by John Sugden
Nelson’s health, in fact, was now seriously fractured, and a major impediment to someone with his prodigious capacity for work. In that sense Jamaica was not, perhaps, the place to go. The most important of Britain’s possessions in the West Indies, and for more than a century the command centre of her imperial ambitions in that region, Jamaica was aesthetically impressive. Kingston, on the south shore of the island, flourished as a focus for commerce, its large, sheltered harbour hidden from outsiders by a firm spit of land that stretched several miles westwards and terminated in the fortified town of Port Royal, once the haunt of legendary privateers and buccaneers. Yet despite the undeniable beauty of the island, where shining strips of white sand separated green forests from turquoise seas, there was an uncomfortable chill to the sunlight. Within, the prosperous sugar plantations were maintained by slave labour, and forever threatened by rebellion; and without, beyond the blue horizons bastions of Britain’s imperial rivals, Spain and France, could be found in all directions. Every European war made Jamaica a target. More lethal still, and apposite to Nelson’s physical condition, the area was pestilential. Diseases such as yellow fever and malaria could sweep the unacclimatised with fierce, uncontrollable power.
Nelson knew Jamaica and knew what it could do. Sobering the natural optimism of youth and his hunger for adventure and action were dark fears for what it held in store for his weakened body. His chest pained him on the outward voyage, surviving the attentions of John Cunningham, the ship’s surgeon, and Joshua Doberry, the servant to which his new rank entitled him. There was a naval cemetery near Port Royal named Green Bay, and during his years on the island Horace would come to regard it as a ravenous beast, waiting with open jaws to devour him.
6
The Lowestoffe got into Spithead with no greater loss than a yawl, submerged in a heavy squall outside Margate as it was being towed behind. Accompanied by the Grasshopper sloop under William Truscott, she sailed again on 16 May 1777, heading into the setting sun with a bevy of merchantmen. Locker was ordered to load wine and other necessities at Madeira, before continuing to Barbados and the Leeward Islands.19
The Atlantic crossing was mundane. Occasionally the escorts had to lay to or fire guns to keep the merchant ships together, and Lieutenant Nelson carefully entered these and other daily aggravations in his log. ‘At 4 PM [26 June] committed the body of the deceased [Edward Clark, a seaman] to the deep,’ he wrote. ‘At 1/2 past 5 the Betsey hailed us and informed us of some of her people being mutinous. Immediately hove to, hoist[ed] the boat out and sent her on board. At 7 the boat returned with 2 men, having left one [of our own] in their room.’ A seaman and a marine of the Lowestoffe were also lost overboard during the voyage. Surprisingly, in those days few sailors could swim, and by the time a frigate could be brought to and a boat lowered the chances of rescue were slim. Other than that, the seizure of a schooner on 1 July was the only relief from routine. She seemed to be American property, so Locker brought her into Carlisle Bay, Barbados, two days later, but she established her innocence and had to be released. From Barbados the Grasshopper proceeded with part of the convoy to St Vincent, while the Lowestoffe pressed on with the rest to Port Royal by way of Antigua. Though the seas were ‘infested by rebel privateers’ Captain Locker brought all his charges safely to their destination on 19 July.20
During the voyage Nelson occupied a frugal larboard (left-hand side) cabin on the lower deck between the surgeon and purser, across from the quarters of the first lieutenant and master on the starboard side. But his warmest relationship was with the men who occupied the grander cabin on the deck above, a friendship unusual in its closeness and durability. It developed between a middle-aged man and a youth twenty-seven years his junior, who was barely a man. Nelson liked most of his captains, but Locker was special: he became his best friend and professional confidant, always there as if he had been close blood kin, and always strong.
