Nelson (4 page)

Nelson’s rise to prominence in the Mediterranean between 1793 and 1797 has only slightly been less underwritten, although it was during those years that he learned the art of an admiral and earned the recognition of his peers. In the present volume I have redressed
these imbalances and provided the first comprehensive reconstruction of Nelson’s earlier career. In the process fresh information has had to be complemented by the modification or deletion of some of the canonical stories about Nelson. He actively promoted his own legend, and was being lionised before his death. Embellishments, misconceptions and outright fictions have continued to flourish, and the need to trace stories to source and ground a new biography in a professional evaluation of credible primary evidence has become a major imperative.

There have been many Nelsons because there have been many writers, tailoring material to different purposes, but I stand with the Duke of Wellington when he espoused the balanced portrait. Wellington only met Nelson once, in the summer of 1805, when the rising but comparatively obscure general visited the secretary for war and colonies in London after his return from India. Finding himself waiting in an anteroom with the immediately recognisable figure of Horatio Nelson, Wellesley (as he then was) began to converse, ‘if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side and all about himself’ and in ‘a style vain and so silly as to surprise and almost disgust me’. But suspecting shortly that his audience was ‘somebody’, Nelson briefly left the room to investigate, returning ‘a different man, both in manner and matter’. Now he spoke as an ‘officer’ and ‘statesman’, and in later life Wellington couldn’t recall ‘a conversation that interested me more’.

Reflecting, the general mused that ‘if the secretary of state had been punctual and admitted Lord Nelson in the first quarter of an hour I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had, but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior man. But certainly a more sudden and complete metamorphosis I never saw.’ Wellington’s experience has been much quoted, but its warning about misleading abstractions is often forgotten. To understand Nelson it is necessary to see the whole of the man. In fact the triviality and the professionalism observed by Wellington were born of a common dynamic. They were both driven by Nelson’s need for distinction and acclaim. It spurred him to extreme endeavour, and to theatrical vanity. Both were sides of a single coin.
²¹

The sea and seafaring necessarily feature substantially in every biography of Nelson, but we must remember that he was also a Georgian, governed by the circumstances of his age and influenced by its beliefs and attitudes. The eighteenth-century England that moulded Nelson
is often lost among the swelling sails, fierce cannonades and straining shrouds and stays. A product of modest ‘middling’ stock, he rose to become a peer of the realm, but throughout remained a quintessential late eighteenth-century man. Neither an autocrat nor a populist, Nelson adhered to his notion of a naturally hierarchical society in which deferential inferiors were bound to betters by a system of paternalism. It was this vision, with its emphasis upon mutual obligations between governors and governed, that shaped his exercise of authority as well as his political attitudes. When we put Nelson back into the society in which he lived many of his actions and reactions readily fall into place.

Nelson has suffered from much idolatry and some denigration, but readers deserve dispassionate judgements. The admiral walked noisily through history, seeking the applause of fellow travellers, but was flawed like the rest of them. He was inherently generous and humane, but hardened by war and capable of startling ruthlessness. He set great store by loyalty and duty, and rested matters of state upon them, but betrayed a good wife and deserted a mistress. Generally honest and relatively careless of wealth, his advance into middle age deepened a financial insecurity and sharpened acquisitive instincts, and he benefited from some of the pecuniary abuses of the day. Highly intelligent and sensitive, Nelson devoured newspapers and books, but never banished the powerful prejudices that occasionally marred his judgement. His experience of life only reinforced his suspicion of foreigners and a belief in traditional English government. Though he prided himself on honour, strength and independence of mind, he was easily flattered and manipulated by flatterers. A sound professional, thoughtful and painstaking in preparing for combat, he could be wrong-headed and reckless and a victim of his own powerful warrior spirit. His intentions were usually good, but not infrequently he acted badly.

As the full extent of the material for this project came into view, it was obvious that it would require more than a single volume. This book covers the least familiar period of Nelson’s life, and traces him from childhood to the brink of international fame in 1797. We leave him looking as we all know him, a slim, sharp-featured, boyish admiral bedecked in the first of his honours, effectively blind in one eye and with an empty right sleeve, but with his last few and great years at the forefront of the European war still ahead.

