by John Sugden
2
The outward passage had not been as bad as Nelson had feared.
True, his quarterdeck had been crowded, but although Lady Hughes was ‘an eternal clack’ time had shown her a ‘very pleasant good’ person, while the many young gentlemen darting here and there had become ‘my dear good children’. Captain Nelson loved young people, and saw himself in their thirst for adventure. He fussed over them like a proud father, daily haunting the schoolroom to monitor their progress, and ensuring they learned every kind of task. ‘All the youngsters, I hope, learnt and did the[ir] duty, from rigging the topgallant mast to stowing the ballast; they never were confined to any particular part of the service,’ he recalled. ‘The trouble of breeding up officers properly I need not state, and it is only by their turning out good men that a captain is repaid.’2
At noon, when the boys assembled on deck to calculate the ship’s position with the master, they also found Nelson there with his quadrant; and when the Boreas ‘crossed the line’ in June, by which phase our informant must have meant the Tropic of Cancer rather than the Equator, they were bled and given ‘purgative medicines’ on the orders of a captain mindful of the health of those who had never seen the tropics before. In the opinion of First Lieutenant James Wallis the youngsters benefited from these ministrations to a ‘wonderful’ degree.3
Lady Hughes was also impressed by Nelson’s ‘attention’ to the boys and his patience with those still learning their trade. He ‘never rebuked’ those intimidated by the fearful climbs aloft, she noticed. ‘Well, sir,’ he told one reluctant apprentice, ‘I am going a race to the mast-head, and beg I may meet you there.’ As she recalled it, ‘No denial could be given to such a wish, and the poor little fellow instantly began his march. His lordship [Nelson] never took the least notice with what alacrity it was done, but when he met [the boy] in the top instantly began speaking in the most cheerful manner, and saying how much a person was to be pitied that could fancy there was any danger, or even any thing disagreeable in the attempt. After this excellent example, I have seen the timid youth lead another, and rehearse his captain’s words.’ According to Lady Hughes, the boys responded to their captain with adulation and vied with each other for his approval.4
On 2 June, the day after the Boreas reached Funchal in Madeira, Lady Hughes and her daughter accompanied Nelson, his brother and senior officers ashore to visit the Portuguese governor. As the boat pulled from the ship it fired a salute for her ladyship but it was not this she remembered but the entourage of ten young gentlemen in the captain’s train. It resembled a school outing, with excited juveniles outnumbering their supervisors. ‘I make it a rule to introduce them to all the good company I can,’ Nelson explained, ‘as they have few to look up to besides myself during the time they are at sea.’ He understood that though the boys were receiving lessons in mathematics, navigation and seamanship from the master, their formal education contained little about fighting and commanding a ship. For that they had to rely upon role models, and Nelson was determined to be the best he could. At Funchal his budding Nelsons not only learned something about international niceties, but also the fraternity of all seafarers, because Nelson supplied emergency rations to a Danish frigate.5
Yet even on this first voyage there were indications that Nelson’s partnership with the Boreas might frustrate more than excite. The captain did not enthuse about the ship in his usual fashion, and a few hard cases were beginning to emerge among the crew. In Plymouth one of the seamen, Thomas Johnston, had grumbled when his wife and the other women on board were ordered off the ship just before sailing. Standing between decks near the fore hatchway, where he could be heard by men loading water and beer into the hold, Johnston declared that ‘if his wife was not permitted to go out in the ship, that no woman should go out in her’. Ordinary ratings were not allowed to take wives and sweethearts to sea, although officers sometimes did, and female passengers were not uncommon. Evidently Johnston took exception to the Hughes women and the wife of Daniel Letsome Peers, the purser, being given passage. His words sounded subversive and Bromwich reported them to Lieutenant Wallis. Nelson called Johnston onto the quarterdeck to warn him ‘what the consequences would be if he continued to make use of improper expressions’, but left it at that. Unfortunately, Johnston did not improve. Indeed, he took pride in his incorrigibility. ‘I am reckoned one of the worst men in the ship,’ he later bragged, claiming that if his fellows had been ‘as bad’ the Boreas ‘would never have got . . . to Barbados or Antigua’.6
A truculent marine named John Nairns was also becoming troublesome. Though generally attentive to duty he was ‘frequently drunk’ and threatening to hit one officer or another. Off Madeira, Nairns earned one of the three floggings seen on the outward voyage by receiving a dozen strokes for abusing his sergeant, John Cochran, but he remained unreformed. At Barbados he struck a petty officer and was lucky that the victim chose not to make an issue of it.7
Nelson, too, was unusually contentious throughout his spell in the Leeward Islands. As a rising officer he had generally endeared himself to superiors and peers, and had few bad words for any of them. But during this command he was forever standing upon his dignity, and reacting powerfully and sometimes tactlessly to fancied affronts or anything that smacked of slackness of duty. Although many have admired his conduct and seen courage and principle in it, a few historians have admitted the strain of arrogant intemperance and self-righteous pedantry that developed. Out in these islands Nelson tended to be irritable, uncompromising and severe with his men. He was, of course, still in his twenties, and might be excused the confidence and follies of youth, but professional frustration, sexual tension and indifferent health may also have influenced his behaviour.
