Deeds that Won the Empire Part 14

"'Captain,' they cry, 'the fight is done, They bid you send your sword!'

And he answered, 'Grapple her stern and bow.

They have asked for the steel. They shall have it now; Out cutla.s.ses, and board!'"

--KIPLING.

On the morning of July 3, 1801, a curious scene, which might almost be described as a sea comedy, was being transacted off the coast of Alicante. Three huge French line-of-battle s.h.i.+ps were manoeuvring and firing round a tiny little British brig-of-war. It was like three mastiffs worrying a mouse. The brig was Lord Cochrane's famous little _Speedy_, a craft so tiny that its commander could carry its entire broadside in his own pockets, and when he shaved himself in his cabin, had to put his head through the skylight and his shaving-box on the quarter-deck, in order to stand upright.

Cochrane was caught by Admiral Linois' squadron, consisting of two s.h.i.+ps of eighty guns and one of seventy-four, on a lee sh.o.r.e, where escape was impossible; but from four o'clock till nine o'clock Cochrane evaded all the efforts of his big pursuers to capture him. The French s.h.i.+ps separated on different tacks, so as to keep the little _Speedy_ constantly under the fire of one or the other; and as the British brig turned and dashed at one opening of the moving triangle or the other, the great s.h.i.+ps thundered their broadsides at her. Cochrane threw his guns and stores overboard, and by the most ingenious seamans.h.i.+p evaded capture for hours, surviving some scores of broadsides. He could tack far more quickly than the gigantic s.h.i.+ps that pursued him, and again and again the _Speedy_ spun round on its heel and shot off on a new course, leaving its particular pursuer with sheet s.h.i.+vering, and nothing but s.p.a.ce to fire into. Once, by a quick turn, he shot past one of the 80-gun s.h.i.+ps occupied in trying to tack, and got clear. The _Desaix_, however, a seventy-four, was swiftly on the track of the _Speedy_; its tall canvas under the growing breeze gave it an advantage, and it ran down to within musket-shot of the _Speedy_, then yawed, bringing its whole broadside to bear, intending to sink its tiny foe with a single discharge. In yawing, however, the _Desaix_ shot a little too far, and the weight of her broadside only smote the water, but the scattered grape cut up the _Speedy's_ rigging and canvas so terribly that nothing was left but surrender.

When Cochrane went on board his captor, its gallant captain refused to take his sword, saying he "could not accept the sword of an officer who had struggled for so many hours against impossibility." Cochrane and his gallant crew were summarily packed into the Frenchman's hold, and when the French in their turn were pursued by the British line-of-battle s.h.i.+ps, as every broadside crashed on the hull of the s.h.i.+p that held them captive, Cochrane and his men gave a round of exultant cheers, until the exasperated Frenchmen threatened to shoot them unless they would hold their tongues--an announcement which only made the British sailors cheer a little louder. The fight between Saumarez and Linois ended with a tragedy; but it may be said to have begun with a farce.

The presence of a French squadron in the Straits of Gibraltar at this particular moment may be explained in a few sentences. Napoleon had woven afresh the web of those naval "combinations" so often torn to fragments by British seamans.h.i.+p and daring. He had persuaded or bullied Spain into placing under the French flag a squadron of six line-of-battle s.h.i.+ps, including two leviathans of 112 guns each, lying in the harbour of Cadiz. With haughty, it might almost be said with insolent daring, a couple of British seventy-fours--sometimes, indeed, only one--patrolled the entrance to Cadiz, and blockaded a squadron of ten times their own force. Napoleon's plan was to draw a strong French squadron, under Admiral Linois, from Toulon, a second Spanish squadron from Ferrol, unite these with the s.h.i.+ps lying in Cadiz, and thus form a powerful fleet of at least fifteen s.h.i.+ps of the line, with a garnis.h.i.+ng of frigates.

Once having got his fleet, Napoleon's imagination--which had a strong predatory bias--hesitated betwixt two uses to which it could be turned.

