Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (33 page)

On September 28th the prayer was answered. As the
Victory
joined the Fleet the captains hurried aboard to greet the Admiral, forgetting everything in their enthusiasm. Their reception, Nelson told Lady Hamilton, caused the sweetest sensation of his life. " He is so good and pleasant a man," wrote Captain Duff of the
Mars,
a

¹
"He sleeps by the side of my cot . . . until the time of tacking and then marches off to be out of hearing of the guns, for he is not reconciled to them yet."—Collingwood, m.

newcomer to his command, " that we all wish to do what he likes without any kind of orders." Codrington, who was also serving under him for the first time, spoke of the joy throughout the Fleet; every one felt that his work would be appreciated and that nothing but the best would be good enough for such a commander. Soon every ship's company was busy painting in black and yellow bands after the old Mediterranean pattern and endeavouring to make her what the delighted Codrington called
"a
dear Nelsonian—in all things perfect."
¹

For Nelson's task, as he made the Fleet aware, was to transform it into an instrument fit to do the service for which the country was waiting. Less than a third of its twenty-nine battleships had been with him in the Mediterranean. Of the remainder most, for all their staunch virtues and wonderful skill, fell a little short of that flawless discipline, training and spirit which he expected of those who sailed with him. If he was to annihilate a superior enemy he knew he had to crowd into a few brief weeks, and perhaps only days, the teaching of years. And he had to school the captains not of a mere squadron but of the Navy itself, a third of whose fighting strength was now gathered under his command.

But Nelson in those autumnal days of 1805 was a "man exalted. On the two days after his arrival—the first of them his forty-seventh birthday—he entertained his flag officers and captains to dinner, and, as he laid before them his plans for destroying the enemy, an electric current ran through them. "Some shed tears," he told Emma afterwards," all approved. It was new, it was singular, it was simple! And from Admirals downwards it was repeated—' It must succeed.'" Some who listened at the long table were strangers: others were old friends like Collingwood who had shared with him
"a
brotherhood of more than thirty years." But all were welded that night into one by the magic of the Nelson spirit and ritual: the gleaming silver and mahogany, the stately music, the cheerful, courtly hospitality, the friendliness and consideration, the sense that ran through all of sharing in a great adventure.
²
Jealousy, sulking, backbiting—maladies that long confinement in over crowded ships easily breed—could not survive in such an atmosphere. "We can, my dear Coll, have no little jealousies," Nelson wrote to his Second-in-Command. " We have only one great object in view, that of annihilating our enemies and getting a glorious peace for our country."

¹
Nicolas VII,
53, 66, 70-1;
Codrington,
51, 76;
Wynne, III,
210-11.

²
After dinner
, according to Captain Fremantle
, they witnessed a play "performed by the seamen on board the
Victory.
It was very well conducted, and the voice of the seaman who was dressed in great form and performed the female part was entertaining to a degree."—Wynne, III,
211.

Consciously or unconsciously Nelson in those last weeks off Cadiz was fashioning a tradition and a legend that was to be of priceless service to England. He reminded the Navy that, whatever the bonds of authority, leadership was not a mere matter of transmitting orders but of evoking the will to serve. Building on all that was best in the great naval tradition in which he had been nurtured and discarding all that was bad, he established an ideal of discipline that was as revolutionary an advance on the dead, unfeeling authoritarianism of the past as the teachings of Rousseau, and far more practical. It was founded, not on a corporate abstraction, but on the individual who alone, as he saw, embodied the principle of life. Its ideal was liberty in a framework of discipline—a liberty that worked and was grafted, in the English mode, on nature. Captain Fremantle testified how pleasant it was, after Lord Nelson's arrival, to be given constant change of scene and occupation, freedom of choice and method and yet to know precisely how far one might go.
¹

It was this which, as an officer said, double-manned every ship in the line. Nelson was essentially a humanitarian who, wooing men to duty, trusted them and had the imagination to see into their hearts. By his reckoning the best disciplinarian was he who most loved and understood men, who remembered that they were human beings and treated them accordingly. One of his first acts was to order that the names and families of all killed and wounded should be reported to him for transmission to the Chairman of the Patriotic Fund and that an account of every man's case should accompany him to hospital. In this spirit he allowed Sir Robert Calder to return in his own flag-ship to England to face his court martial, thus depriving the Fleet of one of its precious three-deckers at the very moment that he was fretting for every gun to annihilate the enemy. "I much fear I shall incur the censure of the Board," he wrote to the Admiralty, "but I trust that I shall be considered to have done right as a man to a brother officer in affliction—my heart could not stand it." It would have been idle for authority to complain; such tenderness and consideration were an essential part of Nelson's success. He could not discard them without ceasing to be Nelson.

All the while that he was inspiring others with cheerfulness and resolution Nelson's own heart was aching for the home which he had barely seen and for the woman and child from whom he had so long been parted. On the second night after he entertained his captains to dinner he was seized by a painful and dreadful spasm. "The good people of England will not believe," he wrote, "that rest

¹
Wynne, III,
211.

of body and mind is necessary to me." To comfort Emma, he told her that the brief days of happiness at Merton were only a foretaste of greater happiness: "Would to God they were to be passed over again, but that time will, I trust, soon come, and many, many more days to be added to them."

