by John Sugden
The command of a ship, even one as inconsiderable as the Badger, conferred elements of patronage. Nelson had the right to take four captain’s servants on board, but so far from home he had no relatives to slot into the vacant positions. Nelson picked out four likely ratings for the honour – William Sylvan, Frank Lepee, William Orswood and John Smith. Lepee, an eighteen-year-old Londoner, had joined the Lowestoffe as a boatswain’s servant in 1777, and would follow Nelson for sixteen years.3
Nelson was troubled with deserters during the six months he commanded the Badger. Whenever the ship was moored in a port, malcontents seized opportunities to run. Twenty-one in all did so, two-thirds of them members of the Badger’s crew, and the rest ‘supernumeraries’ being given passage or awaiting distribution to other ships. The defectors even included a midshipman, Henry Lee, who fled at Rattan (Roatan) Island in March. It was not a good record, especially for a brig looking for prizes, and suggests the inexperience of her captain. On the other hand, Nelson apparently preserved reasonable order. A few men followed him to other commands, including the purser John Tyson and the assistant master John Wilson. Only one was punished – Thomas Rochester, a pressed man from Brentwood in Essex, earning the dubious distinction of being the first man ever flogged on Nelson’s orders when he received two dozen lashes for drunkenness and disobedience.4
Sometimes men were disturbed by any change of captain, as the history of that excellent ship the Ruby demonstrated. After the death of her popular commander Joseph Deane in 1780 there was widespread disaffection. As Nelson wrote, ‘Of that noble ship’s crew, three hundred took boats and are gone off. Every method has been used to bring them back, which I hope will prove successful.’5
Possibly the departure of the Badger’s previous captain unsettled some of her men and increased the difficulties of the young successor. Nelson hardly cut an imposing figure. He was surprisingly adolescent, barely months beyond the age of majority and had something of a schoolboy about him. A mop of sandy brown hair fell about a thin, sensitive, almost effeminate face with alert blue eyes, a wandering nose and sensuous mouth, until drawn into a ribbon or queue behind. His height was no more than average for the time, perhaps five feet six inches, and he was slim with a waist about thirty-two inches and no more than thirty-eight across the chest. Clothes sometimes hung on him casually. Contemporaries later spoke of Nelson as ‘small’ and ‘slight’, ‘not a tall man’, or ‘about the middle height, thin, and somewhat inelegantly formed’ with ‘few words and plain manners’. It is easy to excuse sun-burnished tars aboard the Badger looking incredulously at each another as this apparently insignificant and whimsical little creature with a Norfolk drawl hopped aboard. As yet his lust for distinction and genius only flickered freely within, out of sight.6
There is no evidence that Nelson himself had misgivings. His instructions directed him westwards to the British settlements clinging like limpets to the Mosquito coast of Spanish Honduras and Nicaragua, scratching a living from logging, farming and fishing for green turtles. There were several of them – St George’s Key near Belize and Black River, Rattan Island and Omoa in the Gulf of Honduras – all of them surviving at the sufferance of Spain and in fear of the depredations of American privateers and French naval forces. They were even more afraid that Spain would also pitch into the war against Britain. Now that France had allied herself with the American colonies, Britain was fighting on both sides of the Atlantic and was dangerously stretched. There was a reasonable chance that Spain would also attack her, and try to regain control of Gibraltar, which Britain had acquired in 1704. If Spain declared war, the British settlements in Honduras and Nicaragua would become easy targets, and as they struggled to improve their defences they cultivated good relations with the local Mosquito Indians. Nelson was charged with communicating with the British settlements and bringing an Indian leader named King George to Jamaica for talks with the governor, Major General John Dalling.
