Nelson

by John Sugden

  This delicate situation, as well as the possibility of a return of the French humbled by Clive less than twenty years before, kept a small squadron of the Royal Navy on station. It had various duties to fulfil. Hughes himself sailed from Kedgeree to escort transports to Calcutta and to confer with Warren Hastings, the crown’s new governor general in Bengal. The Seahorse was careened at Kedgeree, heeled over against a frame so that the bottom could be scrubbed clean of barnacles, seaweed and infestation, and then also left, bound on East India Company business. For Horace, who had spent more than four years in a peacetime navy, the assignment brought a new experience – his first taste of battle.

  Eighty-nine boxes of company rupees were lowered into the dark hold of the Seahorse before Farmer returned to Madras for orders. There the Seahorse was instructed to ship the treasure to Bombay on the west coast, and to offer support to its governor and council. There had been talk of a Portuguese expedition leaving Goa to recapture Bassein and Salsette from the Mahrattas. If anything frightened the East India Company more than Hindu princes, it was European rivals, and to pre-empt any Portuguese action the British had seized the disputed areas themselves. Naturally, the Mahrattas were furious and retaliation was expected. The company clamoured for naval protection.16

  Consequently, the Seahorse made its first appearance on the west coast of India, putting into Anjenga road on 15 February 1775, just in time to witness a three-hour partial eclipse of the moon. Moving northwards along the coast, they reached latitude nine degrees forty-six minutes, near the southern fringes of the coastal state of Mysore, ruled by Haidar Ali. It was Sunday 19 February, calm but hazy. Captain Farmer’s log tells the story of Nelson’s first ever skirmish:

  At 5 AM weighed and made sail. At 7 saw two sail standing towards us, which we imagined to be Bombay [Company?] cruisers. At 1/2 past 7 they hauled their wind to the southward, and stood after the Dodley [a ‘country ship in company’ since the previous evening] and hoisted Hadir Aly’s colours. We immediately tacked, and stood after them. At 8 fired several shot to bring one of them to, thinking her to be a Marratta. At 9 one of the [enemy] ketches sent her boat on board us, and told us they belonged to Hadir Aly, but as the [other] ketch did not bring to, nor shorten sail, and several other vessels [were] heaving in sight, which we imagined to be [enemy] consorts, we kept firing round and grape shot at her until noon. Broke 6 panes [of] glass in chase. At 1/2 past noon the ketch brought to, and struck her colours. We hoisted out the cutter, and sent her with an officer on board, who found her to be one of Hadir Aly’s armed cruisers. At 1/2 past 2 PM hoisted the cutter in and made sail. Upon examining the shot racks, and the grape shot which were hung under the quarter deck, we found that we fired at the above vessel fifty-seven round shot, nine pounders; fifteen grape shot, nine pounders; two double-headed hammered shot, nine pounders; twenty-five round shot, three pounders; and two grape shot, three pounders.17

  Lively as the exchange was, it merely punctuated Farmer’s important mission north and he reached Bombay almost a month later on 16 March. The news had improved. It appeared that the Mahrattas had no plans to recover Bassein and Salsette by force, and that they were about to conclude an armistice with the East India Company. Indeed, the supreme council of the company had sent a plenipotentiary to the Mahratta capital, Poona, and it was expected that Salsette would be yielded without violence. This is, in fact, what happened. By playing one faction among the Mahrattas against the other, the company secured Salsette in 1776 by the treaty of Purandhar.18

  At Bombay, Horace saw an astonishingly spacious and beautiful haven, with a lighthouse, fort, dry dock and church, but the combined efforts of the navy and the company kept him busy. The rupees were unloaded and two detachments of the company’s troops with an artillery train embarked for Surat road, further north. However, while Farmer was effectively an arm of the company, he maintained the privileges and status of the Royal Navy. When a company ketch flew the broad pendant of a commodore in Surat road, Farmer decided that a prerogative of his commander-in-chief had been breached. He fired a swivel gun at the vessel and sent one of his officers on board to remove the offending object.

