Nelson the Commander

by Bennett, Geoffrey

  NELSON THE COMMANDER

  Geoffrey Bennett

  © Geoffrey Bennett 2013

  Geoffrey Bennett has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 2001, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1972 by B.T. Batsford Ltd.

  This edition published in 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  To the PAST OVERSEERS SOCIETY OF ST MARGARET AND ST JOHN, WESTMINSTER, which had inherited from the erstwhile St Margaret's Vestry Club, the tradition that, whilst enjoying a whitebait dinner at Greenwich in 1805, its members received the news of Nelson's death and immediately rose and in silence drank a toast to THE IMMORTAL MEMORY.

  This tradition has since been honoured each year by the Society at its annual dinner before the ceremony of transferring their unique and famous Tobacco Box to its Custodians of the ensuing year, of which the original component was acquired in 1713, and on which the year 1798 is commemorated by a representation of the battle of the Nile and the year 1805 by a portrait of Lord Nelson

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Postscript

  Foreword

  I Dialectic

  II Neptune's Cradle 1758-1792

  III Ship-of-the-Line 1793-1796

  IV The Fleet In Which He Served

  V First Steps to Glory 1796-1798

  VI Aboukir Bay 1798

  VII Emma 1798-1800

  VIII To the Baltic 1800-1801

  IX Boulogne and Merton 1801-1803

  X A Long Watch and a Long Chase 1803-1805

  XI Cape Trafalgar 1805 (1)

  XII Legacy

  Chapter Notes

  Bibliography

  Extract from The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918 by Richard Hough

  Acknowledgements

  To Her Majesty The Queen, for gracious permission to quote from papers in the Royal Archives, Windsor, the author submits his humble thanks.

  My second debt is to my wife whose advice and help throughout the writing of this book have been of incalculable value. Without her wise guidance on Nelson's relations with his wife and with Emma Hamilton from the female viewpoint I should have been 'all at sea'.

  My third is to Dr. J. E. de Courcy Ireland whose encyclopaedic knowledge and objective understanding of maritime history have done so much to enable me to deal with my subject 'warts and all'; and to Captain W. R. H. Lapper, Royal Navy, who by likewise reading this book in typescript, has steered me clear of many a shoal. Neither is, however, to be held responsible for any errors in my navigation.

  My fourth, but by no means least, is to Admiral of the Fleet Sir Peter Hill-Norton, G.C.B. for allowing me to use the greater part of his speech delivered in Washington, D.C., on Trafalgar Day, 1970, as a singularly apposite Foreword.

  Others to whom I am indebted include Mr. R. C. Mackworth-Young, Assistant Keeper of the Royal Archives and his staff at Windsor; Captain E. Borg, Royal Danish Navy, for an invaluable visit to Copenhagen; Commander L. T. Kuzmin, Assistant Naval Attaché to the Embassy of the U.S.S.R. in London, who enabled me to use the papers of Admiral Ushakov; Mr. Douglas Robinson, M.D., of Pennington, New Jersey; Lieutenant-Commander W. E. Pearce, Royal Navy, Captain of HMS Victory (Ship) for a most illuminating visit to his command; the Director of the Central Maritime Museum, Leningrad; Mr. A. W. H. Pearsall and the staff of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich ; and the Librarians of the City of Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and their staffs, in particular for the speed with which they obtained such books as I needed from abroad.

  For permission to use copyright material I have to thank Miss Carola Oman for a short extract from her Nelson, and J. M. Dent & Son for a quotation from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad.

  I have also to thank Mr. P. S. Roland for translating Russian documents; Miss Mary Rundle for compiling the index; Mr Arthur Banks for drawing the admirable maps and diagrams, and Miss Adrienne Edye for untiringly typing and retyping my often illegible manuscript.

  Lastly, I acknowledge my debt to all those who have 'charted the way', the authors and editors of the many books already published dealing directly and indirectly with Nelson's life and career which are listed in my Bibliography.