The Badger sailed on 25 January 1779, and five days later made the mouth of the Black River in Honduras. Nelson had a letter from Dalling for the settlers, but there was a reef across the estuary and he fired a gun for a pilot. Unfortunately, the weather was blustery and the water broke so menacingly across the reef that no one dared risk coming out to him. The next day he slipped a few miles further east towards Cape Camaron, anchored off what he called ‘Prinaw Creek’, and dispatched a boat upstream to reach the Black River settlement that way. Then, continuing along the coast as far as Cape Gracias a Dios, he sent more of the governor’s messages ashore before returning to Black River and finally getting the Badger to its moorings. King George and two of his attendants duly arrived on board. George was the leader of the Sandy Bay ‘samboes’, a mixed Indian–black community descended from the survivors of a slaver shipwrecked upon the coast a hundred or so years before. These blacks, as well as Indian warriors throughout the region, were being courted by the British as potential military auxiliaries in case a war broke out with Spain.
Nelson visited Rattan Island, where the guns were hoisted out and the ship careened, and St George’s Key before setting sail for Jamaica in March. By his own story the trip was a success. He ‘gained so much the affections of the [Mosquito coast] settlers that they unanimously voted me their thanks, and expressed their regret on my leaving them, entrusting to me to describe to Sir Peter Parker and Sir John Dalling their situation should a war with Spain break out’.7
On 2 April the Badger reached Port Royal, where ten of His Majesty’s ships, including the old Lowestoffe, were gathered. Although desertions increased in port, he had reasons to believe the efficiency of his crew had benefited from the cruise. No prizes had been taken, but the men had sharpened their skills in exercises with the guns and the pursuit of half a dozen suspicious sails. Nelson’s first mission in command of a ship of war might have lacked incident, but it was nothing of which to be ashamed.
2
On reaching Port Royal, he was sorry to find Captain Locker ill and talking about returning home. The thought of losing another close friend worried Nelson, though he believed Locker would recover in England. As a favour to his old captain, on 21 April Nelson entered his eldest son, William Locker junior, on the books of the Badger as a captain’s servant, re-rating Frank Lepee as an able seaman to make room. A pay book lists Locker’s son as ‘prest’, but both that and his very presence were fictitious. In fact the boy was not on the ship at all. He was not even in the West Indies. Nor had he reached his eleventh birthday, the minimum age at which a son of a naval officer might enter the service. Less than ten years old, William Locker was too young to serve legitimately on any warship. He was still at home with his mother, but if he ever chose a naval career the bogus sea time he had accumulated on the Badger would ease his promotion.8
The next day Nelson sailed again, submerging his sadness about Captain Locker in a hunt for privateers.
He enquired of every ship he ‘spoke’ and chased all doubtful sails in vain, but on the clear afternoon of the 28th his luck seemed to change. The Badger pursued a ship for an hour before halting it with a warning shot. She was the La Prudente sloop of eighty tons, on her way from Cape François to New Orleans with dry goods, sugar, coffee and other French produce. Though she mounted no artillery, a few muskets, pistols and cutlasses, as well as powder and shot, were taken from her. Her master, Pedro Guinard, protested that the ship was Spanish, but most on board were French and Nelson searched her for two days. The ship’s papers, eventually discovered hidden inside a shoe, were recently dated and suggested that La Prudente belonged to three Frenchmen who were naturalised Spaniards residing in New Orleans. Nelson was sure of his prize but her status was ambiguous. Was she French, and therefore fair game, or the property of Spaniards, with whom Britain was not yet at war? In the event, Nelson’s prize agent in Jamaica, Hercules Ross, failed to get her condemned in the vice-admiralty court. More unfortunately, Nelson had to hold the sixteen prisoners, including a master, two of the owners and
a black servant, on board the Badger for a week before landing them at Port Antonio. In the intervening time some of his crew became infected with what he was told was the plague.9
Nor was there compensation elsewhere. On the afternoon of 30 April Nelson encountered an enemy privateer off the northeast coast of Jamaica and pursued it for the rest of the day, discharging futile rounds of shot and grape. The next morning the wind dropped and the Badger lay becalmed under lifeless sails while her target propelled itself to safety under oars. Six days later another promising ‘chase’ escaped in dark, cloudy weather leaving Nelson cursing his lack of a night glass.10