One was to make a dash on Lisbon, and require, under threat of an instant bombardment, the delivery of all British s.h.i.+ps and goods lying there. This ingenious plan, it was reckoned, would fill French pockets with cash and adorn French brows with glory at one stroke. The amount of British booty at Lisbon was computed--somewhat airily--at 200,000,000 pounds; its disappearance would send half the mercantile houses of Great Britain into the insolvency court, and, to quote a French state paper on the subject, "our fleet, without being buffeted about the sea, would return to Brest loaded with riches and covered with glory, and France would once more astonish Europe." The alternative scheme was to transport some 32,000 new troops to Egypt and restore French fortunes in that country.

Meanwhile Great Britain took energetic measures to wreck this new combination. Sir James Saumarez, in the _Caesar_, of eighty guns, with six seventy-fours, was despatched to keep guard over Cadiz; and he had scarcely reached his station there when a boat, pulling furiously over from Gibraltar, reported that Admiral Linois' squadron had made its appearance off the Rock, beating up westward. The sails of the _Caesar_ were instantly swung round, a many-coloured flutter of bunting summoned the rest of the squadron to follow, and Saumarez began his eager chase of the French, bearing away for the Gut under a light north-west wind. But the breeze died down, and the current swept the straggling s.h.i.+ps westward. All day they drifted helplessly, and the night only brought a breath of air sufficient to fan them through the Straits.

Meanwhile Linois had taken refuge in the tiny curve of the Spanish coast known as the roadstead of Algeciras. Linois was, perhaps, the best French seaman of his day, having, it is true, very little French dash, but endowed with a wealth of cool resolution, and a genius for defensive warfare altogether admirable. Algeciras gave Linois exactly what he wanted, an almost una.s.sailable position. The roadstead is open, shallow, and plentifully besprinkled with rocks, while powerful sh.o.r.e batteries covered the whole anchorage with their zone of fire.

The French admiral anch.o.r.ed his s.h.i.+ps at intervals of 500 yards from each other, and so that the lines of fire from the batteries north and south crossed in front of his s.h.i.+ps. The French squadron carried some 3000 troops, and these were at once landed, and, manning the batteries, raised them to a high degree of effectiveness. Some fourteen heavy Spanish gunboats added enormously to the strength of the French position.

The French never doubted that Saumarez would instantly attack; the precedents of the Nile and of Copenhagen were too recent to make any doubt possible. And Saumarez did exactly what his enemies expected.

Algeciras, in fact, is the battle of the Nile in miniature. But Saumarez, though he had the swift daring of Nelson, lacked his warlike genius. Nelson, in Aboukir Bay, leaped without an instant's pause on the line of his enemy, but then he had his own s.h.i.+ps perfectly in hand, and so made the leap effective. Saumarez sent his s.h.i.+ps into the fight headlong, and without the least regard to mutual support. At 7.50 on the morning of July 6, an uncertain gust of air carried the leading British s.h.i.+p, the _Pompee_, round Cabrita; Hood, in the _Venerable_, lay becalmed in the offing; the flags.h.i.+p, with the rest of the squadron, were mere pyramids of idle canvas on the rim of the horizon.

The _Pompee_ drifted down the whole French line, scorched with the fire of batteries and of gunboats, as well as by the broadsides of the great French s.h.i.+ps, and at 8.45 dropped her anchor so close to the _Formidable_--a s.h.i.+p much bigger than itself--that the Frenchman's buoy lay outside her. Then, deliberately clewing up her sails and tautening her springs, the _Pompee_ opened a fire on her big antagonist so fierce, sustained, and deadly, that the latter found it intolerable, and began to warp closer to the sh.o.r.e. The _Audacious_ and _Venerable_ came slowly up into their a.s.signed positions, and here was a spectacle of three British s.h.i.+ps fighting four French s.h.i.+ps and fourteen Spanish gunboats, with heavy sh.o.r.e batteries manned by 3000 troops thrown into the scale! At this stage, too, the _Pompee's_ springs gave way, or were shot away, the current swung her round till she lay head on to the broadside of her huge antagonist, while the batteries smote her with a deadly cross-fire. A little after ten o'clock the _Caesar_ dropped anchor three cables' lengths from the _Indomptable_, and opened a fire which the French themselves described as "tremendous" upon her antagonist.

Linois found the British fire too destructive, and signalled his s.h.i.+ps to cut or slip their cables, calculating that a faint air from the sea, which was beginning to blow, would drift them closer under the shelter of the batteries. Saumarez, too, noticed that his topsails were beginning to swell, and he instantly slipped his cable and endeavoured to close with the _Indomptable_, signalling his s.h.i.+ps to do the same.

