The peace signed at Amiens in March 1802 served two useful purposes. It gave the nation a breathing space, and it allowed Napoleon an opportunity to convince all Englishmen who were not beyond being taught by experience that with him no lasting peace was possible. His annexations, his insolent denial to England of any right to a voice in the affairs of the Continent, his dishonesty in the matter of the withdrawal of the French troops from Holland, his persistence in calling on England to evacuate Malta, and the hostile measures against English trade which he adopted, soon convinced all but a few that war with him was inevitable. There could be no peace with a ruler who endeavoured to force England to adhere to the letter of a treaty which he was himself violating daily in spirit and substance. He did not believe that peace could be permanent, but trusted that it would last till he had found the means to arm against us at sea. In the hope that he could revive French shipping by means of a colonial trade, he sent a great armament to reoccupy the French part of the island of San Domingo, which had been lost by a revolt of the slaves. Another was sent to the East Indies provided with instructions how to attack our possessions. The English Government, urged by public opinion, defeated his plans by forcing on war in May 1803.

The brevity of the suspension of hostilities allowed no time for important internal changes in the navy, but this interval saw the beginning of administrative reforms which were to produce their chief fruits after 1815. St. Vincent, who had become First Lord in the Addington Ministry in 1801, was profoundly conscious of the waste and corruption which prevailed in the Navy Office. He persuaded, indeed it may be said that he forced, his colleagues to pass the Act of the 43rd George III., which appointed Commissioners “for inquiring into irregularities, frauds, and abuses in the Navy Departments, and in the business of prize agency.” The Commissioners produced a series of reports between 1802 and 1805, which revealed much mismanagement and the existence of not a little pilfering. The Commission of 1802 was succeeded in 1806 by another “for revising and digesting the civil affairs of the Navy,” which also made reports in 1809. These documents are full of instruction, but they cannot be analysed and extracted here. Their immediate effect was good, for they terrified evil-doers and aroused the temper of the country. But they produced their main fruits as late as 1830, and during the administration of Sir James Graham.[6] St. Vincent, intent on reform, was obstinate in refusing to believe in the renewal of war with France. He was accused of allowing the strength of the navy to fall to a dangerously low figure. His enemies did their best to raise public anger against him, and Pitt attacked him hotly in the House of Commons.

A little sober investigation reduces these charges to moderate proportions. St. Vincent’s critics were as unmeasured, and as indiscriminating in criticising him, as he and his followers were in scolding the Navy Office. In Parliamentary and other public discussions our English respect for truth is qualified by a lively sense of the value of loud-mouthed and hectoring accusations of stupidity and turpitude as instruments of controversy. In March 1803 there were perhaps not so many vessels in commission as there might have been, and it is possible that St. Vincent had carried economy too far in the dockyards. But the French dockyards were empty, and Napoleon was taken completely by surprise—as indeed he confessed. He had exhausted his resources by fitting out the fleet sent to San Domingo, and his naval arsenals had been stripped bare. Some of the vessels he sent out were unable to reach French ports before the renewal of hostilities. Six of the line took refuge in the Spanish port of Ferrol, and another hid at Cadiz. Even including these seven, he had only thirteen sail of the line ready for sea, and they in bad condition. We had thirty-nine, and the superiority in frigates was much greater. Thus we were able to blockade our enemy with overwhelming forces from the beginning. Nelson took the command in the Mediterranean; Pellew off Ferrol; Cornwallis off Brest; Sir Sidney Smith in the North Sea; while Keith took the command of the reserve in the Downs. As for the condition in which these squadrons were, we have the word of Sir Edward Pellew, a very competent witness. Speaking in the House of Commons on the 15th March 1804, he said:—

When Pellew was speaking, a year after the war began, the whole sea-going naval force at Napoleon’s disposal, including vessels belonging to the Batavian Republic and stationed at the Cape or in the Indian Ocean, did not exceed, and except on paper did not reach, 48 of the line and 37 frigates. At that time England had in commission 88 ships of the line, 13 ships of 50 guns, 125 frigates, and a swarm of sloops, gunbrigs, cutters, and “armed ships”—hired merchant-ships carrying guns. We had every means of collecting stores, and the French had few. The disproportion of force in our favour was so overwhelming, and was so well known, that it is hard not to feel some contempt for the flushings of apprehension and spasms of clamorous terror into which our fathers were thrown by the fear of invasion.

