Nelson
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Nelson has suffered from much idolatry and some denigration, but readers deserve dispassionate judgements. The admiral walked noisily through history, seeking the applause of fellow travellers, but was flawed like the rest of them. He was inherently generous and humane, but hardened by war and capable of startling ruthlessness. He set great store by loyalty and duty, and rested matters of state upon them, but betrayed a good wife and deserted a mistress. Generally honest and relatively careless of wealth, his advance into middle age deepened a financial insecurity and sharpened acquisitive instincts, and he benefited from some of the pecuniary abuses of the day. Highly intelligent and sensitive, Nelson devoured newspapers and books, but never banished the powerful prejudices that occasionally marred his judgement. His experience of life only reinforced his suspicion of foreigners and a belief in traditional English government. Though he prided himself on honour, strength and independence of mind, he was easily flattered and manipulated by flatterers. A sound professional, thoughtful and painstaking in preparing for combat, he could be wrong-headed and reckless and a victim of his own powerful warrior spirit. His intentions were usually good, but not infrequently he acted badly.
As the full extent of the material for this project came into view, it was obvious that it would require more than a single volume. This book covers the least familiar period of Nelson’s life, and traces him from childhood to the brink of international fame in 1797. We leave him looking as we all know him, a slim, sharp-featured, boyish admiral bedecked in the first of his honours, effectively blind in one eye and with an empty right sleeve, but with his last few and great years at the forefront of the European war still ahead.
This book was not written specifically for the bicentenary of Nelson’s death. The idea for it germinated decades ago, and serious research began at the beginning of the nineties, but the increasing interest in Nelson occasioned by the anniversary, with an attendant sharpening of literary cutlasses, has inevitably loomed over the last few years. To rush the research to fit some arbitrary date would defeat its object, however, and my own reflections upon the findings of the anniversary writers will have to await a succeeding volume of this biography. In the preparation of the first I have benefited from aid and kindness at every step, and am proud to record the names of my benefactors in the acknowledgements. Nevertheless, burdens imposed by a long-term project like this do not fall equally, and the people closest to me shouldered far too many. My dedication, therefore, is to those for whom Nelson, quite honourably and unwittingly, has also proven himself to be an efficient thief of time.
I
PROLOGUE: DUEL AT MIDNIGHT
Upon a terrace by the
Thames I saw the admiral stand,
He who received the latest clasp
Of Nelson’s dying hand.
Age, toil and care had somewhat bowed
His bearing proud and high,
But yet resolve was on his lip
And fire was in his eye.
I felt no wonder England holds
Dominion o’er the seas,
Still the red cross will face the world
While she hath men like these.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Tribute to Admiral Hardy
1
IT was late in the evening of Monday 19 December 1796 and the sky promised a night of cloud and fresh squalls. The two fast British frigates bore northeastwards on the starboard tack, the Spanish Mediterranean coast out of sight to larboard, and the enemy port of Cartagena somewhere in the darkness ahead. The smaller of the frigates, the Blanche captained by D’Arcy Preston, was flung out on the inshore flank, and both ships were on full alert. For though this was not what Commodore Nelson on La Minerve called a fighting mission, it was a dangerous one nonetheless.
Only weeks before, the main British fleet under Sir John Jervis had quit the Mediterranean, and left it an enemy lake controlled by the combined forces of France and Spain. Now Nelson was going back with these two small ships. They were five days out of Gibraltar, almost alone in a hostile sea spotted with enemies.
Nelson’s orders, dated nine days before, were to evacuate Britain’s only remaining garrison in the Mediterranean, the handful of troops on the island of Elba, between Corsica and the Italian peninsula, with all artillery, baggage and stores. Some seventeen warships at Elba, the largest of them only frigates, were also to be extricated.
