Nelson (45 page)

But time hung heavily, and Captain Nelson lingered on in the heat and mosquitoes of English Harbour. He tried to keep the men busy. They refitted and repainted the ship and in spare moments danced, sang and juggled with the captain’s blessing. The young gentlemen entertained the company by performing simple plays but the place seemed oppressive. One man was lost overboard and a few died of fever. His brother William, his appetite for the life of a naval chaplain thoroughly sated, fell sick and was packed off home in the
Fury
at the end of September. Among those who stayed tempers began to fray.

The first day of August put both Johnston and Nairns before courts martial. Lieutenant Dent had stopped Johnston’s grog ration on account of his bad behaviour and he became surly and insubordinate. According to young Stansbury ‘he said that while his grog was stopped he would stop the ship’s duty’. Dent ordered him confined below, but Johnston replied that ‘he’d be damned if he would not open the captain’s eyes’, and continued to complain as he pulled on stockings to receive the irons about his ankles.
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Johnston was tried a week later on board the
Unicorn
. Captain Stirling presided because the defendant had called Nelson as a witness. In fact, even at this pass, Johnston appeared to regard his captain as a protector. He attempted to put an innocent construction upon his remarks, advertised the years he had spent in the navy without punishment and appealed to Nelson for ‘a character’. Horatio was not unsympathetic, and had no personal issue with the prisoner, but he had to support the authority of his junior officers. Nevertheless, he did what he could. He had only known of Johnston’s seditious remarks ‘from complaint’ and acknowledged his strengths. ‘I never had any complaint against him except for his making use of improper words, and had I not received these complaints I should have esteemed him one of the best men that I ever sailed with.’ Bromwich, who had been troubled by Johnston, had to admit that he had only seen the man drunk once, when they all celebrated crossing the line. But the court decided that Lieutenant Dent’s charges were partly proven and sentenced Johnston to two hundred lashes around the squadron. It did not cure him, for he received three subsequent but routine floggings aboard the
Boreas
in as many years for drunkenness, threatening a boatswain, disobedience and neglect of duty.

The same Sunday Johnston ran foul of Dent, Nairns also got into trouble. Nelson was told that the marine had just returned from shore after being absent without leave, and brought him to the quarterdeck to explain himself. Horatio was offering Nairns a means of mitigating his offence, but the fellow merely became abusive and got a dozen lashes in return. After receiving his punishment Nairns went below to clean up and was soon quarrelling with Sergeant Cochran, who wanted him to join a guard being formed to welcome Admiral Hughes aboard the ship. Exasperated, Cochran said there would be consequences if Nairns did not turn out. ‘They may flog and be buggered, for I don’t care,’ retorted the bloodied marine. ‘They never shall make a good soldier of me. See what kind of satisfaction I gave them! Bugger my eyes if I would cry out if they would flog me to death!’ The chagrined sergeant complained to his superior, Lieutenant Theophilus Lane, who formally demanded a court martial.

Again, Nelson was called to testify and his evidence is worth quoting because it tells us something about his attitude to punishment:

Q: You have heard the charge read?

A: Yes.

Q: Have not repeated complaints been made to you of the prisoner’s ill behaviour?

A: Yes.

Q: What has in general been the cause of these complaints?

A: Drunkenness, striking his officers, neglecting his duty, using improper words such as, ‘I might flog and be buggered, for that I should get no good out of him’, and going on shore without leave.

Q: Was the prisoner punished in consequence of these complaints?

A: Sometimes he was, and sometimes not. He was punished so frequently and reprimanded so often to no purpose. He was past my power of
reclaiming
him.

Q: Did any instances of the prisoner’s misbehaviour fall immediately within your knowledge?

A: Yes, drunkenness and contempt for me.

Q: Did you punish him for that contempt?

A: Complaint was made to me for his going on shore without leave by the first lieutenant. I sent for the prisoner on the quarter-deck to hear his reasons for going out of the ship. His actions were so contemptuous that I was obliged to order him to [be flogged at] the gangway.

Q: Do you recollect the punishment you inflicted on him at that time?

A: A dozen lashes.

Q: Do you recollect how many times you have punished him since he has been under your command?

A: Twice at the gangway.

Q: You say you had complaints lodged against the prisoner for striking his officer. Was he punished for that?

