Men of Honour (18 page)

A winter night in the Mediterranean; the sailors wrapped up in their heavy greatcoats; some of them larking about on the gangways that crossed the waist of the ship from the quarterdeck to the forecastle, perhaps drunk, although Vincent couldn't mention that; and then the sprightly boy going a step too far and disappearing into the dark. It happened in the course of the war tens of thousands of times. It has very roughly been reckoned that an average of about 5,000 men in the Royal Navy died every year: about 400 in enemy action or of their wounds; another 500 in shipwreck: about 2,600 from disease and almost 1,700 from accidents on board. In a war that lasted 22 years, that gives a figure of about 37,000 men who died from accidents on board. Ships were intensely dangerous places but only
rarely can there have been a letter such as Vincent's. More often the news would have come in a far colder fashion. This is a letter which the young Henry Bayntun wrote to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty from Jamaica in August 1800:

Gentlemen,

I beg leave to inform you of the Death of the persons named in the Margin late belonging to His Majesty's Ship under my command who had allotted part of their wages for the maintenance of their families and I have to request you will stop the payment of the same in consequence.

George Cuttler

Lott. Boyce

That's all: the money from the distant son or father stops coming one day. It is a commercial arrangement: the man is dead and so the navy no longer pays for his services. The stopping of the pay may well have been the only way in which the family of the dead man heard the news. Like hundreds of thousands of others, they will go on the poor relief and all they are left with is the knowledge that the body of their man has been dropped into the ocean, sewn into a hammock, shotted at each end with a 32lb ball.

On either side of the class division, a form of love operated. The British fleet was thick with it. Officers loved officers and men loved men. That closeness did not cross the divide between quarterdeck and lower deck. But without doubt, on the best ships, there was a sense of oneness in a ship's company, a treasuring by the men of a commander they admired; and a nurturing by the commander of the men he relied on. Captains might transfer from one ship to another and take their entire ship's company with them. Elderly midshipmen might look after young gentlemen
volunteers, much as family retainers might have attended to them at home.

Certainly, this morning, there is an outpouring of love to those at home. On board HMS
Mars
, Captain George Duff was already a hero. He had run away to sea when he was nine, had been in 13 engagements before he was 16, and had been placed, on Collingwood's recommendation, in command of the all-important inshore squadron watching the Combined Fleet in Cadiz. It was intended that the
Mars
would lead Collingwood's lee column into battle. There was a heroic look to him: ‘a man of fine stature, strong and well made, above six feet in height, and had a manly, open, benevolent countenance,' famous in the fleet as ‘an instructor, and father, to the numerous young men who were under his command.' He had his eldest son, 13-year-old Norwich, with him on board the
Mars
as a volunteer and this morning he wrote to his wife, whom he had married fifteen years before, a desperately rushed, ink-blotched letter which was found among his papers when the battle was over.

Monday Morning 21st Oct.1805

My Dearest Sophia I have just time to tell you we are just going into action with the Combined, I hope and trust in God that we shall all behave as becomes us, and that I may yet have the happiness of taking my beloved wife and children in my arms. Norwich is quite well and happy I have however ordered him of the Q
^r
Deck Yours ever and most truly Geo: Duff

The quarterdeck was the most dangerous part of the ship in battle, where officers stood desperately conspicuous and with the protection only of the men's hammocks brought up from below and stowed in netting along the gunwale. The quarterdeck was the killing zone. Any father would send his son below hidden behind the thick oak bulwarks of the
Mars
.