An early example of this punctilio had occurred at Funchal. Nelson’s time there had been pleasant enough. He embarked some wine to soften up the governor of Dominica, with whom he intended to broach the matter of lands Captain Locker had inherited there, saluted the king’s birthday, fraternised with the captain of the Resource and sent his brother ashore to preach in an English trade factory. But he took umbrage when Charles Murray, the English consul, neglected to return a visit Nelson had made, and grumpily declined to have further dealings with the man. The quarrel, he admitted to Locker, was rooted in nothing more than ‘a little etiquette about visiting’, but there would be similar occasions in the next few years. Salutes were another raw spot. Any failure to fire the correct number of guns to acknowledge his flag he deemed a national insult. There must have been diplomatic ways of correcting such oversights but Horatio was not always good at finding them. The governor of the Dutch island of St Eustatius received one protest, and in December 1784 Nelson even fired two nine-pounders at the British fort at Barbados for neglecting to salute a national French schooner leaving port.8
However, leaving Funchal on 8 June the Boreas had reached Carlisle Bay, Barbados, in the Windward Islands eighteen days later. Here things had looked up. Rear Admiral Sir Richard Hughes, commander-in-chief in the Leeward Islands, was there in the Adamant, along with a number of other captains. It was with ‘no small degree of satisfaction’ that Nelson discovered he stood next to Hughes in seniority, and was consequently second-in-command of the station. As such he had the privilege of presiding over the courts martial in Carlisle Bay. Moreover, the admiral seemed to bear him no grudges for their previous difficulty. Hughes came aboard the Boreas the day she arrived, reclaiming his family and the dispatches Nelson had brought from the Admiralty. Lady Hughes gave Horatio an excellent ‘character’, and Sir Richard was relentlessly amiable, regretting only that Nelson did not have the opportunity to ‘partake of family fare’ at his table more often. On his perambulations ashore the admiral dutifully introduced Horatio to all the eminent islanders.9
Nelson had left Barbados on 20 July with orders to ‘lay up’ for the hurricane season in English Harbour. He sailed northwards by way of Martinique and Dominica. Dominica was merely a wood and water s
top, but at the French island of Martinique Horatio was at his most insistent. He berated the governor for not greeting His Britannic Majesty’s ship with colours above the citadel, and only when national dishonour had been expunged by an exchange of fifteen-gun salutes between frigate and fort did fraternisation commence. The governor visited the Boreas, and Captain Nelson went ashore, each greeted by salutes of eleven guns. Nelson arrived accompanied by as many young gentlemen as could tumble into his boat, and enquired after some British seamen in the town jail. He also discovered that the French officer who had been inattentive to his ship’s colours when he arrived had likewise been incarcerated, and upon reflection allowed his inherent generosity to prevail. Horatio gallantly pleaded for the offender’s release. All things put to rights, the Boreas eventually sailed into English Harbour on 28 July.10
The Leeward Islands squadron divided for the hurricane season. At the island of Grenada was stationed Nelson’s old friend Cuthbert Collingwood, with his forty-four-gun frigate the Mediator and two sloops, the Rattler and the Experiment, the first under the younger Collingwood brother, Wilfred. The rest of the ships were with the Boreas at English Harbour – the Adamant (Captain William Kelly), flying the flag of Sir Richard Hughes; the Latona frigate under Captain Charles Sandys; the Unicorn, Zebra, Fury and Falcon, all sloops and brigs, respectively commanded by Charles Stirling, Edward Pakenham, William Smith and Velters Cornelius Berkeley; and the Berbice tender of William Lucas. It was a contemptible flotilla compared to some of the fleets Nelson had known, but he had authority within it and organised both the captains’ mess and any necessary courts martial. Briefly, before the tedium wore him down, there was a little satisfaction.