A: The day after we left Madeira to the best of my recollection a complaint was made to me that the prisoner had struck or attempted to strike the corporal, and I punished him for mutiny.
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Nelson, it seems, gave his men opportunities to explain their actions, and punished to reclaim – at least in theory, but he regarded Nairns as irredeemable. The court agreed. Nairns received two hundred and fifty lashes through the fleet, was ‘drummed on shore’ and dishonourably discharged from his corps.

Difficulties were not confined to the ranks, for tensions were also stretching in the airless gun room, where the lieutenants, officers of marines and the senior warrant officers shared cramped accommodation. Wallis, the snuff-taking first lieutenant, was a conscientious officer, up spryly at seven each morning, and a fine seaman. But he was abrasive and haughty. He had ‘strange whims’, someone said long afterwards, and though a man of ‘many good qualities’ occasionally ‘appeared half mad’. Although second-in-command aboard the
Boreas
, he began feuding with the supersensitive Lane about who had the greater authority over the marine detachment. A court martial confirmed the supremacy of Wallis, but Nelson regretted the divisions sown among his officers. Dent, for example, had supported the first lieutenant, but Thomas Graham, the surgeon, had seconded Lane.
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Nelson helped where he could. Despite his own privileged rise, he sympathised with junior officers tripping over a treacherous career ladder and greatly valued loyalty. It was the unfortunate Bromwich who most concerned him, and he appealed for his promotion to both Sir Richard and Lady Hughes. Bromwich’s preferment, he said, was ‘the only favour’ he presumed ‘to ask’. As a result of such overtures, on 20 December Bromwich was appointed acting lieutenant of the flagship, and fourteen months later acting commander of a government brig, but even these advantages failed to get his lieutenancy confirmed. As late as 1790 he was having to drop back down to master’s mate. Bromwich became a lieutenant ten years after passing his examination but never received the opportunities he deserved.
Though out of sight Nelson continued to fight for him, but with only modest success.
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Nelson’s own dissatisfaction with the Leeward Islands manifested itself in almost constant irritability. On more tiresome days the silence of his cabin was broken by the scratching of his pen as he wrote to Locker, Kingsmill and almost everyone else he knew, though not ‘a single creature in England’ seemed to reply. To Cornwallis he sent a cask of haddock by way of the
Zebra
sloop and confessed a nostalgia for Jamaica, regretting that no ship was available for him to send ‘poor Cuba [Cornwallis]’ some of the provisions perennially in short supply in Port Royal.
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His letter writing partly reflected loneliness, the want of satisfying associates in Antigua and his own frustration. He castigated his fellow creatures mercilessly. Hughes, who usually eased his gout ashore, was ‘tolerable’ though entirely uninspiring; he ‘bows and scrapes too much for me’, Nelson thought. Lady Hughes’s incessant chatter he had grown to ‘detest’ while the flag captain, Kelly, was ‘an ignorant self-sufficient man’. Sandys of the
Latona
had once been Horatio’s superior on the old
Lowestoffe
, but now stood nearly four years his junior on the captains’ list. Nelson recognised the good in him, and liked him as a man, but Sandys failed wretchedly as an officer and went through ‘a regular course of claret every day’. As for the other captains of the squadron, they were – bar two – mere ‘ignoramuses’.
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The exceptions were the Collingwood boys. Wilfred, slightly the younger man, had only been promoted commander the year before and was not dissimilar to Nelson, for his flimsy constitution belied a sharp and strong mind. Cuthbert was ten years Nelson’s senior, and in some ways a contrast. Where Nelson hungered for attention, Collingwood regarded fame as a transitory and futile possession. Its ‘trumpet makes a good noise,’ he once said, ‘but the notes do not dwell long on the ear’. Where Nelson was impatient and opportunist, Collingwood was steady and solid as a rock. And where Nelson was quiet but endearing, Collingwood suffered from a somewhat dour and dull disposition. Yet overriding such discrepancies were common attributes. Both were men of the modest middle classes and had gone to sea at twelve; both enjoyed reading and wrote reasonable letters; both were conservative politically; and, more than anything else, both were basically decent men sharing a powerful sense of public duty. Horatio felt a deepening friendship for ‘my dear Coll’, and grieved that the hurricane months had shut him in Grenada, rather than Antigua. ‘What
an amiable good man he is!’ he told Captain Locker. ‘All the rest are geese!’
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If Nelson had few good words for his colleagues, he had even fewer for the islanders themselves. ‘I detest this country,’ he wrote; English Harbour was an ‘infernal hole’, and the island a ‘vile place’. Its people, he came to believe, were disaffected and selfish, and in blacker moments he thought them ‘trash’. Perhaps he was thinking about the plantation managers who cheated their absentee landlords, drank the newly fashionable claret and dallied with mulatto mistresses, discarding any inconvenient offspring. This was far from a measured opinion, however. A midshipman who arrived at English Harbour a couple of years later told a very different story. The island ‘society’ was ‘excellent’, he recalled, ‘particularly’ in Antigua, where ‘I . . . experienced all that hospitality could give. They were men of education, and had seen a good deal of life.’ At about the same time another observer thought the British women possessed ‘refined sense’ and made ‘good wives, excellent parents, worthy friends, free from affectation, and blessed [with] every amiable quality’.
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Sometimes Nelson rode the twelve miles to St John’s, on the north coast, where balls and dances occasionally enlivened the impressive stone-built courthouse, whist, cribbage and all-fours were played at Smith’s tavern, and ladies protected their complexions by walking masked along the streets. At English Harbour he rarely dined ashore, but received a few invitations, some to the home of Samuel Eliot, both of whose eligible daughters were being pursued by naval officers. But there was one house to which he found himself returning with an increasing frequency, and where his troubles, real or imaginary, diminished. It was Windsor, high up on the hill above the dockyard, where breezes kept the heat at bay. There lived John Moutray, the elderly naval commissioner of Barbados and the Leeward Islands, and his fascinating young wife.

