Transcriber's Note:

This book was published in two volumes, of which this is the second. The first volume was released as Project Gutenberg ebook #52588, available at [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52588]

THE
INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER
UPON THE
FRENCH REVOLUTION AND EMPIRE
1793-1812

BY

CAPTAIN A. T. MAHAN, U.S.N.

PRESIDENT UNITED STATES NAVAL WAR COLLEGE

AUTHOR OF "THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER UPON HISTORY, 1660-1783"
OF "THE GULF AND INLAND WATERS," AND OF A
"LIFE OF ADMIRAL FARRAGUT"

IN TWO VOLUMES

Vol. II.

FOURTH EDITION.

LONDON

SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, & RIVINGTON
(LIMITED)

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

Note.—The references to the "Correspondance de Napoléon" are to the quarto edition, in thirty-two volumes, published in Paris between 1858 and 1869.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

VOLUME II.
MAP AND BATTLE PLANS.

THE

INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER

UPON THE

FRENCH REVOLUTION AND EMPIRE.

CHAPTER XII.

Events on the Continent, 1798-1800.

Disorders of France under the Directory.—Disastrous War of the Second Coalition.—Establishment of the Consulate.—Bonaparte overthrows Austria and frames against Great Britain the Armed Neutrality of 1800.—Peace of Lunéville with Austria.

WHILE Bonaparte was crossing the Syrian desert and chafing over the siege of Acre, the long gathering storm of war known as the Second Coalition had broken upon France. It had been preceded by a premature outburst of hostility on the part of the Two Sicilies, induced by the excitement consequent upon the battle of the Nile and fostered by Nelson; [1] who, however influenced, was largely responsible for the action of the court. Despite the advice of Austria to wait, a summons was sent to the French on the 22d of November, 1798, to evacuate the Papal States and Malta. A Neapolitan army of fifty thousand men marched upon Rome; and five thousand were carried by Nelson's ships to Leghorn with the idea of harassing the confidently-expected retreat of the enemy. [2] Leghorn was at once surrendered; but in the south the campaign ended in utter disaster. The French general Championnet, having but fifteen thousand men, evacuated Rome, which the Neapolitans consequently entered without opposition; but their field operations met with a series of humiliating reverses, due partly to bad generalship and partly to inexperience and the lack of mutual confidence often found among untried troops. The French re-entered Rome seventeen days after the campaign opened; and the king of Naples, who had made a triumphal entry into the city, hurried back to his capital, called upon the people to rise in defence of their homes against the invaders, and then fled with the royal family to Palermo, Nelson giving them and the Hamiltons passage on board his flag-ship. The peasantry and the populace flew to arms, in obedience to the king's proclamation and to their own feelings of hatred to the republicans. Under the guidance of the priests and monks, with hardy but undisciplined fury, they in the field harassed the advance of the French, and in the capital rose against the upper classes, who were suspected of secret intelligence with the enemy. Championnet, however, continued to advance; and on the 23d of January, 1799, Naples was stormed by his troops. After the occupation, a series of judicious concessions to the prejudices of the people induced their cheerful submission. The conquest was followed by the birth to the Batavian, Helvetian, Ligurian, Cisalpine, and Roman republics, of a little sister, named the Parthenopeian Republic, destined to a troubled existence as short as its name was long.

The Neapolitan declaration of war caused the ruin of the Piedmontese monarchy. The Directory, seeing that war with Austria was probable, decided to occupy all Piedmont. The king abdicated on the 9th of December, 1798; retiring to the island of Sardinia, which was left in his possession. Piedmont was soon after annexed to the French Republic.

On the 20th of February, 1799, having failed to receive from the emperor the explanations demanded concerning the entrance of the Russian troops into his dominions, the Directory ordered its generals to advance. Jourdan was to command in Germany, Masséna in Switzerland, and Schérer in Italy. The armies of the republic, enfeebled by two years of peace and by the economies of a government always embarrassed for money and deficient in executive vigor, were everywhere inferior to those of the enemy; and the plan of campaign, providing for several operations out of reach of mutual support, has been regarded by military critics as essentially vicious.

Jourdan crossed the Rhine at Strasburg on the first of March, advancing through the Black Forest upon the head waters of the Danube. On the 6th Masséna crossed the river above Lake Constance, and moved through the Alps toward the Tyrol, driving the Austrians before him on his right and centre; but on the left he entirely failed to carry the important position of Feldkirch, upon which would depend the communication between his left and the right of Jourdan, if the latter succeeded in pushing on as ordered. This, however, he was unable to do. After some severe partial encounters there was fought on March 25th, at Stokach, near the north-west extremity of Lake Constance, a pitched battle in which the French were defeated. Jourdan then saw that he had to do with largely superior forces and retreated upon the Rhine, which he recrossed above Strasburg on the 6th of April.

On the 26th of March, the day after the defeat of Jourdan at Stokach, Schérer in Italy attacked the Austrians, who were occupying the line of the Adige, rendered famous by Bonaparte in his great campaign of 1796. The events of that day were upon the whole favorable to the French; but Schérer showed irresolution and consequent delay in improving such advantages as he had obtained. After a week of manœuvring the two armies met in battle on the 5th of April near Magnano, and after a long and bloody struggle the French were forced to give way. On the 6th, the day that Jourdan retreated across the Rhine, Schérer also fell back behind the Mincio. Not feeling secure there, although the Austrians did not pursue, he threw garrisons into the posts on that line, and on the 12th retired behind the Adda; sending word to Macdonald, Championnet's successor at Naples, to prepare to evacuate that kingdom and bring to northern Italy the thirty thousand men now so sorely needed.

Jourdan having offered his resignation after the battle of Stokach, the armies in Germany and in Switzerland were united under the command of Masséna; whose long front, extending from the Engadine, around the sources of the Inn, along the Rhine as low as Dusseldorf, was held by but one hundred thousand men, of whom two-thirds were in Switzerland. In the position which Switzerland occupies, thrust out to the eastward from the frontiers of France, having on the one flank the fields of Germany, on the other those of Italy, and approachable from both sides by many passes, the difficulties of defence are great; [3] and Masséna found himself menaced from both quarters, as well as in front, by enemies whose aggregate force was far superior to his own. Pressed along the line of the Rhine both above and below Lake Constance, he was compelled to retire upon works constructed by him around Zurich; being unable to prevent the junction of the enemy's forces, which approached from both directions. On the 4th of June the Austrians assaulted his lines; and, though the attack was repulsed, Masséna thought necessary to evacuate the place forty-eight hours later, falling back upon a position on the Albis mountains a few miles in his rear.

During the two months over which these contests between Masséna and his enemies were spread, the affairs of the French in Italy were growing daily more desperate. After the victory of Magnano the Austrians were joined, on the 24th of April, by twenty thousand Russians under Marshal Suwarrow, who became general-in-chief of the allied armies. On the 26th Schérer turned over his command to Moreau; but, although the latter was an officer of very great capacity, the change was too late to avoid all the impending disasters. On the 27th the passage of the Adda was forced by the allies, and on the 29th they entered Milan; the French retiring upon the Ticino, breaking down the bridges over the Po, and taking steps to secure their communications with Genoa. Pausing but a moment, they again retreated in two columns upon Turin and Alessandria; Moreau drawing together near the latter place the bulk of his force, about twenty thousand men, and sending pressing invitations to Macdonald to hasten the northward march of the army of Naples. The new positions were taken the 7th of May, and it was not till the 5th that the Austro-Russians, delayed by the destruction of the bridges, could cross the Po. But the insurrection of the country in all directions was showing how little the submission of the people and the establishment of new republics were accompanied by any hearty fidelity to the French cause; and on the 18th, leaving a garrison in Alessandria, Moreau retreated upon the Apennines. On the 6th of June his troops were distributed among the more important points on the crest of the range, from Pontremoli, above Spezia, to Loano, and all his convoys had safely crossed the mountains to the latter point. It was at this moment that he had an interview with Admiral Bruix, whose fleet had anchored in Vado Bay two days before. [4]

While events were thus passing in Upper Italy, Macdonald, in obedience to his orders, evacuated Naples on the 7th of May, at the moment when Moreau was taking his position on the Apennines and Bonaparte making his last fruitless assault upon Acre. Leaving garrisons at the principal strong places of the kingdom, he hurried north, and on the 25th entered Florence, where, though his junction with Moreau was far from being effected, he was for the first time in sure communication with him by courier. There were two routes that Macdonald might take,—either by the sea-shore, which was impracticable for artillery, or else, crossing the Apennines, he would find a better road in the plain south of the Po, through Modena and Parma, and by it might join the army of Italy under the walls of Tortona. The latter course was chosen, and after a delay too much prolonged the army of Naples set out on the 9th of June. All went well with it until the 17th, when, having passed Modena and Parma, routing the allied detachments which he encountered, Macdonald reached the Trebia. Here, however, he was met by Suwarrow, and after three days' desperate fighting was forced to retreat by the road he came, to his old positions on the other side of the mountains. On the same day the citadel of Turin capitulated to the allies. After pursuing Macdonald some distance, Suwarrow turned back to meet Moreau, and compelled him also to retire to his former posts. This disastrous attempt at a junction within the enemies' lines cost the French fifteen thousand men. It now became necessary for the army of Naples to get to Genoa at all costs by the Corniche road, and this it was able to do through the inactivity of the enemy,—due, so Jomini says, not to Suwarrow, but to the orders from Vienna. By the middle of July both armies were united under Moreau. As a result of the necessary abandonment of Naples by the French troops, the country fell at once into the power of the armed peasantry, except the garrisons left in a few strong places; and these, by the help of the British navy, were also reduced by the 1st of August.

This striking practical illustration of the justness of Bonaparte's views, concerning the danger incurred by the French in Upper Italy through attempting to occupy Naples, was followed by further disasters. On the 21st of July the citadel of Alessandria capitulated; and this loss was followed on the 30th by that of Mantua, which had caused Bonaparte so much delay and trouble in 1796. The latter success was somewhat dearly bought, inasmuch as the emperor of Germany had positively forbidden Suwarrow to make any further advance before Mantua fell. [5] Opportunity was thus given for the junction of Moreau and Macdonald, and for the reorganization of the latter's army, which the affairs of the Trebia and the subsequent precipitate retreat had left in a state of prostration and incoherence, from which it did not recover for a month. The delay would have been still more favorable to the French had Mantua resisted to the last moment; but it capitulated at a time when it could still have held out for several days, and Suwarrow was thus enabled to bring up the besieging corps to his support, unknown to the enemy.

Meanwhile Moreau had been relieved by Joubert, one of the most brilliant of the young generals who had fought under Bonaparte in Italy. The newcomer, reaching his headquarters on the 2d of August, at once determined upon the offensive, moved thereto by the wish to relieve Mantua, and also by the difficulty of feeding his army in the sterile mountains now that ruin had befallen the coastwise traffic of Genoa, by which supplies had before been maintained. [6] On the 10th of August the French advanced. On the 14th they were in position at Novi; and there Joubert saw, but too late, that Suwarrow's army was far larger than he had expected, and that the rumor of Mantua's fall, which he had refused to credit, must be true. He intended to retreat; but the Russian marshal attacked the next morning, and after a fierce struggle, which the strength of their position enabled the French to prolong till night, they were driven from the field with heavy loss, four general officers and thirty-seven guns being captured. Joubert was killed early in the day; and Moreau, who had remained to aid him until familiar with all the details of his command, again took the temporary direction of the army by the agreement of the other generals. Immediately after the battle Suwarrow sent into the late Papal States a division which, co-operating with the Neapolitan royalists and the British navy, forced the French to evacuate the new Roman republic on the 27th of September, 1799.

At this moment of success new dispositions were taken by the allied governments, apparently through the initiative of Austria; which wished, by removing Suwarrow, to keep entire control of Italy in her own hands. This change of plan, made at so critical a moment, stopped the hitherto triumphant progress; and, by allowing time for Bonaparte to arrive and to act, turned victory into defeat. By it Suwarrow was to march across the Alps into Switzerland, and there take charge of the campaign against Masséna, having under him an army composed mainly of Russians. The Archduke Charles, now commanding in Switzerland, was to depart with the greater part of the Austrian contingent to the lower Rhine, where he would by his operations support the invasion of Holland then about to begin.

On the 13th of August,—the same day that Bruix entered Brest, carrying with him the Spanish fleet, and two days before the battle of Novi,—the expedition against Holland, composed of seventeen thousand Russians and thirty thousand British troops, sailed from England. Delayed first by light winds and then by heavy weather, the landing was not made till the 27th of the month. On the 31st the Archduke, taking with him thirty-six thousand Austrians, started for the lower Rhine, leaving General Hotze and the Russian Korsakoff to make head against Masséna until the arrival of Suwarrow. The latter, on the 11th of September, immediately after the surrender of Tortona, began his northward march.

At the moment the Archduke assumed his new command, the French on the lower Rhine, crossing at Mannheim, invested and bombarded Philipsburg; and their operations seemed so far serious as to draw him and a large part of his force in the same direction. This greatly diminished one of the difficulties confronting Masséna in the offensive movement he then had in contemplation. Hearing at the same time that Suwarrow had started from Italy, he made his principal attack from his left upon the Russians before Zurich on the 25th of September, the right wing of his long line advancing in concert against the Austrian position east of Lake Zurich upon its inlet, the Linth. Each effort was completely successful, and decisive; the enemy being in both directions driven back, and forced to recross the streams above and below the lake. Suwarrow, after a very painful march and hard fighting, reached his first appointed rendezvous at Mutten two days after the battle of Zurich had been lost; and the corps that were to have met him there, fearing their retreat would be cut off, had not awaited his arrival. The old marshal with great difficulty fought his way through the mountains to Ilanz, where at length he assembled his exhausted and shattered forces on the 9th of October, the day on which Bonaparte landed at Fréjus on his return from Egypt. By that time Switzerland was entirely cleared of Russians and Austrians. The river Rhine, both above and below Lake Constance, marked the dividing line between the belligerents.

The Anglo-Russian attack upon Holland had no better fate. Landing upon the peninsula between the Zuyder Zee and the North Sea, the allies were for awhile successful; but their movements were cautious and slow, giving time for the local resistance to grow and for re-enforcements to come up. The remnants of the Dutch navy were surrendered and taken back to England; but the Duke of York, who had chief command of the allied troops, was compelled on the 18th of October to sign a convention, by which the invading force was permitted to retire unmolested by the first of December.

During the three remaining months of 1799 some further encounters took place in Germany and Italy. In the latter the result was a succession of disasters to the French, ending with the capitulation, on the 4th of December, of Coni, their last remaining stronghold in Piedmont, and the retreat of the army into the Riviera of Genoa. Corfu and the Ionian Islands having been reduced by the combined Russian and Turkish fleets in the previous March, and Ancona surrendered on the 10th of November, all Bonaparte's conquests in Italy and the Adriatic had been lost to France when the Directory fell. The brave soldiers of the army of Italy, destitute and starving, without food, without pay, without clothing or shoes, without even wood for camp-fires in the bitter winter nights on the slopes of the Apennines, deserted in crowds and made their way to the interior. In some regiments none but officers and non-commissioned officers were left. An epidemic born of want and exposure carried off men by hundreds. Championnet, overwhelmed by his misfortunes and by the sight of the misery surrounding him, fell ill and died. Bonaparte, now First Consul, sent Masséna to replace him.

In Germany nothing decisive occurred in the field; but in consequence of some disagreements of opinion between himself and the Archduke, Suwarrow declined further co-operation, and, alleging the absolute need of rest for his soldiers after their frightful exposure in Switzerland, marched them at the end of October into winter quarters in Bavaria. This closed the share of the Russians in the second coalition. The Czar, who had embarked in the war with the idea of restoring the rights of monarchs and the thrones that had been overturned, was dissatisfied both with the policy of Austria, which looked to her own predominance in Italy, and with Great Britain. A twelvemonth more was to see him at the head of a league of the northern states against the maritime claims of the great Sea Power, and completely won over to the friendship of Bonaparte by the military genius and wily flattery of the renowned captain.

During this disastrous year, in which France lost all Italy except the narrow strip of sea-coast about Genoa, and after months of desperate struggle had barely held her own in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, the internal state of the country was deplorable. The Revolutionary government by the Committee of Public Safety had contrived, by the use of the extraordinary powers granted to it, to meet with greater or less success the demands of the passing hour; although in so doing it was continually accumulating embarrassments against a future day of reckoning. The Directory, deprived of the extraordinary powers of its predecessor, had succeeded to these embarrassments, and the day of reckoning had arrived. It has been seen how the reactionary spirit, which followed the rule of blood, had prevailed more and more until, in 1797, the political composition of the two Councils was so affected by it as to produce a strong conflict between them and the executive. This dead-lock had been overcome and harmony restored by the violent measures of September, 1797, by which two Directors and a number of members of the legislature had been forcibly expelled from their office. The parties, of two very different shades of opinion, to which the ejected members belonged, had not, however, ceased to exist. In 1798, in the yearly elections to replace one-third of the legislature, they again returned a body of representatives sufficient to put the Councils in opposition to the Directory; but this year the choice of the electors was baffled by a system of double returns. The sitting Councils, of the same political party as the Directory, pronounced upon these, taking care in so doing to insure that the majority in the new bodies should be the same as in the old. In May, 1799, however, the same circumstance again recurred. The fact is particularly interesting, as showing the opposition which was felt toward the government throughout the country.

This opposition was due to a cause which rarely fails to make governments unpopular. The Directory had been unsuccessful. It was called upon to pay the bills due to the public expectation of better things when once the war was over. This it was not able to do. Though peace had been made with the continent, there remained so many matters of doubt and contention that large armies had to be maintained. The expenses of the state went on, but the impoverished nation cried out against the heavy taxation laid to meet them; the revenues continually fell short of the expenditures, and the measures proposed by the ministers to remedy this evil excited vehement criticisms. The unpopularity of the government, arising from inefficient action, reacted upon and increased the weakness which was inherent in its cumbrous, many-headed form. Hence there resulted, from the debility of the head, an impotence which permeated all the links of the executive administration down to the lowest members.

In France itself the disorder and anarchy prevailing in the interior touched the verge of social dissolution. [7] Throughout the country, but especially in the south and west, prevailed brigandage on a large scale—partly political, partly of the ordinary highway type. There were constant reports of diligences and mail-wagons stopped, [8] of public treasure plundered, of republican magistrates assassinated. Disorganization and robbery spread throughout the army, a natural result of small pay, irregularly received, and of the system of contributions, administered with little responsibility by the commanders of armies in the field. The attempt of the government to check and control this abuse was violently resented by generals, both of the better and the worse class; by the one as reflecting upon their character and injuring their position, by the other as depriving them of accustomed though unlawful gains. Two men of unblemished repute, Joubert and Championnet, came to a direct issue with the Directory upon this point. Joubert resigned the command of the army of Italy, in which Bernadotte from the same motive refused to replace him; while Championnet, in Naples, compelled the commissioner of the Directory to leave the kingdom. For this act, however, he was deprived and brought to a court-martial.

From the weakness pervading the administration and from the inadequate returns of the revenue, the government was driven to extraordinary measures and to the anticipation of its income. Greater and more onerous taxes were laid; and, as the product of these was not immediate, purchases had to be made at long and uncertain credit, and consequently were exorbitant in price while deficient in quantity and quality. From this arose much suffering among all government employés, but especially among the soldiers, who needed the first attention, and whose distress led them easily to side with their officers against the administration. Contracts so made only staved off the evil day, at the price of increasing indebtedness for the state and of growing corruption among the contractor class and the officials dealing with them. Embarrassment and disorder consequently increased apace without any proportionate vigor in the external action of the government, and the effects were distributed among and keenly felt by all individuals, except the small number whose ability or whose corruptness enables them to grow rich when, and as, society becomes most distressed. The creditors of the nation, and especially the holders of bonds, could with difficulty obtain even partial payment. In the general distrust and perplexity individuals and communities took to hoarding both money and food, moved by the dangers of transit and by fear of the scarcity which they saw to be impending. This stagnation of internal circulation was accompanied by the entire destruction of maritime commerce, due to the pressure of the British navy and to the insane decree of Nivôse 29 (January 19, 1798). [9] Both concurred to paralyze the energies of the people, to foster indolence and penury, and by sheer want to induce a state of violence with which the executive was unable to cope.

When to this internal distress were added the military disasters just related, the outcry became loud and universal. All parties united against the Directors, who did not dare in 1799 to repeat the methods by which in the two previous years a majority had been obtained in the legislature. On the 18th of June the new Councils were able to force a change in the composition of the Directory, further enfeebling it through the personal weakness of the new members. These hastened to reverse many of the measures of their predecessors, but no change of policy could restore the lost prestige. The effect of these steps was only further to depress that branch of the government which, in so critical a moment and in so disordered a society, should overbear all others and save the state—not by discussion, but by action.

Such was the condition of affairs found by Bonaparte when he returned from Egypt. The revolution of Brumaire 18 (November 9, 1799) threw into his hands uncontrolled power. This he proceeded at once to use with the sagacity and vigor that rarely failed him in his early prime. The administration of the country was reconstituted on lines which sacrificed local independence, but invigorated the grasp of the central executive, and made its will felt in every corner of the land. Vexatious measures of the preceding government were repealed, and for them was substituted a policy of liberal conciliation, intended to rally all classes of Frenchmen to the support of the new rule. In the West and North, in La Vendée, Brittany, and Normandy, the insurrection once suppressed by Hoche had again raised its head against the Directory. To the insurgents Bonaparte offered reasonable inducements to submission, while asserting his firm determination to restore authority at any cost; and the rapid gathering of sixty thousand troops in the rebellious districts proved his resolution to use for that purpose a force so overwhelming, that the completion of its task would release it by the return of spring, to take the field against external foes. Before the end of February the risings were suppressed, and this time forever. Immediate steps were taken to put the finances on a sounder basis, and to repair the military disasters of the last twelvemonth. To the two principal armies, of the Rhine and of Italy, were sent respectively Moreau and Masséna, the two greatest generals of the republic after Bonaparte himself; and money advanced by Parisian bankers was forwarded to relieve the more pressing wants of the destitute soldiery.

At the same time that these means were used to recover France herself from the condition of debility into which she had fallen, the first consul made a move calculated either to gain for her the time she yet needed, or, in case it failed, to rally to his support all classes in the state. Departing from the usual diplomatic routine, he addressed a personal letter to the king of Great Britain and to the emperor of Germany, deploring the existing war, and expressing a wish that negotiations for peace might be opened. The reply from both sovereigns came through the ordinary channels of their respective ministries. Austria said civilly that she could not negotiate apart from her allies; and furthermore, that the war being only to preserve Europe from universal disorder, due to the unstable and aggressive character of the French governments since the Revolution, no stable peace could be made until there was some guarantee for a change of policy. This she could not yet recognize in the new administration, which owed its existence only to the violent overthrow of its predecessor. Great Britain took substantially the same ground. Peace was worse than worthless, if insecure; and experience had shown that no defence except that of steady and open hostility was availing, while the system which had prevailed in France remained the same. She could not recognize a change of system in the mere violent substitution of one set of rulers for another. Disavowing any claim to prescribe to France what should be her form of government, the British ministry nevertheless said distinctly that the best guarantee for a permanent change of policy would be the restoration of the Bourbons. This seemingly impolitic suggestion insured—what was very possibly its object—the continuance of the war until were realized the advantages that seemed about to accrue. Not only were the conditions at that time overwhelmingly in favor of the allies, but there was also every probability of the reduction of Egypt and Malta, and of further decisive successes in Italy. These, if obtained, would be so many cards strengthening their hands in the diplomatic game to be played in the negotiations for peace. Believing, as the British ministry of that day assuredly did, that a secure peace could only be based on the exhaustion, and not upon the moderation or good faith, of their enemy, it would have been the height of folly to concede time, or submit to that vacillation of purpose and relaxation of tension which their own people would certainly feel, if negotiations were opened.

Nor were these military and moral considerations the only ones affecting the decision of the government. Despite the immense burdens imposed by the war to support her own military expenditures and furnish the profuse subsidies paid to her allies, the power of the country to bear them was greatly increased. Thanks to the watery rampart which secured peace within her borders, Great Britain had now become the manufactory and warehouse of Europe. The commercial and maritime prostration of Holland and France, her two great rivals in trade and manufactures, had thrown into her hands these sources of their prosperity; and she, through the prodigious advances of the ten years' peace, was fully ready to profit by them. By the capture of their foreign possessions and the ruin of the splendid French colony in Haïti, she now controlled the chief regions whence were drawn the tropical products indispensable to Europeans. She monopolized their markets as well as the distribution of their produce. Jealously reserving to British merchant shipping the trade of her own and conquered colonies, she yet met the immense drain made by the navy upon her merchant seamen by relaxing the famous Navigation Laws; permitting her ships to be manned by foreigners, and foreign ships to engage in branches of her commerce closed to them in time of peace. But while thus encouraging neutrals to carry the surplus trade, whose rapid growth was outstripping the capacity of her own shipping, she rigorously denied their right to do as much for her enemies. These severe restrictions, which her uncontrolled sea-power enabled her to maintain, were re-enforced by suicidal edicts of the French government, retaliating upon the same unhappy neutrals the injury their weakness compelled them to accept from the mistress of the seas,—thus driving them from French shores, and losing a concurrence essential to French export and import. In this time of open war no flag was so safe from annoyance as the British, for none other was protected by a powerful navy. Neutrals sought its convoy against French depredations, and the navigation of the world was now swayed by this one great power, whom its necessities had not yet provoked to lay a yoke heavier than the oppressed could bear.

To this control of the carrying trade, and of so much of the agricultural production of the globe, was added a growing absorption of the manufactures of Europe, due to the long war paralyzing the peaceful energies of the continental peoples. In the great system of circulation and exchange, everything thus tended more and more to Great Britain; which was indicated as the natural centre for accumulation and distribution by its security, its accessibility, and its nearness to the continent on which were massed the largest body of consumers open to maritime commerce. Becoming thus the chief medium through which the business of the civilized world was carried on and its wants supplied, her capital grew apace; and was steadily applied, by the able hands in which it accumulated, to develop, by increased production and increased facilities of carriage, the powers of the country to supply demands that were continually increasing on both sides of the Atlantic. The foreign trade, export and import, which in 1792, the last year of peace, had amounted to £44,500,000, rose in 1797 to £50,000,000, and in 1800 to £73,700,000. Encouraged by these evident proofs of growing wealth, the ministry was able so to increase the revenue that its receipts, independent of extraordinary war taxes, far exceeded anything it had ever been before, "or," to use Pitt's words, "anything which the most sanguine hopes could have anticipated. If," he continued, "we compare this year of war with former years of peace, we shall in the produce of our revenue and in the extent of our commerce behold a spectacle at once paradoxical, inexplicable, and astonishing. We have increased our external and internal commerce to a greater pitch than ever it was before; and we may look to the present as the proudest year that has ever occurred for this country." [10]

With such resources to sustain the armies of their allies, and certain of keeping a control of the sea unparalleled even in the history of Great Britain, the ministry looked hopefully forward to a year which should renew and complete the successes of 1799. They reckoned without Bonaparte, as Bonaparte in his turn reckoned again and again without Nelson.

Russia took no more part in the coalition; but the forces of Germany, under the control of Austria and subsidized by Great Britain, either actually in the field or holding the fortified posts on which the operations depended, amounted to something over two hundred and fifty thousand men. Of these, one hundred and twenty-five thousand under Mélas were in Italy. The remainder under General Kray were in Germany, occupying the angle formed by the Rhine at Bâle, where, after flowing west from Lake Constance, it turns abruptly north for the remainder of its course. The plan of campaign was to stand on the defensive in Germany, holding in check the enemies there opposed to them, and in Italy to assume a vigorous offensive, so as to drive the French finally out of the country. That achieved, the idea was entertained of entering France at the extreme south, and possibly investing Toulon, supported by the British navy.

When Bonaparte first took charge, there remained to France only two hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, of whom at the opening of the campaign of 1800 there were in the field, opposed to the Austrians, but one hundred and sixty-five thousand. One hundred thousand conscripts were called for; but time would be needed to turn these into soldiers, even with the advantage of the nucleus of veterans around whom they would be gathered. The equipment and provisioning both of the old and new levies also required time and effort. Bonaparte's project was to assume the offensive in Germany, turning there the position of the Austrians, and driving them northward from the Rhine towards the head waters of the Danube. For this great operation the army under Moreau was raised to an equality with the enemy opposed to him. Masséna in Italy was directed to stand solely on the defensive, concentrating around Genoa the bulk of the thirty-five or forty thousand men which alone he had. While he held this position in such force, the Austrians could scarcely advance into France along the narrow coast road, leaving him in the rear. When the expected success in Germany was won, there was to be detached from that army, which should then assume an attitude of observation, a corps twenty thousand strong. This should cross Switzerland, entering Italy by the St. Gothard Pass, and there joining a force of forty thousand to be led by the First Consul in person through the Pass of St. Bernard. This mass of sixty thousand men was to throw itself in rear of the Austrians, forcing them to fight for their communications through Lombardy, and hoping under the first general of the age to win, over a less skilful opponent, such victories as had illustrated the famous campaigns of 1796 and 1797.

Bonaparte's plan thus hinged upon the French occupation of Switzerland, which, intervening as a great rampart between the Austrians in Germany and Italy, permitted him to cover the movements against the former by the curtain of the Rhine between Lake Constance and Bâle, and to use safely and secretly the passes leading into the plains of Lombardy and Piedmont. To this advantage of position he conjoined, with inconceivable wiliness, an absolute secrecy as to the very existence of the forty thousand, known as the Army of Reserve, which he himself was to lead. The orders constituting this force were given the utmost publicity. Its headquarters were established at Dijon, and one of Bonaparte's most trusted subordinates was sent to command it. An appeal was made to discharged soldiers to join its ranks; some material of war and some conscripts, with a corps of officers, were assembled. There preparations stopped—or went on so feebly in comparison with the glowing boasts of the French journals, that hostile spies were entirely deceived. The Army of Reserve became the joke of Europe, while the scattered detachments that were to compose it were assembling at points separated, yet chosen with Bonaparte's consummate skill to permit rapid concentration when the hour came. To insure perfect secrecy, the correspondence of these different bodies was with him alone, not through the Ministry of War.

The campaign was opened by the Austrians in Italy. Mélas, with seventy thousand men, attacked Masséna along the chain of the Apennines. Difficulties of subsistence had forced the latter to disseminate his troops between Genoa and Nice. Through this necessarily thin line the Austrians broke on the 5th of April, and after several days of strenuous resistance, furthered by the facilities for defence offered by that mountainous region, Masséna was driven into Genoa. The left wing of his army under Suchet was forced back toward Nice, where it took position on the Var. On the 18th of April Masséna was definitively shut up in Genoa with eighteen thousand men, and so short of provisions that it became a matter of the utmost urgency to relieve him.

