Nelson: The Poisoned River (3 page)

Five

The
Harrison affair moved on in fits and starts. While Nelson oversaw final work on Hinchinbrook’s yards and cordage in Port Royal, powder, shot and other ordnance material was hauled down to the jetties in a train of ox-carts. The fleet transports, alongside wharves in Kingston, were taking on supplies enough for more than two thousand men, and making preparations to have them marched on board.

As
always in loading spirits in Jamaica, many full casks were spiked or broken, many full men – soldiers, sailors, layabouts – ended up ‘as drunken raving bastards.’ The sound of beating and of the whip almost drowned out the carousing, morning, noon and night, and to add to the problems, Sir Peter Parker’s press gangs roamed the jetties, indiscriminately snatching sailors already assigned to transports, to make up his Navy numbers.

The
chaos at the waterside was almost matched by the chaos in the smarter side of town. Under constant pressure from the admiral and his cohorts, Governor Dalling agreed to reinstate Harrison as Attorney General, and let the matter die. All very well until Harrison got on his high horse, and insisted Dalling formally admit that he had lost his temper, and the fault was his entirely.

‘Red
rag to a bull,’ Nelson told Cuthbert Collingwood. ‘Dalling exploded, and sacked him from his position as Advocate General into the bargain. Which put Admiral Parker in impossibility. Advocate General is an appointment of the Admiralty, and Sir Peter will be forced to approach London to settle it. And in the meantime…well, you can imagine.’

In
the meantime, Dalling himself was set aside as governor, and his post went temporarily to Brigadier General Archie Campbell, who had just arrived from England to be his mere Lieutenant.

‘Poor
Parker was fit to hang himself,’ said Nelson. ‘The army brings him out in hives at the best of times, and he said he feared his piles might rupture. I was in two minds as whether he was jesting!’

General
Campbell, however, proved himself in Parker’s eyes when the time came to embark the expedition. He rode down from Spanish Town to Kingston in full ceremonials expecting to salute a fighting force of volunteers and non-regular soldiers on the Grand Parade, and was met instead with an abysmal rabble.

As
Hastie reported it to Nelson, ‘there were not above a hundred men or so, surrounded by whores and slavers on the snatch, and most of them were heavily in liquor. There was a lot of nakedness, or very near it, with women’s dugs and soldiers’ buttocks flashing in the sun, and many of the military looked set to clear them with their muskets. Then Campbell trotted up there on his charger, calm as summer.’

It
could have gone a half a dozen ways, but Campbell’s next gambit won the day and undying loyalty from the men. Instead of lashes, or fists, or a musket ball – he disbursed ten guineas, which they were told they could collect on board their transports, in the form of rum.

‘Sir,’
said Hastie. ‘You will never see again men turn so beautiful from drunken villains to the merest grateful serfs. The only pity is that Campbell is staying here and leaving us to Colonel Polson’s tender mercies on the Main.’

For
which half-jest he was reprimanded for discourtesy.

Nelson’s
orders were to set sail as soon as maybe for the Mosquito Shore. His first task was to round up his flotilla, which consisted of a large three-masted transport, three sloops, two brigs and a tender called the Royal George. On board they carried something of a secret weapon – a barge made up in sections to sail up shallow rivers – which would be put together when they reached the San Juan entrance. This was in the charge of Lieutenant Edward Despard, and the men of the Royal Batteaux Corps. Although not thirty, Despard had made his name designing fortifications for Jamaica, and would do so, if need be, on the Main.

Tim
Hastie, standing near Nelson on his privileged position on the quarterdeck, watched the hills of Jamaica slowly fading from sight with mixed emotions. It was the third of February, and the expedition had been so long in the preparation that time was close to being critical. The health of his patient was not good, and it would inevitably get worse as the season grew hotter and more fetid. Thomas Dancer, the appointed surgeon for the venture, was actually of the opinion that the land they were heading for was a place of fine good health, and a cure for most ills. Which Tim thought as unlikely as a snowstorm in high summer.

Hastie
had been told also, many times, that his man was prone to seasickness, but true or not it was the least of his concerns. The night before they had left port he had stripped and washed Nelson, and administered wine and vinegar and ground cinchona bark, contrary to Dancer’s direct instructions. It had done some good undoubtedly; but his fears remained.

Another
myth or story Hastie had heard about this skinny, unwell man was that he did not flog his sailors. One day beyond the Palisades this was also proved untrue, and on the person of some poor drunk wretch who had jumped overboard responding to the cries of wife or sweetheart. Indeed the leaving of the port had quite unsettled Tim, and he had wondered at the numbers prepared to risk their lives rather than be wrenched finally away from land. The quays had been swarming with screaming, shouting women, begging and supplicating their menfolk not to go.

