Nelson: The Poisoned River

by Needle, Jan

  At which the captain, finally, said he would dispatch a cutter in the morning to contact Superintendent Lawrie, although it seemed ‘damned unlikely’ that he would have tracked all the way to Cape Gracias a Dios with a thousand men merely to track back home again in a huff because the navy had not been there on time to meet him.

  With near twenty four hours lost, Hinchinbrook raised her anchor later in the morning to follow the swift cutter to the coast, leaving Penelope to trail them if and when she could. The flotilla was greatly overburdened now, with men and stores and ordnances, but Hastie woke the fevered captain later with some welcome news.

  ‘Sir! The first lieutenant begs to inform you, the Penelope has made sail! She has broke free, sir, and is under way. His best assessment is she will come up with us in the morning.’

  Next dawn, then, Nelson was on the quarterdeck with his spyglass in his hand, the outline of the cape having been discerned from a lookout on the main topmast head. As the morning rose the sun came clearer, but the expected ships of Lawrie did not heave into view.

  At the entrance to Wank’s River soundings were taken and the anchor dropped, and Colonel Polson rowed ashore in haste to make the rendezvous.

  He returned most chastened. He had met an officer, certainly – but it was a lieutenant of a regiment of foot camped in the area, not James Lawrie. Mr Lawrie, indeed, promiser of much, dreamer of a British conquest of the Spanish America itself, had provided neither guns, nor boats, nor men. As far as was known, he was many miles north, at the Black River settlement. And when a camp was made on land, apparently in good, healthy land for it – the mosquitoes made their presence known. In their millions.

  Eight

  The only good thing, from Tim Hastie’s point of view, was that Captain Nelson seemed reinvigored by the setbacks. More likely, Hastie thought, it was the cleaner and airier conditions on the ship now that the soldiers and other useless men were gone ashore. He’d also arranged for fires to be lighted down below (in closed-in iron pots for fear of conflagration) and sulphur burned, and vinegar splashed and scattered over everything. At nights, though, the air was still appalling with the buzz and whine of insects. There was not a man on board who wasn’t eaten half alive.

  Men did begin to die, mainly on shore but also on the ships. The first to go on Hinchinbrook was a marine, who had gone down with malaria but was thought to be recovering. Hastie had no hand in caring for him, but Dr Dancer insisted an increase in the supplies of wine and beer forced down his neck would ‘do the trick,’ and when the man soon died said it was merely a mortification brought on by lack of exercise.

  On land, the insects seemed to bite far worse, and there were truly more of them. But Dancer laughed at Timothy’s suggestion that they were the cause of sickness, blaming instead the vile airs that rose from the swamps nearby, well known for hundreds of years to be the bearers of the ills. He cited Surgeon General Moseley, who had even published a book about it, insisting that the mosquito bites were a nuisance, but only dangerous if scratched into ulceration. He also pointed out that the springs nearby were full of splendid ‘essences’ which would ‘carry off the bile.’

  Timothy countered as robustly as he dared that the Mosquito Indians protected themselves from the evening biting time by all manner of coverings, including burying themselves in sand. Which only led to laughter, and jests about him being but ‘a Liverpool apothecary’s apprentice.’

  Nelson, Polson and Despard engaged in almost nightly discussions – on ship not shore, at Nelson’s insistence – about the way forward. Time, as Governor Dalling had insisted, was truly a great factor, and if they stayed too long before they reached Greytown, the rains would be upon them, with all that that implied. It was Despard who suggested that the settlers Lawrie had hoped to recruit were probably more concerned with keeping their heads down and carrying on their smuggling with the Spanish traders, and Hastie who said the talk in camp was that the Indians feared they would be cheated and sold into slavery, a ‘damned slur’ that drove Polson to fury, and later turned out to be not far from the truth.

  Meanwhile the officers decided to build the pre-constructed gunboat brought from Port Royal, which at the very least would keep the soldiers occupied and take their minds off drinking and whoring with the native girls who could be bought. Dr Dancer had already announced that the incidence of pox was rocketing, and wondered why the others laughed at his po-face.

