Nelson: The Dreadful Havoc

by Jan Needle

  ‘Breakfast after prayers each morning, early. Gruel, maybe thin porridge and a piece of bread, and then more prayers. My father was a stickler for God, whom he said would look to us right throughout our life, should we honour him. There was eight of us – five boys three girls and three more dead as babes – so the honouring must have rose quite audible to heaven, but mama died when Katty was still an infant, and poor papa but six and forty. It was the winters of that low east coast. They are excessive bleak.’

  The eyes turned in on themselves, and Nelson shivered. His face was masked in sweat, with angry red patches on the white skin. Each bite he had sustained in the forests on the Main seemed never to heal, for all the potions Mrs Cuba made up and dabbed on them. Better potions than Tim’s own, he did admit. As he got older in the tropics, Tim’s faith diminished rather than grew. He sometimes wondered if any white man could survive for long. In Nicaragua he watched the whites die first, with the blacks and Indians more comfy in their skins.

  In his journal he had noted that some sailors, who had seen much and survived, imagined miscegenation to be the only hope. Cuthbert Collingwood had explained the word to him, and even that lugubrious streak had laughed to say it.

  ‘It means breeding with the blacks,’ he said. ‘And don’t pretend you’re shocked to me, Tim, for you’ve seen plenty of it enough in Liverpool, I’ll bet my socks. The Portuguese make a virtue of it. They’ve been here longer than the rest of us, and down in Brazil and so on coffee is the only colour, with a bit of cocoa bean thrown in. They live, and trade, and steal the Spanish fortunes when the Dons have dropped down sick. Us English may be superior, it’s what we like to think, but if health’s the yardstick we’re not worth a peck of shit.’

  In truth, Tim had been shocked, for the attitude to the foreigner in his army and his navy was hardly deep respect. When he reached Jamaica, though, he saw that all the whores were black, and many of the female slaves could keep body and soul together only in the good old-fashioned way. And Mrs Cuba was named Cornwallis for another reason than coincidence.

  He had, indeed, wrestled long and hard, in writing an honest account of his new life as he had promised her, to explain to Sarah something that she might take wrong – she must take wrong – even about his little captain. For he had seen Cuba put naked young women in his bed some nights, not for any pleasure it might give him, but to keep him warm. The fever decreed his body heat, it seemed, so when Nelson was hot he was as slippery as a pig on a griddle, and when cold his face ice-blue, his fingers white as bone. So she packed him not in ice, but in fine soft maiden flesh, as long as they could stand the chill. The problem was for Hastie, that sometimes he wished he was the naked man. How tell that to his future wife?

  ‘I killed a polar bear,’ said Nelson. Tim jumped, the voice came out so strong and sudden. The captain’s eyes were turned on him, clear, calm. ‘My mama said I must be brave, so I killed a polar bear.’

  Hastie knew the next sentences as if by rote. ‘No, I did not kill him,’ Nelson would say, ‘I was prevented by my captain. I thought him cowardly, but Captain Lutwige was most insistent that I had put myself in danger, and knew not the power of a polar bear. I still think he was wrong, but as my musket had misfired I suppose I am not clear to argue it too strong. Our expedition leader, the Honourable Constantine Phipps, was Lord Mulgrave’s oldest son, you know, and as such would certainly not have played the ninny, but he had to back up Lutwige, as his superior. That was on the Carcass, an odd name for a bomb, not so? Lutwige insisted I might have ended up as one. A carcass, not a ship.’

  Hastie had heard this story many times, always when Nelson was gripped by his fever, never when he was rational. He guessed that there was truth in it – Nelson, as a lad, had indeed gone on an expedition for the North West Passage – but he guessed also that it was not entire truth. It came out pat, and Nelson, as always, emphasized the rank and importance of the men who held him back, or indeed admired him. What was the strength and danger of a polar bear, though? Hastie had been told by men who claimed to know that such animals could tear down a house as if its stones were straw.

