17 
“THE French people—may God thoroughly destroy their country and cover their flags in ignominy—are a nation of obstinate infidels, of unrestrained evildoers,” declared the Ottoman sultan and caliph of Islam when he learned of the French invasion. “Rivers of blood have watered the earth and the French have finally succeeded in their criminal designs over the nations that succumbed to them. They are sunk in a sea of vice and error; they gather under the flag of the Devil, and they can only be happy amidst chaos, taking their inspiration from Hell itself … may almighty God whom we worship turn their Satanic plots against them!”
“With the Prophet’s powerful protection,” he added hopefully, “these armies of atheists will be scattered before You and exterminated.”
Napoleon ordered an immediate march on Cairo. His plan was to capture the smaller cities of Damanhur, Rosetta, and El Ramaniya along the way. With the Nile Delta in their hands, the French would drive the Mameluke warriors out of their capital city and seize control of the country. General Kléber, who needed to recover from his head wound, would stay behind as military governor of Alexandria. Admiral Brueys stayed with the fleet, which he had anchored in Aboukir Bay, just east of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile.
The last of the groups to leave the ships were the savants. While the army marched on Alexandria, France’s most distinguished scientists, scholars, writers, and artists had been left on board, forced to beg moldy biscuits and brackish water from the remaining crew. At last a frigate was sent to bring them to shore. It dumped them, along with their belongings and the elaborate instruments of their trades, on a beach near some remnants of marble columns and they straggled into town.
Vivant Denon, the artist-archaeologist whose magnificent sketches would help create the discipline of Egyptology, recalled his brutal entry into Alexandria: “I was assailed by packs of wild dogs, which came at me from the doorways, the streets, the rooftops, their cries reverberating from house to house. I left the streets and tried to cling to the shoreline.… I jumped into the sea to get free of the dogs, and when the water became too deep I scaled the walls themselves. Finally, soaked to the skin, covered in sweat, overcome with fatigue and frightened out of my wits, I reached the soldiers on guard at midnight, convinced that the dogs were the sixth and most terrible of the biblical plagues of Egypt.”
Except for Napoleon’s favorites, who lodged with him, the rest of the savants went essentially homeless in Alexandria. The general who was supposed to be in charge of them was busy preparing the march on Cairo. He told the savants to make do as best they could. France’s most illustrious minds found themselves with fewer comforts than the lowest soldier.
Napoleon would attempt to remake Egyptian society from top to bottom in a manner as extreme as what he had done so quickly in Malta. But the Egyptians would prove much more resistant to their makeover, and in trying to bludgeon them into accepting foreign rule in the name of “rights for all,” the French would unleash storms that are still igniting conflict between East and West to our own day. In a sign of future troubles, when the French tried billeting some of their troops in Alexandria’s old city, a number had theirthroats slit, so the policy was jettisoned.
THE vast infantry caravan left for Cairo first, dragging their artillery pieces behind them like stones. The thirty-six-mile march from Alexandria to Damanhur crossed brutal, arid desert, filled with Bedouin who made a sport of hunting stragglers, whom they decapitated or kept for ransom and abuse. The French tried to retaliate with artillery but with little effect: the tribesmen merely withdrew to a safe distance and then returned, always taking the opportunity to strike the endless caravan at points where the men looked weak, tired, or crazed from thirst. Despite the dire water shortage on the road to Cairo, Napoleon had made no significant arrangements for water-carrying vehicles.
It was July. Temperatures during the day went over 110 degrees. One of the reasons the British had not thought the French armada was heading for Egypt was the lunacy of invading the country in the middle of summer. But calculated lunacy—the defying of conventional wisdom and prudence in order to gain advantage—was one of Napoleon’s favorite tactics.
