When General Napoleon Bonaparte defeated the Mamelukes at the Battle of the Pyramids on July 21, 1798, he carried out only the first move in a complicated game. He was now the master of Egypt and in a matter of hours would occupy Cairo. That, however, was not the main object of this mission. The central goal was to sever Britain's communications with the East, destroy her trade and loosen her grip on India. Perhaps even a French occupation of part of Australia would be possible. To the young Corsican-born general, just coming into his stride in the wake of his brilliant campaign in northern Italy, the possibilities seemed to be infinite. 'This little Europe is too small a field,' Bonaparte supposedly said before setting out for Alexandria. 'Great celebrity can be won only in the East.'

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Little could Bonaparte have imagined, as he surveyed the beckoning East in the manner of a Roman emperor, that he was about to be all but ruined by the sudden swoop of a British naval flotilla commanded by Vice Adm. Sir Horatio Nelson.

The extraordinary story of the Battle of the Nile, as the action in Aboukir Bay is often incorrectly called, is remarkable for its paradoxes and its revelation of the power of an individual. For a start, the British fleet that fought the French on that first day of August 1798 should not have been fit for battle. Only a year before, much of it had been in a state of mutiny, more dangerous to Britain than to her enemies.

The fleet's commander, Nelson, disagreed with time-honored tactics and was determined to try a revolutionary new idea in the coming battle. Had he been surrounded by radio and satellite communications, it is likely his superiors in London would not have let him go ahead.

Nelson was a nervous, neurotic genius. He was already immersed in his love affair with Lady Emma Hamilton, wife of the British ambassador in Naples — an example of misbehavior that in later times would have led to his being cashiered. At times Nelson would happily disobey orders — his most celebrated act of disobedience thus far had brought about British victory at Cape St. Vincent on February 14, 1797.

Naval tactics had changed little since Henry VIII of England came up with the idea of firing alternate broadsides. All the cannons on one side of a ship of the line would deliver a shattering volley, then the ship would turn so the first battery of guns could be reloaded and primed, while the guns on the opposite side of the ship fired. The superior maneuvering of the English ships, allowing more broadsides to be fired one after another, was largely responsible for the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. That highly successful 16th-century tactic became unwieldy in the 17th and 18th centuries, and British sea fights against the Dutch and French were usually heavy battering matches in which the two sides hammered each other into exhaustion.

Nelson's genius produced a better idea — an idea that was so like Napoleon's schemes of tearing an army to fragments that Nelson should perhaps be known as the Napoleon of the waves. At Cape St. Vincent, Commodore Nelson — not yet an admiral, but one step above a captain — was serving under Sir John Jervis. Jervis was a 61-year-old sea dog straight out of the pages of Tobias Smollett. Brave, devoted to his men, sensible and never foolhardy, he would have been the best kind of soldier's general had he been in the army. When he had civilians on board, as sometimes happened after rescuing British civilians from territories about to be occupied by the French, he would ask the women to sing duets. Charmed by his good humor, they were always willing to oblige.

When Jervis sighted the Spanish fleet one misty morning, he ordered his ships to sail in a long line for the center of the Spanish line. Seeing the Spanish force divided but with the rearmost ships hastening to close up with the vanguard, Nelson sailed his ship, the 74-gun Captain, out of the British line — against orders — and deliberately placed it between the two divisions of the enemy fleet. So many cannons opened fire on Captain that for a time it vanished in the smoke. But when the smoke cleared Nelson's ship was still afloat. His reckless gambit held apart the two sections of the Spanish fleet just long enough for the rest of Jervis' ships, though outnumbered nearly 2-to-1, to concentrate against first one Spanish division and then against the other, with devastating results.

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