The Battle of the Nile

It is six in the evening of the first of August in the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and ninety-eight, on the quarterdeck of the Vanguard, off the entrance of Aboukir Bay on the Egyptian coast, in a light north-westerly. He is thirty-nine years old. He is Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson. He has one eye. He has, since the Tenerife action thirteen months ago, no right arm. He has been chasing the French battle fleet across the Mediterranean for seventy-three days. He has missed them at Toulon, at Malta, at Alexandria. Yesterday at noon, off the Bay of Aboukir, his look-out of the Zealous saw the upper masts of thirteen ships of the line at anchor in two and three cables of water, on a line drawn from the shoal of the island at the head of the bay south-east to the village of Aboukir.

His captains have been to dinner aboard the Vanguard at midday. They have eaten standing up in his great cabin. He has put the question to them, which is the question of attacking a French line of thirteen at anchor with thirteen of his own under sail in the last two hours of daylight on an unsurveyed shore. They have all said yes.

He thinks: Brueys has anchored close in. He believes the shoal protects his head. He has not put a spring on his cables. He believes I will not attack tonight.

He thinks: if there is water under the bow at the head of his line for me to round him, his head is open to me on both sides at once.

He thinks: Foley will see this before he reaches it. Foley sails the closest of any of them. Let Foley find the gap. If there is no gap I will know it within the half hour and I will reform on the seaward side.

He says to Berry, his flag-captain, that he will go in.

Foley of the Goliath leads the line at twenty minutes past six. He shaves the head of the French line on the inshore side, finds the water, drops anchor opposite the third French ship from the front, the Conquérant, on her unengaged side. The Zealous under Hood follows him. The Orion, the Audacious, the Theseus follow Hood. Five British ships of the line are inside the French anchorage on the unengaged side before the French gun-captains have realised they are coming. Nelson on the Vanguard takes the seaward side. The remainder of his line takes station beside him. The French centre is engaged, in the next forty minutes, on both sides at once.

Brueys on the Orient, 120 guns, the largest ship of the line in the world, is hit twice in the thigh in the first hour and refuses to be carried below. He is hit a third time at half past eight by a round-shot that nearly cuts him in two. He has himself propped up against a sea-chest on his quarterdeck so that he may, by his own words, die at his post. He dies at a quarter to nine. Fire breaks out forward on the Orient at about ten o'clock. The British boats of the Alexander are among the first to see the smoke. They drop the engagement and pull off. Every captain in the line who can see the Orient burning gives the order at once to cut his cables and stand off her radius.

She blows up at twenty-two minutes past ten. The shock is felt at Rosetta, twenty miles away. The night, by the reports of the British logbooks, is lit as bright as noon for the next ten seconds. Burning timber falls on the British and French ships within half a mile of her. The action stops, by mutual unstated consent, for ten minutes after the explosion, and then resumes, more slowly, into the early hours of the morning. By dawn, eleven of the thirteen French of the line are taken or destroyed. Two have escaped to seaward. The British have lost no ship. Two hundred and eighteen British dead. Approximately one thousand seven hundred French.

He is wounded in the head by a piece of langridge shot late in the action and is taken below with the wound bleeding into his good eye. He is told by his surgeon Jefferson that he will likely live. He says: I have given Bonaparte's letters home a long swim. The phrase is not coined for the moment; he has used it twice already that summer in correspondence. The remark is, however, the truth. Bonaparte's army of the Orient is now without a fleet to bring it home. The Mediterranean closes against France. The British command of those waters runs unbroken for the next seven years. Nelson is made Baron Nelson of the Nile by an exhausted government on the news, an honour he is reported to have considered insufficient and which is the source, by the lights of his biographers, of the strange titular self-amendment of his last codicil at Trafalgar: Nelson and Bronte. Bronte was the dukedom the King of the Two Sicilies gave him for the Nile, in his own right and in perpetuity, and which his line carried until 1981.