  Postscript

  According to p. 2, 'the Victory, alone of all the great armada of warships which have flown the British ensign, is preserved in Portsmouth dockyard'. By a happy chance, this statement has been proved wrong whilst the book was with the printers; by the unexpected decision taken in the summer of 1971, to preserve for posterity in a Thames-side berth opposite the Tower of London, the last and largest of Britain's World War Two cruisers, HMS Belfast, 11,550 tons, completed in 1939 with twelve 6-inch guns.

  Foreword

  By Admiral of the Fleet Sir Peter Hill-Norton, G.C.B.,

  British Chief of the Defence Staff

  From a speech delivered in Washington, D.C.,

  on Trafalgar Night, 21 October 1970

  Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Gentlemen. . . . This is a unique occasion; the first time that any First Sea Lord has had the honour of entertaining the Chief of Naval Operations and his officers in their own capital city, to commemorate a British sailor who had his baptism of fire in the War of American Independence.

  Your Navy shares with ours many traditions which have led to a mutual respect and understanding, and to a unique relationship of outstanding importance to the Free World. In 1782, when captain of the frigate Albemarle, Nelson captured an American fishing schooner, the Harmony of Massachussetts, whose skipper and owner, Nathaniel Carver, had almost reached port with a cargo representing all his worldly possessions. Ordered to pilot the Albermarle into Boston, Carver did so with such speed and skill that Nelson, saying that it was not the custom of English seamen to be ungrateful, returned his schooner to him and gave him a certificate of good conduct. Two months later, Carver by chance came across the Albemarle still on patrol, with her crew suffering badly from scurvy, and presented Nelson with four sheep, several crates of fowls and a large quantity of fresh vegetables. It would be difficult to find a better example of mutual respect and understanding.

  We speak almost the same language, and our Services are governed in what they do and how they do it by long established tradition, which has its origin in professional integrity, courage, skill and diligence. And Lord Nelson had these qualities to a degree that no British sailor before or since has been able to equal: he is an example of what we should all like to be, and what from an early age we are taught to try and live up to. Your Navy also has its heroes, and we admire the superb seamanship, courage and fighting qualities of the American captains in the classic single ship actions of the War of 1812. Bainbridge of the Constitution, Dekatur of the United States, Lawrence of the Hornet and the Chesapeake, all have an honoured place in both American and British naval history.

  It is a widely held fallacy that to look back on the past is not only unprofitable but a sign of decadence. Nothing could be further from the truth; none of us should make the mistake of thinking that we have nothing to learn from history or its great men. The Royal Navy looks back with pride on what Nelson did for his country, but not because what we were doing at that time was necessarily right, nor because we are filled with nostalgia for our imperial past. We look back at the standards of conduct and the sense of purpose and duty of this small frail man, so that they may serve as an inspiration to us and our successors. These are sentiments which, in the context of your own great men, I am sure you share.

  Today, it is the mode to denigrate the fighting Services, and with them the virtues of integrity and industry, skill and enterprise, courage and perseverance, without which we should have no purpose and could not hope to sur
vive in a materialistic age. The remedy is in our own hands: it is for us to ensure that by our own conduct and example, the Profession of Arms, and particularly the Naval Service, continues to be recognized as an honourable, difficult and worthwhile vocation.

  Nelson did it; let us, each in his own way, seek to rise to his standards. Gentlemen, I give you the toast : 'The Immortal Memory'.

  I Dialectic

  Horatio Nelson, Vice-Admiral of the White, Knight of the Bath, Baron and Viscount of the Nile and of Burnham Thorpe and Hilborough in the County of Norfolk, Duke of Brontë - plus the posthumous bestowal (on his elder brother, William) of an earldom and the viscountcy of Trafalgar and Merton. His death 'was felt in England as something more than a public calamity . . . [so] deeply we loved and revered him. . . . The country had lost . . . its great naval hero. . . . So perfectly had he performed his part, that the maritime war, after the battle of Trafalgar, was considered at an end: the fleets of the enemy were not merely defeated, but destroyed . . . through Nelson's surpassing genius. He could scarcely have departed in a brighter blaze of glory. He has left us . . . a name which is our pride, and an example which will continue to be our shield and strength.'

