nder, 1915.

CHAPTER XI

THE NAPOLEONIC WARS: THE FIRST OF JUNE AND CAMPERDOWN

Ten years after the War of American Independence, British sea power
was drawn into a more prolonged and desperate conflict with France.
This time it was with a France whose navy, demoralized by revolution,
was less able to dispute sea control, but whose armies, organized
into an aggressive, empire-building force by the genius of Napoleon,
threatened to dominate Europe, shaking the old monarchies with
dangerous radical doctrines, and bringing all Continental nations
into the conflict either as enemies or as allies. The dismissal
of the French envoy from England immediately after the execution
of Louis XVI (Jan. 21, 1793) led the French Republic a week later
to a declaration of war, which continued with but a single
intermission--from October, 1801, to May, 1803--through the next
22 years.

The magnitude of events on land in this period, during which French
armies fought a hundred bloody campaigns, overthrew kingdoms, and
remade the map of Europe, obscures the importance of the warfare
on the sea. Yet it was Great Britain by virtue of her navy and
insular position that remained Napoleon's least vulnerable and
most obstinate opponent, forcing him to ever renewed and exhausting
campaigns, reviving continental opposition, and supporting it with
subsidies made possible by control of sea trade. In Napoleon's own
words the effect of this pressure is well summarized: "To live
without ships, without trade, without colonies, is to live as no
Frenchman can consent to do." The Egyptian campaign, conceived as
a thrust at British sources of wealth in the East, and defeated
at the Nile; the organization of the northern neutrals against
England, overthrown at Copenhagen; the direct invasion of the British
Isles, repeatedly planned and thwarted at St. Vincent, Camperdown,
and Trafalgar; the final and most nearly successful effort to ruin
England by closing her continental markets and thus, in Napoleon's
phrase, "defeating the sea by the land"--these were the successive
measures by which he sought to shake the grip of sea power.

The following narrative of these events is in three divisions:
the first dealing with the earlier engagements of the First of
June and Camperdown, fought by squadrons based on home ports; the
second with the war in the Mediterranean and the rise of Nelson as
seen in the campaigns of St. Vincent, the Nile, and Copenhagen;