Potentially more damaging to a young commander was a disagreement with the master of a British merchantman in Port Antonio in May. Still short of seamen, Nelson sent a boat around the traders anchored in the port, looking for likely men to press into service, and his officer brought five hands from the Amity Hall. Reconsidering, Nelson regretted the action. He had left the merchantman with enough seamen to function, but worried that his conduct might appear highhanded and planned to return the pressed men. But when the master of the Amity Hall stormed aboard in ‘a most impertinent manner, and with very abusive language told me he should take [me to] the law’, Nelson saw red. Growing what he modestly termed ‘warm’, he returned two of the five sailors, added one of the less useful of his own men and declared he would keep the rest. The master appeared mollified. At least he apologised to Nelson on his next visit to the Badger on 13 May, but a bad account of the affair was already circulating in Kingston.11
For the first time Nelson felt his public reputation endangered. The captain of a man-of-war was accountable not only to professional superiors but also to the mercantile community and society at large. He wrote to Locker in search of help and reassurance, but it was a sad letter, written after he had learned that his ‘sea-daddy’ had at last been given leave to return to England. For some time Locker had been afflicted with a violent scorbutic disorder that pained his back and loins and he went home in May. Personally impoverished as he felt, Horatio knew that Jamaica was no place for a sick man:
I see you are quite settled about going home [he wrote], which in all probability may happen before you can hear from me again, but I shall always write to you in England. I hope you will have a good passage, and find Mrs Locker and all your family in good health. I hope you will soon recover when you get home. The friendship you have shown me I shall never forget, and though I lose my best friend by your going, I would not have you stay a day in this country. I am very sorry indeed Captain [Joseph] Deane [of the Ruby] is ill. I beg you will give [him] my best wishes for his speedy recovery.12
Behind him Captain Locker left his young admirer with a certificate of good behaviour covering service on the Lowestoffe, a prayer book signed by the two of them, now in the Royal Naval Museum, a treasure chest of memories and the comforting knowledge that he had a professional ally at home. But the ailing captain did not return home to the happiness he anticipated. He recovered his health, but his young wife, of whom he had never stopped speaking, died in childbirth the following year and was buried in the village of Addington, Kent, where the couple had married ten years before.
Back in Jamaica, Nelson witnessed a misfortune of a different kind. At Port Antonio on 23 May 1779 he picked up a small convoy for Bluefields on the Mosquito coast. Preferring to search for a privateer haunting the region, he discharged the ships at Montego Bay to make a fruitless cruise, and was back in the same place at the end of the month.
At three-thirty on the afternoon of 1 June five ships entered the bay and moored near the Badger. Four were London merchantmen and the other was their escort, the twenty-gun Glasgow under Captain Thomas Lloyd. About two hours later an alarm was raised on the Glasgow. The ship was on fire. A purser’s steward, Richard Brace, had been stealing rum from the after hold and dropped a light into the cask. Soon the flames were out of control and smoke was billowing from the quarterdeck hatchway on the starboard side of the ship, creating what Nelson described as ‘a most shocking sight’.
A terrifying scenario loomed, for Lloyd’s was no ordinary cargo. He had been shipping gunpowder to Jamaica, and if it exploded the Glasgow, the other ships sharing the anchorage, and the warehouses and magazines were all threatened with violent destruction. There could have been a panic, but Lloyd kept his head and for part of the time directed operations from the unsafe station of a boom. The court martial, held on the Bristol at Port Royal the following month, recognised his efforts to save the ship. Sir Peter Parker happily reported the captain’s acquittal, declaring that he had behaved ‘remarkably’ and been ‘well seconded by his officers and crew’. Only the miserable steward was held culpable, and he was lucky to get no more than one hundred lashes for conduct leading to such calamitous consequences.
Nelson learned of the disaster from Lieutenant Richard Oakley of the Glasgow. Oakley was out in a boat pressing sailors when the fire broke out, but seeing the smoke and confusion on board he returned at once. Calling alongside the Badger, Oakley demanded as many buckets as could be found, and collecting the first dozen pulled strenuously back to the Glasgow. Nelson had his boats manned, commandeered two more from nearby merchantmen and with the rest of the buckets hurried after Oakley to help.