  Today, more than a hundred and fifty years after Robert Southey paid this tribute at the close of his classic biography, the British take a more realistic view. As one expression of the nation's feelings at the time of Nelson's death, Parliament voted an annuity of £5,000 ($12,000 - Calculated here and henceforth at the 1971 rate of exchange of approx. £1.00 = $2.40) to his heirs in perpetuity; but the Labour Government which the Nation returned to power in 1945 discontinued this pension on the death of the 5th Earl, without compensation. Oliver Warner has written: 'Setback, reverse, disappointment, Nelson knew them quite as often as their opposite. . . . [But] his triumphs have so caught the general imagination that his failures are scarcely remembered.' Other historians have stressed the watch which a British fleet had to maintain over the French in the Mediterranean after Trafalgar, as part of a blockade that continued to occupy much of the Royal Navy's available strength. So much was this so that when the United States declared war in 1812, a sufficient force could not be spared to prevent their frigates and privateers operating as far afield as the English Channel, nor prevent them sinking and capturing more than 1,000 British warships and merchantmen.

  Many consider Nelson's treatment of his wife inexcusable, especially the harshness of her final dismissal from his life. Others are at a loss to understand how a man who put his trust in God could have become the enslaved lover of a woman who had begun life in domestic service before becoming the mistress of Charles Greville and a model for George Romney. As Lord St Vincent wrote, when Nelson's letters to Lady Hamilton were published in 1814: 'It will reflect eternal disgrace upon [his] character . . . which will . . . be stripped of everything but animal courage.'

  Yet Southey has been proved the truer prophet. The toast to 'The Immortal Memory', is drunk at more annual dinners than that of the Past Overseers of the parishes of St Margaret and St John, Westminster, who thus recall that their members chanced to be enjoying whitebait at Greenwich when they learned the news of Nelson's death. The Victory, alone of all the great armada of warships which have flown the British ensign, is preserved in Portsmouth dockyard, to hoist each year, on 21 October, Nelson's never-to-be-forgotten signal, 'England expects . . .' And it is only a couple of years since Field-Marshal Montgomery judged him supreme among captains of war.

  Nor is praise confined to Britain: there is no naval academy, from the Tokyo of Admiral Togo to the Annapolis of Admiral Dewey, which has not sought to learn from the strategy and tactics with which Nelson countered and destroyed the fleets that challenged Britain's command of the sea. The finding of the board of inquiry held to investigate the circumstances in which six United States destroyers followed their leader on to the rocks off Honda Point, California, on the night of 8 September 1923 contained these words:

  'Had Nelson at Cape St Vincent blindly followed the leader, John Jervis would not have gained the victory which he did. Had Nelson obeyed Parker, Copenhagen would not have been the monument to the British Navy which it is. Blindly following the leader, or unreasoning adherence to set regulations, is more in accordance with the practice of those leaders of the past who hesitated to depart from the line ahead, even when advantages would accrue from a departure from such practice.'

  Even the French, for whom Nelson had such contempt, and whose Fleet he twice defeated so decisively, pay tacit tribute to his greatness; coup de Trafalgar is their expression for a sudden, decisive blow.

  There is, however, another point of view. Moscow's pedagogues acknowledge that Nelson 'distinguished himself by his courage, decisiveness, and exceptional capacity for organization', and that 'his maritime victories had a substantial influence on the strategic position in Europe'. In the three volumes of Admiral Ushakov's papers published in Moscow as recently as 1951-56, the only one of some 1,500 documents singled out for facsimile reproduction is a letter from Nelson. And the Soviet Navy has the same legend as the British, that the black neck silk which has been part of a seaman's uniform for more than a century, is worn in his perpetual memory. But the Nile and Trafalgar are ascribed to his use of Ushakov's 'new original methods of waging war'; and they condemn his 'hostile attitude to the activities of Ushakov's fleet [when Russia was Britain's ally] because he feared the strengthening of Russian influence in the Mediterranean'. (Articles on Nelson in the Soviet Historical Encyclopaedia, Vol. X [1967] and on Ushakov in the Large Soviet Encyclopaedia, Vol. XLIV [1956])

  Similarly, an Irish historian has written:

  'When an Englishman declares that ''no one questions'' Nelson's right to look down on London from his Trafalgar Square column, it occurs to a mere Irishman that the many fine qualities of the English would be better symbolized by a statue of Samuel Plimsoll, the seaman's champion, or by William Hillary, founder of the Lifeboat Service, than by that of the jingo . . . who gloated over the executed body of a Republican admiral [Caracciolo] floating in the Bay of Naples. Nelson, who looked down on Ireland while living, no longer does so dead. We may deplore the loss of a Dublin monument, but not the explosion of another overgrown reputation.' (J. E. de Courcy Ireland in the Irish Times.)

