On the 8th, Captain Hallowell took possession of Aboukir Island, and brought off 2 brass 13-inch mortars, and 2 12-pounders of the same metal. The iron guns he threw into the sea, and destroyed the platforms. On the 10th a vessel was discovered in the offing; the Swiftsure was ordered to chase, and immediately got under weigh; in the evening Captain Hallowell came up with, and took her; she proved to be la Fortune corvette, of 16 guns and 70 men[1]. On the same day Sir Horatio Nelson, who had been wounded in the late battle, wrote to Earl St .Vincent from the mouth of the Nile; and in his letter we find the following passage; “I should have sunk under the fatigue of refitting the squadron, hut for Troubridge, Ball, Hood, and Hallowell; not but all have done well; but these are my supporters.”
Subsequent to the departure of Rear-Admiral Nelson from the shores of Egypt, the Swiftsure formed part of a squadron under the orders of Captain (afterwards Sir Samuel) Hood, employed in co-operation with the Turks and Russians, in harassing the French army, on which service Captain Hallowell remained until Feb. 14, 1799, when he sailed for Palermo, where he joined his gallant chief on the 20th of the following month[2].
- ↑ On board of la Fortune were several officers, and amongst the rest a Surgeon on the staff, who, it seems, had suffered his sense of the dangers and difficulties he was exposed to by the expedition, to get the better of his prudence, and had expressed his disapprobation of it with so much acrimony that General Buonaparte had, by way of punishment, put him into the corvette, bound on a cruize off Damietta. As soon as he was informed of the event of the battle in Aboukir Bay, and that his brother was killed on board l’Orient, he threw his snuff-box overboard, and expressed the most lively sorrow; when suddenly recovering himself with the observation, “c’est la fortune de la guerre,” he turned to the spectators and said he would amuse them, and instantly pulled from his pocket a ludicrous figure of a monk, with which he so entertained himself and them, that in a few moments all care for his brother, his country, or himself, now a prisoner, was forgotten.
- ↑ Lord Nelson had recently escorted the Neapolitan Court from Naples to Palermo. Soon after his Lordship’s arrival at the former place, after the discomfiture of the French fleet, his Sicilian Majesty formed a design of driving the republicans from the frontiers of his dominions, as well as from the Papal States. Accordingly, having collected a large army, amounting, it is said, to 100,000 men, he made rapid marches, and soon came up with the enemy’s forces; but, though he might now have sur-
