The Years of Endurance (35 page)

Perhaps she no longer deserved to. For though Admiral Colpoys's winter guard off
Brest had been doubled to meet the invasion threat, the lax habit of keeping station eight leagues west of Ushant to save wear and tear had caused him to be driven so far into the Atlantic that he had even lost touch with his own frigates. The remainder of the Channel Fleet, according to its winter custom, was in harbour two hundred miles away.

But Hoche and Morard de Galles, taking counsel together in the soft sunshine of December 16th, did not know t
his. To the west at the mouth of
the Iroise Channel they could see the English frigates, beating up and down, and it was reasonable to assume that the blockading battleships were not far away. Soo
ner than encounter them with his
crowded ships the Admiral, instead of making, straight for the open sea, decided to steer south through the rocky
Raz de Sein. But during the afternoon the wind got up and,, fearing the shoals, de Galles countermanded his orders. In the gathering winter evening many of the captains did not see his signals. Some returned to the main Iroise channel and sailed westwards, others continued south into the Raz. But that stout Cornishman, Captain Sir Edward Pellew, of the
Indefatigable,
seeing, his opportunity, stood boldly into their midst and, remaining with them all night-, fired off so many rockets and minute guns from his single frigate
that the labouring battl
eships and transports imagined that they were being
attacked by the entire British
Fleet. In the confusion and panic one ship of the line struck a rock and foundered, and two others collided. When morning broke the French Fleet was dispersed into three widely separated bodies. Worst of all, the frigate
Fraternite,
carrying the Admiral and General Hoche, had vanished altogether.

Thus the expedition was crippled at the outset by the inherent weakness which vitiated all Revolutionary France's efforts" at sea. Indiscipline and lack of the essential training, patience and precision requisite to success in naval affairs made Frenchmen the slaves and not the masters of the elements. Had it not been for sins in their adversaries of a different kind—complacency, elderly indolence and Treasury pedantry about exposing expensive ships to storms—the French Fleet might have been destroyed off its own coast. As it was, divine retribution for its shortcomings was represented only by the human agency of Pellew's solitary frigate. Its scattered divisions, though ignorant of one another s whereabouts, were able to proceed on their way. Colpoys with his fifteen battleships, lost in the ocean solitudes fifty miles to the west of Ushant, never learnt of their sailing till a week after they left
Brest. Having ho advice from the
Admiralty as to the
ir probable destination—Ireland,
the Mediterranean, the West Indies or Portugal—he made no attempt to follow them. Instead he returned home for orders, reaching S
pit
head on the last day of the year. The first news of the French escape was brought to Falmouth on December 20th by Pellew. Only on the 21st did the Commander-in-Chief
of the Channel Fleet, still in
his house at Portsmouth, learn that the enemy he was theoretically blockading had been at sea for nearly a week.

Meanwhile the French, more by accident than design, reassembled in the longitude of Mizen Head. With only eight ships missing,
including, however, the frigate
Fraternite,
they sighted the Minister coast at dawn on the 21st in calm, sunny weather. Next day they entered the long reach of Bantry Bay. There was still no sign of the General and Admiral and none of the dreaded British Navy.

Up to this point fortune had favoured the would-be invaders. But on that day the wind freshened. In order to land at the head of the bay they had to beat up through thirty miles of angry, narrow sea in the teeth of a rising easterly gale. The task was too much for their seamanship: the overcrowded ships, manned by landsmen, were continuously forced to give way as they crossed each other's paths. For three days the struggle continued. " "We have made 300 tacks and not gained 100 yards in
a straight line," wrote the in
furiated Tone. By Christmas Day the storm had reached gale pitch; it was bitterly cold and the air full of driving snow.
¹
A landing was out of the question, for no boat could have lived in those icy waters. In the evening, to Tone's unspeakable chagrin, Admiral Bouvet ordered his ships to cut their cables and run with the wind to the open sea. A few vessels, failing to see the order, hung on for a few days in the bay: then, lacking guns, horses and equipment,, followed their consorts back to France. The last to reach port—on January 14th, 1797—was the
Fraternite,
carrying Hoche and the Admiral. Their only sight of their command in four despairing weeks had been on December 29th when, beating back from the Atlantic against the gale, they encountered off the Irish coast two battleships, one sinking and the other engaged in rescuing her crew.

In these operations the Channel Fleet took no part. On learning that the French were at sea, Lord Bridport on December 21st had announced that he would sail in four days. But in attempting on Christmas Day to reach St. Helens in the teeth of a south-easterly gale, four of his battleships fouled one another and a fifth went aground. It was not till January 3 rd, just as the last French ship was leaving the Irish coast, that the British Fleet began to sail majestically down the Channel. It might as well have stayed in harbour. When after a month's cr
uising it returned to Portsmouth
it had not so much as sighted an enemy. The only serious encounter of the campaign took place on the stormy night of January 13 th when

¹
In Norfolk Woodforde recorded it as a day of intense cold, and at night so bitter as to prevent him from sleeping. At other places in England the barometer fell as much as 35 degrees below freezing point.—
Times,
28th Dec, 1796.

Pellew with two frigates came up with the 8o-gun battleship,
Droits de L’
Homme,
off the Brittany coast. Though heavily outgunned, the frigates by brilliant manoeuvring kept raking the big ship till she and one of her assailants had run aground in Audierne Bay. Here more than a thousand French sailors and soldiers perished on the rocks.

