Bourbon, 12–13 September 1810

Dawn came up on 12 September with a prospect that might have come to Robert Corbet in his dreams. After three months at sea, the scent of land, of earth, trees and vegetation, hung on the warm morning as he looked out from Africaine’s quarterdeck on Bourbon and the neat port of St Denis, bustling with military activity. This was his country’s newest possession, a conquest in which he had played no small part. What made Corbet’s pulse race, however, his eye gleam, were two ships in the distant offing. They were frigates and they could only be French.

Nineteen days had passed since the Battle of Grand Port, and a week since Corbet got wind of it at Rodrigues. What he needed first was a briefing on how matters stood. Before hastening ashore he ordered Lieutenant Joseph Tullidge to make Africaine ready for battle.

Governor Farquhar almost collapsed with relief at seeing him. The plans conceived for invasion had been founded on British naval power. Now the French were masters of these waters and the hurricane season was just weeks away. Far from British ships besieging Ile de France, the French were blockading Bourbon. Rowley in Boadicea was bottled up at St Paul, fifteen miles to the west, by the two frigates espied by Corbet – Astree and Iphigénie (the captured Iphigenia). As for Hamelin’s other frigates, Farquhar said, heaven only knew where they were or what mischief they might be up to, but they could appear on the scene at any time. Thank God, he might have added, that Corbet had turned back at Rodrigues.

A message was transmitted to Rowley. Help was at hand and Boadicea should rendezvous with Corbet at Pointe des Galets, a headland roughly midway between their respective anchorages, so they might ‘make sail simultaneously in pursuit of the Enemy’.1

From his return to Africaine that day, Corbet’s actions suggest a man transfigured. Everything had, at last, fallen into place, presenting an opportunity of a kind that came to few officers. That he would seize it, he had no doubt; for if one thing stands out about Corbet at this time it is the assurance with which he acted. Lesser men were bound by lesser horizons. He was, so far as he was concerned, one of Nelson’s true disciples – a visionary commander, ruthless and bold – and fate and his own judgement had coincided to produce the moment in which he would prove it.

Almost as much as glory, he sought vindication. Much had changed at the Admiralty, where the methods that made him something of a throwback to an earlier, more brutal age, had all but destroyed his career. What others thought of as cruelty, he saw as efficiency. Now that his moment had come, he was convinced that he would be vindicated. Another navy captain, Basil Hall, who became fascinated by Corbet and wrote a study of him, commented:

It was well known that the most earnest desire of his heart was to fall in with an enemy of equal or even superior force in order that he might prove how efficient his [disciplinary] plan really was. He hoped to furnish a triumphant practical answer to his brother officers who often advised him to adopt a less rigid system.2

Was there another figure in the background of Corbet’s visions? Was he haunted by his bitter rival, Willoughby, whose zeal on Corbet’s old ship was already being spoken of in hushed tones? Zeal. That was the essence of it all for Corbet. Great navy officers were a blend of qualities. In Men of Honour, his fine study of Trafalgar and the making of the English hero, Adam Nicolson defined these as Zeal, Honour, Boldness and Love. The word that recurs through Corbet’s career is zeal. There was something of the Old Testament in him. Nicolson cites an extract from William Blake’s prophetic text, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as a summary of Nelson’s method in battle, but the words also resonate with Corbet’s whole career. They might have served as his epitaph:

Nicolson has noted in passing Corbet’s similarity to the Nelsonian ideal – his daring, his extremeness, his ruthlessness, his courage – and yet his distance from it. Here his surviving letters to Nelson are illustrative. Two years before Trafalgar, when Corbet was captaining the sloop Bittern in the Mediterranean, he questioned one of the great man’s orders (it was admittedly ambiguous) and provoked his wrath. Corbet was mortified, the monster of the quarterdeck reduced to a bleating boy: he had sought clarification only ‘in order to guide my weak judgment’, he wrote. ‘No impertinent or inquisitive request to Your Lordship’s letter was ever thought of by me.’ Nelson’s disapproval, he concluded, ‘cannot fail to remain a source of the utmost uneasiness to Your Lordship’s Most Faithful & Most Devoted, Humble Servant’.4

Nelson forgave the transgressor. He noted his zeal, praised his action against the privateer Hirondelle with those words that imprinted themselves on Corbet’s soul – ‘Your conduct and perseverance merit my entire approbation’ – and granted him leave for treatment of the rheumatism that was his cross. When Corbet left the Mediterranean in mid-1805, missing Trafalgar by five months, he wrote thanking Nelson for his constant consideration, signing himself ‘With the Truest Gratitude and Respect’. He could see greatness of spirit, but not emulate it. What Corbet had always lacked, and always would, was his hero’s gift of humanity. The glaring paradox of this man who worshipped Nelson was that he remained quite oblivious to what made him so great a commander, his ability to give and inspire love.

