RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  The artist stayed on the ship for a week, sketching every aspect of the scene with forensic detail, and when Victory sailed to Chatham for repairs to its own battered carcase, Devis accompanied it. He assisted William Beatty – the ship’s surgeon who had attended the dying Nelson – as they decanted the admiral from the alcohol-filled cask in which he had been pickled. Manhandling him like a giant fish, the two men dressed the hero in his uniform, preparing him for his final performance.

  The means of preservation had left Nelson’s features distorted and discoloured, and despite Beatty’s attempts to restore them by rubbing, it was decided that Nelson looked too unlike Nelson, and unfit for public display at his forthcoming lying in state. Yet for Devis, it was an extraordinary opportunity. He could do what a doctor could not, restoring the dead with a gaudy slap of paint.

  The finished canvas was, as Sir John Moore might agree, a suitably operatic scene. Nelson has been felled from above, and lies ashen and limp, his life ebbing away. His accoutrements and awards are discarded uselessly beside his body, which even now looks greenish, as if already steeped in fine brandy and sweet wine; his clothes lie at his feet, the surgeon having cut away his breeches to allow access to his wounds. Nelson was perfectly aware of the significance of his death – from the handkerchief placed over his face and medals as he fell so that his men should not recognise him, to his comment to Hardy, ‘They have done for me at last. My backbone is shot through’ – to his urgent request that his body should not be thrown overboard, as other bodies were being tossed into the Atlantic all around him.

  Around his pale glowing flesh – ‘a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar’ – gather mechanical figures. Like Rembrandt’s depiction of a dissection or a resurrection by Titian, Devis’s painting plays tricks with dark and light; it manages to be both overlit and obscure at the same time.

  His rival, Benjamin West – a Pennsylvanian Quaker, now president of the Royal Academy, and celebrated for his spectacular Death of Wolfe – complained that Devis’s work was not an ‘Epic representation’, and that Nelson looked ‘like a sick man in a Prison Hole’. (Devis might have countered that at least he knew what such a hole looked like.) Given that West had painted his own version of the most famous event in British history, the contrast between the competing works – these aesthetic autopsies, both fighting for historical supremacy – is a wonder to behold.

  West presents an action-movie version of Nelson’s demise, all red-coated marines and a pair of bare-chested sailors who wouldn’t look out of place fighting in a dance hall in Pompey tonight. Hats are raised, heroic stances struck. Every earnest, seaworthy face is turned towards the stricken admiral, who sinks gracefully like a stove schooner in his officers’ collective embrace. Meanwhile the battle rages behind, triumphantly won even in its victor’s fading light. To the boy in me, such scenes were thrilling. In my early teens I was obsessed with the Napoleonic Wars; I spent hours painting tiny metal soldiers with the peacock colours of hussars, chasseurs, dragoons, grenadiers, cuirassiers, lancers and mamelouks, their frogging, plumes, epaulettes, dolmans, pelisses, shakos and leopardskins the epitome of the exotic military dandy.

  How much darker is Devis’s vision! Where there’s scarlet and gold in West’s painting, there’s murk and gloom in Devis’s. His is the mumblecore version of Nelson’s death, all whispers and shadows, imbued with mortality rather than pomp. One is a celebration, the other a Christian parable, a rousing crescendo or a plangent aria: both issue from a theatre of war which neither artist witnessed, staged on an immortal ship with its sails as backcloths, its crew as the angelic chorus, and its rigging as the stairway to heaven.

  It’s all getting a bit fetid down there, fuggy with all this smoke and blood and guts, and I’m relieved to return to open air, ascending to the most sacred spot of all, the ground zero of British history. Screwed into the top deck is the plaque marking the place where the sniper’s musketball did its job, entering Nelson’s left shoulder to lodge between the sixth and seventh vertebrae, carrying golden threads from his epaulette as it travelled on its fatal trajectory, and skewering the heroic corpus in an Olympian apotheosis, forever falling back, over and over again.

  HERE NELSON FELL

  21st Oct 1805

  Except that this is not where he fell, nor is this the ‘original’ plaque which once marked the spot. Like much of the ship, the quarterdeck has been replaced even since I last stood here. And this morning the timbers are being laid again.