Such might have been the fate of the entire expedition had the British command been in more vigorous hands. Had Colpoys been at his station off Brest instead of allowing himself to be blown into the Atlantic, the French could never have left their own coast. Had the main Channel Fleet been at Falmouth or even Torbay, it would have had time after receiving Pellew's tidings to annihilate them in Bantry Bay. But the Government, though it had given Colpoys strength to deal with any force emerging from Brest, had failed to galvanise the Admiralty out of prescriptive habit. The inertia of eighteenth-century decorum and Service seniority was too strong.

As it was, England owed her deliverance solely to divine intervention, or more accurately to her enemies' failure to observe the hard laws on which success at sea depends. She ought to have lost Ireland. There were only 2000 troops and two field-guns at Cork to protect naval stores worth a million and a half sterling. Apart from some highly unreliable Militia the total force in Ireland barely numbered 12,000, mostly newly-raised Dragoons and Fencibles. Hoche's 15,000 veterans should have made short work of these.

Moral strength and weakness are rewarded or punished in war more swiftly than in any other human activity. Cause and consequence follow each other in inescapable succession, though owing to the judgment which attends both combatants simultaneously these are not always easily discernible at the time. England lacked troops to defend Ireland—
the
joint in her moral armour—because her politicians had preferred wishful to logical thinking about their military resources and, in deference to vested interests, had squandered 80,000 white troops in trying to conquer sugar islands climatically unsuited for operations by Europeans. By allowing private profit precedence over national necessities, they had followed the line—always fatal in war—of least resistance. Had their enemy's hands been substantially cleaner than their own, they might have suffered an overwhelming reverse, and their country with them.

Even at this hour, with doom hanging over the land they loved, Pitt and Dundas could not bring themselves to clear thinking. Before Christmas, though aware of the French preparations at Brest and the growing menace of Spain, Dundas had tried to waste two precious battalions on an insane project to seize the Helder and precipitate an imaginary counter-revolution in Holland. Fortunately Duncan, the shrewd Scottish Admiral blockading the Texel, had promptly sent them home again. About the same time the Government ordered Abercromby—half of whose earlier West India expeditionary force had perished of yellow fever—to seize the rich island of Trinidad, though it could neither supply him with information about the strength of the Spanish garrison nor send him any reinforcements. As usual it gambled on hopes, staking the national security for a windfall that would " give a good impression of the war in England." It remained incorrigibly, and at moments criminally, optimistic. Yet even in its most fatuous complacency there was something about it almost noble. While the French Directors broke Bouvet for his unavoidable failure in Bantry Bay, the British Cabinet defended Bridport against all attacks and even refused a parliamentary inquiry as implying an unmerited censure on the old Admiral.

As a matter of fact Abercromby succeeded beyond all reasonable expectation. In February, taking 4000 of his 9000 surviving effectives from the Windward Islands, he boldly landed in Trinidad. The Spaniards, sunk in sloth and corruption, made no defence and surrendered a ship of the line and a hundred pieces of artillery intact. But instead of being satisfied with its undeserved fortune, the Government merely doubled its stakes and ordered Abercromby to take Puerto Rico, which with his inadequate resources he naturally failed to do. Meanwhile, stimulated by the spectacle of an administrative and military incompetence even greater than his own, Dundas pursued the wildest projects for expeditions and revolutions in Spanish South America. These quixotic visions were encouraged not only by a specious Venezuelan adventurer and ex-Revolutionary General named Miranda but by the prosaic young Under-Secretary for War, William Huskisson.
¹
Happily no troops were available; had they been, they would probably have been sent off

¹
To meet his fate, after a lifetime of fiscal administration, under the wheels of
a
train at the opening of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway.

into the malarial blue to conquer an unknown continent. As it was, Dundas even canvassed the possibilities of using the garrison of the Cape and the police force of the convict settlement of New South Wales before he was recalled from his dreams by more pressing dangers at home.

Of the magnitude of these the Government received a reminder early in February. On the day that the last French ship limped back into Brest, Bonaparte won his final and greatest victory of the Lombardy campaign at Rivoli. A fortnight later Mantua fell and the French were virtual masters of Italy. The last ports in the peninsula were closed to British ships and the Pope—the " old priest" of Bonaparte's contemptuous phrase — only averted a sacrilegious march on Rome " to extinguish the torch of fanaticism by a colossal indemnity and the cession of Bologna and Ferrara to a puppet republic which the young general was creating out of his conquests. The elimination of Austria from the struggle was now only a question of weeks.

Britain would henceforward have to stand alone against the greatest military power yet seen on earth and the combined fleets of France, Spain and Holland. If Austria fell only Portugal would remain by her side, and with its vulnerable Spanish frontier Portugal was more of an encumbrance than a help. There were few in Europe who thought much of Britain's chance of survival. Amid the snows of Tulczyn that February the hero of Russia cried out across his dinner table to an English traveller. " Tweddell! " —for old Marshal Suvorof, after the manner of his countrymen, despised prefixes—" the French have taken Portsmouth. I have just received a courier from England. The King is in the Tower and Sheridan Protector."

Meanwhile the French were undismayed by their failure off the Irish coast. Pending the arrival of the Spanish fleet and the sailing of a vaster armada against the doomed British Isles, the Directory was collecting galley slaves and jailbirds for a nuisance raid to stir up trouble in England. The command was entrusted to an American adventurer of blood-curdling reputation named Colonel Tate. He was to land in the Bristol Channel, burn Bristol, " the second city in England for riches and commerce," and cause as much damage and panic as possible, by destroying bridges, magazines, docks, warehouses and factories. He was t
hen to sail to Wales and, march
ing swiftly across the mountains, threaten Chester and Liverpool. His men, equipped with ample " combustible matter," were promised pardon for their crimes, a free rein to their passions and all the booty they could get.