Nelson’s biographers have noticed the friendship without ever explaining it. The captain’s increasing reliance on a green eighteen-year-old when a senior lieutenant shipped aboard seems to have struck no one as unusual, nor has any previous attempt been made to identify the officers of the Lowestoffe. In fact the first lieutenant was Charles Sandys. Sandys was a commissioned officer of four years’ standing, but he was incompetent nonetheless and worse. He was a drunkard to boot. To a colleague who knew Sandys in later years he was ‘one of those vulgar, drunken dolts who bring discredit on the naval service’. As usual, Nelson was generous, but retrospectively admitted that Sandys had exhibited the same weakness aboard the Lowestoffe. ‘The little man, Sandys, is a good-natured laughing creature,’ he wrote to Locker in 1784, ‘but no more of an officer as a captain than he was as a lieutenant.’ The next year he added that ‘little Charles Sandys is as usual – likes a cup of grog as well as ever . . . What a pity he should have that failing. There is not a better heart in the world.’21
The captain of a man-of-war bore the loneliness of command more keenly than most. Isolated on the ocean, his responsibilities were always heavy and sometimes awesome. It was he who was ultimately responsible for the discharge of the ship’s duty, and for the safe return of his vessel and her people to port. Faced with the exigencies of the service, even a good captain needed colleagues to share that burden. Sandys was Locker’s senior lieutenant, in age, rank and experience, but we can see why the captain considered him to be unreliable. Nelson, by comparison, was responsible, conscientious and eager, and like Locker he loved the profession. It was consequently to him, and the master Arthur Hill, that the captain learned to turn.
Nelson always reacted positively to praise and to those who trusted him. It lifted him, and intensified his effort. He had already acquired the habit of actively cultivating friendships with people he admired, and during the voyage innumerable conversations on the quarterdeck or at the captain’s dining table told Horace that William Locker was another kindred spirit.
Locker was born in February 1731, the second of nine children of John and Elizabeth Locker, parents not unlike Nelson’s own. John Locker, a clerk with the Leathersellers’ Company, was ‘highly esteemed in the literary world for his knowledge in polite literature and remarkable for his skill in the modern Greek language’. His wife was the daughter of a Norfolk parson, the rector of Wood Norton and Swanton. William Locker had been educated at the Merchant Taylors’ school, and joined the navy in 1746, enlisting as a captain’s servant at the age of fifteen under a relative, Captain Charles Wyndham. He served in both the West and the East Indies, and was a favourite of Edward Hawke, arguably the most distinguished admiral of the eighteenth century.22
When Nelson met Locker, the captain did not have the obvious appearance of a warrior. He was well read and knowledgeable like his father, and a hearty looking, round-faced man, his receding hair greying at the temples. The limp gave him away though, and often led social conversation to the story that always inspired Nelson the most. Back in 1756, during the Seven Years War, Hawke had appointed the young Locker lieutenant of the twenty-gun Experiment under Captain John Strachan. In June 1757 Strachan engaged a French privateer, the Telemaque, off Alicante. She had twenty-six guns and three times the men, but after a desperate struggle the British boarded and captured her, and Locker had never fully recovered from the splinter he received in a leg that day.
Many years later, after Nelson’s victory at the Nile had turned him into an international hero, he wrote to his old captain recalling that story. ‘You, my old friend,’ he said, ‘after twenty-seven years’ acquaintance know that nothing can alter my attachment and gratitude to you. I have been your scholar. It is you who taught me to board a Frenchman, by your conduct when in the Experiment. It is you who always told [me] “Lay a Frenchman close, and you will beat him”, and my only merit in my profession is being a good scholar. Our friendship will never end but with my life.’ Imagine the feelings of the ageing officer, reading that tribute from the greatest admiral of the time. But then
Locker would have remembered that Nelson had rarely hidden his emotions. If he loved people, be they men or women, he had always said so. It was part of the magic that bound them to him.23
Whether Locker gave Nelson some of his first lessons in naval tactics must remain a matter of conjecture. In time Nelson unquestionably learned that ship for ship the Royal Navy had its Spanish and French adversaries beaten; the close-quarter tactics of his great battles reflected his confidence in the superiority of British seamanship and gunnery as well as his own fiery temperament. Although his marked prejudices against the French in particular sometimes led him to attribute the navy’s success to a fancied superiority of the Anglo-Saxon stock, his more thoughtful utterances betrayed greater understanding. Our knowledge of that process of education in Nelson is far from complete, but it seems to have started with William Locker.