It was a difficult operation, but Sir John Jervis knew that if anyone could do it, it was Nelson. Expecting to fight the Spanish fleet in the Atlantic, the British commander-in-chief had been unable to spare a big ship of the line for the mission. It had to be frigates – smaller but faster vessels, able to avoid more heavily armed adversaries. Jervis had several fine frigate captains fit for the enterprise, but he was wary of arousing jealousies among them, and thought it wiser to entrust the expedition to an officer of greater rank, one respected by every captain in the fleet. It was thus that Commodore Horatio Nelson of the Captain ship of the line received instructions to shift his broad pendant to La Minerve, under Captain George Cockburn, and sail to Elba. ‘Having experienced the most important effects from your enterprise and ability upon various occasions since I had the honour to command in the Mediterranean,’ Sir John told him, ‘I leave entirely to your judgement the time and manner of carrying this critical and arduous service into execution.’1
There was not a drop of flattery in the admiral’s words, for he meant every one. He had the cream of the Royal Navy in his fleet. Men such as Troubridge, Miller, Collingwood and Saumarez. But at the age of thirty-eight, and with a slight, delicate frame and shock head of hair that made him seem positively boyish, Nelson was its rising star. He had already won laurels for his previous commanders-in-chief, Hood and Hotham, and was now serially proving his worth to Jervis. But while the admiral owned that ‘a more able or enterprising officer [than the commodore] does not exist’, he was also discovering that Nelson’s uses went much further than fighting. The commodore had worked effectively with different professionals, with diplomats, army officers and merchants as well as fellow naval officers, and arbitrated between men of disparate tempers and inclinations. Those qualities were needed now, and Jervis chose Nelson in the strong belief that his ‘firmness and ability will very soon fix all the parts of our force, naval and military’. Indeed, the admiral was so sure that Nelson would discharge these new, dangerous and difficult duties with complete professionalism that he put the accompanying frigate under his own relative, Captain Preston, freshly arrived upon the station.2
Nelson had taken only a few of his personal following from the Captain to La Minerve. James Noble, his young signal lieutenant, was an American, the son of a revolutionary Loyalist (an American colonist sympathetic to the British), and had distinguished himself aboard the commodore’s previous ship, the Agamemnon. He had been wounded by the French, and captured by them, but neither incident deterred him from volunteering for every service. With Nelson also came his secretary, John Philip Castang, a Londoner who had followed him for four of his twenty-nine years; a twenty-four-year-old seaman named Israel Coulson, duly rated yeoman of the powder room on La Minerve; and Giovanni Dulbecco, an Italian boy, also formerly of the Agamemnon. 3
However, Nelson knew the entire crews of La Minerve and the Blanche well, for both ships had served under his command during much of the year. Captain Preston was a new appointment, but Cockburn of La Minerve was one of Nelson’s favourite officers. A dour but dependable Scot, Captain Cockburn was a tight-lipped creature with few close friends, but he was talented and energetic, and would one day earn fame – or infamy – for his capture of Washington, the American capital, during the War of 1812. Now a rising captain in his twenties, he was flourishing under Nelson’s supervision.
Hitherto the voyage had been uneventful. Buffeted by gales, they had nevertheless passed Cape de Gata earlier on the 19th, and seized a Genoese polacre. The republic of Genoa was in dispute with Britain, but Nelson released the ship after reliev
ing it of eight bales of silk and a trunk that appeared to belong to the Spaniards, with whom his country was at war. Sold as prize, Nelson reckoned, the merchandise might at least give his seamen a drink. Then the frigates had sailed on, and as night fell penetrated the dangerous approaches to the Spanish naval base of Cartagena.4
At ten in the evening the Blanche signalled. Nelson ordered Cockburn to close with their consort, and Preston made his report. He had seen two Spanish frigates to leeward, bearing towards them. The British ships suddenly hummed with activity, as staccato drumbeats hastened the men to their quarters and the frigates were cleared for action.