The
flogging itself was even more unsettling, taking place in wonderful sunshine, on an empty azure sea, with the sharp stink of sweating men mixed with the scented breeze from off the hidden island. There were on board the Hinchinbrook several hundred men, and paraded in the morning after breakfast they made a sort of carnival. Soldiers mostly in red, one contingent sporting enormous white cockades, while the sailors were drab in greyish whites and blue. On the quarterdeck, the officers clustered and strutted in their scarlets and their golds.

Nelson
was the master of ceremonies, although he looked to Hastie more like a gaudy sort of ghost. He had newly powdered his wig, and his skin glared white, as if treated with mercury. But Dr Dancer, when Tim made so bold to express a small concern, was impatient of his worries.

The
navy way of flogging was unlike what he knew from army camps, but with similar effect. It was a measure of Nelson’s compassion, he was told, that the sailor got only twelve – he could, for such a crime as running, have been killed if a captain so wished, whipped to death. God knows why, Tim thought. The result, after all, would have been the same – a man lost for good and all.

To
receive his dozen, he was lashed to a grating lifted off the deck and tied upright in the shrouds towards the stern. He was stripped naked to the waist, nipped at wrist and ankle by thin cords, and given a folded rag to hold between his teeth. With Nelson watching, and the other officers, he listened to the first lieutenant read out the charge against him. Then he was whipped.

Hastie,
who had volunteered for service only to amass the cash to marry Sarah, the maid he loved in Liverpool, had already decided that his role in life would rather be to ease men’s pain than cause it, and he watched with eyes half closed. Six marines stood guard with muskets, and a boatswain’s mate swung the vicious thongs and smashed them home. No human sound issued from any lip throughout the flogging; the sailor did not even grunt. When it was finished they eased his lashings, gave him a pail of water, and he was allowed below. Now it was the soldier’s turn.

His
crime was drunkenness, which considering General Campbell had expended many guineas to get the men on board, and most were already drunk when he made the offer, was no surprise at all. This man had no special grating, but was lashed by wrist to shroud. He hung there limply, and two corporals swung at him with manic vigour. Many of his fellows seemed to take it as a jest, despite the fact that the lash was made of twisted hide and a flying end of it nearly took his eye out. When he was cut down his comrades cheered, and he collapsed on to the deck. They would have left him there had not the navy officers begun to bellow angrily.

It
was a lovely day, though, and the warm breeze and splashing water would have made a devil smile. Nobody seemed even a mite upset, thought Hastie, and after the whippings the sailors pumped up water which gushed across the decks, and everybody was allowed a quiet skylark. The officers foregathered on the poop deck, lighting pipes and the cigars the Yankees smuggled in from Cuba, while many drunken soldiers slunk below once more. One look at Nelson told Hastie that he also needed his cot, and urgently. Sea motion or whatever, he looked badly.

‘Sir,’
said Tim, out of other earshot, ‘I beg you, you must come below and sleep. Have the mosquitoes bit you in the night?’

The
captain’s face was as yellow as his wig, and he answered in a weakened, creaking voice.

‘Tim,
you have not been in the Carib long, have you? This is nothing, and I am hardly ill. I need rest is all, and wine, and a nice fresh joint of goat’s meat when I wake.’ He laughed. ‘And keep that Dancer man at bay with all his quackery, for I fear that he might kill me if you don’t. He thinks the ship is full of detriment, but I swear to you the worst is over. At sea I’ll be as healthy as a blowfly on a turd.’

Nelson
did not arise for two days after that, two days in which Hastie tended him like a mother would a babe. He used every remedy that he had ever learned from his apothecary master, and he let no one near him but himself. Nelson survived.

After
that he had indeed to appear on deck, however, because there was a duty to be done that could not be conducted by any other man on board. A captain’s duty. The burial of the dead.

Throughout
the time of Nelson’s sickness, Dr Dancer had been coddling the mass of men below. One of them, a soldier of Hastie’s own 79th, had caught malaria when the regiment had first landed in Jamaica, and as so often it had proved ‘the fever that returns.’ He had paraded with the rest in Kingston, had come on board quite fit, before falling into stiffness and disease.

Dancer,
a most confident physician, had given him the drugs he swore by, including draughts of porter – and the soldier had developed ‘putrefactions,’ and promptly died. Nelson himself, doing the oration, could barely speak.

He
was able to pronounce the words ‘vile body’ though. And that night again he could hear the biting insects swarm.