  Carcass, however, was a good name for a bomb-ketch he could agree, and he explained at length to Sarah that it was a small, strong hull that could live in arctic ice. Even when he was not delirious Nelson talked about the expedition, having been astonished by the beauty of it all, the terrifying cold, the walruses and seals disporting on the ice. The fourteen year old midshipman, though, rated the trip as a failure and hoped desperately for opportunities to ‘burnish up my name.’

  ‘It was a walrus that I wanted first,’ he said. He was panting, and his eyes were full of sweat. But when Tim moved to mop at them he was shaken off. ‘The walruses played underneath our boat, and underneath the floes of ice, and would not keep still. I wished to take a tusk back for my little sisters. They would not have credited that such strange creatures even had existence.’

  As the story went, Nelson had failed to catch a walrus, but one night later had gone on to the ice with another midshipman, when both should have been ‘tucked up in our cots like babes.’ And when they’d seen a polar bear, Nelson’s ambitions had soared.

  ‘For my sisters a bit of skin and whiskers would have been more than sufficient, Tim. But when I saw that lovely, ghostly giant in the mist, I knew my father had to have his pelt. I got so close before I fired, too – not above ten feet. And the gun flashed in the pan. My fellow panicked, and told me to come off, but I still had the butt to club it with. I would have got him, too, but a crack of water opened up between us, and as I tried to get across and at him, Lutwige on the Carcass set off a gun and my father’s bear sloped off.’

  He laughed, wiping the sweat from off his face. He laughed, then coughed, until the phlegm came up. Then lay panting till he could talk once more.

  ‘The coward had run back on board and told the captain what I was about. When I got back they dressed me down and told me I was foolish. Better foolish than a craven, though. My father would have dearly loved that skin. And my mother too, if she had only lived.’

  Nelson sighed deeply, and his eyes were closed. He breathed his mother’s name inaudibly, over and over.

  ‘I could feel my heart go out,’ wrote Hastie in his journal, when the silence was complete. ‘He told me once his whole life was for his mother, he was craving her forgiveness always. Forgiveness! Forgiveness for what, I ask myself. He was nine when she passed, my dearest, nine years old! He had never had the chance to prove himself.'

  Chapter Four

  Over the weeks that Mrs Cuba and her ‘hussies’ nursed Nelson back to something not too far from life, Tim Hastie learned much about the captain, and much, he thought, that would mortify him if he knew he had revealed it.

  His father Edmund, though kindly, came out as an ineffective man, who sired children on his wife perhaps as a protest against the drabness of his life. Perhaps to make it up to her for his inferiority, as well. His father had been, like him, a parson, while his wife’s was prebendary of Westminster.

  He was an energetic man in bed, however, and Horatio was the second of that name that he had fathered, the first having died at a mere three months. Another babe had also died, but two older brothers and one older sister had survived.

  The Reverend Edmund, though, was made to feel his place. Although Nelson did not use the words, his mother thought that life had done her badly. She was a Suckling, and would announce to anyone who wished to hear it that her grandmother's brother had been Sir Robert Walpole, George the Second's finest Minister, and later Earl of Orford.

  She even seemed to find some pride in the fact that she was a distant kinswoman to the scion of another noted Norfolk family, one Anne Boleyn, who 'lost her head, in more ways than the one, to the great King Henry!'

  Her lineage did not protect her from the pneumonia that killed her, but luckily for her motherless brood, her brother Maurice Suckling was a great success in his own right, and a fine and generous man.
As a captain in the Navy in the recent wars with France he had won much prize money, and had also made a highly lucrative marriage. He was childless.

  When he came to Burnham Thorpe after his sister’s death, as far as Hastie could devine from Nelson’s fevered ramblings, it was to assess the eight surviving children and work out a path through life for them. Apart from Horatio, he judged the male side of the line to be as feeble as their father, while the girls were ‘merely maids.’

  In the event, Suckling proved a fair judge. And when Horatio, at the age of 12, wrote and asked if he would find him a position in the Navy, it was done. Like his mother, Nelson had not been backward in coming forward, and had painted himself as something of a coming hero. In that, Tim reflected, he had not changed much in the intervening years.

