Nelson

by John Sugden

  Legend depicts Nelson with a ridiculous black eyepatch, as if hiding an empty socket, but his many portraits and the few descriptions suggest that time more or less restored the appearance of the injured organ. Only the fine pastel made by Johann Schmidt of Dresden in 1800 depicts the slightly clouded aspect it presented to more intent observers. Nelson’s ‘beauty’ survived, but his vision was irreparably damaged. Within a year the eye had begun to cause him occasional pain again and its sight had relapsed towards total darkness. It is possible that damage to the nerve was causing optic atrophy, or that secondary glaucoma was developing with a corneal oedema.44

  The Corsican campaign had left a permanent mark upon him, but Nelson still viewed it with mixed feelings. Calvi had surrendered as promised. At ten o’clock on 10 August its haggard defenders had marched out to hand over their arms: 300 French, 247 Corsican auxiliaries and 300 seamen. In the hospital another 313 sick and wounded were found, while for one reason or another four hundred civilians, one of them reputedly the prettiest woman in Calvi, also marched out to be shipped to France with the defeated troops. One hundred and six artillery pieces, more than eight thousand shot and shells, two frigates, two merchantmen, a gunboat and several small craft became undisputed spoils of war. Nelson got great satisfaction from sending Lieutenant Moutray to take possession of the Melpomene and Le Mignonne frigates because they were the survivors of the squadron he had fought off Sardinia ten months before.

  Neither side had suffered heavy casualties, judged by the warfare of the time. Stuart reported his losses as thirty killed and sixty-one wounded, including those sustained by partisan and French royalist allies, while Nelson heard that, despite the severe damage to the town and works of Calvi, the French had only sustained eighty killed and wounded in the fighting.45

  Nelson had not entirely approved of the handling of the siege. Nine days between 1 and 10 August had been spent waiting for the French to surrender, as they had agreed to do if no further assistance reached them. Nelson had wanted to bombard the bastion or destroy it with explosives to speed up the result. ‘I had rather take a place by our own fire and efforts than by the enemy being starved and sickly,’ he lamented. There was more glory in a conquest by arms.46

  Hood held similar views, but was spiteful enough to air them to government. The admiral was ill and irritable, and inflamed by Stuart’s refusal to involve him in the final negotiations for a capitulation. Furthermore, he had been talking to a French engineer who visited the Victory the day after Calvi surrendered, and was sure that Stuart could have battered the enemy into a speedier submission. The French were starving and sickening, and they only had two days of powder left, having lost sixty barrels in an explosion of their magazine. Nor were the fortifications in the town casemated, so that their occupants had little shelter from enemy artillery. Weighing it all up, Hood’s flag captain scoffed ‘that our marine ideas of the distressed, defenceless, deplorable situation of the town and inhabitants of Calvi were well founded’. Another day’s firing was all that was needed, but ‘the humane generosity of the British general is [now] extolled by the bearer of every party-coloured [French] cockade’.47

  Stuart, of course, had not been privy to this information when he had agreed his truce on 1 August. He was worried about his own shortages of powder and shot, and was foggy about his enemy’s resources. In using hindsight to wound Stuart the admiral had been less than fair, but he had a point when he complained that those final days of the war in Corsica had been expensive. An enemy older and deadlier than the French guns, one Nelson knew only too well, had begun to damage the British forces. Disease. Men crowded in flimsy tents and unsanitary camps, and working to their physical limits in violent extremes of weather close to the malarial margins of the sea, became targets for several predatory diseases. ‘Every hour our troops and seamen [are] falling ill and dying,’ Nelson wrote the day Calvi surrendered. ‘On that day not 400 soldiers were fit for duty.’ He exaggerated, but not wildly. ‘Considerably more than two-thirds of our number are in hospital; men and officers tumble down daily in the most melancholy manner,’ said Moore. The sailors, perhaps more inured to hardship in foreign climes, fared better than the soldiers, and Nelson had divided his men into two shifts so that only half were at the batteries at any one time. Yet by 5 August thirty had been invalided to the Agamemnon and seventy more were ill. Many of Nelson’s friends and officers were down with fever. Lieutenant Colonel Wemyss, with whom he had formed good relations (‘God bless you,’ Wemyss had written to him) asked for a ship to take him away. Hallowell, Suckling, Moutray, Hoste and Bolton were all sick.48

