Battle of the Nile
Nelson destroyed the French fleet at anchor in Aboukir Bay on the night of 1 August 1798 and left Napoleon's army stranded in Egypt. He had been searching the Mediterranean for two months, had missed the invasion convoy twice, and had reached Alexandria before it and left again. He found the fleet in the afternoon, moored in a line close to the shore with shoal water inside it, and attacked at once with the light going — which was itself unusual, since fleet actions were normally begun in the morning. The manoeuvre that decided it was made by a captain rather than by the admiral. Foley took the Goliath inside the French line on the reasoning that if there was room for the enemy to swing at anchor there was water enough to sail in, and five ships followed him, so that the leading French vessels were engaged from both sides at once by ships whose landward guns were not even manned. The French rear, further down the line, was never engaged at all. L'Orient, the 120-gun flagship, caught fire and blew up at about ten at night with an explosion that stopped the firing for several minutes and was heard in Alexandria. Eleven of thirteen ships of the line were taken or destroyed. Napoleon's army was cut off, the Second Coalition formed within months, and the Mediterranean became a British lake for the rest of the war. The battle is also where the Nelsonian method appears fully formed: brief the captains beforehand, trust them to act without signals, and accept risk to get a decisive result rather than an inconclusive one. Trafalgar seven years later was the same idea applied to a fleet under sail.
- Year: 1798 CE
- Category: Military
