Problems napoleon faced in his strugle to archive colonies

The first problem was that of men, money, and materiel. Napoleon had originally projected a total army of 60000, for his ultimate advance into India: these were to comprise 30,000 Frenchmen and 30,000 recruits he hoped to find in Egypt, conveyed on 10000 horses and 50000 camels, together with provisions for sixty days and water for six. With these, a train of artillery, 150 field-pieces and a double issue of ammunition, he estimated he could reach the Indus in four months. The very mention of the Indus, with its association with Alexander the Great, is suggestive.
Napoleon faced the next problem, that of persuading the French people that their hero had embarked on a worthwhile, prestigious and glorious venture. His ploy was to surround the expedition with the aura of scientific discovery. Without telling his chosen candidates exactly where they were going, Napoleon invited scores of eminent scientists to accompany him on a tropical voyage of adventure. Given that they were taking a leap into the unknown, it is surprising how few of the savants turned him down; it was doubtless his role and status at the Institute that persuaded them. If the British had intercepted and sunk Napoleon's Egyptian flotilla, much of France's intellectual talent would have gone to the bottom.

Napoleon had to keep his destination secret. This he did with remarkable success, aided by the undoubted fact that troops continued to collect in Channel ports; they would eventually be used in the ill-fated Hardy-Humbert expedition to Ireland in August. Only the English agent at Leghorn correctly guessed the true destination of Napoleon's men but his view was dismissed skeptically at the Admiralty. Another factor helping Napoleon was that at the very time he set out for Egypt, a great rebellion broke out in Ireland, which occupied a good deal of English attention. The one serious miscalculation - it was nearly fatal - that Napoleon made was to assume that the Royal Navy would not re-enter the Mediterranean. Some instinct - or was it merely the Jeremiah laments of his right-hand man Henry Dundas ? - led the warmongering and ferocious Francophobe William Pitt to send a strong naval squadron under Nelson into the Mediterranean, when the obvious course would have been simply to bottle up the exit from the Straits of Gibraltar.