by Max Adams
The situation in the West Indies required officers of enterprise, watchfulness and zeal. Admiral Parker quickly realised that Nelson, young and inexperienced though he was, was of the right sort and, after taking him into Bristol as third lieutenant in July 1778, soon promoted him master and commander of Badger, a 14-gun brig. Nelson, with his ‘interest’ at the Admiralty, had gone from master’s mate to master and commander in just over a year. This was on 8 December, a day when Parker was required to make no less than fourteen promotions.4 Losses from capture and disease had left many ships short of their full complement. It was Nelson’s influence with Parker that led to Collingwood’s rescue from the clutches of Haswell, and promotion: first into Lowestoffe under the likeable William Locker and then on the same day that Nelson was made commander, as second lieutenant of the Bristol.5
As Nelson’s luck began to rub off on him, Collingwood followed his friend as if pulled along in his slipstream. Nelson was made post (still just twenty years old: his birthday was three days after Collingwood’s) in Hinchinbroke, a captured French 28-gun frigate, in June 1779. He was replaced as master and commander in Badger by Collingwood, now thirty. Nelson wrote to his brother William explaining why the West Indies was both feared and loved by officers, saying, ‘We all rise by deaths. I got my rank by a shot killing a post-captain and I most sincerely hope, I shall, when I go, go out of the world the same way.’6 When Nelson died at Trafalgar it was Collingwood, once again, who succeeded him.
Within a few months Collingwood succeeded Nelson as post-captain in Hinchinbroke, when his friend was invalided home after the first of those rash amphibious expeditions that would blight Nelson’s war record for the next twenty years.
In 1779 Britain was under threat of invasion by France. The Channel fleet was in a state of high alert, and that alert extended as far as Jamaica, which was threatened by the presence of a French base at St Domingo. When that immediate danger passed, the governor of Jamaica, Major-General John Dalling, decided, on his own initiative, to attempt a pre-emptive strike on Spanish territories. In the lunatic spirit of Cortez he planned to force a passage to the Pacific Ocean up the San Juan river in Nicaragua, bisecting the possessions of the Spanish New World, and achieving immortality for himself. In April 1780 Nelson was put in charge, in Hinchinbroke, of escorting the troop transports to the mouth of the river. Collingwood, in Badger, was sent in support. For the first time but not the last, Nelson disobeyed orders and decided to help the expedition along its way, ultimately attempting to storm a Spanish fortress many miles up the river in thick jungle.
The diseases and dangers of the jungle, the snakes, mosquitoes, yellow fever, accounted for a large number of the expeditionary force, and very nearly for Nelson. He had to be sent home to England, and it was feared he would be dead before he got there. Collingwood’s ship, waiting week after week off the mouth of the river, fared little better, as he recalled many years later:
My constitution survived many attacks, and I survived most of my ship’s company, having buried in four months 180 of the 200 who composed it. Mine was not a singular case, for every ship that was long there suffered in the same degree. The transports’ men all died, and some of the ships, having none left to take care of them, sunk in the harbour: but transport ships were not wanted, for the troops whom they had brought were no more; they had fallen, not by the hand of the enemy, but from the contagion of the climate.7
Collingwood replaced Nelson again, this time as post-captain in Hinchinbroke. It had taken him nineteen years to get on the ‘list’, and five since his promotion to lieutenant at Bunker’s Hill. From now on, he could comfort himself with the knowledge that if he lived long enough, he would die an admiral. That step would take another nineteen years. In the meantime, he must hope for a bloody war and a sickly season. What he got was a hurricane.
On 18 October 1780, a month before Britain declared war on the Dutch for aiding France, Collingwood was in command of another frigate, the 24-gun Pelican, cruising off the south-east corner of Jamaica.8 With no warning, a hurricane of tremendous force swept through the Windward Islands. Afterwards, Admiral Rodney, seeing the extent of the devastation, wrote that ‘nothing but ocular demonstration could have convinced me [of its extent] … the island [Jamaica] has the appearance of a country laid waste by fire and sword.’9 Pelican was wrecked, thrown on to the Morant Keys where she broke apart:
The next day, with great difficulty, the ship’s company got on shore, on rafts made of the small and broken yards; and upon those sandy islands, with little food, we remained ten days, until a boat went to [Port Royal], and the Diamond frigate came and took us off.10
This is understatement. It was generally considered that when a ship was wrecked or about to sink, her captain no longer had power of authority over his men. A frequent scenario involved sailors breaking into the spirit room and drowning in as near a state of inebriation as possible. Very few seamen, officers or ratings, could swim, and many understandably panicked in such situations. Collingwood held his nerve, ensured that his officers and men did too, and brought off a remarkable feat of survival, his second in a year. The subsequent court-martial, mandatory for any captain who lost his ship, was a formality. Even so, it was hardly glory.