  ‘What are they made of?’ my companion – who happens to be named Horatio – enquires of one of the workers, who is busy kicking a black bin bag full of rubbish over the place where he lay.

  ‘Wood?’ the man replies, pleased with his own sarcasm.

  Not even hearts of oak; as Horatio points out, the new decking is comprised of tropical hardwood.

  Suddenly, I feel fooled. Is any of this real? The cannon ranged along the lower decks have long since been replaced by fibreglass replicas, for reasons of weight and wear, we’re told; although the cannonballs are made of concrete rather than iron. The entirety of this ‘Victory’ might as well be a set for a seventies television production, with a different crew: a director in thick-rimmed spectacles and sideboards, lumbering cameras on wheels wielded by men in huge headphones, and a smart young continuity woman, clipboard at the ready. Someone plays some stirring music.

  When the Athenians honoured Theseus’ ship by replacing its rotting planks, their philosophers agonised as to whether it was Theseus’ ship any longer, any more than a river is the same river as its waters constantly flow out to sea, or than you are the same you since your body has rebuilt itself many times since you came into being. We are memory, not history. At what point, in the transmigration of maritime souls, did Victory stop being Victory, if it ever did? For the long nineteenth century the Regency relic lay along the quayside, accessed by Victorian visitors by boat and ladder, reincarnated in the Victorian image like an over-restored country church; a Victorian version of what it should look like, rather than the Georgian ship Nelson had known. In 1922 it was brought into dry dock as a pageant, a nineteen-twenties edition of itself. In the Second World War it was a symbol of resistance while the dockyard buildings burned around it in the Blitz. Then it became a life-size Airfix kit for boys like me.

  Now, in the twenty-first century, it is no more or less Victory than a forest is the sum of its replanted parts. In a Hampshire nature reserve, another plaque tells me that the oaks from which Victory was made took three hundred years to grow, three hundred to flourish, and three hundred to die. Perhaps the ship should be allowed the same dignity. In the interests of historical accuracy she ought to be left to rot there in the dockyard as a memorial to all that she meant, and now does not mean.

  On Christmas Eve 1849, wearing his new green box coat, of which he was inordinately proud, Herman Melville took a cab from his lodgings in Craven Street, which lay just off Trafalgar Square and its lofty statue of Britain’s naval hero. The narrow road ran down from The Strand towards the unembanked shore, where the Thames flowed wide and filthy, ‘the inscrutable riverward street packed to blackness’, as Henry James would see it. After three months away from home, Melville was leaving London.

  After a five-hour journey from Waterloo station, he arrived at Portsmouth, where he spent the night at the Quebec Hotel on the Point, a spit of land jutting out into the harbour. Nicknamed Spice Island, it had long been a lawless place, a huddle of taverns, warehouses and whorehouses. The hotel still stands, a genteel Georgian building, and its address – Bath Square, at the end of Bathing Lane – advertises its original function: as a bath house fed with salt water, the waves almost running into its dining room and up to its guests’ tables. Predating Torquay’s medical baths by half a century, the Quebec was a testament to a serious pleasure: that of entering the sea for its own sake.

  The building is dwarfed on either side by stone ramparts. At their feet runs a slender beach whe
re, in summer, old men with blurred tattoos turn the colour of coffee, and where local lads throw themselves off walls made to repel invaders, their pale bodies arcing into the water like seals. I swim there too, in the narrow channel dredged deep enough to accommodate aircraft carriers. I imagine Herman watching me from his room, before taking to the streets.

  It was late December, and a cold wind blew up the Solent. That coat came into its own. This was the sort of place to which Herman was always drawn, like the Battery in Manhattan, where he was born; places where the streets stopped and the sea took over. On his early-Christmas-morning stroll, he ‘passed the famous “North Corner”’, as his journal records. ‘Saw the “Victory”, Nelson’s ship at anchor.’ Then he returned for breakfast, only to be rudely interrupted by news that the ship which was to take him home had appeared in the harbour. In a flurry of capsized coffee cups, he dashed to grab his bag, and set off on his voyage back to New York.

