Nelson
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They were merchants, what people in those days called ‘men of business’, and shrewd and sensible if Nelson was any judge. Both had been associates of William Whitehead, who, with his late partner, Francis Colley, had supplied government establishments throughout the West Indies, including the naval hospital and the dockyard at Antigua. Certainly Wilkinson and Higgins were extraordinarily well versed in public expenditure, and the former had been employed by the Victualling Board and for five years had sat in the Antigua assembly. Now the two had a startling proposal for His Royal Highness. They promised a massive exposure of fraud throughout the islands and the means of ripping it out root and branch. Millions of pounds of public money would be saved.
For those days the figures were stunning. According to Wilkinson and Higgins, £900,000 or so was annually being lost in Antigua, St Lucia and Barbados, while upwards of another million was being siphoned off in Jamaica. Whitehead’s company had been at the core of the frauds. When it had been dissolved, Wilkinson and Higgins had purchased the business, with both its stock and debts, and in due course acquired its books and papers. It was from these that they planned to lay bare the whole corrupt operation. Their proposal to William Henry was a simple but attractive one. If he would prompt a full-scale investigation on the lines they suggested, they would ask for no additional reward from government. Their sole remuneration would be a percentage of whatever sums they helped to recover, 15 per cent on the first £100,000 and half that amount on any further sums.
Although the prince made encouraging noises, he had no time for the business at present, but Captain Nelson took a different view. His enquiries revealed that the remarkable proposal followed a history of ill will between Whitehead and Wilkinson and Higgins. Whitehead was filing a suit, and Wilkinson and Higgins were threatening to retaliate by exposing Whitehead. According to John Burke, the solicitor general of Antigua, whom Nelson consulted, Wilkinson and Higgins had even demanded ‘hush money’ from dockyard officials implicated in the frauds. Nevertheless, in Nelson’s opinion all of that merely worked to the government’s advantage. If an opportunity to detect corruption had appeared as a result of a falling out, it ought to be seized with enthusiasm. From his own experiences, Nelson was sure that dishonesty and peculation were rife in the islands, and now a way of bringing the perpetrators to justice had come into his hands.34
Wilkinson and Higgins drove one charge home with the skill of a Nantucket harpooner. They told William Henry that Whitehead had been the principal prize agent during the last war and that thousands of pounds of prize money due to British sailors remained unpaid. If nothing else, the thought of honest hard-working tars being swindled by shore-bound sharks was guaranteed to elicit Nelson’s interest.35
The enforcement of the navigation laws had been one arm of Nelson’s purification campaign, and despite preoccupations with the prince, his orders to the squadron were still to make illegal traders a prime concern. Collingwood of the Rattler had been his busiest weapon. The previous September, Collingwood had taken the Fanny brig of North Carolina and the Maria ship at Grenada, and in January 1787 he was at Barbados taking possession of the Dolphin schooner. The vice-admiralty courts at Grenada and Barbados were both unreconstructed, and history repeated itself. Collingwood was told he had no authority to seize, and in both places he was asked to pay advance fees. The attorney general in Barbados, Brandford, had handled Nelson warily, but his insistence on being paid to press the suit of the Dolphin forced Collingwood to release her. In February, Nelson renewed his campaign, this time pouring a fire upon the corrupt prize courts.36
When Wilkinson and Higgins came forward with their charges they found a reforming but frustrated naval captain ready to attack on new fronts. He rode to St John’s a few times to interview the two merchants, fired demands for documents to the dockyard and greedily pored over the sample materials his informants produced. Backed by pages of item-by-item accounts, with bundles of receipts and vouchers, their indictment appeared truly formidable.37
