Nelson

by John Sugden

  The assistants crouched forward to hold the stricken admiral, one or two firmly pinning his body down and another probably extending the crippled arm taut over the edge of the ‘table’, holding the limb by the part to be amputated. It was a grisly business, and if the Duke of Clarence is to be believed one helper fainted and had to be replaced by the chaplain. Eshelby bent over with a sharp incision knife and made a rapid circular cut high above the wound, severing the skin, sinews and muscles of the upper arm to the bone, and allowing residual blood and tissue to fall into a receptacle below or splash freely upon the ship’s timbers. Nelson bore the mutilation stoically but he never forgot that first chilling coldness of the knife as it sliced through his flesh. Ever after he insisted that surgical instruments be warmed in water before use.33

  Then an assistant drew the skin and tissue above the wound as far up the admiral’s arm as he could, a procedure that enabled Eshelby to reach the bone deep inside the stump. Before tackling the humerus, the surgeon probably secured the arteries, possibly by relaxing the tourniquet to allow them to be identified by the flow of blood. Peering intently in the gloom, he gently extricated each artery with a pair of forceps and bound them with broad silk ligatures or waxen thread. A fine-toothed handsaw was then applied to the bone itself. Using one hand to steady the shredded arm, Eshelby worked quickly with the saw in the other, skilfully avoiding splintering the bone as he cut through. Once the limb had been amputated, the skin and tissue being held back above the wound were allowed to retract over the severed humerus, leaving the two ligatures attached about two inches up the wound, hanging out. They would help drain the injury of infectious matter, and in several weeks slip out as the arteries below the ligatures rotted away. The operation had lasted about thirty minutes and ended when the edges of Nelson’s stump were finally brought together by dry lint and strips of adhesive plaster, and dressed.

  Eshelby has since been much criticised for tying the median nerve with an artery in one of Nelson’s ligatures, but there are grounds for acquitting the harassed surgeon. Beneath the dim, wavering light of a ship’s lantern, it would have been difficult for Eshelby to see the median nerve as he struggled to secure an artery deep within the wound. Moreover, in the late eighteenth century it was not always considered bad practice to include the median nerve with a ligature. Innovative London surgeons were becoming critical of the process, pointing out that ligatures separated more easily from wounds if arteries had been secured independently of the nerve, but their advice was by no means universally accepted elsewhere.34

  When Nelson was helped to his cot, it seemed that his ordeal had been justified. The patient was given pills of opium and advised to rest. As he closed his eyes, the admiral still knew little of what was happening ashore. No tidings from the town had reached him, and the distant noise of battle continued. Before sleeping, Nelson put a ragged, unpractised left-hand signature to a fine copy of the terms to be offered the Spanish garrison and gave some orders for the disposition of the squadron. Even at this stage he hoped Troubridge might yet be successful and that good news might arrive.

  Unfortunately it did not.

  8

  All the signs were bad ones. As the weather grew squally some of the boats began to return, protesting their inability to land anywhere, and a few found themselves immediately redeployed searching for more survivors of the Fox. Firing from the town subsided after a few hours, but the Spanish batteries of the Paso Alto and Torre de San Andres to the northeast continued to exchange shots with the British ships. Indeed, as the morning developed the enemy guns seemed to find their range. They hit the Culloden, Emerald and the mortar launch and forced the Theseus to cut her cable and shift position. It was ominous, for had Troubridge conquered, those Spanish batteries would have been silenced.

  In fact, daylight found Troubridge’s party still besieged in the convent. From its upper storey the British fired on any opponents intrepid enough to approach too closely, raising cheers as they did so. They replenished some of their military supplies, and had small successes. According to Captain Waller, ‘several Spanish officers and near a hundred men came in and laid down their arms’. It encouraged the British to believe that the desertions the German pilot had spoken of might yet take place. Unfortunately, their enemies still commanded the adjacent streets with muskets and field pieces, and time was on their side. Troubridge could not be reinforced, but the Spanish forces were being concentrated and swollen by incoming militia.