  Things had reached a pretty pass some few days later when Nelson ordered the flotilla hauled off the coast because there was the makings of a storm up in the sky – a suggestion that pilot Hanna pooh-poohed. But the ships were sailed off into the open sea, and when the gale arrived it caused considerable damage on land, destroying many tents and not a few provisions. Next day Superintendent Lawrie’s ships began to arrive, although they had suffered some losses on the journey, and some, indeed, had to be rescued by the fleet as it returned to shore.

  ‘The worst of it,’ said Nelson, while Tim was giving him his physic, ‘is that the Indians have no trust at all in us, least of all in the superintendent. In which, indeed, I wholly sympathise, for I would not trust the man myself as far as I can spit. It is also said he deposed the former superintendent, Hodgson, through a fine piece of blackguardry. It will be interesting to see how many of his fabled thousand we end up with as our force.’

  Within another week, as Hastie noted in the journal he was keeping for his Sarah, the ‘awful truth’ was revealed. Lawrie had recruited a mere twelve settlers, who had with them ‘a few dozens of their slaves, and an additional six score of the Indians called Mosquito. I must tell you, dear, the insects are named for the natives, not vice versa. Another strangeness of this most strange country.’

  The next essential port of call was Pearl Key on the mainland south of the Cape, where Lawrie promised ‘yet more’ settlers and men. Nelson and the pilot argued long and hard on aspects of this voyage in the shallow coastal waters, but Hanna swore by God Above that his knowledge was impeccable. When the Hinchinbrook struck bottom Nelson was beside himself, and his friend Captain Despard was hard put to stop him spilling blood. Divers were sent overboard and reported the damage, and Nelson suggested Hanna should attend to it himself.

  Shortly after this Hanna demonstrated his lack of worth again, by promising fresh water at the next two landing points they came to, both of which proved barren. The captain and Polson, by now cemented by adversity, agreed with Despard that they should press on, and with the prefabricated gun carrier (ceremonially named Lord Germain) in tow astern, they fought dirty weather until they could ‘drop hook’ at Greytown, just one day short of fifty after setting sail from Jamaica.

  Although two weeks or even less was a not unusual time for the same trip, convention dictated that a celebration must be held in the main cabin. It was subdued and minor, though, and when his guests had gone, the captain said to Hastie: ‘Tim, my task is over. Admiral Parker’s order is that I remain at river mouth as guardship, while they push on upstream. A month ago that made me furious, but tonight I must confess I’m almost glad. It is a complete ragtag and bobtail, and only Despard is truly competent. And very soon, Tim – it will start to rain.’

  Hastie slid into his own cot, beneath his mosquito muslin, and pondered.

  ‘At least your health is better, captain,’ he thought. ‘Thank God you’re now beyond Tom Dancer’s tender mercies.’

  Nine

  Nelson’s mood remained ambiguous for some days. To Hastie, observing him observe the military engaged in loading and preparing to set off up the river, it was a time spent in limbo. Still on the books of the 79th – the Liverpool Blues – he was yet recognised as Nelson’s physician, and Dancer was more than happy to have washed his hands of him. Almost from the moment that the army camped on shore their health deteriorated. Dancer soon complained that he was running out of bottled beer.

  To grace St John’s with the name of Greytown seemed laughable to a Liverpool man like Hastie. It was
no town at all, but a sad collection of wood and wattle huts, roofed in leaves, and ‘steeped in shit’ as Despard put it. In the tropics, strange animals abounded, and even the hogs and dogs were of another world. The population, to all intents, kept themselves invisible, knowing from old that white men lied as often as they opened their mouths. The river was low, waiting for the rainy season, and the mud stank and bubbled. It also harboured snakes, and alligators, and other crawling, deadly beasts.

  Despard was ashore as soon as the Hinchinbrook had anchored, and rowed on to the long, white sandy spit that enfolded the San Juan to make a natural harbour. Nelson’s master had sounded it as five fathoms deep and more, and Despard’s plan was to erect a battery on the shore in case marauders came inside the spit. He had worked with Nelson on some Port Royal forts in the past, and they pored over maps and plans for hours.

