Leander vs Genereux – 18 August 1798
Seventeen days after the British victory at the Battle of the Nile, the Leander 50, homeward-bound with Rear-Admiral Lord Nelson’s dispatches, was intercepted off Crete by the superior French Généreux 74 and defeated in a bloody and defiant six-and-a-half-hour duel.
The honour of carrying home Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson’s despatches reporting his victory at the Battle of the Nile was given to his flag captain, 30-year-old Edward Berry, who on 6 August, five days after the battle, set sail for England aboard the small two-decked Leander 50, commanded by Captain Thomas Thompson.
At first light on 18 August, having been delayed in her passage down the Mediterranean by light winds, the Leander was six miles to the west of Crete when a ship of the line was spotted in the south-east. Thompson and Berry’s inclination was to avoid an action, for the stranger was evidently a 74-gun vessel, but unfortunately the Leander lay becalmed whilst the other ship was able to approach with the benefit of a southerly breeze, and thus the decision was taken out of their hands. Despite hoisting Neapolitan and then Turkish colours, the vessel was easily identified as the Généreux 74, Captain and Chef de Division Louis Jean Nicolas Lejoille, one of the French ships which had escaped from the rear of their line at the Battle of the Nile – if nothing else the shot holes in her canvas gave her away. She was obviously bent on obtaining revenge, and Thompson decided to face the inevitable, shorten sail, and fight her.
The Leander had been launched in 1780 and had seen employment in the Leeward Islands during the latter years of the American Revolutionary War, as well as brief periods of duty as a flagship on the Newfoundland and Mediterranean stations in the years of peace. Recalled to the colours in 1795, (two years after the commencement of the French Revolutionary War), she had served under Nelson at the Santa Cruz disaster in 1797. The principal contribution to her broadside weight of metal of 432 pounds came from the twenty-two 24-pounder cannons on her lower gun deck, and the twenty-two 12-pounder cannons on her upper gun deck, and whilst her design compliment was 350 men, she had but 282 aboard at this time. Her commander, the 32-year-old Captain Thompson, was a post captain of almost eight years seniority, and although he had only commanded just one post ship, the Leander, and that only for the previous 21 months, he was regarded as a steady and reliable officer.
The Généreux had been launched in 1785 at Rochefort and was already a veteran of three battles – Genoa, the Hyeres Islands, and the Nile. Her principal armament was the twenty-eight 36-pounder cannons on her lower gun deck, and thirty 18-pounder cannons on her upper gun deck, which contributed to a broadside weight of metal of 1024 pounds. Her crew, bolstered by survivors from other vessels at the Battle of the Nile, numbered 936 men, and her captain, the 38-year-old Lejoille, had commanded the frigate Alceste 32 when leading the capture of the Berwick 74 in 1795, an action in which he had been badly wounded.
At 9 a.m. the Généreux ranged up on the Leander’s weather larboard quarter and fired a shot across her bows, to which the latter responded with a full broadside. A furious cannonade then commenced on both sides. Over the next hour and a half the two ships manoeuvred into position, still with all guns blazing, and by 10.30 they were yardarm to yardarm, the Généreux having run aboard the Leander’s larboard bow.
There followed a five-hour engagement with so much shot being fired that what there was of the wind died away. The smaller Leander suffered the most but try as the French did to board with their overwhelming numbers, they were constantly repelled by the fire of the British marines and small-arms men. When the merest wind did blow the Généreux ahead, the Leander remained almost becalmed, her fore topmast lying to larboard and her mizzen over the stern. As the Frenchman moved in for the coup-de-grace the Leander, with the aid of a scrap of spritsail, managed to luff under her stern and rake her gloriously from a distance of ten yards. Yet the British were never to get the upper hand again, and in the mill pond of a sea the Généreux was able to take advantage of a light breeze, pass across the Leander’s bow, rake her mercilessly from stem to stern, and then assume a position on her starboard side where the wreckage of the Leander’s spars prevented the usage of her guns.