The French troops wore dark-colored woolen uniforms and carried forty-pound packs. When not crossing bare ground or desert, they marched on a cragged, rocky camel trail along the abandoned Nile-Alexandria canal that was little better. One of Dumas’s fellow generals captured the deadly conditions of the march from Alexandria: “Leaving that city behind to follow the Nile upriver, you find a barren desert, naked as your hand. Every dozen miles you run into a bad well of bitter, salty water. Imagine an army forced to cross these arid plains, with no escape from their unbearable heat. Dressed in wool and bearing five days of supplies on his back, after an hour’s march the soldier is overcome by the heat and the weight he carries. He unburdens himself, throwing down his rations, focusing only on the present with no thought of tomorrow. When thirst comes, he finds no water. That is why, in the horrors of this scene, you saw soldiers die of thirst, of starvation, of heat, while their comrades, on seeing this suffering, blew out their own brains.”
Dumas, along with Napoleon, had remained in Alexandria for some days, presumably trying to buy mounts for his men. But Alexandria was too poor a town to offer a significant number of horses. On July 4, Napoleon offered all cavalrymen who were unmounted a choice: they could either join the march to Cairo carrying their saddles or they could accept temporary reassignment to infantry brigades and march with less weight. Those who carried their saddles would have first dibs at horses in the future.
On July 7 the cavalry evacuated Alexandria to join the army marching southeast toward Cairo. Only a small contingency force under Kléber remained to garrison the city. Dumas and a small group of officers who, like him, had horses accompanied Napoleon. The rest had to proceed on foot, with or without their saddles. Dumas and Napoleon made the trip from Alexandria to Damanhur in under twenty-four hours. Here they met the army that had suffered the same journey over three hideous days, and here the real troubles for Dumas in Egypt began.
WHEN the first French troops reached the outskirts of the town of Damanhur—“a pile of huts, resembling dovecotes”—only one thing mattered: there was water. The officers and enlisted men fell over one another to get at it. They jumped into the cisterns and doused their uniforms and splashed and danced and laughed and sang. One officer drank twenty cups in a row. That stop by the cisterns, he would recall, “remains etched in the minds of every soldier in my division as one of the good memories of his life.”
Having ignored his generals’ urgent dispatches during their march from Alexandria to Damanhur, Napoleon was hardly embraced when he arrived at the front. Dr. Desgenettes, the chief medical officer, whose job kept him close to everyone, from the general-in-chief to the lowest ranks, recalled the mood: “When someone shouted in distress: There’s no more water!—the army answered with deep sighs or in tones of fury. Despair went so far that men took their own lives, reminding themselves with bitter irony that they had their six acres that Napoleon had promised them. The feeling of collapse that hit the soldiers, or that excited them to fury, also overtook their leaders.” Napoleon himself would recall “seeing two dragoons leave their ranks and, running as fast as they could, drown themselves in the Nile.” One particularly promising young brigadier shot himself out of despair after going on a bitter rant about the expedition’s poor planning and deadly cost so far.* Later, reflecting on the Egyptian campaign while in exile on Saint Helena, Napoleon would put the blame for its failures on the men: “This kind of warfare was even harder on them, because it contrasted the more with the comforts of the Italian piazza and casinos.”
Without mounts, the cavalry felt especially bereft and angry. They resented the haste and the lack of preparedness. Dumas’s mood grew particularly dark, and Dr. Desgenettes remembered how Dumas “threw [his] trimmed hat on the floor, trampled [it] underfoot and, amid a flow of exclamations of frustration, told the troops that the [government] had deported them out of hatred for their leader, because they were afraid of him.” There was certainly some truth to these words—though Dumas may have later wished he had not spoken so freely.
One evening while camped in Damanhur, Dumas procured a few ripe samples of a local fruit so bountiful, delicious, and thirst-quenching that the men had taken to calling it “Saint Watermelon.” He invited some of his fellow generals—Lannes, Desaix, and the young firebrand Joachim Murat—into his tent to share them. The talk turned to the existential problem at hand: What were they doing there? Had the government intended to send them into a trap of disease and privation in the desert? Was Napoleon a victim or an architect of the plot? There was talk about declaring to the general-in-chief that the army would not go any farther than Cairo.
