by John Sugden
It was a melancholy end to Nelson’s first official command. On 13 June, in the voyage from St Ann’s to Port Royal, he chased a brig that refused to respond to warning shots. A hundred round and grape shot were fired before the quarry submitted, but investigation merely revealed her to be a Jamaican privateer.
However, exciting news awaited Nelson in port: Sir Peter Parker had a frigate for him to command and was promoting him post-captain. On 20 June, Nelson consigned the Badger to the capable hands of his good friend Cuthbert Collingwood, thrilled to have gained that life-changing foothold on the bottom of the captains’ list. He was still only twenty years old, with plenty of time to travel the long road to flag rank.
Before his death Captain Suckling had predicted that the Reverend Edmund Nelson would live to see his son an admiral and now it looked as if the prophecy might be fulfilled.
3
Officers hungry for promotion and prize money used to toast the Jamaica station with the words, ‘A sickly season and a bloody war!’14 Promotion came quickly out there. Partly it was the remoteness, which compelled commanders-in-chief to fill vacancies from available officers, rather than to wait for Admiralty appointments. And partly it was the speed at which such vacancies occurred. Disease took more men than battle and the turnover of officers and men was ferocious. The Jamaica station offered fine opportunities to take prizes and to step into dead men’s shoes – if you survived.
Certainly Nelson was making progress. In 1779 Captain Everitt, formerly commander of the Badger, was killed in action. A chain of promotions followed, as gaps were filled, and on 11 June Nelson succeeded Christopher Parker to the captaincy of the Hinchinbroke, a French prize that had been converted into a nine-pounder, twenty-eight-gun frigate. The Hinchinbroke leaked like an old bucket, and had only been brought into service to meet the increasing demands upon the Jamaica station, but it put Nelson on the captains’ list. The problem was that the ship was still at sea on a trip to Florida, and her new captain had to kick his heels in Jamaica until her return.
In one of his news-packed letters to Locker, Nelson admitted that he was ‘never well in port’, but on this occasion his disappointment was the greater because Captain Deane wanted him to accompany the Ruby to their old cruising grounds off Haiti. Instead, Horatio had to content himself sharing the captains’ mess in Jamaica, cultivating new friends as if they were exotic plants.15
Deane, Collingwood and Cornwallis were particularly close companions during this time. Collingwood, a round-faced Tynesider who had known Nelson since 1773, was ten years older but inferior in rank. He seemed to step into every post Nelson vacated and followed him to the Lowestoffe, Badger and Hinchinbroke. Captain William Cornwallis of the Lion, a ruddy-complexioned, quiet and self-effacing officer, was five years older than Collingwood, but Horatio also enjoyed his company. ‘I hope I have made a friend of him,’ he told Locker. The remark, though casually made, reveals much about young Nelson’s character. He was a taciturn, sober man, but there was nothing stony or stiff about him. Far from one of life’s unemotional passers-by, falling indifferently in and out of acquaintanceships at the drop of a hat, he actively sought like spirits, and invested time and effort into making them friends. To them he was fiercely loyal and compassionate, rejoicing in their successes and commiserating over tribulations. In time his circle widened, as he infected one colleague after another. We have already seen him standing by Captain Locker, and here in Jamaica he forged lifelong friendships with Deane, Collingwood and Cornwallis.16
To Nelson’s relief his enforced spell ashore was not devoid of incident. A large French fleet from Toulon was already among the West Indian islands, under the command of the Comte d’Estaing. In June it seized St Thomas and Grenada, two British islands in the Lesser Antilles. And then, amid rumours of the approach of this overwhelming force, came the news that Spain, too, had finally declared war on a harassed Britain, hoping to regain Gibraltar in any peace negotiations. It was not unexpected but serious all the same. Suddenly the dangers from occasional American corsairs seemed small indeed, for the seas were full of powerful enemies.
At the beginning of August 1779 the Gayton, a Jamaican privateer, came into port with a tender. Its company had seen some of d’Estaing’s ships on 29 July, eight ships of the line, several frigates and many transports, and they were close by, off the northeast coast of Hispaniola, within striking distance of Jamaica. Some Spaniards, as ignorant as the Gayton of the deteriorating relations between their respective countries, told the captain of the privateer that d’Estaing’s full force was larger still, and consisted of twelve line of battleships, as many frigates and a hundred or so transports. They were going to embark twelve thousand soldiers at St Nicolas Mole, guarding the Windward Passage, and then fall upon Jamaica itself.
