On June 6, the French convoy from Civita Vecchia hove in sight off Malta; on June 9, it was joined by the main fret. The sight of the 400 ships was terrifying. "Never"', wrote a witness, had Malta seen such a numberless fleet in her waters. The sea was covered for miles with ships of all sizes whose masts resembled a huge forest. (1)

Bonaparte's plan was simplicity itself. He would request the Maltese Grand Master's permission for the French fleet to renew its water supply. Then, whether permission was granted or not, he would land his troops to the north and south of Valetta and on the neighbouring island of Gozo, encircle Valetta, and wait for the Knights' surrender. The population was to be assured that the French came with peaceful intentions and would respect their property and religion. Nothing in the orders issued by Bonaparte and Berthier between June 6 and June 9 indicates that hostilities were anticipated.

To Bonaparte's surprise, there had been some resistance, especially on Gozo. Some cannon had been fired, and in a few spots the Maltese regulars and militia even had emptied their muskets at the French before throwing them away to expedite their retreat. This misunderstanding, as Bourrienne called it, irritated the General, who blamed Poussielgue for it. After spending a few hours on the island, he returned to L'Orient and went to sleep.

On Gozo, according to the reminiscences of Captain Vertray, then a lieutenant in the 9th  Half-Brigade, the French scaled the local defences singing the Marseillaise as they went. A  few Knights allowed themselves to be captured; the Maltese defenders, after some  resistance, were equally happy to capitulate and kiss their victors' hands. Vertray says that French and Maltese instantly began to fraternize; Quartermaster Sergeant Francois, also of  the 9th Half-Brigade, declares that the island of Gozo was thoroughly looted, the  inhabitants having left their homes.(3)

At Valetta, meanwhile, consternation was general among the Knights as well as among the Maltese. Women were wailing in their houses, saints were carried through the streets in procession, and Grand Master von Hompesch spent the day debating with his council of Knights what to do. None of these activities contributed materially to the defence of Valetta, a city named for the Grand Master Jean de la Valette; under whose command it had resisted centuries ago  Sulayman the Magnificient's army for five months. (4)

Von Hompesch had had sufficient warning, long before the French appeared, that an attack was impending. A weak and irresolute man despite his sixteen quarters of nobility and the elegant suit of armour in which he had himself painted, he had done nothing to prepare for that eventuality. There were enough supplies in Valetta to withstand a siege for four months, but the defences were in poor shape. The guns, of which there were nearly a thousand, had not been used for a century except to fire salutes. The powder supplies were rotten. The Maltese militia (about 10,000 men) showed little martial spirit. They were not afraid of the Turks, they said, but they had been told that the French were devils, and who would not be afraid of devils? There was a native garrison of about 1,500 men, hardly  enough to serve 1,000 guns. As for the Knights, there were exactly 332 in Malta; of these,  fifty were too old or too ill to fight. Of the remaining 272, few showed the faintest sparks of  the spirit of Villiers de L'Isle-Adam or Jean de la Valette: on June 10, many of them  deserted the militiamen they were supposed to command, and two allegedly were shot by their own men as deserters. 

Two hundred of the Knights were French. Their reliability became dubious in the morning of June 10, when Bosredon de Ransijat informed the council that he would not fight against  his countrymen and offered his resignation as Treasurer of the Order. His message unnerved the Maltese Grand Master, whose only action on that crucial day consisted in putting his  Treasurer under arrest. Conflicting reports poured into the council chamber of mob violence, of Knights being killed by the Maltese, and of hidden arms supplies being  distributed to the population by French agents disguised as Greeks: small as it was, the city was in chaos. In the evening, a deputation of leading Maltese nobles and burghers was  admitted to the council chamber and pleaded with von Hompesch to put an end to a useless resistance. 

Undoubtedly there was a fifth column of disaffected Knights and officials within the walls of Valetta. Their number, however, was small, and energetic action could have paralysed them. Yet the strength of fifth columns resides not so much in their numbers as in the vague fear and panic they inspire: nothing serves the purposes of traitors better than do shouts of `Treason!' Conversely, nothing is more convenient to those who do not care to fight than to claim that they have been betrayed. Admittedly, the Knights could not have held out for long, but they could easily have resisted for two weeks. At worst, this would have saved their honour; at best, it would have resulted in the relief of Malta by the British fleet and the destruction of the French forces. Von Hompesch did not know that on June 9, the day the two French convoys joined before Valetta, Admiral Nelson with fourteen battleships had started on his pursuit of the French fleet, and that two weeks later he would be within reach of Malta. Neither, for that matter, did General Bonaparte, who knew only that Nelson was somewhere about with three battleships but had not yet learned of the British reinforcements. Had he been aware of them, he would not have spent a week in Malta. Hompesch's ignorance and irresolution, combined with the confusion created by a handful of disaffected men, led to the decision made in the early morning hours of June 11 to sue for an armistice. For twenty four hours, the course of modern history depended on some 500 men, warrior monks, quaint relics of the Age of Crusades. Had their hearts been as anachronistic as were their institutions, they would have fought, regardless of the outcome, as had their predecessors. But their hearts were modern: resistance seemed an empty gesture; surrender allowed hopes for material compensation.

