Nelson: The Essential Hero (19 page)

At that moment in the war, with the French triumphant, with the Austrians ineffectually trying to hold the gates of Italy, and with the British Mediterranean fleet run-down and weak in morale through having been inefficiently used, a hatchet was just what was needed.

Throughout the early months of 1796 Nelson continued the arduous and exhausting blockade of Toulon. But, like most such blockades, though the fruits of it were not evident to the seamen who in the gales and blizzards held the blinkered coast during those months when the Riviera reveals a very different face from that known to the sun-lover in summer, its effects were grimly felt by the French ashore. Even though it was almost impossible to stop all the small coasters that scurried close inshore from port to port, no major traffic could move while the French fleet lay bottled up in Toulon. Meanwhile Corsica still had to be guarded, British trade with the eastern Mediterranean protected, and such help as could be afforded to the Austrians provided. It was fortunate that Jervis took to Nelson at once, while the latter was quick to see in him those qualities which had been so sadly lacking in Hotham. As he wrote to Fanny: ‘Our new Admiral will not land at Leghorn. The late one was so much here that Sir John is determined to act the contrary. Reports say the French will have their fleet at sea again. If they do I think they will now lose the whole of them, for we have a man of business at our head.’ As nearly always he appended his best regards to his father, and added the note : ‘Josiah is very well and is daily threatening to write you a letter.’ No one could ever deny that to his wife, to his friends, to the Duke of Clarence, and to sundry others, he was the most admirable of correspondents; and all this in addition to the daily business of the ship and the many formal letters and despatches required by the Service. While saying this, it must equally be added that Fanny was the most regular, concerned and tender letter-writer that any naval officer could have dreamed of.

Bonaparte, not yet quite twenty-seven years of age, had now been appointed General of the Army of Italy. His military genius and political sense were already apparent to those who had been in close contact with him and although there was much against him - his Corsican accent, his unimpressive appearance, and the judgement of some like Suchet (a future Marshal of the Empire) that he was ‘an intriguer’ - he had that special fire which men like the
sans-culottes
would follow. He understood them well enough, these veterans ‘who had grown hoary in battle. ... I had to act with
eclat
to win the trust and affection of the common soldier: I did so.’ His army consisted of 30,000 hungry and ragged men, in want of everything - and many of those wants caused by the British blockade. But on 27 March 1796 Napoleon found the words that would rally them : ‘Soldiers! You are almost naked and you are starving. ... I am about to lead you into the most fertile plains in the world. Before you are great cities and rich provinces; there we shall find honour, glory, and riches.’

Curiously enough, the two great antagonists (who were never to meet) both married ladies from the West Indies, both of whom were widows. But Nelson was more fortunate in his choice of Frances Nisbet than was Napoleon in Josephine de Beauharnais, who was to make his life miserable with her unfaithfulness, and for whom he cherished a passion that was as violent as his Corsican temperament. One other singular coincidence emerges: on almost the very day that Bonaparte issued his famous call to his troops, Nelson received the order from Jervis to fly a pendant as Commodore aboard the
Agamemnon.
Midshipman William Hoste acquainted his family: ‘It gives me infinite pleasure to be able [to inform you] that our good Captain has had this additional mark of distinction conferred upon him, which, I daresay, you will agree with me, his merit richly deserves.’ The broad pendant, denoting a commodore second class, which Nelson now hoisted, was not a rank in itself, but a post that enabled a senior captain to exercise an admiral’s duties in advance of the time that he was actually promoted to flag-rank.

In June that year, the
Agamemnon
, far and away the ship most in need of a major refit of all in the fleet, was ordered home. Nelson hoped to have gone with her, he might indeed even now have stayed aboard, but the health of another captain was even worse than his own and, as he wrote to Sir John Jervis: ‘I cannot bear the thought of leaving your command.’ Just as, all those years ago at Sandy Hook, he had opted for Lord Hood’s squadron, having come to the conclusion that with Hood he would find honour and action, he realised that he had found in Jervis another commander who would lead him where that ‘radiant orb’ beckoned. Although few of the original officers were left aboard
Agamemnon
, and the ship’s company through sickness and wounds had also largely changed, although his wonderful 64 was ‘old and worn out’, he cannot have watched her go without great emotion. He had been aboard her over three years, and in her he had experienced everything that the fickle Mediterranean could do - from infuriating summer calms to long dead swells, to white squalls off the coast of Toulon and black gales off Corsica. With her departure in the direction of Gibraltar a chapter of his life ended. He was now a commodore, and would never again be sole and simple captain of a ship, but would have a captain under his command. He had learned in her how to handle a man-of-war in every kind of weather and had tried her, himself, and his fellow officers and sailors, against the navy of revolutionary France. The Homeric Agamemnon had been ‘The King of Men’, and in the ship that had been called after him Nelson himself had learned something of the grandeurs and the miseries, the glories and the concerns, of kingship.