The British cables rattled hoa.r.s.ely through their hawse-holes along the whole line, and the s.h.i.+ps were adrift; but the breeze almost instantly died away, and on the strong coast current the British s.h.i.+ps floated helplessly, while the fire from the great sh.o.r.e batteries, and from the steady French decks, now anch.o.r.ed afresh, smote them heavily in turn.

The _Pompee_ lay for an hour under a concentrated fire without being able to bring a gun to bear in return, and then summoned by signal the boats of the squadron to tow her off.

Saumarez, meanwhile, had ordered the _Hannibal_, under Captain Ferris, to round the head of the French line and "rake the admiral's s.h.i.+p."

Ferris, by fine seamans.h.i.+p, partly sailed and partly drifted into the post a.s.signed to him, and then grounded hopelessly, under a plunging fire from the sh.o.r.e batteries, within hail of the Frenchman, itself also aground. A fire so dreadful soon reduced the unfortunate _Hannibal_ to a state of wreck. Boats from the _Caesar_ and the _Venerable_ came to her help, but Ferris sent them back again. They could not help him, and should not share his fate. Saumarez, as a last resource, prepared for a boat attack on the batteries, but in the whole squadron there were not enough uninjured boats to carry the marines.

The British flags.h.i.+p itself was by this time well-nigh a wreck, and was drifting on the reefs. A flaw of wind from the sh.o.r.e gave the s.h.i.+ps steerage-way, and Saumarez drew off, leaving the _Hannibal_ to its fate.

Ferris fought till his masts were gone, his guns dismounted, his bulwarks riddled, his decks pierced, and one-third of his crew killed or wounded. Then he ordered the survivors to the lower decks, and still kept his flag flying for half-an-hour after the shot-torn sails of the shattered British s.h.i.+ps had disappeared round Cabrita. Then he struck. Here was a French triumph, indeed! A British squadron beaten off, a British seventy-four captured! It is said that when the news reached Paris the city went half-mad with exultation. Napoleon read the despatch to his ministers with eyes that danced, and almost wept, with mere gladness!

The British squadron--officers and men in such a mood as may be imagined--put into Gibraltar to refit; the _Caesar_, with her mainmast shot through in five places, her boats destroyed, her hull pierced; while of the sorely battered _Pompee_ it is recorded that she had "not a mast, yard-spar, shroud, rope, or sail" which was not damaged by hostile shot. Linois, meanwhile, got his grounded s.h.i.+ps and his solitary prize afloat, and summoned the Cadiz squadron to join him. On the 9th these s.h.i.+ps--six sail of the line, two of them giants of 112 guns each, with three frigates--went triumphantly, with widespread canvas and many-coloured bunting, past Gibraltar, where the shattered British squadron was lying, and cast anchor beside Admiral Linois in Algeciras Bay.

The British were labouring, meanwhile, with fierce energy, to refit their damaged s.h.i.+ps under shelter of the guns of Gibraltar. The _Pompee_ was practically destroyed, and her crew were distributed amongst the other s.h.i.+ps. Saumarez himself regarded the condition of his flags.h.i.+p as hopeless, but his captain, Brenton, begged permission to at least attempt to refit her. He summoned his crew aft, and told the men the admiral proposed to leave the s.h.i.+p behind, and asked them "what they thought about it." The men gave a wrathful roar, punctuated, it is to be feared, with many sea-going expletives, and shouted, "All hands to work day and night till she's ready!" The whole crew, down to the very powder-boys, actually worked while daylight lasted, kept it up, watch and watch, through the night, and did this from the evening of the 6th to the noon of the 12th! Probably no s.h.i.+p that ever floated was refitted in shorter time. In that brief period, to quote the "Naval Register," she "s.h.i.+fted her mainmast; fished and secured her foremast, shot through in several places; knotted and spliced the rigging, which had been cut to pieces, and bent new sails; plugged the shot-holes between wind and water; completed with stores of all kinds, anchors and cables, powder and shot, and provisions for four months."