  Now for the first time in his life Nelson experienced the prolonged frustrations of one of the least popular but most common duties of the naval officer. Convoy work. Waiting for merchantmen to gather, shepherding them from one place to another, keeping them together, moving forward stragglers and cruising ahead or on the flanks to intercept enemies was nearly always calculated to raise the blood pressure. It was often a distraction from the more exciting and profitable work of chasing prizes. On this occasion there were compensations, for these were new seas and scenes to Nelson. The Seahorse proceeded northwest across the Arabian Sea to Muscat, and then with the Betsy Galley through the Strait of Hormuz and along the Persian Gulf to Bushire. On 24 May they ran into Bushire road to clean, refit and provision. The local sheik was entertained aboard as well as the head of the English trade factory at Bussorah, who had been driven from his town by a war between the Turks and the Persians.

  If we may believe Nelson’s account, during this time he was much in the foretop, from where he was well positioned to spot potential dangers. On the voyage to Bushire, for example, a large area of discoloured water was seen in the path of the ship off ‘Cape Verdeston’ on 22 May. It was taken to be shallows, and while the Seahorse shortened sail a cutter went ahead to investigate, only to discover that the focus of their interest was an immense shoal of fish spawn. Coming back from Bushire to Bombay, life in the foretop largely consisted of keeping convoys under surveillance in the generally hazy weather.

  It was important work, for the convoy was typically unmanageable. The Seahorse sailed from Bushire on 16 July with a party consisting of the Eagle, an armed snow belonging to the East India Company; the aforementioned Betsy Galley and another ‘country’ ship, the Fatty Eloy; the Betsy schooner; and two ketches, the Euphrates and the Tigris. Making along the coast, the ships soon got separated and when the Seahorse reached Muscat on 30 July only the Euphrates was still in company. Fortunately, some of the others had already made the harbour, and the balance came in shortly afterwards. The journey was resumed on 6 August, with the ketches replaced by a ship named the Indian Queen. The Fatty Eloy proved herself to be a sluggish sailor, and acted as a drag on the convoy, and after satisfying himself that the ships were in no particular danger, Farmer urged them to make more sail and forged on ahead. He reached Bombay with only the Betsy Galley in company on 15 August and the remainder of his charges strung out behind.

  The voyage from Bushire to Bombay had given Able Seaman Nelson his first full taste of the fretful drudgery of convoy duty, though the foretop protected him from the petty annoyances that worried his seniors below. Not all the frustrations related to the everyday vexations of sailing a ship of war and herding merchantmen, for fresh personnel problems were surfacing under Farmer’s troubled command.

  On 28 July the captain had received a written complaint from the gunner, George Middleton, charging Lieutenant Thomas Henery with various offences, including tyrannical behaviour. Henery responded sharply. Although others stood ready to support the gunner’s stories, he said Middleton was ‘a lying good for nothing’. When the Seahorse returned to Madras in September and found the Salisbury anchored there, Farmer brought Middleton’s complaint to the attention of Commodore Hughes. On the 15th Hughes suspended Henery from duty, but for the moment there were not enough post-captains to form a court. The matter had to be left to fester.19

  5

  Horace probably didn’t like Henery. He was a foolish, blustering fellow, always threatening to have people flogged around the fleet for trivial offences that no court martial would ever have taken seriously. In particular he enjoyed baiting the ‘young gentlemen’. Some or all of the midshipmen were quartered in the gun room in the bowels of the ship, and shared Gunner Middleton’s distaste for the lieutenant. Apparently Henery suspected that both were plotting his downfall,
and declared the midshipmen ‘a parcel of puppies, and he would send one half of them [to be flogged] round the fleet, and not two Captain Farmers should save them’.

  But with Henery suspended, and Surridge and Abson again sharing watches, life on the Seahorse improved for the midshipmen. The ship itself, enduring the longest voyage Nelson had made so far, was no less in need of attention. The tropics were hard on wooden sailing ships, and encrusted worm-ravaged hulls, rotting masts, frayed weathered ropes, rat-gnawed casks and canvas, stinking beer, vermin-ridden bread and men drained by debilitating climes were all too evident to Commodore Hughes. Now, in his second year on the station, he also knew the great monsoon was on its way and ships and crews needed to be in shape. After taking a detachment of East India Company soldiers to Pandarty road, Farmer accordingly found himself under the command of Captain Benjamin Marlow of the Coventry. On 14 October the two ships were ordered to Trincomalee on the eastern coast of Ceylon for wood, water and supplies. They were then to rejoin Hughes on the Malabar coast, preparatory to wintering in Bombay and going into dry dock.

