Losing Nelson

by Barry Unsworth

  Released from the nightmare of doubt, I turned my mind to the January of 1793, which was when the call came. This was one of my favourite episodes in his career; I used often to dwell on it. On the twenty-sixth the news comes from Paris: Louis XVI has gone to the block before a jubilant populace. Even as the royal head rolls into the basket, life changes for Horatio—his long exile is over, his days as petty squire draw to a close. It is the beginning of that twelve-year struggle with revolutionary France which was to take him to the heights of achievement and renown. That same day there is a despatch from the Admiralty: he is appointed to command HMS Agamemnon, sixty-four guns. At the beginning of February, France declares war on Britain. Four days later, Horatio leaves Burnham Thorpe for London, never to return.

  What an amazing change of fortune. As yet no-one knows his name. All his great battles are before him. He is thirty-four years old, emerging from obscurity with all his energy and ambition, still whole and unmutilated, at the height of his powers and in the prime of life. The ship they have given us is in the prime of life too, twelve years old. She is sheathed in copper to reduce the drag of accumulated weed and shellfish. Standard practise by then. But the Agamemnon is one of the first ships to have her plating secured by copper bolts instead of iron to avoid electrolysis. Technically, her sixty-four guns are too few for a rating of ship of the line, but her sailing qualities more than make up for this. That February, as he sets about commissioning her at Chatham, Horatio is taking possession of a warship that for her size is one of the fastest and strongest in the world.

  Thinking of this, the power and promise of it, the mettle of the man and the ship, I felt again the prickle of tears, companion of my solitude. I was with him as he trod a quarterdeck for the first time in five years, amid the odours of river water and tar and raw hemp and wet planks, with him as he went down to his cabin, opened the new logbook with its binding of black leather, saw in its unmarked pages his days of opportunity ahead.

  There is a lot to be done before we are ready for sailing: the hold has to be trimmed, a new foremast and bowsprit have to be fitted, stores to be loaded, working clothes and hammocks to be issued to the crew. By the middle of April she is ready. She waits in the Downs Roadstead for a convoy she is to escort down-Channel to Portsmouth. I see her swinging at her anchor, tugging at her cables—the ship as impatient to be gone as her captain. The ancestral foe across the water … It was the beginning of his true life, the phase of glory.

  With this image, the slim figure pacing the deck, the scent of battle borne to his nostrils through the Channel mists, I took myself off to bed. A few pages of Keegan’s Battle at Sea and I was ready for sleep. I passed into first sleep easily enough in those months but almost always woke in the early morning and then could not sleep again. Waking me this time was one of my sorrow dreams, as I was in the habit of calling them. The ground floor of an old house, ruinous and empty, with wooden floors that echoed to the steps. From somewhere above me a voice raised in lamentation—high-pitched, throatformed sounds, overwhelmingly lonely and desolate, as if from some far edge of the world. As always, the sorrow seemed tangible, physical, like rain, and the rain had a light of its own, whitish, slightly phosphorescent. It came down through the house, enveloping but not touching me. The voice was known to me, but I resisted the knowledge. Then the divisions between the levels of the house melted away and I saw in a sort of sliding diagonal vista the slope of attic ceilings and a figure with its back to me, sitting on a bed. High-collared coat, narrow shoulders, some suggestion of a wig. Then I was in the same room, the figure had fallen silent, the head was beginning to turn slowly towards me. I made a clattering escape downwards and away, a sensation like running downhill in a landslide, a debris of metal or wood moving under my feet. I slid and scrambled down, away from the turning head, the terrible prospect of meeting the eyes. This clattering descent drowned other sounds. However, it was not the panic of being pursued that I woke to but the anguish of that screaming grief and the fear that lay below it, a fear that kept me lying rigidly there, as if waiting for an assault in the dark—fear of grief itself, fear of the loss foretold.

  10

  I slept again when the light came. But all next day and the one following I felt the shadow of that dream over me, a sense of foreboding and at the same time a sort of restlessness, a feeling of impending change. This mood was broken on the thirteenth of the month, when—as always—I celebrated the engagement known as Hotham’s Action. March 1795—an important date, I had always considered it. Though hardly more than a skirmish compared to his great battles of later, it was the occasion when Horatio first showed signs of angelic promptings, his capacity for breaking free, breaking the line.

  Two years and some weeks have passed since Horatio was treading the decks of his new ship at Chatham and just over eight months since the injury to his right eye at Calvi during the Corsican campaign. On this side by now he is virtually blind; he can distinguish light from darkness but not much more than that. Still in command of the Agamemnon, he is with the Mediterranean Fleet under Admiral William Hotham, engaged in the blockade of Toulon—there is a danger that the French may break out and attempt to retake Corsica.

  Difficult to say precisely when a sea battle begins. There is the vast arena, the seeking out, the sighting, the chase, the first shots. I date Hotham’s Action from March the eighth, a Sunday evening, six days before fighting was joined. Horatio is at anchor at Leghorn, writing home to Fanny. He is interrupted; there is no time for more than a hasty close: I have only to pray God to bless you.