3
But time hung heavily, and Captain Nelson lingered on in the heat and mosquitoes of English Harbour. He tried to keep the men busy. They refitted and repainted the ship and in spare moments danced, sang and juggled with the captain’s blessing. The young gentlemen entertained the company by performing simple plays but the place seemed oppressive. One man was lost overboard and a few died of fever. His brother William, his appetite for the life of a naval chaplain thoroughly sated, fell sick and was packed off home in the Fury at the end of September. Among those who stayed tempers began to fray.
The first day of August put both Johnston and Nairns before courts martial. Lieutenant Dent had stopped Johnston’s grog ration on account of his bad behaviour and he became surly and insubordinate. According to young Stansbury ‘he said that while his grog was stopped he would stop the ship’s duty’. Dent ordered him confined below, but Johnston replied that ‘he’d be damned if he would not open the captain’s eyes’, and continued to complain as he pulled on stockings to receive the irons about his ankles.11
Johnston was tried a week later on board the Unicorn. Captain Stirling presided because the defendant had called Nelson as a witness. In fact, even at this pass, Johnston appeared to regard his captain as a protector. He attempted to put an innocent construction upon his remarks, advertised the years he had spent in the navy without punishment and appealed to Nelson for ‘a character’. Horatio was not unsympathetic, and had no personal issue with the prisoner, but he had to support the authority of his junior officers. Nevertheless, he did what he could. He had only known of Johnston’s seditious remarks ‘from complaint’ and acknowledged his strengths. ‘I never had any complaint against him except for his making use of improper words, and had I not received these complaints I should have esteemed him one of the best men that I ever sailed with.’ Bromwich, who had been troubled by Johnston, had to admit that he had only seen the man drunk once, when they all celebrated crossing the line. But the court decided that Lieutenant Dent’s charges were partly proven and sentenced Johnston to two hundred lashes around the squadron. It did not cure him, for he received three subsequent but routine floggings aboard the Boreas in as many years for drunkenness, threatening a boatswain, disobedience and neglect of duty.
The same Sunday Johnston ran foul of Dent, Nairns also got into trouble. Nelson was told that the marine had just returned from shore after being absent without leave, and brought him to the quarterdeck to explain himself. Horatio was offering Nairns a means of mitigating his offence, but the fellow merely became abusive and got a dozen lashes in return. After receiving his punishment Nairns went below to clean up and was soon quarrelling with Sergeant Cochran, who wanted him to join a guard being formed to welcome Admiral Hughes aboard the ship. Exasperated, Cochran said there would be consequences if Nairns did not turn out. ‘They may flog and be buggered, for I don’t care,’ retorted the bloodied marine. ‘They never shall make a good soldier of me. See what kind of satisfaction I gave them! Bugger my eyes if I would cry out if they would flog me to death!’ The chagrined sergeant complained to his superior, Lieutenant Theophilus Lane, who formally demanded a court martial.
Again, Nelson was called to testify and his evidence is worth quoting because it tells us something about his attitude to punishment:
Q: You have heard the charge read?
A: Yes.
Q: Have not repeated complaints been made to you of the prisoner’s ill behaviour?
A: Yes.
