Nelson

by John Sugden

  One finds it impossible to disagree with writer Tom Pocock who voiced the opinion that if Mary had lost her husband in Antigua she might have married one of her naval admirers, but that person would probably have been Cuthbert Collingwood.

  XIII

  OLD OFFICERS AND YOUNG GENTLEMEN

  ‘He was a thorn in our flesh,’ came the reply –

  ‘The most bird-witted, unaccountable,

  Odd little runt that ever I did spy.’

  Robert Graves, 1805

  1

  MAJOR General Sir Thomas Shirley, captain general and governor-in-chief of His Majesty’s Leeward Caribee Islands, was fifty-six and at the stage of life when an honourable and rewarding retirement looked attractive.

  He had come to the islands from England, but colonial service was in his blood. Boston born, he was the son of Lieutenant General William Shirley, the governor of Massachusetts and commander-in-chief in North America at the outbreak of the Seven Years War. Both Thomas’s older brothers had died defending Britain’s North American empire, one with Braddock’s ill-fated army, slaughtered by Indians and French on the Monongahela River in 1755, the other during a march from Oswego. Sir Thomas himself had been in the army since 1745, fought at Louisbourg, Minorca and Belle Isle, and commanded a regiment in Portugal. He had served as lieutenant governor of Dominica.

  Since May 1781 Shirley had governed the Leeward Islands, and to him had fallen the task of protecting Antigua, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis during the last dangerous years of the American war. In February 1782 he had made a creditable though not uncriticised defence of Brimstone Hill against superior and ultimately overpowering French forces invading St Kitts. Both Nevis and St Kitts had fallen, but they were restored to Britain by the Peace of Paris, and Shirley resumed his stewardship from within the impressive walls of Clarke’s Hill, his residence in St John’s. Sir Thomas had enemies but he was widely respected in the islands, where he was known to be ‘a mild and humane governor’, but he was hoping to write a handsome finale to his full career. His wife had been dead some years, but he had a young son, William Warden, and before he withdrew to England he wanted to ennoble his posterity by petitioning the crown for the restoration of a family baronetcy extinct since 1705. 1

  Retirement would bring relief, for it had not taken Shirley long to discover that peace was sometimes little less turbulent than war. He was an astute man. In one of his earliest letters as governor, for example, he had drawn attention to the ecological consequences of deforestation, which he realised exposed and dehumidified the soil – a remarkably modern view. Unlike Horatio Nelson, the governor respected the islanders, and knew them to be fundamentally loyal to the crown. ‘I have always met with a very cheerful concurrence on the part of this island to the requisitions I have occasionally made to them for the good of His Majesty’s service and the protection of the colony,’ he wrote. The local press was squarely loyal in sentiment, and fussed over royalty, and during the war the islanders had invested large sums in defence. Antigua alone had spent £88,000. Though their merchants had occasionally indulged in treasonable trade with foreigners, their motives had been commercial rather than political. After all, they needed Britain. Unlike the mainland American colonies, which were relatively secure from traditional European enemies after the conquest of New France, the islands were vulnerable to Spanish and French forces. They looked to the British crown for protection.2

  But loyalty, Shirley knew, was not written in stone. If the rebellion in America had taught him anything it was that the empire could only thrive with the consent of the governed, and that was what was beginning to worry him about the navigation laws. Some of the island traders were doing well. With a monopoly of the British sugar market their exports were picking up nicely, though the rum trade, which depended more upon American outlets, was faltering. But there was a widespread perception that the crown’s strict enforcement of the navigation laws spelled ruin.3