For a few days the island was in turmoil, as every scrap of news seemed to confirm the ominous tidings. His Majesty’s ships Charon and Pomona reported seeing eighteen large ships at Port au Prince on 4 August, evidently preparing to join d’Estaing, and on the 17th a neutral Dutch vessel put into Jamaica from Hispaniola. It brought word that d’Estaing’s fleet had reached Cape François on the north coast of Haiti, and twenty-six ships of the line, up to a dozen frigates and twenty-two thousand troops were massing for the invasion of Jamaica. There was a panic. Without waiting for the approval of the island’s assembly, on 7 August the governor, Major General John Dalling, declared martial law from the King’s House in Spanish Town and summoned a considerable proportion of the militia into service. Blacks were mustered to complete unfinished fortifications, and batteries and redoubts were thrown up along a thirty-mile front from six miles to windward of Kingston to the old harbour. Letters for help went from Dalling and Parker to Sir Henry Clinton commanding the British troops on the American mainland, and to Vice Admiral John Byron. They explained that a full-blown attack was ‘daily expected’.17
For more than a century Jamaica had stubbornly represented Britain in the Caribbean, defying the powers of imperial Spain and France, but now the island seemed doomed to fall before overwhelming forces. The tension, tightened by the heat and humidity of the hurricane season, lasted for weeks. At the dead of night on 24 August, Kingston was jolted from sleep by the sound of gunfire, and the militia spilled out ‘with wonderful alacrity’, evidently determined to resist the enemy as if they were not most indifferently armed. But it was a false alarm. This time the invaders proved to be no more than a convoy of London merchantmen, being escorted in by His Majesty’s ship the Pallas. 18
Nelson was flattered with a key command in the defences. Admiral Parker had all his ships except the Hinchinbroke and four sloops, and disposed them to command the approaches to Kingston. A boom was placed between Gun and Pekin Keys to divert attackers into the channel between Gun Key and Fort Charles, situated at Port Royal on a spit of land that curled around the harbour. A redoubtable seventeenth-century fortress dominating the harbour mouth with a hundred guns in double tiers, Fort Charles would be the focus of any battle for Kingston. Despite his youth, Nelson was put in charge of it with five hundred soldiers. Supporting him were the Salisbury, Charon, Lion and Janus, anchored about a cable’s length apart in a line across the harbour entrance, from the point at Port Royal to what was called the western middle ground. If the French overwhelmed them, the ships had instructions to fall back to the Bristol and Ruby in the narrows off Fort Augusta, which was also defended by a boom. Five more men-of-war, including the Lowestoffe, were stationed at various points of danger and four fire ships had been prepared.19
Yet, for all this, Nelson could see the defences were flawed. There were simply not enough men. Jamaica had only two regiments of regulars, the 60th (Royal American) Regiment and the 79th (Liverpool Blues), of which only the first was acclimatised to the tropics. For the rest reliance had to be placed in a discontented militia consisting of a few whites, many blacks and a large number of mere conscripts. Furthermore, the entire 6,800 troops available were widely scatte
red to cover different points. Five thousand were ‘between the ferry and Kingston’, another thousand at Fort Augusta, five hundred at Fort Charles and three hundred at the Apostles Battery. The guns at Forts Charles and Augusta were principally served by privateersmen, who were to be summoned by an alarm system, but the other batteries were largely manned by untrained blacks drummed up from the plantations by Hercules Ross. It did not inspire Nelson with confidence. ‘I think you must not be surprised to hear of my learning to speak French,’ he told Locker dryly on 12 August.20
Seventeen days after Nelson’s pessimistic prediction, the Punch tender arrived with new intelligence. She had spoke a vessel that had been at Cape François only hours before, and learned that d’Estaing had sailed on 17 August with a hundred and twenty warships and transports and thousands of soldiers. The master of the Punch reconnoitred Cape François and St Nicolas Mole himself, and confirmed that the French fleet had gone, leaving nothing larger than a frigate behind. Wherever d’Estaing was heading it was obviously not Jamaica, and the imminence of the hurricane season seemed to preclude any later descent upon the island being made. Everyone breathed easily again, martial law was lifted and ships were allowed to come and go as before.21
Nelson was proud of the confidence that had been placed in him and would boast that his was ‘the most important post in the whole island’, but the appearance of the Hinchinbroke soon restored him to his proper element. The first of September was a clear day. Captain Nelson went on board the frigate and solemnly listened while his commission was read to the assembled ship’s company. Then he prepared his new command for sea.
