The triumphant and hitherto unchecked advance of Bonaparte had greatly encouraged the French party in Corsica, which had been increased by a number of malcontents, dissatisfied with their foreign rulers.  Owing to the disturbed condition of the interior, the British troops had been drawn down to the sea-coast.  Bonaparte, from the beginning of his successes, had kept in view the deliverance of his native island, which he expected to effect by the exertions of her own people, stimulated and supported by the arrival upon the spot of Corsican officers and soldiers from the French armies.  These refugees, proceeding in parties of from ten to twenty each, in small boats, movable by sail or oars, and under cover of night, could seldom be stopped, or even detected, by the British cruisers, while making the short trip, of little more than a hundred miles, from Genoa, Nice, and Leghorn.  The latter port, from its nearness, was particularly favorable to these enterprises; but, although neutral, and freely permitting the ingress and egress of vessels belonging to both belligerents, its facilities for supporting a Corsican uprising were not so great as they would be if the place were held for the French.  For this reason, partly, Bonaparte had decided to seize it; and he was still more moved to do so by the fact that it was a centre of British trade, that it contributed much to the supply and repair of the British fleet, and that the presence of vessels from the latter enabled an eye to be kept upon the movements of the Corsicans, and measures to be taken for impeding them.

“The enemy possessing themselves of Leghorn,” Nelson had written in the middle of March, when expecting them to do so by a coastwise expedition, “cuts off all our supplies, such as fresh meat, fuel, and various other most essential necessaries; and, of course, our fleet cannot always [in that case] be looked for on the northern coast of Italy.”  Bonaparte had not, indeed, at that time, contemplated any such ex-centric movement, which, as things then were, would have risked so large a part of his army out of his own control and his own support; but in the middle of June, having driven the Austrians for the moment into the Tyrol, consolidated his position upon the Adige, established the siege of Mantua, and enforced order and submission throughout the fertile valley of the Po, which lay in rear of his army and amply supplied it with the necessaries of subsistence, he felt not only able to spare the force required, but that for the security of the right flank and rear of his army it had become essential to do so.  The Papacy and Naples, although they had contributed little to the active campaigning of the allies, were still nominally at war with France, and might possibly display more energy now that operations were approaching their own frontiers.  Should the British take possession of Leghorn with a body of troops,—­their own or Neapolitan,—­the port would remain a constant menace to the operations and communications of the French, and especially at the critical moments when the Austrians advanced to the relief of Mantua, as they must be expected to do, and actually did on four several occasions during the succeeding six months.