  Nelson’s own health wavered but held. Apart from his injured eye, his old feverishness had returned. ‘This is my ague day,’ he told Hood at the end of July. ‘I hope this active scene will keep off the fit. It has shook me a good deal, but I have been used to them, and don’t mind them much.’ Somehow he kept going. As he marvelled to the Duke of Clarence on a day when a thousand men looked like phantoms, ‘I am here the reed amongst the oak. All the disorders have attacked me, but I have not strength for them to fasten upon. I bow before the storm, whilst the sturdy oak is laid low.’49

  When Calvi fell, Hood had hastened back to Mortella Bay, signalling again, as far as Stuart was concerned, his latent indifference to the state of the task force. Nelson’s job had delayed his departure. Transports were needed for victors and vanquished and guns and stores had to be retrieved and returned to the ships. Horatio felt indebted to the agent for transports, Lieutenant Richard Sainthill. ‘Your readiness at all times to expedite the king’s service I shall always bear my testimony of,’ he told him.50

  On board the Agamemnon the battle to save sick sailors and marines had also continued, not always successfully. ‘Departed this life John Murfey, seaman,’ ran a typical log book entry. ‘Received on board six bullocks, six baskets of onions, seven boxes of lemons for the sick . . . Received thirty-five sick men on board.’ Fresh meat, vegetables and fruit helped combat dietary disorders such as scurvy, but life-threatening fevers needed more. By the end of October, Nelson reckoned some fifty Agamemnons had been lost.51

  Nevertheless, after many tribulations the Corsican campaign had at last been a success and Nelson was proud of his part in it. The victory owed much to Hood’s determination and Stuart’s extraordinary leadership at Calvi, but probably no officer counted for more in the liberation of Corsica than the captain of the Agamemnon. He had been there at the beginning, blockading the hostile ports in winter storms, and he was there at the end after a monumental labour, commanding the guns that fired fourteen thousand projectiles to silence Calvi. He had refused to be beaten by towns others had thought impregnable, and spared nothing in their capture. Some had criticised his judgement, understandably so to a point, but others had seen his achievements as inspirational, no less understandably. To such as young William Hoste, Nelson’s operations suggested that the navy could occasionally transcend its traditional role and reduce major strongholds ashore. He would remember those lessons and draw strength from them twenty years later when he captured the great mountain fortresses of Cattaro and Ragusa in the Adriatic.

  Nelson was a sailor, but his only naval engagement so far, the fight with the French frigate, had been a mediocre stand-off, and his most newsworthy activities had been ashore in Nicaragua and Corsica, working more as ‘a besieging general’ than an admiral. Yet however unorthodox, he wanted his achievements to be recognised. Privately there was some congratulation. When Admiral Phipps Cosby got home and met Fanny at a ball in Bath he told her that ‘no man in the Mediterranean had done what you [Nelson] had’. Sir William Hamilton wrote agreeably to the man himself, ‘I do not believe that ever man or ship went through so long or so hazardous a service as you both have done.’ But these opinions remained within the private domain, for the public dispatches again glossed over Nelson’s services.52

  Hood, who had done Nelson such an injustice in his Bastia dispatch, forwarded two copies of t
he captain’s Calvi journal to government but left Stuart to make the full report. His own résumé referred vaguely to the captain’s ‘unremitting zeal and exertion’. Stuart acknowledged that the sailors under Nelson and Hallowell had ‘greatly contributed to the success of these movements’ but wrote them out of much of the action. Reading the accounts of the night of 18 July in Stuart’s dispatch and Nelson’s journal one can only conclude that both men were perpetuating prevalent interservice jealousies. Nelson barely mentioned the soldiers who helped him build the new battery outside Fort Mozzello, and Stuart credited the same achievement to three army officers without making any reference to the seamen whatsoever.53

