Nelson: The Poisoned River

by Needle, Jan

  ‘And the rains might come,’ said Nelson. ‘It is mid April. The rains will come.’

  And the rains will kill you, Tim Hastie thought. The captain was as pale as death. When the heavens open up, they will surely swallow you. Surely.

  But Polson was not to be persuaded.

  Eighteen

  Polson was not to be persuaded, because boots were needed on the ground. Not that they had boots – some of the men were already wearing makeshift sandals cut from hide, their shoes rotted and broken – or even ground solid enough to stand on. In reality, Nelson confided to Hastie, the colonel was afraid that the river was too much for his land soldiers, and one could sympathise with that, although he was quite wrong.

  ‘We had so many boats go over, so much gear and powder lost,’ said Nelson. ‘I…I…’ His voice gave way to wheezing. His face went paler as he fought to get his breath. And then it creased in agony, as he clenched his hands around his stomach. ‘Ah God, Tim. I need to—’

  Tim led him to a handy bush, and tried not to listen as Nelson voided wind and fluid just out of his sight. No solids left to be excreted now. Almost nothing left inside at all.

  Nelson’s spirit, though, was undiminished. While Polson struggled up one river bank – less than a mile, but every inch a battle – and other men, on his orders, took different ways, the navy force unloaded the four-pounder guns and carriages and manhandled them to positions chosen by the captain. They waited until full dark to cross the last open spaces, and used block and tackle and all their skill to get the artillery up the steepest slope. Despard, in the meantime, used his men to level off the ground to site the battery.

  It was not until the next day, however, the thirteenth, that one gun was put in place and Nelson judged that it was time for firing. Weak though he was, he also judged it fit that he himself should lay it, calculate the angle and the charge, and ignite the fuse. His first shot hit the fort, to rousing cheers, and a wild response from the Spaniards. Wild, in that their returns were notably inaccurate.

  Polson then had his artillerymen drag the remaining three four-pounders up a nearby slope to aid the navy in their battery. It was a lesson cruelly taught. After several army shots and not one hit, Nelson took charge of all. Ammunition was severely restricted, and must not be wasted. On his fourth or fifth shot, the captain smashed the flag pole off the highest turret.

  There were only twenty balls or so, and when they had been used there was little to be done but wait. Polson had ordered more materials some days before, and later sent another urgent dispatch downriver to urge it on. Snipers were set up to prevent water parties from the fort reaching the river – it had a cistern within the walls, but lacked a well – and there was sporadic musket fire. The worst injury on the English side was when a sailor (one of Nelson’s, shamingly) got drunk and chased a pig into the danger zone beneath the walls, and got a musket ball inside his stomach. For once, Dr Dancer’s favourite remedy (strong liquor) seemed to do the trick.

  It was not until the twentieth that the cannon balls arrived, and another day before they were unloaded and carried to the guns. Disastrously, there were only fifty of them, out of two hundred that had been shipped from Greytown. As Colonel Polson had feared, the soldier escort had failed to keep them safe. Liquor, which was also decimating his own waiting men, had played its usual part.

  There was worse to come. As Tim Hastie marked it in his journal, after dark that night the long awaited rainstorms broke.

  ‘Sarah,’ he said, ‘I do not know if this paper book can survive to tell the tale, let alone your pining Timothy. I am inside a tent, but might as well be outside. It has a roof of stoutish flax, but the rain beats down so heavy on the outside that inside is like a misty day on Merseyside. It comes through the fabric as a fog, and my candle pops and splutters. The land outside is more like liquid, and the only worse place in the camp, God help us all, is the so-called hospital. There Dr Dancer, brave fellow, continues to try and keep the men alive.

  ‘Now though, dearest, his task is getting worse, and so is mine. My own charge, Captain Nelson, is falling rapidly to a decay that might soon prove fatal. He has been racked by dysentery for long enough, has survived a bout of poisoning from a stream, but now has been assailed once more by a vile malaria. Hot fevers, icy, shaking bouts, diarrhoea (forgive my crudeness, cariad), the hawking up of naught but blood and bile. Polson suggested he should try the hospital, so weak had he become, but Dancer, God bless him, would not hear of it. “Although it is my only pride and joy,” he said. “I would not put a dog in it!”