His broad pendant was transferred to the 74-gun
Captain.
As captain of her he was to have a fine seaman, Ralph Miller, New York born, who had seen much action and who was to become one of Nelson’s devoted followers. The year 1796, which saw Nelson well on the way to becoming an admiral, was not to prove a happy one for the British in the Mediterranean. Everywhere the French were on the advance, sweeping through Italy, capturing Leghorn in July, and fomenting revolution in Corsica. Leghorn and Genoa were now closed against the British, and Corsica, although an admirable source of timber, had always required supplies from the mainland to feed the fleet. As it appeared that the island would soon become untenable, Nelson was despatched to capture nearby Elba whose main harbour of Porto Ferraio, as well as a good anchorage at Porto Azzurro, could easily accommodate the fleet, while its proximity to the mainland would make the matter of supplies easier. He was rewarded for the success of this venture in August by being confirmed substantive commodore, which gave him an increase in pay. The small island of Capraia, forty miles east of Corsica, was subsequently taken to provide a further lookout point from which the blockade of Leghorn could be maintained, and also as a riposte to the action of the Genoese Government in seizing British property. On all sides it could now be seen that the triumphs of Bonaparte ashore — ‘they are masters on shore, and the English at sea’ - were having the inevitable effect of swaying weak and vacillating kingdoms and principalities to join the French camp. In the battle between the Elephant and the Whale it is always the triumphs of the Elephant that are visible to the landsman. The city-dweller or the peasant sees the passage of conquering armies - tangible proof of power and success — but what he does not see are what Admiral Mahan described as ‘those far-distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked, but which stood for ever between it and the dominion of the World’.

By the autumn, with Spain as well as Holland now allied with France against Britain, nothing in Europe stood against the French advance. It was clear that Corsica must be abandoned, and this most successful evacuation was carried out in October despite gale-force winds. Nelson could happily announce that ‘Every man and vessel [is] safely moored in Porto Ferrajo, for its size the most complete harbour in the world.’ Eighteen years later, long after Nelson was dead, the forty-five-year-old ex-Emperor Napoleon was to be landed here in an English frigate, sighing at the sight of what territory was left to him: ‘My island is very small.’ Nelson, the seaman, could admire an excellent harbour, but Napoleon (the man responsible for more death and destruction in the western world than any individual until Adolf Hitler) could only regret the scant acres of an island that, however delightful, could not satisfy the vanity of his ambition. Nelson, however, was not without his small vanities, as he readily confessed to Fanny in a letter that August: ‘A person sent me a letter, and directed as follows, “Horatio Nelson, Genoa”. On being asked how he could direct in such a manner, his answer, in a large part, was “Sir, there is but one Horatio Nelson in the world.” ’ He went on to more practical matters : ‘Lord Spencer has expressed his sincere desire to Sir John Jervis, to give me my Flag. You ask me when shall I come home? I believe, when either an honourable peace is made, or a Spanish war, which may draw our Fleet out of the Mediterranean. God knows I shall come to you not a sixpence richer than when I set out.’

San Fiorenza, Bastia, Calvi, all the places where he had spent so much time and arduous endeavour with his ‘Agamemnons’ in making secure bases for his country, were already abandoned. Many a commander in subsequent centuries has had to see hard-fought-for gains turned over to the enemy, but Nelson was to suffer even more disillusionment. In December, the decision was taken in London to withdraw the fleet altogether from the Mediterranean. ‘As for Corsica/ he wrote, ‘I have seen the first and last of it. I was the cause of giving many lucrative employments for the army which they were incapable of getting for themselves and I took them off the island when they were equally helpless.’ As for the decision to leave the Mediterranean entirely to the French, it made him frantic with distress: ‘They at home do not know what the Fleet is capable of performing - anything and everything. Of all the Fleets I ever saw, I never beheld one, in point of officers and men, equal to Sir John Jervis’s, who is a Commander-in-Chief to lead them to glory.’ But the final evacuation, Elba, was to be his next mission.