*

Early in the afternoon of 12 September, Corbet returned to Africaine. The French frigates had drawn off, allowing further breathing space. He made all sail towards them, at the same time raising the Commodore’s pendant in Africaine – a ruse intended to convince them that she was the Boadicea and disguise the fact that there were now two British frigates in the offing. By all accounts Africaine had been cleared for action ‘with alacrity and spirit’ and there is every reason to believe that, contrary to much subsequent naval legend, her crew went forth with eagerness to battle.5

At around 4 p.m. Africaine was approaching from the east as Boadicea, converging from the west, rounded Pointe des Galets. The French, lying to the north, had seen them before they sighted each other and were running to the north-east. For the first time since Grand Port, Rowley could see he had parity or better with the foe: as well as Africaine, he was followed by the sloop, Otter, and the brig, Staunch. Bouvet, who had emerged as the best fighting captain on the French side, had taken over the Iphigénie and besides two frigates had just the brig Entreprenant. He also had one other card up his sleeve, however. Iphigénie mounted heavy 18-pound French cannons, moved into her from Bellone.6

Corbet estimated that the French were seven or eight miles ahead. Under topgallants and with a wind fresh from the east, the sweet-sailing Africaine was gaining on them. The Boadicea, on the other hand, having set out from a westerly direction, was struggling head on to the wind and falling behind. From early evening, Corbet had the testing task of staying up with the enemy and at the same time retaining contact with Boadicea.

Hours more in the chase lay ahead when he announced that there would be no evening grog. ‘It shall not be said that we wanted Dutch courage to thrash these Frenchmen,’ he said. ‘Strike the spirits into the hold.’ There was apparently no demur and Corbet then ‘hailed the decks to let the men sit down between the guns, tell long yarns and appoint agents for their prize money’. The master’s mate Jones paints an image of the scene which, while idealised, may be allowable.

A merrier night I have seldom passed than that – between the guns, surrounded by a brave, humorous, contented and confiding crew. The pencils of such men as Marryat would have found ample materials from what was narrated in Jack’s best style on the Africaine’s main deck on that occasion. They all knew and showed they knew that a better seaman or more skilful and brave officer than Corbet was not to be found.7

The Africaine closed rapidly. She was a beautiful sailer, scything along at nine knots close-hauled, and although Astree and Iphigénie had topgallants and staysails set, she had them within range well before midnight. According to Tapson, ‘as it was not Capt Corbet’s intention or wish to strike the first blow until Boadicea should be in a position to support us, he shortened sail, and continued to increase or diminish the canvas as occasion required’.8 A gun was fired and a blue light burned every half hour to indicate their position to Rowley.

But Rowley – six miles in the rear and still hindered by the easterly wind – was having difficulty staying in touch. A squall had blown up and through a dark, rainswept night, he could make out little, as an entry in Boadicea’s log indicates: ‘6.20 lost sight of the chase. 6.30 lost sight of Otter and Staunch. At 7 saw a flash NE. Burnt a blue light. 8.15 saw a flash. At 9 saw 2 flashes. At midnight squally with rain at times.’9

The crucial moment came after midnight.

At 2am very light winds. At 3 observed Africaine commence action. 3.30 observed a very heavy firing from 3 ships in close action.10

Those very light airs had settled matters. Rowley was becalmed. Corbet, throwing caution to the wind, had seized his moment.

