Bill Fawcett - 100 Mistakes That Changed History

The situation in 1798 was not good for Britain. It was at war with revolutionary France, and one by one its allies had been defeated or intimidated out of the war. Things had gotten so bad that by 1797 there was no British fleet in the Mediterranean for the first time in 150 years. In fact, there were only a few ports in the Mediterranean Sea that any British ship could even enter. Those friendly ports were Gibraltar, Malta, and Naples, among the hundreds of ports that were found on the shores of the Mediterranean, Adriatic, and connected waters.

The French were on a roll, and one general was definitely making a name for himself. He was Napoleon Bonaparte, who had conquered and revitalized the French army in Italy. Napoleon had effectively defeated the entire peninsula except for Naples: a conquest that came soon after that. Bonaparte had returned to Paris to be hailed by the masses, which made the members of the Directorate rather nervous. Fortunately for them, Napoleon began agitating in February 1798 for an army with which to conquer Egypt. The idea appealed to the French politicians on many levels.

Egypt, while technically part of the Ottoman empire (a French ally), had been, in reality, an independent nation ruled by the Mameluke horsemen for centuries. Placed where it was, if France could control Egypt, it had an easy route to India. Since the American Revolution, India had become a vital part of the trade empire that financed Britain and her allies. If India could be threatened, then England might be forced to accept a peace on France’s terms. If Egypt were captured, the only route the British would have to India would involve going completely around Africa, taking months to send any reinforcements. With Egypt, French troops could reach India in a few weeks. Egypt would effectively give the French Republic interior lines in any expansion of the war to India or the Orient. It would put the British at such a disadvantage, there was a good chance of France taking over the entire subcontinent. Without the wealth of India, continuing the war would bankrupt Britain within months.

There also was another important factor that had to be on the minds of those who approved Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt: It got him out of Paris. In fact it got him out of Europe entirely. Win or lose, the venture seemed to remove Bonaparte as a political threat.

By the spring of 1798, more than 31,000 soldiers and almost 200 scholars had gathered in Toulon for the invasion of Egypt. It was impossible to gather such a force without the British knowing. Word had reached the British weeks earlier, and in response, Nelson had reentered the Mediterranean. His fleet was hovering about seventy miles south of Toulon harbor, hoping to engage the French ships commanded by Admiral Baraguey as soon as they sailed. This was important because Nelson had no idea what the final destination of this powerful army would be. He knew only that from Toulon the fleet would be headed for an invasion. If Napoleon and more than 30,000 men got loose in the Mediterranean, the possible targets ranged from Ireland and Portugal to Malta and Constantinople or Egypt. So the young admiral waited anxiously for the French to sail into his arms.

Most plans do not survive contact with the enemy, but Nelson’s plan did not even have to wait for the enemy before it began to unravel. Weather scuttled any chance Nelson had of intercepting Napoleon near Toulon. A sudden and locally severe storm in early May swept across the Mediterranean and slammed through where the British fleet stood guard. It caught that fleet in the open waters. Nelson’s flagship, the Vanguard , lost all of its masts. She had to be towed into a port and was nearly lost in the effort. The few frigates Nelson controlled were unavoidably scattered as they ran before the storm and were soon out of contact. Frigates were the scouts of the fleet and losing them proved costly later. All the British ships were separated and damaged. While the British were scattered and battered, the French sailed. Luck helped them avoid the storm. More than fifty merchant ships and a dozen men-of-war were able to slip south past the crippled British ships totally unobserved.

Nelson really had no choice but to put his hopes in meeting the French near their destination. This was because in the day of wooden ships and iron men, locating the enemy on the open sea was incredibly difficult. Today, with GPS and real-time satellite photography it can be hard to picture just how little a sea captain 200 years ago could observe. In an ocean that encompassed tens of thousands of square miles, a crewman perched on the top mast might be able to spot a ship ten or twelve miles away. His vision was greatly limited by the effective horizon. If they passed just a mile beyond the effective horizon of the enemy, a hundred ships, or in this case nearly eighty, were effectively invisible. Even sailing in a line at the normal speed, a ship’s best speed was around ten miles per hour. Plus the warships could not separate too fully as they would have to be able to signal one another if anything was found. So all of Nelson’s fleet, once it was reassembled and repaired, could search only a tiny portion of the sea at a time. Frigates, being faster and more able to stop merchant ships and ask questions, helped. But after the storm, Nelson’s frigates mostly managed to find one another, not the main fleet. This meant that they were of no use to Nelson in the weeks just after the French sailed. Even if one of the frigates found the French vessels, its captain wouldn’t know where Nelson’s ships were to report that finding to him.

So Nelson had lost sight of Napoleon’s army and protecting ships. But he knew that he had to find them. Everyone was in a panic as to what the already famous French general might do. Nelson got new orders and information from Gibraltar, but they were of no help. The orders made it clear that no one in England or Gibraltar had any better idea where Napoleon was going than Nelson did. The French fleet had vanished, and when it reappeared the cost to the British was likely to be high. Nelson’s orders were for him to search the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, Greek waters, and even the Black Sea as needed. They also warned that the French could be planning to invade Ireland, or maybe grab Gibraltar, or Naples, or Sicily, or Malta. It is interesting that the list in his orders did not include Egypt, a tribute to the disinformation being put out by the French. So basically Admiral Nelson’s orders read “look somewhere” but gave him no idea where to look.

By the time the British were repaired and ready to sail again as a fleet, ten days had passed. That meant the French could be as much as 300 miles away in about any direction. With no hard information on Napoleon’s whereabouts, Nelson chose one of the possible invasion targets. He sailed for the port city of Naples. The Italian city had two advantages. It was a friendly port, one of the few, so supplies and more repairs were available. And there was a good chance that the British ambassador to that kingdom, Lord William Hamilton, might have obtained, from the many merchants who used the port, some idea of where the French fleet was.

Strangely, considering all the disinformation being spread by the French, France’s ambassador in Naples had told the British ambassador that Napoleon’s eventual destination was Egypt. But Lord Hamilton was unable to separate that nugget of truth from the many lies purposely spread by French agents, and so he put no faith in it. Instead he made his own best guess. When they sailed into Naples, Hamilton told Nelson’s captains that he thought Napoleon’s immediate destination was Malta.

On June 20, a month after the French had been lost, while sailing from Naples toward Malta Nelson’s ships were met by the British consul from Messina as the fleet passed through the straits named for that city. The consul carried the news that Napoleon had indeed gone to Malta and the island had surrendered to his overwhelming force on June 9. It was too late to save Malta and probably too late to stop the French from sailing on.