This book was not written specifically for the bicentenary of
Nelson’s death. The idea for it germinated decades ago, and serious research began at the beginning of the nineties, but the increasing interest in Nelson occasioned by the anniversary, with an attendant sharpening of literary cutlasses, has inevitably loomed over the last few years. To rush the research to fit some arbitrary date would defeat its object, however, and my own reflections upon the findings of the anniversary writers will have to await a succeeding volume of this biography. In the preparation of the first I have benefited from aid and kindness at every step, and am proud to record the names of my benefactors in the acknowledgements. Nevertheless, burdens imposed by a long-term project like this do not fall equally, and the people closest to me shouldered far too many. My dedication, therefore, is to those for whom Nelson, quite honourably and unwittingly, has also proven himself to be an efficient thief of time.

Upon a terrace by the

Thames I saw the admiral stand,

He who received the latest clasp

Of Nelson’s dying hand.

Age, toil and care had somewhat bowed

His bearing proud and high,

But yet resolve was on his lip

And fire was in his eye.

I felt no wonder England holds

Dominion o’er the seas,

Still the red cross will face the world

While she hath men like these.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon,
Tribute to Admiral Hardy

I
T
was late in the evening of Monday 19 December 1796 and the sky promised a night of cloud and fresh squalls. The two fast British frigates bore northeastwards on the starboard tack, the Spanish Mediterranean coast out of sight to larboard, and the enemy port of Cartagena somewhere in the darkness ahead. The smaller of the frigates, the
Blanche
captained by D’Arcy Preston, was flung out on the inshore flank, and both ships were on full alert. For though this was not what Commodore Nelson on
La Minerve
called a fighting mission, it was a dangerous one nonetheless.

Only weeks before, the main British fleet under Sir John Jervis had quit the Mediterranean, and left it an enemy lake controlled by the combined forces of France and Spain. Now Nelson was going back with these two small ships. They were five days out of Gibraltar, almost alone in a hostile sea spotted with enemies.

Nelson’s orders, dated nine days before, were to evacuate Britain’s only remaining garrison in the Mediterranean, the handful of troops on the island of Elba, between Corsica and the Italian peninsula, with all artillery, baggage and stores. Some seventeen warships at Elba, the largest of them only frigates, were also to be extricated.

It was a difficult operation, but Sir John Jervis knew that if anyone could do it, it was Nelson. Expecting to fight the Spanish fleet in the Atlantic, the British commander-in-chief had been unable to spare a big ship of the line for the mission. It had to be frigates – smaller but faster vessels, able to avoid more heavily armed adversaries. Jervis had several fine frigate captains fit for the enterprise, but he was wary of arousing jealousies among them, and thought it wiser to entrust the expedition to an officer of greater rank, one respected by every captain in the fleet. It was thus that Commodore Horatio Nelson of the
Captain
ship of the line received instructions to shift his broad pendant to
La Minerve
, under Captain George Cockburn, and sail to Elba. ‘Having experienced the most important effects from your enterprise and ability upon various occasions since I had the honour to command in the Mediterranean,’ Sir John told him, ‘I leave entirely to your judgement the time and manner of carrying this critical and arduous service into execution.’
¹

There was not a drop of flattery in the admiral’s words, for he meant every one. He had the cream of the Royal Navy in his fleet. Men such as Troubridge, Miller, Collingwood and Saumarez. But at the age of thirty-eight, and with a slight, delicate frame and shock head of hair that made him seem positively boyish, Nelson was its rising star. He had already won laurels for his previous commanders-in-chief, Hood and Hotham, and was now serially proving his worth to Jervis. But while the admiral owned that ‘a more able or enterprising officer [than the commodore] does not exist’, he was also discovering that Nelson’s uses went much further than fighting. The commodore had worked effectively with different professionals, with diplomats, army officers and merchants as well as fellow naval officers, and arbitrated between men of disparate tempers and inclinations. Those qualities were needed now, and Jervis chose Nelson in
the strong belief that his ‘firmness and ability will very soon fix all the parts of our force, naval and military’. Indeed, the admiral was so sure that Nelson would discharge these new, dangerous and difficult duties with complete professionalism that he put the accompanying frigate under his own relative, Captain Preston, freshly arrived upon the station.
²