  The truth was that Antigua was still impoverished. The war had disrupted trade, and forced the colonists to spend heavily on fortifications, improvements to the ports and the maintenance of extraordinary numbers of British troops. The embarrassments had coincided with a run of wretched harvests that year after year returned less than cost. In 1779–80 the distress was such that the crown granted a loan of £20,000, but though that money had to be repaid, the economy got no stronger. The sugar harvest of 1783 was only a tenth of what it had once been, and Antigua’s debt to Britain stood at £38,000. In July the assembly begged the king to consider their many disbursements and seven years of drought,

  the severity of which cannot be more justly described than by a detail of the disappointments and misery it has produced. Our crops have been destroyed, our labours and industry frustrated, our debts accumulated by a deprivation of the only means to reduce them. Families, falling from ease and affluence into penury and want, have been obliged to abandon the estates of their ancestors. Our lands, which when blessed with rains were fruitful and abounding, are become sterile, and debarred thereby of our usual resources, our expences in the cultivation of our plantations have continually increased. Such has been, and such still is, our situation, and this too at a time when the calls upon us for the defence of our country, and for the accommodation of your Majesty’s garrison, required more than usual supplies. And at this unfortunate period, when your Majesty’s faithful subjects thought the measure of their woes complete, they saw their metropolis [St John’s] a second time in flames, and the most valuable parts of it, which had before escaped a similar conflagration, were now laid in ashes.4

  Nor were these merely the words of paranoid planters. ‘This country is poor, most of the landholders being impoverished from a series of bad crops previous to the last three years,’ reported one visitor. ‘In fact the greater part of the estates in this island are in trust or under mortgage to the merchants of London, Liverpool and Bristol.’5

  Similar problems beset most of the other British West Indian islands, and just when the fractured American trade was beginning to return and relieve their battered economies, the issue of the navigation laws swept ominously in from the sea. Everywhere people worried that the exclusion of essential American supplies would dry up provisions, fuel inflation and blight recovery. There were riots in Barbados and St Kitts, noisy complaints in the press, inflammatory handbills and an increasing number of anti-British voices in the local assemblies. Petitions were prepared in the islands while in England in 1785 the Society of West India Merchants and Planters lobbied Parliament for a committee of enquiry. Antigua begged the crown to rescind its debt, and in 1783 petitioned that ‘foreign bottoms’ be allowed to deliver provisions at moments of crisis.6

  Appointed by the crown, Sir Thomas Shirley was ultimately responsible to the king for the enforcement of the navigation laws in the Leeward Islands, but his salary was voted by the Antiguan assembly, and his friends and the members of his advisory council belonged to the controlling planting class that expected him to articulate its grievances. At first Shirley doubted the navigation laws would do the islands much damage, and he had been unwise enough to say so in one of his dispatches home, but as his appreciation of the local predicament deepened he edged towards a compromise.

  In February 1784 he forwarded a petition of the St Kitts assembly to ministers. It prayed that their ports be declared free and open to all. Shirley thought the measure ‘beneficial’, and pointed out that the island was well favoured; properly supported it might capture trade from the rival Dutch colony of St Eustatius with its open ports. At any rate, it merited ‘the benignity and attention’ of government ‘in a very high degree’ because of its ‘strong and steady attachment . . . to His Majesty’s service in many instances previous to, and during, its subjection to the arms of France’ during the war. Like the other islands it was, he later added, groaning under ‘a very heavy load of debt’. On 30 July Shirley even suggested that American vessels of a small tonnage be allowed into the islands
, all of which ‘depend very much on America for almost all kinds of trade . . .’7

  Unfortunately, the temper and inclinations of the British government were tracing a different path. In 1783, during the dying days of Lord Shelburne’s administration, Pitt indeed proposed a bill removing the restrictions upon commercial intercourse between the new American republic and the West Indies, but the government fell and the bill with it. Fears then spread that any relaxation of the navigation laws would ravage the British carrying trade and its ‘nursery of seamen’. Lord Sheffield, a Member of Parliament, used a wealth of argument, statistics and a silver pen to rally the country behind the navigation laws in his famous tract, Observations on the Commerce of the United States, published in 1783. Sheffield was sure that the growth of Canada and Nova Scotia would meet the requirements of the West Indian islands, while the mother country herself would simultaneously benefit from a direct American trade. There was no need to threaten the country’s naval resources by a hasty repeal of the navigation laws. In Antigua, therefore, Shirley found that whatever inclination to temporise had existed in Britain was evaporating. Few in London were interested in his plan for concessions.