  Nelson's childhood was austere, although Hastie had not a lot of knowledge of that class of personage. Himself from a village in North Wales, he had walked to Liverpool in search of work, and was bright enough and keen enough to have gained apprenticeship to Sarah's father. In their own terms hardly poor, in terms of Nelson's family they were barely beyond the gutter.

  Whether it was fantasy or not, the small, frail Norfolk boy was certain he was destined to go far. Or that is what he insisted to Hastie in the long, hot nights he sat beside his bed. But often, when he talked about his mother’s death, he was almost incoherent with guilt and grief. Guilt? He mumbled the word endlessly, with ‘failing’ also discernible.

  ‘I tried to tell him he was wrong,’ wrote Hastie, ‘and sometimes it would provoke him to weak anger, painful to behold. He seemed to think he was his mother’s only hope, and he had let her down by not stopping her from dying. He raged that he must be henceforward strong and brave. He loved his sisters, but did not trust his brothers.’

  In his second school, pulled out of the Royal Grammar School in Norwich by his uncle Suckling after the death, Nelson fell into the clutches of a fearful martinet and parson called Jones, who was head of a private academy nearer his home. His tales of this time, Tim noted, were all of his unusual bravery, and the risks he undertook to indicate his lack of fear of bullies and of bullying.

  ‘He seemed to see himself as some sort of ancient knight,’ the letter recounted. ‘This vicious little man – Welsh, according to Nelson, which may have been a jibe at me! – was a demon with the whip, and even threatened gory retribution if the boys should eat one of his garden pears. So Horatio, by his account, one night broke into the orchard and stole the lot of them. To add to this chivalric act, he shared the pears out to the others, and would not take a single one himself. This sounded priggish, and I said so. But I said it very quiet, dear. I could not risk upsetting the poor man.’

  It did occur to Hastie at some point that such tales might one day be worth writing up. He had gleaned from Nelson’s telling, in rather bitter tones, that many current ‘heroes’ had contributed not a little to their exploits as published in the prints and the gazettes.

  ‘He has a certain feeling, Sarah, that his merits might get lost in the hurly-burly, and he also has a feeling that he has not the advantages of other Navy men in terms of influence, what they call “interest.” I have a feeling of my own, from time to time, that the boastings might be aimed at a posterity he hopes to mark. He is not a natural writer of our language, though; his spelling and his clarity leave much to be desired. When he is recovered fully, I think that I might offer service in this direction, or at least hint at it.

  ‘But one thing is absolutely sure: while I have breath in body, nothing to his detriment shall ever be set before other eyes than yours. Unless, at some time in the future, he should wish it of himself.’

  The idea that Nelson’s ‘interest’ was poor was one that Hastie found a little singular. When Captain Suckling had come into his life his prospects were transformed, and he was entered on the Navy’s books aged twelve, which did wonders for his ‘seniority’ when promotion came to be computed later.

  But throughout his years at school, the pale, sick boy still dreamed doughty dreams, and built himself up with stories. Lost one day in a search for birds’ nests and cut off by a swollen river, he was asked by his grandmother why fear had not driven him back to her home earlier. To which he replied, Tim understood, that he had ‘not an inkling of what fear might be.’ Honour, too, he returned to obsessively. His whole life, he insisted, was nothing without honour: it was his very soul.

  Captain Suckling, if he had heard these tales of derring-do at all, responded to them with a certain humour, Tim Hastie wrote one hot Jamaica night.

  ‘Horatio was on holiday from school when he heard that Uncle Maurice, who had been on half pay for ages, had been appointed to another ship, the Raisonnable, and he immediately got his brother William to write and beg a place for him on her – which I’ll wager was because his own penmanship and grammar were so lacking.

  ‘The captain was agreeable to welcome so modest a hero as had been represented to him – although his answer was a shade ambiguous. The boy should come by all means and most welcome, despite he was so unrobust a specimen, he replied. And if he got his head knocked off by the first cannon ball that found him, well that would solve his problems, would it not?’