The disposition of our[7] forces was admirably calculated to place concentric barriers, elastic, mobile, but tough and impenetrable, between the shores of Great Britain and a Continental assailant. The inner barrier consisted of the fleet under the command of Lord Keith, who had his headquarters in the Downs. He had 21 sail of the line and 6 ships of 50 guns, 29 frigates, 26 sloops, 12 bomb-vessels, 25 gunbrigs, 32 cutters and luggers, 19 armed ships. These vessels watched the coast of France, and the dependent Batavian Republic from Havre to the Texel. There was on our own coast a swarm of armed boats:—135 between Yarmouth and Leith; 149 between Southend and Orfordness; 181 between Hastings and the mouth of the Thames; 138 from Poole to Newhaven; 21 at Liverpool, Glasgow, and Greenock; 114 on the coast of Ireland: in all, 738. Keith’s fleet was also the reserve on which other fleets could fall back in case of need. Next, outside of Keith, came the Brest blockade under Cornwallis:—20 sail of the line, 5 frigates, 1 sloop, 5 cutters, or luggers, or schooners. Beyond Cornwallis was the squadron watching Rochefort:—5 sail of the line, 1 frigate, 1 cutter. Then came 7 sail of the line, 2 frigates, 1 sloop, 1 cutter, which watched Ferrol. In the Mediterranean, Nelson had 13 sail of the line, 1 50-gun ship, 11 frigates, 10 sloops, 3 bomb-vessels, 6 gunbrigs, 2 cutters. In the East Indies were 6 sail of the line, 2 50-gun ships, 7 frigates, 5 sloops. In the West Indies were 8 sail of the line, 1 50-gun ship, 11 frigates, 20 sloops, and 15 small craft. The vessels doing convoy work may be left aside at present.

As we had no such army as could assail Napoleon at home, this mighty force could only cruise and watch till such time as the Emperor of the French (to give him the title he assumed on the 18th May 1804) put its strength to the test. He threatened invasion by arrogant word and ostentatious deed. There were then, there are now, it is probable that there always will be, disbelievers in the sincerity of his threats. He wrapped himself in clouds of lies, and he is not to be believed on his bare word, either when he said he would invade, or when he declared that he had never seriously contemplated invasion. As he said himself, he served a merciless taskmaster, “the nature of things,” and it was in the nature of things that his empire was subject to attack by the powers of Central and Eastern Europe. He cannot have meant to attempt an invasion of England at a time when the armies of Austria were actually marching against him. We know that during the last months of 1804 and the first of 1805, when war with Austria seemed imminent, he suspended his preparations for an invasion of England, and resumed them only when a letter from the Emperor Francis II. gave him assurance that he would not be interrupted. But though he was bound to bow to necessity, and turn from England when the frontier of the Rhine was in danger, it by no means follows that he would not have made the attempt had it been at any time possible. He had promised the French to rid them of their hereditary enemy England, and he could only make sure of keeping his word by invasion. His power depended on his popularity, and that depended on victory. He had risen to a towering height by running great risks, and he went on running them to the end, to keep what he had won. If he believed anything, he believed that his presence in England at the head of an army would bring the country to submission at once, and even to revolution. Assuredly he did mean to run the hazard of making an invasion, subject always to the leave of “the nature of things,”—if, that is to say, the forces at his command and the circumstances around him allowed of the venture.

It is not necessary to produce reasons for believing that he never meant to risk a crossing of the Channel with a flotilla alone. He had given conclusive reasons for not running that hazard when the Directory made him General of the Army of England in 1797. The swarm of flat-bottomed boats he collected between the spring of 1803 and the autumn of 1805, and the army he encamped at Boulogne, were never meant to act by themselves. The flotilla might be used under protection of a fleet. The army was very well placed to be drilled, and kept under his own eye and influence for all service. His assurances that he meant to invade with the flotilla and army by themselves were designed to satisfy public opinion in France, and inspire fear in England. It must not be forgotten that Napoleon was betrayed, and knew he was betrayed, by people about him who dreaded the consequences of his rule to France. Their identity is uncertain, though Talleyrand has been supposed to have been one of them. Whoever they were, these persons known as the “he-friend,” and the “she-friend,” and the “son of the friend,” had access to Napoleon’s most secret papers, and communicated the substance of them to a certain Count d’Antraigues, an exiled French Royalist attached to the Russian mission in Saxony. Through Antraigues the information came to the English Government. Napoleon, who knew he was betrayed but could not detect the traitors, used countermines to confuse and mislead them. Many of the minutes he made and the orders he issued have much the air of having been designed to reach his enemies and put them on a false scent.

When the preliminaries of October 1801 were signed, there were 250 flat-bottomed boats in existence of the model brought to France by Muskeyn. In March 1803 only 136 were available. Napoleon began at once to repair and strengthen this remnant. His first plan was to add a moderate number of flat-bottomed boats, and to draw largely on fishing and coasting craft for his transports. It was soon found that these resources would be insufficient. By July 1803 he had adopted plans for building 1410 flat-bottomed vessels, and in August the number was fixed at 2008. They were to be divided into frames of 110 feet by 25, drawing 8 feet, rigged as barques; chaloupes of 76 to 80 feet by 17, drawing 5 to 6 feet, rigged as brigs; bateaux cannoniers of 60 by 14 feet, drawing 4½ feet, rigged as luggers; caiques—small luggers and schooners; bomb-vessels, and péniches, a species of fishing-boats. All carried guns, from the twelve 24-pounders of the frames down to the single obusier or shell-firing gun of the péniches. They were built all along the north coast of France, at Paris, on the Rhine and in Holland. They were brought to their headquarters at Boulogne, down rivers and canals and by voyages along the coast from fort to fort and creek to creek. Harbours were cleared for them, and batteries built for their protection. The most determined efforts on the part of our naval officers failed to prevent these craft from collecting in and about Boulogne. But there Napoleon’s success with them ended. They could not be sent to sea. The fine schemes for combining troops and transports remained mere schemes. The ports cleared for the transports silted up again as fast as they were made. When the vessels were anchored in the harbours, they could only get out in driblets. When they anchored outside, they were harassed by English attacks, and injured by gales. Napoleon was eye-witness to the destruction of a number of them by a gale in June 1804. It is true that we did them but little harm. Our sea-going ships could not push their attacks home on a shallow coast, and we did not build corresponding vessels for the purpose. An attempt to make an end of them by a species of floating mines called “catamarans,” much favoured by Mr. Pitt, proved a failure in October 1804. Yet the utmost they could do was to escape destruction. They could not go out, as Napoleon knew from the first. His naval officers told him the truth with perfect candour.