*

Accounts of that night added a final layer to the dark mythology attaching to Corbet’s name. For decades afterwards stories would circulate with the decanter at navy dinners and captains’ tables, acquiring resonance and momentum until they started to make their way into print. All this came to a head some thirty years later when Jenkin Jones, by then a captain himself, published a pamphlet intended to silence some of the uglier tales and vindicate his hero. Still the myths endured. To some extent they still do.* Jones’s missionary fervour – ‘I feel proud to have served under Captain Corbet; his memory will ever be sacred to me’ – means that his evidence is not always reliable. The best and coolest source for these events is the little-known journal of John Tapson.

By midnight it became clear that the Africaine was on her own. ‘A heavy squall came on,’ Tapson wrote,

Corbet’s heart beat with a savage joy. ‘It is said that he deemed himself at this critical moment of his fate the most fortunate of men to possess such an opportunity for distinction,’ a fellow captain wrote. ‘He exclaimed in the greatest rapture: “We shall take them both! Steer right for them! And now my brave lads, stand to your guns and show them what you are made of!”’12 Jones presents him as a more measured figure, shouting through a loudhailer: ‘Fire your guns as you bring them to bear. Take cool aim and do not throw a shot away.’13

The opening broadside was fired at about 2.20 a.m., as Africaine came up on Astree’s weather quarter at musket range. Flames in the dark illuminated briefly the apple-cheeked hulls of the two ships and the ghostly shadows of canvas.

Less than ten minutes into the action – the Astree had just fired her second broadside – the Africaine’s quarterdeck was hit. A flash, a thud, and Corbet lay in the flickering light of a lantern, a widening pool of blood pumping from his right leg. Men ran to his side bearing more lanterns.

First reports had it that he had been shot from behind by one of the crew. This story gained sufficient credibility for it to be repeated in the standard histories of the day, albeit with caveats. It will not bear much scrutiny. Corbet’s principal wound was caused by a ball from Astree which took off his right foot, ‘a little above the ancle [sic]’.14 At the same moment, a chunk of the gunwale through which the ball had just passed came spinning through the air, smashing his right femur in a number of places.

Corbet was borne away, passing his command to Lieutenant Tullidge, a courageous officer but one in awe of his hypercritical captain. It was generally agreed that the prudent course now would have been to drop astern and await Rowley in Boadicea. According to Tapson:

Meanwhile the Astree had set her mainsail ‘to shoot ahead out of our fire’, at which the Africaine’s crew set up a cheer. (This spawned another myth – that the crew had cheered to see their captain carried away wounded.) As soon became apparent, it was a forlorn triumph.

Tullidge made sail to go alongside Iphigénie. Had he pursued Astree, she might have struck while Iphigénie was still off to leeward and unable to manoeuvre into a firing position. Instead, Africaine came broadside on to Iphigénie while Astree was placed in a raking point across her bows. The French directed grape and langrage at her masts and rigging where they wrought havoc, so that by the time Tullidge tried to slide away from the fire ‘it was found impossible to move a single yard, every brace and bowline having been shot away’. At the same time the wind had dropped. Tapson recorded:

No hope therefore now remained of being succoured by Boadicea, and no alternative but to hammer away at an Enemy double our own numerical force and, from the relative superiority of their position at least 4 times that force – for only the two bow chasers on the forecastle could be brought to bear on Astree and the 6 aftermast guns on the Iphigénie.16

After an hour of this, Tullidge had been wounded four times – somehow he remained on deck – and Robert Forder, the other lieutenant, was below with a musket ball in the chest. At 4 a.m. the master, a man named Parker, had his head removed by a round shot, while the senior army officer, Captain Elliott, also lost his head, to grapeshot.

In the absence of any other officer, command of the forecastle guns had fallen to the young master’s mate, Jones, who was also wounded. He recalled cannon smoke drifting across a deck puddled and smeared with blood. Most of the bodies had been tossed over the side or taken below.

The slaughter in the dark … the obdurate spirit … a helpless frigate being withered at close range – the Africaine had acquired a terrible resemblance to the death throes of Nereide.

At around 5 a.m. Corbet lay in the cockpit, sweating in agony. His right leg had been amputated at the knee. The thigh, fractured in a number of places, was a bloody bandaged mess tied off with a tourniquet. The whole leg would almost certainly have to come off; but the wound was not necessarily mortal; Corbet had been saved by the exertions of his surgeon, a sickly and disabled man named James Campbell who had been with him on Nereide and who, over the past three hours, had performed miracles of hasty butchery in his gloomy cell. The recovery of many severely wounded men was testimony to this.