  Nelson had left Stuart on good terms and suspected that the general’s dispatch had been influenced as much by his dislike of Hood as a natural wish to serve the army. He still felt hugely cheated. As Lord Radstock, who knew Nelson at this time, testified, his ‘perpetual thirst’ for glory was ‘ever raging within’, and he was bitter that the names of so many nonentities seemed preferred to his. ‘Others have been praised who, at the time, were actually in bed, far from the scene of action,’ he grumbled. Then, as optimism reasserted itself, he would redouble his efforts. ‘Never mind,’ he told his sister, Susanna, ‘I’ll have a Gazette of my own [one day].’ One of the most lasting lessons Nelson took from Corsica was the necessity for self-publicity. In the future he would prepare accounts of his own for the press.54

  In the meantime he could at least use his improved leverage with Hood to help his followers. ‘I shall be very glad to attend to your wishes in favour of your surgeon’s mate immediately,’ the admiral told him, ‘and if you will send Mr Fellows on board the Victory I will promote him as soon as I can.’ Five days later Hood promoted Lieutenant Hinton of the Agamemnon to the flagship.55

  Unfortunately, it was not in Nelson’s power to help another who had attracted his attention. Lieutenant James Moutray of the Victory, Mary’s only son, fell sick in Calvi and never recovered. The youth had endeared himself to many officers, including the admiral, who described Moutray as ‘universally lamented’. But only one chose to record the fact for the public. A modest plaque could long be seen in the church of St Fiorenzo, a prosaic but sincere tribute from a senior professional to a junior. It read:

  Sacred to the memory of Lieutenant James Moutray, R.N., who, serving on shore at the siege of Calvi, there caught a fever of which he died, sincerely lamented, on August 19th, 1794, aged 21 years. This stone is erected by an affectionate friend, who well knew his worth as an officer and his accomplished manners as a gentleman.56

  The author placed his initials at the end. They were ‘H.N’.

  XX

  TWO MEETINGS WITH

  FRENCH GENTRY

  Awake my muse, assist my lyre,

  My feeble untun’d tongue inspire

  To sing of glorious deed.

  How gallant Hotham did defeat

  The French, and made them to retreat

  With nimble-footed speed.

  Richard Lovat, armourer’s mate

  1

  THE fleet felt neglected by the powers at home. It was short of sails, masts, cordage and men, and none of its ships had seen harder service than the Agamemnon. Instead of sailing to Gibraltar to refit as planned, she limped towards Leghorn, the nearest suitable port, where she anchored on 30 August, a day ahead of Hood’s Victory. Perhaps a dozen men had been killed and wounded in the winning of Corsica, and a few had deserted, but sickness and fatigue had taken the greatest toll of her men. There had been more sad tasks to perform than usual: men to be buried at sea, and their clothes and possessions sold, shared or secured as circumstances demanded. One hundred and fifty of the crew were sick.1

  Recovery was slow. Ten days later the fleet physician reported the company much debilitated, and as late as 10 October seventy-seven men were still on the sick list. Again Hood pressed Nelson to leave the broken Agamemnon and transfer to a seventy-four-gun ship. Everyone knew that the seventy-four was the line of battle ship par excellence, the ultimate blend of power, speed and manoeuvrability, but Nelson clung to his beloved sixty-four. ‘I could not bring myself to part with a ship’s company with whom I have gone through such a series of hard service,’ he wrote.2

  Some of the men seemed beyond repair, but most slowly returned to duty and Nelson was able to take Josiah and Hoste to Pisa, where the supposedly medicinal waters and the sights seemed to aid convalescence. The Agamemnon herself was in such poor shape that Nelson expected to be ordered to sail her to England, perhaps with Lord Hood. The admiral had wanted to go home for a while. Ill and barely able to write, he was still feuding with General Stuart and mired in controversy. Nelson remained unwilling to admit flaws in his hero, and attributed the army’s jealousy to the success at Bastia. Soldiers ‘hate us sailors’, he told Fanny. ‘We are too active for them. We accomplish our business sooner than they like.’ Stuart, he was sure, had ‘deeply imbibed this diabolical leaven’. Irrespective, the upshot was that Hood requested and was granted leave, and Nelson encouraged Fanny with talk about a homecoming and finding ‘some snug cottage’ that would free them from the parsonage. His ambition, in reality, was merely to refit his ship and rest in England, and then to return with his rejuvenated admiral to the Mediterranean. Liberating Corsica had been intoxicating. At last he was at the forefront of military and naval endeavour, winning golden opinions, exalting his station, and – as he saw it – doing something valuable. He wanted more of it. As he shortly said to his wife, ‘not an hour this war will I, if possible, be out of active service’.3

  No ship deserved a respite more than Nelson’s leaking sixty-four, but despite the seizure of Corsica the war in the Mediterranean was not going well. French power was growing. Shrugging off the attacks of the hostile coalition in northern and eastern Europe, the republicans went onto the offensive, marching into Spain and squaring up to the Austrians and the smaller powers to the east. Their eyes rested hungrily upon the Italian states and they resented the loss of Corsica, but as long as the British fleet commanded the sea both were difficult to reach. The French fleet was still divided between Toulon and Golfe Jouan, but more ships were being fitted out and its capacity increased. As naval rivalry in the Mediterranean intensified, the consequence of the failure of Hood and Hotham to destroy their opponents in 1793 and 1794 became increasingly evident. In these circumstances every capital ship counted and any plans to withdraw the Agamemnon were quickly shelved.

  On 18 September, Hood’s most enterprising captain received fresh orders. He was to proceed to the republic of Genoa and deliver a letter to Francis Drake, the British minister plenipotentiary.4

  This was an important mission. Genoa was a small power, uncomfortably located between France to the west and the other Italian states to the east, politically neutral but economically bound to the former by trade. It was rumoured that members of the Genoese government were in the pay of the French; certainly, the state had loaned money to their powerful neighbour and expected due returns. Relations between Britain and Genoa had accordingly been less harmonious, and the previous year Hood had become so incensed at the small republic’s failure to prevent French attacks upon British shipping in their territorial waters that he had sent a squadron into the Ligurian Sea. Sweeping aside the niceties of neutrality it had seized a French frigate in Genoa and subjected the port to a spasmodic blockade.

  A year on, there were grounds for believing that the Genoese might now be more sensible of the need for better relations with the British and their allies. The war had marched closer. French armies were moving eastwards along the riviera into Genoese territory, and it was thought that General Bonaparte (‘represented to be a man of uncommon capacity and courage, and of a very bold and enterprising spirit’) planned to quarter them in Savona for the winter before loosing them against Genoa and northern Italy the following spring. On the other hand, Britain and her allies, Austria and Sardinia-Piedmont, were poised to interpose themselves between Geno
a and the Gallic horde, and an Austrian army was soon advancing to occupy Savona before the French arrived.5

  It was time for Britain and Genoa to repair bridges, and Nelson seemed the right man for the job. He had demonstrated some diplomatic talent in Naples and Corsica, and had not been tainted by the previous difficulties with Genoa. Accordingly he was sent ahead of Hood to help restore amicable relations. On 19 September the Agamemnon entered Genoa after a short voyage, exchanging generous salutes with the batteries before anchoring near the mole. Nelson noticed two French privateers and some British merchantmen in the harbour, evidence of Genoa’s effort to steer between powerful belligerents, and thought the ‘magnificent’ palaces and buildings comparable to Naples, but briskly buckled down to business. The British consul, Joseph Brame, said that Drake was daily expected from Milan, but in the meantime arranged for Nelson to meet the doge at the Piazza San Lorenzo on the evening of the 20th. Horatio duly presented himself in full-dress uniform, and was gratified to see the doge advance from a throng in the middle of an opulent room to greet him. The two exchanged pleasantries, but Nelson sensed that while the Genoese understood that the British fleet and Austrian army might protect them they were deeply afraid of provoking the French. The doge munificently received Nelson’s assurances that the Royal Navy would respect Genoa’s neutrality, but declined to enter allied plans to defend Italy.6