Something else must be done to clear the way for an invading army, and there was only one thing which promised success. A force of sea-going ships must be collected to protect the transports. Therefore, from the end of 1803 till late in 1805, the correspondence of Napoleon is filled with elaborate plans for concentrating a fleet in the Channel. These plans of campaign and the letters written in combination with them fill hundreds of pages in the vast compilation of Captain Desbrière. This most competent French authority is inclined to believe that much of the vast correspondence was meant to be betrayed and to mislead the English Government. No other rational explanation can indeed be found for the confusing way in which proposals for expeditions to Scotland, Ireland, and the East Indies are mingled with plans for bringing squadrons from Brest, Rochefort, Ferrol, Cadiz, and Toulon together in the Channel. These alternative schemes, eccentric in every sense of the word, were never acted on. If they were designed to deceive the British Government, they failed.

The solid core of a mass of mere words was the design to concentrate a strong fleet in the Channel. A squadron, or squadrons, of the ships at Napoleon’s command was, or were, to cross the Atlantic in order to distract the attention of the English Government and induce it to send ships in pursuit. Napoleon’s intention was that his vessels should come back and unite in the Channel, where they would have a superiority over the English who, he calculated, would be weakened by detachments. The English Government had early warning that this was in fact his plan, and prepared to defeat it by a counter policy of concentration. The penury of the French dockyards and the time required to build the flat-bottomed boats compelled Napoleon to delay the application of his plan. Seven of his ships were blockaded in Spanish ports, and his relations to Spain were peculiar. She was bound by treaty to join him in the war, but was allowed to compound for armed help by the payment of a subvention. England might fairly have considered this contribution to the funds of its enemy, and have declared war on Spain at once. But it refrained until 6th October 1804, when it seized the home-coming Spanish treasure ships in the Straits of Gibraltar. Spain declared war in December. Napoleon’s plans may be divided into those laid before and those laid after October 1804. It is enough to say of the first, which were never put to the test, that after a variety of hypothetic suggestions had been made and rejected, Napoleon decided in favour of the comparatively simple scheme that Latouche-Tréville, who commanded at Toulon, should elude Nelson and head for Rochefort, drive off the English blockading squadron, and be then ready to co-operate with the fleet at Brest. There was nothing impossible, or even very hazardous, in this plan. Nelson made it his boast that he did not blockade Toulon. He only watched the port by frigates, remaining on the coast of Sardinia with his liners, hoping that the French would come out, and that he would be able to bring them to battle. He had every right to rely on victory if a battle could be secured; but, as the future was to show, he was not entitled to calculate on meeting the Toulon fleet. Success would depend on the receipt of prompt information from his frigates, but Nelson remained far from Toulon, he allowed his squadron to drive in the north-easterly winds, and was seldom at his rendezvous, and so days often passed before the frigates could find his flag. It was, too, a fixed idea of his, that if the French left Toulon, it would be for the purpose of renewing their disastrous adventure in Egypt. Napoleon, who read his mind with remarkable sagacity, and who ranked his judgment low, had calculated on this very fixed idea of the English admiral’s as an element in his own favour. It is by no means improbable that the concentration at Rochefort might have been effected if the resources of the Toulon yard had been greater. But the squadron was fitted for sea with difficulty. Latouche-Tréville died on the 20th August 1804. His successor had to be selected, and then came the war between Spain and England, which brought a new element into the problem. At that moment, too, there was a strong probability that war would break out with Prussia and Austria. The invasion schemes were hung up, and in September Napoleon was intent on organising attacks on England’s colonies. Even these were designed to draw off English forces from home waters and leave the road free for a push from Brest and Boulogne. Their real purpose was known to the English Government, which was warned by its secret agents, and showed itself well aware of its enemy’s purpose.