  ‘Men can still joke, Sarah, men still are brave. But I am told these rains are not like English rains, and that this storm alone might last for weeks or months. More supplies are due at any day, which please God will bring alleviation. Pray for me, Sarah. But before that, my dearest…please pray for Nelson.’

  The stores arrived, and through one of those mistakes for which the military is most famous, were sufficient only for a scant few days. That same morning the last ball for the four pound cannons was expended, and the carronade that came up with the stores proved beyond the skill of the army men to fire accurately. Nelson was approached, then rapidly abandoned to Tim Hastie’s care. He had lost the power of speech and thought.

  ‘I think that he will die,’ wrote Hastie. ‘His mind moves in and out, and I can hardly get him to keep even vermicelli down. With Dancer so hard pressed with sickness, I have been called on often to give aid to the newly wounded, of whom there is a growing number. I was rousted out this morning when a party of the Blues went to the river to prevent the water carriers leaving the keep, and came under sneak attack.

  ‘It was early, with Nelson thankfully asleep, and when I was hurried to the water, shots were flying round like wasps. God help me, Sarah – I found that I enjoyed it! To be doing something! To be beyond the smell of sickness and of death. One man was hit but three-foot from me – less – and I was not afeard, but exhilarated! And happily, dear girl, he was not badly hurt, and thanked me very pretty when I bound him up.

  ‘But happiness was short-lived. I am ashamed to tell it, cariad, but I must. Ten minutes afterwards, the attackers having been chased away, we came upon three victims of their jolly little outing. Three of our men, three sons of Liverpool, robbed, and killed, and naked on the strand. It is said the Dons will be out soon once more, in full force. And Nelson lies abed, and sweats, and groans. He will be so vexed that he has missed it.’

  Hastie was right in his intelligence. That night the Spanish sallied out in strength, and the air was thick with musketry and yells. The Loyal Irish bore the brunt of the first wave, and two of them were killed, but Colonel Polson had pulled his men up forward just in time, and the battle, though extremely fierce, went to the English not too bloodily. Next day, the twenty eighth, the colonel asked Timothy to convey to Nelson that he was going to invite the castle to surrender – and enquired if he had an officer who had the Spanish to translate it!

  ‘Sarah, we had no such man,’ Tim wrote. ‘And in any way, Nelson was by now too ill to speak or even think. To say that he was raving would be to risk his anger, but he was gripped with fever, and hallucinating. But even as I waited on him, hoping desperate that he would come to good again, I was interrupted with news of another messenger. And required to attend the colonel urgently.

  ‘You may imagine, if you will, the scene. Polson was standing by the roaring river in sight of San Juan castle, and I say roaring advisedly, because the sky was almost solid with the rain. The level of the water was rising inch by inch, and it had gone from a sleek, green, sinuous animal to a raging, tumbling torrent. Drawn up on the bank there was a pitpan, fully manned with Africans, jet black and magnificent. The colonel seized me by the arm.

  ‘“Despatches!”’ he shouted. ‘“Hastie, we will save your captain’s life! We have failed to persuade him he must go downriver, but now he can’t deny us! Despatches! Orders from Admiral Parker. He is to give Collingwood command of Hinc
hinbrook, and he is to go to Jamaica to be captain of the frigate Janus. Orders that will save his life.”’

  It was two hours before Nelson was conscious enough to be told all this. Tim Hastie kept him quiet, refused to let Polson or Despard even enter his tent. But finally the deed was done, and Nelson was convinced.

  Whether the castle fell or not, he would play no part in it. He had orders from his admiral, and Horatio Nelson, above all other things, would do his duty.

  With the aerosol of rain misting the dull flax interior, Hastie leaned inwards, and the men embraced.

  Please God, thought Tim, that there would still be time.