Nelson’s official biographers, Clarke and McArthur, gave their hero the full credit for evacuating the Glasgow. In their version Nelson finds the Glasgow’s men abandoning the burning ship by jumping into the sea, but turns them back, insisting that the powder first be thrown overboard and all guns be pointed upwards. This story, designed purely to inflate Nelson’s reputation, was a libel on the officers and men of the unfortunate ship, and erased Lloyd and Oakley from the rescue completely. Nelson himself never made so extravagant an assertion. Though characteristically effusive about his contribution, he allowed that ‘it was owing to my exertions, joined to his [Lloyd’s], that the whole crew were rescued from the flames’. Inasmuch as he provided many of the boats needed to evacuate the one hundred and sixty men there was some justification for this claim.
In reality, Lloyd’s men were desperately fighting the flames before Nelson arrived. Hammocks soaked in water were thrown into the after hold to dampen the fire, and attempts were made to contain it beneath the lower deck before the suffocating smoke and heat between decks drove the men back. Oakley and the gunner both claimed the honour of prompting the removal of the powder, and Lloyd later said that he gave orders that none should leave the ship until every cask had been thrown overboard. Oakley, the gunner and a dozen men broke open the magazine door, and by six o’clock barrels and munitions were being handed up the fore hatchway. Last to be cleared were the filled cartridges. If a major explosion had been averted, however, the ship itself was doomed. At about seven the flames were breaking through the quarterdeck, licking up the mizzen and main rigging and running forward, and the order to abandon ship had to be given.
Nelson’s contemporary statement, hitherto unused by biographers, was given to the court martial in Port Royal and completely destroys the Clarke and McArthur fable:
On the first of June between five and six in the evening I saw the alarm of fire on board the Glasgow. Immediately ordered all assistance from the Badger, which was immediately sent. I went alongside and saw the ship in a blaze, about one quarter of an hour after the first alarm. After seven o’clock the flames broke through the quarter deck and ascended the main and mizzen rigging, when the boats were ordered by Captain Lloyd to the bows of the ship to receive the men. They were carried from thence on board the Badger. Several of the men were much burned, particularly the master [Thomas Cobby] who died the next day. When I went first alongside I heard Captain Lloyd encouraging the men in getting the powder out of the magazine and to throw the powder out of the arm chest on the quarter-deck. Likewise to lay down the guns to prevent their doing any damage to the shipping or the town. The ship was lined entirely from the bowsprit to the quarter [deck] with men drawing water to extingui
sh the fire with expedition and good order.
On the decks of the Badger officers and men of the Glasgow huddled in disbelief, but although some had been burned most were safe. The master of a merchant ship then came aboard to protest at the danger to his ship, and it was decided to haul the burning carcass out to sea. Nelson and Lloyd cut the bower anchor cables securing the dying ship, got a hawser aboard her and at about eight-thirty turned her loose before a wind from the land. She drifted away, the flames patterning the dark water and consuming her to the waterline, until about midnight when the ruined shell exploded and then sunk swiftly.
The master of the Glasgow died of his injuries at seven the following morning, and nine days later another seaman also died, although whether in consequence of the fire is unknown. Unfortunately, the rainy season broke the day after the tragedy, and sickness spread among the refugees squatting on the open decks of the little Badger, unable to find shelter below. Horatio shed his burden as quickly as he could. Some sailors were left at Montego Bay when he put to sea on 2 June, and six days later another seventy were transferred to the Achilles victualler at St Ann’s harbour, where Nelson also disembarked over twenty muskets, eighteen cartouche boxes, fifty-two four-pound shot, half a barrel of powder, a dozen boarding pikes and a number of match paper cartridges and powder horns. The remaining passengers were discharged at Port Royal, which Nelson reached with a convoy on 19 June.
Nelson usually felt for unfortunate officers, and wrote a week after the event that Captain Lloyd was still ‘very melancholy indeed’, while poor Oakley, ‘a very good young man’, had lost everything but the clothes he stood in. Though exonerated by court martial and reemployed, Lloyd never prospered. Eventually he retired to Carmarthen in Wales, but Nelson never forgot him, nor failed to express his greatest respect for the unfortunate officer. A little more than four years before his own death off Cape Trafalgar, he wrote to Lloyd that ‘my heart is always warm to you, and your friendship will be the pleasure of my life, let the world either smile or frown upon me’.13