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Nelson the Commander

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by Bennett, Geoffrey


  High, too, comes leadership, for no officer who lacks this talent is likely to command so much as a squadron, let alone a fleet. Nor, unless he be an outstanding leader, will he be able to make full use of his other gifts and skills. Its ingredients are many. The Royal Navy lists fifteen, headed by faith and knowledge. The Royal Air Force is content with seven, efficiency coming first and personality second. The United States Marine Corps counts fourteen, beginning with integrity and knowledge. The United States Army believes bearing and courage to be more important. And that well-proven leader, Field-Marshal Slim, rates courage highest and will-power next.

  Such disparities between acknowledged authorities are understandable. Choose any two great leaders and their outstanding characteristics will seldom be the same. Compare a few examples from our own times; Jellicoe's brilliant brain with Beatty's dashing panache; Haig's taciturn strength with Montgomery's extrovert egotism. The essence of leadership is, however, simply stated: it is the capacity to inspire men to give of their individual and corporate best in all circumstances, but especially when the odds against them are greatest.

  A naval commander must be a strategist. This is not so evident today when radio has enabled this aspect of war to be directed from a nation's capital. But in Nelson's time, when communications were slow and uncertain, admirals, especially those serving overseas, had to have a clear understanding of how sea power should be used to further the conduct of a war so that the final victory might be gained on land; how best to employ their ships for the protection of their country's and its allies' maritime trade and in support of their armies, and to prevent the enemy from using the sea for either of these vital purposes.

  A naval commander must be a skilled tactician. He must know not only how to manoeuvre and fight his fleet, but how to engage, or avoid action with, the enemy in circumstances that are most favourable to his own fleet. But there is more to naval tactics than applying rules formulated from the experience of others; more, too, than adapting them to suit new types of ship and new weapons. Naval tactics are an art as well as a science, far more so than on land where, to quote from a manual published in 1857:

  'it is almost a certainty that an order will produce certain results. The military commander moves his pieces with the precision of a chess-player. At the note of a bugle, columns form line, consolidate into masses, or deploy into fractions; an inevitable disaster is converted by successful generalship into an honourable retreat. But the seaman is dependent on two uncompromising agents, wind and wave; and over them he has no positive control; he must take them as they come and be ready with his resources. A shift of wind threw three ships out of the brunt of the battle of the Nile. . . . A gale scattered the hard-won trophies of Trafalgar. . . . And it was in the full conviction of the impossibility of adhering to fixed rules that Nelson threw himself on the bravery of his men and the undirected ability of his captains.'

  Napoleon is the classic example of a military commander who could not understand this essential difference between war on land and war at sea. (2) As Emperor of France he rebuked his admirals again and again for failing to carry out his orders to undertake operations against the British, when they were powerless to obey because adverse winds prevented their ships leaving harbour.

  A naval commander should be a diplomatist. He has to do more than fight the enemy. He must work in harmony with kings and statesmen, governors and generals, of his own country and of its allies. He must negotiate with those of neutral powers; sometimes with those of the enemy. He should know when to threaten, when to plead, when to show the iron hand, when to wear a velvet glove, when to be tolerant of weakness, when to defy a bully's strength. And in all this he operates in waters more dangerous than those in which his flagship sails, a sea in which he is more likely to founder. For whilst the successful fleet commander is the man who follows Danton's advice, 'De l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours l'audace', the diplomatist must remember Talleyrand's counsel, 'N'ayez pas de zèle.' To cite one example, Nelson's erstwhile second-in-command, Saumarez, made a significant contribution to Britain's ultimate victory over Napoleon when, from 1808 to 1812, he not only cleared the Baltic of a hostile Russian fleet, but maintained such amicable relations with Sweden that her ports remained open to British shipping, even though force majeure compelled her to join France's allies. In Nelson's own words, 'political courage . . . is in an officer abroad as highly necessary as battle courage'.