As Dr. Desgenettes would later report in his memoirs, one of Napoleon’s many informants somehow heard everything at this meeting. Alexandre Dumas would piece together a fairly accurate version of the incident, assembling details of the evening from old soldiers who had been there when his father stepped dangerously out of line:
Eating three watermelons was the only purpose of the get-together in my father’s tent, but the gathering quickly took on political overtones when the generals began to air their frustrations.
What had we come to do in this accursed country—a place that had devoured every would-be conqueror from Cambyses II to Saint Louis? Were we here to found a colony? Why leave behind the warm, gentle sun, great forests, and fertile plains of France for this fiery sky, this shadeless desert, these scorched plains? Was Bonaparte hoping to carve himself out a new monarchy, as the ancient Roman governors had done? He might have at least asked the other generals if they would be content as the heads of this new satrapy. That might have appealed to the freedmen and slaves of the ancient armies, but it wouldn’t to the patriots of 1792, who weren’t the satellites of a single man, but the soldiers of a nation.
Was there anything to these criticisms beyond the harmless grumbling that emerges under stress? Or was this already the beginning of a rebellion against the ambitions of the future leader of a coup? The generals themselves might have been hard-pressed to answer, but that is exactly what was reported to Bonaparte as a serious attack on his authority by the general who had been the most vocal in declaring my father’s watermelons delicious and Napoleon’s motives rotten.
THE French army continued southeast toward Cairo. Reaching the Nile the next day, the troops slaked their thirst and were soon beset by dysentery. Worse was the affliction that began to affect their eyes: as they marched over the parched Nile basin, thousands of soldiers began experiencing a redness, burning, and swelling in one or both eyes, often with a discharge of pus. This, they realized, was why so many of the locals had one or two opaque, milky eyes. The French called this condition the Egyptian blindness, and it became the most widespread scourge of the expedition, as thousands of soldiers became partially or even fully blind.† Despite Bonaparte’s admonition that “the Mamelukes are your enemy, not the inhabitants,” troops began to ignore the orders against looting. Commanders did not object, since all notion of supply had broken down.
“You cannot imagine the fatigue of the marches,” Dumas would write to his friend Kléber in Alexandria, “most of the time without food, forced to glean what the preceding divisions had left behind in the horrible villages they had pillaged.”
Strangely enough, none of the villagers greeted them as liberators. Everywhere the population seemed prepared to put up resistance. General Berthier himself witnessed a peasant woman, who approached holding her baby, suddenly stabbing an aide-de-camp in the eye with a pair of scissors. Dumas wrote to Kléber that they were “harassed during the whole march by this horde of thieves called Bedouins, who killed our men and officers twenty-five paces from the column. General Dugua’s aide-de-camp, Géroret, was assassinated the day before yesterday in that way, while carrying orders to a platoon of grenadiers, within gunshot of the camp.”
The French army soon encountered the official enemy in a test skirmish on July 13, dispatching some three hundred Mamelukes and chasing off another four thousand. Napoleon imagined that they wouldn’t fight again until after the French seized Cairo. But on July 21, after a thirteen-hour march that began at 2 a.m. and ended the next afternoon around three, the French at last arrived at the place they were to fight their decisive battle: thousands of Mameluke horsemen stood facing them, their sabers flashing in the mid-afternoon sun.
“The Mamelukes have a great deal of spirit,” Dumas would write dryly to Kléber after the battle was over.
The horsemen were clad in an array of brightly colored embroidered silk jackets, the sleeves encrusted with ivory beads and precious stones. Each man carried pistols in his belt, a blunderbuss, daggers, and the renowned Mameluke sword, a curved saber that could cut off a human head at a single blow.‡
One of the French officers present marveled at these men who are “covered in sparkling armor, enhanced with gold and gems, dressed up in varied, brilliantly multicolored suits, their heads adorned with feathered turbans, and some wear gilded helmets. They are armed with sabers, spears, cudgels, arrows, muskets, blunderbusses, and daggers. Each is outfitted with three pairs of pistols … The wealth and novelty of this spectacle made a vivid impression on our soldiers; from that moment on, their thoughts were set on booty.”