At that hour, Tullidge concluded that the ship could no longer be defended and struck the colours. Out of 295 men, 50 had been killed and 126 wounded. This was fewer than Nereide – 92 dead, 138 wounded – but still unconscionably high for an English man-of-war.† There could be no question that the Africaine had acquitted herself in the highest tradition of naval gallantry.

When Corbet was told, he flew into a state of ‘raged vexation’ and burst out:

For shame, hoist the Colours again! Fight and go down! Fight and go down!18

Tapson put it charitably. Corbet, he wrote, was either unaware of the extent of the carnage, or was overwrought. In the ‘excitement occasioned by his wound on his naturally irritable Temper, added to the mortification and chagrin at the idea of surrendering to an Enemy, he was become reckless of life’. It may be closer the mark to conclude that, cheated of his chosen destiny, he sought immolation of everything, ship and men. All that was left to him was matching the bloody example set by Willoughby on Nereide.

Tullidge – with four wounds a gory, haggard figure himself – spent some time pointing out the futility of further resistance. Eventually, if not convinced, Corbet was persuaded that the ‘Colours had received no Tarnish’. And yet, ‘his proud and lofty spirit could ill brook the idea of falling into the hands of the Enemy’. He sent Tapson, the only man able to speak French, up on deck with Tullidge to receive the French officer. It was the last they saw of Corbet.

The ceremony was brief and grim, with none of the usual courteous ritual. When Tullidge proffered the sword to the French officer, ‘the Brute rudely snatched it’ and virtually pushed him and Tapson towards the Iphigénie, barking ‘Embarquez toute suite.’ They were better received on the quarterdeck by Bouvet – ‘a perfect contrast to the Ruffian we had just left’ – who expressed the hope that his opposite number, Rowley, was well. It transpired that Corbet’s ruse of hoisting the Commodore’s pendant had indeed deceived the French into thinking that they were in action with Boadicea and that the second English ship – still becalmed some miles off in the dawn light – was the Indiaman, Windham.

On hearing the true identity of his antagonist, Bouvet became concerned. It turned out that by an extraordinary coincidence he knew Corbet

The immediate question was what to do with the Africaine. Within minutes of her surrender, all three masts had come crashing down and, to all intents and purposes, she was a wreck. Bouvet still sent on board a prize crew to attempt to bring her in to St Paul. And so Corbet was left on his ship with about twenty Frenchmen and eighty Africaines.

* * *

From this point there is no first-hand account. All the officers had left the ship. Jones’s narrative ends and Tapson, captive on Iphigénie, based his on what he was able to glean later. The absence of sources no doubt contributed to the rumours that started to fly almost as soon as Corbet was found later that day, dead in Tapson’s cot. ‘The blood in it [had] completely saturated all the Bedding.’20 The tourniquet, untied, lay beside him. The body, slight and white, was cold.

Tapson established that after the surrender, Corbet had been moved from the orlop, where the surgeon and his assistants remained feverishly busy, to the purser’s cabin and put in a cot. There he lay in agony. Pain was nothing new to one who had been a martyr to rheumatism for years, but he did not endure it well. ‘He appears to have borne the acute bodily pain with but little patience or fortitude [Tapson wrote] notwithstanding his brave and daring Spirit.’21

Corbet’s physical suffering was all the worse for his grief of mind. To him came the overwhelming injustice of it all – the ball that had cut him down before he could carry through his strategy, and so early in the action that it added a hint of malign mockery to his fate. Others would pose the same agonising question on his behalf. ‘Who will say what steps he would have taken had he kept the deck?’ Jones wrote. Might he have pursued Astree and secured a famous victory? There is every reason to suppose that the question tormented Corbet’s final hours.

The theme of revenge as a factor in his death is a persistent one. It was taken up by Captain Basil Hall, a popular author of seafaring yarns who was as appalled as he was intrigued by the stories he had heard about Corbet. Hall never accepted that he had been shot by his own men but repeated a variation of the betrayal story that he heard from other officers. This was that during the battle, his men ‘read to [Corbet] the bitterest lesson of retributive justice that perhaps was ever pronounced to any officer’.

