by John Sugden
Not surprisingly, Suckling’s promotion had been sure and steady. A lieutenant before his twentieth birthday, he became a post-captain on 2 December 1755 at the age of twenty-nine. In 1761 his claims to attention had increased with his marriage to Mary, a sister of the second Lord Walpole and sister-in-law to a daughter of the third Duke of Devonshire. Although Suckling’s wife had died early in the marriage, his connections to such political powerhouses as the Walpoles, Townshends and Devonshires left him with a residue of useful friends and acquaintances.11
Nor was Captain Suckling without property and expectations of more. As his responsibilities in London increased during the 1770s he acquired town houses in the capital – for example, one in Park Street, Mayfair, which he sold in 1776. His principal properties remained in East Anglia, however, at Barsham, Winfarthing, Diss and elsewhere. The captain was also in line to succeed to the Suckling estate of Woodton Hall, a handsome property of three storeys with a wine cellar, built in spacious grounds in 1694. It had descended to Denzil and Hannah Suckling, but their heir, Robert, was what the family ungraciously called a ‘lunatic’ and there were plans to transfer the estate to Captain Suckling, his cousin.12
The trouble was that, for all his success, the captain nursed a worrying void in his life. There was no one close to him to share his fortunes. Suckling had never known his father, who had died when he was four, and had grown up adored by his mother and older sister. His wife, Mary, died in 1764 after three childless years of marriage, and was buried at Wickmere near Wolterton, leaving only a strand of her fair hair in a locket of pearls and blue enamel as a memento. Then came that cold, bleak, tragic winter of 1767–8 when, as we saw in the previous chapter, Suckling lost his sister and mother almost at a single stroke in Burnham Thorpe. In less than three years the women in his life had been taken from him. Although his younger brother, William, had a family of his own, Maurice had no one. Captain Suckling’s will, written in 1774, proclaimed this vacuum. Among bequests to his brother and a few others, including some of the Walpoles who had shown him ‘continued friendship’, he bestowed extensive bequests upon the progeny of his dead sister. Each of the Nelson nieces received £1,000 and the nephews £500. 13
Captain Suckling was more than happy to forward young Horace in the service. There was no one to whom he felt a greater duty and he was constantly alert to opportunities for the boy. He had brought him, with Boyles and a few others, to the Triumph but in truth there was relatively little to be learned on a semi-stationary guardship. Plenty of small boat work, assisting ships to moor, running errands and shifting men and stores to and fro, but no real taste of experience under sail. The ship remained moored at Sheerness. It was provisioned, cleaned and refitted. There was a search for a leak, three men got a dozen lashes each, two of them for striking an officer and the third for mutinous remarks, and a man fell overboard and drowned. But this was not going to make his nephew a deep-water seaman.14
Then Captain Suckling learned something interesting. A merchantman belonging to the West India magnate Thomas Hibbert, and his partners Purrier and Horton of London, was bound for Jamaica and the other islands, and its captain was none other than Suckling’s old shipmate John Rathbone. Rathbone had come to Suckling’s Dreadnought from the Sphinx and been rated master’s mate on 3 June 1757. The two had served in the West Indies together. Now Rathbone offered to take Horace with him and turn him into a sailor, and when he navigated the Mary Ann out of the Medway on 25 July 1771 the boy was aboard. Four days later the ship left the Downs, heading west.15
Despite his earlier misgivings about Horace’s constitutional frailty, and the boy’s obvious susceptibility to the seasickness that would trouble him throughout life, Captain Suckling must have believed his nephew had toughened up. Life at sea was harder – much harder – than sitting at moorings. The work was unrelenting, and under the watch system Horace was going to have to combine hard labour with as little as four hours’ sleep a day. The merchant service was also a particularly demanding school. Compared to the Royal Navy it was poorly manned, and the sailors often struggled with larger workloads and greater indiscipline. Even more worrying, the West Indies was a notoriously fever-ridden destination. Maurice had been there himself, and as a teenager he had heard Richard Glover’s chilling ballad, ‘Admiral Hosier’s Ghost’, which broadcast the fate of Hosier and four thousand of his men, wiped out in the islands by yellow fever, a year after Suckling was born. But for all that, Horace would be out on deep water, knotting and slicing ropes, taming the terrors of climbing aloft on lurching ratlines, and working his way out along the yards, scores of feet above the heaving main deck to bring in or make sail. If nothing else, it would establish once and for all whether young Nelson was cut out for the life he had chosen.16