On Sunday, July 12, 1801, the French and Spanish s.h.i.+ps in Algeciras Bay weighed anchor, formed their line of battle as they came out, off Cabrita Point, and, stately and slow, with the two 112-gun Spaniards as a rearguard, bore up for Cadiz. An hour later the British s.h.i.+ps warped out of the mole in pursuit. It was an amazing sight: a squadron of five sail of the line, which had been completely disabled in an action only five days before, was starting, fresh and refitted, in pursuit of a fleet double its own number, and more than double its strength! All Gibraltar crowded to watch the s.h.i.+ps as, one by one, they cleared the pier-head. The garrison band blew itself hoa.r.s.e playing "Britons, strike home," while the _Caesar's_ band answered in strains as shrill with "Come, cheer up, my lads, 'tis for glory we steer." Both tunes, it may be added, were simply submerged beneath the cheers which rang up from mole-head and batteries and dock-walls. Just as the _Caesar_ drifted, huge and stately, past the pier-head, a boat came eagerly pulling up to her. It was crowded with jack-tars, with bandaged heads and swathed arms. A cl.u.s.ter of the _Pompee's_ wounded, who escaped from the hospital, bribed a boatman to pull them out to the flags.h.i.+p, and clamoured to be taken on board!

Saumarez had strengthened his squadron by the addition of the _Superb_, with the _Thames_ frigate, and at twenty minutes to nine P.M., vainly searching the black horizon for the lights of the enemy, he hailed the _Superb_, and ordered its captain, Keats, to clap on all sail and attack the enemy directly he overtook them. Saumarez, in a word, launched a single seventy-four against a fleet! Keats was a daring sailor; his s.h.i.+p was, perhaps, the fastest British seventy-four afloat, and his men were instantly aloft spreading every inch of canvas. Then, like a huge ghost, the _Superb_ glided ahead and vanished in the darkness. The wind freshened; the blackness deepened; the lights of the British squadron died out astern. But a wide sprinkle of lights ahead became visible; it was the Spanish fleet! Eagerly the daring _Superb_ pressed on, with slanting decks and men at quarters, but with lights hidden. At midnight the rear s.h.i.+ps of the Spanish squadron were under the larboard bow of the _Superb_--two stupendous three-deckers, with lights gleaming through a hundred port-holes--while a French two-decker to larboard of both the Spanish giants completed the line.

Keats, unseen and unsuspected, edged down with his solitary seventy-four, her heaviest guns only 18-pounders, on the quarter of the nearest three-decker. He was about to fling himself, in the gloom of the night, on three great s.h.i.+ps, with an average of 100 guns each! Was ever a more daring feat attempted? Silently through the darkness the _Superb_ crept, her canvas glimmering ghostly white, till she was within some 300 yards of the nearest Spaniard. Then out of the darkness to windward there broke on the astonished and drowsy Spaniards a tempest of flame, a whirlwind of shot. Thrice the _Superb_ poured her broadside into the huge and staggering bulk of her antagonist.

With the second broadside the Spaniard's topmast came tumbling down; with the third, so close was the flame of the _Superb's_ guns, the Spanish sails--dry as touch-wood with lying for so many months in the suns.h.i.+ne of Cadiz--took fire.

Meanwhile a dramatic incident occurred. The two great Spaniards commenced to thunder their heavy broadsides into each other! Many of the Superb's shots had struck the second and more distant three-decker.

Cochrane, indeed, says that the _Superb_ pa.s.sed actually betwixt the two gigantic Spaniards, fired a broadside, larboard and starboard, into both, and then glided on and vanished in the darkness. It is certain that the _San Hermenegildo_, finding her decks torn by a hurricane of shot, commenced to fire furiously through the smoke and the night at the nearest lights. They were the lights of her own consort! She, in turn, fired at the flash of the guns tormenting her. So, under the black midnight skies, the two great Spanish s.h.i.+ps thundered at each other, flame answering flame. They drifted ever closer. The fire of the _Real Carlos_ kindled the sails of the sister s.h.i.+p; the flames leaped and danced to the very mast-heads; and, still engaged in a fiery wrestle, they blew up in succession, and out of their united crews of 2000 men only a little over 200 were picked up!