  This interruption can only have been the order to put out to sea. Hotham had received intelligence that the French under Rear-Admiral Pierre Martin had left Toulon with fifteen sail of the line. Their intention: to cover a troop convoy bound for the invasion of Corsica. Two days later, on the morning of the tenth, the French ships are sighted. Hotham, with fourteen British warships and one Neapolitan, gives the signal for a general chase. It is the first fleet engagement of Horatio’s career, but he has to wait for the action he craves; the enemy is elusive and the weather fickle.

  Impossible here, of course, in this unvarying light, on this glinting sea of my table, to reproduce that uncanny weather, mists that lifted and fell, dwindling breezes, shifting hazes on a horizon of phantom clouds and phantom sails. It is during this time that the ardent Horatio, on fire to get to grips with the foe, adds a postscript to his letter: My character and good name are in my own keeping. Life with disgrace is dreadful. A glorious death is to be envied.

  I quoted those words to Miss Lily one evening—I think it was after this. They had always been important words for me. I first heard them from my history teacher when I was fourteen. “Not very reassuring for Fanny,” she said. That was her only response. A perfect statement of the heroic creed, and that was all she could find to say. Not very reassuring for Fanny. She reduced the whole thing to the reactions of a limited person like Fanny Nelson. I tried to point this out to her at the time, how absurd it was, but she wouldn’t see it. Not couldn’t, wouldn’t. “Well, he was writing to her, wasn’t he?” she said. “I mean, he was writing to her, not one of his mates. She would have been worried enough already. Did he have to talk about dying?”

  I felt a sort of pity for Miss Lily as I was setting out the ships, because in uttering these words she had shown herself to be just as limited as Fanny. But I soon forgot this as I began to concentrate on the action. It was a brush rather than a full-scale engagement, though the French losses were high, at least eight hundred dead. I did not set out the whole line, only the ships immediately concerned—on the French side, the Ça Ira, Censeur, Sans Culotte, and Jean Bart; on the English side, the frigate Inconstant, Horatio in the Agamemnon, and Hotham’s flagship, the Britannia.

  Seven forty-five by my watch. In anxiety not to fail with the timing, I had set the alarm for seven that morning, but I had not needed it; I had been awake since four. It was 8 A.M. when Horatio saw his chance, and that is
for me the beginning of the action. At daybreak the enemy have been sighted three or four leagues to the southwest, approximately a yard on my table here. The French are refusing battle; they are running southward with the wind, pursued by the English fleet on a parallel line. Hotham, in the Britannia, breaks the red flag for action stations. The sound of drumming is heard on all the English ships, bulkheads and screens and movable furniture are stowed away, the galley fires are doused, the gundecks watered and sanded. The ship’s companies bind their heads, cast off their shoes, strip to the waist—cooler working at the guns and easier for the surgeons to operate on wounds not infected by dirty cloth. The surgeons themselves wait with their knives and saws and swabs down in the orlop, below the water line. Sleeves rolled up well above the elbows …

  Six minutes from the first drumbeat to readiness for battle. Now, exactly now, 8 A.M. on this morning of the thirteenth, Horatio, well ahead in the speedy Agamemnon, sees a French eighty-gun ship, afterwards identified as the Ça Ira, fall foul of another, sees them collide, draw apart again, sees that the Ça Ira has had her fore and main topsails carried away; they lie trailing over her starboard side. At once she begins to lose way, she is detached from the main body. Here she is, here I place her, lying astern of the French line.

  For all their stateliness and the beauty of their sail, these fleets were like fierce hunting packs, constantly famished. To fall out, to be isolated, to be sick or disabled, meant mortal danger. First to go for her is the leading frigate, the Inconstant, at the head of the English line. But the Ça Ira is a heavily armoured ship; she can’t run, but she can still bite. The frigate is savaged, she reels away. Now comes Horatio’s moment. He swings out of the line and stands towards the disabled ship. She has now been taken in tow by a frigate, which is attempting to draw her away westward. The Sans Culotte and the Jean Bart have come in to protect her. I place them here, on her weather bow, at gunshot distance.

  Horatio bears down on her. Still in tow, she gives him a raking fire as he approaches. He is intending to wait till the ships touch before ordering the broadside, but this fire from her stern is so accurate and damaging that he cannot wait so long. At a distance of one hundred yards, less than an inch on my table, he gives the order: the helm of the Agamemnon is put astarboard, and as she falls off he gives the Ça Ira a full broadside, raking her from stern to stem, each gun double-shotted. Almost every shot goes home. Immediately the broadside is discharged, he puts the helm aport and stands after her again. For the best part of two hours this manoeuvre is repeated. He stands after her, falls away to starboard, pounds her with a broadside, stands after her again. The French ship, big enough to put the Agamemnon in her hold, is still under tow; she cannot get round to return the broadsides. The carnage among her crew is terrible; her masts and rigging are in ruins, but most of her guns are still serviceable.

  Now the towing frigate succeeds in getting her round; at last she can bring her broadside to bear, use her heavier guns to pulverize her tormentor. But their setting is misjudged, they are too much elevated. Horatio runs on boldly; the enemy shots fly over him. He is ready to fight the Frenchman broadside to broadside. And it is now, at this crucial stage, that the cautious Hotham hoists the signal of recall.

