by John Sugden
However, in his eagerness for action Nelson neglected a fundamental foundation for any success at sea: an adequate supply of victuals. The master’s log of the Albemarle shows that though the ship took on wood and water several times after reaching Canada – at St John’s, Capelin Bay and in the St Lawrence – she failed to replenish food supplies reduced by the Atlantic voyage. Nelson was sailing towards an enemy coast with a serious shortage of fresh food. It was a mistake for which he would pay, but from which he would also learn an important lesson.
5
He was away for two months but for the most part without luck. ‘In the end our cruise has been an unsuccessful one,’ he told Locker on 19 October. ‘We have taken, seen and destroyed more enemies than is seldom done in the same space of time, but not one arrived in port.’ Even this was an exaggeration, for the ship’s logs show that few prizes were taken, and those inconsiderable ones at that. Compared with the fruits of that cruise in the old Bristol back in ’78 this was an exceedingly lean harvest.23
On 6 July Nelson came up with the Pandora off Cape Rozier, bent upon the same errand. Captain John Inglis was sick, and complaining about the Canadian climate, but at least his cruise would net him a Salem privateer. Nelson was not so fortunate. On 11 July he found what might have been an enemy privateer, but it was too close inshore to be captured, and the following month other promising ‘chases’ were lost in the all too frequent fogs. Nelson’s first successes occurred on 11 and 12 July, when he recaptured two British vessels taken by the Americans, the last a schooner from Madeira taken only the previous day by the enemy privateer Lively. 24
Operating in Boston Bay, Captain Nelson found little to whet his appetite. True, there were prizes to be had, but they promised meagre amounts of prize money, and one gets the impression that Nelson thought the work dirty. These were not privateers but small fishing schooners, each manned by about half a dozen men eking an uncertain living by working the offshore banks. Some British officers would have happily destroyed the trade, and did so. Three-quarters of the Chatham fishing fleet were lost by the last year of the war. But the captain of the Albemarle showed no such zeal. Several times during the cruise he ‘spoke’ enemy fishing vessels – that is, he exchanged words with their masters without boarding, and then allowed them on their way, and at least once, on 24 August, he ‘left off’ a ‘chase’ after discovering that it was merely a fishing schooner. In fact, Nelson’s exploits off the American coast in July and August were marked by acts of generosity on both sides that are pleasing to record.
Nelson’s first real prize was a fishing boat from Cape Cod, which fell into his hands on 13 July. The master, Richard Rich, and his five companions were taken aboard the Albemarle to act as pilots, while Nelson threw a tow rope onto the vessel itself, intending to use her as a tender. Though the prisoners had little choice but to cooperate, they forged a reasonable relationship with the British captain, and when he took a Plymouth fishing boat off Cape Sable on 9 August Nelson not only discharged his ‘pilots’ but also returned their ship.
An almost daily catalogue of escapades followed. Early in August Nelson spent several days chasing a square rigger he took to be a French warship. He got close enough to force the ‘chase’ to jettison small boats and spars but lost her on the 5th. On the 9th and 10th Nelson captured fishing boats from Plymouth and Marblehead, while the 12th saw him overtake an American prize of His Majesty’s ship Charlestown. It was leaking and he destroyed it and shifted the prize crew to his own frigate. The next day a Cape Cod fishing schooner with six men was captured, and on the 14th the Albemarle drove another ship ashore near Cape Cod and dismasted it. On the 15th a Plymouth fishing boat fell into the bag, but Nelson merely used her to receive his remaining prisoners and spare his thinning provisions. A Boston fishing boat taken the following day was less fortunate. Nelson suspected it was spying for French warships sheltering in Boston harbour, and destroyed the vessel after removing her four-man crew. There were one or two more prizes, the last on 29 August when a shallop was boarded inshore from the Albemarle’s pinnace.25
The most attractive incident occurred on 18 August, when the Albemarle spotted a schooner inshore and sent a tender after it. To Nelson’s surprise, the vessel made no attempt to escape but turned towards the British frigate. It was the Harmony, of Plymouth, Massachusetts, owned by Thomas Davis and commanded by Nathaniel Carver. In some way Davis and Carver were connected with the prize Nelson had taken in July and then released after her master had served him as a pilot. The Americans had been overwhelmed by Nelson’s generosity in restoring the prize, and when the Albemarle reappeared Davis sent Carver out with a strange but remarkable offering.
