Nelson (103 page)

Nelson returned to his station with a new authority and new blood.

Back in Genoa towards the middle of April, Nelson found others also disposed to turn over new leaves. Even the republic’s secretary of state, upon whom Nelson called with Consul Brame, seemed superficially amenable on the issues of neutral trade. He admitted that merchants who shipped goods to or for the French had to accept the risks, and congratulated Nelson upon his broad pendant. De Vins was gone, and was ‘as little mentioned’ in diplomatic circles ‘as if he were no longer in the land of the living’, while his successor, Jean-Pierre de Beaulieu, decorated with the Grand Cross of the Order of Marie Theresa, flattered Nelson. As Brame noted, ‘The commodore had some communication with General Beaulieu by means of Mr Peirson [of the
Agamemnon
]. Many thanks and compliments passed. The general said
he should acquaint the emperor [of Austria] of the commodore’s meritorious conduct and zeal.’
⁷⁰

Underneath though, the war was still going badly. Emerging from a winter of uncommon severity the coast was under even tighter enemy control, with Vado and Savona still in French hands. France regarded the German theatre as her prime concern, but the Army of Italy still numbered sixty-three thousand effectives with two units in reserve. Some of the ‘neutral’ coastal towns it had occupied the previous year, including Alassio, had since been strengthened against naval attack, and the inshore shipping that had defeated Nelson in the last campaign was still brazenly plying back and forth. Worse, with Austria the only major continental adversary remaining, France was poised to deliver a knock-out punch. Three massive strikes were in the making, from the Sambre and Meuse, the Rhine and Moselle, and Nice. Bonaparte was personally in command of the latter and southern thrust, which was preparing to roll up opposition on the riviera before turning north through the plains of Lombardy and crossing the Alps into the Tyrol towards Vienna.

The old triumvirate Nelson had formed with Drake and Trevor was reconstituted, but most of the remedies they had unsuccessfully applied in 1795 were just as uncertain as before. Alarmed at the naval build-up in Toulon, Nelson wrote to Naples as early as 11 March recommending the king equip a flotilla of small warships and light craft to patrol the coast in case the French tried to land in Italy. As usual, the Neapolitans reacted with alacrity, and at one time two twenty-gun xebecs and a score of galliots, gunboats and feluccas were being fitted for action, carrying a total of sixty guns and seventeen hundred and forty men. Within weeks moves were afoot to redirect the force to the riviera to help the Austrians block French advances through the republic of Genoa, but without Savona and Vado there was no suitable base for the flotilla. Drake and Nelson failed to cajole the Austrians into retaking Vado, but in the end it hardly mattered. Though supposedly at Nelson’s disposal, the Neapolitan flotilla had still not arrived by 17 May. As an interim measure, Trevor tried to substitute a fleet of lightly armed feluccas and thirty-six-pounder gunboats manned by a thousand Sardinians, but though the king of Sardinia approved of the proposal it foundered amid disagreements about who would pay and victual the crews. The issue was still in the air when Sardinia suddenly dropped out of the war in May and changed the military situation.
⁷¹

In March and April, Drake, now generally based in Milan, was no more successful in reviving the plan to mount amphibious diversionary raids behind French lines. His faith in Nelson remained boundless, and for several weeks he pressed the idea of giving him a fleet of gunboats and two or three thousand British marines, Corsican troops or Neapolitans to enable him to strike unpredictably at such places as Stefano, Finale and San Remo. But the British, Austrian and Neapolitan governments pleaded their lack of resources. Jervis judged his fleet unable to supply the gunboats and doubted that Elliot, viceroy of Corsica, could spare the men. In Naples, Acton, the most influential minister, was even more dismissive. ‘Mr Drake’s plan of operation in having three thousand men wandering about on that extended coast from Perpignan to Voltri’ would not ‘answer’ his ‘desires and expectations. As to the landing for taking the rear of the enemy, I cannot see how on that coast without magazines, and no ports to keep the transports, the men could be adventured.’ In other words, if the plan had been viable in 1795, when the Austrians commanded relevant ports, it was no longer.
⁷²

