The Life of Nelson, Volume 1

It may not unnaturally cause some surprise that, with the urgent need Nelson had felt the year before for small armed vessels, to control the coastwise movements of the enemy, upon which so much then depended, no serious effort had been made to attach a flotilla of that kind to the fleet. The reply, however, to this very obvious criticism is, that the British could not supply the crews for them without crippling the efficiency of the cruising fleet; and it was justly felt then, as it was some years later at the time of the Boulogne flotilla, that the prime duty of Great Britain was to secure the sea against the heavy fleets of the enemy. If, indeed, the Italian States, whose immediate interests were at stake, had supplied seamen, as they might have done, these could quickly have been formed to the comparatively easy standard of discipline and training needed for such guerilla warfare, and, supported by the cruising fleet, might have rendered invaluable service, so long as the system of coast defence was defective. How far the rulers of those States, trained heretofore to the narrowest considerations of personal policy, could have been induced to extend this assistance, is doubtful. They did nothing, or little.

Nelson measured the odds against him accurately, and saw that the situation was well-nigh hopeless. Nevertheless, there was a chance that by vigorous and sustained action the enemy might be not only impeded, but intimidated. He sought earnestly to obtain the co-operation of the Sardinians and Neapolitans in manning a flotilla, with which to grapple the convoys as they passed in shore. By this means, and the close scouring of the coast by the vessels of his squadron, something might be effected. He contemplated also using the crews of the British vessels themselves in gunboats and light-armed feluccas; but he said frankly that, important as was the duty of intercepting communications, the efficiency of the fleet was more important still, and that to divert their crews over-much to such objects would hazard the vessels themselves, and neutralize their proper work. The resort, therefore, could only be occasional. The general political complexion of affairs in the Mediterranean depended greatly upon the presence and readiness of the British fleet, and its efficiency therefore could not be risked, to any serious extent, except for the object of destroying the enemy's naval forces, to which it was then the counterpoise.

Acting, however, on his determination to co-operate effectively, at whatever risk to his own squadron,—to the detachment, that is, which the commander-in-chief thought could safely be spared from his main force for the secondary object,—Nelson applied all his intelligence and all his resolution to the task before him. In words of admirable force and clearness, he manifests that exclusiveness of purpose, which Napoleon justly characterized as the secret of great operations and of great successes. "I have not a thought," he writes to the minister at Genoa, "on any subject separated from the immediate object of my command, nor a wish to be employed on any other service. So far the allies," he continues, with no unbecoming self-assertion, "are fortunate, if I may be allowed the expression, in having an officer of this character." He felt this singleness of mind, which is so rare a gift, to be the more important, from his very consciousness that the difficulty of his task approached the border of impossibility. "I cannot command winds and weather. A sea-officer cannot, like a land-officer, form plans; his object is to embrace the happy moment which now and then offers,—it may be this day, not for a month, and perhaps never." Nothing can be more suggestive of his greatest characteristics than this remark, which is perhaps less applicable to naval officers to-day than it was then. In it we may fairly see one of those clearly held principles which serve a man so well in moments of doubt and perplexity. At the Nile and at Trafalgar, and scarcely less at St. Vincent and Copenhagen, the seizure of opportunity, the unfaltering resolve "to embrace the happy moment," is perhaps even more notable and decisive than the sagacity which so accurately chose the proper method of action.