  History records the names of many commanders - American, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish and Russian, as well as British and French - who have measured up to most of these requirements; who were therefore successful. But what of the few who achieved greatness; what more did they have to make them so? Genius? This is more easily recognized, especially after a man is dead, than defined. Of what value to say that it involves 'a transcendent capacity for taking trouble', or is an 'admixture of madness', even if both be true of Leonardo da Vinci? Moreover, genius may take many forms: Handel's is epitomized in the sublime matching of music to words in his Messiah, Einstein's in the harsh realities of E=mc². Both these men have, however, one thing in common; they needed no more than their own eyes and hands to transmit their inspiration to us. So, too, with most spheres of human activity. But not that of the naval or military commander: his eyes and hands are his officers and men: he depends on them for the execution of his strategy and tactics. And if they are to enable him to defeat the enemy, he needs a quality that is no more easily defined than genius.

  It is well recognized in the theatre and concert hall. Pablo Casals, the Spanish cellist, Lord Olivier, the British actor, Arturo Toscanini, the Italian conductor, and Galina Ulanova, Moscow's ballerina assoluta, are all world famous not only for exceptional talent but for that rare gift, star quality. But others besides great artists have this. 'If,' wrote Field-Marshal Lord Wavell in Soldiers and Soldiering of the 27-year-old Napoleon's appointment to command the Armée d'Italie, 'you can discover how a young unknown man inspired a ragged, mutinous, half-starved army and made it fight . . . how he dominated and controlled generals older than himself, then you will have learned something beyond the study of rules and strategy.' Nor did the Emperor lose this quality in the hour of his final defeat: 'What an ineffable beauty there was in that smile . . . his mouth had a charm about it that I have never seen in any other human countenance,' noted a midshipman serving in HMS Bellerophon when Napoleon surrendered to Captain F. L. Maitland in 1815 for passage to Plymouth - where in the sound he saw lying at their moorings the wooden walls that all his genius had been powerless to overcome. Star quality is, in short, one of the ingredients of true greatness in a naval or military commander.

  It is, then, these gifts, talents, virtues, skills, call them what you will - ambition, leadership, strategist, tactician, diplomatist and star quality - which should guide our study of Nelson's career. It is with these in mind that we should judge his successes and failures, and give our verdict on his stature as a naval commander - and decide whether he is rightly numbered among the world's Great Captains whose victories are writ in letters of gold across the pages of history since Lysander of Sparta destroyed the Athenian fleet at Aegos-Potami in the year 405 BC - and whose courage even unto death is an inspiration to many more than those whose business is in the field of war.

  II Neptune's Cradle 1758-1792

  Born within sound of the North Sea, in the parsonage house of Burnham Thorpe in the county of Norfolk on 29 September 1758, Nelson was the sixth child and fifth son of the rector, the Reverend Edmund Nelson, and his wife, née Catherine Suckling, a kinswoman of Sir Robert Walpole, fourth Earl of Orford (the first Earl was the Admiral Russell who defeated the French at the battle of La Hogue in 1692). He was baptized Horatio in the marble font that still serves this Christian purpose in his father's church, and was taught the virtues of discipline, and encouraged to stand on his own young feet, in the vigorous and frugal life of a staunch Protestant household. He first attended Norwich's Royal Grammar School, a
nd then Sir John Paston's School, North Walsham, where the headmaster flogged enough Latin into his memory for him to be able to quote Cato more than thirty years later.

  At the age of nine he suffered a traumatic experience which was to give him an Achilles heel: with the sudden death of his mother in 1767, at the age of 42, he was deprived of a woman's love and sympathy just when a boy needs them most. Horatio never forgot one lesson that she taught him, characteristic of an age in which France had superseded Spain and Holland as Britain's chief enemy: as she 'hated the French', so was he inspired 'to hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil'. But her brother, Captain Maurice Suckling, was of more immediate importance. He made his reputation in command of the 60-gun Dreadnought during the Seven Years War. In 1759, the 'year of victories' in a conflict that enabled Saunders to carry Wolfe up the St Lawrence to capture Quebec, and Clive to conquer India, the Dreadnought and two similar ships-of-the-line put Commodore de Kersaint's superior French West Indies squadron to flight. And towards the end of 1770 Horatio learned that Suckling was ordered to recommission the Raisonnable, a 64-gun vessel captured from the French, for a likely war with Spain. 'Do write to my father,' he urged his elder brother, William, 'and tell him I would like to go with my Uncle Maurice to sea.'

