Battle of the Nile

On the evening of 1 August 1798, a British fleet under Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson caught the French Mediterranean fleet at anchor in Aboukir Bay, on the coast of Egypt east of Alexandria, and all but destroyed it in a battle that lasted into 3 August. The French fleet had carried Napoleon and his army to Egypt only weeks earlier. Its loss left that army stranded, handed Britain control of the Mediterranean, and helped draw other powers back into war with France.

By 1797 Britain was the only major power still fighting the French First Republic. Rather than attack Britain directly, Bonaparte proposed seizing Egypt, then nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, as a base that could threaten British India and its trade. In May 1798 a great convoy carrying more than 35,000 soldiers sailed from Toulon. It captured Malta from the Knights of St John in June and then headed for Alexandria.

Nelson was sent into the Mediterranean to find out where the French were going. Without frigates to scout for him, he guessed Egypt and raced to Alexandria, but he arrived on 28 June to find the harbour empty: he had passed the slower French convoy in the dark and was ahead of it. He turned back, missing the French by less than a day. Bonaparte landed, took Alexandria and marched inland, while his naval commander, Vice-Admiral François-Paul Brueys d'Aigalliers, found Alexandria's harbour too shallow for his biggest ships and anchored his thirteen ships of the line in a defensive line in Aboukir Bay. Late in July Nelson finally learned of the landing in Egypt and sailed south.

Nelson's ships sighted the French early in the afternoon of 1 August and attacked at once, while many French sailors were still ashore. Brueys believed his line, backed by shoals, could not be outflanked, but Captain Thomas Foley of HMS Goliath saw room between the leading French ship and the shoal and led several British ships round the head of the line to attack from the landward side, where the French guns were not ready. The rest of the British fleet engaged from the seaward side, catching the French van in a crossfire. Fighting began a little after 18:00, and over the next three hours the leading French ships were battered into surrender. Nelson was struck above his blind right eye by a metal fragment, but the wound proved superficial.

At the centre of the line stood Brueys's 120-gun flagship, L'Orient. Brueys was mortally wounded by a cannonball and died on deck. Around 21:00 a fire broke out aboard, and at about 22:00 it reached the magazines and the ship blew up. More than a thousand of its crew are thought to have died, including Captain Casabianca and his young son, whose story later inspired Felicia Hemans's poem Casabianca.

Fighting resumed at dawn on 2 August. The French rear division under Rear-Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve had taken little part, and he now led two ships of the line and two frigates out to sea. The remaining French ships were captured, wrecked on the shoals or burned by their crews, the last on 3 August. British losses were recorded as 218 killed and some 677 wounded; French losses are estimated at between 2,000 and 5,000 killed and wounded, with thousands more taken prisoner.

The victory gave the Royal Navy a dominance in the Mediterranean it kept for the rest of the war. French-held Malta was cut off and starved into surrender, and British ships helped defeat Bonaparte at Acre in 1799. Encouraged by the news, the Ottoman Empire went to war with France, and Austria and Russia joined the Second Coalition. Bonaparte returned to France late in 1799 without his army, which was defeated in 1801. Nelson was made Baron Nelson of the Nile and became a celebrity across Europe. The naval supremacy won at the Nile lasted through the Napoleonic Wars that followed.

Our 1800 map shows Egypt as part of the Ottoman Empire, as it was when the French landed, with the French First Republic in western Europe.