The truth was that the war was different now, and afforded Nelson far fewer opportunities to intervene. Beaulieu, a veteran of the Seven Years War, was seventy-four years old, and if (as Nelson said) he still possessed ‘the fire of youth’, he could not be drawn into a westward push along the seashore to wrestle with the frustrations that had defeated De Vins. By the end of March the French had seized Voltri and advanced to within five or six miles of Genoa itself, partly to frighten the Italian republic into granting substantial loans. Their allied opponents seemed scattered and vulnerable. The nearest Austrian army, consisting of twelve thousand men, was at Acqui, thirty-five miles inland from Genoa, while twenty thousand Piedmontese were strung out to the southwest watching the mountain passes in an effort to prevent enemy incursions into Lombardy.
⁷³

On 8 April 1796, Horatio Nelson was in Genoa, sending Beaulieu assurances that he could rely upon British support for any Austrian counterattack. Beaulieu was planning to move upon Voltri, and returned an encouraging reply two days later. Without delay Nelson hurried ashore at five in the evening, collected Consul Brame as an interpreter, and visited the quarters of the Austrian chargé d’affaires, Count Giovanni Girola. There he learned that the Austrians were attacking Voltri at daylight the following day, 11 April, and Beaulieu wanted Nelson to cover his seaward left flank. The commodore had
four ships at the mole, the
Agamemnon
and
Diadem
sail of the line, the last under Captain George Henry Towry, and the
Meleager
and
Blanche
frigates. He gave orders for them to prepare as unobtrusively as possible, and led them quietly to sea after dark.
⁷⁴

They stole along the coast towards Voltri, their sails filled with a moderate breeze, and the lights of the Austrian army winking in the darkness to starboard. Nelson planned to anchor the
Agamemnon
and
Meleager
within half gun shot of the Austrian flank before daylight, and to position the
Diadem
and
Blanche
ahead between Voltri and Savona, ready to train their guns on the road to batter the French as they retreated. It was useless, however. Instead of moving at daylight on the 11th as scheduled, the Austrians went forward early, in the previous evening, converging upon Voltri in two columns while a third attacked Savona. There was little resistance at Voltri, where ten thousand Austrians took three hundred French prisoners and some magazines, but because the columns were poorly coordinated four thousand enemy soldiers escaped towards Savona. Nelson was unable to punish the refugees. The premature land attack meant that most of the enemy soldiers had escaped before the ships could close in on the road. Nelson’s broadsides pounded a few flying detachments of French off Arenzano, and his boats went as far inshore as they dared, but for the most part the horses had bolted. Later that day, in the few hours Beaulieu was allowed to savour victory, he courteously acknowledged ‘his great obligations to Captain Nelson’ for bringing his ships so close. But the commodore himself dashed off disappointed reports to Drake and Trevor asking them to impress upon their allies ‘the absolute necessity of punctuality in joint attacks’.
⁷⁵

Little was actually gained by the offensive, which stalled as suddenly as it had begun. The next day Bonaparte brought up reinforcements, and taking personal charge of the French operations went into action like a tightly coiled spring. He threw back the third Austrian column threatening Savona, denuding it of nearly a thousand men and all of its artillery, and stopped Beaulieu in his tracks. Realising that the Austrian forces on the coast could not support their allies, Bonaparte turned north to attack the Piedmontese under General Louis, Baron Colli. It took him only two weeks to smash a wedge between the allied armies, knock Sardinia-Piedmont out of the war, and spill his half-starved, ill-clad, lethal horde through the Apennine passes towards Lombardy. Bonaparte forced the Adda River at Lodi on 10 May, clearing the Austrians out of the way, and entered Milan a few days
later, turning it into a satellite of France and stripping it of what was needed to re-equip his army. Then, while the victors marched upon Mantua, where thousands of Austrian soldiers were holed up, Beaulieu’s humbled warriors fell back to the Tyrol and the Veneto. British diplomats were dismayed by Bonaparte’s blistering speed and aggression. ‘If he was not a Jacobin, I should call [him] a fine fellow for his enterprize and abilities,’ sighed Trevor.
⁷⁶

These operations took Bonaparte away from the coast, where his right had been menaced by Nelson’s hungry battleships. Much of the time the commodore was reduced to listening to cannons rumbling in distant mountains, and trying to make sense of garbled accounts of battles that came from Genoa or Leghorn. The war was coursing inland, beyond his direct interference, and all he could do was to fall upon enemy supplies wherever he saw them, relying on Drake and Brame to protect him from the inevitable cascade of Genoese complaints about the violation of their neutrality.