Villeneuve was chosen to succeed Latouche-Tréville, mainly because the emperor looked upon him as a lucky man, and because that was a valuable quality in the prevailing dearth of capable admirals. On the 12th December 1804 orders were sent to Villeneuve to prepare for a great expedition to the West Indies, where he was to be joined by Missiessy with the squadron from Rochefort. They were to capture colonies, and after a stay of sixty days to come back to Rochefort. Nothing was said of ulterior movements in the instructions to them. But orders of nearly the same date were sent to Ganteaume at Brest to get to sea, make a commerce-destroying cruise on the coast of Ireland, go to Ferrol, pick up the French and Spanish ships there, and join Villeneuve and Missiessy on their return from the West Indies. If the concentration was effected, Napoleon would have, so he thought, that command of the Channel which, as he told Latouche in July, would make him master of the world. But he was trying to overreach his taskmaster, “the nature of things.” Such a scheme could succeed only by a truly wonderful combination of capacity on the part of his officers, of incapacity on the part of the English officers, and of good fortune. Two parts out of three of the scheme failed. Missiessy did indeed get away from Rochefort on the 11th January 1805, reached the West Indies, did considerable damage to our trade, and got safe back by the 20th May. Ganteaume was unable to get to sea without a battle with the blockading fleet, and he was forbidden to fight. Villeneuve got to sea on the 17th January, when a north-easterly gale had forced the English look-out frigates off the coast. The result did to some extent justify Napoleon’s foresight. Nelson, who heard on the 19th that Villeneuve was at sea, acted on his fixed idea that Egypt was the object of the French, went to look for them in the Levant, and was not back to his rendezvous in Sardinia till the 27th February. But Villeneuve had been driven back on the 20th January by bad weather. On the 22nd he wrote a letter to his friend the Minister of Marine, Decrès, which if Napoleon had seen it and had known where to look for a more resolute officer would have caused his instant dismissal. It can be compared only with the piteous letter in which the Duke of Medina Sidonia implored Philip II. not to give him the command of the Armada. Villeneuve declared that he had always longed for a useful but not for a glorious career; that this enterprise he was sent on could end in nothing but disgrace; that his ships looked very well in harbour, but were helpless at sea; that the troops given him to attack the English islands were a pest; and that he wished the emperor would name his successor. Napoleon was exasperated with the admiral’s “lack of decision.” Yet he had to accept Villeneuve also as part of “the nature of things.” At first the proposed combination was given up. Orders were sent to Missiessy to consider himself independent, and they reached him. In a short time Napoleon received assurance from Austria which convinced him that he was for a time safe from molestation. In March the great combination scheme was taken up again. Counter orders to wait for Villeneuve were sent to Missiessy, but failed to reach him. On the 2nd March orders were sent to Ganteaume to sail for Ferrol, pick up the French and Spanish ships, go to Martinique to join Villeneuve, and then head back for the Channel. On the same day orders went to Villeneuve to sail to the West Indies, and wait for Ganteaume at Martinique for forty days. If he failed to appear, Villeneuve was to return by San Domingo and the Canaries, waiting for him there once more, and on his failure to appear, was to go to Cadiz. All was to depend on the success of Ganteaume in getting away. “The nature of things” was to be overreached. But it is not so easy to overreach “the nature of things.” The concentration broke down first because Missiessy did not receive his counter orders, and therefore did not wait for Villeneuve, and then because Ganteaume failed to leave Brest. He was too closely watched by Cornwallis.

On the 30th March, Villeneuve got away from Toulon with eleven sail of the line. Nelson’s policy of no-blockade produced the effect which some naval officers at least had foreseen. The French fleet was sighted on the 31st March, thirty-five miles south of Toulon, by the Phœbe and Active frigates. The Phœbe went in search of Nelson, who was at the Gulf of Palmas, in Sardinia, on that day; but she did not report to him till the 4th April, for he had left Palmas on the 3rd to water at Pula. Villeneuve, who had heard that Nelson was at Palmas, steered to the west of the Balearic Islands, and was missed by him. It is strange that the British Government knowing what it knew of Napoleon’s intentions, and having adopted the proper counter-policy of concentration in the Channel, had not ordered its admiral in the Mediterranean to disregard the imaginary danger to Egypt. Once more Nelson manœuvred to protect what the French were not attacking. He stretched his look-out ships from the south of Sardinia to the coast of Africa, and went to Palermo. On the 16th April he was at the south end of Sardinia, and on that date he learned that Villeneuve had passed the Straits of Gibraltar eight days before. The French admiral had stopped outside the Spanish harbour of Carthagena on the 7th, and had called on Admiral Salcedo to join him. The Spaniard excused himself, and Villeneuve went on to Cadiz that night. He drove off the blockading squadron of Sir John Orde—six sail of the line and frigates. Orde retired to a safe distance, and then sailed to join Cornwallis in the Channel. On the 9th, Villeneuve reached Cadiz, where he was at once joined by the Aigle and the Spanish admiral, Gravina. Most of the Spanish vessels, six in number, were unable to be in time to sail with the French. The allies straggled across the Atlantic, and had the good fortune to unite their eighteen sail at Fort de France in Martinique by the 16th May.