What Wilkinson and Higgins termed ‘the English Harbour plunder’ originated, they said, with three men – Whitehead, Peter Alsop, the ordnance storekeeper at the dockyard, and James Young, the surgeon at the naval hospital. After 1779, when Anthony Munton became naval storekeeper and clerk of the cheque at English Harbour, the devious trio soon ‘initiated [him] into the mysteries of defrauding government’. As examples of the frauds, Wilkinson and Higgins presented Nelson with irrefutable evidence of two types of scam. In one, false musters were concocted for the hospital and certified by Young, so that inflated sums for the subsistence of the sick could be extracted from government. Accounts for one quarter in 1782 showed that Young’s share of the proceeds from the phantom patients amounted to £544. 38
The second type of fraud involved charging government for more than supplies and services had actually cost, and pocketing the difference. Thus, during one quarter of 1781 the government paid £6,878 for articles of ordnance when the real cost, including ‘above twelve per cent’ commission for Whitehead as agent, amounted to only £5,528. The difference was split fifty-fifty between Whitehead and Alsop. Similarly, in a three-month period of 1782, Anthony Munton paid £12,357 for items that should have cost a total of £9,190. In this instance Whitehead and Munton divided the excess profits with the master shipwright and the master attendant of the dockyard. According to Wilkinson and Higgins, frauds of a like nature permeated the whole service, from the hire of black labour to the use of watering vessels.39
Nelson noted that there was no effective system for ensuring that goods and services were supplied to government at competitive prices. Contractors were supposed to certify the current market prices of wares on vouchers, but they were suffered to set down the highest rather than the going rate. He discovered that Munton even appeared to be purchasing government supplies from himself, under the fictitious name of ‘Cornelius Cole’.40
Once again Horatio Nelson felt the self-gratifying impulses of the crusader, the champion of government and taxpayer and scourge of the corrupt. In May he scribbled various letters in support of Wilkinson and Higgins – to Sir Charles Middleton, the comptroller of the Navy Board, to Lord Howe at the Admiralty, to the Master General of the Ordnance Board which supplied the armed services with guns and ammunition, and to the king’s senior minister, William Pitt. Frauds were notorious, he told Lord Howe, ‘but how to detect them has hitherto been a matter not to be accomplished. But a door is opened from which I hope will, if not the means of recovering back large sums of money, at least be the means of preventing frauds in future.’41
Sure that he could interest the government in mounting an investigation, Nelson’s greatest worry was that the culprits would be forewarned by careless talk in time to disguise their chicanery. He suggested Pitt pass an injunction against the removal of property pending the outcome of any enquiry, and cautioned William Henry against mentioning the matter during his constant fraternisations. ‘Silence . . . is [the] best mode to be pursued at present,’ he said, for ‘although every person is talking of it, yet no person knows for a certainty where the blow will fall.’42
Nelson impressed Wilkinson and Higgins, who were disappointed when the captain had temporarily to suspend his investigations after being ‘seized with a severe fever peculiar to this climate’. And at home there were those also ready to listen to allegations of fraud. Lord Howe for one determined to examine the business when Nelson came home and could be interviewed. But therein lay a partly submerged reef, for the Admiralty’s view of the captain of the Boreas was starting to cloud. Until now Lord Howe, encouraged by Hood, had viewed Nelson as a promising new talent but that opinion was being damaged by the latest tidings from the Leeward Islands. The catalyst for those mounting misgivings was Prince William Henry, who seemed to be twisting Nelson around every finger.43
6
On 9 March, Philip Stephens, secretary to the board of Admiralty, wrote to Nelson in a clear hand that their lordships were ‘much d
isappointed and dissatisfied at the little attention you have shown to the rules and practice of the service, as well as the directions contained in the 10th and 11th articles of the General Printed Instructions, in having authorised His Royal Highness to disregard the applications of the deputy muster master to be furnished with a perfect muster book’. Evidently, the prince had decided that it was not necessary to supply an up-to-date muster of the Pegasus, and Nelson had failed to disabuse him. Horatio later professed to have been guided by other sections of the captains’ instructions, but he knew the prince was behaving irregularly, and continued to supply musters for his own ship in the usual way.44
A small bore broadside perhaps, but the letter of 9 March was no isolated rebuke; it was merely the opening salvo of what would become a regular bombardment.