Nelson's deeds did not belie his words. Immediately after definite news of Beaulieu's retreat to the Po was received, Sir John Jervis appeared off Genoa with the fleet. The "Agamemnon" joined him, and remained in company until the 23d of April, when by Nelson's request she sailed on a cruise to the westward. From that time until the 4th of June she was actively employed between Nice and Genoa, engaging the batteries, and from time to time cutting out vessels from the anchorages. His attempts were more or less successful; on one occasion he captured a considerable portion of the French siege-train going forward for the siege of Mantua; but upon the whole, the futility of the attempt became apparent. "Although I will do my utmost, I do not believe it is in my power to prevent troops or stores from passing along shore. Heavy swells, light breezes, and the near approach to the shore which these vessels go are our obstacles.... You may perceive I am distressed. Do you really think we are of any use here? If not, we may serve our country much more by being in other places. The Levant and coast of Spain call aloud for ships, and they are, I fancy, employed to no purpose here." The position was almost hopelessly complicated by the Genoese coasters, which plied their trade close to the beach, between the mother city and the little towns occupied by the French, and which Nelson felt unable to touch. "There are no vessels of any consequence in any bay from Monaco to Vado," he wrote to Jervis; "but not less than a hundred Genoese are every day passing, which may or may not have stores for the French." "The French have no occasion to send provisions from France. The coasts are covered with Genoese vessels with corn, wine, hay, &c., for places on the coast; and they know I have no power to stop the trade with the towns. I saw this day not less than forty-five Genoese vessels, all laden, passing along the coast. What can I do?"

Although not definitely so stated, it is shown, by an allusion, that Nelson at this time entertained, among other ideas, the project of keeping afloat in transports a body of three thousand troops, which should hover upon the coast, and by frequent descents impose a constant insecurity upon the long line of communications from Nice to Genoa. The same plan was advocated by him against the Spanish peninsula in later years.36 Of this conception it may be said that it is sound in principle, but in practice depends largely upon the distance from the centre of the enemy's power at which its execution is attempted. Upon the Spanish coast, in 1808, in the hands of Lord Cochrane, it was undoubtedly a most effective secondary operation; but when that distinguished officer proposed to apply a like method, even though on a much greater scale, to the western coast of France, against the high-road south of Bordeaux, it can scarcely be doubted that he would have met a severe disappointment, such as attended similar actions upon the Channel in the Seven Years' War. On the Riviera, in 1795, this means might have been decisive; in 1796, in the face of Bonaparte's fortified coast, it could scarcely have been more than an annoyance. At all events, the advocacy of it testifies to the acuteness and energy with which Nelson threw himself into the operations especially intrusted to him.

His letters during this period reflect the varying phases of hope and of discouragement; but, upon the whole, the latter prevails. There is no longer the feeling of neglect by his superior, of opportunity slipping away through the inadequate force which timid counsels and apathetic indolence allowed him. He sees that the chance which was permitted to pass unimproved has now gone forever. "As the French cannot want supplies to be brought into the Gulf of Genoa, for their grand army," he writes to the admiral, "I am still of opinion that if our frigates are wanted for other services, they may very well be spared from the Gulf." And again, "As the service for which my distinguishing pendant was intended to be useful, is nearly if not quite at an end, I assure you I shall have no regret in striking it." Sir John Jervis, he asserts with pride, has cruised with the fleet in the Gulf of Genoa, close to shore, "where I will venture to say no fleet ever cruised before—no officer can be more zealous or able to render any service in our profession to England;" yet from the decks of the flagship he and Nelson had helplessly watched a convoy passing close in shore, and directly to windward, but wholly out of reach of their powers of offence. At times, indeed, somewhat can be accomplished. For several days the "Agamemnon" "has kept close to shore, and harassed the enemy's troops very much. Field pieces are drawn out on our standing in shore. You must defend me if any Genoese towns are knocked down by firing at enemy's batteries. I will not fire first." Six weeks later he writes again: "Our conduct has so completely alarmed the French that all their coasting trade is at an end; even the corvette, gunboats, &c., which were moored under the fortress of Vado, have not thought themselves in security, but are all gone into Savona Mole, and unbent their sails."

This movement, however, which he notes under the date of June 23, proceeded probably less from fear than from the growing indifference of the French concerning their communications by water, now that their occupation of the line of the Adige River had solidified their control over the ample resources of Piedmont and Lombardy. At the very hour when Nelson was thus writing, he learned also the critical condition of Leghorn through the approach of a French division, the mere sending of which showed Bonaparte's sense of his present security of tenure.