The _Superb_, meanwhile, had glided ahead, leaving the three-deckers to destroy each other, and opened fire at pistol-shot distance on the French two-decker, and in thirty minutes compelled her to strike. In less than two hours of a night action, that is, this single English seventy-four had destroyed two Spanish three-deckers of 112 guns each, and captured a fine French battle-s.h.i.+p of 74 guns!

The British s.h.i.+ps by this time were coming up in the rear, with every inch of canvas spread. They swept past the amazing spectacle of the two great Spaniards destroying each other, and pressed on in chase of the enemy. The wind rose to a gale. In the grey dawn the _Caesar_ found herself, with all her sister s.h.i.+ps, far astern, except the _Venerable_, under Hood, which was hanging on the quarter of the rearmost French s.h.i.+p, the _Formidable_, a magnificent s.h.i.+p of 80 guns, with a gallant commander, and carrying quite too heavy metal for Hood.

Hood, however, the most daring of men, exchanged broadsides at pistol-shot distance with his big antagonist, till his s.h.i.+p was dismasted, and was drifted by the current on the rocky shoals off San Pedro. The _Caesar_ came up in time to enable its disgusted crew to see s.h.i.+p after s.h.i.+p of the flying enemy disappear safely within the sheltering batteries of Cadiz.

TRAFALGAR

I. THE STRATEGY

"Uprose the soul of him a star On that brave day of Ocean days; It rolled the smoke from Trafalgar To darken Austerlitz ablaze.

Are we the men of old, its light Will point us under every sky The path he took; and must we fight, Our Nelson be our battle-cry!

He leads: we hear our Seaman's call In the roll of battles won; For he is Britain's Admiral Till setting of her sun."

--GEORGE MEREDITH.

That Trafalgar was a great British victory, won by splendid seamans.h.i.+p and by magnificent courage, everybody knows. On October 21, 1805, Nelson, with twenty-seven line-of-battle s.h.i.+ps, attacked Villeneuve, in command of a combined fleet of thirty-three line-of-battle s.h.i.+ps. The first British gun was fired at 12.10 o'clock; at 5 o'clock the battle was over; and within those five hours the combined fleets of France and Spain were simply destroyed. No fewer than eighteen s.h.i.+ps of the line were captured, burnt, or sunk; the rest were in flight, and had practically ceased to exist as a fighting force. But what very few people realise is that Trafalgar is only the last incident in a great strategic conflict--a warfare of brains rather than of bullets--which for nearly three years raged round a single point. For that long period the warlike genius of Napoleon was pitted in strategy against the skill and foresight of a cl.u.s.ter of British sailors; and the sailors won. They beat Napoleon at his own weapons. The French were not merely out-fought in the shock of battling fleets, they were out-generalled in the conflict of plotting and warlike brains which preceded the actual fight off Cape Trafalgar.

The strategy which preceded Trafalgar represents Napoleon's solitary attempt to plan a great campaign on the tossing floor of the sea. "It has an interest wholly unique," says Mahan, "as the only great naval campaign ever planned by this foremost captain of modern times." And it is a very marvellous fact that a cl.u.s.ter of British sailors--Jervis and Barham (a salt eighty years old) at the Admiralty, Cornwallis at Brest, Collingwood at Cadiz, and Nelson at Toulon--guessed all Napoleon's profound and carefully hidden strategy, and met it by even subtler plans and swifter resolves than those of Napoleon himself. The five hours of gallant fighting off Cape Trafalgar fill us with exultant pride. But the intellectual duel which preceded the shock of actual battle, and which lasted for nearly three years, is, in a sense, a yet more splendid story. Great Britain may well honour her naval leaders of that day for their cool and profound strategy, as much as for the unyielding courage with which such a blockade as, say, that of Brest by Cornwallis was maintained for years, or such splendid daring as that which Collingwood showed when, in the _Royal Sovereign_, he broke Villeneuve's line at Trafalgar.