  Nelson got his first sight of Trincomalee as the Seahorse was towed into harbour on 22 October. Farmer welcomed the Dutch governor aboard, and amidst compliments and clinking wineglasses secured permission for a wood detail to camp ashore and cut timber. Two petty officers led the shore party and threw up a tent as a base. The job was done, but four of the detail deserted and a marine was drowned during the boat journeys to and from the ship.

  On some of the nine days the two ships stayed at Trincomalee, Horatio Nelson also went ashore, enjoying a brief period of leisure with his friends. At the behest of the ever mindful Surridge, Farmer restored the youth to his former rank of midshipman on 31 October and he was again freely fraternising with other petty officers of the quarterdeck. In later life Nelson recalled that at the age of seventeen he was induced to play at a gaming table and actually won £300, which in those days was a large sum of money for a naval petty officer. However, he suddenly realised that, had he lost rather than won such an amount, he could never have paid the debt. It was a sobering thought. Horace had been brought up to pay his way and vowed he would never gamble again. The story may have grown in the telling but probably referred to some incident that occurred in Madras, Trincomalee or Bombay.20

  Reprovisioning complete, Marlow led the two ships to the Malabar coast in November and found Commodore Hughes at Anjenga. The Seahorse was then sent north, taking one convoy from Tellicherry to Goa and picking up another there for Bombay, where Hughes was concentrating his squadron for the winter. The finer days of these final voyages of the year may have given Midshipman Nelson his first opportunity to tack a ship, as if he was a master or lieutenant. Surridge had found the boy obedient and conscientious, ever eager to learn and serve, and no doubt prevailed upon the senior officers occasionally to allow him to tack the Seahorse. Tacking was a particularly tricky method of changing a ship’s direction by turning its bow through the wind, but Horace performed the task with efficiency and authority, while Surridge stood by approvingly, knowing he had turned this boy into a capable sea officer.21

  The Seahorse eventually arrived at Bombay on 19 December and remained for several months. On 19 February Nelson witnessed a formidable ritual aboard the ship. The captains of the squadron were piped aboard and swallowed by Farmer’s cabin. While red-coated marines stood sentinel outside the door, inside Commodore Hughes presided over a court consisting of Marlow of the Coventry, Walters of the Salisbury, John Clerke of the Dolphin and James Pigott of the Swallow. Lieutenant Henery was marched in, surrendered his sword and seated himself to listen to a succession of witnesses to charges of drunkenness, disobedience, profaning the sabbath and tyrannical conduct. There was enough to show that the accused had neither judgement nor popularity, but the court did not feel he merited a conviction. Surridge and Abson both cleared Henery of malpractice.

  Henery was more of a fool than a rogue. He damned and threatened freely. Lodington was menaced with four hours at the masthead, a common punishment for erring midshipmen, and young Troubridge was driven from the carpenter’s store room with the threat that he would be flogged around the fleet for leaving the deck without permission. The carpenter’s servant, though innocent of any wrongdoing, also endured a tirade, in which Henery threatened to flog him because his master had planned to take him ashore without asking the permission of an officer. Henery particularly picked on Midshipman William Sullivan, subjecting him not only to the usual threats about flogging through the fleet, but to habitual name-calling, such as ‘Coolie’ and ‘Puppy’.

  Henery’s inability to sympathise with the ‘young gentlemen’ was recollected by one of them, Master’s Mate Joseph Keeling, then about twenty-one years old:

  I was going on board the Salisbury once to answer a signal, and one of the boat’s crew was very insolent to me and refused to row. On my coming on board I acquainted the lieutenant of it, and he told me I certainly must have made too free with the men or else they never would have used you so, and told me to go away. I recollect another time between decks two men were fighting. I went to part them, and one of them struck me. I immediately went aft and made a complaint to the lieutenant, who gave me no satisfaction at all.22

  It was this acerbic, unhelpful personality, rather than serious misconduct, that seemed to have rebounded upon Henery. George Middleton, the gunner, brooded over what he considered to be an unjustified rebuke during the firing of a salute. The lieutenant complained that the powder was being brought up from the magazine too slowly. ‘God bless me, sir,’ puffed the hapless gunner. ‘I make what haste ever I can.’ ‘God damn me, sir,’ replied Henery, ‘make more haste, or else I’ll haste you elsewhere!’

