Action of 22 October 1793

The new French Republic had declared war on the Kingdom of Great Britain on 1 February 1793, following years of rising tension. The British immediately laid preparations for the deployment of a large fleet to the Mediterranean Sea, in order to enact a blockade on the French Mediterranean Fleet based at Toulon. The British Mediterranean fleet was dispatched in a series of divisions during the spring, led by Vice-Admiral Lord Hood, and numbered 21 ships of the line and associated frigates. Among this force was the 64-gun small ship of the line HMS Agamemnon, under the command of Captain Horatio Nelson. Hood's fleet entered the Mediterranean at the end of June 1793, and on arriving off Toulon found the French naval base in open revolt against the Jacobin National Convention. Hood negotiated the surrender of the port and the French fleet, landing substantial troops and stores to defend it from French Republican counterattack. Hood was aware of the vulnerability of his position and sought a nearby safe harbour, settling on the island of Corsica. Corsica had been invaded and annexed by the French in 1768 and its inhabitants were still rebellious; shortly before Hood's arrival an attempt by the French to arrest the island's leader Pasquale Paoli had led to an uprising which had driven the French garrison into a three fortified towns on the northern coast. Hood sent a squadron under Commodore Robert Linzee to attempt to negotiate the surrender of these strategically important positions, with orders that if these overtures failed, Linzee was to attack the port of San Fiorenzo. The attack failed, and Linzee withdrew to Cagliari on the allied island of Sardinia. In early October, Agamemnon was sent to join Linzee for an operation against a French convoy anchored in the neutral port of Tunis; ==Battle==

In the early hours of 22 October, as Agamemnon sailed southwards down the Sardinian coast, sails were sighted leeward. At 02:00 the strange ships fired rocket signals and tacked eastwards away from the British ship. Nelson closed with the squadron under the assumption that they may be from the allied navies of Naples or Sardinia. At 04:00 he attempted to hail the rearmost ship, a large frigate, but received no answer. The council decided to pause and allow the crew to eat a meal before reengaging the French, but the conclusion was moot as Perrée also declined to renew the action. By 12:00 repairs on Melpomène were sufficient to allow the French to withdraw. Nelson himself later estimated that the combined French force mustered 170 guns and 1,600 sailors and could easily have overwhelmed his disabled ship had they counterattacked. He wrote that "Had they [the French frigates] been English, a 64 could never have got [away] from them." ==Aftermath==

Following the engagement, Nelson joined with Linzee on 24 October and completed the ultimately unsuccessful negotiations at Tunis. Perrée was able to reach Corsica, landing reinforcements for the garrison and anchoring his frigates at San Fiorenzo and Calvi. The bolstered French forces on the island were able to conduct limited offenses around Bastia, recapturing the town of Farinole from the Corsican irregulars. In December 1793 the French army recaptured Toulon and Hood was forced to withdraw. An invasion of Corsica was planned in 1794, with successful sieges at San Fiorenzo in February, Bastia in April and Calvi in July–August. During these operations, during which Nelson led the naval detachments ashore and lost an eye to cannon-fire at Calvi, all of Perrée's squadron, except Hazard, was captured or destroyed. and in 1798 led the British fleet which destroyed the French Mediterranean Fleet at the Battle of the Nile. In 1800, during the siege of Malta, he encountered Perrée again at the Battle of the Malta Convoy, in which Perrée was killed in action and his ship captured by Nelson. Nelson himself was killed in action five years later at the Battle of Trafalgar, in which a combined French and Spanish fleet was destroyed. He is remembered as one of Britain's greatest and most successful naval commanders. ==Notes==