On April 25 Moreau began his movements, of a somewhat complicated character, but resulting in his whole army being safely across the Rhine on the first of May. Eighty thousand French troops were then drawn up between Bâle and Lake Constance in an east and west direction, threatening the left flank of the enemy, whose front was north and south, and in position to attack both their line of retreat and the immense depots whose protection embarrassed all the movements of the Austrians. On the 3d of May the latter were defeated at Engen, and their depot at Stokach was captured. On the 5th they were again beaten at Moesskirch, and on the 9th at Biberach, losing other large deposits of stores. General Kray then retired upon Ulm on the Danube, and the first act of Bonaparte's design was accomplished. It had not corresponded with the lines laid down by him, which were too adventurous to suit Moreau, nor was the result equal to his expectations; but the general strategic outcome was to check for the time any movements of the enemy in Germany, and enable Moreau to send the force needed to co-operate with Bonaparte in Italy. This started on the 13th of May, and was joined on the way by some detachments in Switzerland; the whole amounting to between fifteen and twenty thousand men. [11]

On the 6th of May the first consul left Paris, having delayed to the last moment in order to keep up the illusions of the Austrian commander-in-chief in Italy. The crossing of the St. Bernard began on the 15th, and on the 20th the whole army had passed. On the 26th it issued in the plains of Piedmont; whence Bonaparte turned to the eastward, to insure his great object of throwing his force across the enemy's communications and taking from him all hope of regaining them without a battle. On the first of June he entered Milan.

Meanwhile Masséna's army, a prey to horrible famine, prolonged in Genoa a resistance which greatly contributed to the false position of the Austrians. Of these, twenty-five thousand were before Nice, thirty thousand before Genoa. Twenty thousand more had been lost by casualties since the campaign opened. Unwilling to relinquish his gains, Mélas waited too long to concentrate his scattered troops; and when at last he sent the necessary orders, Masséna was treating to evacuate Genoa. The Austrian officer on the spot, unwilling to lose the prize, postponed compliance until it was secured,—a delay fraught with serious results. On the 5th Genoa was given up, and the besiegers, leaving a garrison in the place, marched to join the commander-in-chief, who was gathering his forces around Alessandria. Meanwhile Bonaparte had crossed to the south side of the Po with half his army. On the 14th of June was fought the battle of Marengo. Anxious lest the foe might give him the slip, the first consul had spread his troops too widely; and the first events of the day were so far in favor of the Austrians that Mélas, who was seventy-six years old, left the field at two in the afternoon, certain of victory, to seek repose. An hour later the opportune arrival of General Desaix turned the scales, and Bonaparte remained conqueror on the ground, standing across the enemy's line of retreat. The following day Mélas signed a convention abandoning all northern Italy, as far as the Mincio, behind which the Austrians were to withdraw. All the fortified places were given up to France, including the hardly won Genoa. While awaiting the Emperor's answer to propositions of peace, sent by the First Consul, there was to be in Italy a suspension of arms, during which neither army should send detachments to Germany. On the 2d of July Bonaparte re-entered Paris in triumph, after an absence of less than two months.

Meantime Moreau, after learning the successful crossing of the St. Bernard, had resumed the offensive. Moving to the eastward, he crossed the Danube below Ulm with part of his force on the 19th of June, threatening Kray's communications with Bohemia. A partial encounter on that day left five thousand prisoners in the hands of the French, who maintained the position they had gained. The same night Kray evacuated Ulm, moving rapidly off by a road to the northward and so effecting his escape. Moreau, unable to intercept, followed for some distance and then stopped a pursuit which promised small results. He was still ignorant of the battle of Marengo, of which the Austrians now had news; and the latter, while concealing the victory, announced to him the suspension of arms, and suggested a similar arrangement in Germany. Convinced that events favorable to France lay behind this proposition, Moreau would come to no agreement; but on the contrary decided at once to secure for his victorious army the most advantageous conditions with which to enter upon negotiations. Closely investing the important fortresses of Ulm and Ingolstadt on the Danube, with part of his force, he recrossed the river with the remainder and advanced into Bavaria. On the 28th of June he entered Munich; and near there was signed on the 15th of July an armistice, closely corresponding with that concluded by Bonaparte in Italy just one month before. The two belligerents retired behind appointed lines, not again to engage in hostilities without twelve days' notice. During this suspension of arms the blockaded Austrian fortresses should receive every fortnight provisions proportioned to their consumption, so that in case of renewed operations they would be in the same condition as when the truce began. The two great French armies were now encamped in the fertile plains of Italy and Germany, living in quiet off districts external to France, which was thus relieved of the larger part of their expense.

The effect of this short and brilliant campaign of unbroken French successes was to dispose to peace both members of the coalition. Neither, however, was yet reduced to negotiate apart from its ally. On the very day the news of Marengo was received at Vienna, but before the last reverses in Germany, Austria had renewed her engagements with Great Britain, both powers stipulating not to treat singly. The first consul, on the other hand, was distinctly opposed to joint discussions, his constant policy in the cabinet as in the field being to separate his opponents. As Austria's great need was to gain time, she sent to Paris an envoy empowered to exchange views with the French government but to conclude nothing. The emperor also intimated his wish for a general pacification, and on the 9th of August the British minister at Vienna notified to that court the willingness of his own to enter into negotiations for a general peace.

With this began an encounter of wits, in which Bonaparte showed himself as astute at a bargain as he was wily in the field. Austria, if not given too much time, was at his mercy; but Great Britain held over him a like advantage in her control of the sea, which was strangling the colonial empire he passionately wished to restore. Haïti had escaped from all but nominal control; Martinique, the gem of the Antilles, was in British hands; Malta and Egypt, the trophies of his own enterprise, were slowly but surely expiring. For these he too needed time; for with it there was good prospect of soon playing a card which should reverse, or at least seriously modify, the state of the game, by bringing Russia and the Baltic navies into the combination against Great Britain. In this support, and in the extremity to which he might reduce Austria, lay his only chances to check the great opponent of France; for, while almost supreme on the Continent, he could not from the coast project his power beyond the range of a cannon's ball. His correspondence throughout this period abounds with instructions and exhortations to fit out the fleets, to take the sea, to relieve Malta and Egypt, to seize Sardinia by an expedition from Corsica, and Mahon by a squadron from Brest. All fell fruitless before the exhaustion of French sea power, as did also his plan for an extensive cruise on a grand scale against British commerce in many quarters of the world. "I see with regret," wrote he to the minister of Marine, "that the armament of the fleet has been sacrificed to that of a great number of small vessels;" but in truth there was nothing else to do. His ablest admirals failed to equip ships from which every resource was cut off by the omnipresent cruisers of the enemy. "We can never take Mahon," he writes to the court of Spain, in the full swing of his triumphs after Marengo; "therefore make war on Portugal and take her provinces, so as to enter negotiations for peace with your hands as full as possible of equivalents."

The Czar Paul had joined the second coalition full of ardor against the French revolution and determined to restore the princes who had lost their thrones. He had been bitterly mortified by the reverses to his troops in 1799, and especially by the disaster to Suwarrow, for which he not unjustly blamed Austria. He was also dissatisfied to find in his allies less of zeal for unfortunate sovereigns than of desire to reduce the power of France, to whose system they attributed the misfortunes of Europe. Disappointment in his unbalanced mind turned soon to coolness and was rapidly passing to hostility. The transition was assisted, and a pretext for a breach with Great Britain afforded, by a fresh outbreak of the old dispute between her and the Baltic powers concerning the rights of neutrals. Denmark in 1799 adopted the policy of convoying her merchant vessels by ships of war, and claimed that a statement from the senior naval officer, that the cargoes contained nothing forbidden by the law of nations, exempted the convoy from the belligerent right of search. British statesmen denied that this conceded belligerent right could be nullified by any rule adopted by a neutral; to which they were the more impelled as the Danes and themselves differed radically in the definition of contraband. Danish naval officers being instructed to resist the search of their convoys, two hostile encounters took place; one in December, 1799, and the other in July, 1800. In the latter several were killed on both sides, and the Danish frigate was carried into the Downs. Seeing the threatening character of affairs, the British ministry took immediate steps to bring them to an issue. An ambassador was sent to Copenhagen supported by nine ships-of-the-line and several bomb-vessels; and on the 29th of August, barely a month after the affray, a convention was signed by which the general subject of searching ships under convoy was referred to future discussion, but Denmark consented to suspend her convoys until a definitive treaty was made. The Danish frigate was at once released.

It will be observed that this collision occurred in the very midst of the negotiations between Austria and France, to which Great Britain claimed the right to be a party. The whole vexed question of neutral and belligerent rights was thus violently raised, at a moment most inauspicious to the allies and most favorable to Bonaparte. The latter, crowned with victory upon the Continent, found every neutral commercial state disposed to side with him in contesting positions considered by Great Britain to be vital to her safety. It was for him to foster this disposition and combine the separate powers into one great effort, before which the Mistress of the Seas should be compelled to recede and submit. The occasion here arose, as it were spontaneously, to realize what became the great dream of his life and ultimately led him to his ruin,—to unite the Continent against the British Islands and, as he phrased it, "to conquer the sea by the land." Circumstances, partly anterior to his rise to power, and partly contrived by his sagacious policy during the previous few months, particularly favored at this moment such a league, for which the affair of the Danish convoy supplied an impulse, and the prostration of Great Britain's ally, Austria, an opportunity. Bonaparte underestimated the vitality and influence of a state upon which centred a far-reaching commercial system, and in valuing naval power he did not appreciate that a mere mass of ships had not the weight he himself was able to impart to a mass of men. He never fully understood the maritime problems with which from time to time he had to deal; but he showed wonderful skill at this critical period in combining against his principal enemy an opposition, for which Prussia afforded the body and the hot temper of the Czar the animating soul.

Since 1795 Prussia had shut herself up to a rigorous neutrality, in which were embraced the North German states. Under this system, during the maritime war, the commerce of the larger part of the Continent poured in through these states—by the great German rivers, the Ems, the Weser, and the Elbe—and through the cities of Hamburg and Bremen. The tonnage clearing from Great Britain alone to North Germany increased from 120,000 in 1792 to 389,000 in 1800; a traffic of which Prussia took the lion's share. To these advantages of neutral territory it was desirable to join the utmost freedom for neutral navigation. Upon this Great Britain bore heavily; but so large a proportion of the trade was done through her, and the sea was so entirely under the power of her navy, that prudence had so far dictated acquiescence in her claims, even when not admitted. This was particularly the case while Russia, under Catherine II., and in the first years of her son, tacitly or openly supported Great Britain; and while Austria, though badly beaten in the field, remained unshaken in power. The weaker maritime countries, Sweden, Denmark, and the United States of America, were determined by similar motives. They groaned under the British exactions; but the expansion of their commerce outweighed the injuries received, and submission was less hurtful than resistance in arms. Russia herself, though not strictly a maritime state, was a large producer of articles which were mainly carried by British ships and for which England was the chief customer. The material interests of Russia, and especially of the powerful nobles, were therefore bound up with peace with Great Britain; but an absolute monarch could disregard this fact, at least for a time. The furious, impulsive temper of Paul I., if aroused, was quite capable of overleaping all prudential considerations, of using the colossal power of his empire to support the other states, and even of compelling them to act in concert with him.

Such were the discordant elements which Bonaparte had to reconcile into a common effort: on the one hand, the strong though short-sighted mercantile interests, which to retain great present advantages would favor submission rather than resistance to the exactions of Great Britain. These were represented by the development of carrying trade in the neutral Baltic states, by the enlarged commerce of Prussia and North Germany,—which through their neutrality in a maritime war had become the highway of intercourse between the Continent and the outer world,—and by the productions of Russia, which formed the revenue of her great proprietors, and found their way to market wholly by sea. Bound together by the close relations which commerce breeds between states, and by the dependence of each upon the capital and mercantile system of Great Britain, these interests constituted the prosperity of nations, and could by no rulers be lightly disregarded. On the other hand stood the dignity of neutral flags and their permanent interests,—always contrary to those of belligerents,—the ambition of Prussia and her jealousy of Austria, and finally the chivalrous, reckless, half insane Paul I., seeking now with all the bitterness of personal feeling to gratify his resentment against his late allies.

Bonaparte had already begun to work upon the Czar as well as upon the neutral powers. Closely observing the political horizon from his first accession to office, he had noted every condition capable of raising embarrassments to Great Britain, whom his unerring military insight had long before recognized [12] as the key to a military situation, in which his own object was the predominance of France, not only on the Continent but throughout the world. Sagacious a statesman as he was, and clearly as he recognized the power of moral and political motives, his ideal of control was essentially forcible, based upon superior armies and superior fleets; and consequently every political problem was by him viewed much as a campaign, in which forces were to be moved, combined, and finally massed upon the vital points of an enemy's position. The power of Great Britain was sea power in its widest sense, commercial and naval; against it, therefore, he aimed to effect such a combination as would both destroy her commerce and cripple her navy. The impotence of France and Spain, united, to injure the one or the other had been clearly shown by repeated defeats, and by the failure of the commerce-destroying so industriously carried on during seven years of war. Far from decaying or languishing, the commerce of Great Britain throve everywhere with redoubled vigor, and her fleets rode triumphant in all seas. There was, however, one quarter in which she had not hitherto been disturbed, except by the quickly extinguished efforts of the Dutch navy; and just there, in the Baltic and North Sea, was the point where, next to the British islands and seas themselves, she was most vulnerable. There was concentrated a great part of her shipping; there was the market for the colonial produce stored in her overflowing warehouses; there also were gathered three navies, whose united masses—manned by hardy seamen trained in a boisterous navigation and sheltered in an enclosed sea of perilous access—might overweight a force already strained to control the Mediterranean, to blockade the hostile arsenals, and to protect the merchant shipping which thronged over every ocean highway.

To close the north of Europe to British trade, and to combine the Baltic navies against that of Great Britain, became thenceforth the fixed ideas of Bonaparte's life. To conciliate Denmark he released a number of Danish ships, which had been arrested by the Directory for submitting to search by British cruisers. The extent of the czar's alienation from his former allies not being at first apparent, he next courted Prussia, the head of the North German neutrality, in whose power it was to arrest British trade both through her own territory and through Hamburg. Prussia was ambitious to play a leading part in Europe. The five years spent by Austria, France, and Great Britain in exhausting warfare, she had used to consolidate her power and husband her resources. She wished now to pose as a mediator, and looked for the time when the prostration of the combatants and her own restored strength would cause them to bend to her influence, and yield her points, through the simple exhibition of her force. The advances and flatteries of the first consul were graciously received, but the path Prussia had traced for herself was to involve no risks—only gains; she wished much, but would venture naught. It was a dangerous part to play, this waiting on opportunity, against such a man as swayed the destinies of the Continent during the next twelve years. From it arose a hesitating, selfish, and timid policy, fluctuating with every breath of danger or hope of advantage, dishonoring the national name, until it ended in Jena and the agonies of humiliation through which the country passed between that disaster and the overthrow of Napoleon. Such a spirit is prone to side with a strong combination and to yield to a masterful external impulse.

Under this Bonaparte next sought to bring her. "We shall make nothing out of Prussia," he writes to Talleyrand on the first of June, 1800, on his way to Marengo; and he adds, "If the news from Egypt [apparently the defeat of the Turks by Kleber] is confirmed, it will become important to have some one in Russia. The Ottoman Empire cannot exist much longer, and if Paul I. turns his looks in that direction our interests become common." [13] Bonaparte was at no pains to reconcile this view with an assurance made a month later to Turkey that "no anxiety need be felt about Egypt, which will be restored as soon as the Porte shall resume its former relations with France." [14] On the 4th of June he recommends general and flattering overtures to the czar, accompanied by special marks of consideration. The latter was fully prepared to be won by compliments from the man for whose military glory he had come to feel a profound enthusiasm. On the 4th of July Bonaparte's general advances took form in a definite proposal to surrender to Russian troops Malta, whose speedy loss by himself he saw to be inevitable; an offer calculated not only to charm the Czar, who delighted to fancy himself the head and protector of an ancient order of knights, but also to sow discord between him and Great Britain, if, as was probable, the latter declined to yield her prey to a friend who at a critical moment had forsaken her. The letter sketched by the first consul was carefully worded to quicken the ready vanity of its recipient. "Desiring to give a proof of personal consideration to the emperor of Russia and to distinguish him from the other enemies of the republic, who fight from a vile love of gain, the first consul wishes, if the garrison of Malta is constrained by famine to evacuate the place, to restore it to the hands of the czar as grand master of the order; and although the first consul is certain that Malta has provisions for several months, [15] he wishes his Majesty to inform him what conventions he would wish to make, and what measures to take, so that, if the case arise, his troops may enter that place." [16] This was shortly followed by the release of the Russian prisoners in France, in number between seven and eight thousand, whom Bonaparte clad and dismissed with their colors and their officers to return into Russia; suggesting that, if the czar thought proper, he "might demand of the English to release an equal number of French prisoners; but if not, the first consul hoped he would accept his troops as an especial mark of the esteem felt for the brave Russian armies." [17]

Immediately after these transactions occurred the collision between British and Danish cruisers in the Channel, and the entrance of the Baltic by the British fleet, to support its ambassador in his negotiation with Denmark. Paul I. made of the latter a pretext for sequestrating all British property in Russia, to be held as a guarantee against the future action of Great Britain. This order, dated August 29, 1800, was followed by another of September 10, announcing that "several political circumstances induced the emperor to think that a rupture of friendship with England may ensue," and directing a concentration of Russian troops. The cloud blew over for a moment, the sequestration being removed on the 22d of September; but the fall of Malta, which had surrendered on the 5th of the same month, brought matters to an issue. The czar had gladly accepted Bonaparte's adroit advances and designated a general to go to Paris, take command of the released prisoners and with them repair to Malta. The capitulation became known to him early in November; before which he had formally published his intention to revive the Armed Neutrality of 1780 against the maritime claims of Great Britain. It being very doubtful whether the latter would deliver the island after his unfriendly measures, a sequestration of British property was again decreed. Some three hundred ships were seized, their crews marched into the interior, and seals placed on all warehouses containing British property; the czar declaring that the embargo should not be removed until the acknowledgment of his rights to Malta, as grand master of the Order. The sequestrated property was to be held by an imperial commission and applied to pay debts due to Russian subjects by private Englishmen.

Affairs had now reached a stage where Prussia felt encouraged to move. The breach between Great Britain and Russia had opened wide, while the relations of the czar and first consul had become so friendly as to assure their concert. The armistice between Austria and France still continued, pending the decision whether the latter would negotiate with the emperor and Great Britain conjointly; but Bonaparte was a close as well as a hard bargainer. He would not admit the joint negotiation, nor postpone the renewal of hostilities beyond the 11th of September, except on condition of a maritime truce as favorable to France as he considered the land armistice to be to Austria. He proposed entire freedom of navigation to merchant vessels, the raising of the blockades of Brest, Cadiz, Toulon, and Flushing, and that Malta and Alexandria should be freely open to receive provisions by French or neutral vessels. The effect would be to allow the French dockyards to obtain naval stores, of which they were utterly destitute, and Malta and Egypt to receive undefined quantities of supplies and so prolong their resistance indefinitely. Great Britain was only willing to adopt for Egypt and Malta the literal terms of the armistice applied to the three Austrian fortresses blockaded by French troops. These were to receive every fortnight provisions proportioned to their consumption, and the British ministry offered to allow the same to Malta and Egypt. They also conceded free navigation, except in the articles of military and naval stores. Bonaparte refused. Austria's advantage in the armistice, he said, was not the mere retention of the fortresses, but the use she was making of her respite. Between these two extreme views no middle term could be found. In fact, great as were the results of Marengo, and of Moreau's more methodical advance into Germany, the material advantage of Great Britain over France still far exceeded that of France over Austria. The French had gained great successes, but they were now forcing the enemy back upon the centre of his power and they had not possession of his communications; whereas Great Britain had shut off, not merely Egypt and Malta, but France herself from all fruitful intercourse with the outer world. The negotiation for a maritime truce was broken off on the 9th of October. Meanwhile Bonaparte, declining to await its issue, had given notice that hostilities would be resumed between the 5th and 10th of September; and Austria, not yet ready, was fain to purchase a further delay by surrendering the blockaded places, Ulm, Ingolstadt, and Philipsburg. A convention to this effect was concluded, and the renewal of the war postponed for forty-five days dating from September 21st.

In such conditions Prussia saw one of those opportunities which, under Bonaparte's manipulation, so often misled her. The prostration of her German rival would be hastened, and the support of the first consul in the approaching apportionment of indemnities to German states secured, by joining the concert of the Baltic powers against Great Britain. Without this accession to the northern league the quarrel would be mainly naval, and its issue, before the disciplined valor of British seamen, scarcely doubtful. Prussia alone was so situated as to deal the direct and heavy blow at British commerce of closing its accustomed access to the Continent; and the injury thus inflicted so far exceeded any she herself could incidentally receive, as to make this course less hazardous than that of offending the czar and the French government. The political connection of Hanover with Great Britain was a further motive, giving Prussia the hope, so often dangled before her eyes by Bonaparte, of permanently annexing the German dominions of the British king. An occasion soon arose for showing her bias. In the latter part of October a British cruiser seized a Prussian merchantman trying to enter the Texel with a cargo of naval stores. The captor, through stress of weather, took his prize into Cuxhaven, a port at the mouth of the Elbe belonging to Hamburg, through which passed much of the British commerce with the Continent. Prussia demanded its release of the Hamburg senate, and upon refusal ordered two thousand troops to take possession of the port. The senate then bought the prize and delivered it to Prussia, and the British government also directed its restoration; a step of pure policy with which Fox taunted the ministry. It was, as he truly remarked, a concession of principle, dictated by the fact that Prussia, while capable of doing much harm to Great Britain, could not be reached by the British navy.

Whether it was wise to waive a point, in order to withhold an important member from the formidable combination of the North, may be argued; but the attempt met the usual fate of concessions attributed to weakness. The remonstrances of the British ambassador received the reply that the occupation, having been ordered, must be carried out; that the neutrality of Cuxhaven "being thus placed under the guarantee of the king will be more effectually out of the reach of all violation." Such reasoning indicated beyond doubt the stand Prussia was about to take; and her influence fixed the course of Denmark, which is said to have been averse from a step that threatened to stop her trade and would probably make her the first victim of Great Britain's resentment. On the 16th of December a treaty renewing the Armed Neutrality of 1780 was signed at St. Petersburg by Russia and Sweden, and received the prompt adherence of Denmark and Prussia. Its leading affirmations were that neutral ships were free to carry on the coasting and colonial trade of states at war, that enemy's goods under the neutral flag were not subject to seizure, and that blockades, to be respected, must be supported by such a force of ships before the port as to make the attempt to enter hazardous. A definition of contraband was adopted excluding naval stores from that title; and the claim was affirmed that vessels under convoy of a ship of war were not liable to the belligerent right of search. Each of these assertions contested one of the maritime claims upon which Great Britain conceived her naval power, and consequently her place among the nations, to depend; but the consenting states bound themselves to maintain their positions by force, if necessary.

Thus was successfully formed the combination of the Northern powers against Great Britain, the first and most willing of those effected by Bonaparte. By a singular coincidence, which recalls the opportuneness of his departure from England in 1798 to check the yet undivined expedition against Egypt, [18] Nelson, the man destined also to strike this coalition to the ground, was during its formation slowly journeying from the Mediterranean, with which his name and his glory both before and after are most closely associated, to the North Sea; as though again drawn by some mysterious influence, to be at hand for unknown services which he alone could render. On the 11th of July, a week after Bonaparte made his first offer of Malta to the czar, Nelson left Leghorn for Trieste and Vienna. He passed through Hamburg at the very time that the affair of the Prussian prize was under discussion, and landed in England on the 6th of November. Finding his health entirely restored by the land journey, he applied for immediate service, and was assigned to command a division of the Channel fleet under Lord St. Vincent; but he did not go afloat until the 17th of January, 1801, when his flag was hoisted on board the "San Josef," the three-decker he had captured at the battle of Cape St. Vincent. Meanwhile, however, it had been settled between the Admiralty and himself that if a fleet were sent into the Baltic, he should go as second in command to Sir Hyde Parker; and when in the very act of reporting to St. Vincent, the day before he joined the San Josef, a letter arrived from Parker announcing his appointment.

By this time Austria had received a final blow, which forced her to treat alone, and postponed for nearly five years her reappearance in the field. The emperor had sent an envoy to Lunéville, who was met by Joseph Bonaparte as the representative of France; but refusing to make peace apart from Great Britain, hostilities were resumed on the 28th of November. On the 3d of December Moreau won the great battle of Hohenlinden, and then advanced upon Vienna. On the 25th an armistice was signed at Steyer, within a hundred miles of the Austrian capital. Successes, less brilliant but decided, were obtained in Italy, resulting on the 16th of January, 1801, in an armistice between the armies there. At nearly the same moment with this last news the first consul received a letter from the czar, manifesting extremely friendly feelings towards France, while full of hatred towards England, and signifying his intention to send an ambassador to Paris. This filled Bonaparte with sanguine hopes, the expression of which shows how heavily sea power weighed in his estimation. "Peace with the emperor," he wrote to his brother at Lunéville, "is nothing in comparison with the alliance of the czar, which will dominate England and preserve Egypt for us;" [19] and he ordered him to prolong the negotiations until the arrival of the expected ambassador, that the engagements contracted with Germany might be made in concert with Russia. Upon a similar combined action he based extravagant expectations of naval results, dependent upon the impression, with which he so hardly parted, that one set of ships was equal to another. [20] A courier was at once dispatched to Spain to arrange expeditions against Ireland, against Brazil and the East Indies, to the Caribbean Sea for the recovery of the French and Spanish islands, and to the Mediterranean to regain Minorca. "In the embarrassment about to come upon England, threatened in the Archipelago by the Russians and in the northern seas by the combined Powers, it will be impossible for her long to keep a strong squadron in the Mediterranean." [21]

The Russian envoy not arriving, however, Joseph Bonaparte was instructed to bring matters to a conclusion; and on the 9th of February the Austrian minister at Lunéville, after a stubborn fight over the terms, signed a treaty of peace. The principal conditions were: 1. The definitive surrender of all German possessions west of the Rhine, so that the river became the frontier of France from Switzerland to Holland. 2. The cession of Belgium made at Campo Formio was confirmed. 3. In Italy, Austria herself was confined to the east bank of the Adige, and the princes of that house having principalities west of the river were dispossessed; their territories going to the Cisalpine Republic and to an infante of Spain, who was established in Tuscany with the title of King of Etruria. The Cisalpine and Etruria being dependent for their political existence upon France, the latter, through its control of their territory, interposed between Austria and Naples and shut off the British from access to Leghorn. 4. The eleventh article of the treaty guaranteed the independence of the Dutch, Swiss, Cisalpine and Ligurian republics. In its influence upon the future course of events this was the most important of all the stipulations. It gave to the political status of the Continent a definition, upon which Great Britain reckoned in her own treaty with France a few months later; and its virtual violation by Bonaparte became ultimately both the reason and the excuse for her refusal to fulfil the engagements about Malta, which led to the renewal of the war and so finally to the downfall of Napoleon. 5. The German Empire was pledged to give to the princes dispossessed on the west of the Rhine, and in Italy, an indemnity within the empire itself. By this Prussia, which was among the losers, reaped through Bonaparte's influence an abundant recompense for the support already given to his policy in the North. This success induced her to continue the same time-serving opportunism, until, when no longer necessary to France, she was thrown over with a rudeness that roused her to an isolated, and therefore speedily crushed resistance.

CHAPTER XIII.

Events of 1801.

British Expedition to the Baltic—Battle of Copenhagen—Bonaparte's futile attempts to contest control of the Sea—His Continental Policy—Preliminaries of Peace with Great Britain, October, 1801—Influence of Sea Power so far upon the Course of the Revolution.

BY the peace of Lunéville Great Britain was left alone, and for the moment against all Europe. The ministry met the emergency with vigor and firmness, though possibly with too much reliance upon diplomacy and too little upon the military genius of the great seaman whose services were at their disposal. Upon the Continent nothing could be effected, all resistance to France had been crushed by the genius of Bonaparte; but time had to be gained for the expedition then under way against Egypt and destined to compel its evacuation by the French. The combination in the North also must be quickly dissolved, if the country were to treat on anything like equal terms.

An armed negotiation with the Baltic powers, similar to that employed with Denmark the preceding August, was therefore determined; and a fleet of eighteen sail-of-the-line with thirty-five smaller vessels was assembled at Yarmouth, on the east coast of England. Rapidity of movement was essential to secure the advantage from the ice, which, breaking up in the harbors less rapidly than in the open water, would delay the concentration of the hostile navies; and also to allow the Baltic powers the least possible time to prepare for hostilities which they had scarcely anticipated. Everything pointed to Nelson, the most energetic and daring of British admirals, for the chief command of an expedition in which so much depended upon the squadron, numerically inferior to the aggregate of forces arrayed against it, attacking separately each of the component parts before their junction; but Nelson was still among the junior flag-officers, and the rather erratic manner in which, while in the central Mediterranean and under the influence of Lady Hamilton, he had allowed his views of the political situation to affect his actions even in questions of military subordination, had probably excited in Earl Spencer, the First Lord, by whom the officers were selected, a distrust of his fitness for a charge requiring a certain delicacy of discretion as well as vigor of action. Whatever the reason, withholding the chief command from him was unquestionably a mistake,—which would not have been made by St. Vincent, who succeeded Spencer a few weeks later upon the fall of the Pitt ministry. The conditions did not promise a pacific solution when the expedition was planned, and the prospect was even worse when it sailed. The instructions given to Sir Hyde Parker allowed Denmark forty-eight hours to accept Great Britain's terms and withdraw from her engagements with the other Powers. Whether she complied peaceably or not, after she was reduced to submission the division of the Russian fleet at Revel was to be attacked, before the melting ice allowed it to join the main body in Cronstadt; and Sweden was to be similarly dealt with. Under such orders diplomacy had a minor part to play, while in their directness and simplicity they were admirably suited to the fiery temper and prompt military action which distinguished Nelson; and, but for the opportune death of Paul I., Great Britain might have had reason to regret that the opportunity to give Russia a severe reminder of her sea power was allowed to slip through the lax grasp of a sluggish admiral.

The fleet sailed from Yarmouth on the 12th of March, 1801; and on the 19th, although there had been some scattering in a heavy gale, nearly all were collected off the Skaw, the northern point of Jutland at the entrance of the Kattegat. The wind being north-west was fair for going to Copenhagen, and Nelson, if in command, would have advanced at once with the ambassador on board. "While the negotiation is going on," he said, "the Dane should see our flag waving every moment he lifted his head." As it was, the envoy went forward with a frigate alone and the fleet waited. On the 12th it was off Elsineur, where the envoy rejoined, Denmark having rejected the British terms.

This amounted to an acceptance of hostilities, and it only remained to the commander-in-chief to act at once; for the wind was favorable, an advantage which at any moment might be lost. On this day Nelson addressed Parker a letter, summing up in a luminous manner the features of the situation and the different methods of action. "Not a moment should be lost in attacking," he said; "we shall never be so good a match for them as at this moment." He next hinted, what he had probably already said, that the fleet ought to have been off Copenhagen, and not at Elsineur, when the negotiation failed. "Then you might instantly attack and there would be scarcely a doubt but the Danish fleet would be destroyed, and the capital made so hot that Denmark would listen to reason and its true interest." Since, however, the mistake of losing so much time had been made, he seeks to stir his superior to lose no more. "Almost the safety, certainly the honor, of England is more entrusted to you than ever yet fell to the lot of any British officer; ... never did our country depend so much on the success of any fleet as of this."