During his period at sea Horace would be kept on the books of the Triumph. Officially, he was still aboard. It was another of those subterfuges, designed to preserve the boy’s sea time even when he was somewhere else. In addition, he would continue to draw the pay of a captain’s servant, about half that of a midshipman. Between 1 July 1771 and 30 June 1772 the sum of £11 8s. 10d. was accordingly paid the missing boy, at least on paper. We do not know what arrangement Suckling had made with Rathbone. It is possible the captain had made it worth Rathbone’s while to take the boy, and that he pocketed Horace’s wages as compensation.17
The Mary Ann reached Tobago in the Windward Islands at the end of the year 1771 and then wove her way around tropical islands towards Jamaica. A year after leaving London she returned, reaching Plymouth on 7 July 1772 and Gravesend ten days later. The muster of the Triumph, which still stood on guard at Sheerness, records that Nelson was ‘discharged’ as captain’s servant at his own request on 18 July 1772, and re-rated as an ordinary seaman the same day. Obviously the boy rejoined his uncle’s ship the day after his return, and the new rating reflected his increased seafaring status.18
Horace found the captain in the thick of ceremonial pomp rarely seen in the merchant service. No sooner had Suckling treated the first lord of the Admiralty to ‘a most elegant entertainment’ aboard the Triumph than he was preparing for the visit of Lord Suffolk and three other peers at the end of July. Horace had room to ponder. Unquestionably he had benefited from his spell in the merchant service but there was one unanticipated consequence. As he later recalled, ‘if I did not improve in my education, I returned a practical seaman, with a horror of the Royal Navy, and with a saying then constant with the [merchant] seamen, “Aft the most honour, forward the better man!” It was many weeks before I got in the least reconciled to a man-of-war, so deep was the prejudice rooted, and what pains were taken to instil this erroneous principle in a young mind.’19
In the minds of many merchant sailors, a good number of whom, like Rathbone himself, had served in the Royal Navy, the king’s service was thoroughly unattractive. The officers lived ‘aft’ and enjoyed the privilege of walking the quarterdeck, cornering the glory and most of the prize money, while the common mariners of the ‘forecastle’ – the living space they used up front below the old forecastle deck – bore the brunt of the work. It was a service in which merit seldom secured just rewards. A considerable time had to elapse before life on the Triumph convinced Horace otherwise.
3
For the next year Horace remained with his uncle on the Triumph. He found most of the personnel of the ship unchanged. John Boyle and Robert Shipman, lieutenants of seven and nine years’ standing, were still in post, but the kindly first lieutenant, Lambert Brabazon, was replaced soon after Nelson’s return by Thomas Tonken, and Second Lieutenant Henry Jackson, an Orford man, by Anthony Perry.20
In August or September Horace was re-rated a midshipman, and slung his hammock and possessions in the midshipman’s berth below the lower gun deck, either in a space near the aft hatchway known as the cockpit or possibly in the gun room with the gunner.
The nine ‘middies’ with whom he shared the following year were a mixed bunch. Almost fourtee
n, Horace was certainly the youngest, although whether he experienced any of the bullying that plagued some midshipmen’s messes is doubtful. As the captain’s nephew he was plainly destined for promotion, and help was still readily at hand in his friend Boyles, now nineteen years old. There was an even older acquaintance from the Raisonable in the mess, James Etheridge, a former acting mate who had been recommended to Suckling by the captain of the Alderney.