Nelson had severed by this time his long and affectionate connection with the battered "Agamemnon." On the 4th of June the old ship anchored at San Fiorenzo, having a few days before, with the assistance of the squadron, cut out from under the French batteries the vessels carrying Bonaparte's siege-train, as well as the gunboats which convoyed them. There was then in the bay the "Egmont," seventy-four, whose commander had expressed to the admiral his wish to return to England. Jervis, therefore, had ordered Nelson to the spot, to make the exchange, and the latter thought the matter settled; but to his surprise he found the captain did not wish to leave the station unless the ship went also. This did away with the vacancy he looked to fill; and, as the "Agamemnon," from her condition, must be the first of the fleet to go home, it seemed for the moment likely that he would have to go in her with a convoy then expected in the bay. "I remained in a state of uncertainty for a week," he wrote to his wife; "and had the corn ships, which were momentarily expected from Naples, arrived, I should have sailed for England." The dilemma caused him great anxiety; for the longing for home, which he had felt in the early part of the winter, had given away entirely before the pride and confidence he felt in the new admiral, and the keen delight in active service he was now enjoying. "I feel full of gratitude for your good wishes towards me," he wrote to Jervis in the first moment of disappointment, "and highly flattered by your desire to have me continue to serve under your command, which I own would afford me infinite satisfaction." The following day he is still more restless. "I am not less anxious than yesterday for having slept since my last letter. Indeed, Sir, I cannot bear the thoughts of leaving your command." He then proposed several ways out of the difficulty, which reduced themselves, in short, to a readiness to hoist his pendant in anything, if only he could remain.

No violent solution was needed, as several applicants came forward when Nelson's wish was known. On the 11th of June, 1796, he shifted his broad pendant to the "Captain," of seventy-four guns, taking with him most of his officers. Soon afterwards the "Agamemnon" sailed for England. Up to the last day of his stay on board, Nelson, although a commodore, was also her captain; it was not until two months after joining his new ship that another captain was appointed to her, leaving to himself the duties of commodore only. In later years the "Agamemnon" more than once bore a share in his career. She was present at Copenhagen and at Trafalgar, being in this final scene under the command of an officer who had served in her as his first lieutenant, and was afterwards his flag-captain at the Nile. In 1809 she was totally lost in the river La Plata, having run aground, and then settled on one of her anchors, which, upon the sudden shoaling of the water, had been let go to bring her up.37 It is said that there were then on board several seamen who had been with her during Nelson's command.

On the 13th of June the "Captain" sailed from San Fiorenzo Bay, and on the 17th joined the fleet off Cape Sicie, near Toulon, where Jervis, six weeks before, had established the first of those continuous close blockades which afterwards, off Brest, became associated with his name, and proved so potent a factor in the embarrassments that drove Napoleon to his ruin. There were then twelve British ships off the port, while inside the enemy had eleven ready for sea, and four or five more fitting. The following day Nelson again left the fleet, and on the 21st of June arrived at Genoa, where very serious news was to be received.

The triumphant and hitherto unchecked advance of Bonaparte had greatly encouraged the French party in Corsica, which had been increased by a number of malcontents, dissatisfied with their foreign rulers. Owing to the disturbed condition of the interior, the British troops had been drawn down to the sea-coast. Bonaparte, from the beginning of his successes, had kept in view the deliverance of his native island, which he expected to effect by the exertions of her own people, stimulated and supported by the arrival upon the spot of Corsican officers and soldiers from the French armies. These refugees, proceeding in parties of from ten to twenty each, in small boats, movable by sail or oars, and under cover of night, could seldom be stopped, or even detected, by the British cruisers, while making the short trip, of little more than a hundred miles, from Genoa, Nice, and Leghorn. The latter port, from its nearness, was particularly favorable to these enterprises; but, although neutral, and freely permitting the ingress and egress of vessels belonging to both belligerents, its facilities for supporting a Corsican uprising were not so great as they would be if the place were held for the French. For this reason, partly, Bonaparte had decided to seize it; and he was still more moved to do so by the fact that it was a centre of British trade, that it contributed much to the supply and repair of the British fleet, and that the presence of vessels from the latter enabled an eye to be kept upon the movements of the Corsicans, and measures to be taken for impeding them.

