Nelson (86 page)

There were those in the army who felt discomfited by a victory that confounded their predictions of a more protracted or bloody struggle. A competent soldier, Lieutenant Colonel Moore, was reduced to joining an incompetent one, General D’Aubant, in sneering from the sidelines. At times they had implied that the capture of Bastia was beyond the present means of the combined services, and increasingly they exonerated their inaction by disparaging Nelson’s bombardment and insisting that it added nothing to the naval blockade but a waste of ammunition. Their remarks about the siege have sometimes been accepted as objective statements; but in one sense Moore and D’Aubant’s professional reputations rested more easily with a failure of the siege than its successful outcome.

It was true, of course, that the bombardment ran down munitions, though we can imagine Nelson scoffing that those who did not fight always conserved ammunition. The end of the siege left reserves of powder particularly low. The fleet was in need of twelve hundred barrels, while at the arsenal at Gibraltar, which had sent six hundred barrels of powder to Hood, the reserves were uncomfortably low. It was also true that the siege was an inadequate substitute for the attack that should have been made from the heights, and made for heavier work than Nelson expected. But to argue, as some historians have done, that the bombardment added nothing to the situation is merely to imbibe Moore’s wilful negativity. The dearth of food, produced solely by the blockade, seems to have been the most immediate cause of the town’s surrender, but there is nothing surprising about that. In many, if not most, sieges that end in a negotiated surrender the lack of food and water are key issues, as they had been in Nelson’s previous military operation in Nicaragua, but that hardly entitles other contributions to be dismissed. Evidence from inside Bastia suggests considerable structural damage, heavy and rising casualties and a serious shortage of gunpowder produced by the firing. In fact, both St Michel’s flight from the town and its final surrender were partly justified by
the lack of powder. It is reasonable to presume that the total package, including the strain of living under fire and fears of the town being stormed by ferocious Corsicans, influenced the result. Calvi’s fall, no less than Bastia’s, would be precipitated by the exhaustion of food and ammunition.
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Early in May, after a period of doubt, the confidence of the Hood–Nelson party had increased. The new advanced batteries had opened fire, and the French suddenly looked shaky. With a victory looming, D’Aubant looked for a way out. On 13 May reinforcements arrived from Gibraltar. There were only six hundred of them, and they probably made a smaller difference to the comparative sizes of the opposing forces than the casualties wrought by Nelson’s siege guns had done, but they gave the general a means of saving face. On the 14th two of D’Aubant’s officers went to the
Victory
with an offer to collaborate. A week before Hood would have jumped at the opportunity, but now he eyed the ambassadors with scarcely veiled contempt. As far as he was concerned, they were merely cutting themselves in for a piece of credit at the end of a hard-won fight. Scathingly he told the officers that their general ‘need not give himself that trouble’.
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Hood had not wholly mistaken his man, and when the surrender of Bastia was finally agreed D’Aubant descended like a vulture upon the spoils, appearing in force upon the heights above the town on 21 May. It was his duty, of course, to occupy the abandoned redoubts and forts, but in an extraordinary dispatch to the home secretary he had the gall to suggest that the news of his advance might have hastened the French surrender. The general had now abandoned all consistency. He asked Dundas to believe that his advance, after the enemy had agreed to capitulate, was helping to end the siege, when he had spent two months vociferously refusing to move on the grounds that such an advance was pointless. Hood gave the general no relief. The day D’Aubant’s warriors marched over the heights the admiral told him Bastia would have fallen ‘long since’ if the troops had acted properly, and warned that he now intended to attack Calvi, the last French stronghold in Corsica.
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There were lessons for everyone, including Nelson. As he inspected the town from the inside, he marvelled at a strength he had earlier denied. It should have told him something about the need to base military decisions upon the best intelligence, but he was naturally exhilarated by his success and for the moment voiced rather the opposite conclusion. Whatever some historians have said about the capture of
Bastia, the naval officers of the day, as well as many in the army, regarded it as a victory dragged from the teeth of pessimism. It certainly reinforced Nelson’s impressions of the capabilities of his seamen. As for the enemy, they had shown no spirit whatsoever, he mused. ‘I always was of opinion, have ever acted up to it, and never have had reason to alter it, that one Englishman was equal to three Frenchmen.’ It was a favourite boast, but fortunately Nelson’s tendency to loose egotistical talk was not always a true indication of his deeper reflections or actual conduct.
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In the case of Bastia he had made mistakes, but it is difficult to deny him considerable credit. He had urged the attack, and whether blockading or besieging he had been its most energetic instrument. None reading the letters and journals of the day can doubt his strenuous commitment. Yet, remarkably, the man who profited as much as any from his labour paid it the most meagre public tribute. Admiral Hood was surely aware of Nelson’s need for recognition, as well as the sacrifices he had made to earn it, but the admiral’s public dispatch of 24 May damned his leading subordinate with faint praise and credited some of his achievements to another officer.