  There is no hint, in his scant account, of Melville having actually boarded Victory; it was then a receiving and training station, not officially open to visitors, although ‘this would not prevent an enterprising sailor extending an informal invitation to come aboard for a few shillings’. But he certainly boarded it in his imagination: when Father Mapple delivers his sermon on Jonah from a pulpit-prow in Moby-Dick, ‘impregnable in his little Quebec’, a ray of light, shed from a window with an angel’s face in it, illuminates a spot on the chapel floor, ‘like that silver plate now inserted into Victory’s plank where Nelson fell’. Nor is it any wonder that this story so affected the young American on his visit to Portsmouth, since the shore from which he left England was the same from which Nelson embarked for his fated appointment.

  On that last day on land, the vice admiral had tried to ‘elude the populace by taking a byeway to the beach’, only for a crowd to gather at Southsea, ‘pressing forward to obtain a sight of his face; many were in tears, and many knelt down before him, and blessed him as they passed’. It was as if he were already a saint.

  The numbers swelled as they reached the sea wall, pushing towards the parapet, ‘for the people could not be debarred from gazing till the last moment upon the hero – the darling hero – of England’. At two o’clock in the afternoon, Nelson embarked from the bathing machines, and was rowed to Victory past the wheeled huts lined up on the shore.

  A month later, on 21 October 1805, he strode on deck to face the enemy. In the literary accounts that match Devis and West’s paintings with their florid words, he was a standing target. According to the poet Robert Southey – on whose biography of the hero Melville drew – Nelson ‘wore that day, as usual, his admiral’s frock-coat, bearing on the left breast four stars of the different orders with which he was invested. Ornaments which rendered him so conspicuous a mark for the enemy were beheld with ominous apprehension by his officers.’ For his part, Melville saw ‘a sort of priestly motive’ which led Nelson to ‘dress his person in the jewelled vouchers of his own shining deeds; if thus to have adorned himself for the altar and the sacrifice’. In fact, that day Nelson wore his undress coat with sequin replicas of his awards sewn over his heart. Yet those paillettes and silver-gilt thread did indeed turn his coat into a conspicuous costume, ‘an ornate publication of his person’.

  These stories preoccupied Melville, who was busy creating his own myths. In London, he had made a pilgrimage to Greenwich, taking the steamer from the Adelphi down the Thames; he was already familiar with the river, having crossed from Wapping by the new tunnel to Rotherhithe, ‘flinging a fourpenny piece to “Poor Jack” in the mud’. He even claimed to have seen a beggar on Tower Hill with a board hanging around his neck like an albatross – only it was painted with the whale that had bitten off his leg.

  Greenwich’s naval hospital was well known for its veterans, identified by their own wooden stumps and archaic blue frockcoats and cocked hats which earned them their nickname, Greenwich geese. The building itself was a great ship beached on the riverbank, with figureheads on its walls and peg-legged sailors accommodated in ‘cabins’ along with their mementoes, from maritime paintings to stuffed seabirds.

  Wandering along the terrace, Melville met a fellow American, ‘an old pensioner in a cocked hat with whom I had a most interesting talk … a Baltimore Negro, a Trafalgar man’. This chance encounter would assume a certain importance for the writer. During the Napoleonic Wars, many Americans were press-ganged into the British navy, ‘all kinds of tradesmen and Negroes’ – twenty-two on Victory alone. The Baltimorean told Melville that even the gaols were raided for crews.

  In a photograph taken in 1854, five years after Melville’s visit, a group of Greenwich veterans sit on a bench. Among them is an elderly black man. Records indicate that one Richard Baker, born in Baltimore, served at Trafalgar on HMS Leviathan and later joined the pensioners; his ship was retired to Portsmouth Harbour as a prison hulk, holding convicts bound for Van Diemen’s Land. Was this Melville’s countryman? He sits in antediluvian company, an exotic figure clutching a cane, a medal on his waistcoat, his hair turned entirely white.

