West Indies. The Toulon fleet was to recapture Surinam and the Dutch
colonies and take reinforcements to Santo Domingo (where the struggle
with Christophe was still going on); additionally, it was to detach a small
contingent of ships and 1,500 men to capture St Helena (dramatic irony!)
and cut the East Indies trade route. The Rochefort squadron meanwhile
was to capture Dominica and St Lucia, reinforce the French position at
Martinique and Guadalupe, and then attack Jamaica and the British West
Indies. As a final piece of icing on the strategic cake, Villeneuve and
Missiesy were to rendezvous in the West Indies and return together to
Europe, there to raise the Royal Navy blockade on the ports ofFerrol and
Corunna.
With these grandiose and rather absurd plans we see clearly
Napoleon's Achilles' heel: the inability to concentrate on a single clear
objective to the exclusion of all others. The thinking was that Missiesy
and Villeneuve would decoy Cornwallis away to the West Indies - for the
British would surely have to divert in strength to deal with the threat to
their position in the Caribbean - thus allowing Ganteaume the freedom
for his multifaceted mission. The orders concerning Ferrol and Corunna
were meant to give a last nudge to Spain to declare war on Britain, with
whom she had been teetering on the edge of hostilities for months. But it
was all much too convoluted in conception and was vulnerable to the
obvious objection that as each part of the plan connected with every
other, the possibility of something going badly wrong increased
exponentially.
The amazing thing was that Napoleon nearly pulled it off, only to be
thwarted by the elements. Everything was against the grand design: no
one had thought how to divert Nelson from the blockade of Toulon;
security was blown almost instantly, and the ease with which British
secret agents got wind of the stratagem has led some scholars to conclude
that Napoleon had already abandoned serious hopes of an invasion of
England and was feeding disinformation to the enemy. Yet, against all the
odds, on 11 January 1805 Missiesy and the Rochefort fleet evaded its
windbound blockaders and, even more incredibly, Villeneuve too escaped
from Toulon while Nelson's ships were watering in Sardinia. Despite
crowding on sail, Nelson was unable to catch up with or even locate
Villeneuve and for the first time England's greatest sailor began to feel
genuine alarm.
Yet Villeneuve, having momentarily outwitted the British, was laid low
by the weather. After a terrible battering in the Gulf of Lyons, he lost his
nerve and crept back into the safety of Toulon. When Napoleon heard of
marcin
(Marcin)
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