Back in Port Royal the damage was not confined to the more than one hundred ships that had been lost or driven ashore,11 or the town’s buildings. There was political trouble too. Another gale, this time in the Leeward Islands, had forced Rodney to demand that Parker turn over Port Royal’s facilities to repair his ships. Parker, stung by Rodney’s tone, and by previous run-ins with him over seniority, pointed out his own priorities and effectively refused assistance. When finally Rodney came to appreciate Parker’s situation he did not feel able to back down gracefully. Both of them wrote complaining letters to the Admiralty. It was the sort of bickering among senior commanders abroad that seriously compromised the navy’s effectiveness. Such examples determined commanders like Collingwood and St Vincent that the good of the service must always come before personal interests. Rodney, in any case, was an untypical officer. He was a fine and brave seaman and a skilful battle commander, but he was notoriously corrupt, both politically and financially. He made so many enemies, Parker included, that his junior officers’ careers were hampered by his recommendation.
Collingwood returned to England early in 1782. It is not clear if he managed to go north this time, but his constant applications to the Admiralty suggest that once more he stayed close to the action in London. Like many an officer ashore, he found the difficulties of command were as nothing to the social complexities that a post-captain, ashore on half-pay, was expected to immerse himself in. In the third of his letters that survive, Collingwood told his brother John that Mrs Massingberd, a ‘very comical woman’, seemed rather too keen on him. She contrived to write some very warm words about him to her son and asked Collingwood to forward the letter. Mrs Massingberd mixed the covers so that Collingwood found himself (by design, he was certain) reading her glowing praises of him. He does not seem to have taken her very seriously:
Let a woman alone for a good story. I begin John to think they are more dangerous to encounter than Hurricanes, as they do not give so fair a warning. Would I was abroad again! Better be wrecked a thousand times at sea, than once ashore.12
In common with all his letters home, this one was supposed to be circulated among family and friends. Collingwood felt he had an obligation to keep his family up to speed not just with his own affairs, but also the affairs of those with whom he came into contact. He liked to entertain, too, and the sort of throw-away line cast in Mrs Massingberd’s direction became a polished trick over the years: always delivered straight, like the best comedy, and often, especially in later years, casting a dark shadow of gallows humour. In his next letter but one, while he was in Portsmouth, he told his sister:
Madam the dowager has taken it into her head that after warm summers, follow cold winters, and in fitting her house to resist
the inclemencies of the weather, among other things she has provided a husband. Her first was a sailor – chance gave her a sailor – but still doubting to which proffession the preference was due, she now means to give a fair tryal to an old soldier, and matters are pretty near concluded between her and Col Heywood …13
And then …
It wou’d be a happy thing if she [Madam Teesdale] was to kick off; she is a withered branch of society and might be lopt off without injury to it, indeed if the whole family was at kingdom come, I think they would be well off.14
It would have amazed many of his colleagues, towards whom he maintained a very formal reserve, to discover the mischief and wit that lay behind the straight face; although those who carefully read his piercing blue eyes found hidden depths. Nelson, whose relationships were always intense, was one. Another was Mary Moutray.
After a brief period in command of the 64-gun Sampson,15 Collingwood was given Mediator, a fourth-rate, 44-gun two-decker frigate which had captured two French ships bound for the West Indies the previous year. Despite some trouble finding enough men to make up her complement, Collingwood had her ready to sail at the end of September 1783. One of her new midshipmen described a scene that must have been familiar to all sailors:
As two months advancement of wages were going to be paid to the ship’s company before she sailed, the Commissioner’s yacht came alongside, and the bumboat people that came off were allowed to bring their goods on board; the main deck was appropriated for exhibiting their goods, and it became a perfect fair, where the sailors laid their money out long before they got it …16
Bound for the Leeward Islands station at Antigua, Mediator carried the new navy commissioner for the dockyard, John Moutray, and his wife Mary. At first, Collingwood was annoyed. He had to give up his own spacious cabin for them, it would cost him money to entertain them in a fitting manner, and he would be ten shillings a day worse off than he had been in Sampson. He would not mind too much, he told his sister, if the passengers showed their gratitude once they were there. As it happened, Mary Moutray might have ended her days as Lady Collingwood – or for that matter Lady Nelson.