  To Melville, this sailor, an alien like himself, was a living memory of a legendary past, in a place where time and space began and ended: embedded in the hill behind was a brass line over which one could step from one hemisphere to another. When he walked into the Painted Hall, Melville found fifteen hundred veterans at dinner; the contrast between the rough mariners in their frockcoats and the baroque interior was remarkable: ‘Pensioners in palaces!’ And in an anteroom he came into the presence of the hero himself: a row of glass cases filled with Nelsoniana.

  Six years later, in 1856, Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne would also visit Greenwich. He’d just arrived in London from Southampton, where he’d seen Netley Abbey and was fascinated by the gypsy woman who’d lived in the ruins for thirty years. Ever attuned to the gothic, Hawthorne was struck by the Painted Hall and its sanctuary, ‘completely and exclusively adorned with pictures of the great Admiral’s exploits. We see the frail, ardent man in all the most noted events of his career, from his encounter with a Polar bear to his death at Trafalgar, quivering here and there about the room like a blue, lambent flame.’ For Hawthorne, as for Melville, Nelson was a legend. ‘But the most sacred objects of all are two of Nelson’s coats, under separate glass cases.’

  One is that which he wore at the Battle of the Nile, and is now sadly injured by moths, which will quite destroy it in a few years, unless its guardians preserve it as we do Washington’s suit, by occasionally baking it in an oven. The other is the coat in which he received his death wound at Trafalgar. On its breast are sewed three or four stars and orders of knighthood, now much dimmed by time and damp, but which glittered brightly enough on the battle-day to draw the fatal aim of a French marksman. The bullet-hole is visible on the shoulder, as well as part of the golden tassels of an epaulet, the rest of which was shot away. Over the coat is laid a white waistcoat with a great bloodstain on it, out of which all the redness has utterly faded, leaving out of it a dingy yellow hue, in the threescore years since that blood gushed out. Yet it was once the reddest blood in England, – Nelson’s blood!

  Seventy years and many wars later, these relics retained their power. In 1926, when writing To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf visited that Greenwich chamber and found it heady with emotion. The sight of the coat whose decorations Nelson had hidden with his hand as he was carried down, ‘lest the sailors might see it was him’; his ‘little fuzzy pigtail’ tied in black; and his long white stockings – ‘one much stained’; all these prompted her almost to burst into tears, ‘& could swear I was there on the Victory’.

  In the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, the Thames shore is accounted part of the country’s coast, the sea inside the city turned inside-out. Up until the nineteen-thirties the riverbank at Greenwich was used as a beach from which Londoners swam, as if it were a resort. Walking there a few years after Woolf’s visit, Denton Welch passed the desultory strand where the
low tide still reveals blackened bones, empty oyster shells and the soft stems of clay pipes like the debris of some long-forgotten feast. On the shore he saw a pair of children playing ‘some spiritualistic ghost game … close to the horrible black water’. The young artist felt overwhelmed by the insistent sights and sounds of the river, ‘their never-ending story of time passing, longing, death’. Later, riding over the Thames on a bus at night, he looked down from the bridge into the swirling darkness and imagined how awful it would be to swim around its stone piers. He wondered if they had barnacles on them, and thought of the black mud at their edges, so deep that he might sink up to his neck in it. What if he were to see someone jump from the parapet? Would he dive in too, only for the suicide to clutch at him frantically, drowning him as well?

  I realise, as I walk along the river, that my pockets are so full of stones I’ve collected from other beaches that if I fell in I’d probably sink as quickly as Virginia sank into the Ouse. One step over the embankment and there’d be nothing the modern world could do to save me; I would enter another world. The solidness of the stone edge only intensifies the intimation of mortality: when it replaced the beaches of the city, the embankment made the Thames flow more dangerously, ‘running away with suicides and accidentally drowned bodies faster than a midnight funeral’, as Dickens wrote. Its blocks still stand as gravestones for the lost, the two dozen or more souls who throw themselves into the river each year as it courses through the capital.

  Behind me rise Wren’s colonnades and cupolas – ‘among the most splendid things of their kind in Europe’ – measuring out the imperial reach. This is London’s water palace, built to service its maritime empire. And at the heart of the baroque complex, so little changed that it is often used in films as a stand-in for the eighteenth-century city – is its chapel, its domed entrance draped with semi-naked female figures and captioned with Biblical exhortations for those who would take to the sea.