In the dark the process was complicated as well as hurried, but the men were trained to work efficiently and silently. Pillars, partitions, hammocks and other impedimenta were stowed out of the way, inflammables such as canvas doused in water to resist fire, and decks sprinkled with sand to provide greater grip to running bare feet. Red-coated marines stood ready with their muskets, while gun crews cast the cannons loose. Mechanically men unplugged the threatening muzzles, cleared touchholes and levelled the pieces before hauling them to the opened ports. Lines of ‘powder monkeys’ formed to shift the cartridges, shot and wads from the magazines and powder rooms to the guns. Others prepared to receive rather than inflict damage. Carpenters and their mates braced themselves to stop any holes punched through the timbers below the waterline, while in the airless murk of the bowels of the ships, probably on the platforms below the gun decks, the surgeons and their assistants laid out their grisly tools.
Some historians have criticised Nelson’s decision to fight on the grounds that it jeopardised his greater mission, the evacuation of Elba, but this is to miss the whole thrust of his experiences in the Mediterranean over the previous three to four years. As he ordered Cockburn to haul the ship’s wind, cross the bows of the Blanche and pass under the stern of the largest of the enemy frigates, he had not the slightest fear of failure.
For times were changing and the French and Spanish navies were not what they had once been. Political turmoil, shortages of skilled sailors and experienced officers, and inefficient defensive tactics had taken their toll. However impressive or powerfully armed their ships, they were far outmatched in seamanship and gunnery by the British crews. In fact, while its rivals decayed, the Royal Navy had relentlessly improved, keeping the sea in all weathers and forging an awesome fighting efficiency under outstanding captains. Nelson had always been an opportunist, hungry for distinction, but he was one of several officers who understood the implications of those changing historical circumstances.
The traditional tactics of battle, which saw belligerent fleets in more or less parallel lines banging away at each other over distance, were defensive in character and keyed to a time when the competing navies had been more equally matched. But now Britain’s superiority in battle was making the old safe and sure line-ahead formations increasingly obsolete. Risks might be taken to achieve decisive results, and the ‘line’ abandoned. When Nelson advised an admirer, the young Lord Cochrane (later the model for the fictional heroes of Marryat, Forester and O’Brian) to ‘never mind manoeuvres, always go at them’, he was not expressing a mindless and reckless enthusiasm for combat. As much as anyone he believed in rigorous training and careful planning. Rather he was acknowledging the massive battle superiority of the Royal Navy, and suggesting that its advantages were maximised in close-quarter actions with the enemy.5
That night off the Spanish coast he was set to prove it in a straight stand-up fight.
It was ten-forty before La Minerve slipped under the impressive stern of the Santa Sabina, the Spaniard’s burning poop light and greater size marking it as the senior of the two enemy ships. The odds were roughly equal on the face of it, though Nelson had a slight superiority in the number of guns and weight of metal fired. La Minerve was a captured French prize. She carried forty-two guns, two of them carronades designed for close-range action, while the Spanish ship mounted forty: twenty-eight eighteen-pounder and twelve eight-pounder cannons. The manpower conferred few advantages either way. On the Santa Sabina Don Jacobo Stuart commanded some 286 men, whereas Nelson had 216 seamen and 25 marines, giving a total of 241, besides perhaps a score of ‘supernumeraries’.6
But as Nelson knew full well it was teamwork and the skill with ships and guns that mattered. From the beginning he outmanoeuvred his opponent by running alongside the Spaniard’s vulnerable stern, where the timbers were flimsier and there were few enemy guns to face. From that position he could ‘rake’ the Santa Sabina with his full broadside, hitting her end-on and smashing wood, dismounting guns and killing and maiming men along the entire length of her decks.
‘This is an English frigate,’ Nelson called, with his usual submersion of the other British nationalities. There was no answer, and La Minerve opened fire, the guns along her side spitting fire into the night as they bore upon their targets. Three minutes later the Blanche brought the other Spanish frigate, the forty-gun Ceres, to action, and all four ships were wreathed in the powder smoke of murderous point-blank volleys. The horror of a sea fight was like no other. Large round shot could smash through ship timbers more than two feet thick, and there was nowhere for men to run. Caged in a wooden hell, amidst the roar, smoke and stench of guns, and air filled with lethal flying debris, they knew that only inches of plank and sheathing divided them from the deep below. Men slaved silently at their pieces, and fell and suffered and died.7
Nelson’s opponent, Don Jacobo Stuart, was not one to run away from a challenge. A descendant of the expelled James II of England, he was as proud as any Castillian caudillo and fought bravely, but he was simply outgunned and outsailed. Cockburn, who as captain of La Minerve was responsible for her management, handled his frigate beautifully. She wore this way and that to prevent her opponent escaping to leeward, and unleashed one broadside after another into her with mechanical precision. According to the Spaniards, the fire from Nelson’s ship ‘was a perfect hell’.8
While La Minerve and Santa Sabina manoeuvred and fought, as if partners in a macabre midnight dance, the Blanche vindicated the commodore’s confidence by defeating the Ceres with little trouble. Preston, like Nelson, fired into the Spaniard’s bow and stern when he could, raking her fore and aft. As usual the enemy fire was misdirected, largely flying up towards masts, spars, sails and empty air rather than into the British hull; it was also sluggish and poorly aimed. ‘When they did fire their guns they were in such haste that their shot all went over us,’ recalled an American seaman aboard the Blanche. After taking eight or nine broadsides in half an hour and suffering forty-five casualties the Ceres ceased firing. Her colours were hauled down and she called for quarter.9
Meanwhile, Nelson’s battle with the Santa Sabina raged for two and a half hours, ending at about one-twenty in the morning when Don Jacobo hauled down his colours and declared he could fight no more. The masts of the Spanish frigate had all been damaged close to the decks, her mizzen was down, her hull riddled and her sails and rigging slashed to pieces. Many of her men were killed and wounded – probably many more than the fifty-six later admitted in Cartagena and fewer than the 164 claimed by Nelson. But she had not been crushed with impunity. La Minerve had suffered most aloft, due to the inefficient continental practice of trying to bring down masts and sails, but she had also sustained forty-six human casualties, including a midshipman and seven others killed. Lieutenant Noble had been showered in splinters and injured in six or seven places.
Jonathan Culverhouse, the first lieutenant of La Minerve, went aboard the prize and sent the Spanish captain on the opposite journey. Once on the quarterdeck of the British ship, Don Jacobo explained that he had lost all his senior officers and offered his sword, but Nelson generously declined to take it. While they talked Thomas Masterman Hardy, second lieutenant of the victorious ship, took a prize crew of twenty-four to the Santa Sabina to help Culverhouse secure the prisoners, clear wreckage and fix the ship for sailing as best they c
ould. Speedy repairs were begun on both ships as they got underway towards the southeast, La Minerve towing her prize behind.
Elated by his victory, Nelson returned to his cabin to pen a candlelit report to Sir John Jervis. This was a dispatch obviously destined for the London Gazette and he was determined to do his men justice. No one fought more tenaciously for his followers than Commodore Nelson and he jumped at this new opportunity to advance Cockburn and his officers.
You are, sir, so thoroughly acquainted with the merits of Captain Cockburn [he wrote] that it is needless for me to express them, but the discipline of the Minerve does the highest credit to her captain and lieutenants, and I wish fully to express the sense I entertain of their judgement and gallantry. Lieutenant Culverhouse, the first lieutenant, is an old officer of very distinguished merit. Lieutenants Hardy, [William Hall] Gage, and Noble deserve every praise which gallantry and zeal justly entitle them to, as do every other officer and man in the ship. You will observe, sir, I am sure with regret, amongst the wounded, Lieutenant James Noble, who quitted the Captain to serve with me, and whose merits and repeated wounds received in fighting the enemies of our country entitle him to every reward which a grateful nation can bestow.
If the engagement had ended there, Nelson would have taken two Spanish frigates and scored a minor but striking and morale-lifting success. Unfortunately, it did not, and the fortunes of war had more in store for him.