his admiral's humiliating failure, his rage was a sight to behold. The
volcanic anger is still evident in his correspondence in February:
'What is to be done with admirals who allow their spirits to sink and
determine to hasten home at the first damage they may receive? ... A few
topmasts carried away, some casualties in a gale of wind are everyday
occurrences. Two days of fine weather ought to have cheered up the
crews and put everything to rights. But the greatest evil of our Navy is
that the men who command it are unused to all the risks of command.'
The Emperor's withering scorn was warranted. Villeneuve's self
serving justification for his actions is decisively refuted by the fact that
Nelson rode out the selfsame storms without sustaining significant
damage to his ships.
It should be stressed that the British by no means simply awaited
Napoleon's next move; they made serious assaults of their own, and there
was always the danger that one of these might make grave inroads on the
invasion flotilla and so lead to the cancellation of the whole enterprise. In
September r8o3 the Royal Navy bombarded Dieppe and Calais from the
sea, though without momentous result. Then, in March-April r8o4 it
attempted to block Boulogne harbour by scuttling a group of stone-laden
ships at the entrance to the harbour; however, the attempt was bedevilled
by incompetent planning and adverse weather and was finally abandoned
in a welter of mutual recriminations. In October and November Boulogne
was bombarded with rockets, and mines and torpedoes were used, though
again without effect. But the British never gave up and another such vain
attack was made as late as November r8o5 when all danger of an invasion
had receded. There were those in England who urged amphibious
assaults by commandos and marines, but the experience of the Seven
Years War and even more so 1798 - when r,400 men were lost in a futile
attempt to destroy Ostend canal - argued against such tactics. The
defences at Boulogne and the other Channel ports were extremely strong
and the risks in landing and reembarking troops, especially in bad
weather, were deemed unacceptable.
In r8os Napoleon made his final, and in many ways most determined,
attempt to gain that crucial temporary superiority at sea that would allow
the Grand Army to cross the Channel. But once again his strategy was
the work of a Cartesian apriorist, a mathematician used to commanding
land armies and with no real understanding of the minutiae of naval
warfare. The one dubious card he held that was not available to him in
r8o4 was the Spanish navy, for Spain had finally entered the war in
December r8o4. But the Emperor's attempts to conf ront the Royal Navy