"The enemy possessing themselves of Leghorn," Nelson had written in the middle of March, when expecting them to do so by a coastwise expedition, "cuts off all our supplies, such as fresh meat, fuel, and various other most essential necessaries; and, of course, our fleet cannot always [in that case] be looked for on the northern coast of Italy." Bonaparte had not, indeed, at that time, contemplated any such ex-centric movement, which, as things then were, would have risked so large a part of his army out of his own control and his own support; but in the middle of June, having driven the Austrians for the moment into the Tyrol, consolidated his position upon the Adige, established the siege of Mantua, and enforced order and submission throughout the fertile valley of the Po, which lay in rear of his army and amply supplied it with the necessaries of subsistence, he felt not only able to spare the force required, but that for the security of the right flank and rear of his army it had become essential to do so. The Papacy and Naples, although they had contributed little to the active campaigning of the allies, were still nominally at war with France, and might possibly display more energy now that operations were approaching their own frontiers. Should the British take possession of Leghorn with a body of troops,—their own or Neapolitan,—the port would remain a constant menace to the operations and communications of the French, and especially at the critical moments when the Austrians advanced to the relief of Mantua, as they must be expected to do, and actually did on four several occasions during the succeeding six months.

Bonaparte, as he was ever wont, diligently improved the opportunity permitted to him by the need of the Austrians to reorganize and reinforce Beaulieu's beaten army before again taking the field. Threatened, as often again in later years, by enemies in divergent directions, he with the utmost promptitude and by the most summary measures struck down the foe on one side, before the other could stir. Occupying Verona in the first days of June, he immediately afterwards detached to the southward a corps under Augereau to enter the Papal States; and at the same time another small division, commanded by General Vaubois, started from the upper valley of the Po, ostensibly destined to proceed against Rome by passing through Tuscany. The effect of Augereau's movement, which was closely followed by the commander-in-chief in person, was to bring both Naples and the Pope speedily to terms. An armistice was signed by the former on the 5th, and by the latter on the 24th of June. Vaubois, on the other hand, after passing the Arno below Florence, instead of continuing on to Siena, as the Grand Duke had been assured that he would, turned sharp to the westward, and on the 28th of June entered Leghorn, which was thenceforth held by the French. Thus within a brief month were the British deprived of two allies, lethargic, it is true, in actual performance, but possessed of a degree of potential strength that could not but enter largely into Bonaparte's anxieties; while at the same time they lost the use of a seaport that had heretofore been considered essential to their support.

Rumors of Vaubois' movement reached Nelson in Genoa at noon of June 23, but somewhat vaguely. "Reports are all we have here," he wrote to Jervis the same day, "nothing official from the armies;" but he thought the situation critical, and started without delay for Leghorn. Arriving there on the morning of June 27, after a passage rendered tedious by light airs and calms, he found the British merchant vessels that had been in the harbor, to the number of nearly forty sail, already under way, laden with British merchants and their property, and standing out under convoy of several ships of war; while in pursuit of them—a singular indication of the neutrality possible to small States like Tuscany and Genoa at that time—were a dozen French privateers, which had been lying beside them within the mole. One or two of the departing vessels were thus taken.

The first impression upon Nelson's mind was that the occupation of Leghorn was only the prelude to an invasion of Corsica in force. "I have no doubt," he wrote to the Viceroy, "but the destination of the French army was Corsica, and it is natural to suppose their fleet was to amuse ours whilst they cross from Leghorn." Thus reasoning, he announced his purpose of rejoining the admiral as soon as possible, so as not to lose his share in the expected battle. "My heart would break," he says to Jervis, "to be absent at such a glorious time;" but it is difficult to understand why he imagined that the French would transfer their army into the destitution of the Corsican mountains from the fertile plains of Lombardy, abandoning the latter to their enemy, and exchanging their assured communications with France for the uncertainties and irregularities of a water transit over seas commanded by the British fleet. The tenure of the island, as he well knew, depended upon the willing support of the Corsicans themselves; in the equal balance of the existing war, neither belligerent could maintain its control against the opposition of the natives.