Victory was not something he could expect, but at least his efforts were appreciated in the fleet. Throughout that difficult spring Admiral Jervis’s faith in him never wavered. ‘I cannot possibly be without you in the Gulf of Genoa,’ wrote the commander-in-chief. He meant it, and told the secretary of the Admiralty of ‘the satisfaction I feel in having an officer of such zeal and local knowledge on the important station he occupies’.
⁷⁷

The issue of Genoese neutrality grew thornier with every French success. Almost all the Italian republic’s coasts and harbours were occupied by the French, and in Genoa the government struggled to retain some freedom of action against increasingly strident Jacobin voices. Nelson could do no other than regard the coast as hostile. His statement to Jervis that ‘to pretend . . . that although our enemies took possession . . . [of] . . . the republic of Genoa that we are not by every means in our power to attack them both at sea and ashore will [not] bear reasoning upon’, had the determined admiral nodding fiercely in agreement.
⁷⁸

Nevertheless, without the base at Vado it was harder than ever to damage the French supply line. Nelson stationed ships between Nice and Alassio, hoping to intercept supplies going east or west, but the coast was full of neutral and French sails, and he was compelled to
admit that his squadron had ‘not taken one of two or three hundred [vessels] of different sizes which have passed them’.
⁷⁹

Skill and temerity did produce some victories, however. In the supposedly neutral harbours Nelson preferred to provoke the French into firing the first shots to furnish grounds for self-defence. The morning of 25 April saw him approaching Loano in search of an enemy convoy he had heard about in nearby Finale. Only four of the transports remained when he arrived under a drizzling rain, supported by the
Diadem
,
Meleager
and
Peterel
. Between one and two in the afternoon five boats were assembled at the
Peterel
, an eighteen-gun sloop commanded by Charles Stuart. Lieutenants Suckling, Noble and Compton of the
Agamemnon
each took responsibility for a boat, along with Culverhouse of the
Meleager
and an officer of the
Diadem
. As they approached the harbour the French opened fire with artillery and musketry, effectively breaching the neutrality of their Genoese hosts, and Nelson brought his ships in to provide cover. Most of the French missiles howled overhead, but in a lively half-hour the
Agamemnon
was hit and the largest of the French batteries demolished with a score of its attendants killed and wounded. By three-thirty the boats had towed out their prizes, an eight-gun bombard with provisions and ordnance, a ketch laden with powder and sixteen hundred muskets, and two galleys with provisions. Three Britons were wounded, one of them Lieutenant Noble. Young James Noble’s commission had been confirmed the previous month, and Nelson spoke of him as ‘a most gallant and worthy officer’, but he was singularly unlucky. Since joining the ship on 5 October he had been captured by the French and exchanged, and now he fell, hit in the throat by a musket ball. Fortunately, his windpipe was unscathed and the ball was extracted, although not before Noble had almost been strangled by a coxswain who sought to staunch the flow of blood by tightening a black silk stock around his neck.
⁸⁰

The success was welcome, because malignant tongues in Genoa were sapping allied morale with stories of French siege equipment getting past the British ships, and in reporting it Nelson did not ignore his own cause at home. Perhaps remembering that his rank of commodore had still to be confirmed, he again resorted to addressing the board of Admiralty as well as his admiral. In the past the practice had served him well, and it did now. Spencer positively encouraged the correspondence, begging Nelson not to ‘make any apologies for writing, as it is very satisfactory to hear from you when we can
in any way’. As Nelson’s missives continued the first lord expressed his appreciation of direct news from the Mediterranean, and asked for more of it.
⁸¹

Nelson revisited Loano on the evening of 7 May, attacking after dusk with all but the
Diadem
of his former contingent. This time he failed. In three-quarters of an hour a red-hot shot fired by the French hissed into the starboard bow of the
Blanche
, where it smouldered ominously. The wind also fell, exposing the ships to a dangerous fusillade, and the wounded
Blanche
was cut up about the hull, masts and spars. Nelson prudently abandoned his attempt to extricate a gunboat and three brigs from the harbour, but recovered his injured frigate after one and a half hours of action. Rebuffed, he tried Finale the same night. This time the operation was performed so stealthily that a brace of vessels were brought out without an alarm having been raised, but daylight proved the vessels to be legitimate Genoese traders and Nelson ordered their release.