The ‘pilots’ had noticed the lack of fresh provisions aboard the British frigate, as well as the first signs of scurvy, a disease feared by all sailors. In gratitude for the return of his ship, Davis sent Nelson animals, fresh vegetables and a copy of the current Boston newspaper. Captain Nelson was greatly moved. He sent the provisions to his sick, pressed an unwelcome payment upon his benefactors and also a gift equal in value to their own. It was a written testimonial that Carver’s ship had been captured and returned ‘on account of his good services’, and that he deserved well of British officers. In effect, it gave the Harmony immunity from the British cruisers, and enabled her to fish the banks unmolested for the duration of the war. Davis was so proud of his certificate that he had it framed and exhibited in his home for many years.26
It had been an unsuccessful cruise, but Horatio made a notable escape on 14 August, when he hovered outside Boston harbour. At about three in the afternoon five ships were seen coming out, but fog reduced visibility and Nelson had to close in for a better look. An hour later brought him near enough to see four ships of the line and a frigate. They were French, part of a force under the Marquis de Vaudreuil, which had been driven from the West Indies by the British under Admiral Rodney and was holing up in Boston. Every one of the oncoming enemy ships was superior in strength to the Albemarle. At four-thirty one of the big ships of the line fired a signal gun, and the squadron turned towards the lone British frigate. It was then that Nelson realised the mistake he had made. He had closed upon an enemy force he could not fight.
Coming towards him the five French warships were ultimately bound for Piscataway to bring some mast ships back to Boston. The ships of the line were seventy-four- or eighty-gunners, and their frigate was the thirty-two-gun Iris. Any one was capable of crushing the little Albemarle, a mere twenty-eight-gun frigate. Nelson did the only thing he could; he wore his ship and fled.
What happened next is uncertain. According to the logs of the Albemarle, Nelson simply outstripped his pursuers. The captain’s log, for instance, states that ‘at 7 the ships in chase had dropped much [behind]’, and Master Trail’s more detailed account as well as Hinton’s log carry the same story. It appears that a chase of about two-and-a-half hours left the enemy far astern, and the Albemarle out of immediate danger. This is much as we would have expected, for if frigates could not outfight ships of the line they were generally able to outsail them.
However, when recounting the incident for Captain Locker two months later Nelson resorted to fantasy. The French, he said, ‘gave us a pretty dance for between nine or ten hours, but we beat all except the frigate, and though we brought to for her, after we were out of sight of the line-of-battleships, she tacked and stood from us. Our escape I think wonderful: they were upon the clearing up of a fog within shot of us and chased us the whole time about one point from the wind. The frigate, I fancy, had not forgot the dressing [drubbing] Captain [Elliot] Salter had given the Amazon for daring to leave the line-of-battle ships.’ In this account, therefore, Nelson outsailed the ships of the line in a prolonged chase and then offered battle to the frigate, which mercifully opted for discretion rather than valour. Though an improved version of the incident, even this was a mere halfway house.
For in the ‘Sketch of My Life’, written for the Naval Chron
icle in 1799, Nelson claimed to be ‘chased by three French ships-of-the-line and the Iris frigate. As they all beat me in sailing very much, I had no chance left but running them amongst the shoals of St George’s bank. This alarmed the line-of-battle ships, and they quitted the pursuit; but the frigate continued, and at sun-set was little more than gun-shot distant, when the line-of-battle ships being out of sight, I ordered the main topsail to be laid to the mast, when the frigate tacked, and stood to rejoin her consorts.’