  One thing Nelson pointed out to Tim most firmly, was that he was entered as a midshipman, not a captain’s servant, which meant his ‘history’ started then – the first of January, 1771. But it was not until the first or second week of March, his schooling finally discarded, that the ‘poor, shivering boy’ found himself in Chatham.

  Alone in an unknown port, searching for an unknown ship. And twelve years old.

  Chapter Five

  As the idea of aiding the captain to achieve just recognition took shape, Tim Hastie continued writing his letters to Liverpool, but also made fair copies for his journal, in his best calligraphy. Entries like this:

  They say it is the British way to breed men tough. Well imagine poor Horatio after this latest die was cast. He received his summons to join his uncle's ship one freezing morning at a miserable boarding school.

  Under the eyes of his unforgiving fellow pupils, as well as the Welsh parson who could only see his departure as a diminution of the fees he earned, this tiny, weakly boy must needs strip himself of both education and his beloved brother William, who was forced to stay alone.

  A brief visit to his home, painful farewells to the servants and his brothers and his sisters, packing his meagre articles of clothing, all no doubt unsuitable for his future life, then a trip to London in a freezing coach with only his father as companion.

  When they reached London, Horatio alone is transferred to another coach to whisk him alone to Chatham on a foggy, foggy Medway afternoon.

  Nelson was not, in fact, alone on the coach, but knew nobody by name, and had been warned to speak to no one, no one at all. It was dark when he arrived, and very raw. The mist was almost liquid, and the liquid left a salt taste on his lips. He stood there with his baggage at his feet, and wondered what to do.

  Naturally, he had assumed someone would meet him. His Uncle Suckling had been told of his arrival, surely? Perhaps it was some naval tradition, some test of his initiative. But he was not a city boy, and the noise, and dirt, and ragged people unsettled him.

  Had he been in uniform, somebody would have helped, no doubt. Had he been dressed more like an urchin, God alone knows what might have become of him. It was a seaport. New naval war activity was starting, new people, male and female, were seeking for a living or for spoils. For all his claimed bravado, this child could have been lost forever.

  He was saved by luck or providence. A navy officer, guessing from his demeanour what he was up to, approached him. Fortunately, the uniform overruled the Rev Nelson’s strict instruction not to talk. The man knew the Raisonnable, and offered some refreshment, and found a bumboat to row him out to her.

  Things were not much better on the Raisonnable. As Nelson told it, ‘no one at all professed to know my name, or what I was do
ing there. In my innocence, I thought the idea of any person roaming willy-nilly around such a ship was an absurdity. But Captain Suckling was not on board, and formality of any sort did not apply.’

  It was three days or more – it was a small boy’s memory, and posterity was always at his shoulder – before Suckling arrived. By which time Horatio had found somewhere to sleep, had been given food and drink, and allowed at least to watch the routine of the ship.

  Routine, however, was a relative term. Life on a man-of-war working up for commission was like nothing in the world that anyone, man or boy, could have imagined. It was more a busy village or small market town than a machine for sailing or fighting, with market stalls, sheep, cows, goats and fowl milling everywhere. There were men of every creed and colour, including French (the race that Horatio’s mama had brought him up to hate the most), and wives, mistresses and children, in addition to a small but busy band of prostitutes. Horatio could not help but wonder what papa would have said of them.

  When his uncle was piped on board at long last, he greeted Nelson distantly, explaining later that that must be the shipboard way, in case the dread word ‘favourite’ should be bruited. He commented on his landman clothes, told him off to a different berth among the midshipmen (who had tended to shun the new boy, only because they could), and directed him to a barber-man ‘to shear his maiden locks.’

  Hastie, in a note to Sarah, commented on this ‘harshest of introductions to the sailors’ life.’ He suspected that the Welsh demon with the cane had done the lad a favour on a par with having lost his mother. He doubted he had any more tears unshed, or if he did that anyone should ever see them fall.

  By the time the Raisonnable hauled anchor up to go and fight the enemy. Nelson had only the finer points of seamanship left to learn.