The Mamelukes, for their part, could not take this new threat seriously. They had beaten back the Mongols when no other military force could. Every Mameluke warrior had practiced martial arts since childhood, learning a tradition nearly ten centuries old. To them, these French soldiers were nothing more than godless lackeys in matching uniforms.
The French numbered about twenty-five thousand. Estimates of how many Mamelukes faced them vary greatly, though historians often quote the numbers recorded by Napoleon: twelve thousand Mameluke warriors, each with three or four armed servants, eight thousand Bedouin, and twenty thousand janissaries (Ottoman foot soldiers). The Mameluke warrior’s military servants accompanied him into battle, reloading his pistols and passing him appropriate weaponry, rather like a golf caddy selecting his player’s clubs. The warriors were also trailed by musicians playing flutes and tambourines, as well as crowds of women and children following along to watch the unbelievers be dispatched.
The French soldiers formed themselves into squares, six ranks deep; it was a formation designed to resist and frustrate cavalry charges. The rows of infantry formed a kind of human fortress. At the center of each square Dumas and Murat distributed the cavalry, along with the ammunition and supplies. The artillery was placed at the four corners.
The Mameluke riders attacked the French squares in powerful but disorganized charges, each warrior hurling himself like a tank at the enemy. If they had been able to isolate groups of five, ten, or even a dozen French soldiers, one of these ultimate human fighting machines would have easily won. If they had coordinated themselves into a modern cavalry charge, they might have broken the squares. But, as it was, they could not penetrate even one. The French, despite their poor morale and the fact they had not slept all night, showed remarkable discipline in holding their fire as they watched hundreds of terrifying warriors charging at them, legendary blades poised to chop off their heads, waiting for the precise moment when the volley could be loosed to maximum effect. “The flaming wads from our muskets penetrated their rich uniforms, floating and light like gauze, embroidered with gold and silver,” recalled a soldier from one of the squares.
The Mamelukes had never seen one of their cavalry charges fail. Now they failed repeatedly. When French soldiers were hit, they were simply pulled into the center of the square and replaced. The French squares never broke, while the Mameluke horsemen kept attacking with futile bravery. Meanwhile the French artillery shelled their rear with howitzers, and another division attempted to cut the Mamelukes off from their fortifications and any possible retreat.
Realizing that the French were trying to trap them, the Mamelukes determined to make one final all-out charge on two of the five French squares. Thousands of warriors rode at the two at once, but both divisions held. The French countercharged with bayonets and drove the Mamelukes by the hundreds into the Nile, where more than a thousand are said to have drowned. Still, thousands of Mamelukes did ride off into the desert, where, though they were pursued by Dumas and Murat, most escaped south, into Upper Egypt, to regroup. After the French left, the Mamelukes would try to regain their former power over the country, ultimately in vain. Napoleon’s invasion had sounded their death knell—just as, ironically, Saint Louis’s crusader invasion in 1248 had marked the beginning of their reign in Egypt.
The French would call this the Battle of the Pyramids, though the pyramids at Giza were just far enough away that they likely were not visible during the battle at all. (Illustrations that show the Great Pyramid looming over the combat were either propaganda, which Napoleon went to great lengths to encourage, or orientalist fantasies.) Despite the implications of the Mamelukes’ defeat, in the battle’s aftermath Napoleon himself seemed mainly dazzled by the souvenirs they had left on or near the battlefield: “carpets, porcelain, silverware in great abundance. During the days following the battle, the soldiers busied themselves fishing in the Nile for bodies, many of which had two or three hundred gold pieces on them.”