Obviously the details were cloudier in 1799 than seventeen years earlier, but Nelson seems to have embroidered his escapade for public consumption. His claim to have shaken off the ships of the line by running his frigate between dangerous shoals has no counterpart in the contemporary evidence, not even in the exaggerated story sent to Locker. However, it echoes the then forgotten achievements of Elliot Salter, to which Nelson had alluded in the letter to Locker. Salter’s exploit had occurred about the same place and time – off Cape Henry on 29 and 30 July 1782, a mere fortnight before the chase involving Nelson. Salter’s frigate, the Santa Margaretta, had been reconnoitring Vaudreuil’s ships before two enemy frigates, the Amazon and Iris, chased him away. Boldly deciding to fight, Salter squared up to the superior Amazon and defeated and took her before the sluggish Iris saw fit to intervene. The Iris then retreated towards her reassuring ships of the line, but the following day the impudent Salter was pursued by the entire French squadron. He had to relinquish his prize and only escaped by running the Santa Margaretta into the tricky shoals off the Delaware.
Though writers have accepted Nelson’s final and heroic version of the pursuit of the Albemarle, the kernel of truth it contained was probably deliberately inflated to exalt the captain’s prowess. Nelson was becoming increasingly besotted with public attention and learned to be his own publicity agent. He never invented incidents, but was prone to magnify his achievements, sometimes (as here) to the point of grossly misrepresenting the facts. Nevertheless, even unvarnished, the escape off Cape Cod was fortunate and dramatic enough, and Horatio justly regarded it as compensation for the barren returns of his prize taking.27
A more formidable enemy than the French was scurvy. That scourge of long-haul sailing was caused by a lack of vitamin C and a reliance on salted provisions rather than fresh fruit and vegetables. Debilitating and painful, it was usually heralded by swelling gums, falling teeth and excruciatingly painful joints. In Nelson’s time nothing was known about vitamins, but it was well understood that scurvy was caused by the poor diet and sensible commanders did what they could to supply fresh food and issue lemon or orange juice as antiscorbutics. As an admiral Nelson was remarkable for his ability to maintain healthy crews, and this early scurvy outbreak aboard the Albemarle was due entirely to inexperience and carelessness. He was so intent on finding those suspicious sails he had seen between Newfoundland and Quebec that he neglected to provision properly. By the end of August, notwithstanding the generosity of the Harmony’s people, the rations on the Albemarle were stretched paper-thin. Twenty-eight supernumeraries and prisoners or British prize crews picked up during her operations had helped to deplete the provisions. The men were soon ‘knocked up with the scurvy’ and early in September one died. Nelson ran for Quebec.28
His need to get the sick ashore arguably put the ship at risk in the St Lawrence. Above the Isle of Bic, Nelson rashly navigated the difficult north traverse in light winds on 15 September. The gales that opened the day promised an easy passage, but by ten in the morning the wind had dropped and the ship found itself becalmed and sliding steadily with the current towards threatening shallows. Francis Roillet, a local pilot picked up at Bic, was ‘frightened out of his senses’ according to Bromwich’s story. But Nelson would not be deterred. He lowered a pinnace and had the men row forward with a kedge anchor to drop it into the water ahead. Then, to the ‘astonishment’ of the pilot, he wound the anchor on the capstan and painfully drew his ship out of danger.29
On 18 September he anchored in Quebec and discharged twenty-five of his men to the local hospital. The cruise had been gruelling, but the sequel bore an entirely different character. For the first time Horatio fell in love.