  And another Irishman has expressed a view of Nelson this side of idolatry:

  'Charles XII . . . Nelson [and] Joan of Arc . . . were . . . half-witted geniuses, enjoying the worship accorded . . . to certain forms of insanity. . . . When [Nelson's] head was injured at the battle of the Nile, and his conduct became for some years openly scandalous, the difference was not important enough to be noticed. ' (George Bernard Shaw in the preface to Caesar and Cleopatra.)

  So, where lies the truth? Though neither the Russians nor the Irish deny Nelson a niche in history's hall of fame, does he merit the supreme place that England accords him? Trafalgar was, after all, his only victory over an enemy fleet at sea: at Copenhagen and the Nile he destroyed ships at anchor. Did his strategy match his tactical skill? To what purpose did he pursue Villeneuve across the Atlantic to the West Indies - and back again? What were his qualities - not those that gained him the hearts as well as the huzzas of his countrymen, but as a sea commander in whom a disciplinarian so strict as Lord St Vincent discerned virtues that transcended all his shortcomings?

  What was there in Nelson, in an age when the Royal Navy thrived on 'rum, sodomy and the lash', (Sir Winston Churchill's phrase) that turned his captains into a 'Band of Brothers', and moved the roughest sailor to tears on hearing of his death? And has his example inspired Britain, especially her Navy, for good - or was it responsible for the complacency that imbued Queen Victoria's Fleet, from which Lord Fisher extricated it only just in time to avert defeat by Imperial Germany in the First World War? Is there something of lasting value to be learned from Nelson's career? Or, in an age in which the old military virtues - courage, self-sacrifice, comradeship and the rest - seem of questionable relevance, (1) s
hould Nelson be struck from William Railton's column in London's Trafalgar Square, as he has been from William Wilkins' in Dublin's O'Connell Street?

  Can an Englishman put aside the hero worship instilled into him in the nursery, when Britannia held undisputed sway over the oceans, and give objective answers to questions such as these? The present writer, who is proud to have served in the Royal Navy during the thirty years that covered a revolution comparable with the change from sail to steam - the replacement of the 'great gun' by the guided missile - can but try.

  But guidelines first: if this study is to avoid being stranded on such domestic shoals as the insufferable conduct of Nelson's stepson, Josiah Nisbet, or the possibility that his daughter Horatia had a twin sister (suggested by Winifred Gerin in her Horatia Nelson); if, too, it is to steer clear of such shallows as the theory, more appropriate to W. S. Gilbert's John Wellington Wells (in The Sorcerer) than the serious historian, that Nelson so far courted death on 21 October 1805 as to be tantamount to suicide, the fairway must be buoyed. A naval commander's greatness is measured by more than the number and extent of his victories: one must assess the inborn qualities and acquired skills that enabled him to achieve results of such consequence to his country.

  High on the list comes ambition: not for William Blake's 'strongest poison ever known', which is power; nor for riches, which Cicero condemned as 'so characteristic of a narrow and small mind'; but to do one's duty - to serve one's God, one's Sovereign and one's Country - to the best of one's ability, determined to do so better than other men and to get to the top. For no commander is born great and few have greatness thrust upon them; most must strive to reach the stars. A few are sufficiently inspired by the personal satisfaction of successful achievement. Wellington is a notable example: 'the great principle of his life was "duty". . . . He had but one object in view - to benefit the State . . . to the utmost of his ability and skill. . . . The desire to win applause . . . seems never to have moved him.' (Field-Marshal Lord Montgomery in The Times, 7 June 1969.) Yet he became Prime Minister of England. But most men need public acclaim. They hunger for honour and glory for which the rewards counted for more in Nelson's day than in our own.