by John Sugden
On 19 August the ships put to sea again but the general situation had not improved. A barrier of ice extended through more than twenty degrees of longitude in the latitude of about eighty degrees north, and there was no way through it. Finally, on the 22nd, with the season rapidly closing, Phipps admitted defeat and headed for home.
Considering their privations the ships were still in respectable shape, although the Carcass was indisputably the less manageable of the two vessels, and the men of the Racehorse cursed her ‘dull sailing’. Lutwidge had occasionally to lower his boats to help her manoeuvre, and Nelson may have been in charge of the cutter when it helped tow the Carcass clear of its consort on 24 August. The boy may have assumed the worst of the voyage was over as the polar seas heaved astern, but he was roughly awakened by a tempest that enclosed them on the evening of 10 September, some twenty leagues from the coast of Norway in latitude fifty-seven degrees and thirty-eight minutes. Indeed, it was as savage a storm as Horace had ever endured.
The winds strengthened after the ships passed the Shetland Islands and entered the North Sea on the last leg of their journey home. For a while they briskly blew the vessels forward, but 8 September was a gloomier day and the winds less dependable. When the storm broke two days later it was ferocious, sluicing the cleared decks and ripping at the ropes that secured the small boats. ‘It blew as hard almost as we thought it well could,’ remarked Floyd from the sea-tossed Racehorse, and the waves ‘tumbled in upon us exceedingly’, rising so high that the Carcass was blotted from sight. The people on both ships feared the other had gone to the bottom. The main deck of the Carcass continually rolled beneath sheets of water, and when the storm slackened in the earlier part of the 11th and the battered ships struggled to repair their wounds they were still separated.25
The respite was brief, however. Late that same day a sudden clap of thunder heralded a fresh attack, and by midnight ‘the sea [was] making a free passage’ over the Carcass. Provisions, casks lashed to the deck, spars and booms were taken over the side, and the launch was scuttled and shoved overboard to relieve the ship. Men laboured to take in sail aloft, tie themselves down or keep their feet on careering decks awash with sea water. The carpenter Abraham Purcell, who was trying to secure hatches and stores, was swept both out of and into the ship by different waves, and a mate and a foretopman also went overboard. The gale eased at ten o’clock on 12 September, and the sails were reset, but it had been a close thing. The Carcass was ‘almost waterlogged from the weight of water on her decks’.26
Meanwhile, the Racehorse too had survived the latest onslaught, though ‘everybody agreed that they had never been but once in so great a tempest’. Two guns were jettisoned, three boats lost and the ship was thrown upon its side several times. When the seas subsided and the winds fell on the 13th the sailors of both ships, weary and wasted from constant battle, looked for a haven.27
For Midshipman Nelson, the man in the making, some of the sights that now opened before him must have been welcome reminders of the boy he had been not so very long ago. To starboard of the Carcass the beautiful Norfolk coast slid by. Cromer lighthouse blinked in the distance on 18 September, and the next day the ship put into Yarmouth. They remained a few days waiting for a suitable wind, repairing the ship and replenishing stores, and acquaintances of Nelson may have been among the several visitors who travelled from Norwich to come aboard.
There was still no word of Phipps. Lutwidge had orders to proceed to the Nore in the event of a separation, but he feared that Phipps had drowned and wrote to the Admiralty notifying them of his return. On the 23rd the Carcass was compelled to resume its voyage without any further news of the commodore, but three days later her crew were greatly relieved to find the Racehorse in Harwich harbour. The adventure was now thoroughly over, and another week took Lutwidge to Deptford, where he moored his ship alongside a sheer-hulk and left her for a complete overhaul.