  Shirley had not given up hope, however. He received Lord Sydney’s insistence on the full implementation of the navigation laws in January 1785, and warned that ‘there is a great reason to apprehend that these islands will feel many inconveniences from the want of a regular supply of corn . . . and of some species of lumber, which last, for a time at least, our own colonies in North America [Canada] will not be able to furnish’. He asked for more directions.8

  It was amidst this exchange that Governor Shirley first heard of the young, boyish looking captain of His Majesty’s frigate Boreas. Horatio Nelson, bent upon a zealous self-righteous enforcement of the navigation laws, contemptuous of the islanders, whom he regarded as corrupt, self-seeking rebels, and beyond the control of his admiral, was unlikely to make a constructive contribution to the problem. A clash with him was almost inevitable.

  It gathered quickly, beginning with Collingwood’s interception of the American ship the Liberty trying to reach St John’s in December 1784. Collingwood claimed the vessel was attempting to enter under the pretext of distress to unload its illegal cargo, and in return was accused by the islanders of blockading their port. Shirley had tried to establish an acceptable routine for handling such matters, and it was on his prompting that Admiral Hughes had revised his instructions to captains at the end of the month. As we have seen, those orders required foreign ships to be intercepted by the navy, and held in abeyance while their credentials, as well as the British captain’s report, were submitted to the governor or his representatives. Ultimately, therefore, it was the governor who decided upon the propriety of the ship proceeding.

  In January 1785 Nelson refused to obey the revised order, declaring that it was for the navy alone to determine whether foreign ships be allowed into British ports. The civil authorities, and by implication, Governor Shirley himself, could not be trusted. Nelson made a candid response to Hughes on 9 January, but for some time Shirley remained ignorant of the disagreement. Naturally he presumed that Hughes commanded his own officers. It was not until mid-January, when the governor wrote directly and innocently to Captain Nelson, begging ‘leave’ to suggest the ‘surest mode’ of putting Hughes’s order into practice, that he himself came directly under fire.

  Far from anticipating outrage, Shirley believed he was successfully marrying authority ashore and afloat. He had accepted that the claims of incoming foreign ships needed investigation, and that naval officers were qualified above all others to assess any alleged damage. Every foreign master seeking admission to a port would have to submit a report from the intercepting naval commander. Though the governor or his representative would be the final arbiter, Shirley promised Nelson that ‘if it shall be very manifest that there is not a necessity for such vessels coming into port to repair . . . you would send them about their business’. It was through ‘our joint endeavours’ that the navigation laws could best be implemented.9

  In fact, the day Shirley wrote his personal letter to Nelson, seeking to induct him into the new procedure, he also addressed the presidents of the councils in Nevis, St Kitts and Montserrat asking their cooperation. The Americans were now foreigners, he reminded those authorities, and enclosing copies of his letter to Captain Nelson urged them to ‘aid him as much as lies in your power to carry the several acts of parliament relative to trade with foreigners into execution’. Shirley did not approve of the navigation laws, but his government had ordered him to enforce them and it was a matter of creating a uniform approach. There is no reason to doubt his integrity, though he underestimated the extent to which merchants and officials alike were prepared to shirk their duty and evade the legislation.10

  Nelson, on the other hand, had the poorest possible opinion of the civil authorities. Most recently he had sent Wilfred Collingwood’s Rattler to Sandy Point at St Kitts, where four American merchantmen were found on 14 January. Investigating, Collingwood uncovered a catalogue of irregularities, evasions and illegalities. The law only admitted ships that were British built and owned, and piloted by a British master and crew. But the American master of one of the ships claimed to be British purely on account of having served in British merchantmen during the war. Another of the four ships was the Nancy, owned by Seth Doane of New London. She had been to St Kitts, where she was turned into a ‘British bottom’ by purchase. Her cargo was sold to the Basdens, merchants of the island, and after an alleged sale the ship itself was re-registered at the customs house as a British vessel.

  All four vessels, in one or more particulars, smashed holes through the navigation laws, and Wilfred Collingwood confronted Henry Bennett, the collector of customs at Sandy Point, demanding to know why they had been given registers authorising them to trade. Bennett was slippery. He did not defend all the illegal practices of which Collingwood complained, but was clearly at loggerheads over some important issues. The law required owners and masters to be British subjects, but Bennett was willing to accept the mere swearing of an oath of allegiance in lieu. He also had a liberal interpretation of what constituted a ‘British bottom’. According to him, only American ships built after 1783, when the independence of the United States was formally recognised by Britain, were ‘foreign bottoms’; those built during the War of Independence itself, between 1776 and 1783, could be accepted as British because at that time the colonists were simply rebellious subjects of the crown.

  Wilfred Collingwood was not a man to be put upon, especially by Bennett and a bunch of crown lawyers and customs officials. He replied crisply. During the war any American vessel captured by the navy was deemed legitimate prize. They were obviously regarded as foreign ships. In time it was Collingwood’s opinion, rather than Bennett’s, that would be regarded as the definitive interpretation of the law, and it was the experiences of both Collingwood brothers that coloured Nelson’s reaction to Shirley’s overtures.11

  Searching further afield for allies, Nelson rushed papers relating to the Rattler’s debacle direct to the Admiralty, without even submitting them to his commander-in-chief. The affair convinced him that the civil authorities were rotten to the core and hand-in-glove with the illegal traders. He had already thrown out Hughes’s revised order, and now he just as summarily dismissed Shirley’s plea for ‘joint endeavours’ by the navy and the governors and presidents of council.

  At the end of January Nelson rocked Governor Shirley back on his heels with a furious missive from St Kitt’s. Cuthbert Collingwood, who until then had been the focus of the navy’s campaign, had responded to Shirley’s suggestions without enthusiasm, but at least obediently. Certainly, there was no indication that he would eschew the procedures outlined. But Nelson completely denied the right of civil authorities to intervene in the process, and charged them with negligence if not corruption. The navigation laws were directed to the officers of the navy, ‘well knowing that
those whose profession is the sea must be the best judges of the accidents which may happen upon that element’, and their duty was to report solely to a superior professional officer. Nelson declined to hold himself accountable to any civil official, though if one of an appropriate rank enquired he would receive ‘such information as is proper he should know’. Only if no warship was present should the presidents of council and customs officers handle the business. ‘Thus,’ said Nelson, in almost a mock parody of the governor’s letter, ‘by our joint endeavours will illegal trade be suppressed.’12

  Nelson hoped that when the civil authorities did act, they would ‘do their duty’ and exclude foreign commerce, but he made no bones about what he thought of the customs officers who registered ineligible ships as legitimate traders. In his final sentences Nelson went so far as to suggest that Shirley himself might want commitment. He was giving the governor this information, he said, so ‘that you may, if you think fit, take methods to hinder’ illegal acts; as for himself, the captain was transmitting accounts of the fraudulent trade to the home government.13

  This letter was a blow to the face of Governor Shirley. It told him that his procedures were going to be ignored, whether backed by the admiral or not, and that neither he nor any other civilian was to be trusted. Nelson’s statement that he was sending his findings direct to London sounded very much like a threat. Suddenly all Shirley’s plans to steer between the contending parties were scuttled. The governor was also ‘hurt and insulted’ by Nelson’s letter, as he lost no time in explaining. He told Nelson that he had never intended to slight the navy, and took great exception to the ‘insinuation that you thought either I connived at the malpractices of others, or was negligent of my own duty’. As for the captain reporting to government, that too was unsettling. ‘If I am at all concerned, or mentioned, in such accounts,’ Shirley demanded, ‘I make no doubt but you will have candour enough to inform me of it.’14