Bonaparte landed at night, on a poorly known coast in a rough sea, because he knew Nelson was hunting him. Men drowned, equipment stayed aboard. On the morning of 2 July three columns marched on Alexandria; the city, its Arab walls in ruins, was taken in a few hours. Kléber was wounded in the forehead during the assault.
The proclamation read to the inhabitants set the tone for the whole expedition: Bonaparte declared himself a friend of the sultan and of Islam, claimed to respect God, his Prophet and the Koran, and presented the French as liberators of Egypt from the Mamluks. Translated into Arabic and printed on the spot, the text was propaganda of a new kind.
On 1 August, Brueys's squadron, anchored in Aboukir bay, was annihilated by Nelson; L'Orient blew up with its admiral and part of the Maltese treasure. Thirteen of seventeen ships were lost. The Army of the Orient, victorious ashore, had no way home: it would hold out three years in Egypt without supplies or reinforcements.
Alexandria remained the base and the crossing point. From there Bonaparte secretly embarked on 23 August 1799, leaving his army to Kléber, and there Menou capitulated in 1801. The British then carried off the seized antiquities, among them the Rosetta Stone, found in 1799 near Rashid and now in the British Museum. The scholars kept their notes: the result would be the Description de l'Égypte.