When the French admiral reached the Antilles, he had no other orders than those dated the 2nd March, which directed him to wait for Ganteaume at Martinique for forty days, and then to cruise among the Canary Islands. He therefore waited, and undertook no other operation than the recapture of the Diamond Rock, then held by an English naval detachment which was a thorn in the side of the French island. The Rock was retaken on the 31st May, but on the previous day Villeneuve had been joined by the Didon from Rochefort. She brought orders which were well calculated to disturb him. They were dated the 14th April, and after informing him that he was to be joined by Rear-Admiral Magon from Rochefort with two sail of the line, instructed him to wait in the islands for another month, to distinguish himself by taking English islands, to come to Ferrol, join the French and Spanish ships there, and head for Brest and Boulogne. These orders implied that Villeneuve must be prepared to fight a battle in the Channel. The admiral, who well knew the defects of the ships with him, and who could judge that the raw ships at Ferrol would be still less capable of meeting the English, was sorely disturbed at the prospect of having to undertake such a venture at the head of such a force. He knew, too, that lack of provisions would make it impossible for him to remain for a month in the West Indies, while he had every reason to fear that his enemy, who must by this time have learned his whereabouts, would attack him. He was aware that Admiral Cochrane, who had been sent from before Ferrol in March, was in the West Indies with six sail. It was a simple enough business to attack the English islands. When, therefore, Magon joined him on the 4th June, Villeneuve embarked more soldiers from the garrisons of the islands, and sailed to assail Antigua. On the 10th he captured an English convoy near the island, and learned from his prisoners that Nelson had reached Barbadoes in pursuit of him on the 4th.

The English admiral had paid dearly in anxiety for the looseness of the watch he kept on Toulon. When he was informed that the French squadron had left the Mediterranean, he hurried in pursuit. But the wind was against him. He reached Tetuan on the 4th April, and left next day, but it was not till the 10th that he anchored in Lagos Bay. He had had every cause for anxiety. The French had escaped from the Mediterranean, and he had no indication whither they had gone. He was almost equally disposed to sail to the West Indies lest they should be bound to Jamaica, or to steer for the Scilly Islands in order to be at hand in case their destination was the Channel or the coast of Ireland. His troubles were aggravated by the fact that a convoy of transports carrying General Craig and a body of troops bound to Sicily and Naples had left England on the 17th April, under protection of Admiral Knight, with two line-of-battle ships, the Queen and the Dragon. It might have fallen in with Villeneuve. On the 10th his doubts were removed. Rear-Admiral Campbell, the officer in the Portuguese service who had warned Jervis of the neighbourhood of the Spaniards on the day before the battle of Cape St. Vincent, now gave Nelson information which convinced him that Villeneuve had sailed for the West Indies. The convoy with General Craig’s expedition came in, and was sent on its way to Sicily. Nelson left Bickerton in command in the Mediterranean, and with ten ships pursued Villeneuve on the 11th.

Orde had sent home information of Villeneuve’s escape, and had also given warning to the West Indies. The Admiralty was taking measures to send Collingwood, then serving in the Channel, in pursuit of the French, when it was informed that Nelson had gone on his own responsibility. Collingwood was ordered to Cadiz to replace Orde, who had shown a lack of precision, and a counter concentration of naval forces was prepared in the Channel and the approaches to it. The anxiety in the country was keen. It was said in the press that nobody in England slept quietly, for there was a very general appreciation of the real significance of Villeneuve’s cruise. There was so little doubt on the subject that on the 9th May a London paper, the Morning Chronicle, stated that many were of opinion that the French admiral would join the ships at Cadiz and Ferrol and then enter the Channel. The public was relieved when it learned that Jamaica was in more danger than the mother country.

When Nelson reached Barbadoes, he was misled by circumstantial but unfounded reports given him by Major-General Brereton into the belief that the French had gone south to attack Trinidad and Tobago. He went immediately in pursuit to the Gulf of Paria, only to learn that he had been misinformed. He at once returned, and was off Martinique on the 10th, the very day on which Villeneuve, after hastily sending the troops he had drawn from the garrison of Martinique and Guadaloupe back in frigates, had sailed for Ferrol. Nelson heard of the departure of Villeneuve at Antigua, and on the 13th he also sailed for Europe. The Frenchman was undoubtedly right in leaving the West Indies at once. Even a successful battle (and he did not look upon success as possible) would have destroyed his power to carry out what Napoleon in a letter to him dated the 29th April called the “essential operation,” the union of the French squadrons in the Channel. But he took too northerly a course, and therefore lengthened his voyage unduly. His mistake had disastrous consequences for him. Nelson, when starting to return to his proper station in the Mediterranean, despatched the Curieux brig, Captain Bettesworth, with information for the Admiralty. On the 19th June, Bettesworth sighted the allies 900 miles N.E. of Antigua. He pressed on, and in the early hours of the 8th July gave Lord Barham, the old naval officer who was then First Lord, the news that Villeneuve was on his way back. The Government was well aware of the real purpose of the French fleet. Lord Barham had only to carry out a settled policy when he at once ordered Calder, who had succeeded Cochrane in command of the Ferrol blockade, to call in Rear-Admiral Stirling, who was watching Rochefort, and to bar Villeneuve’s road to Ferrol. Calder received his orders on the 15th, called Stirling to his flag, and stationed himself 90 miles west of Finisterre. On the 22nd he sighted the allies to the south of him. Nelson, sailing on a more southerly route, had reached Cape St. Vincent on the 17th. He had good professional cause for returning to his proper station. Yet it is strange that even at that hour he remained firm in the faith that the ultimate aim of the French was Egypt. If he had read the mind of Napoleon as Napoleon read his, he would surely have steered for Ferrol. In that case, he would have headed Villeneuve, and would have united his ten ships to the fifteen then with Calder. The twenty-five would have made an end of the twenty French and Spanish ships and of the great invasion scheme at a blow.