LATE-eighteenth-century Cairo was a city of about 250,000 inhabitants, but the French marched in to find empty streets, since, without the Mamelukes, the people were too scared to come out to face their conquerors. The first to emerge were the Europeans. An Italian pharmacist told a French officer that the Mameluke leaders had warned the inhabitants of Cairo that “the infidels who come to fight you have fingernails one foot long, enormous mouths, and ferocious eyes. They are savages possessed by the Devil, and they go into battle linked together with chains.” Instead, as the Arab chronicler Al Jabarti (whose account of the expedition remains the most reliable non-French source on it) was shocked to discover, “the French soldiers walked the streets of Cairo unarmed and molested no one.” And the French wanted to be welcomed: “They joked with the people and bought whatever they needed at very high prices. They paid one [Egyptian] dollar for a chicken, fourteen paras for an egg—in other words, what they would have paid in their own country … Thus the shops and coffee houses reopened.”
As usual, Napoleon ordered a whirlwind of social and political reforms. Within weeks, the French organized garbage collection, established hospitals, and illuminated the streets by requiring that each house keep a lantern lit outside every night. They constructed mills and bakeries so Egyptians could learn that most basic culinary glory—how to bake French bread. The savants and the engineers set to work mapping the city and making drawings of all the monuments and important buildings. They measured the Sphinx and poked around inside the Great Pyramid, disturbing thousands of sleeping bats.
While in Italy and Malta he had trampled upon religion, in Egypt Napoleon adopted a new strategy. Here Napoleon cynically calculated that he must be seen as an emissary of the Prophet, so he issued his elaborate and peculiar proclamation to the Egyptian people, printed on the Arabic printing press looted from the Vatican. Four thousand copies were printed in Arabic, Turkish, and French; the proclamation went to great lengths to impugn “that gang of slaves,” the Mamelukes, as usurpers, and to prove that Napoleon’s glory and the glory of the prophet Muhammad went hand in hand.
In French the proclamation read: “Tell the people that the French are … true friends of the Muslims! The proof is that they have been to Rome and have destroyed the throne of the Pope, who always incited the Christians to make war on Muslims.” In the Arabic leaflets, however, “true friends of the Muslims” had been rendered simply as “true Muslims”—an audacious provocation that Arabic readers would not fail to condemn.
Napoleon’s proclamation and subsequent communiqués were translated by the Arabist savants, who had trouble because many revolutionary political concepts simply had no equivalent in Arabic. To make matters worse, these intellectuals were assisted in their translations by several Maltese Arabic speakers who had signed on to the expedition. But Maltese Arabic was an anachronistic and unique island dialect that had little in common with the Arabic spoken in Egypt, and various translation quirks and errors rendered the French proclamations ridiculous to Egyptians.
The local Cairo clergy offered to issue a fatwa recognizing Napoleon as the legitimate ruler of Egypt—provided the entire French army formally convert to Islam. Napoleon actually considered the offer, but when it became clear that the muftis’ demand included mass adult circumcision and total abstinence from wine, the conversion plan was scrapped.
FOR the thousands of French officers and enlisted men occupying Cairo, the situation hardly promised glory. They missed everything about their old life: Europe, the Revolution, the campaigns in Italy and on the Rhine, Malta—all of it was better than being stuck in a disease-ridden city surrounded by unfathomable people who most likely hated you.
“We have arrived at last, my friend, in the land we had so much desired,” Dumas wrote to Kléber. “But for God’s sake, it is so far from what we imagined. This wretched town of Cairo is inhabited by a lazy rabble squatting all day in front of their miserable huts, smoking and drinking coffee or eating watermelons and drinking water. One can easily lose oneself for an entire day in the stinking narrow streets of this famous capital.”
Cut off from wine shipments, the occupying army made beer and distilled spirits from local figs and dates, but many also took to the local custom of smoking hashish and drinking hash-infused juices and teas. The perpetual hash haze would become such a problem for the occupation that the French would eventually impose their own drug laws and begin confiscating and burning bales of hashish.
One day, without warning, the general-in-chief stormed into Dumas’s quarters. Napoleon himself, when he dictated his memoir on Saint Helena at the end of his life, recalled with apparent relish how he’d dressed down the man whose chest was level with his nose: “You have preached sedition. Beware that I don’t fulfill my duty, for your six feet and one inch would not prevent you from being shot in two hours.”