When in 1803 the war which brought to an end the brief peace of Amiens broke out, Napoleon framed a great and daring plan for the invasion of England. French plans for the invasion of England were somewhat numerous a century or so ago. The Committee of Public Safety in 1794, while keeping the guillotine busy in the Place de la Revolution, had its own little plan for extending the Reign of Terror, by means of an invasion, to England; and on May 27 of that year solemnly appointed one of their number to represent the Committee in England "when it was conquered." The member chosen was citizen Bon Saint Andre, the same hero who, in the battle of the 1st of June, fled in terror to the refuge of the French flags.h.i.+p's c.o.c.k-pit when the _Queen Charlotte_, with her triple lines of guns, came too alarmingly near. But Napoleon's plans for the same object in 1803 were definite, formidable, profound. Great Britain was the one barrier in the path of his ambition. "Buonaparte," says Green, in his "Short History of the English People," "was resolute to be master of the western world, and no notions of popular freedom or sense of popular right ever interfered with his resolve. . . . England was now the one country where freedom in any sense remained alive. . . . With the fall of England, despotism would have been universal throughout Europe; and it was at England that Buonaparte resolved to strike the first blow in his career of conquest.

Fifteen millions of people, he argued, must give way to forty millions."

So he formed the vast camp at Boulogne, in which were gathered 130,000 veterans. A great flotilla of boats was built, each boat being armed with one or two guns, and capable of carrying 100 soldiers. More than 1000 of such boats were built, and concentrated along twenty miles of the Channel coast, and at four different ports. A new port was dug at Boulogne, to give shelter to the main division of this flotilla, and great and powerful batteries erected for its protection. The French soldiers were exercised in embarking and disembarking till the whole process could be counted by minutes. "Let us," said Napoleon, "be masters of the Straits for six hours, and we shall be masters of the world."

When since the days of William the Conqueror were the sh.o.r.es of Great Britain menaced by such a peril? "There is no difficulty," said Moltke, "in getting an army into England; the trouble would be to get it out again." And, no doubt, Englishmen, fighting on their own soil and for their own hearths, would have given an invader a very rough time of it. But let it be remembered that Napoleon was a military genius of the first order, and that the 130,000 soldiers waiting on the heights above Boulogne to leap on British soil were, to quote Mahan, "the most brilliant soldiery of all time." They were the men who afterwards won Austerlitz, who struck down Prussia with a single blow at Jena, who marched as victors through the streets of Vienna and of Berlin, and fought their way to Moscow. Imagine such an army, with such a leader, landed on the green fields of Kent! In that case there might have been an English Austerlitz or Friedland. London might have shared the fate of Moscow. If Napoleon had succeeded, the fate of the world would have been changed, and Toronto and Cape Town, Melbourne and Sydney and Auckland might have been ruled by French prefects.

Napoleon himself was confident of success. He would reach London, he calculated, within four days of landing, and then he would have issued decrees abolis.h.i.+ng the House of Lords, proclaiming a redistribution of property, and declaring England a republic. "You would never have burned your capital," he said to O'Meara at St. Helena; "you are too rich and fond of money." The London mob, he believed, would have joined him, for, as he cynically argued, "the _canaille_ of all nations are nearly alike."

Even Napoleon would probably have failed, however, in subduing Great Britain, and would have remained a prisoner where he came intending to be a conqueror. As he himself said when a prisoner on his way to St.

Helena, "I entered into no calculation as to the manner in which I was to return"! But in the battles which must have been fought, how many English cities would have perished in flames, how many English rivers would have run red with the blood of slain men! "At Waterloo," says Alison, "England fought for victory; at Trafalgar for existence."

But "the streak of silver sea" guarded England, and for more than two years Napoleon framed subtle plans and organised vast combinations which might give him that brief six hours' command of the Strait which was all he needed, as he thought, to make himself the master of the world. The flotilla could not so much as get out of the ports, in which the acres of boats lay, in a single tide, and one half of the army of invasion must lie tossing--and, it may be suspected, dreadfully sea-sick--for hours outside these ports, waiting for the other half to get afloat. Then there remained forty miles of sea to cross. And what would happen if, say, Nelson and Collingwood, with a dozen 74-gun s.h.i.+ps, got at work amongst the flotilla? It would be a combat between wolves and sheep. It was Nelson's chief aspiration to have the opportunity of "trying Napoleon on a wind," and the attempt to cross the Straits might have given him that chance. All Napoleon's resources and genius were therefore strained to give him for the briefest possible time the command of the Channel; and the skill and energy of the British navy were taxed to the utmost to prevent that consummation.

