George Keith Elphinstone, 1st Viscount Keith

A French frigate squadron, under Rear-admiral Perrée, is captured by the British fleet under Lord Keith, off Toulon in the Action of 18 June 1799.

Kléber views the situation of the expeditionary force with pessimism and, like many of the soldiers, wishes to return to the theater of war in Europe.

On January 24, 1800, he signs a convention with Sir Sydney Smith by which the French are to evacuate their troops from Egypt.

However, Smith, the British naval commander in the eastern Mediterranean, has exceeded his powers and is instructed by his superior officer, Admiral Lord Keith, to require the French to surrender as prisoners of war.

The British Royal Navy ship of the line, HMS Queen Charlotte (1790), while operating as the flagship of Vice-Admiral Lord Keith, is reconnoitering the island of Capraia, in the Tuscan Archipelago, when it catches fire on March 17, 1800.

Keith is not aboard at the time and observes the disaster from the shore.

The fire is believed to have resulted from someone having accidentally thrown loose hay on a match tub.

Two or three American vessels lying at anchor off Leghorn are able to render valuable assistance, losing several men in the effort as the vessel's guns explode in the heat.

Captain A. Todd writes several accounts of the disaster that he gives to sailors to give to the Admiralty should they survive.

He himself perishes with his ship.

The crew is unable to extinguish the flames and at about 11 am the ship blows up with the loss of six hundred and seventy-three officers and men.

Austrian troops (forty thousand men) under Field Marshal Michael von Melas surround General André Masséna on April 6,and  blockaded by a strong British squadron under Lord Keith.

The French army is evacuated from Genoa on June 4, 1800.

Masséna is allowed to march out, with all the honors of war.

A portion of his force joins General Louis-Gabriel Suchet, and the rest is conveyed in British ships to Antibes.

Kléber had reopened hostilities, although the Ottoman reoccupation was well underway, defeating a Turkish army at Heliopolis (near Cairo) on March 20 and recapturing Cairo on April 21.

He has begun to restore French authority when a Syrian Muslim, Sulayman al-Halab, assassinates him on June 14.

His successor, 'Abd Allah Jacques Menou, a French officer (and former nobleman) who had turned Muslim, is determined to maintain the occupation and administers at first a tolerably settled country, although he lacks the prestige of his two predecessors.

The landing of the British expeditionary force under Sir Ralph Abercromby is intended to defeat or drive out an estimated twenty-one thousand remaining troops of Napoleon's ill-fated invasion of Egypt.

The fleet, commanded by Baron Keith, includes seven ships of the line, five frigates and a dozen armed corvettes.

With the troop transports, it is delayed in the bay for several days by strong gales and heavy seas before disembarkation can proceed.

Under General Friant, some two thousand French troops and ten field guns in high positions take a heavy toll of a large British force disembarking from a task-force fleet in boats, each carrying fifty men to be landed on the beach.

The British then rush and overwhelm the defenders with fixed bayonets and secure the position, enabling an orderly landing of the remainder of their seventeen thousand five hundred-strong army and its equipment.

The skirmish is a prelude to the Battle of Alexandria and results in British losses of one hundred and thirty killed and six hundred wounded or missing.

The French withdraw, losing at least three hundred dead or wounded and eight pieces of cannon.

Abercromby will die a week later of a wound received in the action.