  Whether the lieutenant’s bluster turned into actual physical abuse was another matter. It was said that Henery had ordered excessive floggings in November 1774, when the ship was at Kedgeree and the captain absent in nearby Calcutta. One marine was reported to have been flogged, and his regimental clothes, fiddle and sea chest thrown overboard. And the lieutenant was supposed to have regularly employed a rattan ‘to forward the people to their duty’. But neither this, nor some testimony relating to intoxication, weighed sufficiently with the court, hence his acquittal.

  A sensible man would have treasured the reprieve, internalised its lessons and set about rehabilitating his reputation, but Henery was consumed with resentment. He racked his brains to find mud to fling at Farmer, furious that the captain had allowed the complaint to go forward. Thus, two days after Henery’s court martial, Hughes and his officers reassembled on the Seahorse to consider charges the first lieutenant had proffered against his own captain.

  They were flimsy indeed, but Henery hit the bull’s-eye when he accused Farmer of keeping his son and a slave boy on the books when neither was present. This sin was of a type so widely practised in the navy that most officers turned a blind eye towards it. Many, if not most, had committed such frauds themselves, or at least benefited from them. The purser, Alexander Ligerwood, and Surridge were placed in the embarrassing position of owning that they had authenticated false books, but the captain’s guilt was felt worthy of no more than a mild reprimand.

  Henery’s other attack drew attention to indigo, piece-goods and bales of cloth that Farmer had taken aboard at Surat and Anjenga. The implication was that the captain was making money out of illicit freight, but it collapsed when Commodore Hughes revealed that the goods had been embarked upon his, not Farmer’s, orders. Without too much trouble the court dismissed the charges as ‘dictated by a spirit of malice and litigiousness’ and honourably acquitted the defendant.23

  The sight of a captain and first lieutenant exchanging courts martial was an uncommon one, and Horace may have pondered its lessons in leadership. In some mysterious way the captain had failed to meld his senior officers into a team and suffered the consequences. Though his record had been exonerated, the bad blood aboard the Seahorse raised questions about his powers of
command. As for Henery, he can only have been an object of derision among the ‘young gentlemen’. He had acted badly and compounded his errors by a misguided prosecution of his captain. Juniors who turned upon superiors without good cause seldom did themselves a favour. In this case Thomas Henery survived to become a commander the following year – probably because in the East Indies there were few alternatives to fill available posts – but it is doubtful that his early death deprived the navy of an outstanding officer.

  Had Horace remained in the East Indies it is likely that promotion would have been a speedy prospect for him too, for he had acquired all the basic skills of handling and navigating ships, and boasted a good mind and a thorough devotion to his profession. On paper at least he was near qualifying for lieutenant. He was approaching his eighteenth birthday, but the ship’s books had advanced his years by three and now had him over twenty, the official minimum age for a lieutenant’s commission. Moreover, he was close to completing the six years of sea service that were also needed, and there was little doubt about his ability to pass the obligatory oral examination. The tantalising prize of a first commission from the king seemed to be just around the corner.

  But then, about the time Henery and Farmer were locked in combat by court martial, he was struck down by a stealthier foe. It was almost certainly malaria.

  In the autobiography Nelson wrote twenty-three years later he simply described it as a life-threatening illness, and Surridge remembered it as a disorder ‘which nearly baffled the power of medicine’. The midshipman was wasted, his frame reduced almost to the skeleton and for a while he lost the use of his limbs. For years after his eventual recovery he suffered recurrent febrile attacks. Little was known about malaria in Nelson’s day, except of course for its devastating onset. The work of Ross, Manson and Bignami, establishing the role of the female mosquito in human malaria, was still a hundred or more years away and the prevailing eighteenth-century opinion attributed the disease to insanitation and fetid air.24