The mountain fell in labour, and produced a ridiculous mouse. When Calder saw the allies to the south of him on the 22nd July, he rightly decided to attack their twenty sail with his fifteen. His intention was to cut through their line and destroy their rear. Calder cannot be blamed for failing to carry out his plan, for a dense fog settled down on the two fleets. It was so thick that the combatants could not see where the vessels nearest to them were save by the flash of their gun-fire. After preliminary movements of no significance, the fleets engaged in line ahead, standing to the south. The English to leeward engaged the van, composed of the Spaniards, and the centre of the allies. The fire of the Spaniards was so wild that when the English frigate Egyptienne reconnoitred them before the battle, they failed to hit her, though by the testimony of her first lieutenant, she went close enough “to see the moustachios of the Dons.” Two of the Spanish ships, the San Rafael and the Firme, leewardly tubs, sagged through Calder’s line, and were taken. The fleets separated in the dark after a cannonade which did some damage to masts and spars. The charge of weakness brought against Admiral Calder is based on his conduct in the days following the battle. He showed no desire to renew the action, and was very unduly nervous about the part which might be taken against him by the French and Spanish ships in Ferrol. Yet an officer of a daring spirit (and at such a crisis it was the duty of every officer to show the utmost daring) would have calculated that his fifteen vessels were quite able to ruin the eighteen enemies in front of them long before help could come out of the land-locked harbour of Ferrol. Even if his own fleet was to be shattered in the act of destroying the enemy, it would still have put a stop to any further movements of theirs in the direction of the Channel. Calder was unduly cautious, and it is to be feared that he was also unduly over anxious for the safety of his prizes, the reward of toil and danger. He went off to put them in the way of safety, very complacently calculating that Villeneuve would go south to Cadiz where Nelson would be waiting for him.

Villeneuve was well disposed to go to Cadiz, and had Napoleon’s leave to go if his fleet suffered such injury in battle as should render it incapable of carrying out the essential operation—which, said the Emperor sanctimoniously, may God forbid. He had no confidence in his command. On the 6th August, when the impression made on him by the action of the 22nd July was fresh, he told his friend Decrès that the French and Spanish Navies were incapable of producing large squadrons fit to meet the English. And such as his force was it was sickly and had been weakened by desertion in the West Indies. The decision to go to Cadiz was to be taken later. When Villeneuve was assured by Gravina that their fleets could enter Vigo in the then prevailing wind he decided to go thither, and he anchored in the spacious Spanish harbour on the 26th July.

When Napoleon heard that the English squadron blockading Rochefort had disappeared from before the port, he concluded that Villeneuve must be already on his way back, and that the English knew it. The squadron brought home in May by Missiessy, and now commanded by Allemand, was then in Rochefort. It had orders to escape to sea, to go on a commerce destroying voyage on the coast of Ireland, and to meet Villeneuve if he came back at the time first fixed. The Emperor now proposed to send Allemand to meet Villeneuve at once. But he had sailed before the counter order reached Rochefort. To Villeneuve orders were sent almost in profusion. Following a practice which grew on him, and was the despair of his generals during the Peninsular War, Napoleon wanted to regulate everything from a distance, and would keep suggesting alternative courses. Yet the general drift of his orders was plain enough. Villeneuve was not to be enticed into Ferrol, which is difficult to leave except in certain states of the wind, was to call out the French and Spanish ships there, join Allemand, and come on to Boulogne. If he had been resolute enough to leave the Emperor to answer for the consequences in this world and the next, Villeneuve might have made a bold stroke, and might at least have failed with honour. On the 28th July, six days after the battle off Ferrol, this was the position. Keith’s fleet was in the Downs and the North Sea, where, during the westerly winds, it could do little to help the ships in the Channel. Cornwallis, with twenty sail of the line, was watching the twenty-two ships of Ganteaume at Brest. There were fourteen French and Spaniards in Ferrol. Calder, who had not yet divided his force, was not far from that port. Allemand, who had sailed later than had been intended, had wisely not gone to cruise on the coast of Ireland, but had placed himself 120 miles to the west of Ferrol, to meet Villeneuve, who was at Vigo with eighteen sail, of which, however, three, two Spaniards and one French, were unfit for further service. Nelson, who had been persuaded at last that the French were not aiming at Egypt (apparently by the arguments of Collingwood), was off Cape St. Vincent on his way home with eleven sail, carrying out spontaneously, though tardily, the Government’s policy of concentration. Collingwood, with four sail, remained off Cadiz to blockade six Spaniards. Sir R. Bickerton, with another four of the line, was watching another six Spaniards at Carthagena. On the 1st August Villeneuve left Vigo and went to the outer Bay of Ferrol, leaving his three lame ducks behind. Calder had been forced north by south-westerly winds. Then it was that he detached the ships originally taken from before Rochefort. He returned with nine sail, and, finding the enemy in force, fell back on the 9th on Cornwallis. Nelson was on his way north, well out at sea tacking against head winds. On the 11th he was off Ushant, and on the 13th he joined Cornwallis. The allies, who were in great need of stores, did not sail till the 11th. Villeneuve distrusted his fleet more profoundly than ever, for, when anchoring in Arosa Bay, his ships had all come into collision with one another. He had been told that Allemand was cruising in search of him, but the Didon, which he sent to meet the Rochefort squadron, was taken by an English frigate. He could hear nothing. The wind was against him. Success appeared to him impossible, and he was not stern enough to sail to destruction since his master would have it so. The weak man, heavily laden, grasped at the qualified leave given him to go south, and on the 15th August, being then 200 miles W.N.W. of Finisterre in a N.E. wind, he bore up for Cadiz.