Six

When Hastie came on deck next morning there was a riot going on. He looked about for constable and bosun’s mates, but saw none. He looked aft in some anxiety as a swarm of men in trousers only, naked to the waist, rushed across the well in a stampede, and saw the first lieutenant in his position, and the master, and the sailor at the helm. Then he heard cheers.

Despard
and Polson, two of the army officers, were watching him from the shadow of the shrouds. Despard, a long-faced man with Irish clearly in his blood, laughed.

‘Fear
not, young mister medical,’ he said. ‘This is Captain Nelson’s way. He is confined to his sick bed maybe, but the men must keep fit. Army and navy have a rivalry. So we’ve set them on to games.’

Nelson
was not, in fact, in his cot, but he was certainly not well, and Tim Hastie had already given him an infusion as a part of breakfast. But well or not, he had taken time to confer with his officers, and with some of the army men. This, presumably, was the upshot.

The
weather in the Caribbean this day was balm to a physician’s heart. The breeze was not over-light, not over-stiff, and the ship, as far as he could see, was carrying all her sails. The sea was blue and sparkling, with white horses but no monstrous waves. All along the lee rail men were being sick, he noticed now, but that was inevitable. Hastie had done enough voyages to learn that some men never got over the sickness, and anyway, they were only two days away from land.

‘There
will be dancing later,’ said Despard. ‘He is a great one for dancing, your master. Drinking, dancing, staying up all night. I hear that in Jamaica he haunted the governor’s house like a jolly wraith. Haunted the young women, also.’

Hastie
was obscurely scandalized at this, although he knew it was in some wise true. Nelson liked fine wine, and called it ‘his medicine’ when he was not feeling up to much. He also had a longing after young women, although always in the most proper way. Cuthbert Collingwood had sometimes teased him to his face.

‘He
comes from a large family, Tim, you must understand that fact,’ he’d said on the verandah one pleasant evening. And, more quietly another time: ‘His mama died when he was only nine. He craves a mother, maybe, more than a wife. But also longs for children.’

Colonel
Polson, who was in no way as open as Despard, said rather sourly, ‘He haunted Governor Dalling for advantage also, mayhap. For so young a captain, he has done exceeding well. It cannot all be by merit, surely?’

Despard,
despite his lesser rank, did not hold back his opinion. He made a face at Polson that came close to sneering.

‘That
smacks of sour grapes, Lieutenant Colonel!’ he said, his voice still full of laughter to remove a sting. ‘Good heavens, sir, this expedition has made you up from captain quick enough. Would you call that a lack of merit also?’

Polson
had the grace to laugh, but added, ‘Aye, but you must accept his uncle being Comptroller helped him in his rise. When I first saw him I asked myself “who is this light-haired boy, and how well will he lead men?” I am not convinced that letting men play sports and lark about gives me much added confidence.’

‘His
hair is growing well now, sir,’ Hastie said stiffly. ‘He had to shave it off for medical reasons. In any way, his real hair is more sandy than pale. A sort of ginger, as they call it.’

‘Has
he got Irish blood?’ asked Despard. ‘It could be we will turn out blood related!’

Hastie
shook his head.

‘No,
pure English stock as I believe, Captain. His father is a churchman in Norfolk. Governor Dalling is also a Norfolk man. I believe that explains why they first got on well.’

‘But
the Comptroller—’ Polson started, and Hastie cut him off.

‘Was
dead when Nelson became post,’ he said. ‘And every navy man that I have ever met, sir, says that he is exceptional. And—’

‘And
will end up admiral of the fleet!’ laughed Despard. ‘I think there is merit in both positions, gentlemen, but please don’t let’s fall out for it. Look there! There’s wrestling about to start! My money’s on that great bull-neck man. He’s a Liverpool Blue, the 69th. He’s had more pox since getting to Jamaica than any other three men in the regiment. Outrageous.’

When
the larking and racing were considered over for the day, Nelson appeared on deck and set on the men to small arms practice. The army officers assumed this would be a formal thing, but again the captain – although pale as a spring onion – would have none of it. After less than half an hour of line-ups aiming listlessly at nothingness over the side, he had the master and the boatswain lower boats, crew them with oarsmen, and tow kites and other targets for the musketmen to shoot at.

‘Enough
fiddle-faddling,’ he cried. ‘There will be prizes! There will be wine and rum! I wager the navy men will prove the best!’

In
musketry he was proved wrong, which he then turned to advantage by insisting on a contest with great guns. This caused extreme excitement and great merriment, for the soldiers had no knowledge, and not a little fear, of the Hinchinbrook’s nine-pounders.