Having thus shown the necessity for celerity, Nelson next discussed the plan of operations. Copenhagen is on the east side of the island of Zealand, fronting the coast of Sweden, from which it is separated by the passage called the Sound. On the west the island is divided from the other parts of Denmark by the Great Belt. The navigation of the latter being much the more difficult, the preparations of the Danes had been made on the side of the Sound, and chiefly about Copenhagen itself. For half a mile from the shore in front of the city, flats extend, and in the Sound itself at a distance of little over a mile, is a long shoal called the Middle Ground. Between these two bodies of shallow water is a channel, called the King's, through which a fleet of heavy ships could sail, and from whose northern end a deep pocket stretches toward Copenhagen, forming the harbor proper. The natural point of attack therefore appears to be at the north; and there the Danes had erected powerful works, rising on piles out of the shoal water off the harbor's mouth and known as the Three-Crown Batteries. Nelson, however, pointed out that not only was this head of the line exceedingly strong, but that the wind that was fair to attack would be foul to return; therefore a disabled ship would have no escape but by passing through the King's Channel. Doing so she would have to run the gantlet of a line of armed hulks, which the Danes had established as floating batteries along the inner edge of the channel—covering the front of Copenhagen—and would also be separated from her fleet. Nor was this difficulty, which may be called tactical, the only objection to a plan that he disparaged as "taking the bull by the horns." He remarked that so long as the British fleet remained in the Sound, without entering the Baltic, the way was left open for both the Swedes and the Russians, if released by the ice, to make a junction with the Danes. Consequently, he advised that a sufficiently strong force of the lighter ships-of-the-line should pass outside the Middle Ground, despite the difficulties of navigation, which were not insuperable, and come up in rear of the city. There they would interpose between the Danes and their allies, and be in position to assail the weaker part of the hostile order. He offered himself to lead this detachment.

Battle of Copenhagen.
[Click here for larger map]

This whole letter of March 24, 1801, [22] possesses peculiar interest; for it shows with a rare particularity, elicited by the need he felt of arousing and convincing his superior, Nelson's clear discernment of the decisive features of a military situation. The fame of this great admiral has depended less upon his conduct of campaigns than upon the renowned victories he won in the actual collision of fleet with fleet; and even then has been mutilated by the obstinacy with which, despite the perfectly evident facts, men have persisted in seeing in them nothing but dash,—heart, not head. [23] Throughout his correspondence, it is true, there are frequent traces of the activity of his mental faculties and of the general accuracy of his military conclusions; but ordinarily it is from his actions that his reasonings and principles must be deduced. In the present case we have the views he held and the course he evidently would have pursued clearly formulated by himself; and it cannot but be a subject of regret that the naval world should have lost so fine an illustration as he would there have given of the principles and conduct of naval warfare. He concluded his letter with a suggestion worthy of Napoleon himself, and which, if adopted, would have brought down the Baltic Confederacy with a crash that would have resounded throughout Europe. "Supposing us through the Belt with the wind first westerly, would it not be possible to go with the fleet, or detach ten ships of three and two decks, with one bomb and two fire-ships, to Revel, to destroy the Russian squadron at that place? I do not see the great risk of such a detachment, and with the remainder to attempt the business at Copenhagen. The measure may be thought bold, but I am of opinion the boldest are the safest; and our country demands a most vigorous exertion of her force, directed with judgment."

Committed as the Danes were to a stationary defence, this recommendation to strike at the soul of the confederacy evinced the clearest perception of the key to the situation, which Nelson himself summed up in the following words: "I look upon the Northern League to be like a tree, of which Paul was the trunk and Sweden and Denmark the branches. If I can get at the trunk and hew it down, the branches fall of course; but I may lop the branches and yet not be able to fell the tree, and my power must be weaker when its greatest strength is required" [24]—that is, the Russians should have been attacked before the fleet was weakened, as it inevitably must be, by the battle with the Danes. "If we could have cut up the Russian fleet," he said again, "that was my object." Whatever Denmark's wishes about fighting, she was by her continental possessions tied to the policy of Russia and Prussia, either of whom could overwhelm her by land. She dared not disregard them. The course of both depended upon the czar; for the temporizing policy of Prussia would at once embrace his withdrawal from the league as an excuse for doing the same. At Revel were twelve Russian ships-of-the-line, fully half their Baltic fleet, whose destruction would have paralyzed the remainder and the naval power of the empire. To persuade Parker to such a step was, however, hopeless. "Our fleet would never have acted against Russia and Sweden," wrote Nelson afterwards, "although Copenhagen would have been burned; for Sir Hyde Parker was determined not to leave Denmark hostile in his rear;" [25] a reason whose technical accuracy under all the circumstances was nothing short of pedantic, and illustrates the immense distance between a good and accomplished officer, which Parker was, and a genius whose comprehension of rules serves only to guide, not to fetter, his judgment.

Although unable to rise equal to the great opportunity indicated by Nelson, Sir Hyde Parker adopted his suggestion as to the method and direction of the principal attack upon the defences of Copenhagen. For this, Nelson asked ten ships-of-the-line and a number of smaller vessels, with which he undertook to destroy the floating batteries covering the front of the city. These being reduced, the bomb vessels could be placed so as to play with effect upon the dockyard, arsenals, and the town, in case further resistance was made.

The nights of the 30th and 31st of March were employed sounding the channel. On the first of April the fleet moved up to the north end of the Middle Ground, about four miles from the city; and that afternoon Nelson's division, to which Parker had assigned two ships-of-the-line more than had been asked—or twelve altogether—got under way, passed through the outer channel and anchored towards sundown off the south-east end of the shoal, two miles from the head [26] of the Danish line. Nelson announced his purpose to attack as soon as the wind served; and the night was passed by him in arranging the order of battle. The enterprise was perilous, not on account of the force to be engaged, but because of the great difficulties of navigation. The pilots were mostly mates of merchantmen trading with the Baltic; and their experience in vessels of three or four hundred tons did not fit them for the charge of heavy battle-ships. They betrayed throughout great indecision, and their imperfect knowledge contributed to the principal mishaps of the day, as well as to a comparative incompleteness in the results of victory.

The next morning the wind came fair at south-south-east, and at eight A. M. the British captains were summoned to the flag-ship for their final instructions. The Danish line to be attacked extended in a north-west and south-east direction for somewhat over a mile. It was composed of hulks and floating batteries, eighteen to twenty in number and mounting 628 guns, of which about 375 would—fighting thus at anchor—be on the engaged side. The southern flank now to be assailed was partly supported by works on shore; but from the intervening shoal water these were too distant for thoroughly efficient fire. Being thus distinctly weaker than the northern extremity, which was covered by the Three-Crown Battery and a second line of heavy ships, this southern end was most properly chosen by the British as the point of their chief assault for tactical reasons, independently of the strategic advantage urged by Nelson in thus interposing between the enemy and his allies. At half-past nine signal was made to weigh. The ships were soon under sail; but the difficulties of pilotage, despite careful soundings made during the night by an experienced naval captain, were soon apparent. The "Agamemnon," of sixty-four guns, was unable to weather the point of the Middle Ground, and had to anchor out of range. She had no share in the battle. The "Bellona" and "Russell," seventy-fours, the fourth and fifth in the order, entered the Channel; but keeping too far to the eastward they ran ashore on its farther side—upon the Middle Ground. They were not out of action, but beyond the range of the most efficient gunnery under the conditions of that period. Nelson's flag-ship following them passed clear, as did the rest of the heavy ships; but the loss of these three out of the line prevented by so much its extension to the northward. The result was to expose that part of the British order to a weight of fire quite disproportioned to its strength. A body of frigates very gallantly undertook to fill the gap, which they could do but inadequately, and suffered heavy loss in attempting.

The battle was at its height at half-past eleven. There was then no more manœuvring, but the simple question of efficient gunnery and endurance. At about two P. M. a great part of the Danish line had ceased to fire, and the flag-ship "Dannebrog" was in flames. During the action the Danish crews were frequently re-enforced from the shore; and the new-comers in several cases, reaching the ships after they had struck, renewed the fight, either through ignorance or indifference to the fact. The land batteries also fired on boats trying to take possession. Nelson seized on this circumstance to bring the affair to a conclusion. He wrote a letter addressed "To the brothers of Englishmen, the Danes," and sent it under flag of truce to the Crown Prince, who was in the city. "Lord Nelson has directions to spare Denmark when no longer resisting; but if the firing is continued on the part of Denmark, Lord Nelson will be obliged to set on fire all the floating batteries he has taken, without having the power of saving the brave Danes who have defended them." The letter was sent on shore by a British officer who had served in the Russian navy and spoke Danish. The engagement continued until about three P. M., when the whole line of floating defences south-east of the Crown Batteries had either struck or been destroyed.

The fortifications were still unharmed, as were the ships west of them covering the harbor proper; but their fire was stopped by the bearer of a flag of truce who was bringing to Nelson the reply of the Crown Prince. The latter demanded the precise purport of the first message. Nelson took a high hand. He had destroyed the part of the enemy's line which he had attacked; but it was important now to withdraw his crippled ships, and with the existing wind that could only be done by passing the Crown Batteries. Had the three that ran aground been in the line, it is permissible to believe that that work would have been so far injured as to be practically harmless; but this was far from the case. The admiral in his second letter politicly ignored this feature of the situation. He wrote, "Lord Nelson's object in sending on shore a flag of truce is humanity; [27] he therefore consents that hostilities shall cease till Lord Nelson can take his prisoners out of the prizes, and he consents to land all the wounded Danes and to burn or remove his prizes. Lord Nelson, with humble duty to His Royal Highness, begs leave to say that he will ever esteem it the greatest victory he ever gained, if this flag of truce may be the happy forerunner of a lasting and happy union between my most gracious Sovereign and His Majesty the King of Denmark." Having written the letter, he referred the bearer for definite action to Sir Hyde Parker, who lay some four miles off in the "London;" foreseeing that the long pull there and back would give time for the leading ships, which were much crippled, to clear the shoals, though their course for so doing lay close under the Crown Batteries. Thus the exposed part of the British fleet was successfully removed from a dangerous position and rejoined Parker north of the Middle Ground. The advantage obtained by Nelson's presence of mind and promptness in gaining this respite was shown by the difficulties attending the withdrawal. Three out of five ships-of-the-line grounded, two of which remained fast for several hours a mile from the batteries, but protected by the truce.

The result of the battle of Copenhagen was to uncover the front of the city and lay it, with its dockyards and arsenals, open to bombardment. It was now safe to place the bomb vessels in the King's Channel. It became a question for Denmark to decide, whether fear of her powerful allies and zeal for the claims of neutrals should lead her to undergo further punishment, or whether the suffering already endured and the danger still threatening were excuse sufficient for abandoning the coalition. On the other hand, Nelson, who was the brains as well as the backbone of the British power in the North, cared little, either now or before the battle, about the attitude of Denmark, except as it deterred Parker from advancing. Now, as before, his one idea was to get at the Russian division still locked in Revel by the ice. The negotiations were carried on by him and resulted in an armistice for fourteen weeks, after which hostilities could be resumed upon fourteen days' notice. Thus was assured to Parker for four months the entire immunity he desired for his communications. Fear of Russia long deterred the Danes from this concession, which Nelson frankly told them he must have, so as to be at liberty to act against the Russian fleet and return to them; and he made it the indispensable requisite to sparing the city. During the discussions, however, the Crown Prince received news of the czar's death. Paul I. had been murdered by a body of conspirators on the night of March 24. The Danish government concealed the tidings; but the departure of the soul of the confederacy relieved their worst fears and encouraged them to yield to Nelson's demands.

Denmark's part in the Armed Neutrality was suspended during the continuance of the armistice; but the British ministers showed as little appreciation of the military situation as did their commander-in-chief in the Baltic. "Upon a consideration of all the circumstances," they wrote to Nelson, [28] "His Majesty has thought fit to approve the armistice." Nelson was naturally and justly indignant at this absurdly inadequate understanding of the true nature of services, concerning whose military character a French naval critic has truly said that "they will always be in the eyes of seamen his fairest title to glory. He alone was capable of displaying such boldness and perseverance; he alone could confront the immense difficulties of that enterprise and overcome them." [29] But his conduct at Copenhagen, brilliant as was the display of energy, of daring and of endurance, was far from exhausting the merits of his Baltic campaign. He had lifted and carried on his shoulders the dead weight of his superior, he had clearly read the political as well as the military situation, and he never for one moment lost sight of the key to both. To bombard Copenhagen was to his mind a useless piece of vandalism, which would embitter a nation that ought to be conciliated, and destroy the only hold Great Britain still had over Denmark. [30] Except for the necessity of managing his lethargic and cautious commander-in-chief, we may believe he would never have contemplated it; but under the circumstances he used the threat as the one means by which he could extort truce from Denmark and induce Parker to move. With the latter to handle, the armistice slipped the knot of the military difficulty; it was the one important point, alongside which every other fell into insignificance. "My object," he said, "was to get at Revel before the frost broke up at Cronstadt, that the twelve sail-of-the-line might be destroyed." Well might St. Vincent write, "Your Lordship's whole conduct, from your first appointment to this hour, is the subject of our constant admiration. It does not become me to make comparisons; all agree there is but one Nelson."

Meantime, while the British fleet had been dallying in the approaches to the Baltic, important events had occurred, furthering the projects of Bonaparte in the North and seriously complicating the position of Great Britain. No formal declaration of war was at any time issued by the latter country; but its government had not unjustly regarded as an act of direct hostility the combination of Denmark, Sweden, and Prussia, to support the czar in a course first undertaken to assure his claim upon Malta, and in furtherance of which he had seized as pledges three hundred British merchant vessels with their crews. [31] As an offset to the British interests thus foreclosed upon by Russia, and to negotiate upon somewhat equal terms, the government, on the 14th of January, 1801, ordered an embargo laid upon Russian, Danish, and Swedish vessels in British ports, and the seizure of merchant ships of these powers at sea. Of four hundred and fifty Swedish vessels then abroad, two hundred were detained or brought into British harbors. They were not, however, condemned as prizes, but held inviolable to await the issue of the existing difficulties. To the remonstrances of Sweden and Denmark, supported by Prussia, the British ministry replied definitely, on the 7th of March, that the embargo would not be revoked so long as the Powers affected "continued to form part of a confederacy which had for its object to impose by force on his Majesty a new system of maritime law, inconsistent with the dignity and independence of his crown, and the rights and interests of his people." [32] In consequence of this and of the entrance of the Sound by Parker's fleet, Prussia, on the 30th of March, and as a measure of retaliation, closed the mouths of the Elbe, the Weser, and the Ems—in other words, the ports of North Germany—against British commerce, and took possession of the German states belonging to the king of Great Britain. On the same day a corps of Danish troops occupied Hamburg, more certainly to stop British trade therewith.

Thus Bonaparte's conception was completely realized. There was not only a naval combination against Great Britain, but also an exclusion of her trade from one of its chief markets. The danger, however, was much less than it seemed. On the one hand, while the annoyances to neutral navigation were indisputable, the advantages it drew from the war were far greater; its interests really demanded peace, even at the price set by Great Britain. On the other hand, the more important claims of the great Sea Power, however judged by standards of natural right, had prescription on their side; and in the case of contraband, whatever may be thought of classifying naval stores as such, there was for it a colorable pretext in the fact that France then had no merchant shipping, except coasters; that naval stores entering her ports were almost certainly for ships of war; and that it was in part to the exclusion of such articles that Great Britain owed the maritime supremacy, which alone among armed forces had successfully defied Bonaparte. In short, the interest of the Northern states was to yield the points in dispute, while that of Great Britain was not to yield; a truth not only asserted by the ministry but conceded in the main by the opposition. There needed therefore only to throw a little weight into one scale, or to take a little from the other, to turn the balance; while the coalition would dissolve entirely either upon decisive naval operations by Great Britain, or upon the death of Paul I. The czar was the only person embarked heart and soul in the Northern quarrel, because the only one deaf to the call of clear interest. Herein is apparent the crying mistake of intrusting the conduct of the naval campaign to another than Nelson. The time placidly consumed by Parker in deliberations and talking would have sufficed his lieutenant to scour the Baltic, to destroy the Russians at Revel as he did the Danish line at Copenhagen, and to convince the neutral states of the hopelessness of the struggle. Fortunately for Great Britain, the interests of Russian proprietors, which were bound up with British commerce, and hardly yielded eight years later to restrictions imposed by the popular Alexander I., rebelled against the measures of a ruler whose insanity was no longer doubtful. The murder of Paul opened the way for peace.

Among the first measures of the new czar was the release of the British seamen imprisoned by his father. This order was dated April 7. On the 12th the British ships entered the Baltic,—much to the surprise of the Northern Powers, who thought their heavy draught would prevent. The three-deckers had to remove their guns to pass some shoal ground ten miles above Copenhagen. After an excursion to intercept a Swedish fleet said to be at sea, Parker anchored his ships in Kioge Bay,—off the coast of Zealand just within the entrance to the Baltic,—and there awaited further instructions from home; the Russian minister at Copenhagen having informed him that the new czar would not go to war. [33] Nelson entirely disapproved of this inactive attitude. Russia might yield the conditions of Great Britain, but she would be more likely to do so if the British fleet lay off the harbor of Revel. This seems also to have been the view of the ministry. It received news of the battle of Copenhagen on April 15, and at about the same date learned the death of Paul I. Advantage was very properly taken of the latter to adopt a policy of conciliation. On the 17th orders were issued to Parker modifying his first instructions. If Alexander removed the embargo and released the seamen, all hostile movements were to be suspended. If not, a cessation of hostilities was to be offered, if Russia were willing to treat; but upon condition that, until these ships and men were released, the Revel division should not join that in Cronstadt, nor vice versâ. [34] This presumed a position of the British fleet very different from Kioge Bay, over four hundred miles from Revel.

Four days later, orders were issued relieving Parker and leaving Nelson in command. Taken as this step was, only a week after the news of a victory, it can scarcely be construed otherwise than as an implied censure. To this view an expression of Nelson's lends color. "They are not Sir Hyde Parker's real friends who wish for an inquiry," he wrote to a confidential correspondent. "His friends in the fleet wish everything of this fleet to be forgot, for we all respect and love Sir Hyde; but the dearer his friends, the more uneasy they have been at his idleness, for that is the truth—no criminality." [35] The orders were received on May 5. Nelson's first signal was to hoist the boats aboard and prepare to weigh. "If Sir Hyde were gone," he wrote the same afternoon, "I would now be under sail." On the 7th the fleet left Kioge Bay and on the 12th appeared off Revel. The Russian division had sailed three days before and was now safe under the guns of Cronstadt. From Revel Nelson dispatched very complimentary letters to the Russian minister of foreign affairs, but received in reply the message that "the only proof of the loyalty of his intentions that the czar could accept was the prompt withdrawal of his fleet; and that until then no negotiation could proceed." "I do not believe he would have written such a letter," said Nelson, "if the Russian fleet had been in Revel;" [36] but the bird was flown, and with a civil explanation he withdrew from the port. He still remained in the Baltic, awaiting the issue of the negotiations; but Russia meant peace, and on the 17th of May the czar ordered the release of the embargoed British ships. On the 4th of June Great Britain also released the Danes and Swedes detained in her ports. Russia and Prussia had already agreed, on the 27th of April, that hostile measures against England should cease, Hamburg and Hanover be evacuated, and the free navigation of the rivers restored.

On the 17th of June was signed at St. Petersburg a convention between Russia and Great Britain, settling the points that had been in dispute. The question of Malta was tacitly dropped. As regards neutral claims Russia conceded that the neutral flag should not cover enemy's goods; and while she obtained the formal admission that articles of hostile origin which had become bonâ fide neutral property were exempt from seizure, she yielded the very important exception of colonial produce. This, no matter who the owner, could not by a neutral be carried direct from the colony to the mother country of a nation at war. [37] Great Britain, on the other hand, conceded the right of neutrals to carry on the coasting trade of a belligerent; and that naval stores should not be classed as contraband of war. The latter was an important concession, the former probably not, coasting trade being ordinarily done by small craft especially adapted to the local conditions. As regards searching merchant vessels under convoy of a ship of war, Russia yielded the principle and Great Britain accepted methods which would make the process less offensive. Privateers in such case could not search. The question was unimportant; for neutral merchant ships will not lightly submit to the restraint and delays of convoy, and so lose the chief advantage, that of speed, which they have over belligerents. When a neutral sees necessary to convoy her merchantmen, the very fact shows relations already strained.

Sweden and Denmark necessarily followed the course of Russia and acceded to all the terms of the convention between that court and Great Britain; Sweden on the 23d of October, 1801, and Denmark on the 30th of the following March. The claim to carry colonial produce to Europe, thus abandoned, was of importance to them, though not to Russia. At the same time the Baltic states renewed among themselves the engagements, which they had relinquished in their convention with Great Britain, that the neutral flag should cover enemy's property on board and that the convoy of a ship of war should exempt merchant vessels from search. These principles were in point of fact modifications sought to be introduced into international law, and not prescriptive rights, as commonly implied by French historians [38] dealing with this question. For this reason both the United States and the Baltic powers, while favoring the new rule, were little disposed to attempt by arms to compel the surrender by Great Britain of a claim sanctioned by long custom.

Thus had fallen resultless, as far as the objects of the first consul were concerned, the vast combination against Great Britain which he had fostered in the North. During its short existence he had actively pursued in the south of Europe, against Naples and Portugal, other measures intended further to embarrass, isolate, and cripple the great Sea Power, and to facilitate throwing much needed supplies and re-enforcements into Egypt. "The ambassador of the republic," he wrote in February, 1801, "will make the Spanish ministry understand that we must at whatsoever cost become masters of the Mediterranean.... France will have fifteen ships-of-the-line in the Mediterranean before the equinox; and, if Spain will join to them fifteen others, the English, who are about to have the ports of Lisbon, Sicily, and Naples closed to them, will not be able to keep thirty ships in the Mediterranean. That being so, I doubt not they will evacuate Mahon, being unable to remain in that sea." [39]

For the closure of the ports Bonaparte relied with good reason upon his armies; but in the concurrent expectation of uniting thirty French and Spanish ships he reckoned without his host, as he did also upon the Russian Black Sea fleet, and the numbers the British must keep in the Baltic and off Brest. After the armistice with Austria in Italy, a corps under Murat was pushed toward Naples; and on the same day that the treaty of Lunéville was concluded, February 9, a truce for thirty days was signed with the Two Sicilies. This was followed on the 28th of March by a definitive treaty of peace. Naples engaged to exclude from all her ports, including those of Sicily, the ships both of war and commerce belonging to Great Britain and Turkey; while those of France and her allies, as well as of the Northern powers, should have free access. She also suffered some slight territorial loss; but the most significant article was kept secret. The boot of Italy was to be occupied by a division of twelve or fifteen thousand French, whom Naples was to pay and support, and to whom were to be delivered all the maritime fortresses south of the river Ofanto and east of the Bradano, including the ports of Taranto and Brindisi. "This occupation," wrote Bonaparte to his war-minister, "is only in order to facilitate the communications of the army of Egypt with France." [40] The Neapolitan ports became a refuge for French squadrons; while the army of occupation stood ready to embark, if any body of ships found their way to those shores. Unfortunately, the combined British and Turkish armies had already landed in Egypt, and had won the battle of Alexandria a week before the treaty with Naples was signed. As a speedy result the French in Egypt were divided; part being forced back upon Cairo and part shut up in Alexandria,—while the fleet of Admiral Keith cruised off the coast.

No French squadron succeeded in carrying to Egypt the desired re-enforcements, notwithstanding the numerous efforts made by the first consul. The failure arose from two causes: the penury of the French arsenals, and the difficulty of a large body of ships escaping together, or of several small bodies effecting a combination, in face of the watchfulness of the British. Both troubles were due mainly to the rigid and methodical system introduced by Earl St. Vincent; who, fortunately for Great Britain, assumed command of the Channel fleet at the same time that Bonaparte sought to impress upon the French navy a more sagacious direction and greater energy of action. His instructions to Admiral Bruix in February, 1800, [41] were to sail from Brest with over thirty French and Spanish sail-of-the-line, to drive the British blockaders from before the port, to relieve Malta, send a light squadron to Egypt, and then bring his fleet to Toulon, where it would be favorably placed to control the Mediterranean. Delay ensuing, owing to lack of supplies and the unwillingness of the Spaniards, he wrote again at the end of March, "If the equinox passes without the British fleet dispersing, then, great as is our interest in raising the blockade of Malta and carrying help to Egypt, they must be abandoned;" [42] and throughout the summer months he confined his action to the unremitting efforts, already noticed, to keep a stream of small vessels constantly moving towards Egypt.

After the autumn equinox Bonaparte again prepared for a grand naval operation. Admiral Ganteaume was detailed to sail from Brest with seven ships-of-the-line, carrying besides their crews four thousand troops and an immense amount of material. "Admiral Ganteaume," wrote he to Menou, commander-in-chief in Egypt, "brings to your army the succor we have not before been able to send. He will hand you this letter." The letter was dated October 29, 1800, but it never reached its destination. Ganteaume could not get out from Brest till nearly three months later, when, on January 23d, 1801, a terrible north-east gale drove off the British squadron and enabled him to put to sea. "A great imprudence," says Thiers, "but what could be done in presence of an enemy's fleet which incessantly blockaded Brest in all weathers, and only retired when cruising became impossible. It was necessary either never to go out, or to do so in a tempest which should remove the British squadron." The incident of the sortie, as well as Ganteaume's subsequent experiences, illustrates precisely the deterrent effect exercised by St. Vincent's blockades. [43] They could not prevent occasional escapes, but they did throw obstacles nearly insuperable in the way of combining and executing any of the major operations of war. Owing to the weather which had to be chosen for starting, the squadron was at once dispersed and underwent considerable damage. [44] It was not all reunited till a week later. On the 9th of February it passed Gibraltar; but news of its escape had already reached the British admiral Warren cruising off Cadiz, who followed quickly, entering Gibraltar only twenty-hours after the French went by. On the 13th of January Ganteaume captured a British frigate, from which he learned that the Mediterranean fleet under Lord Keith was then convoying an army of fifteen thousand British troops against Egypt. He expected that Warren also would soon be after him, and the injuries received in the gale weighed upon his mind. Considering all the circumstances, he decided to abandon Egypt and go to Toulon. Warren remained cruising in the Mediterranean watching for the French admiral, who twice again started for his destination. The first time he was obliged to return by a collision between two ships. The second, an outbreak of disease compelled him to send back three of the squadron. The other four reached the African coast some distance west of Alexandria, where they undertook to land the troops; but Keith's fleet appeared on the horizon, and, cutting their cables, they made a hasty retreat, without having effected their object.

Similar misfortune attended Bonaparte's attempt to collect an efficient force in Cadiz, where Spain had been induced or compelled to yield to him six ships-of-the-line, and where she herself had some vessels. To these he intended to send a large detachment from Rochefort under Admiral Bruix, who was to command the whole, when combined. To concentrations at any point, however, British squadrons before the ports whence the divisions were to sail imposed obstacles, which, even if occasionally evaded, were fatal to the final great design. The advantage of the central position was consistently realized. On the other hand, where a great number of ships happened to be together, as at Brest in 1801, the want of supplies, caused by the same close watch and by the seizure of naval stores as contraband, paralyzed their equipment. Finding himself baffled at Brest for these reasons, the first consul appointed Rochefort for the first concentration. When the second was effected at Cadiz, Bruix was to hold himself ready for further operations. If Egypt could not be directly assisted, it might be indirectly by harassing the British communications. "Every day," wrote Bonaparte, "a hundred sails pass the straits under weak convoy, to supply Malta and the English fleet." If this route were flanked at Cadiz, by a squadron like that of Bruix, much exertion would be needed to protect it. But the concentration at Rochefort failed, the ships from Brest could not get there, and the Rochefort ships themselves never sailed.

Coincidently with this attempt, another effort was made to strengthen the force at Cadiz. [45] The three vessels sent back by Ganteaume, after his second sailing from Toulon, were also ordered to proceed there, under command of Rear Admiral Linois. Linois successfully reached the Straits of Gibraltar, but there learned from a prize that seven British ships were cruising off his destination. These had been sent with Admiral Saumarez from the Channel fleet, to replace Warren, when the admiralty learned the active preparations making in Cadiz and the French ports. Not venturing to proceed against so superior an enemy, Linois put into Gibraltar Bay, anchoring on the Spanish side under the guns of Algesiras. Word was speedily sent to Saumarez; and on July 6, two days after Linois anchored, six British ships were seen rounding the west point of the bay. They attacked at once; but the wind was baffling, they could not get their positions, and both flanks of the French line were supported by shore batteries, which were efficiently worked by soldiers landed from the squadron. The attack was repulsed, and one British seventy-four that grounded under a battery was forced to strike. Saumarez withdrew under Gibraltar and proceeded to refit; the crews working all day and by watches at night to gain the opportunity to revenge their defeat. Linois sent to Cadiz for the help he needed, and on the 10th five Spanish ships-of-the-line and one French [46] from there anchored off Algesiras. On the 12th they got under way with Linois's three, and at the same time Saumarez with his six hauled out from Gibraltar. The allies retreated upon Cadiz, the British following. During the night the van of the pursuers brought the hostile rear to action, and a terrible scene ensued. A Spanish three-decker caught fire, and in the confusion was taken for an enemy by one of her own fleet of the same class. The two ships, of one hundred and twelve guns each and among the largest in the world, ran foul of each other and perished miserably in a common conflagration. The French "St. Antoine" was captured.

The incident of Saumarez's meeting with Linois has a particular value, because of the repulse and disaster to the British vessels on the first occasion. Unvarying success accounts, or seems to account, for itself; but in this case the advantage of the squadron's position before Cadiz transpires through a failure on the battle-field. To that position was due, first, that Linois's detachment could not make its junction; second, that it was attacked separately and very severely handled; third, that in the retreat to Cadiz the three French ships were not in proper condition to engage, although one of them when brought to action made a very dogged resistance to, and escaped from, an inferior ship. Consequently, the six British that pursued had only six enemies instead of nine to encounter. After making allowance for the very superior quality of the British officers and crews over the Spanish, it is evident the distinguishing feature in these operations was that the British squadron brought the enemies' divisions to action separately. It was able to do so because it had been kept before the hostile port, interposing between them.

Saumarez had wrung success out of considerable difficulty. The failure of the wind greatly increased the disadvantage to his vessels, coming under sail into action with others already drawn up at anchor, and to whom the loss of spars for the moment meant little. These circumstances, added to the support of the French by land batteries and some gunboats, went far to neutralize tactically the superior numbers of the British. With all deductions, however, the fight at Algesiras was extremely creditable to Linois. He was a man not only distinguished for courage, but also of a cautious temper peculiarly fitted to secure every advantage offered by a defensive position. Despite his success there, the broad result was decisively in favor of his opponents. "Sir James Saumarez's action," wrote Lord St. Vincent, "has put us upon velvet." Seven British had worsted nine enemy's ships, as distinctly superior, for the most part, in individual force as they were in numbers. Not only had the Spaniards three of ninety guns and over, and one of eighty, but two of Linois's were of the latter class, of which Saumarez had but one. The difference between such and the seventy-fours was not only in number of pieces, but in weight also. The substantial issue, however, can be distinguished from the simple victory, and it was secured not only by superior efficiency but also by strategic disposition.