In stating that Nelson ‘had the command and directions of the seamen in landing the guns, mortars, and stores’, Hood made it sound as if he had merely conducted a routine disembarkation. Nelson complained that it put him ‘in the rear’ of the action instead of its van, but there was worse. ‘Captain Hunt,’ said the admiral, ‘was on shore in the command of the batteries from the hour the troops landed to the surrender of the town.’ As worded, this was more than an astonishing remark; it was an untruth. Hunt, Nelson grumbled, ‘scarcely ever saw’ a battery, nor did he render ‘any service during the siege. If any person ever says he did, then I submit to the character of a story-teller.’ Others agreed. Some were ‘thunderstruck’ by Hood’s dispatch, and Captain Serocold even talked about publishing a correction. Others would have seen it as another example of the admiral’s favouritism; Captain Fremantle, for example, had long concluded that Hood judged actions by the man, rather than a man by his actions.
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Hunt was also sent home with the admiral’s dispatches, a privilege that offered him further opportunities to press his claims and the right, so he said, to a gratuity reserved for those who brought news of important territorial acquisitions. Nelson understood that Hood possessed some personal reason for pushing Hunt forward, but he was understandably hurt that it had been done at his expense. The attack was
‘almost a child of my own’, he wrote. ‘The whole operations of the siege were carried on through Lord Hood’s letters to me. I was the mover of it. I was the cause of its success.’ More than ‘a little vexed’ with his admiral, Nelson, however, resolved not to quarrel. He had too much to lose, for Hood had already promised that Nelson would enjoy further opportunities for distinction at Calvi. Bottling his resentment, he consoled himself with the belief that Sir Gilbert Elliot, ‘a stranger and a landsman’, would report more accurately and ‘do me that credit which a friend and brother officer’ had denied.
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In the meantime he wrote to the families of the four
Agamemnons
who had died in the fight, and prepared the rest of the company for the next siege. This time it appeared that the army would play its full part. As Bastia fell a new military commander-in-chief arrived to replace the smouldering D’Aubant. Lieutenant General the Honourable Charles Stuart was slim and handsome, a ball of energy, and a soldier to the soles of his boots. He had been twice briefed, once by his government and again by Sir Gilbert, and gave every indication of wanting a better relationship between the two services. Announcing his regret at missing the siege, Stuart generously acknowledged that the victory was ‘alone due to Lord Hood’, and spoke about a new and cordial partnership.
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It was not going to be plain sailing, however. Stuart might have started off on the right foot but Hood was soon antagonising him, and like many brilliant military men Stuart himself was temperamental, stubborn and unbalanced. Even the level-tempered Elliot eventually found him impossible. ‘Of all the vain, haughty, absurd and wrongheaded men I ever had the ill-fortune to meet with, he is the
facile princeps
,’ Sir Gilbert would complain. Dealing with him was like being ‘locked up with a madman in a cell’. Fortunately, though Nelson occasionally ran afoul of Stuart’s prickly disposition, he saw the gold underneath and admired and liked the general.
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Before the campaign against Calvi got underway, some urgent naval business intervened. The French fleet gave Vice Admiral Hotham’s squadron the slip outside Toulon and escaped into the Mediterranean. No one knew where it was going, but the probability was that the French were engaged in a last, desperate effort to save Corsica. Hood put to sea with all available ships on 7 June, the day after the news reached him in Bastia. The
Agamemnon
was already loaded with men and materiel for Calvi, but Nelson quickly shed her excess to catch up with the departing fleet, fancying that at last he was on the eve of
a fleet action. ‘I pray God we may meet this [enemy] fleet,’ he wrote. Hood was also dead set on a decisive result, and ‘was in hopes to have taken or destroyed them . . . which I certainly should have done had not the wind failed me’ and enabled the French to slink into Golfe Jouan, west of Nice. When the British came up on 10 June the enemy ships were anchored close inshore in a strong defensive position, protected by banks and shore batteries. Hood considered whether he might double the enemy line by using the shallows to interpose some of his ships between the land and the French fleet – much as Nelson’s ‘band of brothers’ would do at the Nile four years later – but the manoeuvre seemed impracticable. Hood withdrew like a hungry tiger driven from a kill. Even reinforced by Hotham’s division, he could only appoint guard ships to keep the French under observation, and return to Corsica to cover the siege of Calvi.
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Nelson was sent back to Bastia early to complete his task, and on 12 June embarked the soldiers and stores for the next campaign. He knew the capture of Calvi would be a hazardous enterprise and accepted the personal risks it promised. At Bastia he had been lucky, but this time he was sailing towards his first major injury.