By this time Captain Thompson had been wounded four times, 35 of his crew had been killed and 57 wounded. Although the lion-hearted but unskilled Berry’s sole injury was a contusion caused by a man’s skull smashing into his arm, a third of the Leander’s complement had been incapacitated. At 3.30 p.m. after a six-and-a-half-hour action, Thompson and Berry consulted and decided to accept an encouragement to surrender from Captain Lejoille. There was no spar from which to lower the colours as only the remains of the fore and main masts were still standing, so instead a French flag tied to a pike was hoisted over the side. The French ship, which had itself suffered 100 dead and over 150 wounded, had not a boat left, and it was left to a midshipman and the boatswain to swim over to the Leander to take possession.
Their followed ugly scenes which did little credit to the victorious officers of the Généreux, for when they got the Leander alongside, the French rushed on board and plundered her mercilessly. In the cockpit the surgeon was relieved of his instruments as he tried to attend the wounded; Berry was robbed of six uniforms; Thompson lost everything including a miniature of his mother, and he was deprived of a cot despite his wounds. Lejoille assisted in the plunder by confiscating Berry’s pistols, then added insult to injury by refusing the two captains an immediate transfer to Naples on parole, placing them instead on a French coastal smack which would take four uncomfortable weeks to reach Trieste. The crew of the Leander were treated even worse, for having been obliged to empty out their pockets, and before they were allowed to eat, they were then forced to splice all the rigging on the Généreux and prepare their own ship for sailing. Some of their wounded would then lie in open boats for up to seventeen days without food as they were ferried to Corfu.
It was not until 13 October that Captain Thompson wrote from Trieste to confirm the Leander’s loss. Meanwhile, having already received Nelson’s duplicate dispatches after Captain Hon. Thomas Bladen Capel had arrived at the Admiralty on 2 October overland from Naples, concern in London as to the Leander’s non-appearance had been growing, the more so that reports received from Admiral the Earl of St. Vincent (the commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet) at Lisbon indicated that he was unaware that the Battle of the Nile had taken place. The mystery began to unravel when French newspapers began trumpeting the capture of a British ‘74 or 64’ in the Mediterranean, and by 20 October reliable information had reached the Admiralty that the Leander had been captured and taken to Corfu.
On 25 November, having themselves travelled overland via Vienna and Cuxhaven, Thompson and Berry reached Harwich, and after first visiting his family in Norwich, the latter was knighted by the King at a levee on 12 December. Thompson, now recovered, was honourably acquitted for the loss of the Leander at a court martial aboard the America 64 at Sheerness on 17 December, being praised for his unprecedented defence by the president of the court, Captain George Tripp. He was granted a pension of three hundred guineas a year for his wounds and on 13 February 1799 he too was knighted by the King at St James Palace. Perhaps, it was the King’s response to Thompson’s claim that he had at one time hoped to take the Généreux which best encapsulated the Leander’s heroic defence – “You would not have gained a scrap more credit than you have already achieved if you had.”.
Captain Thompson was back at sea by February 1799, but his active career only lasted another two years before he lost a leg commanding the Bellona 74 at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801. Retiring ashore, he accepted a key civilian position as the Comptroller of the Navy. The Leander was taken into the French Navy and re-rated a 64-gun ship, only to be seized by a combined Russian and Turkish force at the capture of Corfu on 3 March 1799, whereupon she was returned to the Navy by the Tsar. Once back under British colours, she captured the fine French frigate Ville de Milan 40 off Bermuda in 1805 when under the command of Captain John Talbot, but she was then withdrawn from service in the following year.
Captain Lejoille was killed on 9 April 1799 in a non-descript action after the Généreux had grounded in the harbour at Brindisi under the guns of a fort. The Généreux herself was captured off Malta by a squadron under Nelson’s command in February 1800 and bought into the British navy. Surprisingly, she did not enjoy a fruitful career, being decommissioned in August 1802 and then spending eleven years as a prison hulk at Plymouth where she was broken up in 1816.