The fall of Malta stirred up a tempest of recriminations. Hompesch himself was accused of having been bribed in advance and of putting up a mere show of resistance, a rumour given substance by Bonaparte's confidence that he could take Malta without a blow. There is no evidence to support this view. It is almost certain that Hompesch had not been bribed in advance; but he was only too willing to let a bribe shorten his resistance, and this Bonaparte had known in advance. It was thus he could make sure that he could dare. 

In the morning of June 11 an emissary from the Grand Master walked up the thirty-two steps to the deck of L' Orient and delivered two letters-one to Bonaparte, asking for a truce, and one to the geologist Dolomieu, begging him to use his good offices on behalf of the Order to which he once had belonged. Bonaparte appointed Dolomieu (who resented the ambiguous role thus forced on him), along with Poussielgue and his aide-de-camp Junot, to go ashore and confer with Hompesch. Hompesch embraced the black sheep Dolomieu, by. now his only hope; a twenty-four hours truce was signed, pending negotiations for surrender. About midnight, the Grand Master's emissaries including Bosredon de Ransijat, who was no longer under arrest -arrived on L'Orient. Bonaparte was woken; half an hour later, the treaty had been drafted and signed. Malta was ceded to the French Republic; France would use her influence to obtain for Hompesch a principality in Germany, and in the meantime would pay him a yearly pension of 300,000 francs; the other Knights were to receive pensions of 700 to 1,000 francs, depending on their age. 

Bonaparte went ashore in Valetta on June 12 and was received by a delegation consisting of his supporters in the Order. "It's a lucky thing", observed General Caffarelli, who was with him, "that at least there was somebody to open the gates for us." (5)

The Knights Hospitaler, relieved at the thought that no more heroism was required of them, received the French with almost an excess of hospitality. "They showered us with a thousand attentions and civilities", noted Lieutenant Desvernois of the Cavalry. 

While his troops and crews went about their various details and recreations, General Bonaparte addressed himself to the multiple tasks facing him with the impetuosity of a tornado. In the six days he spent in Malta, he dictated no less than 168 reports, despatches, and orders. In a single day-June 13-he liquidated a centuries-old state, established the basis of a new government, and confiscated close to 7,000,000 francs' worth of treasures belonging to the Order, not to mention 35,000 muskets, two battleships, one frigate, and four galleys. The administration of the island was set down in an order containing sixteen terse paragraphs.(6)  Another order, in four paragraphs, dissolved the armed forces of Malta; abolished armourial bearings, and titles of nobility; gave all subjects of enemy powers two days to leave the island; and notified the Knights (with certain exceptions) that they must leave Malta within three days. In yet another order, Citizens Monge and Berthollet were deputed to inspect the Mint, the treasures of the Church of St. John,  and all other places where objects of value might be found.(7) Among the objects of value found were 5,000,000 francs' worth of gold, almost a million francs' worth of silver plate, and the gem-encrusted treasures of the Church of St. John, also valued at about a million.

The Knights were graciously permitted to take with them a splinter of the True Cross, which lacked cash value, and one of the many hands of St. John the Baptist- they are scattered all over the Middle East, along with his several heads-but only after it had been removed from its bejewelled reliquary. All the bullion and precious objects were transferred, after inventory, to the French paymaster; a large part of them were taken to Egypt. To top off the day all this happened on June 13 the General snubbed the Grand Master's invitation to dinner, summoned him and the Knights to his residence, and bluntly informed them that all Knights below sixty years of age had to leave within three days, none being allowed to take with him more than 240 francs, for travel expenses. Excepted from the expulsion were thirty-four Knights, all French and under thirty, whom Bonapane had persuaded to volunteer with the French army in Egypt, and seventeen other officials of the Order (not all of them professed Knights), who had assisted the French in various ways during the preceding months. The list of the seventeen, which may be regarded as the roster of the fifth column, is headed by two Knights Bosredon de Ransijat and Fay Ransijat also heads the list of the governmental commissioners. 