Nelson had taken only a few of his personal following from the
Captain
to
La Minerve
. James Noble, his young signal lieutenant, was an American, the son of a revolutionary Loyalist (an American colonist sympathetic to the British), and had distinguished himself aboard the commodore’s previous ship, the
Agamemnon
. He had been wounded by the French, and captured by them, but neither incident deterred him from volunteering for every service. With Nelson also came his secretary, John Philip Castang, a Londoner who had followed him for four of his twenty-nine years; a twenty-four-year-old seaman named Israel Coulson, duly rated yeoman of the powder room on
La Minerve
; and Giovanni Dulbecco, an Italian boy, also formerly of the
Agamemnon
.
³

However, Nelson knew the entire crews of
La Minerve
and the
Blanche
well, for both ships had served under his command during much of the year. Captain Preston was a new appointment, but Cockburn of
La Minerve
was one of Nelson’s favourite officers. A dour but dependable Scot, Captain Cockburn was a tight-lipped creature with few close friends, but he was talented and energetic, and would one day earn fame – or infamy – for his capture of Washington, the American capital, during the War of 1812. Now a rising captain in his twenties, he was flourishing under Nelson’s supervision.

Hitherto the voyage had been uneventful. Buffeted by gales, they had nevertheless passed Cape de Gata earlier on the 19th, and seized a Genoese polacre. The republic of Genoa was in dispute with Britain, but Nelson released the ship after relieving it of eight bales of silk and a trunk that appeared to belong to the Spaniards, with whom his country was at war. Sold as prize, Nelson reckoned, the merchandise might at least give his seamen a drink. Then the frigates had sailed on, and as night fell penetrated the dangerous approaches to the Spanish naval base of Cartagena.
⁴

At ten in the evening the
Blanche
signalled. Nelson ordered Cockburn to close with their consort, and Preston made his report. He had seen two Spanish frigates to leeward, bearing towards them. The British ships suddenly hummed with activity, as staccato drumbeats
hastened the men to their quarters and the frigates were cleared for action.

In the dark the process was complicated as well as hurried, but the men were trained to work efficiently and silently. Pillars, partitions, hammocks and other impedimenta were stowed out of the way, inflammables such as canvas doused in water to resist fire, and decks sprinkled with sand to provide greater grip to running bare feet. Red-coated marines stood ready with their muskets, while gun crews cast the cannons loose. Mechanically men unplugged the threatening muzzles, cleared touchholes and levelled the pieces before hauling them to the opened ports. Lines of ‘powder monkeys’ formed to shift the cartridges, shot and wads from the magazines and powder rooms to the guns. Others prepared to receive rather than inflict damage. Carpenters and their mates braced themselves to stop any holes punched through the timbers below the waterline, while in the airless murk of the bowels of the ships, probably on the platforms below the gun decks, the surgeons and their assistants laid out their grisly tools.

Some historians have criticised Nelson’s decision to fight on the grounds that it jeopardised his greater mission, the evacuation of Elba, but this is to miss the whole thrust of his experiences in the Mediterranean over the previous three to four years. As he ordered Cockburn to haul the ship’s wind, cross the bows of the
Blanche
and pass under the stern of the largest of the enemy frigates, he had not the slightest fear of failure.

For times were changing and the French and Spanish navies were not what they had once been. Political turmoil, shortages of skilled sailors and experienced officers, and inefficient defensive tactics had taken their toll. However impressive or powerfully armed their ships, they were far outmatched in seamanship and gunnery by the British crews. In fact, while its rivals decayed, the Royal Navy had relentlessly improved, keeping the sea in all weathers and forging an awesome fighting efficiency under outstanding captains. Nelson had always been an opportunist, hungry for distinction, but he was one of several officers who understood the implications of those changing historical circumstances.