Only Gibraltar, ‘this dark corner of the world’, was now left to the British. It was early in December that Nelson wrote to Fanny:

I . . . am going on an arduous and most important mission, which, with God’s blessing, I have little doubt of accomplishing. ... It is not a fighting mission, therefore be not uneasy. I feel honoured in being trusted in the manner I am. ... If I have money enough in Marsh and Creed’s hands, I wish you would buy the cottage in Norfolk, and be assured that I believe it to be impossible that I shall not follow the plough with much greater satisfaction than viewing all the magnificent scenes in Italy.

There can be no doubt, for the theme recurs so often in his letters, that, like many a sailor, he always retained the dream of a quiet rustic life. But the idea of Nelson ‘following the plough’ is laughable. One of his great predecessors, ‘Old Dreadnought’, Admiral Edward Boscawen, expressed himself better in a letter to his wife written during the Seven Years War : ‘To be sure I lose the fruits of the earth, but then I am gathering the flowers of the sea.’ Nelson knew well enough, despite all its hardships and monotony, that he would never have exchanged the wake of a ship for the chocolate-dark curl behind a Norfolk plough. Even the seagulls dipping over that rich earth would have reminded him of those other, salty acres.

The mission on which he was sent, transferring his broad pendant from the
Captain
to the frigate
Minerve,
was no less than to cross the enemy-dominated Mediterranean all the way to Elba, and take off as much as he could of the garrison marooned there. To assist him he had the frigate
Blanche
, and it was with these two small ships that he set out from Gibraltar on 15 December. It proved to be a passage which could certainly never have been described as ‘not a fighting mission’. Hardly were they further east than Cartagena than they fell in with two Spanish frigates, the
Santa Sabina
and the
Ceres.
After all his years as commander of a ‘capital ship’, Nelson was to show that he had not forgotten his early training, and that he could still, in modern terms, fight a ‘destroyer action’. The
Minerve
and the
Blanche
took on their opposite numbers in a simple and traditional ship-to-ship engagement. Nelson, again according to old-fashioned custom, hailed ‘the Don’ and asked his surrender; to which came back the reply: ‘This is a Spanish frigate, and you may begin as soon as you please.’ A spirited duel followed, in which the Spaniard lost her fore, main, and mizzen masts - some tribute to the gunners of the
Minerve.
It was not until all was gone that her captain could be prevailed upon to strike his colours. Nelson’s comment was: ‘I have no idea of a closer or sharper battle : the force to a gun the same, and nearly the same number of men; we having two hundred and fifty. I asked him several times to surrender during the action, but his answer was - “No Sir: not whilst I have the means of fighting left.” When only he himself of all the other Officers was left alive, he hailed, and said he could fight no more, and begged I would stop firing.’ The strange intimacy of warfare in those days is what strikes the modern sailor: the courtesies, and the captains’ hailing each other in between the thunder of the guns. Nelson spoke no more Spanish than French, so the ability of his opponent to exchange shout for shout in English should have surprised him. When the defeated captain came aboard, however, to surrender his sword the explanation was strangely simple. He was none other than Don Jacobo Stuart, great-grandson of James II by his mistress Arabella Churchill. Nelson was moved enough at having defeated the descendant of a king of England, as well as by his opponent’s gallant fighting style, as to restore to Don Jacobo his sword. Meanwhile, the
Blanche
had equally defeated her opponent, and both ships had prize crews aboard the Spaniards and had taken them in tow. Next morning, however, a Spanish frigate hove up and Nelson was compelled to cast off his tow, while the arrival soon after of two Spanish line-of-battle ships removed any possibility of the
Minerve
and the
Blanche
getting away with their prizes. Both Spanish ships were cast adrift, and the two British frigates - their presence in the Mediterranean now only too well known to the enemy - were lucky to get away scot-free. Among those who had to be left behind with the boarding-parties aboard the now recaptured frigates were Lieutenants Culverhouse and Hardy. Nelson was able in due course to arrange an exchange of prisoners. Don Jacobo Stuart, ‘reputed the best officer in Spain’, was to prove not only a gentleman, but also a valuable asset when it came to arranging the exchange.