked boats of the Rhegians, Locrians, Zancleans, and Greeks, it must have been formidable; for even in the present day small craft are sometimes endangered, and I have seen several men-of-war, and even a seventy-four-gun ship, whirled round on its surface. . . .’ But now, with their fair following wind, the British vessels passed easily through the strait.

Sicily appeared peaceful. No vessels came out to meet them with news of any French invasion. The island slept under the June sun, the peak of Etna smoking lazily south of Taormina above the long fertile plain of Catania. It was from this area, as well as from other citrus-producing parts of Sicily like the Conca d’Oro behind King Ferdinand’s other capital, Palermo, that the British Navy bought the lemons which provided the necessary anti-scorbutic in their diet to keep the scurvy at bay.

They passed the fishing village of Riposto, mellow beneath the seaward flanks of the great volcano, the vast empty harbour of Augusta (whose possibilities as a naval base were not appreciated until the days of Mussolini) and were down off the ancient city of Syracuse. This had once been the queen of the Mediterranean, the richest city-port in the ancient world, when Sicily had beckoned the colonising Greeks as the wealth of the New World now beckoned modem Europeans. It shimmered dusty under the sun, part of Ferdinand’s bedraggled kingdom. The officers turned their telescopes on the old castle that guarded its entrance. Nothing. Only the eyes of a few sun-dazzled sentries watched their passage. Here, where the Athenian empire had finally collapsed in the fatal Syracusan expedition, no little interest was felt about this new battle for the control of the Mediterranean. It was comforting for the watchers to see that these ships flew the British ensign. It was no secret that relations between the Court of Naples and that of St James’s were good - even if it was necessary to obscure the fact for fear of the French. Had it been the tricolour that flickered above the ships, it would have been a very different matter. The passage of this imposing British squadron indicated that something was definitely stirring in the central Mediterranean. Nothing had been seen of their flag since their fleet had withdrawn from the inland sea two years before. Weeks would pass before the Syracusans knew for certain what all this unexpected activity foreshadowed.

The long hump of Murro di Porco faded astern as the ships drove on to the south. Two days after leaving the Messina Strait they had their first news. Off Cape Passero, the low south-eastern point of Sicily, where only an old thirteenth-century fort watched over the end of Ferdinand’s dominions, Hardy’s
Mutine
which was scouting ahead sighted a foreign sail - an Italian brig. At last, after so much uncertainty, they had the news they had been waiting for; the French armada had anchored off Malta and their troops had captured the island. The brig, under a Genoese master, had left Malta the previous day - it was only seventy miles from Valetta to Passero. His report was that the French had left Malta six days before and were bound for some unknown destination.

At almost the exact time of speaking to the brig the sails of two French frigates were sighted on the far horizon. This certainly confirmed the veracity of the Genoese master, for where there were frigates there, almost inevitably, somewhere hull down and out of sight was the fleet. Once again Nelson cursed the absence of his own frigates. If he only had them now they could have been sent in chase. It was unthinkable to divert any of the ships-of-the-line to try to intercept. The enemy frigates would have two knots or more over them in the fresh wind that was blowing, and in any case would certainly only lead the British on some wild goose chase away from the prey.

Valuable, then, though the news was, there remained the lack of certainty as to the French objective. Also, although no one could know it at the time, a salient item of information was either misheard or mistranslated. The French had not left six days before, but only three. It is possible that the brig’s captain said that they had
begun
to leave six days before, a quite different matter. Since the advance guard had originally appeared off Malta three days ahead of the slower main body composed of the merchant ship convoy and its escorts, they would have left in much the same manner. Napoleon, having left 4,000 men behind to garrison Valetta, did not himself leave aboard
L'Orient
until 19 June. He had a head start of the British of no more than three days - little enough when his fighting ships were tied to the slower rate of advance of the convoy.