  The near hopelessness of Troubridge’s position was rubbed in whenever he took the offensive. Reflecting upon the ease with which he had stormed the Concepción battery, Miller still thought for a while that fortune might favour them. The captains talked again about making a desperate thrust at the citadel, the command centre of Santa Cruz, but without scaling ladders or adequate ammunition the task looked insuperable. Nonetheless, according to Troubridge’s dispatch he marched out on precisely that errand. One of the more fanciful Spanish narratives even speaks of the British making a brave but unsuccessful assault on the citadel, led by a sergeant of marines in shirtsleeves and a frigate captain. The truth seems to be that Troubridge formed his men and probed the investing forces, but quickly realised that he was hemmed in and thought better of the idea. He and Miller led sorties against the enemy field pieces, but the Spaniards wheeled them from one place to another, and after taking casualties the British fell back upon their convent. Finally, Troubridge did the only thing left open to him, and tried to talk his way out.

  While his men prepared incendiaries Troubridge sent Oldfield to the citadel, accompanied by two Dominican friars fully able to testify to what was going on in the convent. Oldfield’s message was bold and illustrated the sheer lust for plunder that underlay the British operation. Troubridge threatened to burn the town if the royal treasury and property of the Philippines Company were not handed over. It was a bold position, but a preposterous one. Don Antonio Gutierrez de Otero y Santayana was sixty-eight years old, a professional soldier who had grown wise in his country’s service, and he recognised a weak hand when he saw one. He had remained calm throughout the entire crisis, even when the British looked about to carry the town, and now rejected the demands outright. The friars were so afraid that they refused to return to the convent; Oldfield was sent back with entirely fictitious but chilling Spanish claims that their forces numbered nine thousand.

  That card played and blocked, Troubridge sent Captain Hood to make the best terms he could. They were honourable, so much so that one Spanish officer, sensing his people were on the eve of an historic victory, refused to be bound by them. The British were granted safe passage to their ships with their colours and arms. Both sides agreed to release their prisoners, and Troubridge undertook to withdraw without burning the town or making any further attack upon either Tenerife or any of the Canary Islands. Circumstanced as they were, both sides had a bargain. Troubridge extricated his men from an impossible situation, and Don Antonio saved his town and islands from further damage and claimed the honour of having repulsed the victors of Cape St Vincent. As news of the agreement spread, the outlying Spanish forts, which had been firing sporadically upon Nelson’s ships, fell silent.35

  And so, early on the 25th, the battle-stained rump of Nelson’s expeditionary force marched proudly to the mole under their arms and banners, fifes blowing and drums beating. Among the urgent onlookers, the Spaniards observed an old-fashioned courtesy, standing in files with bands playing, but the French sailors jostling beneath their tricolour jeered as the British passed and Troubridge’s officers had difficulty preventing their men from retaliating with blows. Troubridge was at the mole when the incident happened, and fired off a furious protest about the ‘rascally murderous kill-killing French’ to Don Antonio when he heard about it, but there were profuse apologies and equanimity was restored. More; as the war-weary British recovered their prisoners, dead and wounded, and waited to embark, they were served wine, bread and cheese, and their seriously injured
received attention at the local hospital. British accounts are unanimous in their praise of the humanity of their Spanish foes. Troubridge reported that Don Antonio ‘showed every mark of attention in his power’, and reciprocated as much as he could. It was at Troubridge’s suggestion, warmly endorsed by Nelson, that the British carried Don Antonio’s official sealed dispatches to his country announcing the British defeat.36

  At about seven in the morning the news of the defeat was brought to the Theseus by Captain Waller and a Spanish officer in a boat. Nelson ordered a flag of truce to be raised, and all firing ceased. What boats the British had left were sent to collect the survivors, and other boats were loaned by the Spaniards. The battle of Tenerife was over.