With the retreat of Villeneuve the great concentration scheme came to an end. He retired to Cadiz followed by the screaming abuse of Napoleon, who was justly angry, if only because this ignominious end to his grand schemes tended to make him the laughing stock of Europe. Whether he was as angry as he pretended to be is another matter. Rage was one way of persuading the gallery that the failure was not his fault. He had a great and thoroughly vulgar capacity for working himself into fits of hysterical fury, and for falling to cursing like a very drab. He did not altogether resign the hope of making use of Villeneuve’s fleet. While washing his hands of all further attention to details, he gave orders that the combined fleets were to undertake operations in the Mediterranean. He also decided that Villeneuve was too great a coward to be trusted with the command any longer, and that he must be replaced by Admiral Rosily.

So far the initiative had belonged to the French, who were the assailants. Their attack had broken down, and now came the turn of the English to assail. When the arrival of Nelson raised the fleet, under Cornwallis, to forty sail of the line, the admiral felt so sure of his position that he did not hesitate to divide his forces. Nelson went home to rest, taking two liners with him. Two others were sent in for repairs. Eighteen were despatched on the 16th, under Calder, to go in search of Villeneuve. Napoleon called this separation an insigne bêtise, in view of the fact that Villeneuve might have burst into the Channel with a force very superior in numbers to the eighteen sail with Calder, or the seventeen which remained with Cornwallis. He would have had thirty-four if he had joined both the Ferrol ships and Allemand. If fleets and armies were pieces on a draft board, with fixed unvarying powers, the speculation would be worth following up. But they are composed of weapons handled by men who can do but what they can. Will an obese man who has one leg shorter than the other and weak lungs be much the better (he will, of course, be somewhat the better), if he meets two professional fighters separately, and not together. It is quite possible that if Villeneuve had come on, he would have passed Calder without a meeting. In these very months, Nelson came from Cape St. Vincent to Ushant, through seas crossed by the squadrons of Villeneuve, Allemand, and Calder, but met none of them. Allemand ranged down the coast of the peninsula to the latitude of Cape St. Vincent, went back to the Channel, came to the Penmarks, cruised, and waited for Villeneuve, till no hope remained that he could come, then turned to commerce destroying in the Atlantic with immense success, until he anchored at Aix on the 24th December. But Panic and Flight were our allies. Cornwallis suffered nothing by the division of his forces. On the 20th and 21st August he easily beat back the Brest ships, which were forced to make a show of coming out by Napoleon. Villeneuve had run for Cadiz before Calder left Ushant. He sighted Cape St. Vincent on the 17th, Allemand being then barely out of sight behind him. On the 21st he entered Cadiz observed by Collingwood, who was watching the port with three sail of the line, his fourth being then at Tetuan. Collingwood fell back slowly, just ahead of the pursuing French, resolved that if they drove him into the Mediterranean, they should be “backstrapped” into it with him. The allies gave up the pursuit, and Collingwood, with his three, resumed the watch on Cadiz. He was joined by the detached ship at Tetuan, by Bickerton from Carthagena, and at last by Calder. On the 30th August thirty English sail of the line were collected outside Cadiz. It was on the 2nd September that Nelson, then at his house at Merton, heard that the allies were in Cadiz. He hurried to town, and offered his services. It would have been strange if the Government had declined the offer of its greatest fighter of battles at such a moment. Nelson left Spithead with the Victory and the Euryalus frigate on the 15th September, picked up the Ajax and Thunderer on the 18th, and joined Collingwood on the 28th.