6
Mary Simpson was twenty-three years old and an exceptional beauty. ‘If Mary was not the most beautiful girl in Quebec, she was at any rate the most handsome she [I] had ever beheld,’ recalled one who knew her. Nor was this all reflective romanticism. Mary featured in a celebration of the local belles published in the Quebec Gazette only months after Nelson’s visit:
Sure you will rather listen to my call
Since [of] beauty and Quebec’s fair nymphs I sing;
Henceforth Diana in Miss S—ps—n see,
As noble and majestic is her air,
Nor can fair Venus, W—lc—s, vie with thee,
Nor all thy heavenly charms with thee compare.30
Mary was a North American by birth, and a war baby, born as New France was being overthrown. Her father was a Scot, Alexander Simpson, known in the Scottish way as Sandy. Apparently he had come to America with his first cousin, James Thompson, both part of the 78th Regiment of Foot (Simon Fraser’s Highlanders) raised in Scotland in 1757. The two friends saw action in some of the decisive engagements of the Seven Years War, at Louisbourg in 1758, Quebec the following year and Montreal in 1760. Simpson became provost marshal under the celebrated Wolfe, but remained in the colonies after his regiment was disbanded in 1763, and somewhere along the way married and started a family.31
The Simpsons settled in Quebec, where Alexander is said to have resided at Bandon Lodge, the first house outside the narrow archway of St Louis Gate, opposite the parliament building. The Simpsons were hospitable, kind and accomplished people, and Alexander was known as ‘a loving husband, a tender and affectionate father, a good master and a faithful friend’. But when Nelson met them they had fallen upon hard times. Mary, or some of her acquaintances, must have told Horatio of the series of misfortunes that had recently reduced the family’s prospects. It began early in 1781 when Mary’s mother, Sarah, fell dangerously ill of an overgrown fistula. It was a painful and difficult condition in the eighteenth century, but Sarah was still middle aged and strong and survived two ‘desperate’ operations. The burdens of nursing the sick woman and maintaining the home presumably bore heavily upon Mary.32
Unfortunately, another disaster waited in the wings. The day Sarah attempted to leave her room and venture downstairs her husband suffered a sudden apoplectic stroke. He died the following afternoon, 27 March 1781, a man in his prime without even a will made out. The funeral two days later was well attended, attracting most of the worthies of the town, who respected Alexander as a merchant and a man. Sarah applied for an administration of the estate, and gamely resolved to carry on the family business, trading from their house as her husband had done. Given her situation, she placed a courageous advertisement in the local newspaper declaring that she would ‘esteem herself under great obligations to her friends for the continuance of their custom and favour’.33
But it was a very hard road, as James Thompson, now an overseer of military works and fortifications in Quebec, testified. ‘Her [Sarah’s] condition is really deplorable,’ he wrote. ‘The reflection on the loss of a dutiful husband is not the only difficulty she has to labour under, though in her present weakly condition is alone more than she is able to bear. But her large concern in trade will fall heavy on her without the assistance the head of her family naturally afforded.’ Thompson himself had recently boarded with the Simpsons after losing his first wife. They had endured his never-ending stream of business callers with unfailing cheerfulness, but in December 1780, at the age of forty-seven, and shortly before Sarah fell ill, Thompson married a Miss Frances Cooper and moved into the old bishop’s palace. Thompson’s removal had reduced the drudgery of housekeeping, but also cost the household a pair of hands, hands that were now needed.34
Miss Mary Simpson may have been a beauty when she met Nels
on, but her life had already been seared by tragedy, and she had borne responsibilities of the gravest kind. Yet her gaiety, amiability and sense of humour remained, and she was rated a girl of accomplishments. Mary had been educated at the school of a Mr Tanswell, mastered French, and wrote in a competent if scrawling hand, and she was by no means the stereotypical narrow provincial. Though Captain Nelson only knew her in the few short weeks between 18 September and 14 October 1782 he was thoroughly enchanted. In those few soft days of fair weather, sharpened by the occasional fresh breeze and splashes of rain, Mary seemed a vision more glorious than the woods turning to flame in the maturing Canadian autumn. She made him feel better in every way. ‘Health, that greatest of blessings, is what I never truly enjoyed till I saw Fair Canada,’ he wrote to his father. ‘The change it has wrought I am convinced is truly wonderful.’35
We can only speculate how they met. One link was Alexander Davison. During his stay in Quebec, Nelson consorted with the officers of His Majesty’s ships Daedalus, Hussar, Astrea, Canceaux, Cockatrice and Drake, but the most enduring new friend was a thirty-three-year-old Northumbrian shipowner named Alexander Davison. Davison and his younger brother George were importers and suppliers familiar with all the local merchants and accustomed to offering hospitality to naval officers. As a member of the Quebec Legislative Council, Alexander also knew his way around administration. Nelson liked the man and became a regular guest. The captain expected to be posted back home and learned that Davison too was bound for England. He had just sold the premises of ‘Messrs Davison and Lees’ on Notre Dame Street in the Lower Town and was merely awaiting the transfer of money before shipping to London, where Horatio promised to visit.
Although Nelson had matters to deal with aboard his frigate, including the punishment of deserters and a tippling steward, and filling the gaps left by the sick, he attended social events ashore, and it was possibly through Davison that he met Mary. After all, as notable and personable members of the mercantile community the Davison and Simpson families were well known to each other.