  Nineteen

  Nelson, too sick to walk or even stand unaided, dressed in his full uniform to make the journey down to Greytown. He would have been better carried in a cot, he would have been more comfortable in loose and unconstricting clothes. The gleaming eyes in the starkly ravaged faced brooked no argument.

  ‘Tim,’ he whispered, ‘I am post captain in dear England’s navy, and as such I will comport myself. Wash me, Tim, from the keelson up, then dress me in my finery.’

  He even managed a ghostly laugh.

  ‘My finery. Ah, those were the merry days, eh Timothy!’

  Indeed, the white linen, with high stock and flaring waistcoat, were nearer grey than any other shade. His breeches, also, were dingy and creased, some creases showing streaks of ingrained black. The gold buttons were dark with verdigris, while the gold collar and the edgings and lapels were dull and yellow-green. Despite everything that Tim could do, the signs and smell of mould were everywhere.

  ‘My hat is lamentable,’ he said. ‘Tim, it is a drowned cat, but blue and ginger. It is lamentable.’

  His shoes were almost gone, but Nelson noticed, when he walked – unaided – out to make farewells, that they were in a better state that most. His navy men had given up the struggle and gone barefoot some time before, and most of the soldiers were in the same state now. Most were bare from knee to sole, and their tunics and breeches would have shamed a tramp.

  Colonel Polson had formed up a guard of honour, but everybody knew speed was essential. The captain must stay upright, must not collapse. He accepted a dispatch to take to Colonel Kemble, whose own had spoken of reinforcements now arrived at the river entrance, and made brief goodbyes to Despard and his fellow officers, then to his sailors and the soldiers of the Hinchinbrook.

  ‘Farewell,’ said Colonel Polson. ‘You will do great things in your new command, sir. And I promise you, I will send you news the moment that the castle falls. Row fast, men – or my despatches will reach Greytown first!

  For Hastie, speed was not a problem anymore. The waters of the Rio San Juan were high and racing, too high for the earlier rapids to threaten damage to their keel or bilges. A good time for the up trip was now considered to be about two weeks, but Nelson’s journey down took a bare three days. Hastie’s problem was only Nelson’s health.

  ‘The first day he spent in sleeping,’ Tim wrote to Sarah. ‘It was, in some ways, almost a joy to watch. The racing water and the swift breezes made the rainfall almost bearable, and the mosquitoes gave us quits. To see his white face not covered with those biting, sucking monsters was balm to my soul. The tarpaulins in the boat gave more protection, also, than his tent, in that water hits them and runs off instead of bursting through as fog. I cannot say that he was dry, but he was dryer than he’d been for many days. I began to dare to hope that he might indeed pull through.’

  Nelson did pull through, although the cheering that greeted him when he reached the pool at Greytown was not long-lived. He was recognized while far from the bank because of his uniform – indeed as formal and impressive from afar as it was meant to be to frighten off the enemy – but closer to, that uniform became more like a ghastly joke.

  ‘He was a skeleton,’ wrote Hastie. ‘The woodcut of Death himself on a broadside ballad, because I swear to you his head was but a skull. No wig, his hair has grown back sparse and straggled, the ginger bleached to near albino. It would have made your heart break, cariad. And then he stood up in the stern, and would not be helped at all to go on shore. Cuthbert Collingwood was there to greet him, and the two of them shed tears. Two brave men, Sarah, and they cried. It was a most affecting sight.’

  One of the reasons Collingwood cried, Tim Hastie found out soon, was the state of Nelson’s frigate and her crew. The Hinchinbrook had to be pumped for many hours every day, but the teredo worms were destroying her timber faster than it could be caulked. Unlike the frigate Parker had offered Nelson as a replacement, Hinchinbrook was sheathed with wood, not sheets of copper.

  ‘As for her people,’ Tim confided to his journal, ‘there are few words to describe the horror they have undergone. When Nelson signed across command, the normal joy in such transactions was hollow as a drum.’

  In fact, it turned out later, of the two hundred or so of Nelson’s original crew in the Hinchinbrook, only about a dozen survived beyond December, and none of the deaths had been through battle. The frigate herself did not last much longer, although by then Collingwood had in his turn passed on the command. It took neither ball nor storm to kill her. The bottom rotted and she gently sank.