Even as he wrote he knew that what he had come to do precluded the possibility of return. To secure his country and make her victory certain—whether now or in the more distant future—he had to destroy the great concentration lying before him in the inner harbour of Cadiz. The chance would probably never occur again and, when it came, a few brief hours of opportunity would be all he could hope to snatch from the gods of wind and tide. In that day with a force of less than thirty ships of the line—a few
more, perhaps, if the promises given him in England could be made good—he would have to shatter, burn and blast a superior enemy fighting with the courage of desperation. Before him in Cadiz were perhaps thirty-five or thirty-six sail of the line including the three most powerful ships in the world. At Cartagena, two days distant, were six more. And to maintain his fleet on that inhospitable coast he was under the necessity of sending it in detachments to provision and water in the Straits: almost his earliest act had been to dispatch a first instalment of six battleships under Rear-Admiral Louis, thus reducing his fighting strength to twenty-three. "I am very, very,
very
anxious," he wrote to George Rose, begging for reinforcements. "It is, as Mr. Pitt knows, annihilation the Country wants and not merely a splendid victory of twenty-three to thirty-six—honourable to the parties concerned but absolutely useless in the extended scale to bring Bonaparte to his marrow bones. Numbers can only annihilate."

For the menace created by the union of the French and Spanish fleets still remained—a standing challenge to England's strained resources. To keep the Grand Fleet throughout the winter on that exposed and treacherous shore was almost impossible. Yet at the least easing of the blockade the enemy might escape either in a body through the Straits, so imperilling the whole Mediterranean position, or in detachments into the Atlantic to harry trade and the colonies. Though Nelson did not know that before leaving Boulogne Napoleon had prescribed commerce-raiding as the future task of his battle-fleets, he was well aware of its dangers; one of his last acts before leaving England had been to draft a plan for establishing protective cruiser-lines along the Portuguese coast. Already Allemand with a three-decker and four other battleships was roving at will across the home terminals and the Bay. On the day the
Victory
sailed from Portsmouth he had all but run down Baird's and Popham's transports two hundred miles to the west of Lisbon; later, venturing into the Soundings, he had captured the
Calcutta,
whose captain had been forced to sacrifice himself to save his convoy. After evading an angry lunge from Cornwallis, Allemand had transferred his activities to Nelson's communications off the Portuguese coast. A division of the Channel Fleet under Captain Strachan had sailed on September 29th to find him.

Still graver, in Nelson's view, was the risk of Villeneuve running for the Mediterranean. His statesman's instinct warned him that Napoleon, having failed to cross the Channel, would again as in '98 turn eastwards and try to conquer the world by breaking the ring of British sea power at its weakest point—in the Levant. Flis first step must be the great island off the toe of Italy which, still nominally ruled by the weak King of the Two Sicilies, was menaced by St. Cyr's army in the Calabrian ports. When Nelson left England no news had been received of Craig's arrival at Malta or of the long-awaited Anglo-Russian offensive in the Sicilian Straits: France and Russia were still nominally at peace and Austria, though mobilising, had not declared war. But the explosion might occur at any moment, and Nelson knew that when it did Napoleon would try to forestall the Allies in Sicilly. That he would use Villeneuve and his great concentration at Cadiz to further his purpose seemed certain.

To prevent it and to forestall any sudden dash by Ganteaume to join Villeneuve, Nelson withdrew his inshore squadron from before Cadiz. Instead he moved his fleet fifty miles out into the Atlantic where he could both guard against a surprise from the north and control the entrance to the Straits without the risk of being prematurely blown through them. The task of watching the enemy he left to Blackwood's frigates and a linking division of his faster seventy-fours, which maintained hourly communications by flag and gun signals. By withdrawing over the horizon he hoped to tempt Villeneuve out: everything, he told Blackwood, must yield to the overriding necessity of "not letting the rogues escape without a fair fight." He even canvassed the possibility of smokin
g them out with Colonel Congreve
's rockets and the American Fulton's primitive torpedoes which Pitt and Castlereagh, under the intoxicating influence of Sir Sidney Smith, had been vainly trying to use against the abandoned invasion flotilla at Boulogne. Barham had been urging his colleagues that these vaunted inventions, if worth anything at all—which he doubted—had far better be tried on the enemy's battleships at Cadiz than on discarded barges. Yet though in his anxiety for an early decision Nelson repeatedly begged Castlereagh to hurry out the rockets, he pinned his chief hope on the
pressure of famine. Thirty thousand seamen and troops were a heavy drain on the resources and communications of Cadiz, and the prescient Collingwood had instituted a strict blockade of the coast. Nelson, confirming his orders, implored the authorities at home to support him and ignore the protests of neutrals and vested interests.
¹
Unknown to the British, Villeneuve was already preparing for sea. On September 27th he had received Napoleon's orders to sail for Cartagena and Naples. Anxious to recover his relentless master's esteem, he had at once ordered his captains to make ready. But on October 2nd, just as they were about to sail to "strike down England's tyrannical dominion of the seas," rumours reached Cadiz of Nelson's arrival and of his plan to attack with infernal machines. Immediately the port was in a tumult; the order to sail was suspended and all hands were diverted to arming a harbour guard of gunboats. At a Council of War on October 7th, though an easterly breeze offered a chance of entering the Straits before the British could engage, it was resolved, after heated debate, to disobey Napoleon's orders. The French and Spanish admirals were brave men, but they had no wish to commit suicide. And to sail with Nelson in the offing, they reckoned, was suicide.

With Villeneuve's failure to use the cast wind, hopes of a fight fell very low in the Fleet off Cadiz. Only Nelson, buoyed up by some inner sense of impending events, remained convinced that the enemy would put to sea. And on the very day that Villeneuve and his Admirals were debating Napoleon's orders, Nelson's belief became a certainty. For the
Royal Sovereign
arrived from England after a refit with news that war had broken out in Europe and that Craig's army was on the point of leaving for Italy. The British Fleet, after securing the enemy in Cadiz, was ordered to cover his landing. Nelson now knew that Villeneuve or his successor would sail and what course he would take. The fate of Sicily, of the Mediterranean, of Pitt's offensive and in the last resort of England would be decided by a naval engagement at the mouth of the Straits.
²