This anticipation, in its disregard of the perfectly obvious conditions, was scarcely worthy of Nelson's real native sagacity, and shows clearly how much a man, even of genius, is hampered in the conclusions of actual life by the lack of that systematic ordering and training of the ideas which it is the part of education to supply. Genius is one thing, the acquirements of an accomplished—instructed—officer are another, yet there is between the two nothing incompatible, rather the reverse; and when to the former, which nature alone can give,—and to Nelson did give,—is added the conscious recognition of principles, the practised habit of viewing, under their clear light, all the circumstances of a situation, assigning to each its due weight and relative importance, then, and then only, is the highest plane of military greatness attained. Whether in natural insight Nelson fell short of Napoleon's measure need not here be considered; that he was at this time far inferior, in the powers of a trained intellect, to his younger competitor in the race for fame, is manifest by the readiness with which he accepted such widely ex-centric conjectures as that of an attempt by sea upon Leghorn at the opening of the campaign, and now upon Corsica by a great part, if not the whole, of the army of Italy.

"On the side of the French," says Jomini, speaking of Bonaparte at this very period, "was to be seen a young warrior, trained in the best schools, endowed with an ardent imagination, brought up upon the examples of antiquity, greedy of glory and of power, knowing thoroughly the Apennines, in which he had distinguished himself in 1794, and already measuring with a practised eye the distances he must overpass before becoming master of Italy. To these advantages for a war of invasion, Bonaparte united an inborn genius, and clearly established principles, the fruits of an enlightened theory."

Jomini doubtless may be considered somewhat too absolute and pedantic in his insistence upon definite formulation of principles; but in these words is nevertheless to be recognized the fundamental difference between these two great warriors, a difference by which the seaman was heavily handicapped in the opening of his career. As time passed on, responsibility, the best of educators, took under her firm and steady guidance the training of his yet undeveloped genius, gleams of which from time to time, but fitfully and erratically, illumine his earlier correspondence. The material was there from the first, but inchoate, ill-ordered, confused, and therefore not readily available to correct passing impressions, wild rumors, or even to prevent the radically false conceptions of an enemy's possible movements, such as we have had before us. Bonaparte, furthermore, whose career began amid the troubled scenes of a revolution which had shattered all the fetters of established custom,—so strong in England to impede a man's natural progress,—had enjoyed already for some time the singular advantage of being military adviser to the Directory, a duty which compelled him to take a broad view of all current conditions, to consider them in their mutual relations, and not narrowly to look to one sphere of operations, without due reference to its effects upon others.

As to the invasion of Corsica after the manner he had imagined, Nelson was soon undeceived. Bonaparte himself, after a hurried visit to Leghorn, again departed to press the siege of Mantua, having assured himself that for a measurable time he had nothing to apprehend from movements on his flank and rear. Orders were received from Jervis on the 2d of July to institute a commercial blockade of Leghorn, permitting no vessels to enter or depart. The conduct of this business, as well as the protection of British trade in that district, and the support of the Viceroy in securing Corsica against the attempts of French partisans, were especially intrusted to Nelson, whose movements during the following months, until the first of October, were consequently confined to the waters between Corsica and Tuscany, while the Riviera west of Genoa saw him no more. Leghorn became the chief centre of his activities. These redoubled with the demands made upon him; his energy rose equal to every call. A few weeks before, he had made a conditional application to the admiral, though with evident reluctance, for a short leave of absence on account of his health. "I don't much like what I have written," he confessed at the end of his diffident request, and some days later he again alludes to the subject. "My complaint is as if a girth was buckled taut over my breast, and my endeavours, in the night, is to get it loose. To say the truth, when I am actively employed, I am not so bad. If the Service will admit of it, perhaps I shall at a future day take your leave." The service now scarcely admitted it, and the active duty apparently restored his health; at all events we now hear no more of it. Everything yielded to the requirements of the war. "The Captain has wants, but I intend she shall last till the autumn: for I know, when once we begin, our wants are innumerable."