4
Again Nelson inherited the men, but this time he had a small band of followers – the first in his career – to accompany him. Among them were the four captain’s servants (if we include the absent William Locker), Forster the surgeon, Frank Lepee and petty officers such as Cruger, Tyson and Thomas Gore.
The books of the Hinchinbroke also suggest that Nelson was not going to be above the minor financial abuses so commonly practised by captains of the day. His new frigate had a complement of two hundred men, twice that of the tiny Badger, and entitled him to another four captain’s servants, although he was in no better position to exploit the privilege. He filled three of the vacancies with seamen – William Fry, James Hatton and John Notes – and invented the fourth incumbent. ‘Horace Nelson’ never existed and was presumably borne on the books purely to earn the captain the full allowance paid for servants.22
Nelson encountered a few problems acquiring a stable team of officers for the Hinchinbroke. John Walker was master and Robert Huggins the purser, but during the eight months of his command Nelson had no fewer than three first lieutenants, one succeeding another. Notably, all three – Arthur St Leger, Charles Cunningham and George Harrison – were merely acting lieutenants still waiting to take their examinations. Of them Cunningham, whose scant, two-month stint began in November, may have been the ablest. Hailing from Eye in Suffolk, he was actually two years older than his captain and had experience of both the naval and merchant services. Harrison, who followed him, had been the second lieutenant of the Hinchinbroke, and Joseph Bullen, a former protégé of Captain Cornwallis, joined the ship to replace him as the junior commissioned officer on board. Bullen became one of the most steadfast of all Nelson’s followers. Born in April 1761, the son of the rector of Kennett in Cambridgeshire, he had gone to sea as a thirteen-year-old midshipman in Cornwallis’s Pallas, and followed his captain to four more ships before transferring to the Hinchinbroke. 23
Bullen was the only one of Nelson’s lieutenants to hold a full commission, dated two years earlier. The use of so many unqualified officers reflected the shortages on the Jamaica station and the necessity for constant promotions, but hardly helped maintain good order aboard the ships. Nevertheless, Nelson did rather better on the Hinchingbroke than the Badger. He felt it necessary to flog nine of his men, but there were only ten desertions, one from the hospital in Port Royal.24
Nelson enjoyed reading his new orders, which dispatched him to join the Niger (Captain Robert Lambert) and the Penelope (Captain James Jones) in patrolling the Lesser Antilles to the southeast. Here, close to the fabled main, there were opportunities to profit from the new war with Spain. Spanish wars had always been popular in the Royal Navy, because treasure was still shipped from the rich American mines to Spain and fortunes in prize money had occasionally fallen to fortunate officers. Nelson was by no means a slave to lucre, but he was a man of sorely measurable means with a career ahead, and far from blind to the advantages of money. The potentially rich pickings were probably at the forefront of his mind when he sailed from Port Royal on 5 October 1779. 25
Improving the efficiency of his crew on the way, he reached the Niger and Penelope off the Dutch island of Curaçao on the 28th, and two days later experienced his first contested action as a commander. At about midnight of 30 October the squadron spotted four sails to the northeast and gave chase. One quickly surrendered, but the Niger and Hitchinbroke had difficulty with the second. About three-thirty, after exchanging broadsides with the Niger and resisting for an hour, she hauled down her colours. By daylight the other two fugitives had also been taken by the Penelope. They were American vessels, two fourteen-gun ships, the Conference and the Rachel and Betsy, and a brig and a snow, the Penelope and Adrianne, both unarmed, all four owned by Daniel Ross and Company, manned by a total of sixty-eight men, and bound for Curaçao with sugar and coffee. The Americans had been hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered, but they had fought gamely. Nelson’s frigate received several shot, her pinnace was broken and some of her rigging cut. But her captain was richer in more than experience. His promotion to post-captain had increased his share of prize money, and he estimated that the captures would net him £800. 26
On 6 November the Hinchinbroke and the Niger also seized a sloop, but somewhere east of Jamaica Nelson separated from his consort. The end of the month found his frigate being punished by a powerful head sea. Her fore-topgallant yard, main topmast and main top were sheared away, with much standing and running rigging. The men cleared the wreckage and fashioned repairs, but Nelson put into Port Antonio for help. There he was asked to escort a merchantman to Port Royal, and gathering others along the way reached his destination on 12 December.