The fleet of victuallers, transports and store ships swallowed 1,450 officers and men and left for Mortella Bay at St Fiorenzo under Nelson’s careful stewardship. Stuart went as far as St Fiorenzo overland, and Nelson was also sorry to leave Villettes behind. The lieutenant colonel remained in Bastia as acting governor, installed in a house always open to his naval friend. Nelson, said Villettes, had ‘a very good right’ to call it his own, and would always find board and a ‘tolerable dinner’ within its walls. Still, the captain was relieved to be serving under a new military commander-in-chief who believed in making life unsafe for the enemy. During the delay Stuart had inspected Calvi and was impatient to begin, and Nelson agreed. He was supposed to wait for Hood but to Stuart’s delight quickly got underway, and with the
Dolphin
and the
Lutine
was soon shepherding the army toward France’s last foothold on Corsica.
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The position of Calvi was majestic and intimidating. To the west jutted the rugged Cape Revellata, while north and east the town confronted a large but shallow bay. Towards the sea Calvi’s defences were formidable, with large granite walls and a powerful citadel
making any frontal attack difficult in the extreme. When Stuart and Nelson arrived the small harbour was also guarded by a gunboat and the
Melpomene
and
Le Mignonne
, the last surviving frigates from the squadron that had skirmished with Nelson the previous year. More substantially, the town was backed against steep, jagged peaks, deemed to be almost inaccessible, supported by a string of back-door forts and batteries that swept around the town to the west and southwest and covered the land approaches from the rear.

The most northerly of these rearguard fortifications was Fort San Francesco, where three eighteen- or twenty-four-pounders glinted ominously from a rock that the sea battered endlessly below. The most important was Fort Mozzello further south. Perhaps six hundred and fifty yards west of Calvi, Fort Mozzello was a pentagon, with strong stone-casemated faces mounting ten guns (variously described as eights, eighteens and twenty-fours) enclosing a central four-gun cavalier and bombproof that commanded views of both land and sea. To its right, a little north, the Mozzello was supported by an old tower with a howitzer and the Fountain battery, a fascine work of six eighteens sitting on the shoulder of a hill. On a steep rock to the left of Fort Mozzello, and about 2,200 yards to the southwest of Calvi, stood Fort Mollinochesco, its eighteen-pounder and four or five smaller guns watching protectively over the town’s communications with the interior.

In terms of manpower Calvi was much weaker than Bastia. It quartered a battalion of light infantry, several companies of Provençal grenadiers, and the crews of a pair of frigates, in all about twelve hundred defenders. Far more than their counterparts in Bastia, they started the siege short of ammunition and food, and they had few gunners. Nevertheless, their morale remained good, and the natural defences of their mountain fastness led some to consider it almost impregnable.
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