Brilliant as was Saumarez's achievement, which Nelson, then in England, warmly extolled in the House of Lords, the claim made by his biographer, that to these operations alone was wholly due the defeat of Bonaparte's plan, is exaggerated. It was arranged, he says, that when the junction was made, the Cadiz ships should proceed off Lisbon, sack that place, and destroy British merchantmen lying there; "then, being re-enforced by the Brest fleet, they were to pass the Straits of Gibraltar, steer direct for Alexandria, and there land such a body of troops as would raise the siege and drive the English out of Egypt. This would certainly have succeeded had the squadron under Linois not encountered that of Sir James, which led to the total defeat of their combined fleets and to the abandonment of the grand plan." [47] This might be allowed to stand as a harmless exhibition of a biographer's zeal, did it not tend to obscure the true lesson to be derived from this whole naval period, by attributing to a single encounter, however brilliant, results due to an extensive, well-conceived general system. Sir James Saumarez's operations were but an epitome of an action going on everywhere from the Baltic to Egypt. By this command of the sea the British fleets, after they had adopted the plan of close-watching the enemy's ports, held everywhere interior positions, which, by interposing between the hostile detachments, facilitated beating them in detail. For the most part this advantage of position resulted in quietly detaining the enemy in port, and so frustrating his combinations. It was Saumarez's good fortune to illustrate how it could also enable a compact body of highly disciplined ships to meet in rapid succession two parts of a force numerically very superior, and by the injuries inflicted on each neutralize the whole for a definite time. But, had he never seen Linois, Bonaparte's plan still required the junctions from Rochefort and Brest which were never effected.

By naval combinations and by holding the Neapolitan ports Bonaparte sought to preserve Egypt and force Great Britain to peace. "The question of maritime peace," he wrote to Ganteaume, [48] "hangs now upon the English expedition to Egypt." Portugal, the ancient ally of Great Britain, was designed to serve other purposes of his policy,—to furnish equivalents, with which to wrest from his chief enemy the conquests that the sea power of France and her allies could not touch. "Notify our minister at Madrid," wrote he to Talleyrand, September 30, 1800, "that the Spanish troops must be masters of Portugal before October 15. This is the only means by which we can have an equivalent for Malta, Mahon, and Trinidad. Besides, the danger of Portugal will be keenly felt in England, and will by so much quicken her disposition to peace."

A secret treaty ceding Louisiana to France, in return for Tuscany to the Spanish infante, had been signed the month before; and Spain at the same time undertook to bring Portugal to break with Great Britain. Solicitation proving ineffectual, Bonaparte in the spring again demanded the stronger measure of an armed occupation of the little kingdom; growing more urgent as it became evident that Egypt was slipping from his grasp. Spain finally agreed to invade Portugal, and accepted the co-operation of a French corps. The first consul purposed to occupy at least three of the Portuguese provinces; but he was outwitted by the adroitness of the Spanish government, unwillingly submissive to his pressure, and by the compliance of his brother Lucien, French minister to Madrid. Portugal made no efficient resistance; and the two peninsular courts quickly reached an agreement, by which the weaker closed her ports to Great Britain, paid twenty million francs to France, and ceded a small strip of territory to Spain.

Bonaparte was enraged at this treaty, which was ratified without giving him a chance to interfere; [49] but in the summer of 1801 his diplomatic game reached a stage where further delay was impossible. He saw that the loss of Egypt was only a question of time; but so long as any French troops held out there it was a card in his hand, too valuable to risk for the trifling gain of a foothold in Portugal. "The English are not masters of Egypt," he writes boldly on the 23d of July to the French agent in London. "We have certain news that Alexandria can hold out a year, and Lord Hawkesbury knows that Egypt is in Alexandria;" [50] but four days later he sends the hopeless message to Murat, "There is no longer any question of embarking" [51] the troops about Taranto, sent there for the sole purpose of being nearer to Egypt. [52] He continues, in sharp contrast with his former expectation, "The station of the troops upon the Adriatic is intended to impose upon the Turks and the English, and to serve as material for compensation to the latter by evacuating those provinces." Both Naples and Portugal were too distant, too ex-centric, and thrust too far into contact with the British dominion of the sea to be profitably, or even safely, held by France in her condition of naval debility; a truth abundantly witnessed by the later events of Napoleon's reign, by the disastrous occupation of Portugal in 1807, by the reverses of Soult and Masséna in 1809 and 1811, and by the failure even to attempt the conquest of Sicily.

Russia and Prussia had grown less friendly since the death of Paul. Even their agreement that Hanover should be evacuated, disposed as they now were to please Great Britain, was to be postponed until "it was ascertained that a certain power would not occupy that country;" [53] a stipulation which betrayed the distrust felt by both. Since then each had experienced evasions and rebuffs showing the unwillingness of the first consul to meet their wishes in his treatment of the smaller states; and they suspected, although they did not yet certainly know, the steps already taken to incorporate with France regions to whose independence they held. [54] Both were responding to the call of their interests, beneficially and vitally connected with the sea power of Great Britain, and threatened on the Continent by the encroaching course of the French ruler. Bonaparte felt that the attempt to make further gains in Europe, with which to traffic against those of Great Britain abroad, might arouse resistance in these great powers, not yet exhausted like Austria, and so indefinitely postpone the maritime peace essential to the revival of the French navy and the re-establishment of the colonial system; both at this time objects of prime importance in his eyes. Thus it was that, beginning the year 1801 without a single ally, in face of the triumphant march of the French armies and of a formidable maritime combination, the Sea Power of Great Britain had dispersed the Northern coalition, commanded the friendship of the great states, retained control of the Mediterranean, reduced Egypt to submission, and forced even the invincible Bonaparte to wish a speedy cessation of hostilities.

The great aim of the first consul now was to bring Great Britain to terms before news of the evacuation of Alexandria could come to hand. Negotiations had been slowly progressing for nearly six months; the first advances having been made on the 21st of March by the new ministry which came into power upon Pitt's resignation. Both parties being inclined to peace, the advantage necessarily belonged to the man who, untrammelled by associates in administration, held in absolute control the direction of his country. The Addington ministry, hampered by its own intrinsic weakness and by the eagerness of the nation, necessarily yielded before the iron will of one who was never more firm in outward bearing than in the most critical moments. He threatened them with the occupation of Hanover; he intimated great designs for which troops were embarked at Rochefort, Brest, Toulon, Cadiz, and ready to embark in Holland; he boasted that Alexandria could hold out yet a year. Nevertheless, although the terms were incontestably more advantageous to France than to Great Britain, the government of the latter insisted upon and obtained one concession, that of Trinidad, which Bonaparte at first withheld. [55] His eagerness to conclude was in truth as great as their own, though better concealed. Finally, he sent on the 17th of September an ultimatum, and added, "If preliminaries are not signed by the 10th of Vendémiaire (October 2), the negotiations will be broken." "You will appreciate the importance of this clause," he wrote confidentially to the French envoy, "when you reflect that Menou may possibly not be able to hold in Alexandria beyond the first of Vendémiaire, that at this season the winds are fair to come from Egypt, and ships reach Italy and Trieste in very few days. Thus it is essential to push them to a finish before Vendémiaire 10;" that is, before they learn the fall of Alexandria. The question of terms, as he had said before, hinged on Egypt. The envoy, however, was furnished with a different but plausible reason. "Otto can give them to understand that from our inferiority at sea and our superiority on land the campaign begins for us in winter, and therefore I do not wish to remain longer in this stagnation." [56] Whatever motives influenced the British ministry, it is evident that Bonaparte was himself in a hurry for peace. The preliminaries were signed in London on the first of October, 1801.

The conditions are easily stated. Of all her conquests, Great Britain retained only the islands of Ceylon in the East Indies and Trinidad in the West. How great this concession, will be realized by enumerating the chief territories thus restored to their former owners. These were, in the Mediterranean, Elba, Malta, Minorca; in the West Indies, Tobago, Santa Lucia, Martinique, and the extensive Dutch possessions in Guiana; in Africa, the Cape of Good Hope; and in India, the French and Dutch stations in the peninsula. France consented to leave to Portugal her possessions entire, to withdraw her troops from the kingdom of Naples and the Roman territory, and to acknowledge the independence of the Republic of the Seven Islands. Under this name the former Venetian islands, Corfu and others—given to France by the treaty of Campo Formio—had, after their conquest in 1799 by the fleets of Russia and Turkey, been constituted into an independent state under the guarantee of those two powers. Their deliverance from France was considered an important security to the Turkish Empire. The capitulation of the French troops in Alexandria was not yet known in England; and the preliminaries merely stipulated the return of Egypt to the Porte, whose dominions were to be preserved as they existed before the war. Malta, restored to the Knights of St. John, was to be freed from all French or British influence and placed under the guarantee of a third Power. Owing to the decay of the Order, the disposition of this important naval station, secretly coveted by both parties, was the most difficult matter to arrange satisfactorily. In the definitive treaty its status was sought to be secured by a cumbrous set of provisions, occupying one third of the entire text; and the final refusal of Great Britain to evacuate, until satisfaction was obtained for what she claimed to be violations of the spirit of the engagements between the two countries, became the test question upon which hinged the rupture of this short-lived peace.

As the first article of the preliminaries stipulated that upon their ratification hostilities in all parts of the world, by sea and land, should cease, they were regarded in both Great Britain and France as equivalent to a definitive treaty; the postponement of the latter being only to allow the negotiators time to settle the details of the intricate agreements, thus broadly outlined, without prolonging the sufferings of war. To France they could not but be acceptable. She regained much, and gave up nothing that she could have held without undue and often useless exertion. In Great Britain the general joy was marred by the severe, yet accurate, condemnation passed upon the terms by a body of exceptionally able men, drawn mainly from the ranks of the Pitt cabinet, although their leader gave his own approval. They pointed out, clearly and indisputably, that the disparity between the material gains of Great Britain and France was enormous, disproportionate to their relative advantages at the time of signature, and not to be reconciled with that security which had been the professed object of the struggle. They asserted with little exaggeration that the conditions were for France to hold what she had, and for Great Britain to recede to her possessions before the war. They predicted with fatal accuracy the speedy renewal of hostilities, under the disadvantage of having lost by the peace important positions not easy to be regained. The ministry had little to reply. To this or that item of criticism exception might be taken; but in the main their defence was that by the failure of their allies no hope remained of contesting the power of France on the Continent, and that Trinidad and Ceylon were very valuable acquisitions. Being insular, they were controlled by the nation ruling the sea, while, from their nearness to the mainlands of South America and of India, they were important as depots of trade, as well as for strategic reasons. The most assuring argument was put forward by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who had negotiated the preliminaries. At the beginning of the war Great Britain had 135 ships-of-the-line and 133 frigates; at its close she had 202 of the former and 277 of the latter. France had begun with 80 of the line and 66 frigates, and ended with 39 and 35 respectively. However the first consul might exert himself, Lord Hawkesbury justly urged that the British might allow him many years labor and then be willing to chance a maritime war. [57]

Material advantages such as had thus been given up undoubtedly contribute to security. In surrendering as much as she did abroad, while France retained such extensive gains upon the Continent and acquired there such a preponderating influence, Great Britain, which had so large a stake in the European commonwealth, undoubtedly incurred a serious risk. The shortness of the peace, and the disquieting disputes which arose throughout it, sufficiently prove this. Nevertheless, could contemporaries accurately read the signs of their times, Englishmen of that day need not have been dissatisfied with the general results of the war. A long stage had been successfully traversed towards the final solution of a great difficulty. In 1792 the spirit of propagating revolution by violence had taken possession of the French nation as a whole. As Napoleon has strikingly remarked, "It was part of the political religion of the France of that day to make war in the name of principles." [58] "The Montagnards and the Jacobins," says the republican historian Henri Martin, the bitter censurer of Bonaparte, "were resolved, like the Girondists, to propagate afar, by arms, the principles of the Revolution; and they hoped, by hurling a defiance at all kings, to put France in the impossibility of recoiling or stopping herself." [59] Such a design could be checked only by raising up against it a barrier of physical armed opposition. This had been effected and maintained chiefly by the Sea Power of Great Britain, the prime agent and moving spirit, directly through her navy, indirectly through the subsidies drawn from her commerce; and the latter had nearly doubled while carrying on this arduous and extensive war. In 1801 the aggressive tendencies of the French nation, as a whole, were exhausted. So far as they still survived, they were now embodied in and dependent upon a single man, in which shape they were at once more distinctly to be recognized and more odious. They were also less dangerous; because the power of one man, however eminent for genius, is far less for good or evil than the impulse of a great people.

The British statesmen of that day did not clearly distinguish this real nature of their gains, though they did intuitively discern the true character of the struggle in which they were engaged. As is not infrequent with intuitions, the reasoning by which they were supported was often faulty; but Pitt's formulation of the objects of Great Britain in the one word "security" was substantially correct. Security was her just and necessary aim, forced upon her by the circumstances of the Revolution,—security not for herself alone, but for the community of states of which she was an important member. This was threatened with anarchy through the lawless spirit with which the French leaders proposed to force the spread of principles and methods, many of them good as well as many bad, but for whose healthful development were demanded both time and freedom of choice, which they in their impatience were unwilling to give. "Security," said Pitt in his speech upon the preliminaries, "was our great object; there were different means of accomplishing it, with better or worse prospects of success; and according to the different variations of policy occasioned by a change of circumstances, we still pursued our great object, Security. In order to obtain it we certainly did look for the subversion of that government founded upon revolutionary principles.... We have the satisfaction of knowing that we have survived the violence of the revolutionary fever, and we have seen the extent of its principles abated. We have seen Jacobinism deprived of its fascination; we have seen it stripped of the name and pretext of liberty; it has shown itself to be capable only of destroying, not of building, and that it must necessarily end in a military despotism." [60] Such, in truth, was the gain of the first war of Great Britain with the French Revolution. It was, however, but a stage in the progress; there remained still another, of warfare longer, more bitter, more furious,—a struggle for the mastery, whose end was not to be seen by the chief leaders of the one preceding it.

CHAPTER XIV.

Outline of Events from the Signature of the Preliminaries to the Rupture of the Peace of Amiens.

October, 1801.-May, 1803.

THE preliminaries of peace between Great Britain and France, signed on the first of October, 1801, were regarded by both parties, at least ostensibly, as settling their relative status and acquisitions. In their broad outlines no change would be worked by the definitive treaty, destined merely to regulate details whose adjustment would demand time and so prolong the distress of war. This expectation, that the basis of a durable peace had been reached, proved delusive. A series of unpleasant surprises awaited first one party and then the other, producing in Great Britain a feeling of insecurity, which gave point and added vigor to the declamations of those who from the first had scoffed at the idea of any peace proving permanent, if it rested upon the good faith of the French government and surrendered those material guarantees which alone, they asserted, could curb the ambition and enforce the respect of a man like Bonaparte. Bitter indeed must have been the unspoken thoughts of the ministry, as the revolving months brought with them an unceasing succession of events which justified their opponents' prophecies while proving themselves to be outwitted; and which, by the increase given to French influence and power in Europe, necessitated the maintenance of large military establishments, and converted the peace from first to last into a condition of armed truce.

The day after the signature of the preliminaries news reached London [61] of the surrender of Alexandria, which completed the loss of Egypt by the French. It was believed that Bonaparte had, at the time of signing, possessed this information, which would have materially affected the footing upon which he was treating. However that was, he was undoubtedly assured of the issue, [62] and therefore precipitated a conclusion by which to France, and not to Great Britain, was attributed the gracious act of restoring its dominion to the Porte. Concealing the fact from the Turkish plenipotentiary in Paris, the French government on the 9th of October signed with him a treaty, by which it undertook to evacuate the province it no longer held. In return, Turkey conceded to France, her recent enemy, commercial privileges equal to those allowed Great Britain, to whose sea power alone she owed the recovery of Syria and Egypt. This bargain, concluded without the knowledge of the British ministry, was not made public until after the ratification of the preliminaries. At the same time became known a treaty with Portugal, signed at Madrid on the 29th of September. By the preliminaries with Great Britain, Portuguese territory was to remain intact; but by the treaty of Madrid so much of Brazil was added to French Guiana as to give the latter control of the northern outlet of the Amazon.

These events were surprises, and disagreeable surprises, to the British ministers. On the other hand, the existence of the secret treaty of March 21, 1801, by which Spain ceded to France the colony of Louisiana, was known to them, [63] though unavowed at the time of signing. While impressed with the importance of this transaction, following as it did the cession of the Spanish half of San Domingo, the ministry allowed the veil of mystery, with which Bonaparte had been pleased to shroud it, to remain unlifted. The United States minister to London had procured and forwarded to his government on the 20th of November a copy of this treaty, [64] which so closely affected his fellow countrymen; but it was not until January, 1802, that the fact became generally known in England. Gloomy prophecies of French colonial aggrandizement were uttered by the partisans of the Opposition, who pictured the hereditary enemy of Great Britain planted by the Spanish treaty at the mouth of the great river of North America, and by the Portuguese at that of the artery of the southern continent; while the vast and rich colonies of Spain, lying between these two extremes, would be controlled by the supremacy of France in the councils of the Peninsular courts. In a generation which still retained the convictions of the eighteenth century on the subject of colonial expansion, these predictions of evil struck heavily home,—enforced as they were by the knowledge that full one fourth of the trade which made the strength of Great Britain rested then upon that Caribbean America, into which France was now making a colossal intrusion. Faithful to the sagacious principle by which he ever proportioned the extent of his military preparation to the vastness of the end in view, the expedition sent by Bonaparte to reassert in Haïti the long dormant authority of the mother-country was calculated on a scale which aroused intense alarm in London. On the 4th of December, 1801, only ten weeks after the preliminaries were signed, and long before the conclusion of the definitive treaty, fifteen ships-of-the-line and six frigates sailed from Brest for Haïti; and these were rapidly followed by other divisions, so that the whole force dispatched much exceeded twenty ships-of-the-line, and carried over twenty thousand troops. The number was none too great for the arduous task,—indeed experience proved it to be far from adequate to meet the waste due to climatic causes; but to Great Britain it was portentous. Distrusting Bonaparte's purposes, a large division of British ships was ordered to re-enforce the squadron at Jamaica. Weary of a nine-years war and expecting their discharge, the crews of some of the vessels mutinied; and the execution of several of these poor seamen was one of the first results of Bonaparte's ill-fated attempt to restore the colonial system of France.

The apprehensions shown concerning these distant undertakings partook more of panic than of reasonable fear. They overlooked the long period that must pass between possession and development, as well as the hopeless inferiority of France in that sea power upon which the tenure of colonies must depend. They ignored the evident enormous difficulties to be overcome, and were blind to the tottering condition of the Spanish colonial system, then rapidly approaching its fall. But if there was exaggeration in an anticipation of danger, which the whole history of her maritime past entitled Great Britain to reject with scorn, there was no question that each month was revealing unexpected and serious changes in the relative positions of the two powers, which, if not wilfully concealed by France, had certainly not been realized by the British ministers when the preliminaries were signed. Whether they had been cheated or merely out-manœuvred, it became daily more plain that the balance of power in Europe, of which Great Britain was so important a factor, was no longer what it had been when she made such heavy sacrifices of her maritime conquests to secure the status of the Continent.

At the same time was unaccountably delayed the work of the plenipotentiaries, who were to settle at Amiens the terms of the definitive treaty. The British ambassador left London on the first of November, and after some stop in Paris reached Amiens on the first of December. The French and Dutch envoys arrived shortly after; but the Spanish failed to appear, and on different pretexts negotiations were spun out. That this was contrary to the wishes of the British ministers scarcely admits of doubt. They had already made every sacrifice they could afford; and the position of a popular government, under the free criticism of a people impatient for a settled condition of affairs, and forced to temporizing expedients for carrying on the state business during a period of uncertainty, was too unpleasant to suggest bad faith on their part. While this suspense still lasted, a startling event occurred, greatly affecting the balance of power. The Cisalpine Republic, whose independence was guaranteed by the treaty of Lunéville, adopted toward the end of 1801 a new constitution, drawn up under the inspection of Bonaparte himself. Delegates of the republic, to the number of several hundred, were summoned to Lyon to confer with the first consul on the permanent organization of their state; and there, under his influence, as was alleged, offered to him the presidency, with functions even more extensive than those he enjoyed as ruler of France. The offer was accepted by him on the 26th of January, 1802; and thus the power of the Cisalpine, with its four million inhabitants, was wielded by the same man who already held that of the French republic. A few days later for the name Cisalpine was substituted Italian,—a change thought to indicate an aggressive attitude towards the remaining states of Italy.

These proceedings at Lyon caused great alarm in England, and many persons before pacifically disposed now wished to renew the war. The ministers nevertheless ignored what had passed so publicly, and continued the effort for peace, despite the delays and tergiversations of which their envoy, Lord Cornwallis, bitterly complained; but by the beginning of March, when negotiations had lasted three months, their patience began to give way. A number of ships were ordered into commission, and extensive naval preparations begun. At the same time an ultimatum was sent forward, and Cornwallis instructed to leave Amiens in eight days if it were not accepted. The first consul had too much at stake on the seas to risk a rupture, [65] when he had already gained so much by the protraction of negotiations and by his astute diplomacy. The definitive treaty was signed on the 25th of March, 1802. The terms did not materially differ from those of the preliminaries, except in the article of Malta. The boundary of French Guiana obtained from Portugal was indeed pushed back off the Amazon, but no mention was made of the now notorious cession of Louisiana.

The provisions touching the little island of Malta and its dependencies, Gozo and Comino, were long and elaborate. The object of each country was to secure the exclusion of the other from a position so important for controlling the Mediterranean and the approaches thereby to Egypt and India. The Order of Knights was to be restored, with the provision that no citizen either of Great Britain or France was thereafter to be a member. The independence and neutrality of the Order and of the island were proclaimed. The British forces were to evacuate within three months after the exchange of ratifications; but this stipulation was qualified by the proviso that there should then be on the spot a Grand Master to receive possession, and also two thousand Neapolitan troops which the king of Naples was to be invited to send as a garrison. These were to remain for one year after its restitution to the Grand Master; or longer, if the Order had not then provided the necessary force. Naples was thus selected as guardian of the coveted position, because its weakness could arouse no jealousy. The independence of the islands was placed under the guarantee of Great Britain, France, Austria, Spain, Russia, and Prussia; the last four being also invited to accede to the long list of stipulations. The presence of a grand master and the guarantee of the four powers—whose acquiescence was not first obtained—were thus integral parts of the agreement; and upon their failure Great Britain afterwards justified the delays which left Malta still a pledge in her hands, when she demanded from France explanations and indemnities for subsequent actions, injurious, as she claimed, to her security and to her dignity.

By another clause of the treaty Great Britain consented to evacuate Porto Ferrajo, the principal port in Elba, which she had up to that time held by force of arms. It was then known that this was in effect to abandon the island to France, who had obtained its cession from Naples and Tuscany, formerly joint owners, by conventions first made known some time after the signature of the preliminaries. Elba was by its position fitted seriously to embarrass the trade of Great Britain with Northern Italy, under the restrictions laid wherever Bonaparte's power extended; but the most important feature of the transaction was the impression produced by the long concealment of treaties thus unexpectedly divulged. These sudden, unforeseen changes imparted an air of illusion to all existing conditions, and undermined the feeling of security essential to the permanent relations of states.

Despite the shocks caused by these various revelations, the treaty of Amiens was received in Great Britain with satisfaction, though not with the unmeasured demonstrations that followed the announcement of the preliminaries. In France the general joy was no less profound. "It was believed," writes M. Thiers, "that the true peace, the peace of the seas, was secured,—that peace which was the certain and necessary condition of peace on the Continent." The enthusiasm of the nation was poured out at the feet of the first consul, to whose genius for war and for diplomacy were not unjustly attributed the brilliant, as well as apparently solid, results. Statesmen might murmur that France had lost her colonial empire and failed to hold Egypt and Malta, while Great Britain had extended and consolidated her Indian empire by overthrowing the Sultan of Mysore, the ancient ally of France and her own most formidable foe in the peninsula; but the mass even of intelligent Frenchmen stopped not to regard the wreck of their sea power, of which those disastrous events were but the sign. Facts so remote, and whose significance was not immediately apparent, were lost to sight in the glare of dazzling deeds wrought close at hand. All eyes were held by the splendid succession of victories in Italy and Germany, by the extension of the republic to her natural limits at the Rhine and the Alps, by the restoration of internal order, and by the proudly dominant position accorded their ruler in the councils of the Continent. To these was now added free access to the sea, wrung by the same mighty hand—as was fondly believed—from the weakening of the great Sea Power. At an extraordinary session of the Legislature, convoked to give legal sanction to the treaties and measures of the government, the Treaty of Amiens was presented last, as the crowning work of the first consul; and it was used as the occasion for conferring upon him a striking mark of public acknowledgment. After some hesitations, the question was submitted to the nation whether his tenure of office should be for life. The majority of votes cast were affirmative; and on the 3d of August, 1802, the senate formally presented to him a senatus-consultum, setting forth that "the French people names, and the senate proclaims. Napoleon Bonaparte consul for life."

Bonaparte had not waited for this exaltation to continue his restless political activity, destined soon to make waste paper of the Treaty of Amiens. Great Britain having steadfastly refused to recognize the new states set up by him in Italy, he argued she had forfeited all right to interfere thenceforth in their concerns. From this he seems to have advanced to the position that she had no further claim to mingle in the affairs of the Continent at large. The consequent indifference shown by him to British sentiment and interests, in continental matters, was increased by his conviction that "in the existing state of Europe England cannot reasonably make war, alone, against us;" [66] an opinion whose open avowal in more offensive terms afterwards became the spark to kindle the final great conflagration.

The treaty of Lunéville had provided that the German princes, who by it lost territory on the west bank of the Rhine and in Italy, should receive compensation elsewhere in the German empire; and it was agreed that these indemnities should be made mainly at the expense of the ecclesiastical principalities, where, the tenure being for life only, least hardship would be involved. The difficulties attending these distributions, and the fixed animosity between Prussia and Austria, gave Bonaparte a fair pretext to intervene as mediator, and to guide the final settlement upon lines which should diminish the relative power and prestige of France's traditional enemy, Austria, and exalt her rivals. In doing this he adroitly obtained the imposing support of Russia, whose young sovereign readily accepted the nattering offer of joint intervention; the more so that the princes allied to his family might thus receive a disproportionate share of the spoils. Under Bonaparte's skilful handling, the acquisitions of Prussia were so far greater than those of Austria as to fulfil his prediction, that "the empire of Germany should be really divided into two empires, since its affairs will be arranged at two different centres." [67] After the settlement he boasted that "the affairs of Germany had been arranged entirely to the advantage of France and of her allies." [68] Great Britain was not consulted; and her people, though silent, saw with displeasure the weakening of their ally and the aggrandizement of a state they held to be faithless as well as hostile. At the same time bad feeling was further excited by the peremptory demands of Bonaparte for the expulsion from England of certain French royalists, and for the repression of the freedom of the British press in its attacks upon himself. To these demands the British government declined to yield.

The reclamations of Bonaparte against the press, and his intervention in German affairs, preceded the proclamation of the consulate for life. It was followed at a short interval by the formal incorporation with France of Piedmont and Elba, by decree dated September 11, 1802. Piedmont had been organized as a French military department in April, 1801; [69] and Bonaparte had then secretly avowed the measure to be a first step to annexation. The significance of the present action was that it changed a condition which was de facto only, and presumably temporary, to one that was claimed to be de jure and permanent. As such, it was a distinct encroachment by France, much affecting the states of the Continent, and especially Austria, against whose Italian possessions Piedmont was meant to serve as a base of operations. The adjacent Republic of Liguria, as the Genoese territory was then styled, was also organized as a French military division, [70] and no security existed against similar action there,—most injurious to British commerce, and adding another to the transformation scenes passing before the eyes of Europe. Nor was the material gain to France alone considered; for, no compensation being given to the King of Sardinia for the loss of his most important state, this consummated injury was felt as a slight by both Great Britain and Russia, which had earnestly sought some reparation for him. For the time, however, no remonstrance was made by the ministry.

New offence was soon given, which, if not greater in degree, produced all the effect of cumulative grievance. The little canton of Valais, in south-western Switzerland, had in the spring of 1802 been forcibly detached from the confederation and proclaimed independent, in order to secure to the French the Simplon route passing through it to Italy; a measure which, wrote Bonaparte, "joined to the exclusive right of France to send her armies by that road, has changed the system of war to be adopted in Italy." [71] No further open step was then taken to control the affairs of Switzerland; but the French minister was instructed to support secretly the party in sympathy with the Revolution, [72] and an ominous sentence appeared in the message of the first consul to the Legislature, May 6, 1802, that "the counsels of the French government to the factions in Switzerland had so far been ineffective. It is still hoped that the voice of wisdom and moderation will command attention, and that the powers adjoining Helvetia will not be forced to intervene to stifle troubles whose continuance would threaten their own tranquillity." [73]

In Switzerland, perhaps more than in any other part of Europe, had been realized the purpose, announced by the National Convention in the celebrated decrees of November 19 and December 15, 1792, to propagate by force changes in the government of countries where the French armies could penetrate. Vast changes had indeed been made in Belgium, Holland, and Italy; but these when first invaded were in open war with France. The interference in Switzerland in 1798 had no characteristic of serious war, for no means of opposition existed in the invaded cantons. It was an armed intervention, undertaken by the Directory under the impulsion of Bonaparte, avowedly to support citizens of a foreign state "wishing to recover their liberty." [74] As soon as the signal was given by the entrance of the French armies in 1798 the rising was prompt and general;" [75] and was followed by the adoption of a highly centralized constitution, for which the country was unprepared. From that time forward agitation was incessant. Two parties strove for the mastery; the one favoring the new order, known as the Unitarians, whose sympathies were with the French Revolution, the other the Aristocratic, which sought to return towards the former Constitution, and looked for countenance and support to the older governments of Europe. Between the two there was a central party of more moderate opinions.

Having secured the Valais for France, Bonaparte in August, 1802, withdrew the French troops till then maintained in Switzerland; a politic measure tending to show Europe that he respected the independence of the country guaranteed at Lunéville. The opposing parties soon came to blows; and the nominal government of moderates, which had obtained its authority by extra-constitutional action, [76] found that it had on its side "neither the ardent patriots, who wished absolute unity, nor the peaceable masses sufficiently well disposed to the revolution, but who knew it only by the horrors of war and the presence of foreign troops." [77] The aristocratic party got the upper hand and established itself in the capital, whence the government was driven. The latter appealed to Bonaparte to intervene; and after a moment's refusal he decided to do so. "I will not," he said, "deliver the formidable bastions of the Alps to fifteen hundred mercenaries paid by England." A French colonel was sent as special envoy bearing a proclamation, dated September 30, 1802, to command the oligarchic government to dissolve and all armed assemblies to disperse. To support this order, thirty thousand French soldiers, under General Ney, were massed on the frontiers and soon entered the country. Before this show of force all opposition in Switzerland at once ceased.