Back in harbour, the Hinchinbroke was refitted and reprovisioned, ten men were pressed to make good desertions and Horatio punctuated the seasonal festivities with letters to his much-missed ‘sea-daddy’. Locker learned that his rum, stored on the Lowestoffe, was still safe, and that Nelson was sending him some shaddock fruits as a gift; in the meantime he received a chronicle of the ravages of life on the Jamaica station.27
‘Poor Hill’, the former master of the Lowestoffe, had died of a fever at Rattan, and ‘your old coxswain’ had perished in action. Sadder still, Horatio had just attended the funeral of one the most respected of their colleagues. ‘I am now going to tell you what you and many others will be very sorry to hear,’ he wrote. ‘The death of that worthy, good man, Captain Joseph Deane [of the Ruby]. He died on the 12th of January, and was buried next day at Green Bay amidst the tears of his officers and ship’s company and his many friends.’ Nelson, most likely, was among those friends overcome by emotion. He never hid affection from close comrades and was usually tearful at meetings and partings. He would always find deathbed scenes unbearable.
The end of Deane seems to have broken up the captains’ ‘mess’. Horatio, who shared lodgings with Cornwallis, was sure that he would soon be returning to England himself. He was ill again and his doctors were advising him to leave Jamaica. He even applied to the captain and first mate of the Rover, an American ship brought in as a prize, for a particular bottle of medicine. His ‘old complaint in my breast’ was to blame, he informed Locker. ‘It is turned out to be the gout there,’ and he had been twice ‘given over’ to ‘that cursed disorder’ in the past eight months. Gout was a diagnosis eighteenth-cent
ury physicians conveniently ascribed to almost any unidentifiable pain, but Nelson was probably actually experiencing recurrent attacks of the malaria he had contracted in the East Indies.28
Before going home, however, he anticipated performing one more service and Sir Peter was trying to find him a better ship. The admiral offered Nelson a Spanish prize he was converting into a thirty-six-gun frigate, but the captain opted to wait for a purpose-built warship to become available.
Just what that final service would be was rapidly becoming clear and providing the gossip for the island. Excitement and speculation were rife, but few, perhaps none, realised that what began as an adventure of dazzling imperial vision was to disintegrate into a hideous nightmare of broken dreams and death.
VIII
IN THE WAKE OF THE BUCCANEERS
To him, as to the burning levin,
Short, bright, resistless course was given.
Where’er his Country’s foes were found
Was heard the fated thunder’s sound.
Till burst the bolt on yonder shore,
Rolled, blazed, destroy’d – and was no more.
Sir Walter Scott, Marmion
1
MAJOR General John Dalling was almost fifty and had been a soldier for most of his life. He regaled listeners with colourful memories of the Jacobite rebellion and service in North America under Amherst and Wolfe, but he had also spent many years in Jamaica, where he rose from the humble command of Fort Charles to become governor and commander-in-chief of the island in 1777. Dalling was a man it was possible to underestimate. He suffered from an old war wound, cursed a stubborn gout and looked homely, plump and amiable. Entertaining in some style at the King’s House in Spanish Town, a few miles northwest of Kingston, he looked suitably tailored to a life of sedentary administration. But the truth was that Dalling had a vestigial thirst for military glory and was thoroughly fed up with Jamaica. He constantly feuded with the assembly, which was not only corrupt but eager to appropriate powers claimed by the royal governor. Now that Spain had entered the war, joining France and the American colonies, Dalling saw a way out – a means of winning that coveted military reputation with plunder and an honourable retirement to boot.