Missing an arm now, as well as the sight in one eye, most naval officers of Nelson’s elevated rank would probably have been content to haul down their flags and retire to the English countryside and either a hefty pension, or a sinecure in Admiralty House, but not our Hooray Horatio!

As far as Nelson was concerned, there was still much work to be done and, being quite an arrogant chap, he decided there was no one better fitted to carry out that work than himself.

Monsieur Bonaparte, not content with trying to establish domination over Europe, also had his eyes on a prize further eastwards - India.

Britain and France had disputed the sub-continent for many years, but, by the latter half of the eighteenth century, the French had lost all influence there, following a string of defeats at the hands of Robert Clive -Clive of India - but Napoleon considered his new-look French army to be far superior to the Royalist army that had been sent packing three decades earlier.

At the time, he probably had good reason to think this, but India was a long way away and it was still quicker to send supplies overland than to rely on slow moving sailing ships, which had to circumnavigate the Cape of Good Hope, half way through a sea voyage that took many months.

The quickest way of sending men, munitions and other supplies, from Napoleon’s point of view, was by sea from the south of France, to Egypt, where they could be off-loaded and taken overland, either the long way, directly by land, or else down into the Gulf, where they could be further taken on by sea.

This presented a big problem, however - Britain didn’t yet rule Egypt, but her influence there was massive and the Royal Naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean meant that any port in that region could be easily blockaded.

Undeterred, Napoleon had embarked a powerful army for Egypt, where he was well received by many and devoted a large number of warships to protecting the route and, he hoped, to defeating the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean.

For many months, without any real Royal Naval presence in the Mediterranean, it seemed that his strategy might well result in the French wresting India back from British rule, but his eastern army could not move without further supplies and reinforcements and the powers-that-be in London were finally on the move.

It was decided to send a force in pursuit of the French Mediterranean fleet, which had sailed from Toulon in May, under the command of Vice-Admiral François-Paul Brueys d'Aigalliers, Comte de Brueys, escorting a huge armada of transport vessels, all heading towards Egypt.

This was a risky venture, because Nelson’s fleet of thirteen 74-gun ships and one smaller, fifty-gun ship, had been drawn from the Home Fleet’s strategic reserve and left the force guarding and patrolling in European waters stretched thin.

However, it was a gamble thought to be worth taking, as the British government felt reasonably confident that a victory over the French in the east would persuade the Austrian government to declare war and help tip the balance against Napoleon in Europe itself.

Thus it was that Nelson arrived in the Mediterranean at just about the time that the French left Toulon - spies had been warning London of their imminent departure for many weeks - and immediately set off in pursuit.

First, though, he had to find them and, whilst the Mediterranean is only a fraction of the size of the Atlantic, with no radar, no wireless and no air reconnaissance, even a fleet the size of the French one could prove to be as hard to find as the proverbial needle in a haystack.

And so it proved, with the French actually making it to Egyptian waters, before Nelson’s ships caught up with them.

By now, the French position ashore was a strong one and their position off-shore seemingly just as secure, as they lined up their superior force of Admiral Brueys’ 120-gun flagship, three eighty-gun and nine 74-gun ships of the line, with four frigates as additional flank protection, just a few miles off the coast in Aboukir Bay.

It was a formidable defensive line and the British fleet would have to approach a wall of broadside cannon fire head-on, all of which could be concentrated on the one side, from the French point of view. Feeling fairly impregnable, Brueys sat back and awaited what he anticipated would be a one-sided slaughter.

Unfortunately for the French commander, Nelson had done his homework and had a few officers under his command who knew the local waters well.

The French, they told him, were assuming that no ship of the line could possibly sail around behind them, as the water was too shallow and the sandbanks there treacherous.

However, they calculated, if the tide was high enough, there was one passage through which a small force could move, provided that the captains and navigators held their nerve.

A plan of attack was quickly drawn up and, on the morning of 1 August 1798, the British ships began to move towards the French line. Timing was paramount and the timing proved to be perfect.

Just before the British line closed within range, five ships, led by Captain Thomas Foley, aboard HMS Goliath, peeled off and swung around, through the shallows, to get behind the French, whilst Nelson led the remaining ships in a similar arc, presenting broadside fire from his side, as Foley did the same from the landward side.

Suddenly, thirteen British ships were engaging eight French vessels, whilst the remainder of the French force were stranded at the farther side of the bay, from where it would take a long time for them to come about and join the action.

To make matters worse for the French, so confident had they been that nothing could get at them from landward that none of their guns on that side had been run out, nor primed.

Even when Foley’s force swung towards the shallows, the French failed to appreciate the danger, thinking that the British squadron knew nothing of the shallow water problems and would simply run aground.

Too late, they realised their mistake ...

The fighting was fierce and Nelson himself was wounded in the head, but the element of surprise had already made all the difference and, as the battle continued into the evening, the magazine of the 120-gun French flagship L’Orient suddenly erupted with an explosion and display of pyrotechnics that must have knocked the last fight out of the French sailors.

The entire French line was in disarray by this time, with ships burning, listing, missing their rigging and decks covered with dead and dying and the four French ships of the line that had not yet managed to join the action began to hoist sail to make a strategic retreat.

Seeing this, Nelson ordered that they now be engaged and, with the wind in favour of the British ships, two were overhauled and captured. The other two, accompanied by two frigates, managed to complete their getaway - not much to retrieve from such a large original force.

The casualty figures told the story as starkly as anything else: the British lost 218 killed and 677 wounded - the French losses were 5,225 killed, wounded and captured, in what was, at the time, the single most overwhelming naval victory ever seen.

There was no way the French, even with the aid of their Spanish allies, could replace their losses, either in ships or in men and British naval superiority was re-established in the Mediterranean, leaving a huge French army cut off ashore in Egypt.

Those French soldiers endured steadily worsening conditions bravely, but their time was running out and, in 1801, after attempting to retreat along the north African coast, the French Army of Egypt was forced to surrender to a numerically inferior British force.

Napoleon’s dream of India lay in ruins ...

Nelson was not interested in dreams, however and was quickly on the way to Naples, which was rapidly becoming the latest scene of Napoleonic machinations.

Turkey and Russia now declared war on France, but initially made no obvious move to mount a direct military threat towards France itself, whilst Italy - still a fragmented collection of independent states - quickly became a cauldron.

Suddenly, an Austrian made a move; in November, Field Marshal Mack, who had recently accepted command of the Neopolitan Army, mounted an attack on Rome, which he quickly occupied, but this success was short-lived.

Within a month, the French revolutionary troops in Italy counter-attacked and Mack was forced to flee, leaving the way to Naples and the Bourbon and royal family unprotected.

Nelson, however, made it a much happier Christmas than the Bourbons must have been expecting - on 23 December he sailed into the Bay of Naples and, for the next three days, undertook the evacuation to Palermo of the Bourbons and all their sympathisers who had congregated in the city - including one aristocratic English family, who went by the name of Hamilton - Sir William, eminent diplomat and archaeologist, Ambassador to Naples, and his much younger and very pretty wife, Lady Emma ...