  For Midshipman Hoste there was some particularly stinging news. He heard that Lieutenant John Weatherhead had been badly wounded, and was coming out on a Spanish launch. Hoste was almost stupefied with grief. ‘This was a stroke which . . . I could hardly stand against,’ he wrote. John had been shot on the beach, and found by a Spanish officer, who had torn his own shirt and clothing to wipe away blood and form a torniquet. The young Briton was a fine man, the Spaniard recalled, and one he was proud to help. While Hoste prepared a berth aboard the Theseus, hoping against hope, Weatherhead was brought alongside the ship and hoisted aboard on a cradle. He was in great pain, with a messy hole in his stomach, and violently vomited green and yellow fluids. Eshelby managed to give him a little tea, sago and soup, and dosed him with opium, but there was no hope. At twenty-four one of the brightest of Nelson’s protégés was dying.37

  That day and the next the blood-stained survivors of the attack returned, each with his own story. Some were unhurt. Lieutenant Hawkins brought back his squad of small-arms men, and the only physical discomfort suffered by Summers was a recurrence of a ‘gout’ in his foot. But many – very many – were not so lucky. Seventy-one men from the Theseus were killed or wounded: William Harrison, thirty, his left arm fractured by a musket ball; James Harrison, thirty-two, shot through the gluteus muscles of the buttock and hip and injured in the thigh; John Cowper, twenty-one, his leg broken by a musket ball; Patrick McKinna, twenty-seven, shot in the loins; James McKinna, twenty-nine, hit in both legs; John Clarke, twenty-three, shot three times in the right leg . . .38

  It would take time for the British to assess the cost of the disaster. Final returns recorded that 158 were killed and missing and 110 wounded, a total of 268. It was not a severe loss for the time, not when the country was in the midst of squandering eighty thousand men in the West Indies. But it was high for the navy, exceeding anything Nelson had suffered before and approaching the three hundred casualties incurred at the battle of Cape St Vincent. The one-sided nature of the conflict was also demonstrated by the losses of the Spanish and French, which amounted to no more than twenty-five killed and up to thirty-eight wounded.39

  Some have portrayed Nelson’s thrust at Tenerife as wild and reckless, and others as a well-planned operation that misfired. It was both and neither. In some respects it illustrated forethought and preparation, but in others it exemplified the underlying weaknesses in Nelson’s notions of fighting ashore. His intelligence had been bad, and his men remained vague about local conditions, terrain, and the state of the opposition as well as a prey to rumours. At one time his captains allowed themselves to minimise the likely resistance; at another they believed grossly inflated Spanish statements of the forces gathering around them. The expedition was also undermanned. The thousand extra redcoats Nelson had asked for would very probably have tilted the balance against the Spaniards and given him Santa Cruz. Then there had been tactical errors, particularly the costly loss of surprise. After that a direct assault upon prepared defences was always going to be a difficult gamble – one that perhaps would only have been vindicated by success.

  Having said that, hindsight apart, eighteenth-century war was not formulaic, and too often rested capriciously upon changing circumstances and imponderables. Its history is full of gambles that succeeded, and Nelson might have taken the town that night. If the weather had been kinder, or the assault force concentrated instead of scattered, or the Spaniards been less resolute than they were . . . But Fortune was a fickle mistress. She had supported Nelson so often in the past, sometimes in situations of equal or greater difficulty. And now she had deserted him.

  9

  The next day Nelson was a little better, though still in severe pain. Watched over by Remonier, who would stay up with him for many a night, and sedated with opium he had slept and strengthened himself with tea, soup, sago, lemonade and a tamarind drink. Eshelby gave the butchered stump its daily dressing, and although as yet there was no sign of fever, he would prescribe cinchona over the next few days to help with the pain and reduce temperature. The admiral was also constipated – a product, probably, of the opium – and he was given laxatives such as senna and jalap.