  Nothing could better illustrate the difference in temper between these two commanders: the angelic extremist and the prudent half-measures man. Believe me, I know what you must have felt that day, I understand your frustration.

  Next day, March 14, after a brief but violent action, the wrecked Ça Ira and the seventy-four-gun ship that was now attempting to tow her to safety, the Censeur, were both taken by the British. As soon as the French ships struck their colours, Horatio—always prompt to seize the occasion—went aboard the admiral’s flagship to urge an immediate pursuit. They could leave their prizes under a guard of frigates; with bold action, they could destroy the French fleet altogether …

  I saw them in fancy that March morning, as I had seen them often before, in private colloquy together on the quarterdeck of the Britannia: the stolid Hotham, not much heat there despite the name, and the slight, eager Horatio with his strange dead eye. The pupil of the right eye was much enlarged now, diffused in shape and immovable, almost covering the blue of the iris. When another life is closely knit into the fabric of one’s own, certain pictures are favoured by the frequency with which they occur to the mind, though this frequency seems arbitrary and is impossible to explain. From boyhood I have seen those two pacing together as the firing grows slacker and the French ships crowd all possible sail to westward, making for the shelter of Toulon. Hotham is looking straight before him; Horatio is gesturing, glancing from time to time at his commander’s face. The cursed French—they could still be cut off, they are demoralized; what a victory it would be for the Crown. He is vehement—too much so, probably, in view of the difference in rank. And the admiral’s measured reply: “We must be contented, we have done very well.”

  This in its way was true. Corsica was temporarily saved; two French warships had been captured. But Horatio expressed his feelings privately in a letter home some two weeks later. If we had taken ten sail, he said, and allowed the eleventh to escape, I could never have called it well done. Here, in a nutshell, is the whole thesis of my book, the ultimate statement of heroic ambition. Always reaching higher, seeking greater achievement, always wanting the odds to be greater … In that same letter, words printed on my mind for many years now: My disposition cannot bear tame and slow measures. Neither can mine. In spite of all appearances to the contrary, in spite of my obscure life, I knew that he and I were at one, we were like diamond and carbon.

  The moment is all; he knew that, none better. Circumstances had favoured him in this brush with the French, giving him the opportunity to distinguish himself, to be the only commander to go singly into action, a thing very rare in fleet engagements. And he had a fast ship, he was well ahead in the line. But it was he, and he alone, who seized the moment, made it his own. Hotham’s Action, they call it, but it will always ring with Horatio’s name.

  Again the words of the letter came back to me, first heard from the man who taught us history when I was in the fifth form, the man I had talked about in my sessions with Penhas. His name was Grigson. He was broad and short, and he had wiry reddish hair that would not lie back; it stood up straight from his forehead like bristles. He wore rimless glasses, behind which his eyes were a warm orangy colour, like marmalade. I remember him well. He was a Nelson lover too, the first I had ever met. Also, he was a brilliant teacher. Coppernob, his nickname among us. He had a habit of rather tense-seeming gesture, quick cutting or chopping motions of the hands. He would sit before us and talk, not from behind the desk—he brought the chair and sat in front of us, almost among us. Grigson had no problems with discipline; he was strong-voiced and challenging in his gaze, and there was a suggestion of contained violence about him, in those abrupt movements of his hands. No-one dared to show a flicker of derision, even when he fell into the moralizing vein, which was fairly often—it was moralized history he gave us, a course of events determined by character, good or bad. If Napoleon had been a different kind of man, if he had been a true patriot, as Horatio Nelson was, and not set on personal glory, he would have struck at England’s heart in 1798, when the way was open, by landing an army in Ireland, which was in revolt and ready to welcome him with open arms, instead of sacrificing that same army to his grandiose dreams of oriental conquest. Genius, perhaps. But what price genius in a mere adventurer? And he was Corsican into the bargain, which, Grigson implied, was in moral terms a grave disadvantage to start with. Nelson, in that situation, would have put king and country first; he would have gone for the jugular.

  I thought then that Grigson was right, and I think so now. He had notes in a quarto-size red folder, which rested on his knees as he sat there. There was a gesture he made, both hands brought sharply down, a foot or so apart, in a sort of double chopping motion, to indicate the red file in his lap. Here
is your grade A in O-level history.

  He kept the flame alive. I was already making my model ships by then—I had started that at thirteen—and I kept a scrapbook in which I put anything to do with fighting ships before the age of steam. But Grigson gave my passion for Horatio an adult endorsement. In a certain way this was fortuitous; it depended on the power he was able to exert. Had it been possible to make fun of Grigson or disrupt his lessons or behave disrespectfully towards him, his view of Nelson and the importance of character would have gone up in smoke along with everything else about him. Inconceivable now, of course, but then … In adolescence we are easily swayed. If Grigson had been a different kind of man, I might have lost Horatio. But he sat among us and controlled us and drove the message home. This great Englishman—I use that word advisedly, boys, no admixture of the Celt there, generations of Norfolk yeomen, he was English to the core …