Napoleon never forgot a slight, and he’d been furious about the rumblings against him ever since Damanhur, when he had perceived Dumas to be inciting mutiny. Even in a crowd of cavalry officers, Dumas’s temper and bluster were legendary, and he was the most imposing as well as possibly the most respected of the officers.§ Napoleon may have calculated that bringing Dumas into line would silence the other generals in Cairo. But the fact that he recalled the incident decades later, after his empire had fallen, also suggests that Dumas had gotten under his skin.
In fact, he was wrong to assume the disloyalty of Dumas. Generals like Dumas led by inspiration and, like Washington’s Continental Army, they fought better with a reason to fight. Blind discipline was not necessary when one fought for a righteous cause.
But Dumas’s dedication to his republican ideals, to his nation, and to his comrades left the general-in-chief cold. To him, there was only one kind of loyalty that mattered—loyalty to him. Napoleon was not Cincinnatus—he was Caesar.
Though Napoleon would later abandon Egypt without so much as a warning to his fellow generals—leaving them to face hell in the desert while he returned to France to pursue his destiny—he expected them to achieve a far higher standard of loyalty. The logic of the imperial relationship was taking over, even though Napoleon was still officially only one general among equals.
Some days after Napoleon confronted Dumas, he summoned him to his quarters and bolted the door. Alexandre Dumas gives this account of the scene (related afterward by his father to his confidant, General Dermoncourt):
“General, you conduct yourself poorly with me and you are trying to demoralize the army,” Napoleon told him. “I know everything that happened at Damanhur.… I will shoot a general as soon as a drummer-boy.”
“Possibly, General,” said Dumas, “but I think there are some men whom you would not shoot without thinking twice about it.”
“Not if they get in the way of my plans!”
“Look here, General: a moment ago you spoke of discipline; now, you speak only of yourself,” said Dumas. “Yes, the Damanhur meeting took place … [and] yes, I said that, for the glory and honor of my country, I would go around the world, but if it was for the sake of your whim, for you I would stop at the first step.…”
“Thus, Dumas, you divide your mind into two parts: you put France on one side and me on the other.”
“I believe that the interests of France should come before those of a man, however great this man may be … I believe that the fortune of a nation cannot be subdued to that of an individual.”
“Thus, you are ready to separate yourself from me?”
“It is possible, but I don’t agree with dictators, not Sulla any more than Caesar.”
“And you ask for …?”
“To return to France at the first opportunity that presents itself.”
“I promise to put no obstacle in the way of your departure,” said Bonaparte.
“Thank you, General, it is the only favor I ask of you.”
As Dumas was leaving, Bonaparte muttered, “Blind is he who does not believe in my fortune.”
A different recollection of the conversation comes from Dr. Desgenettes, who had it from Napoleon. Napoleon’s account is interesting for its keen description of the psychological nuances at play, as he figures out quickly how the purity of Dumas’s idealism has made him vulnerable. Dr. Desgenettes recalled that Napoleon had begun their conversation by asking him what he thought of General Dumas.
“That he shows a mixture of the sweetest and kindest nature and all the fierceness that a soldier is capable of,” the doctor answered. To which Napoleon, recalling what he believed was Dumas’s subversion of his plan, said he’d told Dumas that if he “had been unlucky enough to notify me not to go further than Cairo, I would have shot [him] with no further formality.” He went on, “Dumas, in a respectful attitude, took it very well; but I added, ‘When that had been accomplished, I would have had you tried by the grenadiers of the army, and I would have covered your memory with opprobrium.’ Then [Dumas] started to sob and shed floods of tears.” Napoleon told Dr. Desgenettes, however, that he recalled “that beautiful deed of arms where [Dumas] stopped on his own and cut down, at the head of a bridge, a column of cavalry, and I felt at peace right away.” But, Napoleon said, he did not oppose Dumas’s leaving Egypt—“Let him carry elsewhere both the delirium of his republicanism and his passing furies.”