Between June 14 and 18, General Bonaparte took care of a number of odds and ends before leaving Malta to conquer Egypt. Among other things, he abolished slavery, visited the bagno of the port, freed the 600 Turks and 1,400 Arab slaves held there, and ordered the Turks (following their own request) to serve as crews in his convoy, pending their release in Egypt; asked the French consuls in Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers to inform the bey's of this action and to invite them to liberate their Maltese slaves in turn; ordered all Maltese men to wear the French tricolour cockade, and promised French citizenship and the right to wear the French national costume to all those who showed sufficient patriotic zeal (especially in the form of voluntary contributions); decreed that all French troops left in garrison in Malta should wear cotton uniforms; formed native National Guard battalions, patterned on the French; set up a military hospital; reorganized the island's hospital and postal services; reduced the number of monasteries and of new priests to be ordained; limited the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Malta to purely ecclesiastic affairs and forbade him to appeal to the Pope; transferred the funds of charitable religious foundations to the hospitals; decreed the death penalty for all Greek Orthodox residents of Malta and the Ionian Islands who had any traffic with Russia.
 

Then Bonaparte ordered that sixty boys between nine and fourteen of age, chosen from among the wealthiest Maltese families, be sent to Paris and educated there as Frenchmen at the expense of the Republic; set up a new primary and secondary school system; fixed the teachers' salaries and prescribed the curriculum (with heavy emphasis on the sciences, French, and "the principles of morality and of the French constitution");la requested the Directory to send graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique to Malta to teach mathematics, mechanics, and physics; determined the new fiscal rates and the salaries and expense accounts of administrative officers; incorporated more than 300 men of the former Malta Regiment into the expeditionary force a useful acquisition, the Maltese language being a branch of Arabic Language.
 

Bonaparte also provided for a French garrison of some 3,000 men to be left in Malta under General Vaubois; and requested that all the soldiers' wives waiting at the Toulon depot to join their husbands be embarked on a second convoy and taken to Malta, to await further orders; despatched his aide-de-camp Lavallette to Albania aboard the frigate L'Arthemise with a letter to his most respectable friend, `Aliy Pasha of Janina,  where would make certain interesting overtures to him; and sent the frigate La Sensible to Toulon, with despatches to the Directory. Along with the despatches, he sent General Baraguey d'Hilliers  and a few personal gifts for the Directors, among them a sterling silver model of a galley dating' s from the Knights' sojourn in Rhodes (It has, he wrote, some curiosity value because of its antiquity') and a silken altar cloth woven in China, which showed "pretty good workmanship" He also informed Citizen Talleyrand that La Sensible would take him from ,Toulon to Constantinople. *

Despite all these activities,  La Sensible never reached Toulon and it was some time before General Baraguey d'Hilliers reached his wife. The frigate was captured by the English frigate Sea-horse on June 27. Except for the general and his two aides-de-camp, whom the British kept as prisoners of war, the crew and passengers were released at Cagliari, in neutral Sardinia. The despatches and trophies had been cast into the sea before La Sensible's surrender. (8) Its mission accomplished, the French armada sailed from Malta on June 18 and 19. The troops had been put on alert or re-embarked as early as June 17.

Meanwhile on June 17 Admiral Nelson reached the Bay of Naples and sent the brig Mutine to get information from the British Minister, Sir William Hamilton. Hamilton suggested that the French might be found off Malta. The question was: had they already left Malta and, if so, for where Sicily or Egypt? Nelson thought it was Egypt. " I shall believe" he wrote to the First Lord, "that they are going on their scheme of possessing Alexandria, and getting troops to India a plan concerted with Tippoo Sahib, by no means so difficult as might at first view be imagined .... Be they bound for the Antipodes, Your Lordship may rely that I will not lose a moment in bringing them to action, and endeavour to destroy their Transports.(9)  He lost not a moment; on June 20 he passed the Strait of Messina, about 160 miles from the position of the French fleet on that date. 

The same day, Bonaparte received intelligence, through one of his cruising frigates, that an English squadron of fourteen ships of the line had been observed sailing eastward. The French decided to set their course toward Crete, to elude their pursuers. The pursuers, traveling at approximately twice the speed of their prey, passed the French, at a few miles distance, during the foggy night of June 22-23. For the whole week following, Nelson was to race after a quarry which was trailing him at a leisurely pace, unaware of his presence. 

Nelson had polled his senior captains on June 22, requesting their opinion as to the real destination of the French. Their replies to his questionnaire were unanimous: the English squadron must crowd sail and make for Alexandria with the utmost speed, to prevent a French landing there. Still, with only one brig to reconnoitre the whole eastern Mediterranean, Nelson was operating in the dark.
 

Nelson did not find the French anywhere near Crete they had passed the island about two weeks earlier. On July 19 he reached  Syracuse: but the French were not in Sicily either. By this time, he was barely able to eat. He had, so he wrote, "gone a round of near six hundred leagues with an expedition incredible" and was as much in the dark as ever. (11)

Nothing is more vexatious to a man possessed by duty and ambition than to appear ridiculous in the pursuit of either. Nelson's every nerve was strained in his passionate determination not to return a failure. `Be assured', he wrote to Sir William and Emma Hamilton (who was not yet his mistress), "I will return either crowned with laurel, or covered with cypress."(12)
 
 

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