To prove how completely they had it in their power to show their sense of the unjust treatment they had received … they folded their arms, and neither loaded nor fired a single shot in answer to the pealing broadsides which the astonished enemy were pouring in upon them … They were cut to pieces rather than fire one gun to save the credit of their commander.22

This ridiculous tale provoked Jones finally to write his pamphlet, and lay that particular myth to rest. Hall insisted, however, that the manner of Corbet’s death had had a profound impact on navy discipline, forcing captains ‘to think upon the danger as well as the folly of urging matters too far’. He also spoke of ‘several versions of this terrible story current in the Navy’.

The most terrible revenge story of all was perhaps too strong meat to be openly repeated at the time: of a ship in which normal order has been lost, officers removed, men confined below, a hated captain lying in agony, alone until a figure slips into the cabin, exchanges looks in which fear and hatred mingle, then a quick movement and the tourniquet is cast aside. It is just about feasible; there were one or two men on board who would have been happy to see Corbet dead, notably the Marine who got ninety-six lashes. But such a script smacks more of our age than theirs.

Central to it is the notion that Corbet was as brutal on the Africaine as on Nereide, for which there is no evidence. Africaine’s log was lost, and with it the punishment record; but Corbet had curbed his worst ways. Tapson never described him as cruel. Arguably, Corbet’s most terrible act on Africaine was wanting to embrace a holocaust – to ‘Fight and go down!’ – without any regard to his men.

On how he met death, it is again Tapson whose version rings most true. A devout and high-minded man, he wanted to believe that when the tourniquet came off it was ‘by some accidental circumstances, Capt Corbet rendered insensible of it from the feverish state of his mind, too exhausted to call the attention of his Attendants to the fact’. But he could not in all conscience do so.

Corbet had never showed any outward recognition of a Creator. His faith was in the Service and it is probable that, just as his hero Nelson died serenely, thanking God for having done his duty, he who had no belief or hope of Redemption took his own life in despair because, presented with a single opportunity, he had failed in his.

He would have been pleased to know that at least some of his fellows saw fit to mention him in the same breath as Nelson. When news of his death reached Capetown one officer, known only as I. H. H., was inspired to produce a ‘Tribute to Friendship’ to Corbet’s memory, a breathlessly overwrought piece of verse, epic in scale if not content (it ran to 104 lines and in places is quite incomprehensible) that concluded: ‘When Corbet died another Nelson fell!’

That opinion of Corbet remained divided despite his death became clear when his impassioned friend tried to have the poem published at the Government printing office. He offered to ‘pay any sum that may be charged’ for 200 copies, intending to have them distibuted among the Navy squadron, only to have the verse returned by order of the Governor, Lord Caledon, with a clear indication ‘that it would not be allowed to be published in the Colony’.

Notes

1. Tapson Journal, 12 September 1810

2. Hall, p.320. The author did not mention Corbet by name but there was no doubt of whom he was writing. It was Hall’s study that provoked Jenkin Jones to write his pamphlet

3. Quoted in Nicolson, p.xxii

4. ADD MSS 34920, Nelson letters, Corbet to Nelson, 5 October 1803, British Library

5. The Africaine’s log was lost and Tapson and Jones left the only accounts of the action

6. Le Combat du Grand Port 1810, thesis by Lieutenant de Vaisseau Roussel, École de Guerre Naval, 1927–8

7. Jones, Character and Conduct of Captain Corbet Vindicated

8. Tapson Journal, 12 September 1810

9. ADM 51/2176, log of the Boadicea, 12 September 1810

10. Ibid., 13 September 1810

11. Tapson Journal, 13 September 1810

12. Hall, p.321

13. Jones, Character and Conduct of Captain Corbet Vindicated

14. Tapson Journal, 13 September 1810

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Jones, Character and Conduct of Captain Corbet Vindicated

18. Tapson Journal, 13 September 1810

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., 5 December 1810

21. Ibid.

22. Hall, pp.321–2

23. Tapson Journal, 5 December, 1810

* Patrick O’Brian’s treatment of the Corbet legend in Mauritius Command may even have given a new lease of life to it.

† These may be compared with those on, say, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar. A First Rate with a crew of some 800 men, the Victory suffered 54 killed and 79 wounded, a casualty rate of roughly one in six. On Africaine the rate was almost two in three, on the Nereide no less than four out of every five.