And more famously Nelson was writing to Emma Hamilton with the emotionality and immediacy that marked all his letters to her, his love pouring without thought on to the page:

Victory Oct
^r
: 19th: 1805

Noon Cadiz ES.E 16 Leagues

My Dearest beloved Emma the dear friend of my bosom the Signal has been made that the Enemys Combined fleet are coming out of Port. We have very little Wind so that I have no hopes of seeing them before tomorrow May the God of Battles crown my endeavours with success at all events I will take care that my name shall ever be most dear to you and Horatia both of whom I love as much as my own life, and as my last writing before the battle will be to you so I hope in God that I shall live to finish my letter after the Battle May Heaven bless you prays your Nelson + Bronte

Nelson is not an aberrational figure. For him, as for his officers, love, longing, battle, glory, sacrifice, honour, risk, excitement and the terrifying beauty of the moment are all bound up in his words. Love and battle are two parts of the same thing. They seem, in Nelson's heightened language, to be almost interchangeable. Love, in a sense, is what battle is for and the battle is where love becomes most clear. He envisages Emma and Horatia forever cherishing not himself but his ‘name'. Henry Blackwood also writes to his wife this morning about his ‘name'. Death hangs in the background; the foreground is filled with love and glory.

Love in the 18th century had been seen, essentially, as a social virtue, part of the politeness which distinguished the 18th century from the rough violence and extreme views of the century before. ‘Politeness' for the enlightened Englishman did not carry its wooden, post-Romantic and
post-revolutionary sense of constraint, inhibition and hypocrisy. The polite was the easy, the open, the courteous, the civilised and the loving. Well dressed and well behaved amicability allowed people of every degree and every condition to mix. The country had lost its martial front. The wearing of swords to public gatherings became unfashionable; towns had their medieval walls demolished and substituted with parks and avenues. This belief in courtesy and the efficacy of charm—at least within the gentlemanly class—was inherited by the best of the Nelsonian officers. It was a belief which despised the old naval tyrants, ‘the oppressive and tyrannical characters in the Navy,' as Captain Anselm John Griffiths described them in his
Observation on some Points of Seamanship,
published in 1809. Griffiths went on:

The man who endeavours to carry all before him by mere dint of his authority and power would appear to me to know little indeed of human nature. Surely there can be no comparison between those who obey from fear and those who do it from inclination, or those who feel that necessary restraint alone is correctly laid on them.

The Royal Navy was, in part, a love structure, for two reasons. Love was one of the marks of a gentleman. ‘Amiability' was one of the characteristics which distinguished an enlightened man. Even old Mr Austen advised his son Francis to treat the men of the lower decks with ‘a certain kind of love' not because they deserved it but because that was what was expected of him. Love was one of the values for which Trafalgar was fought.

More than that, though, love worked as a tool of battle. It was the twin of courage. At the time of Trafalgar, Coleridge, attempting to remake his life after chronic catastrophes over love and drugs in England, had gone to
Malta, where he was working as the secretary of the Governor, Sir Alexander Ball. Ball had been one of Nelson's band of brothers at the Nile. Now he was administering Malta like a philosopher-king. Coleridge, from his own position of half-broken, self-doubting despair, looked up to Ball as pure hero. From another naval officer in Malta, younger than Ball and just as much a hero-worshipper as Coleridge had become, Coleridge heard a story which seemed to encapsulate everything that mattered most about love and courage. Ball had been the lieutenant in command of a cutting-out expedition in the West Indies, in which a small British force, in open boats, attacked an enemy frigate. The young man who spoke to Coleridge had then been a very junior midshipman, a boy:

As we were rowing up to the vessel which we were to attack, amid a discharge of musketry, I was overpowered by fear, my knees trembled under me, and I seemed on the point of fainting away. Lieutenant Ball, who saw the condition I was in, placed himself close beside me, and still keeping his countenance directed towards the enemy, took hold of my hand, and pressing it in the most friendly manner, said in a low voice, ‘Courage my dear Boy! don't be afraid of yourself! You will recover in a minute or so—I was just the same when I first went out in this way.' Sir, added the officer to me, it was as if an Angel had put a new Soul into me. With the feeling that I was not yet dishonoured, the whole burthen of agony was removed; and from that moment I was as fearless and forward as the oldest of the boat crew, and on our return the Lieutenant spoke highly of me to our Captain.