The emotion of Europe was profound; but of the great powers none save Great Britain spoke. What to Bonaparte was a step necessary to the supremacy of France, even though a violation of the treaty of Lunéville, was, in the eyes of Englishmen, not only among the ministry but among the most strenuous of the opposition, an oppressive interference with "the lawful efforts of a brave and generous people to recover their ancient laws and government, and to procure the re-establishment of a system which experience has demonstrated not only to be favorable to the maintenance of their domestic happiness, but to be perfectly consistent with the tranquillity and security of other powers." The British cabinet expressed an unwillingness to believe that there "would be any further attempt to control that independent nation in the exercise of its undoubted rights." [78]

Despite this avowed confidence, the ministry on the same day, October 10, that this vigorous remonstrance was penned, dispatched a special envoy with orders to station himself on the frontiers of Switzerland, ascertain the disposition of the people, and assure them that, if they were disposed to resist the French advance, Great Britain would furnish them pecuniary succors. The envoy was carefully to refrain from promoting resistance, if the Swiss did not spontaneously offer it; but if they did, he was to give them every facility to obtain arms and supplies. Being thus committed to a course which could scarcely fail to lead to hostilities, the British ministry next bethought itself to secure some conquests of the late war, for whose restitution, in compliance with the treaty, orders had already gone forward. On the 17th of October dispatches were sent to the West Indies, to Dutch Guiana, and to the Cape of Good Hope, directing that the French and Dutch colonies ordered to be restored should be retained until further instructions.

Upon receiving the British remonstrance, Bonaparte broke into furious words mingled with threats. On the 23d of October he dictated instructions to M. Otto, the French minister in London, which are characterized even by M. Thiers as truly extraordinary. "He would not deliver the Alps to fifteen hundred mercenaries paid by England. If the British ministry, to support its parliamentary influence, should intimate that there was anything the first consul had not done, because he was prevented from doing it, that instant he would do it." He scouted the danger to France from maritime war, and said plainly that, if it arose, the coasts of Europe from Hanover to Taranto would be occupied by French troops and closed to British commerce. "Liguria, Lombardy, Switzerland and Holland would be converted into French provinces, realizing the Empire of the Gauls." Great Britain herself was threatened with invasion by a hundred thousand soldiers; and if, to avert the danger, she succeeded in arousing another continental war, "it would be England that forced us to conquer Europe. The first consul was but thirty-three. He had as yet destroyed only states of the second order. Who knows how long it would take him, if forced thereto, to change again the face of Europe and revive the Empire of the West?" The minister was directed to state to the British government that the policy of France towards England was "the whole treaty of Amiens; nothing but the treaty of Amiens." A week later the same phrase was repeated in the Moniteur, the official journal, in an article which expressly denied Great Britain's right to appeal to the treaty of Lunéville, because she had refused to recognize the new states constituted by it. M. Otto wisely withheld the provoking language of the dispatch, but necessarily communicated the demand for the whole treaty of Amiens and the refusal of aught not therein found. To this the British minister of foreign affairs replied with the pregnant words, "The state of the Continent when the treaty of Amiens was signed, and nothing but that state." The two declarations created a dead-lock, unless one party would recede.

Despite these explicit formulas both governments were somewhat in the dark as to the extent of the dangers. The British ministry had not heard all that Bonaparte said, and he was ignorant of the orders sent to retain the captured colonies. Meanwhile, Swiss opposition having failed, the British envoy to them was recalled; and on the 15th of November new instructions were sent to the Cape of Good Hope and the West Indies, revoking those of the previous month to stop the restitutions. It remained, however, a question whether the second vessel would overtake the first. If she did not, the action of the British ministry would transpire in an offensive way. Accordingly, when Parliament met on the 23d of November, the king's speech took the color of this perplexity, alluding somewhat enigmatically to the necessity of watching the European situation and providing for security as well as for peace. The debates which followed were tinged with the same hue of uncertainty. The ministry could only say that its policy was to preserve peace, if possible; but that, in view of recent events, it must call upon the House and the country to entertain a spirit of watchfulness. [79]

The Swiss affair was the turning-point in the relations of the two countries. The first consul's vigilance had been lulled by the seeming easy acquiescence of the British ministry in previous encroachments, and the readiness with which, notwithstanding these, they had surrendered their conquests and continued to fulfil the terms of the treaty. Their present action not only exasperated, but aroused him. The remonstrance ended in words; but, like the little trickle which betrays the fissure in a dam, it betokened danger and gave warning that the waters of strife were ready to burst through the untempered barrier put together to restrain them, and again pour their desolating flood over Europe. Bonaparte began to look carefully at the existing situation, and found that the British troops had not yet quitted Egypt nor surrendered Malta to the Order of St. John. Representations were made on both these subjects, and the British government was pressed to evacuate Malta. [80]

The ministry, however, were also alive to the gravity of the situation, increased as it was by the orders, not yet known, to stop the restitutions. To abandon Egypt to Turkey they had no objection; and to the French ambassador's demand replied, on November 30, that the failure to do so had resulted from a misunderstanding on the part of the British commander-in-chief, to whom explicit instructions were now sent. Regarding Malta, their feeling was very different. Honestly intending to carry out the treaty, they had admitted the Neapolitan garrison to the island, though not yet to the fortifications; and their ambassadors to the Great Powers had been early directed to ask their guarantee for the independence of the Order. The French government did not instruct its representatives to do the same. Whether this was due, as Thiers says, to the negligence of Talleyrand, or whether the first consul preferred not to be troubled by the resistance of other powers in case he again seized the island, the failure of France to join in the application caused Russia and Prussia to defer their answer to the British ambassadors. The joint request was not made to Prussia until September, nor to the czar until November 3. By this time the Swiss incident had come and gone, leaving behind it the state of tension already described. Not till the 25th of the month did the czar reply; and then, before giving his acquiescence, he required in the organization of the island changes seriously affecting the object of the treaty, which aimed to base its independence upon its own people as well as upon guarantees. At Amiens it had been agreed that the Order should be open to native Maltese, by whom also at least half the government offices should be filled. Half the garrison likewise was to be composed of natives. To these provisions the czar excepted. All such points of interior organization were to be left to the decision of the legal government of the Order; [81] i. e., of the Order as before constituted.

The record of the ministry in the matter of Malta was so clear that it could well afford to protract discussion on the points raised by Russia. No cession made by the treaty had been more generally lamented by Englishmen, keenly sensitive to all that affected their position in the Mediterranean or threatened the approaches to India. In case the peace which was its sole achievement failed, the ministry could save from the wreck of its hopes no more welcome prize with which to meet a disappointed people. Other valid objections to restoration were not wanting. No Grand Master had yet accepted. Spain, notoriously under Bonaparte's influence, had suppressed the revenues of the Order within her limits. Similar action had followed elsewhere, and it was argued that the income of the Order would not suffice to maintain the defence of the island, nor consequently its independence. But, while thus keeping its hold on Malta by diplomatic pleas, the ministry took broader ground in its discussions with France. Its envoy there was replaced by an ambassador of the highest rank, Lord Whitworth; who was instructed to affirm explicitly Great Britain's right to interfere in continental affairs, whenever in her judgment required by her own interests, or those of Europe in general. He was also to point out the various encroachments which had added to the influence and power of France, and to intimate that these changes in the conditions since the treaty had been concluded entitled Great Britain to compensations. The annexation of Piedmont, the renunciation of the Grand Duke of Parma in favor of France, the invasion of Switzerland, were specifically named as making a most material alteration in the state of engagements since the conclusion of the definitive treaty. Attention was also called to the fact that although, by a convention signed in August, 1801, French troops were to remain in Holland only until the conclusion of peace between Great Britain and France, they had not yet been withdrawn, thus violating the independence of the Batavian republic guaranteed at Lunéville. The ambassador was warned, however, not to commit the government to any specific determinations, and especially on the subject of Malta. [82]

The ministers, therefore, were still undecided. They had climbed upon the fence, but were prepared to get down again on the side whence they had started, if a fair opportunity were given. Unfortunately for the interests of peace, Bonaparte, in the madness of his strength, either exaggerating the weakness of the ministry or underestimating the impulsion it could receive from popular feeling, proceeded deliberately to arouse the spirit which he was never again able to lay. On the 30th of January, 1803, was published in the "Moniteur" Colonel Sébastiani's famous report of his mission to the Levant. Sébastiani had been dispatched in a frigate the previous September, to visit Tripoli, Egypt, Syria, and the Ionian islands, and ascertain the political and military conditions. His report was in the main a fulsome narrative of the reverence in which the first consul was said to be held by the Eastern peoples; but, upon the very detailed account of the indifference to military preparations, followed the startling statement that "six thousand French troops would now suffice to conquer Egypt." The Ionian islands were also pronounced ready to declare themselves French at the first opportunity. Finally, General Stuart, commanding the British troops in Alexandria, was accused of seeking to compass Sébastiani's murder by sending to the Pasha a copy of a general order issued by Bonaparte when in Egypt.

The exasperation such a paper would excite in Great Britain was so obvious, that its publication has been attributed to the deliberate design to provoke a maritime war; under cover of which the first consul could, without open humiliation, abandon the enterprise against Haïti. [83] The first and general success of the French troops in that colony had been followed by a frightful pestilence of yellow fever; after which the negroes in every quarter again rose and defied the weakened bands of their enemies. On the 8th of January the "Moniteur" published the death of Leclerc, the commander-in-chief, with an account of the ravages of the disease. It was indeed painfully apparent that the colony could not be regained, and utilized, without an expenditure of life impossible to afford; [84] but the fever itself was an excuse even more potent than the British navy for abandoning the attempt without military dishonor. To penetrate the real motives of a spirit so subtle and unscrupulous as Bonaparte's is hopeless; nor can dependence be placed upon the statements of his brothers Lucien and Joseph, who are the sole authorities for the purpose thus alleged for the publication. There seems little cause to seek another reason than the same truculent arrogance manifested in his instructions to Otto of October 23, and the success which his past experience had taught him to expect from bluster. The secret mission to Prussia of his confidential aid, Duroc, six weeks later, clearly indicates that the result had disappointed him and that he did not want war,—at least as yet. [85] Duroc was instructed to see the king personally and say that, if war broke out, French troops would occupy Hanover, a step known to be particularly obnoxious to Prussia, who wished herself to absorb it. Her repugnance was to be used as a lever, to induce intervention with Great Britain to evacuate Malta. [86]

Bonaparte in truth was less interested in the West than in the East, whose vast populations, vivid history, and fabled riches struck his imagination far more forcibly than the unpeopled wildernesses of America. Access to the East, as to the West, was perforce by water, and so controlled by the power that ruled the sea; but the way by the Levant was shorter, evasion therefore easier. Malta, Taranto, the Ionian islands, the Morea were gateways to the East. The last three, as practically continental, [87] he considered to be within his own grasp; the first alone could be readily and securely held by the Power of the Seas. From it therefore he sought to hasten her. On the 27th of January Talleyrand, "with great solemnity and by express order of the first consul," required of Lord Whitworth to inform him what were his Majesty's intentions regarding the evacuation of Malta. No reply was given, except a promise to report the conversation. [88] On the 30th was issued Sébastiani's report, whose scarcely veiled threats against British interests in the East might perhaps induce a weak government to propitiate the first consul by compliance.

If so meant, the attempt was miscalculated. The British ministry replied that, despite his just claim for compensation, the king would have withdrawn his force from Malta, when the clauses of the treaty affecting it were fulfilled; but that, in view of Sébastiani's report, he would not do so until substantial security was provided against the purposes therein revealed. From that time forward letters and interviews followed in rapid succession, the British ministry gradually stiffening in its attitude concerning the island. On the 20th of February Bonaparte gave a fresh provocation which deeply stirred the British people, although no notice was taken of it by the ministry. In a message sent that day to the legislature, he declared the certainty of continental peace; but concerning Great Britain he continued: "Two parties there strive for power. One has made peace and wishes to keep it; the other has sworn implacable hatred to France.... Whatever the success of intrigue in London, it will not drag other nations into new leagues, and this government says with just pride: 'England, alone, cannot to-day contend against France.'"

On March 8 the British government sent a message to Parliament, that, in consequence of military preparations going on in the ports of France and Holland, the king judged expedient to adopt additional measures of precaution for the security of his dominions. It is fair to say that these preparations were not on a scale by themselves to warrant the proposed action; which was asserted by critics of the ministry to be due to information of transactions at the Cape of Good Hope. This had already been delivered to the Dutch authorities when the orders countermanding the restitution arrived; but the British commander had adroitly repossessed himself of the works. This news reached London early in March; and the proposed armaments were thought to be precautions rather against Bonaparte's action, when he too heard it, than against the existing movements in French or Dutch ports.

From this time forward Great Britain rather than France was aggressive. Receiving no explanation upon the grievances advanced, Lord Whitworth was on the 4th of April instructed to say that, if the French government continued to evade discussion about compensations due for its aggressions on the Continent and satisfaction for Sébastiani's report, and yet demanded the evacuation of Malta, he should declare that relations of amity could not continue to exist, and that he must leave Paris within a certain time. If they were willing to discuss, he was instructed to propose the cession of Malta in perpetuity to Great Britain and the evacuation of Holland and Switzerland by French troops; in return for which Great Britain would confirm Elba to France and acknowledge the kingdom of Etruria. If a satisfactory arrangement were made in Italy for the king of Sardinia, she would further acknowledge the Italian and Ligurian republics. The first consul replied that he would sooner see the British on the heights of Montmartre than in the possession of Malta. Some futile efforts were made to find a middle term; but the ministry having insisted, as its ultimatum, upon occupying the island for at least ten years, the ambassador demanded his passports and left Paris on the 12th of May. On the 16th Great Britain declared war against France. The following day Admiral Cornwallis sailed from Plymouth with ten ships-of-the-line, and two days later appeared off Brest, resuming the watch of that port. On the afternoon of the 18th Nelson hoisted his flag on board the "Victory" at Portsmouth, and on the 20th sailed for the Mediterranean, there to take the chief command.

Thus again, after a brief intermission, began the strife between Great Britain and France, destined during its twelve years' course to involve successively all the powers of Europe, from Portugal to Russia, from Turkey to Sweden. On the land, state after state went down before the great soldier who wielded the armies of France and the auxiliary legions of subject countries, added to her standards by his policy. Victory after victory graced his eagles, city after city and province after province were embodied in his empire, peace after peace was wrested from the conquered; but one enemy remained ever erect, unsubdued, defiant; and on the ocean there was neither peace nor truce, until the day when he himself fell under the hosts of foes, aroused by his vain attempt to overthrow, through their sufferings, the power that rested upon the seas.

The debates in the House of Commons revealed an agreement of sentiment unparalleled in the former war. Differences of opinion there were. A very few thought that hostilities might even yet be averted, while others argued bitterly that, had Bonaparte's first encroachments been resisted, the nation might have been spared, if not war, at least humiliation. But, while both groups condemned the administration, the one for precipitation, the other for pusillanimous and protracted submission, both agreed that just occasion for war had been given. As usual, opposition took the form of an amendment to the address, which, while carefully excluding any approval of the ministry, still "assured his Majesty of our firm determination to co-operate with his Majesty in calling forth the resources of the United Kingdom for the vigorous prosecution of the war in which we are involved." The proposer, Mr. Grey—one of the most strenuous opponents of the former war—was careful to say that, though he objected to some points of the late negotiation, he acknowledged the necessity of resisting the spirit of encroachment shown by France. Even for this very qualified disapproval of a ministry in whose capacity none had confidence, there could in this grave crisis be found only 67 votes, against 398 who preferred not to weaken, by an apparent discord, the unanimous voice. Having regard to the reasons for their dissent urged by the various speakers, the result disposes forever of the vain assertion that Great Britain feared to meet France alone. The solemn decision was not taken blindfold nor in haste. The exorbitant power of Bonaparte, the impossibility of allies, the burden that must be borne, were all quoted and faced; and Mr. Pitt, who then spoke for the first time in many months, while fully supporting the war, warned the members in his stately periods of the arduous struggle before them. "In giving their assurances he trusted that other gentlemen felt impressed with the same sense which he did of the awful importance of the engagement into which they were preparing to enter; and that they considered those assurances, not as formal words of ceremony or custom, but as a solemn and deliberate pledge, on behalf of themselves and of the nation whom they represented,—knowing and feeling to their full extent the real difficulties and dangers of their situation, and being prepared to meet those difficulties and dangers with every exertion and every sacrifice which the unexampled circumstances of the times rendered indispensable for the public safety.... The scale of our exertions could not be measured by those of former times, or confined within the limits even of the great, and till then unexampled, efforts of the last war." [89]

In the same speech Pitt correctly and explicitly indicated the two methods by which France might seek to subdue Great Britain. "If they indulge themselves in any expectation of success in the present contest, it is built chiefly on the supposition (1) that they can either break the spirit and shake the determination of the country by harassing us with perpetual apprehension of descent upon our coasts, or (2) that they can impair our resources and undermine our credit, by the effects of an expensive and protracted contest." Not to one only, but to both of these means did Bonaparte resort, on a scale proportioned to his comprehensive genius and his mighty resources. For the invasion of England preparations were at once begun, so extensive and so thorough as to indicate not a mere threat, but a fixed purpose; and at the same time measures were taken to close to Great Britain the markets of the Continent, as well as to harass her commerce by the ordinary operations of maritime war. Trafalgar marked the term when all thought of invasion disappeared, and was succeeded by the vast combinations of the Continental System, itself but an expansion of the former measures of exclusion. Framed to impair the resources and sap the credit of Great Britain, this stupendous fabric, upheld, not by the cohesion of its parts, but by the dextrous balancing of an ever watchful policy, overtaxed the skill and strength of its designer, and crushed him in its fall.

CHAPTER XV.

The Trafalgar Campaign to the Spanish Declaration of War. May, 1803—December, 1804.

Preparations for the Invasion of England.—The Great Flotilla.—Napoleon's Military and Naval Combinations and British Naval Strategy.—Essential Unity of Napoleon's Purpose.—Causes of Spanish War.

ALTHOUGH Great Britain and France had each, up to the last moment, hoped to retain peace upon its own terms, preparations for war had gone on rapidly ever since the king's message of March 8. Immediately upon issuing this, couriers were dispatched to the various sea-ports, with orders to impress seamen for the numerous ships hastily ordered into commission. Some details have come down giving a vivid presentment of that lawless proceeding known as a "hot press," at this period when it was on the point of disappearing. "About 7 P. M. yesterday," says the Plymouth report of March 10, "the town was alarmed with the marching of several bodies of Royal Marines in parties of twelve or fourteen each, with their officers and a naval officer, armed. So secret were the orders kept that they did not know the nature of the service on which they were going, until they boarded the tier of colliers at the new quay, and other gangs the ships at Catwater, the Pool and the gin-shops. A great number of prime seamen were taken out and sent on board the admiral's ship. In other parts of the town, and in all the receiving and gin-shops at Dock, several hundreds of seamen and landsmen were picked up. By returns this morning it appears that upwards of four hundred useful hands were pressed last night. One gang entered the Dock theatre and cleared the whole gallery except the women." Parties of seamen and marines were placed across all roads leading out of the towns, to intercept fugitives. In Portsmouth the colliers were stripped so clean of men that they could not put to sea; while frigates and smaller vessels swept the Channel and other sea-approaches to the kingdom, stopping all merchant ships, and taking from them a part of their crews. The whole flotilla of trawl-boats fishing off the Eddystone, forty in number, were searched, and two hands taken from each. Six East India ships, wind-bound off Plymouth on their outward voyage, were boarded by armed boats and robbed of three hundred seamen, till then unaware that a rupture with France was near. [90]

Bonaparte on his side had been no less active, although he sought by the secrecy of his movements to avert alarm and postpone, if possible, the war which for his aims was premature. Orders were given that re-enforcements for the colonies should go forward rapidly, ere peace was broken. No ships-of-the-line or frigates should henceforth go with them; and those already abroad were for the most part at once recalled. Troops were concentrated on the coasts of Holland and Flanders; and the flat-boats built in the last war with a view to invading England were assembled quietly in the Scheldt and the Channel ports. Plans were studied for the harassment of British commerce. On the 9th of April was commanded the armament of the shores, from the Scheldt westward to the Somme, a distance of one hundred and twenty miles, which afterwards became, to use Marmont's vivid expression, "a coast of iron and bronze." A few days later Elba and all the coasts and islands of France were ordered fortified; and the first consul's aides-de-camp sped north and east and west, to see and report the state of preparation in all quarters.

One affair of great importance still remained to arrange. The smaller French islands in the East and West Indies could be held in subjection by a moderate number of troops, who could also resist for a considerable time any attempt of the British, unless on a very large scale. This was not the case with Haïti or Louisiana. In the former the French, reduced by the fever, were now shut up in a few sea-ports; communication between which, being only by water, must cease when the maritime war broke out. Between the blacks within and the British without, the loss of the island was therefore certain. Louisiana had not yet been occupied. Whatever its unknown possibilities, the immediate value to France of this possession, so lately regained, was as a source of supplies to Haïti, dependent for many essentials upon the American continent. With the fall of the island the colony on the mainland became useless. Its cession by Spain to France had at once aroused the jealousy, with which, from colonial days, the people of the United States have viewed any political interference by European nations on the American continent, even when involving only a transfer from one power to another. In the dire straits of the Revolution, when the need of help from abroad was so great, they had been careful to insert in the Treaty of Alliance with France an express stipulation, that she would not acquire for herself any of the possessions of Great Britain on the mainland; having then in view Canada and the Floridas. This feeling was intensified when, as now, the change of ownership was from a weak and inert state like Spain to one so powerful as France, with the reputation for aggressiveness that was fast gathering around the name of Bonaparte.

The fear and anger of the American people increased with the reserve shown by the French government, in replying to the questions of their minister in Paris, who asked repeatedly, but in vain, for assurances as to the navigation of the Mississippi; and the excitement reached a climax when in November, 1802, news was received that the Spanish authorities in New Orleans had refused to American citizens the right of deposit, conceded by the treaty of 1795 with Spain. This was naturally attributed to Bonaparte's influence, and the inhabitants of the upper Mississippi valley were ready to resort to arms to enforce their rights.

Such was the threatening state of affairs in America, while war with Great Britain was fast drawing on. Bonaparte was not the man to recede before a mere menace of hostilities in the distant wilderness of Louisiana; but it was plain that, in case of rupture with Great Britain, any possessions of France on the Gulf of Mexico were sure to fall either to her or to the Americans, if he incurred the enmity of the latter. It was then believed in Washington that France had also acquired from Spain the Floridas, which contained naval ports essential to the defence of Louisiana. On the 12th of April, 1803, arrived in Paris Mr. Monroe, sent by Jefferson as envoy extraordinary, to treat, in conjunction with the regular minister to France, for the cession of the Floridas and of the island of New Orleans to the United States; the object of the latter being to secure the Mississippi down to its mouth as their western boundary. Monroe's arrival was most opportune. Lord Whitworth had five days before communicated the message of the British cabinet that, unless the French government was prepared to enter into the required explanations, relations of amity could not exist, and at the same time the London papers were discussing a proposition to raise fifty thousand men to take New Orleans. [91] Three days later, April 10, the first consul decided to sell Louisiana; [92] and Monroe upon his arrival had only to settle the terms of the bargain, which did not indeed realize the precise object of his mission, but which gave to his country control of the west bank of the Mississippi throughout its course, and of both banks from its mouth nearly to Baton Rouge, a distance of over two hundred miles. The treaty, signed April 30, 1803, gave to the United States "the whole of Louisiana as Spain had possessed it," for the sum of eighty million francs. Thus the fear of Great Britain's sea power was the determining factor [93] to sweep the vast region known as Louisiana, stretching from the Gulf toward Canada, and from the Mississippi toward Mexico, with ill-defined boundaries in either direction, into the hands of the United States, and started the latter on that course of expansion to the westward which has brought her to the shores of the Pacific.

Having thus relinquished a position he could not defend, and, as far as in him lay, secured the French possessions beyond the sea, Bonaparte could now give his whole attention to the plans for subjugating the British Islands which had long been ripening in his fertile brain.

It was from the first evident that Great Britain, having in the three kingdoms but fifteen million inhabitants, could not invade the territory of France with its population of over twenty-five millions. This was the more true because the demands of her navy, of her great mercantile shipping, and of a manufacturing and industrial system not only vast but complex, so that interference with parts would seriously derange the whole, left for recruiting the British armies a fraction, insignificant when compared with the resources in men of France; where capital and manufactures, commerce and shipping, had disappeared, leaving only an agricultural peasantry, upon which the conscription could freely draw without materially increasing the poverty of the country, or deranging a social system essentially simple.

This seeming inability to injure France gave rise to the sarcastic remark, that it was hardly worth while for a country to go to war in order to show that it could put itself in a good posture for defence. This, however, was a very superficial view of the matter. Great Britain's avowed reason for war was the necessity—forced upon a reluctant ministry and conceded by a bitter opposition—of resisting encroachments by a neighboring state. Of these, on the Continent, part had already occurred and were, for the time at least, irremediable; but there had also been clearly revealed the purpose of continuing similar encroachments, in regions whose tenure by an enemy would seriously compromise her colonial empire. To prevent this, Great Britain, by declaring war, regained her belligerent rights, and so resumed at once that control of the sea which needed only them to complete. She pushed her sway up to every point of her enemy's long coast-line; and following the strategy of the previous war, under the administration of the veteran seaman who had imparted to it such vigor, she prevented her enemy from combining any great operation, by which her world-wide dominion could be shaken or vital injury be inflicted at any point. The British squadrons, hugging the French coasts and blocking the French arsenals, were the first line of the defence, covering British interests from the Baltic to Egypt, the British colonies in the four quarters of the globe, and the British merchantmen which whitened every sea.

This was the defensive gain in a war whose motive was essentially defensive. Offensively Great Britain, by the suddenness with which she forced the issue, dealt a blow whose weight none understood better than Bonaparte. That he meant war eventually is most probable. His instructions to Decaen, Captain-General of the French East Indies, dated January 15, 1803, speak of the possibility of war by September, 1804; but how little the bravado of Sébastiani's report indicated a wish for an immediate rupture, is shown by the secret message sent to Andréossy in London, on the very day Whitworth left Paris. Despite the bluster about his willingness to see Great Britain on Montmartre rather than in Malta, he then wrote: "Direct General Andréossy that when he is assured the accompanying note has been communicated to the English government, he cause it to be understood through Citizen Schimmelpenninck or by any other indirect means, that if England absolutely rejects the proposition of giving Malta to one of the guaranteeing powers, we would not here be averse from accepting that England should retain Malta for ten years, and France should occupy the peninsula of Otranto. It is important, if this proposition has no chance of success, that no communication be made leaving any trace; and that we here may always be able to deny that this government could have adhered to this proposition." [94] Bonaparte understood perfectly that Great Britain, by forcing his hand, had struck down the French navy before it had begun to rise. "Peace," he said, "is necessary to restore a navy,—peace to fill our arsenals empty of material, and peace because then only the one drill-ground for fleets, the sea, is open." "Ships, colonies, commerce," the wants he avowed later at Ulm, were swept away by the same blow. How distressed the finances of France, how devoid of credit, none knew better than he, who then, as throughout his rule, was engaged in keeping up the quotations by government manipulation; and the chief of all sources of wealth, maritime commerce, was crushed by the sea power of Great Britain, which thenceforth coiled closely and with ever tightening compression round the coasts of France.

Bonaparte could not indeed realize the full extent of the injury that would be done. Impatient of obstacles, he refused to see that the construction of the flotilla to invade England would devour the scanty material for ship-building, occupy all the workmen, and so stop the growth of the real navy. Even when built, the ever-recurring demand for repairs drained the dockyards of mechanics. [95] Nor could he foresee how completely Great Britain, by reviving the Rule of 1756 in all its rigor, and by replying to each blow from the land by one yet heavier from the sea, would cut off the resources of France and destroy her as a fortress falls by blockade. Unsparing ridicule has been heaped upon Pitt for predicting the break-down of the French Revolution, in its aggressive military character, by financial distress; but in fact Pitt, though he underestimated the time necessary and did not look for the vast system of spoliation which supplied the lack of regular income, was a true prophet. The republic had already devoured an immense capital; [96] and when the conquering spirit it ever displayed reached its natural culmination in Bonaparte, the constantly recurring need of money drove him on from violence to violence till it ended in his ruin. This penury was caused directly by the maritime war, which shut France off from commerce beyond the seas; and indirectly by the general prostration of business in Europe and consequent poverty of consumers, due to their isolation from the sea, enforced by Bonaparte as the only means of wearing out Great Britain.

In 1798, when the Peace of Campo Formio had left France face to face with Great Britain alone, the question of invading the latter had naturally arisen; but Bonaparte easily convinced himself and the Directory that the attempt was impossible with any naval force that could at that time be raised. He then pointed out that there were two other principal ways of injuring the enemy: one by occupying Hanover and Hamburg, through which British trade entered the Continent; the other by seizing Egypt as a base of operations against India. These two were somewhat of the nature of a flank attack; and the former being in the then state of the Continent inexpedient,—for both Hamburg and Hanover were included in the North German neutrality under the guarantee of Prussia, while Austria was by no means so reduced as in 1803,—the expedition against Egypt was determined. Whatever personal motives may then have influenced Bonaparte, that undertaking, from the military point of view and in the then condition of the Mediterranean, was well conceived; and, while allowing for a large amount of good luck, the measure of success achieved must be ascribed to the completeness and secrecy of his preparations, as the final failure must to the sea power of Great Britain.

In 1803 Bonaparte found himself no longer a simple general, under a weak and jealous government upon whose co-operation he could not certainly depend, but an absolute ruler wielding all the resources of France. He resolved therefore to strike straight at the vital centre of the British power, by a direct invasion of the British Islands. The very greatness of the peril in crossing the Channel, and in leaving it between him and his base, was not without a certain charm for his adventurous temper; but, while willing to take many a risk for so great an end, he left to chance nothing for which he himself could provide. The plan for the invasion was marked by the comprehensiveness of view and the minute attention to detail which distinguished his campaigns; and the preparations were on a scale of entire adequacy, which he never failed to observe when the power to do so was in his hands.

For these in their grandeur, however, time was needed; but the first consul was ready to move at once, as far as was possible to land forces, upon the two flanks of the British position. On the 26th of May a corps under General Mortier entered Hanover; while a few days later another corps, under General St. Cyr, passed through the Papal States into the kingdom of Naples, and resumed possession of the peninsula of Otranto with the ports of Brindisi and Taranto. From the latter the Ionian islands, the Morea, and Egypt, were all threatened; and the position kept alive, as in the deep strategy of Napoleon it was meant to do, the anxiety of Nelson concerning those points and the Levant generally. Upon this distraction of the greatest British admiral, justified as it was by the enemy's undoubted purposes in the eastern Mediterranean, depended a decisive part of Bonaparte's combination against Great Britain.

In Hanover British trade was struck. This German electorate of George III. bordered on both the Elbe and the Weser, in the lower part of their course; by occupying it France controlled the two great rivers and excluded from them all British goods. The act was censured as infringing the neutrality of Germany. Bonaparte justified it by the hostile character of the elector as king of Great Britain; but no such plea could be advanced for the occupation of Cuxhaven, the port of Hamburg, which lay on the Elbe outside Hanover. Triple offence was given to Prussia. Her ambition to figure as the guardian of North German neutrality was affronted, her particular wish to control Hanover slighted, and her trade most injuriously affected. To the exclusion of British goods Great Britain replied by blockading the mouths of the rivers, suffering no ships to pass where her own were not allowed, and holding Germany responsible for permitting a breach of its neutrality injurious to herself. The commerce of Hamburg and Bremen was thus stopped; and as they were the brokers who received and distributed the manufactures of Prussia, the blow was felt throughout the kingdom. The distress among the workmen was so wide-spread that the king had to come to their relief, and many wealthy men lost half their incomes. In addition to the advantages of position obtained in Hanover and Naples, Napoleon threw on these two neutral states the charge of supporting the corps quartered on them, amounting to some thirty thousand men in Hanover and half that number in Naples. Holland, against which as the ally of France [97] Great Britain also declared war, had to maintain a somewhat larger force. By such expedients Bonaparte eased his own finances at the expense of neutral or dependent countries; but he was not therefore more beloved.