  Polson’s schedule was many weeks in arrears, though, before he could embark his motley crowd of fighting men. Without Nelson and his navy hands to help, it turned out a quite unholy mess of rushing, shouting men who slipped and fell and dropped things in the water. Precious things, into the bargain. Four pounder cannon, separated from their carriages, iron round shot, cartridges and powder. Much of it could not be salvaged.

  Even Hastie, who was anything but a seaman, felt the urge to leave the Hinchinbrook and go ashore and offer aid, so understood the torture Nelson suffered from Admiral Parker’s orders to remain aloof. The captain observed the chaos through the poop windows, from underneath his piss-coloured wig, and from time to time let out a groan, and muttered incomprehensibly in his broad Norfolk tongue. He was a most unhappy man.

  ‘Will it go on all day?’ he asked at one point. ‘Good Christ, Tim, it is hours after noon already. Is there no one there who knows a boathook from his bollocks?’

  There were many craft of different sizes drawn up to the sand. The largest European craft were the tender Royal George and the pre-made Lord Germain, looking, Hastie wrote in his journal, ‘like a giant cow trough, designed by farmers drunk on rotten cider.’ He thought that very poetic, and not far from the truth. Beside them were native canoes, a huge vessel called a bongo of forty feet or more, and other, lesser copies. The bongo, he was told, was built entirely from a hollowed out mahogany tree.

  ‘Too deep,’ he heard Nelson muttering. He was pulling hair fronds from underneath the wig, and winding them around his fingers. ‘Too deep, they will be grounding all the time inside the river. The whole affair is hopeless.’

  After the stores were loaded came the men. All had muskets, balls and powder, and five-day rations stuffed into their backbags. They struggled to find seats among the oarsmen, moving as stiff and ungainly as clockwork German dolls. Even as the craft were pushed off from the sand some started rocking. Immediately, the soldiers moved, as soldiers will on boats, instead of staying still. Immediately, half the boats were in danger of capsizing.

  Nelson, with a foul oath that would have been understood in Norwich, if nowhere else, got up and went below.

  ‘I cannot bear to watch,’ he told Tim Hastie. ‘God save me, I cannot stand to watch!’

  Indeed, as Captain Despard relayed it later, he missed a farce, a tragic farce that drowned one soldier, and almost finished the whole upriver push before it started. The overloaded craft paddled precariously across the still lagoon, until they reached the brown swirling water of the main stream.

  ‘When the current hit the boats,’ said Despard, ‘it was like a game of skittles. The soldiers were sitting upright with their guns like flagpoles between their legs, and as the bows swung round, half of them jumped up and started shouting. Brave men on land no doubt of it – but surrounded by that filthy bubbling brew they went like frightened children. They were weighted down with kit, and heavy shoes and guns and ammunition, and would have sunk like stones. And all of them knew by now how fast a crocodile can move.’

  The drowning came after Polson, realizing it would be dark before they could get far up river, ordered the boats to head for an island, to set up camp and lighten some of the cargo. Seeing the longed-for beach not far ahead of them, some of the soldiers behaved ‘like drunkards at the fair’ to urge their boats along.

  ‘It was vile,’ said Despard. ‘When the first boat went over, with soldiers rushing all to one side, the oarsmen abandoned rowing and joined the rout. Then men thrown in the water seized the oars of other boats to save themselves, and pulled those over, too. I am surprised, Mr Hastie, that Nelson stayed in his cabin.’

  In case this was an accusation, Tim explained there had been a bout of nausea; which was not true. Nelson had seen the problem from the windows at the stern, but had assessed it close enough to shore not to constitute a deadly danger, and thought interference could only make the matter worse.

  He was right in both cases, it transpired. The man was killed, much gear was lost forever, but Polson had learned his lesson. The decision was made to divide the expedition into two, with one half-loaded convoy going upriver as far as possible next morning, then off-loading so that the empty boats could return for more. If need be, the whole river could be conquered thus.