The expedition had not reached the North Pole. It did not even convince every party that the Northeast Passage was mythical or at least unnavigable, but it had been a creditable performance nevertheless, and reflected favourably upon all concerned. The camaraderie, forged in peril, was warm and infectious, and when the ships were paid off on 14 October First Lieutenant John Baird was almost mobbed by the men who even wanted to strip off their shirts to lay them at Baird’s feet so that his shoes should not be dirtied as he withdrew to his coach. Sadly, talented though he was, Baird had little ‘interest’ in the service and never reached that elusive captain’s list. Nor did Horace’s friend, Robert Hughes, who transferred to the Dublin. He sailed on six other ships before passing his examination for lieutenant in 1780, but evidently died the same year, just after his commission was confirmed.28
Horatio Nelson had been greatly enriched by the experience, and imbibed lessons in seamanship, resourcefulness and resolution. He had grown in confidence, ability and enthusiasm for new challenges. After all, he had filled a man’s place, asked no favours, and won the respect of picked men. Nelson took away not only the continuing goodwill of Phipps and Lutwidge, but also one of the silver pocket watches inscribed with the words, ‘for strict attention to duty with H.M.S. Racehorse. North Pole Expedition 1772.’ Every time he looked at the watch it told him more than the time. It told him he had met a difficult job head-on and shaped up.29
On 14 October he received £8. 2s. 2d. in wages, after various deductions totalling 10s. 4d., and the next day rejoined the old Triumph moored at Blackstakes. Captain Suckling still commanded, and immediately put his nephew’s name back on the ship’s books with the rating of captain’s servant. The ship moved to Chatham on 20 October, but now Horace left her for good. On 26 October he was discharged to the Seahorse, bound with new shipmates for new climes, and the long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope to the East Indies.30
Once again, it seems, Captain Suckling had found just the right situation to further his nephew’s progress in the service.
V
EAST INDIES ADVENTURE
Blake and Rooke, and Vernon near him
Crown’d with glory’s laurel wreath,
Chase despairing thoughts, and cheer him
On to victory or death.
Like a giant from his slumber,
Swift he starts, with freshen’d soul;
‘Yes – among that sainted number
Nelson shall his name enrol!’
H. L. Torre, Nelson’s Vision
1
ONE thing is certain. For all its rigours, the Arctic voyage had left Horace’s appetite for adventure unscathed. Stimulated by his personal success on the polar expedition, his eyes sparkled when his uncle told him about the two ships fitting out for the East Indies.
The twenty-four-gun Seahorse was one of them, a primitive frigate launched in 1748, with a lower deck 112 feet long and a beam or width of thirty-two. Her captain was George Farmer. Farmer’s progress in the service had been steady despite misadventures. A lieutenant the year after Nelson was born, he had stepped up to commander in 1768 and taken the Swift sloop to the South Atlantic the following year. The assignment was not a particularly fortunate one, for in 1770 he was wrecked upon the Patagonian coast. Farmer struggled ashore with his crew, and within a month was rescued by another sloop, but in the ensuing June it was he who surrendered Port Egmont in the Falkland Islands to the Spanish and prompted the crisis that gave Captain Suckling the Raisonable. Still, back in England Farmer was exonerated and promoted to post-captain in January 1771, while not yet forty. He was appointed first to the Launceston and then to the Seahorse.
Farmer was another of Captain Suckling’s friends. Indeed, he had been a midshipman on Suckling’s Dreadnought in the West Indies and owed him favours. Moreover, although Farmer’s roots were in Northamptonshire and Ireland, he had spent several years in the impress service in Norfolk, recruiting for the navy, and living at Facolneston, near Wymondham. It was not until the August and September of 1773, when the Seahorse was being prep
ared, that he moved to Sussex. Most probably Farmer and Suckling, both naval officers based in East Anglia, had seen much of each other over the 1 years.
The Seahorse gave Farmer means of patronage, with places available to family and such useful friends as Captain Suckling. His son, George William Farmer, was entered on the ship’s books as captain’s servant. However, though George was seventeen and entirely capable of sailing, he remained at home when the Seahorse left England, leaving the books to provide him with an entirely fictional career as a midshipman and able seaman. It was fraud, if fraud of a type common to the service. Someone, perhaps Farmer or officers who authenticated his books, collected the wages the absentee was supposed to be earning, while young George gained years of valuable sea time without ever quitting terra firma. As for Nelson, Captain Farmer was quite willing to oblige Suckling and take him aboard, and the youth was accordingly rated midshipman of the Seahorse on 27 October 1773. He was fifteen, but the muster made it eighteen, compounding the misstatements about his age in the books of the Carcass. 2
Since there was no knowing how long a ship might remain on a station as remote as the Far East, Captain Suckling searched for another reliable officer who might share with Farmer the job of looking after his nephew. Supervising affairs in the Medway and the Nore had given Suckling new contacts through the office of the Navy Board, the department responsible for governing dockyards, building and maintaining ships and appointing warrant officers such as masters, pursers and surgeons. It was to one of these contacts, Samuel Bentham, the naval architect and brother of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, that the captain now turned. Thus, on 28 October, Bentham addressed a short letter to a certain Mr Kee. He understood that Kee was agent for Thomas Surridge, who had just been appointed master of the Seahorse, and asked him to draw his client’s notice to young Horatio Nelson, destined to join that ship at Spithead. ‘The master is a necessary man for a young lad to be introduced to,’ opined Bentham. It was, it transpired, a fortunate choice, for Surridge was a protector and role model of outstanding ability.3
Both were needed because the Seahorse was not the happiest ship.
Nelson was good at winning friends among peers and seniors alike. He recalled many with affection in later years, and if he encountered meanness of spirit or incompetence in his travels, he seems to have thought them best buried with the past. He spoke well of his chosen profession, for all its faults. Reading the piece of autobiography he produced in 1799, one is struck by a service abundantly supplied with capable, responsible, and well-meaning officers. The original tapestry, it has to be said, was of a richer weave.
His fellow ‘young gentlemen’ presented the usual variety. Most of the midshipmen who worked with him on the Seahorse were older than he was. There was James Gardiner, William Sullivan of Greenwich, Richard James and Henry Darracott, both from Plymouth, the West Indian Charles Burt, and George Hicks of Norwich, all entered on the books as eighteen or nineteen years of age. James, Burt and Darracott would eventually become lieutenants, but none reached ‘post’ rank. Richard Lodington of Plymouth, another fellow midshipman, was considerably older at twenty-six.
Thomas Troubridge and Thomas Hoare were also mustered as eighteen-year-old recruits and became special friends. Troubridge was the son of Richard Troubridge of London, and exchanged stories of the merchant service with Horace. Originally rated an able seaman, he replaced Gardiner as a midshipman when the latter quit the ship in March 1774, and remained in the Seahorse until 1780, long after Horace had been invalided home. We will encounter him often in these pages. Thomas Hoare, who later took the surname Bertie, served as master’s mate and able seaman before succeeding Horace as midshipman on 14 March 1776. He would eventually get his commission in 1778 and die a full admiral in 1825. 4
Horace discovered other kindred spirits on the Seahorse’s consort, the fifty-gun Salisbury, captained by George Robinson Walters. She flew the broad pendant of Commodore Edward Hughes, an able officer who was being sent to command the small naval squadron in the East Indies. Commodore Hughes ‘always’ showed Nelson ‘the greatest kindness’, but the youth developed a remarkable rapport with one of his inferior officers, Charles Pole. A Devon lad, Pole was the great grandson of a baronet and one of the rare graduates of the Portsmouth Naval Academy.5
Nelson was fifteen when he stepped on board the Seahorse for the first time, and approaching eighteen when malaria forced him home. He spent impressionable years on the ship and it is surprising that biographers have had so little to say about them. Horace enjoyed his East Indian service and often but vainly contemplated a happy return to those waters. He learned a great deal about managing and navigating ships there, enjoyed a feast of new experiences, made valuable friendships and saw hostile action for the first time. However, it was also a time of shadows, closed by serious illness and marred by disturbing social relationships on board. In Captain Farmer, Nelson had his first inadequate commander and met some of the dangers of weak leadership.6
2
The Salisbury and Seahorse were bound upon a protracted service. The East Indies was the furthest station maintained by the Royal Navy and those assigned to it could expect to be parted from homes and families for a long period. As usual when sustained hardship was anticipated, the Admiralty made special provision. Once again portable soup was supplied, ready for twice-weekly servings with peas on the haul across the Indian Ocean, and Irving’s equipment for distilling salt water reappeared, this time reinforced by Osbridge’s machine for sweetening water. While the ships waited for fair sailing weather – the longboat of the Seahorse was overturned by rough water in Spithead harbour, losing boat hooks, oars and spars – the men were also treated to two months’ pay in advance, distributed by naval commissioner James Gambier on the afternoon of 6 November. Horace found, no doubt ruefully, that his pay totalled £4 11s. 6d., but that deductions for the Chatham Chest and Greenwich Hospital, both in aid of sick, injured or aged seamen, left just £2 5s. 0d. for himself.7
Finally, on the morning of 19 November 1773, the ships put to sea, using small boats to help tow them out of harbour. There was an uncertain start. When Captain Farmer fired a thirteen-gun salute in honour of the commodore’s broad pendant, the wads were blown out of two of the cannons and carried away the Seahorse’s lower fore studding sails. Nevertheless, they were soon underway and making an uneventful voyage towards the Cape of Good Hope.
At Funchal road in Madeira there was a major provisioning stop early in December. Two hundred and nine gallons of the Seahorse’s beer were found to have gone ‘calm, sour and stinking’, but they were able to replenish with water, wine and a few provisions before sailing on 11 December. Captain Farmer had kept his people in excellent health. ‘I think it worthy [of] remarking that the ship’s company has been remarkably healthy since we sailed,’ Surridge wrote in his log for 13 January, ‘and this day when we crossed the Equator there was but three men on the sick list with slight complaints.’8
Mr Surridge, the ship’s master, to whom Nelson had been referred before sailing, was ubiquitous on board. There was only one lieutenant, James Francis Edward Drummond, so Surridge commanded a watch, in addition to handling and navigating the ship and instructing the ‘young gentlemen’ in the mysteries of mathematics and setting a course. He was, as Horace quickly discerned, no common man. A master was a warrant officer, appointed by the Navy Board rather than the Admiralty, and though his position was an important one and he took station with the lieutenants he lacked their status, for they and their superiors held the king’s commission from the Admiralty. Masters were often from the lower middling classes, with clerking or shopkeeping backgrounds, normally short of the social connections of the commissioned officers but possessing the rudiments of education. Occasionally men of remarkable talent emerged from the ranks of the masters. The most famous was the explorer James Cook, whose people were hardy hill farmers, but Thomas Surridge, the mentor of Nelson, almost deserves mentioning in the same breath. Like Cook
, Surridge used sheer ability to switch to the commissioned officer ladder, and remarkably he not only made lieutenant but eventually became a vice admiral in 1819.
He was still young when he fashioned Nelson into a fully-fledged seaman. Born about 1747, Thomas Surridge was an Irishman from Passage, near Waterford. He had joined the navy in December 1769, enlisting as able seaman and yeoman of the powder room on the Tweed frigate at Spithead. Richard Surridge, a sixty-two-year-old clerk aboard the Tweed, and said to have been from ‘Donmore’ in Galway, was probably his father or uncle. No doubt it was to reward the elder Surridge’s loyalty that Captain George Collier advanced the boy to midshipman and master’s mate. James Irving was master of the Tweed, and it was from him that Thomas learned the basics of navigation, but Collier himself may have been an influence, for he was an exceptional naval officer, skilled in languages and interested in astronomy, surveying and writing. Young Surridge followed Collier to the Levant and Rainbow, and also sailed under Captains Samuel Thompson, Richard Collins and Richard Onslow. His appointment to the Seahorse followed ten months as master of the Achilles. 9
Surridge taught Nelson navigation and seamanship, and there were few better able to do so. The lessons stuck. Fifteen years later the pupil advised Commodore William Cornwallis, who had been appointed to the East Indies, that Mr Surridge ‘was a very clever man, and we constantly took the lunar observations’. Nelson suggested Cornwallis consult Surridge’s log, and had ‘no doubt’ that it would be found the ‘best of any in the Navy Office’. Obviously Surridge impressed the pliable young man, but the respect was mutual. Years later Surridge remembered Nelson as ‘a boy with a florid countenance, rather stout [strong] and athletic’, and fired by ‘ardent ambition’. He was a good scholar and during his spell on the Seahorse got a thorough grounding in all necessary nautical skills and arts.10