Locker’s stories, for example, extended to Hawke’s great victory in Quiberon Bay in 1759, in which he had served aboard the Sapphire. Locker had later been a flag lieutenant to Hawke in the Royal George, and it is likely that some of the famous admiral’s precepts passed vicariously to Nelson through Locker. Hawke, whose coat of arms enshrined the motto ‘Strike’, had a genuine taste for battle Nelson would have appreciated. His emphasis on close-range action and readiness to depart from the written fighting instructions to achieve a result presaged Nelson’s career. As a captain, for instance, Hawke left the hallowed ‘line of battle’ formation to capture a Spanish capital ship in 1744. Later, raised to flag rank, he tried to marry the strength of the ‘line’ to the ‘general chase’, which allowed ships to break formation in order to pursue a flying enemy, a feature of his most famous victory over the French at Quiberon Bay.24
At the time Locker knew Nelson he probably talked even more about his young wife, Lucy (nineteen years the captain’s junior and the daughter of Admiral William Parry), and of the three sons and two daughters she had borne him. A William Parry among the captain’s servants on the Lowestoffe was probably a brother or nephew of Lucy Locker. The captain’s concern for his family increased soon after the ship’s arrival in Jamaica, because he suddenly fell ill and had to retire to rooms ashore. After his ship’s hull had been sheathed in copper in the dockyard she was ready to sail, but the captain remained incapacitated and it was Sandys who took the Lowestoffe for her first cruise on 8 August. Back in his bed Locker feared the worst during black, lonely reveries, and worried about what would become of Lucy and her children. Searching for a colleague to handle his affairs and do his best for the family, he wrote to the eighteen-year-old stripling who was second lieutenant of his frigate. The reply, when it came, was full of the spontaneous but sincere generosity for which Nelson would become known:
Lowestoffe, at sea, August 12th, 1777.
My most worthy friend,
I am exceedingly obliged to you for the good opinion you entertain of me, and will do my utmost that you may have no occasion to change it. I hope God Almighty will be pleased to spare your life, for your own sake, and that of your family, but should any thing happen to you (which I sincerely pray God may not) you may be assured that nothing shall be wanting on my part for the taking care of your effects, and delivering safe to Mrs Locker such of them as may be thought proper not to be disposed of. You mentioned the word ‘consolation’ in your letter. I shall have a very great one, when I think I have served faithfully the best of friends, and the most amiable of women.
All the services I can render to your family, you may be assured shall be done, and shall never end but with my life, and may God Almighty of his great goodness keep, bless, and preserve you and your family, is the most fervent prayer
Of your faithful servant,
Horatio Nelson
P.S. Though this letter is not couched in the best manner be assured it comes from one entirely devoted to your service. H.N.25
This letter, the outspoken testimony of a young man willing to accept the grimmer burdens of his friendship for an ageing captain looking into the abyss, illustrates the characteristics that had and would continue to endear him to a succession of superiors. Reading it we can understand why William Locker would fight for him through years of obscurity, and take pride in living to know that he had nurtured the country’s greatest national hero.
7
While Locker recovered in Jamaica, the Lowestoffe was out at the beginning of the hurricane season, looking for prizes. They chased numerous sails but had no luck until eleven in the morning of 21 August when a strange vessel was seen in the northwest quarter. Sandys ordered a tender, the Gayton, commanded by a midshipman, to give chase and in four hours it returned with a Charleston sloop laden with rice. A crew of nine was put aboard the capture to sail it to Port Royal, where Locker’s prize agent, the Kingston merchant Hercules Ross, began the process of condemnation in the vice-admiralty court. Two more prizes were taken towards the middle of September. Between Cape Maisi in Cuba and Cape à Foux in French Haiti a ship they had pursued to windward turned out to be the Charleston sloop Mary Angelic, bound for St Nicolas Mole in Haiti with rice and timber. Two days later Sandys took the Burford, a North Carolinian schooner with a cargo of pitch, tar and other stores. It was with some self-congratulation, therefore, that the Lowestoffe returned to Port Royal on 30 September to report to her recuperating captain.26
Locker himself commanded when the frigate returned to her patrol on Guy Fawkes day. One of the prizes taken on the previous cruise had been fitted as a new tender, christened the Little Lucy in honour of Locker’s infant daughter, and sailed fifteen days earlier. Locker soon came up with her to discover that she had engaged an American privateer and lost three men killed and wounded. It was not long before the Lowestoffe herself was in action, perhaps with the same privateer. In 1799 Nelson boasted that the incident ‘presaged my character’ by demonstrating ‘that difficulties and dangers do but increase my desire of attempting them’. Accepting his account the public agreed, and the episode became another of Nelson’s canonical feats of courage, inspiring one of the stirring paintings by Richard Westall which were engraved and published after the admiral’s death.