  Nelson pondered this strategy throughout the evening, while sending his sailors to help the boats be better trimmed and loaded for the morrow. Long after dark he invited Colonel Polson to take wine and sustenance on the Hinchinbrook. He had a proposition.

  ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘I am worried that Admiral Parker, far away in Jamaica, would think me derelict in not helping you to bring this to a good conclusion. Do you agree?’

  Polson was not a stupid man. He thought for a long moment before replying.

  ‘I understood that you had fulfilled your duty by escorting us,’ he said. ‘And by remaining here as a guardship…’

  ‘I would be squandering a store of knowledge and experience that I fear your officers – however fine in any duty necessary on shore in battle – can only lack. The trick is in the words: they are army, I am a sea man. Forgive me if you disagree, but I think I may have a little more to offer, sir.’

  Despard was hiding a chuckle in his hand. He winked at Hastie. Polson was nodding, as if he had something to seriously consider on its merit. But then he let his smile break out.

  ‘I confess, sir, that I am not sure how strong your obligation is to stay here in this harbour. But if it would allow you to advise me – nay, even give me any practical assistance that is possible – then, Captain Nelson, it would make me a contented man.’

  ‘You could successfully undertake it on your own, of course,’ said Nelson, for good form.

  ‘Indeed I could, sir,’ replied the soldier, with similar intent.

  ‘But ships and boats and an abortion like the Lord Germain…’ continued Nelson. ‘Well, I need not say more. Sir, I will throw my lot in with you. With your permission, I will place two of my ship’s boats and let’s say fifty men at your disposal, with me at head of them. Is that acceptable to you?’

  Despard and Hastie laughed openly at this. As Hastie put it in his home journal later that same night: ‘Acceptable! Oh glory, cariad! Polson was like the cat that got the cream, and Nelson not much better. For however modest my little man might play, he dreams of glory and success, and this expedition could be the making of him. Admiral? Lord? Well, the potential has no end.

  ‘This trip up the Rio San Juan could see Spain kicked from the New World like a beggar out at gate. Nelson snored well that night. I think I heard him laughing in his sleep!’

  Ten

  Hastie, in washing down the captain’s torso in the morning, and sponging him liberally with vinegar and camphor oil, was pleased to see the progress he was making. Nelson was impatient with his friend’s attentions, but had more confidence in him than in Dr Dancer.

  This man, official surgeon or whatever, was getting cockahoop about the possibilities now that the men were all on shore, and in later discussions about lightening the loads to be borne upstream even suggested they leave the medical supplies
behind in Greytown.

  ‘Is that wise, doctor?’ said Nelson, circumspectly. ‘I am not a medical myself, but-’

  Dancer interrupted.

  ‘Indeed you are not, with respect sir, and neither is your Liverpool apprentice. Now we are free of the filthy bilges and cramped quarters on the ships we will be new men, I do assure you. And once we have gone a few leagues up the river, these damn swamps will be also gone. No effluvium, no malaria. It is good physicians’ Latin!’

  The reloading under naval orders went on apace, until a signal gun at the entrance warned of an approaching sail. There was great excitement and a call to arms, but the vessel revealed herself to be a sloop from Port Royal, with despatches from the governor.

  As joint commander now, Nelson was invited by Polson to read the letter, which was dated a scant three weeks before. Nelson made a rueful face.

  ‘And we took fifty days,’ he said. ‘Please God the rains will be as tardy in arriving.’

  The dispatch from General Dalling made no mention of the time they may have spent in getting to the river, and assumed much that was embarrassing. He was confident they had already taken the fort some thirty miles from Greytown, and may even have crossed Lake Nicaragua. The sacking of Granada, as Morgan the Buccaneer had done ‘with ease’ a hundred years before was also mentioned, and even the possibility that Polson had reached the Pacific coast.

  Dalling, a man of rumbustious imagination, also hinted that when Polson had laid the groundwork, and enjoyed the credit for that part of it, Dalling himself would come across the water at the head of a permanent army to hold the Spanish Main for England. In pomp and glory.

  ‘Well?’ said Polson, when they had finished reading. Nelson’s response was very dry.