  The need for a parson of small means to provide for the future of many motherless children spurred Edmund Nelson's pen. Suckling answered: 'What has poor little Horatio done that he, being so weak, should be sent to rough it at sea? But let him come, and if a cannon ball takes off his head he will . . . be provided for.' The boy might have a puny constitution as well as being physically small, but he was not being 'sent' to sea; he had chosen a naval career for himself. On 27 November 1770, (1) he was entered midshipman on the books of the Raisonnable.

  Horatio joined her in the Medway in March 1771, 'thrown in at the deep end', into the privations and hardships of the midshipman's berth, when he was only twelve-and-a-half. But some boys went to sea even younger than this: almost within living memory in the case of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Provo Wallis who died in 1892; born 101 years earlier, he was first entered on the books of one of HM ships at the age of four, though he did not go to sea until he was thirteen. And except for a half-hearted experiment with a Naval Academy (opened in Portsmouth Dockyard in 1733, and closed as a peacetime economy in 1837), the British Navy depended on this 'sink or swim' method for training its officers until the Illustrious (immediate forerunner of the Britannia) was commissioned as a harbour training ship in 1857. Until then they were expected to acquire the elements of the sea profession - the techniques of handling and fighting a ship-of-war, and of leading the men who manned her - from practical experience, and from such tutoring as their captains and lieutenants might be disposed to give them.

  The trumpet call of war was muted when Spain withdrew her claim to the Falkland Islands, and the Raisonnable was paid off after a commission lasting only five months. But Suckling was fortunate in an age when few captains obtained employment in peace: he was transferred to HMS Triumph, 74, guardship in the Medway. And, realizing how little the boy would learn in a stationary vessel - characteristic, moreover, of the irregular way in which many aspects of the Royal Navy were administered despite the reforms of Samuel Pepys - he arranged with an old shipmate, now employed by a West India trading house, to take his nephew aboard a merchant ship.

  In the year that he spent in her Horatio studied the rudiments of navigation, visited the islands of the Caribbean, and had his first glimpse of Britain's mercantile marine. He 'returned a practical seaman with a horror of the Royal Navy, and with a saying, then constant with the seamen: "Aft the most honour, forward the better man." It was many weeks before I got the least reconciled to a man-of-war, so deep was the prejudice rooted . . . in a young mind,' by men to whom the sight of a British warship was small comfort, when it so often presaged boarding and the enforced transfer of some of their number into His Majesty's service. Yet, from this experience Horatio learned one invaluable lesson; that for success a commander depends as much on his men as upon his officers.

  Back in the Triumph, Horatio spent the winter of 1772 handling her boats on the fifty-mile stretch of London's river between the Pool and the Swin, becoming, as he wrote later, 'a good pilot . . . confident of myself amongst rocks and sands, which has many times since been of great comfort to me'. Then, at the age of fourteen, he heard that the Royal Society was sending two vessels to explore a north-east polar route to the Pacific. The Racehorse, Captain the Hon. Constantine Phipps, and Carcass, commanded by 'that good man', Captain Skeffington Lutwidge, bomb-ships specially strengthened against ice, were not supposed to carry midshipmen who were no more than children: they needed able-bodied men for such an arduous voyage. But ambition, and the use of 'every interest', gained Horatio an unofficial berth in the Carcass as coxswain of her captain's gig.

  The expedition sailed on 4 June 1773 to reach Spitzbergen three weeks later. A week more and the two ships were making uneasy progress through fog. By the end of July they were ice-bound north of Walden's Island. There, early one morning, (according to legend) Lutwidge chanced to see a small uniformed figure confronting a large polar bear some distance from the ship. When Horatio's musket misfired, and he prepared to club the animal with its butt, Lutwidge put the beast to flight with a shot from one of the Carcass's guns. 'Sir, I wished to kill the bear that I might carry its skin to my father,' the boy explained when reprimanded for an exploit so foolhardy - yet characteristic of the physical courage he was to show when he became a man.