ON the high seas, in the meantime, the mystery of the French fleet’s location had brought Admiral Nelson to a fury of his own. It had made him the laughingstock of England. A London newspaper reflected the mood: “It is a remarkable circumstance that a fleet of nearly 400 sail, covering a space of so many leagues, should have been able to elude the knowledge of our fleet for such a long space of time.” Nelson already despised Napoleon and the revolutionary French, as all good British seamen did, but the harm to his reputation caused by losing the French armada made his desire to locate and destroy it more intense than ever. On July 28, tracking false rumors of a French attack on Crete, the British finally got hold of solid intelligence from Crete’s Ottoman governor: Napoleon was now in Alexandria. Nelson’s fleet set sail at once.
The frigates that had gotten separated from Nelson’s squadron in May had wandered the Mediterranean on their own since then. The French had sighted them off Alexandria just eight days before the Battle of the Nile—an ominous warning that might have saved them had they not ignored it. At 2:30 p.m. on August 1, 1798, as the French army was settling into the daily routine of occupying Cairo, a cheer went up on Nelson’s ships as the men finally caught sight of Napoleon’s fleet, lined up at anchor in Aboukir Bay.
A French lookout had actually spotted Nelson’s ships first, at about 2 p.m., as they began to round the tiny Aboukir Island marking the endpoint of the coastal shoals. Admiral Brueys reasoned that the British would not have enough ships in the bay by sundown to safely mount an attack. Naval warfare still operated at a glacial pace in the late eighteenth century, and ships took long hours to prepare for battle. Among other problems was that, in these last days of square sails, ships were good at sailing across the wind or downwind but bad at sailing into the wind. That was one challenge the British ships faced as they made their way into Aboukir Bay. The other challenge was to line up their ships in an advantageous position in relation to the French fleet. Eighteenth-century naval firepower was concentrated on the sides of each ship, where multiple decks of heavy cannon were arrayed. Ships were measured by the number of heavy guns and also the number of decks that housed them. The biggest ships in Nelson’s squadron had 74 guns; the French ship the Guillaume Tell, on which Dumas had come to Egypt, had 80 guns, about average for the armada; the massive flagship the Orient had 120 guns. To sink or capture the French armada, Nelson’s somewhat outgunned fleet would need to find the best position from which to fire.
As the British ships continued to enter the bay, many of the French officers and sailors were still on shore digging wells to supply water to the fleet. The French admiral had anchored his ships very close to the shoals, sure that the enemy would not risk maneuvering his ships into the shallow, narrow gap between the French ships and the shore, so as to fire from the landward side. Most of the French ships’ guns on the shore side had therefore not even been mounted for battle. Brueys also thought Nelson would not be reckless enough to try anything in treacherous conditions in the failing light. To avoid friendly fire, navies of the era usually delayed combat until dawn. Like Napoleon, however, Nelson cared little for caution and still less about conventional tactics. He called his captains the Band of Brothers and expected them to carry out their mission creatively.
After several hours of tense maneuvering and cannon shots through the smoke-filled sea air, one of Nelson’s captains found a gap between the anchors of two French ships and decided it was the right size to sail through. Several of the lead ships of the French fleet, including the Orient, would find themselves surrounded as British battleships were able to maneuver into position between the French line and the dangerous shoals. Brueys must have realized his mistake, but it was too late.
The French fired first in this particular face-off, and cannon blasts lit the night sky over Aboukir Bay. The formidable French fleet put up a tremendous fight—Nelson himself was nearly killed when a piece of French shot struck his head. But the French position was poor, and the wind had turned in favor of the British, giving them more dexterity than the French, whose sails faced the opposite direction.
After a firefight of several hours, the Leander, Nelson’s smallest ship, moved into a gap opened when the French Peuple Souverain retreated from the British onslaught. The Leander then managed, without running aground, to slip into the narrow strip of water separating the French fleet from the shoals. From there it sent a barrage of cannon fire at the towering 120-gun Orient, battering in the process the French ship that sat between them, the Franklin, named for the electrical ambassador himself. Two other British ships joined the Leander, and together the three surrounded the Orient.