  Timothy followed the fate of the expedition for as long as possible. The figure that destroyed him most was the carnage wrought on the fighting 79th, the Liverpool Blues, the regiment he’d joined to raise the cash to marry Sarah. When they were disbanded, their numbers had gone from eleven hundred to eighty four, in four short years. The battles they had fought had been with disease, not men.

  Nelson left Greytown as news arrived from Polson that the San Juan fort had surrendered – the Spanish all defeated. Not so the mosquitos and the rain, however, whose depredations soon achieved unprecedented killing levels, among both officers and men. Now the battle that Polson, Dalling and the others had to fight was to convince the world the disaster had been in fact some sort of triumph; or at least an honest victory.

  In truth though – less than a year after the expedition had entered the San Juan river in hopes of dividing and sequestering the whole of the Spanish Main – that country’s flag was fluttering above the fortress once again.

  ‘We must rise above it,’ Nelson told Hastie, during his long convalescence in Jamaica. ‘We must rise, and strive, and do our duties as we can. I shall be admiral, Timothy, that is my word of honour. I shall rise up off this bed and find a wife. And then I’ll be an admiral. You can count on it.’

  Map

  About the Author

  Jan Needle has written many books about the British Navy in the eighteenth century, most recently The Devil’s Luck, which is also published by Endeavour Press. The Poisoned River is the first of a series about the life and times of Horatio Nelson, which will look at some of his lesser known exploits, as well as the ones which made him the country’s most iconic hero.

  Born and raised in one of Britain’s greatest naval ports, Jan immersed himself in naval history from an early age, and has sailed in almost every sort of wind-driven ship, including square riggers. The first of his historical sea novels, A Fine Boy for Killing, is considered by many critics to be a classic. The Portsmouth News said ‘We’ve had Hornblower, we’ve had Patrick O’Brian, now we have Jan Needle. The bleakness and authenticity of his historical sea novels is like an Arctic hurricane.’

  Endeavour also published his two most recent thrillers, Other People’s Blood and Death Order. The Guardian said of Death Order: ‘Calculated to leave ageing colonels twitching, and the rest of us open-mouthed…unlikely to endear him to the secret services.’ The Irish Independent said Other People’s Blood ‘moves inexorably to its savage conclusion.’

  Find more of Jan’s books at http://amzn.to/1o8l807

  His website is at www.janneedle.com

  And you can find him on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/skinbackbooks

  If you enjoyed reading Nelson: The Poisoned River you might be interested in The Devil’s Luck b
y Jan Needle, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from The Devil’s Luck by Jan Needle

  Historical Note

  Although this book, and those that follow it, is set very firmly in the eighteenth century, it does not deal with a specific phase in the never ending struggle for world supremacy between Britain and France, nor any of the shorter-lived interventions by other nations. Daniel Swift features later in the century as a captain of the frigate Welfare, but here he is a lieutenant, learning his trade with characteristic single-minded ruthlessness. The Seven Years War is yet to come, and naval skirmishes, rather than set piece battles, are the order of the day.

  Chapter One

  Like many men who have been at sea too long, Captain Hector Maxwell had an uncertain constitution and a stomach that was ten times worse. This early evening, bowling along the Channel with a stiff easterly right on his tail, his mood should have been all sunshine. It was not.

  ‘Look at him,’ he told the assembled dinner table. He pointed. ‘Regard. A fine young man foisted upon me by the strictures of the service, with all the backbone of a maiden’s pap.’

  His first lieutenant, a stolid man called Stewart, belched gently into his fist. This was a permitted solecism; the ship was rolling like a bitch on heat, and everyone was feeling it. The light frigate Pointer was over-canvassed, because Maxwell was in a hurry, so Stewart belched. The midshipman who was the captain’s target, however, was going green.

  ‘He is young, sir,’ said the second, with a smile that was almost gentle. Lieutenant Bullen was a kindly soul, who still bore the scars of bullying from his own first years. ‘What one of us has not felt likewise in a dead-stern ripper?’