At six in the morning of 20 November, when the Lowestoffe was haunting the Windward Passage off Cape Maisi, lookouts reported two sails to the northward. The frigate gave chase and after four hours brought one of the strangers to by firing a cannon and ten double-shotted swivel guns at her. She was the Resolution brig, an American privateer on her way from St Nicolas Mole to North Carolina, but she carried a mere eight guns, ten swivels and twenty men and made little resistance. Her consort, a schooner laden with powder for the American colonies, escaped, and it is possible that Master John Meredith of the Resolution diverted the British ship to allow her to get clear.
In the afternoon, as the prize was brought close by, a fierce storm engulfed both ships, punishing them with rain, bruising gales and heavy seas. Locker ordered Sandys to board and secure the prize, but the first lieutenant flunked the job. Our sources conflict. Nelson’s own, written in 1799, said that the first lieutenant tried to reach the prize but was driven back by the furious waves, but Bromwich, who gave an account even later, maintained that Sandys never left the frigate, but merely went below to rummage for his hanger. Whatever the case, Captain Locker is said to have appeared on deck in consternation. ‘Have I no officer in the ship who can board the prize?’ he called.
The ship’s boat was being jostled alongside, but as the master stepped forward to board it young Nelson stopped him. ‘It is my turn now,’ he said according to his own story, ‘and if I [too] come back it is yours.’ In the meantime the privateer was shipping a great deal of water, and Bromwich said that after Nelson’s boat had ploughed through huge waves it was swept onto the deck of the prize and carried ‘out again with the scud’. Nevertheless, he got on board. The log of the Lowestoffe recorded that at seven in the evening Locker fired a swivel to signal the prize to come under his stern, but made no reference to Nelson’s exploit.
The weather remained so foul that the prize separated, and Locker feared her lost. On the 22nd he backed the topsails of his frigate to wait for her, and both vessels eventually made Port Royal on 24 November. Whatever the prize was worth, Locker and Nelson gained some valuable information from her. The Americans reported that the French at St Nicolas Mole were predicting that their country would soon enter the war in aid of the rebellious colonies, and that a fleet and thousands of soldiers would arrive via Cape François on the north coast of Haiti. Indeed, the French forts at St Nicolas Mole were already well garrisoned, and British ships had been ordered out of the harbour.27
The Lowestoffe’s next cruise, which began on 9 December, took her back through the Windward Passage to the northern coasts of Hispaniola and Cuba and the island-studded seas of the Bahamas. She returned to Port Royal on the last day of January 1778 without any prizes, but Lieutenant Nelson had gained in experience. On this occasion Locker had given him command of the Little Lucy. In his usual style, Horatio later bragged that ‘even a frigate was not sufficiently active for my mind’ so he pressed for the tender, in which ‘I made myself a complete pilot for all the passages through the islands situated on the north side of Hispaniola.’ This suggests that Locker took the American intelligence seriously, and was on the watch for the French fleet as well as further prizes.
When the Lowestoffe returned to Jamaica, Nelson obtained Locker’s permission to cruise independently, and he made two voyages from Port Royal in the Little Lucy. During the first in February he took a prize off the island of West Caicos after a chase of eight hours, apparently the Abigail sloop of Boston, laden with molasses and dry goods. The second cruise occupied much of March and April. In the Bahama Straits on 25 March he captured the Swan sloop, master Daniel Smith, en route from St Nicolas Mole to Nantucket with molasses, but nothing else came his way before he returned to port on 19 April. If relatively unprofitable, these voyages were significant as the first that Nelson made as an independent commander.28