The rest of Nelson’s companions were either fresh-faced hopefuls like himself; deserving and experienced men raised from the ordinary seamen by a benign captain, but without the prospects of the ‘young gentlemen’; or older men who simply lacked the ability to get promotion and remained trapped as midshipmen, increasingly humiliated by their advancing years. Among the first of these groups may have been Richard Puddicomb from Topsham, aged twenty-one; James Urmston, an Irishman, and Thomas Bagster, a former able seaman from Cowes, both twenty-four; the Welshman John Morgan, aged twenty-five; and Thomas Manley Hulke of Deal in Kent. Former able seaman Thomas Jaynes probably belonged to the second group, having been promoted in June 1771 to fill a hole left by two departing officers, Hamlin and Baker. But the senior midshipman in the mess may also have been the least able, for Jonathan Ferry of Woodbridge, Suffolk, another ex-able seaman, was forty-nine years old.21
As an admiral Nelson spoke up for midshipmen, whom he believed ‘a deserving set of young men’, and probably his judgement reflected memories of serving in that rank. It was primarily a learning time, a period in which the trainee officer grasped the principles of a difficult and dangerous trade. Unlike the army, the navy not only required its people to steel themselves for battle and destruction, the most brutal of occupations, but also to survive the rigours of the sea itself. Those who would command one of His Majesty’s ships needed first to know how to preserve it in uncertain tides, winds, currents and seas; how to manoeuvre among shifting shoals or along threatening shores; and how to build a team capable of confronting a life of constant danger. Study was an essential part of the midshipman’s lot. It is not surprising, given the difficulty of the job and the stifling disadvantages of those deficient in ‘interest’, that most midshipmen never reached commissioned rank. Of the ten aboard the Triumph only three – Boyles, Hulke and Nelson – ever made lieutenant.
Horace turned out for lessons in seamanship and navigation from the master, Richard Williams, and kept logs of his daily observations, and he put his hand to signalling and supervising watches, but it was the boat work he particularly enjoyed. The Medway and the Thames provided ideal training grounds in navigation, because both were silting up and the depth of water was ever changing. Horace remembered how Captain Suckling allowed him to go ‘in the cutter and decked long boat, which was attached to the Commanding Officer’s ship at Chatham. Thus, by degrees, I became a good pilot for vessels of that description, from Chatham to the Tower of London, down the Swin, and the North Foreland; and confident of myself among rocks and sands, which has many times since been of great comfort to me.’22
With the Triumph stationed at Chatham, it was the boats that plied back and forth, transporting detachments of marines between the shore and such ships as the Portland, shifting provisions, water, fuel and powder, carrying messages and moving prisoners. Suckling had cutters, a longboat, jolly boat, yawl and pinnace at his disposal, and no doubt his ardent apprentice learned to handle them all, but their work could be punishing and at any time one or other might be put out of action. Only a few weeks after Nelson rejoined his uncle’s ship, the Wells cutter was caught by wind and tide as it headed downriver and grounded on Prince Bridge. It was towed off, but the following day, 9 August, Captain Suckling informed the Admiralty that he needed an additional sailing cutter. Every time he had to change parties of marines at the Nore or Sheerness he had to apply to the naval commissioner at Chatham for the use of his boat. In response the Admiralty offered Suckling the Goodwill cutter as a personal tender, but it was not until 18 December that she was fit to be collected from the dock at Sheerness by Lieutenant Tonken. In the meantime, Suckling’s resources suffered a further loss in October when the Greyhound cutter went to Sheerness for repairs.23
In some respects Horace’s first years afloat seem to have been lonely ones, devoid of the company and care of women, and spent with older men in arduous and testing circumstances. Considering the sensitivity that was always evident in Nelson’s character, it would not seem at face value to have been a world he could have enjoyed. And yet apparently the boy thrived, eagerly embracing every new opportunity for adventure and experience, and pressing forward with undiminished enthusiasm. His life had long been fragmented and unsettled, and it was nothing new to a boy who had moved so quickly from Burnham Thorpe, Norwich and North Walsham to be thrown into different companies with strange faces to learn and new modes of life to master.