The battle he came to fight was offered him primarily by the obstinacy of Napoleon, but immediately by the wounded vanity of Villeneuve. The Emperor had ordered his fleet, and the Spaniards whom he ordered about as his own, not to suffer themselves to be blockaded by an inferior force, but he allowed his orders to sail to stand when he knew that Collingwood had been reinforced. Decrès, the minister of Marine, did not tell Villeneuve that he was to be recalled when Rosily reached Cadiz. The truth reached the unhappy man indirectly, and by public rumour. In a fit of selfish vanity, he, who had been so cautious in avoiding risks when a great end was to be obtained, now decided to rush to sea, when no great advantage was to be gained, and when the danger of destruction was closer than it had been at any moment since he sailed from Toulon in March—and did it wholly and solely that he might escape a personal disgrace. By his orders the allied fleet prepared to put to sea on the 18th October.

Nelson was then cruising some twenty miles west of Cadiz, in a position to steer for the Straits and intercept the enemy whenever he should come out, if, as was nearly certain, he headed for the Mediterranean. He had with him twenty-seven sail, and six were at Gibraltar watering and provisioning. It was on the 19th, when he had just sent Collingwood an invitation to dinner, that he learnt, through the vessels watching in shore, that the enemy were coming out. The wearing of the flagship and the signal for a general chase to the east told the fleet that the allies were moving. The English ships pressed on to head the enemy, each at its best rate of speed, so that the fast sailers outstripped the slow. The allied fleet had worked out of Cadiz with difficulty. On the afternoon of the 20th it was to the south of Cape Trafalgar, and the English fleet was so near that a battle could not be avoided. During the night our look-out vessels saw the long “lighted street” of lanterns which marked the position of the allies. The fleet had returned from the position attained by the general chase of the 19th, and was almost back to its cruising ground. The weather had been variable from squall and haze to calm. The ships were scattered on the morning of the 21st October—a day of very light breeze from N.W., a heavy swell, and a falling barometer, signs of a coming storm. The enemy was seen in the E.N.E. about nine miles off, heading south. The scattered condition of the English ships did not signify much. They knew what they had to do, and they knew that their enemy was incapable of baffling any vigorous attack. Immediately after joining the fleet Nelson had held a meeting of senior officers in his flagship and had explained his method for disposing of the allies—the Nelson touch. The memorandum in which he laid down the principles of his attack remains to tell us what they were. If the enemy were found to windward, then the English fleet was to attack from leeward, which it must do in close-hauled lines ahead, and was to be disposed in three such lines. One, the lee line, led by the second in command, was to cut off a smaller number of the enemy at the rear. The second or weather line, led by himself, was to cut the formation of the enemy at the centre, where his flagship would be. A third, or advance squadron, was to cut through the enemy ahead of the flagship. Nelson displays his contempt for his opponents by two assumptions. One is, that the enemy drawn out in one very long line would not meet this attack by a counter move, as D’Orvilliers had baffled Keppel’s menace to the rear of his line in the battle of Ushant in 1778. The other is that the ships of the enemy thus cut off, amounting to just more than half, could not be succoured by their van before they were crushed. Supposing the enemy to be to leeward, then the three lines were to be drawn up opposite his centre. The lee line, under the second in command, was to fall all together on a smaller number of the enemy’s rear. The weather line and advanced squadron were to be used by himself so as to prevent the centre and van from turning to support the rear. In this case Nelson does his enemy the compliment of supposing him to be capable of making a counter move. If he inverts his line by wearing together, the English lee line is to continue to attack the same ships, though they would now be van, and not rear. It is clear, however, that if this was done (and it was the obvious thing to do), the enemy’s rear and centre had only to let all draw in order to come at once to the help of the ships assailed. Nelson’s manifest conviction that his enemy could not manœuvre, and that his gunnery was bad, was thoroughly justified. It has become rather the fashion to affect a “chivalrous” respect for the enemy at Trafalgar. That is a very pretty sentiment, and is the easier to feel because the more we make of our foe the more do we make of our victory. But though the thirty-three ships of the line which left Cadiz with Villeneuve unquestionably carried thousands of gallant men, they constituted a very bad fleet. Less than half of them belonged to the squadrons which had crossed the Atlantic with Villeneuve. The rest were the raw ships from Ferrol, or Spanish vessels manned at Cadiz from hand to mouth, and at the last moment. Even the most experienced of them were incapable of manœuvring, and that by the confession of their own chiefs. Their gunnery was not only inaccurate, which in very close fighting was not of the first consequence, but was slow in the case of the French, and very slow in the case of the Spaniards. Their powder was of inferior quality and fouled the guns quickly.

It has become so much the custom to speak of everything Nelson did as in some sort miraculous that the memorandum has been treated as a revelation of original genius. Yet when we look at it coolly it is obviously only a plan to do deliberately what Duncan did on the spur of the moment, and under the pressure of circumstances, at Camperdown. The resemblance between the battles becomes still closer when we look at what was actually done on the 21st October.

After the sweeping movements and variable weather of the last few days, the fleet was in some apparent disorder. The division into three of the memorandum was not attempted. The ships were in two swarms, Collingwood’s lee division of fifteen sail, and Nelson’s weather division of twelve.

Nelson’s Division.