Polson,
who had lost his hangdog air, entered into it with enormous verve, and wagered five guineas with Despard on a running-out and laying challenge, by the clock. Polson even took it lightly when Nelson refused to bet. Not for fear of losing, as he explained it, but out of distaste for the sport. He later on, at dinner, spun the yarn that he had won £300 at a gaming table when serving on the frigate Seahorse out in India – ‘almost as a child’ – and had pledged never to repeat the exercise.

‘I
realised when I saw the money that I could as easily have lost,’ he said. ‘In which case, sirs, I might just as well have thrown my carcass in the ocean, for I would never, ever, have had a chance of paying it.’

The
soldiers proved ready learners, although hauling in and out the massive carriages required a great deal more than just brute strength. The tally at the end of it was five sprained shoulders, two broken fingers and a rupture. Hastie, not to his pleasure, was told off to fit the groin-pad.

When
the dry-run (no powder and no shot) was finished, Nelson set his gunners on to their own challenge, watch against watch, again against the clock. From set-to to fire was pretty smart to begin with – the Hinchinbrooks having been active throughout their cruising after smugglers – but it was tightened considerably, again with liquor as the spur.

In
the cabin later, Polson was a shade po-faced, and questioned Nelson on the wisdom of such inducements. In the army, he contended, it would lead on to broken discipline and very ill behaviour. Nelson seemed unimpressed.

‘Mr
Polson,’ he said, ‘I know my people well. I would venture that my regime works exceeding fair.’

‘Ah,’
rejoined the colonel, ‘at present I can only agree with you, but what of later? Indeed I fear, sir, you are a thought over-familiar with them. To treat men like that as of a higher order than a half-trained beast strikes me as…’

Despard
was shaking his head at him, as if in warning. Hastie, too, was looking for perhaps a fire-cracker going off. But Nelson only fixed Polson with a cold, blue, gleaming eye, until the man fell silent. Then he said mildly, ‘I treat them as I treat any man, sir. As I will treat you, in fact. I give respect when it is due, and I expect it in return.’

Polson
swallowed, but he would not give up.

‘And
when that trust is broken, captain? What then?’

He
said it with an air of triumph, and Nelson met it with quite well-concealed contempt. Clearly, the colonel had not angered him.

‘Then
there is the lash, sir. I do not administer it lightly, for I believe bestiality breeds beasts. It may come as a raw surprise to you, but I have a great admiration for my people, not one of whom is like a half-trained animal. Indeed I not only admire them, but I like them, too. I consider them my friends. I would lead them in to hell and I am confident that they would follow me.’

He
stopped, then gave a sudden little laugh. A very jolly laugh.

‘Pray
God they don’t choose to prove me wrong,’ he said. ‘Then I would look a sorry gull indeed!’

Afterwards,
when the servants had cleared away, the charts and maps came out, and the officers of both the services fell into confabulation. They traced the Mosquito Shore – the parts of it in question – down for some two hundred miles and more. Colonel Polson pointed at the several rendezvous agreed already with the Superintendent General of the territory, James Lawrie, and the landfalls at each point were discussed.

‘I
know this coast quite well,’ said Nelson. ‘From the Black River in the north to down as far as Monkey Point. Close to, the shore is difficult. Which is our first point for picking up, colonel?’

‘Captain
Lawrie will meet us at Cape Gracios a Deos. He will have assembled a force of up to one thousand men. At least a hundred British settlers, and free blacks and mulattoes, perhaps five hundred slaves. Plus Mosquito Indians in great profusion to act as porters, guides and canoe paddlers. A formidable force indeed, and then an easy sail down to Rio San Juan. Which I believe you know, sir?’

Despard
exchanged a glance with Captain Nelson. Who again failed to show any irritation.

‘I
said I know the coast to Monkey Point, Colonel Polson. I do not know the entrance to the river, nor yet a dozen feet inside it. We are sailing now to Providence Island where I shall procure a pilot. Without a pilot, this expedition would be doomed before we pulled an oar.’

Now
Colonel Polson showed self-satisfied. He took a draught of wine, expansively.

‘I
have a name, sir. An excellent man called Hanna who comes fully recommended. He knows that shore, and all its rivers, like the back of his own hand. Indeed, sir, I have already sent a message to him from Jamaica. One must not let the grass sprout up between ones feet.’

Nelson
nodded imperceptibly, and added a small smile. Despard sighed.

‘Good,
then,’ said Nelson. ‘We are all on the same lines. It would take a cruel Providence indeed to upset us now. A cruel Providence indeed.’

Rightly
or wrongly, all around the table except Polson could detect the irony.