Battle of the Nile
In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte was the rising star of revolutionary France. That spring he sailed from Toulon with 40,000 soldiers and a massive fleet, bound for Egypt. The plan was bold: seize Egypt, the land bridge between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and use it as a base to threaten British India, Britain’s most valuable colony. He took Alexandria in early July and marched inland, but his fleet remained anchored in Aboukir Bay, near the mouth of the Nile.
Rear Admiral Horatio Nelson had been hunting the French fleet for weeks, narrowly missing them at several ports. On the evening of August 1, he finally found them: thirteen French ships of the line at anchor in a defensive formation close to shore. Nelson’s captains needed no detailed orders. In a daring move, several British ships slipped between the French line and the shore, catching the enemy in a devastating crossfire. The battle raged through the night. Around ten o’clock the French flagship Orient exploded in a blast so enormous that both sides stopped firing for several minutes. By morning, eleven of thirteen French ships had been captured or destroyed. Napoleon’s army was stranded in Egypt, cut off from home.
The victory made Nelson a national hero and established British naval supremacy in the Mediterranean for the rest of the Napoleonic Wars. The broadside ballad The Banks of the Nile captures the domestic side of the campaign: a young woman begs to follow her sweetheart to Egypt, only to be told that no women may go. In fact, women were present aboard many ships at the Nile, and some helped carry gunpowder to the cannons during the battle.