Even with much of its crew absent and half of its cannons unmounted, the Orient was so much larger and more heavily gunned than any of the British ships that it did well against them at first. “The Orient had nearly demolished two of our 74-gun ships, namelyBellerophon and Majestic, and would no doubt have done much more serious mischief,” recalled a British midshipman, but the French sailors “had been painting the ship, and with true French carelessness had left the paint oil jars on their middle deck.” The oil from the paint cans, along with turpentine, caught fire as British shot rained down on the deck. When the British saw the wild flames dancing across the great ship’s stern, they concentrated their blasts toward the flammable target. The fire spread rapidly, and sometime around 10 p.m., it found its way to the great cache of powder and ammunition in the Orient’s magazine.
The biggest ship in the world exploded like a giant bomb. Wood, weapons, and bodies flew so high into the night sky that time seemed suspended before they fell back down. Nine miles away in Alexandria, General Kléber saw a bright flame shoot toward the stars. (“When the Orient went up, we could make out men in the air, covered in flames, the cannons, the sails, the rigging; the whole harbor was on fire; and at the moment of the explosion, Alexandria was lit up,” recalled a French officer with a clear view from a terrace in the city.) And the treasure seized from the Knights of Malta, accumulated over a thousand years—gold bullion, priceless gems, and antiques, riches Napoleon had counted on to fund the expedition—sank to the bottom of Aboukir Bay. Coins and jewels rained down along with the cannon, burning timber, and severed limbs on the decks of the French and English warships as their crews ran for cover. Nothing else of the treasure would be seen again until divers began to bring up coins from Malta, Spain, and France exactly two hundred years later.‖
One of the few French ships to survive the day was the Guillaume Tell, which had carried General Dumas to Egypt. It was later captured by the British off Malta.
* At twenty-eight, General Étienne-François Mireur had been the youngest of Dumas’s cavalry brigadiers and also a doctor. Six years earlier, barely out of France’s finest medical school, Mireur had volunteered for the revolutionary army in Marseilles, where he achieved an odd renown: he’d supposedly been the first to lead his fellow volunteers in renditions of the recently penned French revolutionary anthem, and he sang it so enthusiastically that the song was forever after known for the place where Mireur and those volunteers had sung it—the “Marseillaise.” But whatever remained of Mireur’s enthusiasm had failed him on the march from Alexandria, and one day in early July, as a memoirist of the expedition bluntly described it, Mireur “got on his horse … before dawn, rode into the desert, and blew his brains out.” Other accounts said Mireur had recklessly endangered himself and been shot by Bedouins in a virtually suicidal way.
† Some French doctors mistakenly assumed Egyptian blindness (which they named “Egyptian ophthalmia,” or “ophthalmia militaris”) was caused by the desert climate. The debate over the true cause of the condition—later joined by British doctors—helped found ophthalmology as a separate field of medicine.
‡ The Mameluke sword was considered such a perfectly balanced weapon that, during the fifty years after the Egyptian expedition, it was adopted as the official cavalry weapon by almost all major Western armies and to this day is the official sword of the U.S. Marine Corps.
§ As fate would have it, the leaders of the group opposing Napoleon’s conduct on the expedition were all very tall men: along with Dumas, General Kléber, the geologist Déodat de Dolomieu, and the political savant Jean Tallien were over six feet tall, which was remarkable for the time. Napoleon’s normal sensitivity about height must have been increased by the stature of his opponents.
‖ A limited exploration of the Orient’s wreckage was conducted in 1983, but the first thorough study of the site began on August 1, 1998, precisely two hundred years after the Battle of the Nile. Of the fabled Maltese treasure, marine archaeologists found coins minted in Malta, Venice, Spain, France, Portugal, and the Ottoman Empire, suggestive of Malta’s central place in Mediterranean trade. But there have been no reports of a large trove of riches being recovered. Was it ever there? Although the dominant understanding has long been that Napoleon’s looted Maltese treasure had sunk with the Orient, some scholars hold the dissenting view that much of the treasure had already been moved ashore and melted down before the battle.