On governments so prepared to be enkindled, yet hesitating before the prestige of French success and feeling the mutual distrust inseparable from coalitions, the news of the battle of the Nile fell like a brand among tinder. The French fleet was not only defeated, but annihilated. The Mediterranean from the Straits to the Levant was in the power of the British navy, which the total destruction of its enemy relieved from the necessity of concentration and allowed to disperse to every quarter where its efforts were needed. The greatest general and thirty thousand of the best troops France possessed, with numbers of her most brilliant officers, were thus hopelessly shut off from their country.
After the victory, conscious of its far-reaching importance, Nelson took measures to disperse the news as rapidly as his want of small vessels would permit. The "Leander" sailed on the 5th of August with the first despatches for Lord St. Vincent off Cadiz, but was on the 18th captured by the "Généreux," seventy-four, one of the two ships which had escaped from Aboukir Bay. To provide against such an accident, however, the brig "Mutine" had also been sent on the 13th to Naples, where she arrived on the 4th of September, bringing the first news that reached Europe, and which Nelson asked the British minister to see forwarded to all the other courts. The captain of the "Mutine" started the next day for England, by way of Vienna, and on the 2d of October, 1798, two full months after the battle, reached London with the first accounts.
Conscious of the effect which events in Egypt might have upon British influence in India, Nelson also sent a lieutenant, on the 10th of August, to make his way overland through Alexandretta and Aleppo to Bombay. This officer bore dispatches to the governor, informing him both of the landing and numbers of Bonaparte's expedition, and also of the fatal blow which had just befallen it. The news was most timely. The French had been actively intriguing in the native courts, and Tippoo Saib, the son and successor of Hyder Ali, Sultan of Mysore, their former ally in the days of Suffren, had openly committed himself to his father's policy. It was too late for Tippoo to recede, and he was erelong embarked in a war, which ended in April, 1799, in his death at the assault of Seringapatam and the overthrow of his kingdom; but on the other native states the striking catastrophe produced its due impression. In their operations against Tippoo the British were not embarrassed by troubles in other quarters.