That moment is the culmination of a culture. Nelson, famously, use to run up the ratlines alongside the junior midshipmen going aloft for the first time, encouraging them
upwards, by the example of his ease and grace in the predicament they feared. But Alexander Ball adds even greater dignity to the act. He looks at the enemy not at the midshipman—a gesture which itself preserves the young boy's honour. He holds and presses the midshipman's hand, like a father and a friend. He understands, as a man educated in the knowledge of his own and others' feelings, that it is not the enemy the boy fears, but himself. ‘Don't be afraid of yourself! You will recover in a minute or so—I was just the same when I first went out in this way.' This is the community of honour vivified by an act of loving care. It is one of the foundations of the British victory at Trafalgar: glory as an outgrowth of love.

Its absence from a ship or a fleet could be fatal, but the distinctions are fine and subtle here. The boundary between order and tyranny, between a hard, coherent regularity and a tight brutalism was in fact far more narrow, movable and vague than those terms might suggest. The possibility of abuse in the name of good order and professionalism was inherent in the system. There were certainly officers who behaved as tyrants on ships. Captain Robert Corbet of HMS
Nereide
was typical of those in whom the unbending moral test to which he was subjected destroyed his understanding of what a ship's company might be. He bullied his men, repeatedly humiliating them in front of the rest of the ship's company, had them beaten again and again, repeatedly forcing them to do the same task until it was done to his satisfaction, tyrannising the people he wanted to be part of a perfect fighting machine.

Transferred to HMS
Africaine
, his reputation going ahead of him, Corbet soon arrested a marine for insubordination. An anonymous death threat, in the form of a letter thrown on to the quarterdeck, was then sent to the captain. Corbet immediately armed his officers, confronted the crew and read out the letter to the company, telling
them that ‘it was his fixed determination to be a great deal more severe than he had ever yet been.' The marine was given eight dozen lashes and the ship's purser wrote in his journal: ‘If the People had before this entertained any doubts of the Nerve & determined character of their Captain, they must now no doubt have been undeceived.'

Soon afterwards, when the
Africaine
had been horribly mauled by the French off Mauritius, leaving 163 of her 300 men dead and wounded, Corbet himself died of wounds, either shot by his own men—he had refused to surrender as the French destroyed his ship around him—or, it was said, killing himself by removing a tourniquet and bleeding to death, rather than submit to the humiliation of capture.

A high state of order, courage, devotion to duty, unremitting zeal, a sense of honour, a commitment to ferocious battle: why does Corbet not emerge a hero? So much of him—his daring, his extremeness, his ruthlessness, his courage—is like Nelson, and was perhaps modelled on Nelson, but there is nothing Nelsonian about him, because in Nelson, not uniquely, but all-importantly, there was a quality of grace and humanity, within which the necessarily violent aggression found a dignifying frame, and which inspired love in others. Without it, Nelson would have been a Robert Corbet and no one would have heard of him.

The entire network of love, honour, mutual reliance, selfbelief and sense of responsibility to an end greater than yourself lies behind the morning of Trafalgar. In his great cabin, already partly dismantled for battle, Nelson had written his famous Trafalgar prayer, in which he prayed for a ‘great and glorious Victory' and after it ‘for humanity to be the predominant feature in the British fleet.' He then turned to the codicil to his will, bequeathing both Emma
and their daughter Horatia to the care of his country. Those were ‘the only favours I ask of my King and Country at this moment when I am going to fight their Battle. May God bless my King and Country, and all those who I hold dear. My relations it is needless to mention: they will of course be amply provided for.'

Those few words, at this intensely heightened moment, provide a map of Nelson's and in some ways the naval mind. Nelson was an immensely easy writer, capable of transmitting a wide range of emotion, irony and bitterness to the page. The distance which opens up under the phrase ‘their Battle' is no accident. Nor the astonishing coldness in the reference to his relations. These are the last sentences Nelson ever wrote and they describe a radically polarised world. In England, the Establishment of King and Country, which imposes on its servants duties it would never dream of undertaking itself, and a cluster of relations, parasitically demanding the crumbs that fell from the hero's table; and here, off Cape Trafalgar, a different world, a fleet of friends, of co-partners in the realm of risk and glory, to which, by extension, the woman he loved and the daughter they shared, also belonged.