  On 8 August Phipps judged that it would be necessary to abandon both ships, and for their crews to escape the onset of an Arctic winter by hauling their boats across the ice. However, preparations had no sooner been made for such a hazardous journey than a wind sprang up, dispersing the fog, and carving a clear passage through which the ships returned in safety to the Nore.

  When the Carcass was paid off on 15 October, Suckling immediately obtained a berth for his nephew on board the Seahorse, a 20-gun frigate commanded by Captain George Farmer. In her Horatio voyaged to Basra, to Trincomalee which he thought 'the finest harbour in the world', on to Bengal, and 'made the islands of St Paul and Amsterdam before we hauled to the northward'. In her, too, he first heard the 'sound of the guns' when, off Malabar, Farmer attacked and captured an armed vessel belonging to Haidar Ali, the Muslim soldier-adventurer who, having made himself de facto ruler of Mysore, had become Britain's implacable enemy.

  After eighteen months in the Seahorse, Horatio went down with malaria, which in those days 'baffled all power of medicine', and from which he was to suffer recurrent attacks all his life. As yet only seventeen, he had to be invalided home in the Dolphin, 'almost a skeleton', and despairing of his future. 'My mind was staggered with . . . the difficulties I had to surmount, and the little influence I possessed.' But, 'after a long and gloomy reverse in which I almost wished myself overboard, a sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me, and presented my King and Country as my patron. "Well then," I exclaimed, "I will be a hero! and, confiding in Providence, I will brave every danger." '

  In that crucial hour Nelson emerged from the chrysalis of childhood: the ambition that was to carry him to the peak of his profession was awakened. He was, however, wrong in supposing that he lacked the influence on which promotion in the Royal Navy largely depended for two generations after his own. By the time he returned to England in September 1776, Suckling had become Controller (2) of the Navy, which enabled him to secure for his nephew an immediate appointment to the Worcester, 64, Captain Mark Robinson, as an acting-lieutenant. Joining her at Portsmouth on 8 October, Horatio gained his first experience in charge of a watch at sea, escorting convoys to and from Gibraltar through the worst of that winter's weather. Then, on 8 April 1777, well short of his nineteenth birthday, he was formally examined for lieutenant's rank by officers of the Navy Board. This obstacle successfully surmounted, he was appointed, again through Suckling's influence, second lieutena
nt in the 32-gun Lowestoffe.

  In this 'fine frigate', in which he was 'left in [the] world to shift for myself, which I hope I shall do, so as to bring credit to myself and [my] friends', Horatio sailed for Jamaica. King Louis XVI having decided to take advantage of the revolt by Britain's American colonies to seek revenge for his country's humiliating defeat in the Seven Years War, the Lowestoffe was required to protect British shipping in the Caribbean against both American and French privateers. Her captain, William Locker, an ardent disciple of Lord Hawke, encouraged his officers with such precepts as, 'Always lay a Frenchman close and you will beat him,' which Nelson later rephrased into his own immortal words: 'No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy.' And he rewarded the determination with which Horatio boarded an American prize in a heavy sea with his first command, the schooner Little Lucy. More important, he spoke so well of him to the Commander-in-Chief, Rear-Admiral Sir Peter Parker, that he was transferred to his flagship, HMS Bristol, in which, by September 1778, he rose to be first lieutenant with the responsibilities of second-in-command of this 50-gun ship-of-the-line.

  The next month brought the ill news that Uncle Maurice Suckling had died of a stroke. Horatio had, however, no need to despair at this loss of the man who had furthered his initial progress in the Navy. He had so proved himself by his own exertions that, in December, Parker chose him to be commander of the brig Badger. And six months in her, protecting the settlers of Nicaragua's Mosquito Shore and the north side of Jamaica from the depredations of privateers, were enough to remove any residual anxiety for his future in an age when patronage and 'interest' counted for so much. On 11 June 1779 Parker promoted him to command the 20-gun frigate Hinchinbroke. Since this was a captain's post his naval career was secure. Lieutenants and midshipmen could be passed over by their juniors: many, indeed, never gained promotion; there were midshipmen of forty. But post-captains were promoted by seniority: flag rank was certain if they lived for long enough, especially for those who survived 'a bloody war and a sickly season'.

 

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