By a great stroke of fortune, Collingwood was doing someone else a favour, in taking a small boy with him as his servant and apprentice. Baron Raigersfeld, secretary and chargé d’affaires to the Austrian ambassador in London, was sending his thirteen-year-old son Jeffrey to sea. This was a useful political connection for Collingwood, and suggests that he was regarded as a commander with a future. Jeffrey, who himself became a rear-admiral and was a lieutenant in Speedy some years before Lord Cochrane had her, wrote an autobiography, The life of a sea officer,17 which describes in riveting detail his experience of serving with Collingwood. Here the Collingwood touch is witnessed at first hand, recalled with some affection:
During upwards of the three years and a half that I was in this ship, I do not remember more than four or five men being punished at the gangway, and then so slightly that it scarcely deserved the name, for the Captain was a very humane man, and although he made great allowances for the uncontrolled eccentricities of the seamen, yet he looked after the midshipmen of his ship with the eye of one who felt it a duty to keep youth in constant employment …18
Mediator left Spithead and crossed the notorious Bay of Biscay before striking south-west for the Azores. The Moutrays presumably suffered the same fate as the new midshipman:
I became so very sea sick as to be unable to assist myself in the least … the waves ran so high, and the sea water out of soundings caused so bad a smell on board, from the rolling of the ship as it washed from side to side in the between decks, that had anyone thrown me overboard as I lay helpless upon the gangway I certainly should not have made the smallest resistance.19
Unlike poor Raigersfeld, the Moutrays probably did not recover to find that their sea chests had been emptied by eager hands ‘of all superfluities’ during their prostration. After Biscay, Mediator found herself in the trade winds, and the hands had light work of their passage to Antigua, where she was brought into English Harbour by a pilot with a wooden leg, and:
No sooner anchored than she was crowded with negro men and women, as well as mulattoes, who brought fruit, bread, milk and other things for sale. The dresses of the women were mostly of light striped cottons, their teeth very white, and from wearing their head dress very high, their tout ensemble had rather a coquetish appearance, while their easy manners engaged very sensibly the attention of your young bucks of the navy.20
English Harbour, which possesses the only surviving Georgian dockyard in the world, has changed little since 1783. It has a very narrow entrance guarded by forts on either side. The harbour and docks cannot be seen from the open sea, and in periods of war a great iron chain could be hung between the forts to prevent the entry of enemy craft. The hills which surround it on all sides make it one of the best havens for shipping in the Caribbean during the hurricane season, from June to October. From Shirley Heights, nearly five hundred feet above sea level, there is a commanding view of the harbour and approaches. Even now, there are ‘hurricane chains’ from that time lying on the floor of the shallow basin. These operated rather like the restraining cables on the decks of aircraft carriers: ships entering the harbour flying before the wind would need to stop very quickly to prevent them from running aground, and this they accomplished by seizing cables to the capstans, with grappling hooks at the cables’ ends, and towing them astern so that the hooks caught on the chains stretched across the harbour floor and brought the ship to. It sounds like a hazardous operation in any but the most skilful hands.
Antigua was a crucial possession for the British, even though it is a small island, less than twenty miles long. Its highly developed slave plantations produced sugar and rum in great abundance, and its location at the north-east corner of the Leeward Islands made it an ideal base for patrolling the eastern Caribbean. Unlike Menorca, it was easily defended. Only at English Harbour in the south-east, and at the present-day capital St John’s in the north-west, were there sufficient gaps between reefs to provide either safe anchorages or landing places for an invasion. At English Harbour the government had invested for many years in the development of docking and careenage facilities, many of which still exist. These enabled ship refitting and repair to be carried out without the expense and danger of ships sailing as far as Jamaica or Nova Scotia. In the 1780s a programme of expansion was under way which saw the erection of officers’ quarters and water-storage facilities, to add to the sail lofts, mast-houses and slipways. Many of the buildings were constructed in red brick, brought from England as ballast to be replaced by sugar on the return journey. On the hills around English Harbour and at St John’s there were army barracks and batteries too, and the remains of military cemeteries testify to the high mortality rates suffered by soldier and sailor alike. Here and there a surviving sugar mill or slave barracks offers a sharp reminder of the economic basis of Britain’s Empire.
Collingwood, by the time he arrived here, had decided that the Moutrays were the sort of people he could get along with; so much so, that Mary had managed to penetrate his off-putting professional severity, and come to like him:
There was a degree of reserve in his manner which prevented the playfulness of his imagination and his powers of adding charm to private society being duly appreciated. But the intimacy of a long voyage gave us the good fortune to know him as he was, so that, after our arrival in Antigua, he was as a beloved brother in our house.21
The house in question was called Windsor. It almost certainly stood on the little bluff that overlooks English Harbour from the west, a few hundred yards’ walk from the officers’ quarters. It had louvred walls and a verandah, and caught the best of the fresh cooling breezes that kept insects at bay. Today, there is very little left of it: traces of a stone foundation and a scattering of domestic debris: china, beer and wine bottles, whelk shells by the hundred. For the most part it has been reclaimed by agave and thorny sc
rub, Antigua’s ubiquitous goats and the odd mongoose (introduced to rid the island of ships’ rats, but succeeding only in extinguishing its famous population of racing snakes) its only inhabitants. It is tempting to think that the odd sherd of creamware or pearlware comes from a dinner service used by Collingwood and the Moutrays, and indeed Nelson, who was to arrive here in 1784.
Collingwood became very attached to Mary Moutray, a striking, intelligent and charming woman, twenty-eight years younger than her ailing husband John, who had retired as a post-captain and for whom this posting was a sinecure. She in turn was attracted by the tall naval commander in the prime of life, with his intelligent blue eyes and dry wit. She must have been flattered, too, by his verse:
To you belongs the wond’rous art
To shed around you pleasure;
New worth to best of things impart,
And make of trifles — treasure.22
Evenings with the Moutrays relieved the boredom, discomfort and solitude of the station. Yellow fever was rife in the West Indies, as Collingwood knew only too well from his previous visits. The mosquitoes were another hazard, as poor Raigersfeld was finding to his cost; one bite became an infected ulcer which took fifteen months to heal, and the only partial remedy against them was to be smeared with lime juice:
