Nelson: The Dreadful Havoc

by Jan Needle

But the anchor never did go up for battle. The impending clash with Spain over the Falkland Islands, for which Suckling had got a commission back and the new-built Raisonnable a noble start to her career, turned out to be a figment, or chimera. Whatever Nelson had made of the Navy so far – and it had been furiously busy if nothing else – he did not say. But the new era was a time of great frustration.

  Chapter Six

  Before the hiatus came, Nelson told Hastie in the Port Royal lodging house, he had learned a vast amount. In his lucid moments, which were more and more frequent under Mrs Cuba’s tender care, he painted a picture of the Navy that was not unlike Tim’s own army life.

  ‘The food disgusting,’ Hastie wrote, ‘mainly salt meat despite the livestock running round. The captain dined well, and all his officers, and probably Nelson and his fellow boys as well, although he was loth to allow it. Disgusting but plentiful, which was a reason some poor fellows volunteered to leave their homes and family. And they needed food more than we did in the army, I believe, because the work was crippling. A fair few men, indeed, were crippled. And paid off to starve on shore, I do suppose.’

  To be commissioned completely, the Raisonnable needed 64 guns loaded on by hand and tackle, and enough powder and shot to deliver innumerable broadsides of six hundred pounds in weight of metal – twelve hundred if both sides are counted. She needed stores for five hundred men, and sails and cordage, including spares for her three masts. From what he’d seen on ships at sea, Tim guessed it was a madhouse, or maybe ten times worse.

  The armaments came on board mainly when she had slipped twelve miles downriver to arrive at Sheerness, an even colder and more dismal place than her mooring in the Medway. The weather was so ‘filthy cold’ that men fell sick in numbers, to transfer to one of the many hulks rotting slowly in the mud, exposed to the bitter winds off the North Sea.

  ‘He was a sickly item,’ Hastie wrote. ‘Somewhat miraculous that he lived at all. He did admit from time to time that his imagined love for a heroic naval life had turned to something not far from hatred. Then when he learned the hoped-for Falklands war had faded like a dirty mist, he was in despair.’

  One of the ships that had sailed into Sheerness in these weeks was called the Triumph, a 74 gun third-rater. Suckling was transferred to command her as a guardship, but recognized it spelled only tedium to his ambitious nephew. It was, indeed, as Nelson muttered to Tim Hastie one Jamaica night, almost as bad as being back at school.

  His Uncle Maurice took his duties as a mentor seriously, and quickly found a berth for Nelson on the Mary Ann, John Rathbone master, a merchant ship. They sailed for the West Indies in July and Horatio, as an able seaman, crossed the Atlantic twice. He was sipping sugared lime juice while he told Hastie this, shuddering as if the fever had come back.

  ‘It was my first time in a ship in open sea,’ he said. ‘Only July, with a breeze to make the sailors smile. And I was sick, sick as a dog, sick as a maid in her first months, forgive my indelicacy. I was sick from not far off the Nore, right round the Forelands, North and South, until we found a head wind in the Strait of Dover. Then I was sick properly, in earnest. John Rathbone had promised my uncle I would learn everything, so he offered me no quarter or respite. I was sick for five whole days together.’

  Nelson paused then to take a sip of cooling juice. The windows were wide open, and the air was pure and fine. He breathed it in, shuddering once more, then drank more deeply.

  ‘God love you, Tim,’ he said, ‘when I found the West Indies I thought that I was dead and gone to heaven. So warm and balmy, the scents so beautiful, the fruits and meats so fresh and plenteous. And the women. And the rum.’

  Tim made a note for Sarah: ‘The women, cariad? Was I hearing this? He had been scarce thirteen years old! But I think he was always short of love, even then. I do not think, to treat him fairly, he meant it in an animal sort of way, but a craving, rather, for soft company. He had been torn cruelly from constant intercourse with the fairer sex, starting with the catastrophe that his mother died – he was her favourite child, and learned his morals at her knee, no doubt. Then there were his sisters, and the village girls who came as servants and as playmates.’

  ‘But in his ramblings, in the worst days of delirium, he spoke of a different family of encounters, that I think were in his mind rather than plain history, though I can never know beyond conjecture. He was forced to grow up fast, and as an able seamen must have added bulk and weight and muscle quickly, or he would have wasted quite away. How can I vouch for what he did with Mrs Cuba’s doxies while I was absent with my thoughts of you?’

  The two voyages to the Caribbean gave Nelson other opinions as well. Often, in the discomfort of red hot night, assailed by mosquitoes hour after hour, he mumbled that he hated the navy, and quoted more than once something he must have got from John Rathbone of the Mary Ann.

  ‘Aft the most honour; forward the better man.’

  Nelson had to say it twice before Hastie caught it fully, and flushed painfully on the second time, and covered up his face in sort of shame.

  ‘When I got back on the Triumph,’ he said, ‘I think I must have let Uncle Suckling see my disaffection. He did not thwart me with it, but put me to a different sort of programme altogether. He said I was as good a seaman now on deck and out along the yards as anyone might ever need to be, so I must learn another skill. To be in charge of men, and to master inshore pilotage.’

  Nelson was himself again. He requested the chamber pot, being still too weak to risk his balance or to walk, and Tim held his shoulder while he pissed. It was a strange life to be a man, he thought. When Nelson lay again, Tim wiped his brow.

  The next phase in his training, it transpired, was one that few officers ever mastered, or even troubled with. The beauty of West Indies waters, he told Tim, was that apart from the weather – which in the hurricane season could be as bad as any in the world – pilotage and navigation was easy. True there were a thousand islands, but there was visibility beyond a dream, and even close inshore the bottom could be seen. In other coastal waters, a rock or shoal would take your bottom out without a by-your-leave, but in the Carib you could see the danger, and even far offshore the surface gave the game away. Spanish galleons, ‘as hard to handle as a box of shit without a rudder,’ sailed with impunity. Even drunken pirates rarely came to grief.

  So Nelson became the Sheerness pilot, and conveyancer of important messages. As a reward, his uncle told him, and if he concentrated mightily on his charts and navigation, the decked-in longboat controlled from the commanding officer’s ship at Chatham would be his. So from that point to the Tower, and down the Swin to the North Foreland, he learned the tides and shoals and narrows, and gained confidence in picking through all rocks and hidden dangers.

  And then at fifteen, after the less than triumphant expedition to the arctic, Suckling offered him another wonderful chance. He clearly thought his nephew far too valuable, by now, to have his head blown off in his first action, but wanted him to sample everything else a life at sea could offer. Soon after the arctic expedition in the Carcass, Nelson learned he had been signed on to the 20-gun frigate Seahorse.

  Horatio smiled weakly across the width of Mrs Cuba’s room.

  ‘I was to sail to India, Timothy. That rich, exotic, land. I fought in my first action, won three hundred pounds at cards and swore to give it up forever, and caught for the first time this terrible disease that bids fair to be the death of me.’

  The smile slowly disappeared.

  ‘God damn it all to hell,’ he said, quietly. ‘God damn it. All to hell.’

  Chapter Seven

  When Nelson next spoke, the pause had lasted for what seemed minutes. He had taken a frond of his thin, almost colourless hair, and was twisting it between his fingers. He turned pale, sad eyes onto Hastie.

  'When I sailed for India in the Seahorse,' he said, 'I had a full thick head of nut-brown hair.' A rueful little laugh. 'I lie. It was never full, never thick,
and more an auburn ginger than nut-brown. It served its purpose though; it covered up my head. Look at it now.’

  Hastie did not need to look. Nelson’s hair was thin and sparse, and had bald patches here and there. The weeks up San Juan river had not helped, to put it at its fairest. The scalp was scratched and bitten, fair skin scabbed and streaked with scars. But he smiled encouragement.

  ‘It will grow back, sir. It is growing strong already. One day it will be your crowning glory.’

  Both men laughed at this. It was absurd. Before Tim on the bed lay a skinny, shattered skeleton. With a sense of humour still.

  ‘No matter, Tim. You are a liar and I know not if that’s your Welsh blood or the influence of Liverpool. Is it really as dishonest as men say? You seem quite honest, far as I can tell.’

  ‘It is a seaport, sir. That is the start and end of it. Most men are there but one year in every three, most women do what they can to keep their honour bright and infants fed. There is a constant influx of poor Irish, also. They have a sense of grievance and no money, both of which they blame the English for. It is not Pall Mall.’

  Nelson lapsed into silence. The sounds of Port Royal faded and grew, faded and grew. There was a slave ship in, and among the shouting and the cries of costers, screams could be heard from time to time, sometimes the sharp crack of a whip.

  ‘Full head of hair, new hope, a feeling that the Navy might not be such a bastard after all. Uncle Maurice Suckling told me I had survived the arctic icebergs, I had crawled the Thames and Medway from arse to piss-pipe, and now figured the Atlantic for the merest ditch. Time for a bit of warmth and female flesh. He was a coarse man for a mentor, Captain Suckling. He even told me that my mother would have wanted it!’

  The atmosphere changed. Tim held his breath. When Nelson brought his mother into any conversation, eggshells might get cracked. Sometimes the grief of his start in life, the tearing from the branches of his mother’s love, the wrenching from his sisters, brothers, father and his home seemed like a knife, a twisting, gouging knife. He had whispered, babbled, of the rawness of his loss, the bruising of his spirit, the breaking of his heart, the bleak sense of desertion by the humans there to nurture him. Tim held his breath and thought. Nine years old he’d been, and even now but two and twenty. A feeble, feeble body, a heart of large affection, a life of little peace.

  Then Nelson sighed.

  ‘I joined the Seahorse in ’73. Still rated as a midshipman although I say myself a most experienced one despite not yet sixteen. But Uncle Suckling said I needed more, and by now I paid great attention to everything that this good uncle said. If he said female flesh, then even female flesh it was my duty bound to taste. My sister – which one I can’t remember – exhorted me to remember my God and my calling as an English gentleman, and I swore to myself I would not forget them. I did not spell it out, but as you know yourself, Tim, native women of whatever hue don’t count in the equation.’

  Nelson’s great experience quickly brought him to the fore in his new setting:

  Despite the lateness of the season, when we set sail in that October there was insufficient Spithead wind to move us past Sir Edward Hughes’s flagship, the Salisbury. The longboat was launched, and I undertook the towing of the frigate, until a thirteen-gun salute could be fired. The return salute – eleven – blasted holes in our lower fore studding sails with their burning wads.

  We did not suffer calms for very long, though. Most of our troubles on that voyage were of the other sort. In Madeira three weeks later we must needs effect repairs, including to the heads and necessaries, many of the seats of ease having been carried away in a gale of wind towards November’s end. Fortunately, none of the people were at stool the time the stools were turned to matchwood. Captain Farmer remarked at dinner that that would have been ‘too much a country matter!’

  Later in the voyage, the officers’ necessaries were also sorely damaged by bad weather. At one stage a cistern in the quarter gallery was smashed, occasioning a leak that might indeed have cascaded on Captain Farmer’s sleeping head itself.

  Even worse, potentially, was the eating up of stores caused by adverse winds and sea. From 18th April till anchoring in Madras Roads on May 16th ‘the company ate nothing but portable broth boiled in their pease,’ Tim heard. Which sounded much to him like army fare…

  Throughout the voyage east, Nelson had been stationed in the foretop, where he undertook the duties of an able seaman until the master said he should serve the office of midshipman once more. He boasted that he was no longer a ‘skinny little streak’ but a ‘stout and muscular son of the sea.’ Stout, Tim considered, was unlikely, nor was it much cause for crowing, considering the state he was in now, in Cuba Cornwallis’s bedroom.

  However, East Indies life suited him admirably, that was much apparent.

  The sea was blue, the weather clement, each shore station a part of paradise. I know men had seen great actions here, and there were many hazards for a white man, just as in the Indies of the West. But my life was almost one of ease, as far as that can be under navy discipline. We spent much time ashore in parties, balls and soirees, and the local women were not unaccommodating. There were some English maids, but very few, and way out of my purlieus I fear.

  My best friend, Thomas Troubridge, did better on that score than I, because he had the Irish brogue and could charm a monkey from a tree. And that despite his father was a baker in the Strand! I thought then, and I think it now, that if he lives he will be one day a lord, or a knight at very least. In that climate, he seemed set to live forever, as did I. My health got its comeuppance very soon, however. And then Tom T looked out for me.

  Nelson also, incoherently one evening of strong fever, told Hastie of the day he finally found some action at last, some genuine action, with guns fired and lives at risk. Tim was urged immediately to write it down, to ‘polish up my words.’ They had begun to share the possibility, if the time were ever ripe, of making out some sort of narrative.

  We had been busy off the Ganges Delta and the River Hooghly for a good time, and had done some small rebuilding to our frigate to make her less dark in the officers’ area, and less stifling in the weather. We carried all sort of messages and cargoes, viz chests and sacks of rupees for the East India company, and in the last days of January returned to Madras and sailed again within two days.

  We cruised round Cape Comorin, passed Anjengo, and four days after that we came upon two armed ketches which our Captain rated as suspicious. Signal was made to bring them to, then we tacked and ran out guns and fired shot to encourage them to understand. Within an hour one of them hove to, and set out a boat towards us, which was shortly alongside. They claimed that they were Hyder Ali’s ships – he being the Muslim lord who ruled Mysore, and considered as an ally.

  Nelson, of course, was watching action and tactics like a hawk, and working strategy through his head at double time.

  ‘The other one has not brought up!’ I said to Captain Farmer, who was kind enough to smile acknowledgement instead of telling me to mind my mouth. It was clear to most that the second ketch had kept her course and speed, and the masthead lookout cried then that more sail was heaving into sight.

  ‘Consorts!’ said I to Troubridge, but not so loudly this time. Tom smiled at me and made a noise like sucking eggs.

  ‘Grape shot, if you please,’ said Farmer, most urbanely. ‘Mr Gunner, I do not wish to kill for pleasure, and it might be an honourable mistake, but put a few rounds among the grape to send the message beyond doubt. They really should have brought her to by now.’

  Nelson had maybe little realized, he confessed to Hastie, how very slow a fight at sea could be. If the other sail were consorts, it took them a time interminable to present a valid threat, or for the Seahorse to get within range of the fleeing ketch. When night fell, with light enough in the stars and sky for them to see her still, they closed ever closer until the break of the next day. By mid-morning they opened fire.

 
A stern chase is a long chase, and shot followed shot in inevitable toll. The smoke rose in the rigging – it was a gentle breeze – and Nelson found the acrid smell unbearably exciting. But it was not until noon had passed that the first shots struck home. The ketch was presenting her tail alone, but the grape at last found, and smashed, the window glass.

  At half past midday the ketch brought to and struck her colours, and we sent an officer aboard; but sadly I was not allowed to go. This officer confirmed it was indeed one of Hyder Ali’s ships, which made the captain bite his lip.

  ‘Such a waste,’ he muttered, within my hearing. ‘God alone knows what this has cost their lordships in shot and powder, and all because the fool would not bring to. I’ve a damn good mind to sink him and be damned.’

  The cost, when reckoned up, was high enough. Fifty seven rounds of nine pound shot had gone, fifteen rounds of grape of ditto weight, two double-headed hammered shot from the nine-pounders, twenty five round shot 3-pounders and two grape shot 3-pounders.

  And with what result? Surely, if wars or battles stretch on so very long they could end up bankrupting nations? It is a pity in a way, great pity.

  But it was a thing of glory, too, Nelson told Hastie, with glittering eyes. All the time he fought, he knew he was alive. Not just alive, but revelling!

  Chapter Eight

  The end of pleasure, and of health, came slowly for Nelson, but by the time of its coming he was cemented as a navy officer; there could never be another life. He was in the East for more than two years, and most of it was a sort of love affair.

  When I sailed across the Atlantic that first time and discovered warmer climes, I thought it was the be all and the end. But when we reached the coast of India after months of the worst weather in the world, I found paradise. The people were not slaves like the Africans, one could say that they welcomed us. And apart from skirmishing, and a little touch of piracy, we were not there to fight. Captain Farmer, perhaps too nobly, said we were there to learn, rather than teach, but I honestly think he was romancing. These people needed us, the Indies needed us. It was a liaison made in heaven.