The prince did not help. His private letters to Hood indiscreetly aired grievances Nelson had disclosed in confidence. Thus, Hood learned that Nelson had suffered disgraceful ‘neglect’, and that Lord Sydney had been a stauncher ally in the defence of the navigation laws than Howe. Unfortunately, Hood was thick with Howe, and Nelson’s complaints probably circulated and fed a rising ill will. Nor did William Henry do Nelson a favour by reporting that he ‘approves entirely of my conduct’. Hood and Howe were not the greatest admirers of the prince’s judgement and conduct.45
Nelson earned more criticism over a court martial he supervised in Antigua in the spring of 1787. The Admiralty’s concern was a minor one, but we are unable to dismiss it hastily because it feeds into a divergent but important consideration of the wider discipline exercised by Captain Nelson during his command of the Boreas. As some recent historians have noted, his record was a severe one, and before we examine the minor contemporary charge levied by the Admiralty it is necessary to remark upon the graver concerns of today.
Examining the flogging records of seventy-three ships that served on the Leeward Islands station over a twenty-eight-year period, the American scholar John D. Byrn has estimated that the average percentage of men punished aboard British men-of-war was 9 per cent. Some captains greatly exceeded this, and two ships in the survey had particularly high rates of punishment, the Rattler, in which 31 per cent of the men were flogged on the station, and the Boreas. Between 1 May 1784 and 31 July 1787, Byrn explained, Nelson flogged 86 of 334 men on board his frigate, 25.7 per cent of the ship’s company. Though the statistics are imprecisely known Byrn’s figures were fair as far as Nelson was concerned. In my independent analysis of floggings aboard the Boreas for the full duration of Nelson’s command between 24 January 1784 and 30 November 1787, an almost identical rate of 25.9 per cent was produced.46
Relatively few of the floggings were severe. There were about 148 aboard the Boreas in all, with the annual rate peaking in 1786. Seventy-six per cent of the floggings involved twelve or less strokes of the cat, with all but one of the remainder consisting of between one and two dozen lashes. The most scourged victim was a captain’s servant, William Dixon, who received forty-eight lashes in February 1786 for siphoning Nelson’s rum and sharing it with some of his mates. His partner in crime, another captain’s servant named John Noley, got two dozen strokes and four men who received the stolen rum between six and twelve each.47
This rate of punishment was exceptional for one of Nelson’s commands. He had punished relatively few people aboard the Badger and Hinchinbroke, and the rates aboard the Albemarle and later the Agamemnon were unremarkable. To some extent the Boreas figure may reflect the long, dreary peacetime commission and the excessive amount of time holed up in ports where the temptations to abscond or drink were greater. It is also worth remembering that punishments not only reflected Nelson’s discipline, but also those of his officers. Occasionally floggings arose out of disputes between men and the lieutenants and petty officers whose authority Nelson was obliged to uphold. They did not always originate with the captain. Finally, as Byrn has rightly observed, a single unfortunate incident might occasion multiple floggings. Thus, for example, six men were punished for helping themselves to Nelson’s rum in February 1786, and the entire crew of a longboat was chastised for sneaking liquor on board the ship the following May.
Having said all that, the sharp rate of punishment aboard the Boreas must in a large measure reflect upon her captain. We have noted Nelson’s irritability at this time before, and his readiness to engage one official after another in controversy. Nelson was a young and somewhat intemperate man in his twenties, but in the Leeward Islands it seems that his tolerance was additionally eroded by frequent illness, professional frustration and the stresses of the continual battle with authority. He hated Antigua and Barbados, and when Prince William Henry arrived at the end of 1786 he found an acting commander-in-chief increasingly susceptible to the narrow royal vision of formal and overregimented officer relations.
In short, Nelson’s discipline was not at its best in the Leeward Islands, but that does not mean that he was customarily unjust. One previously ignored indicator of his sense of justice at this time was his performance in courts martial. During his entire spell in the islands Nelson presided over the naval courts. He supervised twenty-two trials involving twenty-six defendants (one of them tried twice for different offences) and heard evidence over a total of nineteen days. The charges ranged from drunken and disorderly behaviour to wilful disobedience and neglect of duty to desertion and mutiny. Each court consisted of a president and four other captains, chosen according to availability and circumstance, and was served by a judge-advocate whose job it was to read the order for the assembly and the indictment contained in the letter of complaint, administer oaths to witnesses and act as secretary. Each member of the court had a vote and a simple majority decided the verdict. Moreover, the proceedings were governed by articles of war that stipulated mandatory punishments for some offences. As president, therefore, Nelson had to accommodate other opinions and written regulations, but still held considerable sway. His courtroom career deserves our attention.
Nelson first sat as president of a naval court in the cabin of the Boreas at Carlisle Bay, Barbados, on 1 July 1784, shortly after arriving on the station, with Cuthbert Collingwood, Thomas Boston, William Hancock Kelly and Edward Pakenham as his captains. They tried William Holland, gunner of the Champion, for drunkenness and disobedience. He had, it transpired, refused to come on deck when bade, but the court judged that he had been drunk rather than ill or purposely disobedient, and dismissed him from the service. He thus escaped severe physical punishment. The same day William Wilson, corporal of the Adamant, was convicted of a serious case of desertion that could have earned him the death penalty. However, in view of his former good character the court reduced his sentence to five hundred lashes, to be administered over different occasions and throughout the squadron in the usual way. It was a cruel punishment, and the first stage of it had to be suspended when Wilson fainted alongside the Boreas after receiving only seventy-two strokes, but within the norms of the day the court believed that it had acted leniently. For the second trial Sotheby of the Champion replaced Kelly of the Adamant as a member of the court to protect defendants from being judged by their own captains.
The following day Nelson reconvened his court and two deserters from the Mediator were convicted. One man received three hundred rather than two hundred lashes because he denied belonging to the ship when apprehended. Of the remaining two men tried by Nelson in Carlisle Bay that July, one was acquitted and the other, Charles Alexander, surgeon of the Zebra sloop, escaped with a reprimand. Three of the five charges against Alexander were thrown out, one was only partly proven, and although he was judged to have used ‘disrespectful language’ ashore it was not only ‘in the hour of general riot and revelling’ but provoked.48
Given its limitations, Nelson’s court attempted to deal justly with its defendants, and to explore motive and degrees of guilt. It also searched for any mitigating circumstances that would justify the reduction of sentences. Indeed, the courts over which Nelson pre
sided during his years in the Leeward Islands moderated the sentences of fourteen of the twenty-four convictions returned. Consider the cases of:
Thomas Ray, who twice deserted from the Unicorn, and was tried at English Harbour on 18 August 1784. The court was ‘very much concerned to find that they are obliged to sentence the prisoner to death’, and ‘in consideration of his gallant services during the war, and his good behaviour upon many occasions, and the exceeding good character which he bears from officers under whom he has served unanimously recommend him as a fit object for mercy to the commander-in-chief’. The following day Nelson was able to announce that Admiral Hughes had pardoned the defendant.
James Couch, carpenter of the Adamant, convicted at English Harbour on 23 August 1784. The court considered ‘that the prisoner’s disobedience of orders did not proceed from intentional neglect, and therefore do not think that any punishment ought to be inflicted upon him’.
William Sympson, lieutenant of the Whitby, tried at Nevis on 14 and 16 June 1785 and found guilty of embezzling oil, paint, canvas, spirits and bread for subsequent sale. The court thought ‘the conduct of the prisoner had been very reprehensible, but from the small quantity of the stores sold they do not think that it could be with an intent to injure government’.
Dennis Mahoney, cook on the Unicorn, convicted of mutiny at Nevis on 17 June 1785. However, ‘in consideration of the said Dennis Mahoney having been wounded in the service of his country and the good character given him by his captain and officers the court only adjudge him to have his warrant taken from him and to receive one hundred lashes’ instead of suffering death.