The French fleet consisted of thirteen ships of the line and four frigates; the British of the same number of ships of the line, and one fifty-gun ship. In number of guns and men the French had a decided superiority. It was evening before the British fleet came up. The battle began at half-past six; night closed in at seven, and the struggle was continued through the darkness, a magnificent and awful spectacle to thousands who watched the engagement with eager anxiety. Victory was not long doubtful. The two first ships of the French line were dismasted in a quarter of an hour; the third, fourth, and fifth were taken by half-past eight; about ten, the L’Orient, Admiral Bruey’s flag-ship, blew up. By day-break the two rear ships, which had not been engaged, cut their cables and stood out to sea, in company with two frigates, leaving nine ships of the line in the hands of the British, who were too much crippled to engage in pursuit. Two ships of the line and two frigates were burnt or sunk. Three out of the four ships which escaped were subsequently taken; and thus, of the whole armament, only a single frigate returned to France.
This victory, the most complete and most important then known in naval warfare, raised Nelson to the summit of glory; and presents and honours were showered on him from all quarters. The gratitude of his country was expressed, inadequately in comparison with the rewards bestowed on others for less important services, by raising him to the peerage, by the title of Baron Nelson of the Nile, with a pension of £2,000. The Court of Naples, to which the battle of Aboukir was as a reprieve from destruction, testified a due sense of their obligation by bestowing on him the dukedom and domain of Bronte, in Sicily. From Alexandria Nelson went to Naples, much shattered in health by the fatigue and intense anxiety which he had experienced during his long cruise, and suffering from a severe wound in the head, received in the recent battle. He was most kindly received by Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador; and here commenced that fatal intimacy with the celebrated Lady Hamilton, which ruined his domestic peace, and led to the only stains upon his public life. Her influence ruled him in all transactions in which the Neapolitan Court was interested: and as she sought in all things to gratify the Queen, to whom she was devotedly attached, the passions and follies of a court corrupt and childish beyond example, were too often allowed to warp the conduct of a British Admiral, who hitherto had sought the welfare of his country, even in preference to his own honour and prospects of advancement. His best friends saw and lamented the consequences of his weakness, and remonstrated, but to no purpose; and he himself, unable to control this passion, or to stifle the uneasy feelings to which it gave birth, appears from his private letters to have been thoroughly unhappy. Overpowering that influence must have been, when it could induce the gallant and generous Nelson to annul a treaty of surrender concluded with the Neapolitan revolutionists, under the joint authority of the Neapolitan Royalist General, and the British Captain commanding in the Bay of Naples, and to deliver up the prisoners to the vengeance of the court, on the sole plea that he would grant no terms to rebels but those of unconditional submission.