  He was well enough to respond to well-wishers and to think of others. ‘Our gallant admiral is much obliged for your kind enquiries,’ Miller wrote to Captain Thompson. ‘He is, as the ladies in the straw say, “as well as can be expected” . . . What a comfort it is to reflect that however great our loss has in other respects been, we have suffered none in honour or our character for humanity. No town was ever so possessed, and so little injury suffered by the inhabitants.’ Nelson tried to write a note of his own to Betsy, whose husband was having a miserable time with his injured right arm. In a trembling new hand he could manage five words: ‘God bless you and Fremantle.’40

  He confirmed the terms Troubridge had made with Gutierrez, and sent the commandant general some beer and cheese as a present. Compton went ashore with a carpenter to inspect their surviving boats and found the Theseus’s cutter dashed to pieces on a rock and the launch lost to the west of the mole. Troubridge and Hood also went back to Santa Cruz to collect twenty-five of their wounded from the hospital and deliver a note to accompany Nelson’s gifts. It offered Don Antonio the admiral’s ‘sincerest thanks for your kind attention to myself and your humanity to those of our wounded who were in your possession or under your care, as well as your generosity to all that were landed’.41

  None of these niceties could erase the sorrow and disappointment that gnawed at the British squadron. Troubridge and Hood dined with Don Antonio that day, but ‘at table they hardly raised their eyes’, a Spanish observer said. ‘One could see that their faces were very sad.’ At sunset the flags and pendants on Nelson’s ships were at half-mast, and salutes were fired as the bodies of Bowen and Thorp were committed to the deep. Bowen’s body had been stripped by some of the islanders, and the sailors had had to dress it in their own clothes to return it to the ship.42

  On the morning of 27 July, Nelson’s squadron finally weighed anchor to leave the scene of its humbling. The admiral faced the job of dictating a brief report to his commander-in-chief. Unlike modern politicians, he sought no scapegoats nor offered excuses. There was no attempt to blame Troubridge for the mistakes of the 22nd, nor criticism of Miller and Fremantle for their plan to storm Santa Cruz. The responsibility had been his, and the gallantry theirs. ‘I am under the painful necessity of acquainting you that we have not been able to succeed in our attack,’ he said, ‘yet it is my duty to state that I believe more daring intrepidity was never shown than by the captains, officers and men you did me the honour to place under my command.’ The flawless secretarial hand and the unsteady, pain-laden signature told an even fuller story.43

  As the ships sailed sadly back to Cadiz, the casualties continued to mount. They told heavily on the small communities that had lived and worked aboard each ship, communities that had bonded in danger and now suffered as families do when losses are close and personal. The muster of the Theseus contained almost fifty entries annotated with such words as ‘drowned in storming Santa Cruz’ or ‘killed at Santa Cruz’. There were meagre possessions to sort and distribute. A few of the dead had left wills. Twenty-two-year-old William Marsh, an able seaman from Kent,
had bequeathed his goods to a Sarah Cole of Sittingbourne, perhaps a sweetheart. Others had no one waiting for them at home, and their belongings were sold to shipmates, some as mementos of lost comrades.

  On 29 July, as they skirted west of Gomera, Lieutenant Weatherhead slipped away, ‘seemingly without pain’. He had appeared to improve, sleeping less fitfully and taking some sago, mutton and broth, but the vomiting had returned and he was constipated, his motions few and black. As his stomach swelled with the fatal bullet still inside it the wound turned gangrenous, and anodyne barely relieved the pain. During his last night Weatherhead’s pulse faded and his extremities grew cold. He died at about one o’clock in the afternoon. The following day was a Sunday, a fitting day for a final farewell to a parson’s boy far from home. At nine in the morning the blue waters nine leagues west of La Palma closed around the body to three volleys of musket fire. A religious service followed, but the burial intensified the gloom about the ship. Nelson promoted Hoste, now seventeen, to act as lieutenant in the place of the dead man, but the boy took no pleasure from it. Weatherhead had been his closest friend from the beginning, and the one with whom he had shared their remarkable adventure over the last four years. When Hoste had been sick or injured it had been Weatherhead, more than anyone else, who had helped him through. Now their partnership was over. ‘In losing him I lost a good companion, and a true friend,’ wrote Hoste, ‘and I believe . . . the nation lost as brave an officer as ever stepped on board a ship. He was the darling of the ship’s company, and universally beloved by every person who had the pleasure of his acquaintance.’44