Now, France, as a matter of fact, had a great fleet, but it was scattered, and lying imprisoned, in fragments, in widely separated ports. There were twelve s.h.i.+ps of the line in Toulon, twenty in Brest, five in Rochefort, yet other five in Ferrol; and the problem for Napoleon was, somehow, to set these imprisoned squadrons free, and a.s.semble them for twenty-four hours off Boulogne. The British policy, on the other hand, was to maintain a sleepless blockade of these ports, and keep the French fleet sealed up in scattered and helpless fragments. The battle for the Straits of Dover, the British naval chiefs held, must be fought off Brest and Ferrol and Toulon; and never in the history of the world were blockades so vigilant, and stern, and sleepless maintained.

Nelson spent two years battling with the fierce north-westers of the Gulf of Lyons, keeping watch over a great French squadron in Toulon, and from May 1803 to August 1805 left his s.h.i.+p only three times, and for less than an hour on each occasion. The watch kept by Cornwallis off Brest, through summer and winter, for nearly three years, Mahan declares, has never, for constancy and vigilance, been excelled, perhaps never equalled, in the history of blockades. The hards.h.i.+p of these long sea-watches was terrible. It was waging an fight with weariness and brain-paralysing monotony, with cold and scurvy and tempest, as well as with human foes. Collingwood was once twenty-two months at sea without dropping anchor. In seventeen years of sea service--between 1793 and 1810--he was only twelve months in England.

The wonder is that the seamen of that day did not grow web-footed, or forget what solid ground felt like! Collingwood tells his wife in one letter that he had "not seen a green leaf on a tree" for fourteen months! By way of compensation, these long and stern blockades developed such a race of seamen as perhaps the world has never seen before or since; exhaustless of resource, hardy, tireless, familiar with every turn of sea life, of iron frame and an iron courage which neither tempest nor battle could shake. Great Britain, as a matter of fact, won her naval battles, not because she had better s.h.i.+ps or heavier guns than her enemies, but only because she trained a finer race of seamen. Says Brenton, himself a gallant sailor of the period, "I have seen Spanish line-of-battle s.h.i.+ps twenty-four hours unmooring; as many minutes are sufficient for a well-manned British s.h.i.+p to perform the same operation. When, on any grand ceremony, they found it necessary to cross their top-gallant yards in harbour, they began the day before; we cross ours in one minute from the deck."

But it was these iron blockades that in the long-run thwarted the plans of Napoleon and changed the fate of the world. Cornwallis off Brest, Collingwood off Rochefort, Pellew off Ferrol, Nelson before Toulon, fighting the wild gales of the Bay of Biscay and the fierce north-westers of the Gulf of Lyons, in what Mahan calls "that tremendous and sustained vigilance which reached its utmost tension in the years preceding Trafalgar," really saved England. "Those far-distant, storm-beaten s.h.i.+ps, upon which the Grand Army never looked," says Mahan, "stood between it and the dominion of the world."

An intellect so subtle and combative as Napoleon's was, of course, strained to the utmost to break or cheat the British blockades, and the story of the one crafty ruse after another which he employed to beguile the British leaders is very remarkable. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is the manner in which these plain-minded, business-like British seamen, for whose mental powers Napoleon cherished the deepest contempt, fathomed his plans and shattered his combinations.

Napoleon's first plot was decidedly clever. He gathered in Brest 20,000 troops, ostensibly for a descent upon Ireland. This, he calculated, would preoccupy Cornwallis, and prevent him moving. The Toulon fleet was to run out with the first north-west wind, and, as long as a British look-out s.h.i.+p was in sight, would steer east, as though making for Egypt; but when beyond sight of British eyes the fleet was to swing round, run through the Straits, be joined off Cadiz by the Rochefort squadron, and sweep, a great fleet of at least sixteen sail of the line, past the Scilly Islands to Boulogne. Napoleon calculated that Nelson would be racing in the direction of Egypt, Cornwallis would be redoubling his vigilance before Brest, at the exact moment the great Boulogne flotilla was carrying its 130,000 invading Frenchmen to Dover! Napoleon put the one French admiral as to whose resolve and daring he was sure--Latouche Treville--in command of the Toulon fleet; but before the moment for action came Treville died, and Napoleon had to fall back upon a weaker man, Villeneuve.