To invade Great Britain there had first to be concentrated round a chosen point the great armies required to insure success, and the very large number of vessels needed to transport them. Other corps, more or less numerous, destined to further the principal movement by diversions in different directions, distracting the enemy's attention, might embark at distant ports and sail independently of the main body; but for the latter it was necessary to start together and land simultaneously, in mass, at a given point of the English coast. To this principal effort Bonaparte destined one hundred and thirty thousand men; of whom one hundred thousand should form the first line and embark at the same hour from four different ports, which lay within a length of twenty miles on the Channel coast. The other thirty thousand constituted the reserve, and were to sail shortly after the first.

To carry any such force at once, in ordinary sea-going vessels of that day, was impracticable. The requisite number could not be had, and there was no French Channel port where they could safely lie. Even were these difficulties overcome, and the troops embarked together, the mere process of getting under way would entail endless delays, the vessels dependent upon sail could not keep together, and the only conditions of wind under which they could move at all would expose them to be scattered and destroyed by the British navy, which would have the same power of motion, and to which Bonaparte could oppose no equal force. The very gathering of so many helpless sailing transports would betray the place where the French navy must concentrate, and where therefore the hostile ships would assemble at the first indication of a combined movement. Finally, such transports must anchor at some distance from the British coast and the troops land from them in boats, an additional operation both troublesome and dangerous.

For these reasons the crossing must be made in vessels not dependent upon sail alone, but capable of being moved by oars. They must therefore be small and of very light draught, which would allow them to shelter in the shallow French harbors and be beached upon reaching the English coast, so that the troops could land directly from them. It was possible that a number of such vessels once started, and favored by fog or calm, might pass unseen, or even in defiance of the enemy's ships-of-war, lying helpless to attack through want of wind. It was upon this possibility that Bonaparte sought to fix the attention of the British government. As the occupation of Taranto and the movements in Italy were designed to divert Nelson's attention to the Levant, so the ostentatious preparation of the great flotilla to pass unsupported was meant to conceal the real purpose of supporting it. To concentrate the apprehensions of the British authorities upon the flotilla, to draw their eyes away from the naval ports in which lay the French squadrons, and then to unite the latter in the Channel, controlling it for a measurable time by a great fleet, was the grand combination by which Bonaparte hoped to insure the triumphant crossing of the army and the conquest of England. He kept it, however, in his own breast; a profound secret only gradually revealed to the very few men intrusted with its execution.

To create and organize the flotilla and the army of invasion was the first task. Preparations so extensive and rapid demanded all the resources of France. To build at the same time the thousand and more of boats, each of which should carry from sixty to a hundred soldiers, besides from two to four heavy cannon for its own defence, overpassed the powers of any single port. Far in the interior of France, on the banks of the numerous streams running toward the Channel and the Bay of Biscay, as well as in all the little coast harbors themselves, hosts of men were busily working. The North Sea and Holland were also required to furnish their quota. At the same time measures were taken to facilitate their passage in safety to the point of concentration, which was fixed at Boulogne, and to harbor them commodiously upon arrival. They could from their light draught run close along shore, and from their construction be beached without harm. Within easy gunshot of the coast, therefore, lay the road they followed in their passages, which were commonly made in bodies of thirty to sixty, and from port to port, till the journey's end. To support the movements, sea-coast batteries were established at short intervals; under which, if hard pressed, they could take refuge. In addition there were organized in each maritime district batteries of field artillery, which stood ready to drive at once to the scene of action in case the enemy attacked. "One field-gun to every league of coast is the least allowance," wrote Bonaparte. In the early months of the war great importance was attached by the British to harassing these voyages and impeding the concentration, but the attempt was soon abandoned. The boats, if endangered, anchored under the nearest guns, infantry and horse-artillery summoned by the coast-telegraph hurried to the scene, and the enemy's vessels soon found the combined resistance too strong. Ordinarily, indeed, the coastwise movement of a division of the flotilla was a concerted operation, in which all the arms, afloat and ashore, assisted. In extreme cases the vessels were beached, and British seamen fought hand to hand with French soldiers for possession; rarely, however, with success. "The cause of our flotilla not having succeeded in destroying the gun-vessels of the enemy," wrote Lord St. Vincent, "did not arise from their draught of water, but from the powerful batteries on the coast." The concentration, though accomplished less swiftly than Bonaparte's eagerness demanded, was little impeded by the British.

The port of Boulogne, near the eastern end of the English Channel, lies on a strip of coast which runs due south from the Straits of Dover to the mouth of the Somme, a distance of about fifty miles. It is a tidal harbor, the mouth of a little river called the Liane, on the north side of which the town is built. In it even boats of small draught then lay aground at low water; and its capacity at high water was limited. Extensive excavations were therefore ordered to be made by the soldiers encamped in the neighborhood, who received extra wages for the work. When finished, the port presented a double basin; the outer, oblong, bordering the river bed on either side of the channel, which was left clear; the inner of semi-circular form, dug out of the flats opposite the town and connected with the former by a narrow passage. Both were lined with quays, alongside which the vessels of the flotilla lay in tiers, sometimes nine deep; and in July, 1805, when the hour for the last and greatest of Napoleon's naval combinations was at hand, and Trafalgar itself in the near distance, Boulogne sheltered over a thousand gunboats and transports ready to carry forty thousand men to the shores of England. North and south, not only the neighborhood of the harbor but the whole coast bristled with cannon; and opposite the entrance rose a powerful work, built upon piles, to protect the vessels when going out and also when anchored outside. For here was one of the great difficulties of the undertaking. So many boats could not pass out through the narrow channel during one high water. Two tides at the least, that is, twenty-four hours, were needed, granting the most perfect organization and most accurate movement. Half of the flotilla therefore must lie outside for some hours; and it was not to be expected that the British cruisers would allow so critical a moment to pass unimproved, unless deterred by the protection which the foresight of Bonaparte had provided.

North of Boulogne and within five miles of it were two other much smaller harbors, likewise tidal, called Vimereux and Ambleteuse; and to the south, twelve miles distant, a third, named Étaples. Though insignificant, the impossibility of enlarging Boulogne to hold the whole flotilla compelled Bonaparte to develop these, and they together held some seven hundred more gun-vessels and transports. From the three, sixty-two thousand soldiers were to embark; and from each of the four ports a due proportion of field artillery, ammunition and other supplies were to go forward. Some six thousand horses were also to be transported; but the greater part of the cavalry took only their saddles and bridles, looking to find mounts in the enemy's country. In the North Sea ports, Calais, Dunkirk, and Ostend, the flotilla numbered four hundred, the troops twenty-seven thousand, the horses twenty-five hundred. These formed the reserve, to follow the main body closely, but apart from it. In the end they also were moved to the Boulogne coast; and their boats, after some sharp fighting with British cruisers, joined the main flotilla in the four Channel ports.

To handle such a mass of men upon the battle-field is a faculty to which few generals, after years of experience, attain. To effect the passage of a broad river with an army of that size, before a watchful enemy of equal force, is a delicate operation. To cross an arm of the sea nearly forty miles wide—for such was the distance separating Boulogne and its sister ports from the intended place of landing, between Dover and Hastings—in the face of a foe whose control of the sea was for the most part undisputed, was an undertaking so bold that men still doubt whether Napoleon meant it; but he assuredly did. For success he looked to the perfect organization and drill of the army and the flotilla, which by practice in embarking and moving should be able to seize, without an hour's delay, the favorable moment he hoped to provide by the great naval combination concealed in his brain. This combination, modified and expanded as the months rolled by, but remaining essentially the same, was the germ whence sprang the intricate and stirring events recorded in this and the following chapters,—events obscured to most men by the dazzling lustre of Trafalgar.

[Between the penning and the publishing of this very positive assertion of the author's convictions, he has met renewed expressions of doubts as to Napoleon's purpose, based upon his words to Metternich in 1810, [98] as well as upon the opinions of persons more or less closely connected with the emperor. As regards the incident recorded by Metternich—it is not merely an easy way of overcoming a difficulty, but the statement of a simple fact, to say that no reliance can be placed upon any avowal of Napoleon's as to his intentions, unless corroborated by circumstances. That the position at Boulogne was well chosen for turning his arms against Austria at a moment's notice, is very true; but it is likewise true that, barring the power of the British navy, it was equally favorable to an invasion of England. What then does this amount to, but that the great captain, as always in his career, met a strategic exigency arising from the existence of two dangers in divergent directions, by taking a central position, whence he could readily turn his arms against either before the other came up?

The considerations that to the author possess irresistible force are: (1) that Napoleon actually did undertake the almost equally hazardous expedition to Egypt; (2) that he saw, with his clear intuition, that, if he did not accept the risk of being destroyed with his army in crossing the Channel, Great Britain would in the end overwhelm him by her sea power, and that therefore, extreme as was the danger of destruction in one case, it was less than in the other alternative,—an argument further developed in the later portions of this work. (3) Inscrutable as are the real purposes of so subtle a spirit, the author holds with Thiers and Lanfrey, that it is impossible to rise from the perusal of Napoleon's correspondence during these thirty months, without the conviction that so sustained a deception as it would contain—on the supposition that the invasion was not intended—would be impossible even to him. It may also be remarked that the Memoirs of Marmont and Ney, who commanded corps in the Army of Invasion, betray no doubt of a purpose which the first explicitly asserts; nor does the life of Marshal Davout, another corps commander, record any such impression on his part. [99]]

North Atlantic Ocean.
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Meanwhile that period of waiting from May, 1803, to August, 1805, when the tangled net of naval and military movements began to unravel, was a striking and wonderful pause in the world's history. On the heights above Boulogne, and along the narrow strip of beach from Étaples to Vimereux, were encamped one hundred and thirty thousand of the most brilliant soldiery of all time, the soldiers who had fought in Germany, Italy, and Egypt, soldiers who were yet to win, from Austria, Ulm and Austerlitz, and from Prussia, Auerstadt and Jena, to hold their own, though barely, at Eylau against the army of Russia, and to overthrow it also, a few months later, on the bloody field of Friedland. Growing daily more vigorous in the bracing sea air and the hardy life laid out for them, they could on fine days, as they practised the varied manœuvres which were to perfect the vast host in embarking and disembarking with order and rapidity, see the white cliffs fringing the only country that to the last defied their arms. Far away, Cornwallis off Brest, Collingwood off Rochefort, Pellew off Ferrol, were battling the wild gales of the Bay of Biscay, in that tremendous and sustained vigilance which reached its utmost tension in the years preceding Trafalgar, concerning which Collingwood wrote that admirals need to be made of iron, but which was forced upon them by the unquestionable and imminent danger of the country. Farther distant still, severed apparently from all connection with the busy scene at Boulogne, Nelson before Toulon was wearing away the last two years of his glorious but suffering life, fighting the fierce north-westers of the Gulf of Lyon and questioning, questioning continually with feverish anxiety, whether Napoleon's object was Egypt again or Great Britain really. They were dull, weary, eventless months, those months of watching and waiting of the big ships before the French arsenals. Purposeless they surely seemed to many, but they saved England. The world has never seen a more impressive demonstration of the influence of sea power upon its history. Those far distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world. Holding the interior positions they did, before—and therefore between—the chief dockyards and detachments of the French navy, the latter could unite only by a concurrence of successful evasions, of which the failure of any one nullified the result. Linked together as the various British fleets were by chains of smaller vessels, chance alone could secure Bonaparte's great combination, which depended upon the covert concentration of several detachments upon a point practically within the enemy's lines. Thus, while bodily present before Brest, Rochefort, and Toulon, strategically the British squadrons lay in the Straits of Dover barring the way against the Army of Invasion.

The Straits themselves, of course, were not without their own special protection. Both they and their approaches, in the broadest sense of the term, from the Texel to the Channel Islands, were patrolled by numerous frigates and smaller vessels, from one hundred to a hundred and fifty in all. These not only watched diligently all that happened in the hostile harbors and sought to impede the movements of the flat-boats, but also kept touch with and maintained communication between the detachments of ships-of-the-line. Of the latter, five off the Texel watched the Dutch navy, while others were anchored off points of the English coast with reference to probable movements of the enemy. Lord St. Vincent, whose ideas on naval strategy were clear and sound, though he did not use the technical terms of the art, discerned and provided against the very purpose entertained by Bonaparte, of a concentration before Boulogne by ships drawn from the Atlantic and Mediterranean. The best security, the most advantageous strategic positions, were doubtless those before the enemy's ports; and never in the history of blockades has there been excelled, if ever equalled, the close locking of Brest by Admiral Cornwallis, both winter and summer, between the outbreak of war and the battle of Trafalgar. It excited not only the admiration but the wonder of contemporaries. [100] In case, however, the French at Brest got out, so the prime minister of the day informed the speaker of the House, Cornwallis's rendezvous was off the Lizard (due north of Brest), so as to go for Ireland, or follow the French up Channel, if they took either direction. Should the French run for the Downs, the five sail-of-the-line at Spithead would also follow them; and Lord Keith (in the Downs) would in addition to his six, and six block ships, have also the North Sea fleet at his command. [101] Thus provision was made, in case of danger, for the outlying detachments to fall back on the strategic centre, gradually accumulating strength, till they formed a body of from twenty-five to thirty heavy and disciplined ships-of-the-line, sufficient to meet all probable contingencies.

Hence, neither the Admiralty nor British naval officers in general shared the fears of the country concerning the peril from the flotilla. "Our first defence," wrote Nelson in 1801, "is close to the enemy's ports; and the Admiralty have taken such precautions, by having such a respectable force under my orders, that I venture to express a well-grounded hope that the enemy would be annihilated before they get ten miles from their own shores." [102] "As to the possibility of the enemy being able in a narrow sea to pass through our blockading and protecting squadron," said Pellew, "with all the secrecy and dexterity and by those hidden means that some worthy people expect, I really, from anything I have seen in the course of my professional experience, am not much disposed to concur in it." [103] Napoleon also understood that his gunboats could not at sea contend against heavy ships with any founded hope of success. "A discussion was started in the camp," says Marmont, "as to the possibility of fighting ships of war with flat boats, armed with 24- and 36-pounders, and as to whether, with a flotilla of several thousands, a squadron might be attacked. It was sought to establish the belief in a possible success; ... but, notwithstanding the confidence with which Bonaparte supported this view, he never shared it for a moment." [104] He could not, without belying every military conviction he ever held. Lord St. Vincent therefore steadily refused to countenance the creation of a large force of similar vessels on the plea of meeting them upon their own terms. "Our great reliance," he wrote, "is on the vigilance and activity of our cruisers at sea, any reduction in the number of which, by applying them to guard our ports, inlets, and beaches, would in my judgment tend to our destruction." He knew also that gunboats, if built, could only be manned, as the French flotilla was, by crippling the crews of the cruising ships; for, extensive as were Great Britain's maritime resources, they were taxed beyond their power by the exhausting demands of her navy and merchant shipping.

It is true there existed an enrolled organization called the Sea Fencibles, composed of men whose pursuits were about the water on the coasts and rivers of the United Kingdom; men who in the last war had been exempted from impressment, because of the obligation they took to turn out for the protection of the country when threatened with invasion. When, however, invasion did threaten in 1801, not even the stirring appeals of Nelson, to whom was then entrusted the defence system, could bring them forward; although he assured them their services were absolutely required, at the moment, and on board the coast-defence vessels. Out of a total of 2600 in four districts immediately menaced, only 385 were willing to enter into training or go afloat. The others could not leave their occupations without loss, and prayed that they might be held excused. [105] When the French were actually on the sea, coming, they professed their readiness to fly on board; so, wrote Nelson, we must "trust to our ships being manned at the last moment by this (almost) scrambling manner." In the present war, therefore, St. Vincent resisted the re-establishment of the corps until the impress had manned the ships first commissioned, and even then yielded only to the pressure in the cabinet. "It was an item in the estimates," he said with rough humor, "of no other use than to calm the fears of the old ladies, both in and out." It was upon his former system of close watching the enemy's ports that he relied for the mastery of the Channel, without which Bonaparte's flotilla dared not leave the French coast. "This boat business," as Nelson had said, "may be a part of a great plan of invasion; it can never be the only one." [106] The event did not deceive them.

In one very important particular, however, St. Vincent had seriously imperilled the success of his general policy. Feeling deeply the corruption prevailing in the dockyard and contract systems of that day, as soon as he came to the head of the Admiralty he entered upon a struggle with them, in which he showed both the singleness of purpose and the harshness of his character. Peace, by reducing the dependence of the country upon its naval establishments, favored his designs of reform; and he was consequently unwilling to recognize the signs of renewing strife, or to postpone changes which, however desirable, must inevitably introduce friction and delay under the press of war. Hence, in the second year of this war, Great Britain had in commission ten fewer line-of-battle-ships than at the same period of the former. "Many old and useful officers and a vast number of artificers had been discharged from the king's dockyards; the customary supplies of timber and other important articles of naval stores had been omitted to be kept up; and some articles, including a large portion of hemp, had actually been sold out of the service. A deficiency of workmen and of materials produced, of course, a suspension in the routine of dockyard business. New ships could not be built; nor could old ones be repaired. Many of the ships in commission, too, having been merely patched up, were scarcely in a state to keep the sea." [107] On this point St. Vincent was vulnerable to the attack made upon his administration by Pitt in March, 1804; but as regarded Pitt's main criticism, the refusal to expend money and seamen upon gunboats, he was entirely right, and his view of the question was that of a statesman and of a man of correct military instincts. [108] Nor, after his experience with the Sea Fencibles, can he be blamed for not sharing Pitt's emotion over "a number of gallant and good old men, coming forward with the zeal and spirit of lads swearing allegiance to the king," &c. [109]

These ill-timed changes affected most injuriously that very station—the Mediterranean—upon which hinged Bonaparte's projected combination. Out of the insufficient numbers, the heaviest squadrons and most seaworthy ships were naturally and properly massed upon the Channel and Biscay coasts. "I know," said Sir Edward Pellew, speaking of his personal experience in command of a squadron of six of the line off Ferrol, "I know and can assert with confidence that our navy was never better found, that it was never better supplied and that our men were never better fed or better clothed;" [110] and the condition of the ships was proved not only by the tenacity with which Pellew and his chief, Cornwallis, kept their stations, but by the fact that in the furious winter gales little damage was received. But at the same time Nelson was complaining bitterly that his ships were not seaworthy, that they were shamefully equipped, and destitute of the most necessary stores; while St. Vincent was writing to him, "We can send you neither ships nor men, and with the resources of your mind, you will do without them very well." [111] "Bravo, my lord!" said Nelson, ironically; "but," he wrote a month later, "I do not believe Lord St. Vincent would have kept the sea with such ships;" [112] and again, naming seven out of the ten under his command, "These are certainly among the very finest ships in our service, the best commanded and the very best manned, yet I wish them safe in England and that I had ships not half so well manned in their room; for it is not a store-ship a week that would keep them in repair." [113]

Such weakness interfered seriously with the close watch of Toulon, in face of the furious weather for which the Gulf of Lyon is noted; yet, from the strategic conditions of the Mediterranean, in no station was it more important to get the earliest news of an enemy's sailing and to keep constant touch with him. With the Straits of Gibraltar at one end, involving in case of escape several different possibilities, and with Egypt fifteen hundred miles away at the other, the most sagacious admiral might be misled as to the destination of a French squadron, if once lost to sight. Upon this difficulty Bonaparte framed his combination. In his first purpose the Toulon fleet was to be raised to ten sail-of-the-line, and at the fitting moment was to sail with a north-west wind, steering a course which, if seen by any British lookout, would indicate an intention of going eastward. To strengthen this presumption, General St. Cyr at Taranto was ordered to raise batteries to shelter a fleet of ten sail, and to prepare half a million rations; while the Minister of War was instructed that an extraordinary operation in that direction was contemplated about the 20th of November. [114] Simultaneously, twenty ships-of-the-line carrying twenty thousand troops were to be ready in Brest for a descent upon Ireland, and to be maintained in a state of readiness for instant sailing. This would conduce to keep Cornwallis close to Brest and away from the approaches to the Channel. The Toulon fleet, after losing sight of the British, was to haul up for the Straits, be joined off Cadiz or Lisbon by a squadron from Rochefort, raising its force to fifteen or sixteen sail-of-the-line, and thence, passing midway between Ushant and the Scilly islands, come about the middle of February off Boulogne; were the first consul expected then to be ready for crossing with his one hundred and thirty thousand men.

For the Toulon fleet, as the pivot on which all turned, Bonaparte selected his boldest admiral, Latouche Tréville, and fixed the middle of January, 1804, as the time of sailing. All the French authorities were scrupulously deceived, except the admiral himself, the Minister of Marine, and the maritime prefect at Toulon, Ganteaume, who had divined the secret. [115] The orders to the latter, ostentatiously confidential to deceive the office clerks, announced Martinique as the real destination, but enjoined him to tell the general commanding the troops that the squadron was going to the Morea, touching at Taranto. At the same time staff-officers were sent to notify St. Cyr that re-enforcements, which would raise his force to thirty thousand men, were coming not only from Toulon but from other ports; and troops throughout northern Italy began to move toward the sea-board.

It is not wonderful that Nelson was misled by such an elaborate scheme of deception. To this day men doubt whether Bonaparte seriously meant to invade England, and naval men then realized too keenly the dangers of the undertaking not to suspect a feint in it. Under all the conditions of the problem, Egypt and the Straits were equally probable solutions, and Egypt was not the only possible objective east of Toulon. Sicily and Sardinia, the Ionian Islands and the Morea, were coveted by Bonaparte; both as forwarding his control of the Mediterranean and as measurable advances towards Egypt and the Levant, traditional objects of French ambition. Nelson also suspected a secret understanding between France and Russia to divide the Turkish Empire; [116] a suspicion justified in the past by Bonaparte's actions and to be vindicated in the future by the agreements of Tilsit. The perplexities of the British admiral were therefore simply the inevitable uncertainties of the defence, the part assumed perforce by the British Empire at large in this war. He had to provide against widely divergent contingencies; and the question is not how far he guessed [117] the inscrutable purposes of Bonaparte, but how well he took measures for meeting either fortune.

Let it, however, be remarked in passing, that the great merit of St. Vincent's strategy was that it minimized the evil resulting from a single admiral's mis-step. To the success of the French scheme it was necessary that, not only one but, all their detached efforts should succeed. The strength of the British strategy lay not in hermetically sealing any one port, but in effectually preventing a great combination from all the ports. It was essential to Bonaparte not merely that his scattered squadrons should, one at one time and another at another, escape to sea, but that they should do so at periods so ordered, and by routes so determined, as to insure a rapid concentration at a particular point. Against this the British provided by the old and sound usage of interior positions and lines. This advantage Bonaparte recognized, and sought to overthrow by inducing them to diverging operations—toward the Levant on one flank, toward Ireland on the other. Both diverted from Boulogne.

To return to Nelson. During the first six months of his command he believed that the Toulon fleet was bound out of the Mediterranean; [118] and indeed, despite Bonaparte's wiles and the opinions of most of his own friends, he continually reverted to that conviction up to the final escape of Villeneuve. He could not, however, on the ground of his own intuitions resist the facts reported to him. On December 12, 1803, he writes: "Who shall say where they are bound? My opinion is, certainly, out of the Mediterranean." [119] Again, January 16, 1804: "It is difficult to say what may be the destination of the Toulon fleet, Egypt or Ireland. I rather lean to the latter." [120] A week later, January 23, the effect of Bonaparte's feints begins to show: "Information just received leads me to believe the French fleet is about to put to sea bound to the eastward toward Naples and Sicily." [121] February 10: "The French have thirty thousand men ready to embark from Marseilles and Nice, and I am led to believe the Ferrol ships will push for the Mediterranean. Egypt is Bonaparte's object." [122]

Against either contingency his course is perfectly clear,—never to lose touch of the Toulon fleet. "My eyes are constantly fixed on Toulon," [123] he says. "I will not lose sight of the Toulon fleet." [124] "It is of the utmost importance," he writes to his lookout frigates, "that the enemy's squadron in Toulon should be most strictly watched, and that I should be made acquainted with their sailing and route with all dispatch." [125] But here the inadequacy of St. Vincent's navy told heavily; and to that, not to Nelson, must be attributed the mis-steps of the later campaign. "My crazy fleet," he writes. "If I am to watch the French I must be at sea, and if at sea must have bad weather; and if the ships are not fit to stand bad weather they are useless." [126] "I know no way of watching the enemy but to be at sea," he tells St. Vincent himself, "and therefore good ships are necessary." Under such conditions, with "terrible weather," in winter, not four fine days in six weeks, and even in summer having a hard gale every week, [127] it was impossible to keep his rickety ships close up against Toulon, as Cornwallis kept against Brest. "I make it a rule not to contend with the north-westers," he said. "Going off large or furling all sail we escape damage by the constant care of the captains;" and he not unjustly claimed equal credit with Cornwallis, in that with such a fleet, to which nothing was sent, he kept the sea ten consecutive months, "not a ship refitted in any way, except what was done at sea." [128]

Though desirable for the battle-ships themselves to be near Toulon, it would have been possible, in so narrow a sea, to dispense with that by taking a central position, and keeping touch with the enemy by numerous frigates; but here also the deficiencies of the navy interfered. Among the Maddalena Islands, at the north end of Sardinia, was found an admirable central anchorage, well sheltered, and having eastern and western exits by which it could be left at a moment's notice in all winds. Here the fleet could safely lie, ready for instant action, within striking distance of any route taken by the enemy, and sure to be found by lookout ships bringing tidings. Thither, therefore, as the direction most favorable for intercepting the French, [129] Nelson went in January, 1804, when informed they were about to sail; but he wrote: "I am kept in great distress for frigates and smaller vessels at this critical moment. I want ten more than I have, in order to watch that the French should not escape me." [130] This but summed up the constant worry of those anxious two years, [131] as it does also the results of recent experience in the annual manœuvres of European navies. Under such circumstances all depends upon the position taken by the main body and the number of scouts it can throw out. Properly, these should move in couples; one of which can carry information, while its consort keeps touch of the enemy till it meets another of the lookouts scattered on their different radii of action.

The situation of Nelson in the Mediterranean, the character of his anxieties, and the condition of his ships have been given in some detail, because upon the opposing Mediterranean fleets turns the chief strategic interest of the intended invasion of England and of the campaign which issued in Trafalgar. Lord St. Vincent left office with the Addington Ministry in May, 1804, and under the energetic rule of his successor, who threw his administrative system to the winds, the condition of Nelson's fleet was somewhat bettered; but the change came too late to remedy it altogether.

Various events meanwhile concurred to postpone the execution of Bonaparte's project and so to prolong the watch of the British admiral. The Boulogne flotilla itself was not as forward as had been expected; but the drain made by it upon the French arsenals, for workmen and materials, was a greater cause of delay, by retarding the equipment of the ships meant to cover the crossing. In December only seven of the line were ready in Toulon. [132] In the spring of 1804, the first consul's attention was absorbed by the royalist plot, which led to the arrest of Pichegru and Moreau, to the seizure of the Duc d'Enghien on German soil and to his execution at Vincennes in March. This last event had diplomatic consequences, in the attitude taken by Russia and Prussia, which still farther engrossed him; and the invasion of Great Britain was thus by successive delays put off to the summer of 1804. On May 25, Napoleon, who had assumed the imperial title on the 18th of that month, writes to Latouche [133] that on the ocean side all was prepared, that the project was only postponed, not abandoned, and asks if he will be ready by July. July 2 he writes again, [134] anticipating his sailing from Toulon by the first of August, instructs him to pick up at Cadiz one French ship-of-the-line which had taken refuge there, thence to go to Rochefort, and finally to reach Boulogne, according to the first plan, by passing through the Channel; or, if necessary, by going north of the British islands. In all passages from port to port he was to keep far out to sea to avoid detection. "Let us," he adds, "be masters of the Strait for six hours and we shall be masters of the world." On the 2d of August, however, Napoleon postpones the invasion for some weeks, because some divisions of the flotilla had not yet joined; and on the 20th of that month Latouche Tréville died.

This loss was serious, as there was not among the surviving French admirals any who had shown himself fit for so important a task, except perhaps Bruix. He, being already definitely associated with the flotilla, could not well be displaced; and his health, moreover, was very bad, so that he also died the following March. Of two others who might possibly prove equal to high command, Rosily and Villeneuve, Napoleon, after some hesitation and with much mistrust, chose the latter. "All naval expeditions undertaken since I have been at the head of the government," said he, "have always failed, because the admirals see double, and have learned—where, I do not know—that war can be made without running risks." [135] From this simple and undeniable standpoint no choice more unfortunate than Villeneuve could have been made. Accomplished, brave, and skilful, he saw the defects of the French navy with a clearness which absolutely sapped his power to take risks. Although capable of the utmost self-devotion, he was unable to devote his command as the forlorn hope upon which might follow a great achievement.

Doubting Villeneuve's resolution, Napoleon now changed the details of his combination; giving to the Toulon fleet the inferior rôle of a diversion, instead of the great part of covering the flotilla at the chief centre of strategic action. The Brest fleet, during the life of Latouche Tréville, had been destined to tie Cornwallis to the French coast by the passive service of a mere demonstration. It was now given the principal part. Its admiral, Ganteaume, had in 1801 been blamed for not relieving Egypt; but Napoleon still felt for him the partiality of close personal association, and knew him to be an able officer. In the new plan, therefore, the Irish expedition passed definitively from a demonstration to a resolve. To it were assigned eighteen thousand troops under Marshal Augereau. Embarking them, Ganteaume should sail with a fleet of twenty ships-of-the-line, pass far out into the Atlantic to baffle pursuit, and then head for the north of Ireland as though coming from Newfoundland. Having landed the soldiers, for which only thirty-six hours were allowed, the fleet should sail for the straits of Dover, either by the English Channel or by the north of Scotland, according to the winds. Arriving near its destination two courses were open, the choice between which would again depend on the wind. Either the Grand Army at Boulogne would cross at once to England, or a corps of twenty-five thousand assembled in Holland under General Marmont, would sail under Ganteaume's convoy for Ireland. "With only eighteen thousand men in Ireland," wrote Napoleon, "we would run great risks; but whether they be increased to forty thousand, or I myself be in England and eighteen thousand in Ireland, the gain of the war will be ours." [136]

The Toulon and Rochefort squadrons were to favor these operations by a powerful diversion. They were to sail separately for the West Indies, the former numbering twelve of the line and the latter five. Upon reaching the Atlantic two of the Toulon ships were to be directed against St. Helena, which they were to seize and then cruise in its neighborhood for three months against British commerce. The rest of the division, carrying four thousand troops, was to retake Dutch Guiana and re-enforce San Domingo, [137] if possible. The Rochefort division, lately commanded by Villeneuve, but now by Missiessy, was to seize the islands Santa Lucia and Dominica, re-enforce Martinique and Guadaloupe and then join Villeneuve. Thus combined, all would return to Europe, appear before Ferrol, releasing five French ships which were there blockaded, and finally anchor at Rochefort. "Thus attacked simultaneously in Asia, Africa, and America," wrote Napoleon, "the English, long accustomed not to suffer from the war, will by these successive shocks to their commerce feel the evidence of their weakness. I think that the sailing of these twenty ships-of-the-line will oblige them to dispatch over thirty in pursuit." [138] Villeneuve was to sail by October 12, and Missiessy before November 1. The Irish expedition should await the departure of the others, but it was hoped might get away before November 23.