But the language of the midshipmen’s mess was less refined than anything he might have heard at boarding school, and the sustained and difficult labour and occasional brutality required major adjustments. The navy was not the merciless institution of popular folklore and made many enlightened efforts to care for its own. Young Nelson had nothing but good to say of most of his commanders and companyions, and like other sailors came to accept the necessity for sharp, physical punishment. It was an ugly spectacle to see men bound to the upraised grating of a hatch and stripped to the waist, grimacing as their backs were cut by the knotted tails of a ‘cat’ wielded by a boatswain’s mate before the assembled company. Between 26 July 1772 and 1 June 1773 there were some twenty-nine such sessions aboard the Triumph, punishing offences such as the embezzlement of stores, neglect of duty, quarrelling and drunkenness. Most floggings involved the statutory twelve lashes, but some offenders received more salutary lessons. Yet this was not necessarily considered a harsh regime in eighteenth-century terms, and enjoyed some support among men as well as officers. Every seaman knew that shirkers did more than multiply the already heavy workload of their fellows; they threatened lives. Each ship’s company was engaged in a treacherous, dangerous and unforgiving business, and could only survive by working as a cohesive team. The loyalty and application of every member was essential, and most men looked to the captain to protect their crucial fraternity from those who would abuse it.
Like everyone on the Triumph, Nelson was forced to watch each flogging, standing straight-faced while the drum rolled and the whip fell. He never questioned the captain’s right to flog, but perhaps it was in these early days that he also learned something most good officers already knew: that while men accepted a fair use of the cat, the minority of captains who flogged gratuitously or indiscriminately quickly forfeited respect. And justice was not easily dispensed, even by well-disposed officers. The severest punishment Horace witnessed with the Triumph was also the saddest, inflicted upon a twenty-two-year-old able seaman from Blackfriars in London named Edward Smith.
Smith was neither a rogue nor a rebel. Officers acknowledged him to be a ‘very sober man, alert and attentive to his duty’, but on 31 August 1772 he had been unlucky enough to go ashore in the pinnace the day a new warship was being launched in Chatham dockyard. The party had landed at New Stairs, where James Downie, the coxswain, allowed his men some leave, provided they returned at an appointed time. Smith and his friends drank at the Red Lion but returned promptly, clear evidence that desertion was not on their minds. However, before the pinnace could get away Lieutenant Brabazon appeared at some waterfront steps and shouted Downie over. The two men went to see the Prince George being launched, and when they returned to the pinnace Smith and a companion were missing.
The attractions of the taphouse had lured them away, and Smith finally got back to the harbour side after the pinnace had left. Desertion was a serious offence and Smith panicked. Afraid to return to his ship and no doubt befuddled to boot, he attempted to escape, but in due course fell into the hands of an Admiralty marshal who returned him to the Triumph for the almost inevitable sequel. At Smith
’s court martial in January 1773 Lieutenants Tonken and Shipman and the master, Richard Williams, spoke up for him, but the charge of desertion was proven.
The common penalty for such an offence was harsh and brutal, and in February it was visited on Edward Smith. One hundred and fifty lashes were administered, half in a boat alongside the Triumph and the remainder beside the Dunkirk. No doubt it was intended to serve as an example, but as the fourteen-year-old Horace saw the yellow flag climb the foremast of the Triumph, heard the macabre drumbeat that accompanied the prisoner to his fate and glimpsed the bloody, swollen back of a decent seaman, he may well have blanched. This was a man the navy had failed. In time most under Nelson’s command would consider him a firm but fair commander, willing to hear the stories of accused men and to consider mitigating circum-stances. Perhaps some of those seeds were sown aboard the Triumph. 24
However, after many months about the Thames and the Medway, it was time for Midshipman Nelson to seek other diversions. Moved by a spirit of adventure, he was finding life on the river increasingly bland. On the afternoon of 15 February 1773 there was brief excitement when fire bells were heard ringing in the Chatham dockyard. Captain Suckling replied immediately with a bell and musket fire, and tumbled a party in the boats to fight the blaze. The fire had started in some rotten wood ignited by sparks from a smithy forge and was soon extinguished. Yet such episodes probably left the fourteen-year-old Horace yearning for more permanent excitement. He began to look for an escape.
In May 1773 he found it. Someone told him that a voyage of discovery was being fitted out for the North Pole. It was a dangerous mission, and only picked men were being recruited. No boys were to be allowed aboard. In fact, it sounded just the sort of adventure young Nelson so desperately wanted.