They were hospitable from the first. When the
Boreas
was being repainted in the latter half of October Nelson even stayed a week there. As he informed Cornwallis, Windsor was always ‘open to me, with a bedchamber, during my broil at this place’. A road skirting the harbour linked Windsor to the dockyard, but Nelson used a boat to cross the narrows between the two.
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John Moutray was the seventh laird of Roxobie, Fifeshire, and was sixty-two. He had become a lieutenant in 1744, commander of the
Thetis
thirteen years later, and post-captain of a forty-gun hospital ship three months after Nelson was born. His career had not only been long, it had also been undistinguished. Periods of unemployment punctuated his service record, and though the American war had provided a succession of commands – including the
Warwick
,
Britannia
and
Ramilles
– he had blighted his prospects taking a convoy to Madeira in August 1780. There had been a Franco-Spanish attack, and though Moutray saved his warships he lost all but ten or eleven of the sixty-six or so merchantmen under his care. Moutray was lucky to have survived the ensuing clamour. Still, he got his career back on track, took the
Vengeance
to relieve Gibraltar in 1782 and made a voyage to Ireland.

Moutray shared Nelson’s distaste for his present posting. Indeed, he had asked the Admiralty to excuse him tropical appointments. His health, he said, had been ruined by scurvy, gout, and ‘a bilious complaint’ picked up in the West Indies, and any ‘return’ to a ‘warm climate’ was ‘hazardous’. Unfortunately, someone at the Admiralty had a wicked sense of humour. The captain was retired from active service, given a civil appointment with the Navy Board in July 1783 and shipped out to supervise the sleepy dockyard in Antigua.
²⁰

Moutray’s misfortunes may have made Nelson better able to bear his own, though the commissioner was compensated with an annual salary of £500. It was the wife, rather than the husband, who attracted Nelson to Windsor, however. Mary Moutray was thirty-three or thirty-four years old and hailed from the Scottish Border. Only months before meeting Nelson she had lost her father, Thomas Pemble, a naval officer of some education. Pemble had entered the service as surgeon’s servant of the
Lowestoffe
, and taken seven years to pass for lieutenant in February 1744. He joined the
Tryal
sloop, but spent Christmas Eve of 1745 marrying eighteen-year-old Catherine Selby at Belford in Northumberland. Two daughters, Catherine and Mary, grew to maturity. In June 1765 Pemble became commander of the
Hazard
sloop, but there his active career ended and he was never promoted post-captain. Two years before Horatio first puffed up the hill above English Harbour, Commander Pemble had asked to be transferred from Whitehaven to a vacancy in the Newcastle impress service, nearer his roots. Perhaps he sensed his life was closing. The switch was made, but Pemble died on 17 May
1784, and his wife, though only fifty-seven or so, also died within the year.
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