This second combination was more vast, more complicated and therefore much more difficult than the first. It is interesting chiefly as indicating the transition in the emperor's mind, from the comparatively simple scheme laid down for Latouche Tréville to the grandiose conception which ended in Trafalgar and claimed Villeneuve as its victim. The course of events, mightier than the wills of sovereigns, now intervened to change again Napoleon's purpose and restore to the Toulon fleet the central part in the great drama. In December, 1804, formal war broke out between Great Britain and Spain.

Spain since 1796 had been in defensive and offensive alliance with France. By the treaty of San Ildefonso, then signed, she had bound herself to furnish, upon the simple demand of the French government, fifteen ships-of-the-line to re-enforce the French navy, as well as a specified body of troops. Holland also had entered into a similar covenant "forever" against Great Britain. At the outbreak of hostilities, therefore, Bonaparte found on either flank a maritime state formally obliged to aid him, whatever its present wish. Holland, a small flat country near at hand, was easily dominated by his army. It was rich, had a valid government and energetic people; and its position admirably seconded his schemes against Great Britain. It therefore suited him to have the Batavian republic join in the war. Spain, on the contrary, being extensive and rugged, was with difficulty controlled by an armed force, as Napoleon afterwards learned to his cost. It was remote from the centre of his power and from the intended operations; while effective military support could not be had from its government, feeble to disorganization, nor from its people, indolent and jealous of foreigners. One thing only was left to Spain of her former greatness,—the silver poured into her treasury from her colonies.

Bonaparte therefore decided to allow the neutrality of Spain, and to relinquish the stipulated aid in kind, upon condition of receiving an equivalent in money. This he fixed at six million francs per month, or about fourteen million dollars annually. Spain protested earnestly against the amount, but the first consul was inexorable. He required also that all levies of troops should cease, any land forces sent into the provinces adjoining France, since September, 1801, should be withdrawn, and the Spanish navy reorganized. Further, he demanded that five French ships-of-the-line then in Ferrol, where they had taken refuge from the British navy in July, 1803, when returning from Haïti, should be by Spain repaired and got ready for sea. "Spain," said Bonaparte, "has three alternatives: 1, she may declare war against England; 2, she may pay the specified subsidy; 3, war will be declared by France against Spain." [139]

When war began, the British minister at Madrid was instructed to ask if Spain intended to furnish France the ships promised by the treaty. If the answer was yes, he was to express no opinion, but say that any excess over the stipulations would be regarded as a declaration of war. Later, when it became known that Spain had signed a convention [140] stipulating the payment of subsidies to France, the ministry took the ground that this was a just cause of war, whenever Great Britain chose so to consider it; though for the time she might pass it over. "You will explain distinctly," ran the ambassador's instructions, dated November 24, 1803, "that his Majesty can only be induced to abstain from immediate hostilities in consequence of such a measure, upon the consideration that it is a temporary expedient, ... and that his Majesty must be at liberty to consider a perseverance in the system of furnishing succors to France as, at any future period, when circumstances may render it necessary, a just cause of war." [141] "I am expressly enjoined to declare," wrote the British ambassador, in making this communication, "that such payments are a war subsidy, a succor the most efficacious, the best adapted to the wants and situation of the enemy, the most prejudicial to the interests of his Britannic Majesty's subjects, and the most dangerous to his dominions; in fine, more than equivalent to every other species of aggression." [142] Repeated inquiries failed to draw from the Spanish government any official statement of the terms of its bargain, either as to the amount of the subsidy, the period during which it should continue, or other conditions of the agreement. [143] Such communication the French ambassador positively over-ruled. [144]

Warning was therefore early given [145] that a condition essential to postponement of action by Great Britain was the suspension of all further arming in Spanish ports. This was repeated in the most formal terms, and as an ultimatum, a few weeks later, on the 18th of February, 1804. "I am ordered to declare to you that the system of forbearance on the part of England absolutely depends on the cessation of every naval armament, and I am expressly forbidden to prolong my residence here, if unfortunately this condition should be rejected." [146] It was alleged and was incontrovertibly true, that, while Spain was so evidently under Bonaparte's influence, armaments in her ports as effectively necessitated watching, and so as greatly added to Great Britain's burdens, as if war actually existed. [147] Another complaint was that prizes made by French privateers were, by process of law, condemned and sold in Spanish ports. [148] The same was doubtless allowed to Great Britain; but in the strict blockade of the ports of France the latter here derived a great benefit, while upon her enemy was simply imposed an additional burden in scouring all the Spanish coast, as though actually at war, in order to recapture inward-bound prizes. Once condemned, the prize goods found their way to the French ports by Spanish coasters. Independent of the difficulty of identifying the property, the small size of these neutral carriers made seizure inexpedient; for the costs of condemnation were greater than the value of the prize. [149] The Spanish government claimed that the condemnation and sale of prize goods in their ports was simply an act of authorized commerce, free from all hostility. [150] Americans who recall the cruises of the Alabama and her fellows will be disposed to think that, whatever the technical accuracy of the plea, neutrality benevolent to an enemy's cruisers constitutes a just cause of war, whenever policy so advises.

The relations between the two countries continued in this strained and critical condition during the greater part of 1804. Bonaparte insisted that the Spanish dockyards should repair the French ships in Ferrol and Cadiz,—which was indeed one of the conditions of the convention of October 19, 1803, concealed from Great Britain,—and should permit seamen to pass by land from one port of Spain to another, and from France through Spain, to complete their crews. He consented indeed that they should go in small bodies of thirty or forty, but the vigilance of the British officials could not be deceived. The relations between France and Spain at this time were not inaptly described in the letter of Napoleon to the king, announcing his assumption of the imperial dignity. He styled him therein "ally and confederate." In June, 1804, an aide-de-camp of the emperor visited Ferrol and Madrid, charged to ascertain the condition of the ships and demand their completion. [151] The British minister could obtain no explanation of this mission, which naturally aroused his attention. [152] Spain in truth was no longer a free agent. On the 3d of July, Napoleon ordered his Minister of Marine to send to Ferrol the men still needed to man the ships there; and on the 19th of the month [153] the British admiral Cochrane, then blockading the port, remonstrated with the governor of Galicia upon this procedure as hostile to Great Britain. On the 3d of September, and again on the 11th, Cochrane wrote to his government that Spanish ships in Ferrol were fitting for sea, that three first-rates were expected from Cadiz, and that no doubt remained that the French, Spanish, and Dutch ships in the port were to act together. He had consequently found necessary to concentrate his force. [154] Immediately upon receiving this information, the British ministry notified the Spanish government that orders had been sent to their admiral off Ferrol to prevent any Spanish ships of war from entering or leaving that port. The ambassador at Madrid was directed to require that the armaments should be discontinued, and placed upon the same footing as before the war. He was also to demand a clear explanation of the relations existing between France and Spain. Unless satisfactory replies were given, he was ordered to quit Madrid.

At the same time the ministry took a more questionable step. Orders were sent to Cornwallis, to Cochrane, to Nelson, and to the naval officer off Cadiz to detain and send to England all Spanish treasure-ships; the intention being to keep them as a pledge until satisfactory arrangements with Spain were made. In consequence of this, on the 5th of October, four British frigates stopped, near Cadiz, four Spanish vessels, of the same class but of inferior armament. The disparity of force was not great enough to justify the Spanish commodore in yielding; and an action followed in which one of his frigates blew up. The other three surrendered and were taken to England. Curiously enough, the news of this transaction had not reached Madrid when the British representative, on the 10th of November, left the city. The final discussions between him and the Spanish government went on in complete ignorance of so decisive an event; but as he could get no explanation of the agreements between France and Spain, he persisted in demanding his passports. On the 12th of December, 1804, Spain declared war.

That Great Britain had just cause for war can scarcely be denied. She now for the first time came into contact with Napoleon's claim that it was, not merely the interest, but the bounden duty of every maritime state to join his attempt to crush her. [155] Upon this principle he justified his policy of coercing all into such hostilities, and formulated at a later day the maxim, "There are no neutrals." The subsidy paid by Spain, calculated on British rates of expenditure, was annually worth to France fifteen ships-of-the-line and two hundred thousand troops; [156] but against Napoleon's further extension of his principle, by suddenly calling into activity the Spanish navy, Great Britain's only safeguard was to insist upon the latter's remaining unarmed. The Spanish government, having promised not to arm, suddenly and without explanation began to equip vessels in Ferrol,—an act which, coinciding with the passage of French seamen through Spain to that place, fairly excited alarm and justified the orders not to allow Spanish ships to enter or leave the port.

The seizure of the treasure-ships is less easily excused, though the obloquy attending it has been unduly heightened by the tragical explosion. Its best palliation lies in Great Britain's previous experience that, in the commercial decadence and poverty of Spain, the treasures of the colonies were a determining factor in negotiations. While they were on the sea, Spain temporized; when they arrived, she stiffened. The purpose was to retain them as a pledge, to be restored in case of a peaceable issue; as Swedish merchantmen were embargoed in 1801, and released when the Armed Neutrality dissolved. A Spanish naval historian, while censuring other acts of Great Britain, says: "The mere detention of the division from America, carrying specie which might be used in behalf of French preparations, could have been overlooked as an able and not very illegal means of bettering the prospects of the English reclamations, in consequence of the scanty satisfaction they obtained from our Court;" and again: "If all the circumstances are impartially weighed, ... we shall see that all the charges made against England for the seizure of the frigates may be reduced simply to want of proper foresight in the strength of the force detailed to effect it." [157] The action, nevertheless, was precipitate, and extenuated by no urgent political necessity. Nelson, who certainly was not averse to strong measures, directed his captains to disobey the order, which he at first thought came only from Cornwallis; for, he said, "I am clearly of the opinion that Spain has no wish to go to war with England." [158]

CHAPTER XVI.

The Trafalgar Campaign—Concluded.

Successive Modifications of Napoleon's Plan.—Narrative of Naval Movements.—Final Failure of Napoleon's Naval Combinations.—War with Austria, and Battle of Austerlitz.—Battle of Trafalgar.—Vital Change Imposed Upon Napoleon's Policy by the Result of the Naval Campaign.

THE Spanish declaration of war was followed by a new treaty of alliance with France, signed in Paris on the 5th of January, 1805, and confirmed on the 18th of the month at Madrid. Spain undertook to furnish, by March 21, to the common cause, at least twenty-five ships-of-the-line and eleven frigates; but the military direction of the whole allied effort was entrusted to Napoleon.

This accession of Spain could not become immediately operative, owing to the backward state of her armaments caused by the previous demands of Great Britain. The emperor therefore adhered for the time to his existing plans, formulated on the 27th and 29th of September. These proving abortive, he next framed, upon lines equal both in boldness and scope to those of the Marengo and Austerlitz campaigns, the immense combination which resulted in Trafalgar.

The events of the ten following months, therefore, have an interest wholly unique, as the development of the only great naval campaign ever planned by this foremost captain of modern times. From his opponents, also, upon whom was thrown the harder task of the defensive, was elicited an exhibition of insight, combination, promptitude, and decision, which showed them to be, on their own element, not unworthy to match with the great emperor. For Napoleon was at this disadvantage,—he could not fully realize the conditions of the sea. Accustomed by forethought and sheer will to trample obstacles under foot, remembering the midwinter passage of the Splugen made by Macdonald at his command, and the extraordinary impediments overcome by himself in crossing the Saint Bernard, he could not believe that the difficulties of the sea could not be vanquished by unskilled men handling the ponderous machines entrusted to them, when confronted by a skilful enemy. To quote an able French writer: "But one thing was wanting to the victor of Austerlitz,—le sentiment exact des difficultés de la marine." [159]

With steam, possibly, this inequality of skill might have been so reduced as to enable the generalship of Napoleon, having also the advantage of the initiative, to turn the scale. With sailing ships it was not so; and in following the story of Trafalgar it must be remembered that the naval superiority of Great Britain lay not in the number of her ships, but in the wisdom, energy, and tenacity of her admirals and seamen. At best her numbers were but equal to those arrayed against her. The real contest was between the naval combinations of Napoleon and the insight of British officers, avoiding or remedying the ex-centric movements he untiringly sought to impress upon their forces.

In December detailed instructions for executing the plan of September 29 were issued to Admirals Villeneuve and Missiessy. [160] The latter, after leaving Rochefort, was to steer between the Azores and Canaries, so as to avoid the British squadrons off the Biscay coast of Spain, go direct to Martinique, take the British islands Santa Lucia and Dominica, and upon Villeneuve's arrival place himself under his command. In pursuance of these orders Missiessy escaped from Rochefort on January 11. He was seen next day by a lookout vessel belonging to the blockading squadron; but the latter, for whatever reason, was off its post, and Missiessy reached Martinique safely on the 20th of February. On the 24th of that month six British ships-of-the-line, under Rear-Admiral Cochrane, sailed in pursuit from before Ferrol; where their place was taken by a detachment of equal force drawn from before Brest.

Villeneuve's orders were to go from Toulon direct to Cayenne, recapture the former Dutch colonies of Guiana, form a junction with Missiessy, re-enforce San Domingo, and start on his return for Europe not later than sixty days after reaching South America. With the combined squadrons he was to appear off Ferrol, release the French ships there blockaded, and bring the whole force, amounting to twenty of the line, to Rochefort. "The result of your cruise," wrote Napoleon to him, "will be to secure our colonies against any attack, and to retake the four Dutch colonies on the Continent, as well as such other British islands as may appear open to the force under your command." Six thousand troops were embarked on board his squadron for the operations on shore. Both he and Missiessy were expressly forbidden to land their crews for that purpose; a decision of the great emperor worthy to be remembered in these days.

Villeneuve was ready to sail early in January, but his first need was to elude the watchfulness of Nelson. The British admiral was known to move from point to point in his command, between the Maddalena Islands and Cape San Sebastian on the Spanish coast, while he kept before Toulon lookout ships always informed of his whereabouts. Villeneuve therefore thought indispensable to start with a breeze strong enough to carry him a hundred miles the first night. For a fortnight the wind hung at north-east and south-east—fair but very light; but on the 17th of January it shifted to north-west, with signs of an approaching gale. The next morning Villeneuve sent a division to drive off the enemy's lookouts; and when these disappeared the squadron sailed, numbering ten of the line and seven frigates. Nelson with eleven ships-of-the-line was at the moment at anchor in Maddalena Bay.

Following Napoleon's plan for deceiving the British admiral, the French squadron steered for the south end of Sardinia, as though bound eastward. During the night it was dogged by the enemy's frigates, which had retired no further than was necessary to avoid capture. At ten o'clock they were close by; and at two in the morning, satisfied as to the French course, they parted company and hastened to Nelson,—the wind then blowing a whole gale from the north-west. Twelve hours later they were seen from the flag-ship with the signal flying that the enemy was at sea, and in two hours more the British fleet was under way. Unable to beat out by the western entrance in the teeth of the storm, it ran in single column through the narrow eastern pass as night fell,—Nelson's ship leading, the others steering by the poop lanterns of the vessel next ahead. When clear of the port the fleet hauled up to the southward, and during the night, which was unsettled and squally, kept along the east coast of Sardinia. The frigate "Seahorse" was sent ahead to pass round the south end of the island and get touch again of the enemy.

During the night the wind changed to south-south-west, and blew heavily throughout the 21st. On the forenoon of the 22d the fleet, still struggling against a heavy southwesterly gale, was fifty miles east of the south end of Sardinia. There it was rejoined by the "Seahorse," which the day before had caught sight of a French frigate standing in toward Cagliari, but had not seen the main body. Not till the 26th did Nelson reach Cagliari, where to his relief he found the French had not been. Nothing even was known of their movements; but the same day the frigate "Phœbe" joined from the westward with news that a French eighty-gun ship, partially dismasted, had put in to Ajaccio. The British fleet then stretched across to Palermo, where it arrived on the 28th. Having now fairly covered the approaches from the westward to Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples, Nelson reasoned that one of two things must have happened: either the French, despite the southerly gale, had succeeded in going east between Sicily and Africa, or they had put back disabled. In the latter case he could not now overtake them; in the former, he must follow. [161] Accordingly, after sending scouts to scour the seas, and three frigates to resume the watch off Toulon, he shaped his course along the north side of Sicily, and on the 30th of January passed through the straits of Messina on his way to Egypt.

Villeneuve had in fact returned to Toulon. On the first night an eighty-four-gun ship and three frigates separated, and the former put in dismasted to Ajaccio, as Nelson had learned. The following day and in the night, when the wind shifted to south-west, three more ships-of-the-line were crippled. Forced to the eastward by the gale, and aware that two enemy's frigates had marked his course, the admiral feared that he should meet the British at a disadvantage and determined to retreat.

Thus prematurely ended the first movement in Napoleon's naval combination for the invasion of England. The Rochefort squadron had escaped only to become a big detachment, wholly out of reach of support or recall. The Toulon fleet, forced to await a heavy wind in order to effect the evasion by which alone the combination could be formed, was through the inexperience of its seamen crippled by the very advantage it had secured. In truth, however, had it gone on, it would almost infallibly have been driven by the south-west gale into the very spot, between Sardinia and Sicily, where Nelson went to seek it, and which was ransacked by his lookouts. [162] Neither Villeneuve nor Nelson doubted the result of such meeting. [163]

The other factor in this combination, the Brest fleet and army corps of twenty thousand men, had been held in readiness to act, dependent upon the successful evasion of the two others. "I calculate," Napoleon had said, "that the sailing of twenty ships from Rochefort and Toulon will force the enemy to send thirty in pursuit;" [164] a diversion that would very materially increase the chances for the Brest armament. For a moment he spoke of sending to India this powerful body, strongly re-enforced from the French and Spanish ships in Ferrol. [165] This was, however, but a passing thought, rejected by his sound military instinct as an ex-centric movement, disseminating his force and weakening the purposed attack upon the heart of the British power. Three months later, when he began to fear failure for the latter attempt, he recurred to the East India project in terms which show why he at first laid it aside. "In case, through any event whatsoever, our expedition have not full success, and I cannot compass the greatest of all ends, which will cause all the rest to fall, [166] I think we must calculate the operation in India for September." [167] India in truth was to the imagination of Napoleon what Egypt was to Nelson,—an object which colored all his ideas and constantly misled him. As was shrewdly said by an American citizen to the British government, in this very month of January, 1805, "The French in general believe that the fountains of British wealth are in India and China. They never appeared to me to understand that the most abundant source is in her agriculture, her manufactures, and the foreign demand." [168] This impression Napoleon fully shared, and it greatly affected his judgment during the coming campaign.

The return of Villeneuve and the delay necessary to repair his ships, concurring with the expected re-enforcements from Spain, wholly changed the details of Napoleon's plan. In essence it remained the same from first to last; but the large number of ships now soon to be at his command appealed powerfully to his love for great masses and wide combinations. Now, also, Villeneuve could not reach the West Indies before the sickly season.

The contemplated conquests in America, which had formed so important a part of the first plan, were therefore laid aside, and so was also the Irish expedition by Ganteaume's fleet. The concentration of naval forces in the West Indies or at some point exterior to France became now the great aim; and the sally of the various detachments, before intended to favor the crossing of the flotilla by a diversion, was now to be the direct means of covering it, by bringing them to the English Channel and before Boulogne. The operations were to begin in March; and urgent orders were sent to Spain to have the contingents in her several ports ready to move at a moment's notice.

The situations of the squadrons in March, when the great Trafalgar campaign opened, need to be stated. On the extreme right, in the Texel, were nine ships-of-the-line with a due proportion of lighter vessels; and some eighty transports lay ready to embark Marmont's army corps of twenty-five thousand men. [169] The Boulogne flotilla was assembled; the few detachments still absent being so near at hand that their junction could be confidently expected before the appearance of the covering fleet. The army, one hundred and thirty thousand strong, was by frequent practice able to embark in two hours. [170] Two tides were needed for all the boats to clear the ports; but as word of the fleet's approach would precede its arrival, they could haul out betimes and lie in the open sea, under the batteries, ready to start. In Brest, Ganteaume had twenty-one ships-of-the-line. The Rochefort squadron was now in the West Indies with Missiessy; but two more ships were ready in that port and one in Lorient. In Ferrol were five French and ten Spanish; of the latter it was expected that six or eight could sail in March. In Cadiz the treaty called for twelve or fifteen to be ready at the same time, but only six were then actually able to move. There was also in Cadiz one French ship. In Cartagena were six Spaniards, which, however, took no part in the campaign. At Toulon Villeneuve would have eleven ships. All these were ships-of-the-line. The total available at the opening of the campaign was therefore sixty-seven; but it will be observed that they were disseminated in detachments, and that the strategic problem was, first, to unite them in the face of an enemy that controlled the communications, and, next, to bring them to the strategic centre.

As in 1796, the declaration of Spain in 1805 added immensely to the anxieties of Great Britain. Lord Melville, who succeeded St. Vincent as First Lord in May, 1804, had at once contracted for several ships-of-the-line to be built in private yards; [171] but these were not yet ready. A somewhat singular expedient was then adopted to utilize worn-out vessels, twelve of which were in February, 1805, cased with two-inch oak plank, and with some additional bracing sent to sea. It is said some of these bore a part in the battle of Trafalgar. [172]

The disposition and strength of the British detachments varied with the movements of the enemy and with the increasing strength of their own navy. Lord Keith, in the Downs with eleven small ships-of-the-line, watched the Texel and the Straits of Dover. The Channel fleet under Cornwallis held Brest under lock and key, with a force varying from eleven, when the year began, to twenty or twenty-four in the following April. This was the centre of the great British naval line. Off Rochefort no squadron was kept after Missiessy's escape. In March that event had simply transferred to the West Indies five French and six British ships. Off Ferrol eight ships were watching the combined fifteen in the port. In October, when the Spanish war was threatening, a division of six was sent to blockade Cadiz. Nelson's command, which had before extended to Cape Finisterre, was now confined to Gibraltar as its western limit, and the Cadiz portion assigned to Sir John Orde,—a step particularly invidious to Nelson, depriving him of the most lucrative part of his station, in favor of one who was not only his senior, with power to annoy him, but reputed to be his personal enemy. Nelson had within the Straits twelve of the line, several of which, however, were in bad condition; and one, kept permanently at Naples for political reasons, was useless to him. Two others were on their way to join, but did not arrive before the campaign opened. It may be added that there were in India from eight to ten ships-of-the-line, and in the West Indies four, which Cochrane's arrival would raise to ten. [173]

On the 2d of March Napoleon issued specific orders for the campaign to Villeneuve and Ganteaume. The latter, who was to command-in-chief after the junction, was directed to sail at the first moment possible with his twenty-one ships, carrying besides their crews thirty-six hundred troops. He was to go first to Ferrol, destroy or drive off the blockading squadron, and be joined by the French and Spanish ships there ready; thence by the shortest route to Martinique, where he was to be met by Villeneuve and, it was hoped, by Missiessy also. If Villeneuve did not at once appear, he was to be awaited at least thirty days. When united, the whole force, amounting to over forty of the line, would, to avoid detection, steer for the Channel by an unusual route and proceed direct to Boulogne, where the emperor expected it between June 10 and July 10. If by Villeneuve's not coming, or other cause, Ganteaume found himself with less than twenty-five ships, he was to go to Ferrol; where it would be the emperor's care to assemble a re-enforcement. He might, however, even with so small a number, move straight on Boulogne if he thought advisable. [174]

Villeneuve's orders were to sail at the earliest date for Cadiz, where he was not to enter but be joined outside by the ships then ready. From Cadiz he was to go to Martinique, and there wait forty days for Ganteaume. If the latter did not then appear he was to call at San Domingo, land some troops and thence go to the Bay of Santiago in the Canary Islands, [175] where he would cruise twenty days. This provided a second rendezvous where Ganteaume could join, if unexpectedly delayed in Brest. The emperor, like all French rulers, did not wish to risk his fleet in battle with nearly equal forces. Whatever the result, his combinations would suffer. "I prefer," said he, "the rendezvous at Martinique to any other; but I also prefer Santiago to a junction before Brest, by raising the blockade, in order to avoid fighting of any kind." [176] When Ganteaume, at a most critical instant, only six days before Villeneuve got away, reported that he was ready,—that there were but fifteen British ships in the offing and success was sure,—Napoleon replied: "A naval victory now would lead to nothing. Have but one aim,—to fulfil your mission. Sail without fighting." [177] So to the old delusion of ulterior objects was sacrificed the one chance for compassing the junction essential to success. By April 1 the British fleet off Brest was increased to twenty-one sail.

Meanwhile Nelson had returned from his fruitless search at Alexandria, and on the 13th of March again appeared off Toulon. Thence he went to Cape San Sebastian, showing his ships off Barcelona to convince the enemy he was fixed on the coast of Spain; reasoning that if they thought him to the westward they would more readily start for Egypt, which he still believed to be their aim. He had by his communications with Alexandria learned the distracted state of that country since the destruction of the Mameluke power and its restoration to the Turks, and reported that the French could easily hold it, if they once effected a lodgment. [178] From Cape San Sebastian the fleet next went to the Gulf of Palmas, a convenient roadstead in the south of Sardinia, to fill with provisions from transports lately arrived. It anchored there on the 26th of March, but was again at sea when, at 8 A. M. of April 4, being then twenty miles west of the Gulf, a frigate brought word of the second sailing of the Toulon fleet. When last seen, in the evening of March 31, it was sixty miles south of Toulon, steering south with a north-west wind. One of the pair of lookouts was then sent to Nelson; and the other, losing sight of the enemy during the night, joined him a few hours after the first. The only clue she could give was that, having herself steered south-west with a wind from west-north-west, the enemy had probably kept on south or borne away to the eastward. Nelson, therefore, took the fleet midway between Sardinia and the African coast, scattering lookout ships along the line between these two points. [179] He was thus centrally placed to cover everything east of Sardinia, and with means of speedy information if the French attempted to pass, at any point, the line occupied by him.

Villeneuve had indeed headed as reported by the British frigates, swayed by Nelson's ruse in appearing off Barcelona. [180] Believing the enemy off Cape San Sebastian, he meant to go east of the Balearic Islands. The next day, April 1; a neutral ship informed him that it had seen the British fleet south of Sardinia. The wind fortunately hauling to the eastward, Villeneuve changed his course to pass north of the Balearics; and on the 6th of April, when Nelson was watching for him between Sardinia and Africa, he appeared off Cartagena. The Spanish division there declined to join him, having no instructions from its government; and the French fleet, continuing at once with a fresh easterly wind, passed Gibraltar on the 8th. On the 9th it reached Cadiz, driving away Orde's squadron. Following his orders strictly, Villeneuve anchored outside the port; and was there at once joined by the French seventy-four "l'Aigle," and six Spanish ships. During the night the combined force of eighteen of the line sailed for Martinique, where it anchored May 14, after a passage of thirty-four days. Some Spanish ships separated the day after sailing; but, having sealed instructions giving the rendezvous, they arrived only two days later than the main body.

This sortie of Villeneuve had so far been exceptionally happy. By a mere accident he had learned Nelson's position, while that admiral was misled by what seems to have been bad management on the part of his carefully placed lookouts. Nelson was not prone to blame subordinates, but he apparently felt he had not been well served in this case. Not till April 16, when Villeneuve was already six days on his way from Cadiz, did he learn from a passing ship that nine days before the French were seen off Cape de Gata, on the coast of Spain, steering westward with an east wind, evidently bound to the Atlantic. To this piece of great good luck Villeneuve's fortune added another. While he carried an east wind with him till clear of the Straits, Nelson, from the 4th of April to the 19th, had a succession of strong westerly gales. "We have been nine days coming two hundred miles," he wrote. "For a whole month we have had nothing like a Levanter except for the French fleet." [181] Not till May 6, after a resolute struggle of over three weeks against contrary fortune, did he anchor his fleet in Gibraltar Bay. Five days later he was on his way to the West Indies. But while the escape from Toulon showed the impossibility of securing every naval detachment of the enemy, the events elsewhere happening proved the extreme difficulty of so timing the evasions as to effect a great combination. While Villeneuve with eighteen ships was hastening to the West Indies, Missiessy, [182] with five others, having very imperfectly fulfilled his mission to annoy the enemy's islands, was speeding back to Rochefort, where orders at once to retrace his steps were waiting. At the same time Ganteaume with his twenty-one was hopelessly locked in Brest. Amid all the difficulties of their task, the British fleets, sticking close to the French arsenals, not only tempered their efficiency for war to the utmost toughness, but reaped also the advantages inseparable from interior positions.

The better to divert attention from his real designs, Napoleon took the time appointed for his squadrons' sailing to visit Italy. Leaving Paris April 1, and journeying leisurely, he was in Alessandria on the first of May and in Milan on the 10th. There he remained a month, and was on the 26th crowned king of the late Italian Republic. His stay in Italy was prolonged to July. It is probably to this carefully timed absence that we owe the full and invaluable record of his hopes and fears, of the naval combinations which chased each other through his tireless mind, of the calculations and surmises—true or false, but always ingenious—which are contained in his almost daily letters to the Minister of Marine.

Prominent among his preoccupations were the detention of Ganteaume,—who, "hermetically blockaded and thwarted by constant calms," [183] could not get away,—and the whereabouts of Nelson, who disappeared from his sight as entirely, and from his knowledge far more completely, than Villeneuve did from the British ken. "In God's name! hurry my Brest squadron away, that it may have time to join Villeneuve. Nelson has been again deceived and gone to Egypt. Villeneuve was out of sight on the 10th of April. Send him word that Nelson is seeking him in Egypt; I have sent the same news to Ganteaume by a courier. God grant, however, that he may not find him in Brest." [184] On the 15th of April Ganteaume did make an attempt. The British fleet had been driven off by a gale on the 11th, but reappeared on the 13th. On the afternoon of the 14th word was brought to Admiral Gardner, who had temporarily relieved Cornwallis, that the French were getting under way. The next day they came out; but the enemy now numbered twenty-four sail to their twenty-one, and after a demonstration they retired within the port.

As the advancing season gave less and less hope of the blockade relaxing, Napoleon formed a new combination. Two ships-of-the-line, now nearly ready at Rochefort, should sail under Rear-Admiral Magon, carrying modified instructions to Villeneuve. The latter was now commanded to wait thirty-five days after Magon's arrival, and then, if Ganteaume had not appeared, return direct to Ferrol, discarding the alternative rendezvous of Santiago. At Ferrol he would find fifteen French and Spanish ships, making with his own and Magon's a total of thirty-five. With these he was to appear before Brest, where Ganteaume would join him, and with the combined force of fifty-six of the line at once enter the Channel. Magon sailed with these orders early in May, and on June 4 reached Villeneuve just in time to insure the direction given by the latter to his fleet upon its return. To facilitate the junction at Brest very heavy batteries were thrown up, covering the anchorage outside the Goulet; and there, in May, Ganteaume took up his position, covered by one hundred and fifty guns on shore.

It will be recognized that the emperor's plan, while retaining its essential features, had now undergone a most important modification, due to the closeness of the British blockade of Brest. A combination of his squadrons still remained the key-stone of the fabric; but the tenacity with which the largest of his detachments was held in check had forced him to accept—what he had rejected as least advantageous—a concentration in the Bay of Biscay, the great hive where swarmed the British navy.

It became therefore more than ever desirable to divert as many as possible of the enemy's cruisers from those waters; an object which now continuously occupied Napoleon's mind and curiously tinged his calculations with the color of his hopes. In defiance of statistics, he thought the East Indies, as has before been said, the first of British interests. He sought therefore to raise alarms about India, and persisted in believing that every division sailing from England was bound there. "Cochrane," he writes on April 13, "was before Lisbon on March 4. He must first have gone to the Cape de Verde, thence to Madeira, and if he gets no information he will go to India. That is what any admiral of sense would do in his case." [185] On the 10th of May, when Cochrane had been over a month in the West Indies, he reiterates this opinion, and at the same time conjectures that five thousand troops which sailed from England on the 15th of April with most secret orders were gone to the Cape of Good Hope. "Fears of Villeneuve's meeting this expedition will force them to send more ships to India." [186] On the 31st of May he guesses that eight ships-of-the-line, which sailed ten days before under Collingwood, were bound to India, [187] and a week later repeats the surmise emphatically: "The responsibility of the ministers is so great they cannot but send him to the East Indies." [188] On the 9th of June he writes: "Everything leads me to believe the English sent fifteen ships to the East Indies, when they learned that Cochrane reached Barbadoes a fortnight after Missiessy sailed; and in that case it is quite possible Nelson has been sent to America." [189] This opinion is repeated on the 13th and 14th; and on the 28th, as the veil was about to fall from his eyes, he sums up the acute reasoning which, starting from a false premise, had so misled him: "It is difficult to believe that without any news the English have sent seventeen ships-of-the-line (i. e. Nelson and Collingwood combined) to the West Indies, when Nelson, joining his ten to Cochrane's six, and three at Jamaica, would have nineteen—superior to our squadron; while Collingwood going to the East Indies with eight and finding there nine, in all seventeen, also superior to us—it is difficult, I say, to believe that the enemy, with the chance of being everywhere superior, should blindly abandon the East Indies." [190]

Some French writers, [191] as well as some English, have disparaged the insight of Nelson, comparing him unfavorably with Napoleon, and basing their estimate largely upon his error in esteeming Egypt the aim of the French. In view of the foregoing extracts, and of other miscalculations made by the emperor during this remarkable campaign—which will appear farther on—it must be admitted that when in the dark, without good information, both were forced to inferences, more or less acute, but which, resting on no solid data, rose, as Nelson said, little above guesses. So also Collingwood has been credited with completely unravelling Napoleon's plan, and his penetration has been exalted above Nelson's because, after the latter's return from chasing Villeneuve to the West Indies, he wrote that the flight there was to take off the British naval force; overlooking his conjecture, two lines before, that (not England, but) "Ireland is the real mark and butt of all these operations." Rather might each adopt for himself Napoleon's own words, "I have so often in my life been mistaken that I no longer blush for it." [192] When his frigates lost sight of Villeneuve, on the night of March 31, Nelson went neither east nor west; he concentrated his force to cover what he thought the most likely objects of the enemy, and awaited information as to his movements. "I shall neither go to the eastward of Sicily nor to the westward of Sardinia until I know something positive." [193] It can be confidently said that under like conditions Napoleon would have done the same.

The fault of Napoleon's calculations was in over-estimating both the importance and the danger of India, and also in not allowing for the insight and information of the British government. He himself laid down, with his peculiarly sound judgment, the lines it ought to follow: "If I had been in the British Admiralty, I would have sent a light squadron to the East and West Indies, and formed a strong fleet of twenty of the line which I would not have dispatched until I knew Villeneuve's destination." [194] This was just what the Admiralty did. A light squadron was on its way to India, and eight ships were ordered to the West Indies under Collingwood; but that able officer, finding Nelson had started, contented himself with sending two to re-enforce him, and took up his own position with six before Cadiz, thus blocking the junction of the Cartagena ships. The strong body of twenty was kept before Brest, much to Napoleon's annoyance. "If England realizes the serious game she is playing, she ought to raise the blockade of Brest." [195] But here, as with regard to the Indian expeditions, Napoleon's thought was fathered by his wish. To weaken the Brest blockade, as he confessed a little later, was the great point for France. [196]

Nothing in fact is more noteworthy, nor more creditable, than the intelligence and steadiness with which the British naval authorities resisted Napoleon's efforts to lead them into ex-centric movements. This was partly due to an accurate judgment of the worth of the enemy's detached squadrons, partly to an intuitive sense of the supreme importance of the Biscay positions, and partly to information much more accurate than Napoleon imagined, or than he himself received in naval transactions. "Those boasted English," jeered he, when he thought them ignorant of Villeneuve's second sailing, "who claim to know of everything, who have agents everywhere, couriers booted and spurred everywhere, knew nothing of it." [197] Yet, by a singular coincidence, on the very day, April 25, that they were supposed thus deceived, the Admiralty were hurrying letters to Nelson and to the West Indies with the important tidings. "You reason," wrote he to Decrès, "as if the enemy were in the secret." [198] This is just what they were,—not as to all details, but as to the main features of his plans. While the emperor was wildly reckoning on imaginary squadrons hastening to India, and guessing where Nelson was, both the latter and his government knew where Villeneuve had gone, and the British admiral was already in the West Indies. About the beginning of May it was known in England not only that the Toulon fleet had sailed, but whither it was bound; [199] and about the first of June, despite the cautions about secrecy imposed by Bonaparte, the British were informed by a prisoner that "the combined fleet, of sixty sail-of-the-line, will fight our fleet (balayer la Manche), while the large frigates will come up channel to convoy the flotilla over. The troops are impatiently awaiting the appearance of the ships to set them free." [200]

The Admiralty therefore understood as well as did Napoleon that the crucial necessity in their dispositions was to prevent the combination of the enemy's squadrons, and that the chief scene of operations would be the Bay of Biscay and the approaches to the Channel. They contented themselves, consequently, with strengthening the force there, and keeping before Cadiz alone a detachment under Collingwood, lest a concentration in that port should compel them to weaken the Biscay squadrons. At the time Villeneuve sailed, an expedition of five thousand troops, whose destination was kept profoundly secret, was ready to start for the Mediterranean. This re-enforcement secured the naval bases of Gibraltar and Malta, and the Mediterranean otherwise was abandoned to frigates, supported by two or three ships-of-the-line. Herein also the practice of the Admiralty agreed with the precept of Napoleon. "The Mediterranean," wrote he on June 7 to his Minister of Marine, "is now nothing. I would rather see there two of Villeneuve's ships than forty;" and he added the pregnant counsel, which was exemplified by the British action, "It seems to me your purpose is not exclusive enough for a great operation. You must correct this fault, for that is the art of great successes and of great operations."

The secret expedition was met by Nelson just as he started for the West Indies. During his heavy beat down the Mediterranean he too, as carefully as Napoleon, had been studying the field on which he was to act; but while the one planned with all the freedom and certainty of an offensive, which, disposing of large means, moves upon a known object, the other, though in a restricted sphere, underwent the embarrassments of the defensive, ignorant where the blow was to fall. One clear light, however, shone step by step on his path,—wherever the French fleet was gone there should he go also.

The west wind which delayed his progress brought swiftly to him, on April 19, a vessel [201] from Gibraltar, with word that, two hours after Villeneuve passed the Straits, a frigate had started for England with the news, and that the French and Spaniards had sailed together from Cadiz. From this circumstance he reasoned, accurately, that the destination was the British Islands; [202] but he did not penetrate the deep design of a concentration in the West Indies. He therefore sent the frigate "Amazon" ahead of the fleet to Lisbon, to gather news and rejoin him off Cape St. Vincent; and by her he wrote the Admiralty, and also to the admirals off Brest and in Ireland, that he should take position fifty leagues west of the Scilly Islands, and thence steer slowly toward them. To any person who will plot this position on a map it will be apparent that, with winds prevailing from the westward, he would there be, as he said, equally well situated to reach Brest or Ireland; in short, in an excellent strategic position known to the authorities at home.

Stopping but four hours at Gibraltar on May 6, on the 9th he was off Cape St. Vincent, and there received news that the combined squadrons, to the number of eighteen of the line, had gone to the West Indies. His concern was great, for he fully understood the value of those islands. He had served there, knew them intimately, and had married there. Not a year before he had written, "If our islands should fall, England would be so clamorous for peace that we should humble ourselves." [203] Still, with all his anxiety, he kept his head. The convoy of troops was close at hand, he must provide for its safety. On the 11th of May it arrived, Nelson's fleet being then under way. To the two ships-of-the-line guarding it he added a third, the "Royal Sovereign," whose bad sailing delayed him; and to this circumstance it was owing that that ship, newly coppered, bore Collingwood's flag far in advance of either British column into the fire at Trafalgar. Three hours after the convoy's junction, at 7 P. M.of May 11, Nelson with ten ships was on his way to the West Indies, to seek eighteen which had thirty-one days' start.

On the 4th of June the British fleet, having gained eight days on the allies, anchored at Barbadoes, where it found Cochrane with two sail-of-the-line. The same day Magon with his two joined Villeneuve. In the three weeks the latter had now been in Martinique he had accomplished nothing but the capture of Diamond Rock, a small islet detached from the main island, which the British held and from which they annoyed the coasters. A frigate outstripping Magon had brought pressing orders to make conquests in the British possessions, during the thirty-five days of waiting for Ganteaume. In consequence, when Magon joined, the fleet was under way, standing north to clear the islands before making the stretch to the southward, and to windward, to reach Barbadoes; which Villeneuve had selected as his first point of attack.

On the 4th of June, therefore, the two hostile fleets were but a hundred miles apart, the distance separating Barbadoes from Martinique. Most singularly, at the very moment Villeneuve started north to return upon Barbadoes, false news, too plausible to be slighted, induced Nelson to go south. Positive information was sent by the officer commanding at Santa Lucia that the allies had been seen from there, May 29, steering south. Nelson anchored at Barbadoes at 5 P. M. June 4, embarked two thousand troops during the night, and at 10 A. M. next day made sail for the southward. On the 6th he passed Tobago, which was reported safe, and on the 7th anchored off Trinidad; where to the astonishment of every one nothing had been heard of the enemy. Cursing the news which had forced him to disregard his own judgment, when only a hundred miles of fair wind severed him from his prey, Nelson turned upon his tracks and steered for Martinique, tortured with fears for Jamaica and every exposed British possession.

On the 8th of June, when Nelson left Trinidad, the combined fleets were nearly four hundred miles from him, off the west side of Antigua. Here they captured fourteen merchant ships which had imprudently left port, and by them were informed that Nelson with fourteen ships (instead of ten) had reached Barbadoes. To these fourteen, Villeneuve, whose information was poor, added five as the force of Cochrane, making nineteen to his eighteen. Supposing therefore the enemy to be superior, not only in quality, which he conceded, but in numbers also, he decided, in view of so unexpected an event as the arrival on the scene of the greatest British admiral, to return at once to Europe. In this he doubtless met the wishes of Napoleon. "I think," said the latter, ere he knew the fact, "that the arrival of Nelson may lead Villeneuve to return to Europe;" [204] and he argued, still seeing things as he wished,—certainly not as a seaman would,—"When Nelson learns Villeneuve has left the Windward Islands, he will go to Jamaica," [205] a thousand miles to leeward. "So far from being infallible like the Pope," wrote Nelson at the same moment, "I believe my opinions to be very fallible, and therefore I may be mistaken that the enemy's fleet is gone to Europe; but I cannot bring myself to think otherwise." [206] Then, having given his reasons, he seems to dive into Napoleon's mind and read his thoughts. "The enemy will not give me credit for quitting the West Indies for this month to come." [207]

Villeneuve also doubtless hoped to shake off his pursuer by his sudden change of purpose. Transferring troops necessary to garrison the French islands to four frigates, he directed the latter to land them at Guadaloupe and rejoin him off the Azores,—a mistaken rendezvous, which materially lengthened his backward voyage. The combined fleet then made sail on the 9th of June to the northward, to reach the westerly winds that favor the passage to Europe.

Three days later Nelson also was off Antigua, and convinced himself that the allies were bound back to Europe. With the tireless energy that brooked no rest when once resolve was formed, the night was passed transferring the troops which but one week before he had embarked at Barbadoes. But not even a night's delay was allowed in sending news to Europe. At 8 P. M. he hurried off the brig "Curieux" with dispatches to the Admiralty, which the captain, Bettesworth, was to deliver in person; a momentous action, and one fraught with decisive consequences to the campaign, although somewhat marred by an overcautious admiral. On the 13th, at noon, the fleet itself, accompanied by one of Cochrane's two ships, the "Spartiate," sailed for the Straits of Gibraltar; but Nelson, uncertain as to the enemy's destination, also sent word to the officer commanding off Ferrol, [208] lest he might be taken unawares.

Although Villeneuve's decision to return was fortunate and characterized by the extraordinary good luck which upon the whole had so far attended him, it is evident that he ran the chance of crossing Ganteaume on the Atlantic, as he himself had been crossed by Missiessy. Napoleon had taken precautions to insure both his waiting long enough, and also his return in case Ganteaume could not get away by a certain time; but not having foreseen, nor until June 28 [209] even known, Nelson's pursuit of Villeneuve, he could not anticipate the course of the latter in such a contingency, nor combine with it the action of the Brest fleet.

Ganteaume, however, was not able to elude Lord Gardner, and on the 8th of May the emperor, having received in Italy the news of Magon's sailing, gave his final decision. If before midnight of May 20 an opportunity offered, the Brest fleet should start; but from daybreak of the 21st, had it every chance in the world, it should stand fast. A frigate was to be kept ready to sail the instant the latter condition took effect, carrying to Villeneuve orders for his action upon reaching Ferrol. This frigate did sail May 21, but of course did not find the admiral in the West Indies. Duplicate instructions were sent to Ferrol.

Villeneuve was by them informed that he would in Ferrol find ready for sea five French and nine Spanish ships, which, with those already under his orders, would make a force of thirty-four sail-of-the-line. In the roads off Rochefort would be five more. At Brest twenty-one ships were lying outside the Goulet, under the protection of one hundred and fifty cannon, ready to get under way at a moment's notice. The great point was to concentrate these three masses, or as much of them as possible, off Boulogne. Three courses were open to him. If the squadron at Ferrol could not leave the port when he appeared, on account of head winds, he should order it to join him at Rochefort and go there at once himself. Thence with forty ships he should proceed off Brest, join Ganteaume, and at once enter the Channel. If, however, the wind was fair for leaving Ferrol, that is, southerly, he would see in that a reason for hastening to Brest, without stopping for the Rochefort squadron; the more so as every delay would increase the British force before Brest. Thirdly, he might possibly, as he drew toward Ushant, find the winds so fair as to give the hope of getting to Boulogne with his thirty-five ships three or four days before the enemy's fleet at Brest could follow. If so, it was left to his discretion to embrace so favorable an opportunity. To these three courses Napoleon added a fourth as a possible alternative. After rallying the Ferrol ships he might pass north of the British Islands, join the Dutch squadron of the Texel with Marmont's corps there embarked, and with these appear off Boulogne. The emperor, however, looked upon this rather as a last resort. A great concentration in the Bay of Biscay was the one aim he now favored.

To facilitate this he busied himself much with the question of diverting the enemy from that great centre of his operations. This it was that made him so ready to believe that each squadron that sailed was gone to the East Indies. If so, it was well removed from the Bay of Biscay. For this he sought to get the Cartagena ships to Toulon or to Cadiz. "If we can draw six English ships before each port," he writes, "that will be a fine diversion for us; and if I can get the Cartagena ships in Toulon I will threaten Egypt in so many ways that they will be obliged to keep there an imposing force. They will believe Villeneuve gone to the East Indies in concerted operation with the Toulon squadron." [210] For this he purposes to send Missiessy to Cadiz. In Rochefort that admiral will occupy a British detachment, but on the spot where the emperor does not wish it; at Cadiz it will be remote from the scene. But later on he says, "Perhaps the enemy, who are now thoroughly frightened, will not be led away; in that case I shall have dispersed my force uselessly." [211] Therefore he concludes to keep him at Rochefort, where, if blockaded, he reduces the force either off Ferrol or off Brest. If not blockaded, he is to go to sea, take a wide sweep in the Atlantic, and appear off Ireland. The English will then doubtless detach ships to seek him; but he will again disappear and take position near Cape Finisterre, where he will be likely to meet Villeneuve returning. [212] Finally, for the same reason, toward the end of June he tries to create alarm about the Texel. Marmont is directed to make demonstrations and even to embark his troops, while part of the emperor's guard is moved to Utrecht. "This will lead the enemy to weaken his fleet before Brest, which is the great point." [213]

All these movements were sound and wise; but the emperor made the mistake of underestimating his enemy. "We have not to do," he said, "with a far-sighted, but with a very proud government. What we are doing is so simple that a government the least foresighted would not have made war. For an instant they have feared for London; soon they will be sending squadrons to the two Indies." [214]

The British government and the British Admiralty doubtless made blunders; but barring the one great mistake, for which the previous administration of St. Vincent was responsible, of allowing the material of the navy to fall below the necessities of the moment, the Trafalgar campaign was in its leading outlines well and adequately conceived, and in its execution, as event succeeded event, ably and even brilliantly directed. Adequate detachments were placed before each of the enemy's minor arsenals, while the fleet before Brest constituted the great central body upon which the several divisions might, and when necessity arose, actually did fall back. Sudden disaster, or being beaten in detail, thus became almost impossible. In the home ports was maintained a well-proportioned reserve, large enough to replace ships disabled or repairing, but not so large as seriously to weaken the force at sea. As a rule the Admiralty successfully shunned the ex-centric movements to which Napoleon would divert them, and clung steadfastly to that close watch which St. Vincent had perfected, and which unquestionably embodied the soundest strategic principles. Missiessy returned to Rochefort on the 26th of May and was promptly blocked by a body of five or six ships. As the force in Ferrol increased, by the preparation of ships for sea, the opposing squadron of six or seven was raised to ten, under Rear-Admiral Calder. Before Brest were from twenty to twenty-five, to whose command Admiral Cornwallis returned early in July, after a three months' sick leave. Collingwood with half a dozen was before Cadiz, where he effectually prevented a concentration, which, by its distance from the scene of action, would have seriously embarrassed the British navy. Such was the situation when Villeneuve and Nelson, in June and July, were re-crossing the Atlantic, heading, the one for Ferrol, the other for the Straits; and when the crisis, to which all the previous movements had been leading, was approaching its culmination.

When Nelson started back for Europe, although convinced the French were thither bound, he had no absolute certainty of the fact. [215] For his decision he relied upon his own judgment. In dispatching the "Curieux" the night before he himself sailed, he directed her captain to steer a certain course, by following which he believed he would fall in with the allied fleet. [216] Accordingly the "Curieux" did, on the 19th of June, sight the enemy in latitude 33° 12' north and longitude 58° west, nine hundred miles north-north-east from Antigua, standing north-north-west. The same day Nelson himself learned from an American schooner that a fleet of about twenty-two large ships of war had been seen by it on the 15th, three hundred and fifty miles south of the position in which Bettesworth saw it four days later.

Bettesworth fully understood the importance of the knowledge thus gained. The precise destination of the enemy did not certainly appear, but there could be no doubt that he was returning to Europe. With that intelligence, and the information concerning Nelson's purposes, it was urgent to reach England speedily. Carrying a press of sail, the "Curieux" anchored at Plymouth on the 7th of July. The captain posted at once to London, arriving the evening of the 8th, at eleven. The head of the Admiralty at that time was Lord Barham, an aged naval officer, who had been unexpectedly called to the office two months before, in consequence of the impeachment of Lord Melville, the successor to St. Vincent. It was fortunate for Great Britain that the direction of naval operations at so critical a moment was in the hands of a man, who, though over eighty and long a stranger to active service, understood intuitively, and without need of explanation, the various conditions of weather and service likely to affect the movements of the scattered detachments, British and hostile, upon whose rapid combinations so much now depended.

Barham having gone to bed, Bettesworth's dispatches were not given him till early next morning. As soon as he got them he exclaimed angrily at the loss of so many precious hours; and, without waiting to dress, at once dictated orders with which, by 9 A. M. of the 9th, Admiralty messengers were hurrying to Plymouth and Portsmouth. Cornwallis was directed to raise the blockade at Rochefort, sending the five ships composing it to Sir Robert Calder, then watching off Ferrol with ten; and the latter was ordered, with the fifteen ships thus united under his command, to cruise one hundred miles west of Cape Finisterre, to intercept Villeneuve and forestall his junction with the Ferrol squadron. With Nelson returning toward Cadiz, where he would find Collingwood, and with Cornwallis off Brest, this disposition completed the arrangements necessary to thwart the primary combinations of the emperor, unknown to, but shrewdly surmised by, his opponents. It realized for Ferrol that which Napoleon had indicated as the proper course for the British fleet off Brest, in case it received intelligence of Villeneuve's approach there,—to meet the enemy so far at sea as to prevent the squadron in port from joining in the intended battle. [217]

Fair winds favoring the quick, Cornwallis received his orders on the 11th; and on the 15th, eight days after the "Curieux" anchored in Plymouth, the Rochefort ships joined Calder. The latter proceeded at once to the post assigned him, where on the 19th he received through Lisbon the tidings of Villeneuve's return sent by Nelson from the West Indies. The same day Nelson himself, having outstripped the combined fleets, anchored in Gibraltar. On the 22d the sudden lifting of a dense fog revealed to each other the hostile squadrons of Calder and Villeneuve; the British fifteen sail-of-the-line, the allies twenty. The numbers of the latter were an unpleasant surprise to Calder, the "Curieux" having reported them as only seventeen. [218]

It is difficult to praise too highly the prompt and decisive step taken by Lord Barham, when so suddenly confronted with the dilemma of either raising the blockade of Rochefort and Ferrol, or permitting Villeneuve to proceed unmolested to his destination, whatever that might be. To act instantly and rightly in so distressing a perplexity—to be able to make so unhesitating a sacrifice of advantages long and rightly cherished, in order to strike at once one of the two converging detachments of an enemy—shows generalship of a high order. It may be compared to Bonaparte's famous abandonment of the siege of Mantua in 1796, to throw himself upon the Austrian armies descending from the Tyrol. In the hands of a more resolute or more capable admiral than Calder, the campaign would probably have been settled off Finisterre. Notice has been taken of Barham's good luck, in that the brilliant period of Trafalgar fell within his nine months' tenure of office; [219] but Great Britain might better be congratulated that so clear-headed a man held the reins at so critical a moment.

The length of Villeneuve's passage, which so happily concurred to assure the success of Barham's masterly move, was due not only to the inferior seamanship of the allies, but also to the mistaken rendezvous off the Azores, [220]—assigned by the French admiral when leaving the West Indies. The westerly gales, which prevail in the North Atlantic, blow during the summer from the south of west, west of the Azores, and from the north of west when east of them. A fleet bound for a European port north of the islands—as Ferrol is—should therefore so use the south-west winds as to cross their meridian well to the northward. Nelson himself sighted one of the group, though his destination was in a lower latitude. In consequence of his mistake, Villeneuve was by the north-west winds forced down on the coast of Portugal, where he met the north-easters prevalent at that season, against which he was struggling when encountered by Calder. This delay was therefore caused, not by bad luck, but by bad management.

Napoleon himself was entirely misled by Barham's measures, whose rapidity he himself could not have surpassed. He had left Turin on the 8th of July, and, travelling incessantly, reached Fontainebleau on the evening of the 11th. About the 20th he appears to have received the news brought ten days before by the "Curieux," and at the same time that of the Rochefort blockade being raised. [221] Not till the 27th did he learn that the British squadron off Ferrol had also disappeared, after being joined by the Rochefort ships. "The 'Curieux' only reached England on the 9th," he wrote to Decrès; "the Admiralty could not decide the movements of its squadrons in twenty-four hours, yet the Rochefort division disappeared on the 12th. On the 15th it joined that off Ferrol, and the same day, or at latest the next, these fourteen ships departed by orders given prior to the arrival of the 'Curieux.' What news had the English before the arrival of that brig? That the French were at Martinique; that Nelson had then but nine ships. What should they have done? I should not be surprised if they have sent another squadron to strengthen Nelson, ... and that it is these fourteen ships from before Ferrol they have sent to America." [222]

On the 2d of August the emperor set out for Boulogne, and there on the 8th received news of Villeneuve's action with Calder and of his subsequent entry into Ferrol. The fleets had fought on the afternoon of July 22, and two Spanish ships-of-the-line had been taken. Night-fall and fog parted the combatants; the obscurity being so great that the allies did not know their loss till next day. One of the British ships lost a foretopmast, and others suffered somewhat in their spars; but these mishaps, though pleaded in Calder's defence, do not seem to have been the chief reasons that deterred him from dogging the enemy till he had brought him again to action. He was preoccupied with the care of the prizes, a secondary matter, and with the thought of what would happen in case the Ferrol and Rochefort squadrons sailed. "I could not hope to succeed without receiving great damage; I had no friendly port to go to, and had the Ferrol and Rochefort squadrons come out, I must have fallen an easy prey. They might have gone to Ireland. Had I been defeated it is impossible to say what the consequences might have been." [223] In short, the British admiral had fallen into the error against which Napoleon used to caution his generals. He had "made to himself a picture," and allowed the impression produced by it to blind him to the fact (if indeed he ever saw it) that he had before him the largest and most important of the several detachments of the enemy, that it was imperatively necessary not to permit it to escape unharmed, and that at no future day could he be sure of bringing his own squadron into play with such decisive effect. The wisdom of engaging at any particular moment was a tactical question, to be determined by the circumstances at the time; but the duty of keeping touch with the enemy, so as to use promptly any opportunity offered, was a strategic question, the answer to which admits of no doubt whatever. On the evening of the 24th the wind was fair to carry him to the enemy, but he parted from them. During the night it blew fresh; and on the morning of the 25th, says a French authority, the fleet was without order, several vessels had lost sails, and others sustained injuries to their spars. [224] Calder, however, was not on hand.

It is related of Nelson that, on his return voyage from the West Indies, he used to say to his captains, speaking of the fleet which Calder allowed to escape, "If we meet them we shall find them not less than eighteen, I rather think twenty, sail-of-the-line, and therefore do not be surprised if I should not fall on them immediately; we won't part without a battle. I will let them alone till we approach the shores of Europe, or they give me an advantage too tempting to be resisted." [225] And again, after reaching England, he found on the 23d of August great anxiety prevailing about Calder, who with eighteen ships was then again cruising for Villeneuve, supposed to have been re-enforced to twenty-eight by the Ferrol squadron. "I am no conjuror," he wrote, "but this I ventured without any fear, that if Calder got fairly alongside their twenty-eight sail, by the time the enemy had beat our fleet soundly, they would do us no harm this year." [226] These two utterances of this consummate warrior sufficiently show how Calder should have viewed his opportunity in July.

Villeneuve had no more wish to renew the action than had Calder. Less even than that admiral could he rise to the height of risking a detachment in order to secure the success of a great design. In the eighteen ships left to him were over twelve hundred men so ill that it was necessary to put them ashore. Constrained by the winds, he put into Vigo on the 28th of July. Calder, on the other hand, having seen his prizes so far north as to insure their safety, returned off Cape Finisterre where he hoped to meet Nelson. Not finding him, he on the 29th resumed the blockade of Ferrol. On the 31st Villeneuve, leaving three of his worst vessels in Vigo, sailed for Ferrol with fifteen ships, of which two only were Spaniards. The fleet, having a strong south-west gale, kept close along shore to avoid meeting Calder; but the latter, having been blown off by the storm, was not in sight when Villeneuve reached the harbor's mouth. The allied ships were entering with a fair wind, when the French admiral received dispatches forbidding him to anchor in Ferrol. If, from injuries received in battle, or losses from any causes whatever, he was unable to carry out the plan of entering the Channel, the emperor preferred that, after rallying the Ferrol and Rochefort squadrons, he should go to Cadiz; but, the Brest fleet being ready and the other preparations complete, he hoped everything from the skill, zeal, and courage of Villeneuve. "Make us masters of the Straits of Dover," he implored, "be it but for four or five days." [227] Napoleon leaned on a broken reed. Forbidden to enter Ferrol, Villeneuve took his ships into the adjacent harbor of Coruña, [228] where he anchored August 1.

Thus was effected the junction which Calder had been expected to prevent. His absence on the particular day may have been unavoidable; but, if so, it does but emphasize his fault in losing sight of the allies on the 24th of July, when he had a fair wind. Twenty-nine French and Spanish ships were now concentrated at Ferrol. The popular outcry was so great that he felt compelled to ask an enquiry. The Admiralty having, by a movement both judiciously and promptly ordered, secured a meeting with the enemy's force so far from Ferrol as to deprive it of the support of the ships there, was justly incensed at the failure to reap the full advantage. It therefore ordered a court-martial. The trial was held the following December; and the admiral, while expressly cleared of either cowardice or disaffection, was adjudged not to have done his utmost to renew the engagement and to take or destroy every ship of the enemy. His conduct was pronounced highly censurable, and he was sentenced to be severely reprimanded.

This was after Trafalgar. The immediate result of the junction in Ferrol was the abandonment of the blockade there. On the 2d of August Calder sent five ships to resume the watch off Rochefort, whence the French squadron had meantime escaped. Not till August 9 did he know of Villeneuve's entrance into Ferrol. Having with him then but nine ships, he fell back upon the main body before Brest, which he joined on the 14th,—Cornwallis then having under him seventeen ships, which Calder's junction raised to twenty-six.

The next day, August 15, Nelson also joined the fleet. On the 25th of July, a week after reaching Gibraltar, he had received the "Curieux's" news. Obeying his constant rule to seek the French, he at once started north with the eleven ships which had accompanied him from the West Indies,—intending to go either to Ferrol, Brest, or Ireland, according to the tidings which might reach him on the way. After communicating with Cornwallis, he continued on to England with his own ship, the "Victory," and one other whose condition required immediate repairs. On the 18th he landed in Portsmouth, after an absence of over two years.

Cornwallis had now under his command a concentrated force of thirty-four or thirty-five sail-of-the-line, all admirably seasoned and disciplined. The allies had in Brest twenty-one, in Ferrol twenty-nine; two great bodies, neither of which, however, was equal in number, nor still less in quality, to his. Adrift somewhere on the sea were the five French ships from Rochefort. For more than five months these vessels, which sailed on the 17th of July, five days after the blockading ships had left to join Calder, ranged the seas without meeting an equal British division,—a circumstance which earned for them from the French the name of "the Invisible Squadron." But, while thus fortunately unseen by the enemy, Napoleon found it equally impossible to bring them within the scope of his combinations; [229] and it may be doubted whether commerce-destroying to the sum of two million dollars compensated for the loss of so important a military factor.

The ships in Cadiz being blocked by Collingwood, and those in Cartagena remaining always inert, the naval situation was now comparatively simple. Cornwallis was superior to either of the enemy's detachments, and he held an interior position. In case Villeneuve approached, it was scarcely possible that the two hostile squadrons, dependent upon the wind, which if fair for one would be foul to the other, could unite before he had effectually crushed one of them. It ought to be equally improbable, with proper lookouts, that Villeneuve could elude the British fleet and gain so far the start of it as to cover the Straits of Dover during the time required by Napoleon. In his concentrated force and his interior position Cornwallis controlled the issue,—barring of course those accidents which cannot be foreseen, and which at times derange the best-laid plans.