Q: What has in general been the cause of these complaints?
A: Drunkenness, striking his officers, neglecting his duty, using improper words such as, ‘I might flog and be buggered, for that I should get no good out of him’, and going on shore without leave.
Q: Was the prisoner punished in consequence of these complaints?
A: Sometimes he was, and sometimes not. He was punished so frequently and reprimanded so often to no purpose. He was past my power of reclaiming him.
Q: Did any instances of the prisoner’s misbehaviour fall immediately within your knowledge?
A: Yes, drunkenness and contempt for me.
Q: Did you punish him for that contempt?
A: Complaint was made to me for his going on shore without leave by the first lieutenant. I sent for the prisoner on the quarter-deck to hear his reasons for going out of the ship. His actions were so contemptuous that I was obliged to order him to [be flogged at] the gangway.
Q: Do you recollect the punishment you inflicted on him at that time?
A: A dozen lashes.
Q: Do you recollect how many times you have punished him since he has been under your command?
A: Twice at the gangway.
Q: You say you had complaints lodged against the prisoner for striking his officer. Was he punished for that?
A: The day after we left Madeira to the best of my recollection a complaint was made to me that the prisoner had struck or attempted to strike the corporal, and I punished him for mutiny.12
Nelson, it seems, gave his men opportunities to explain their actions, and punished to reclaim – at least in theory, but he regarded Nairns as irredeemable. The court agreed. Nairns received two hundred and fifty lashes through the fleet, was ‘drummed on shore’ and dishonourably discharged from his corps.
Difficulties were not confined to the ranks, for tensions were also stretching in the airless gun room, where the lieutenants, officers of marines and the senior warrant officers shared cramped accommodation. Wallis, the snuff-taking first lieutenant, was a conscientious officer, up spryly at seven each morning, and a fine seaman. But he was abrasive and haughty. He had ‘strange whims’, someone said long afterwards, and though a man of ‘many good qualities’ occasionally ‘appeared half mad’. Although second-in-command aboard the Boreas, he began feuding with the supersensitive Lane about who had the greater authority over the marine detachment. A court martial confirmed the supremacy of Wallis, but Nelson regretted the divisions sown among his officers. Dent, for example, had supported the first lieutenant, but Thomas Graham, the surgeon, had seconded Lane.13
Nelson helped where he could. Despite his own privileged rise, he sympathised with junior officers tripping over a treacherous career ladder and greatly valued loyalty. It was the unfortunate Bromwich who most conc
erned him, and he appealed for his promotion to both Sir Richard and Lady Hughes. Bromwich’s preferment, he said, was ‘the only favour’ he presumed ‘to ask’. As a result of such overtures, on 20 December Bromwich was appointed acting lieutenant of the flagship, and fourteen months later acting commander of a government brig, but even these advantages failed to get his lieutenancy confirmed. As late as 1790 he was having to drop back down to master’s mate. Bromwich became a lieutenant ten years after passing his examination but never received the opportunities he deserved. Though out of sight Nelson continued to fight for him, but with only modest success.14
Nelson’s own dissatisfaction with the Leeward Islands manifested itself in almost constant irritability. On more tiresome days the silence of his cabin was broken by the scratching of his pen as he wrote to Locker, Kingsmill and almost everyone else he knew, though not ‘a single creature in England’ seemed to reply. To Cornwallis he sent a cask of haddock by way of the Zebra sloop and confessed a nostalgia for Jamaica, regretting that no ship was available for him to send ‘poor Cuba [Cornwallis]’ some of the provisions perennially in short supply in Port Royal.15
His letter writing partly reflected loneliness, the want of satisfying associates in Antigua and his own frustration. He castigated his fellow creatures mercilessly. Hughes, who usually eased his gout ashore, was ‘tolerable’ though entirely uninspiring; he ‘bows and scrapes too much for me’, Nelson thought. Lady Hughes’s incessant chatter he had grown to ‘detest’ while the flag captain, Kelly, was ‘an ignorant self-sufficient man’. Sandys of the Latona had once been Horatio’s superior on the old Lowestoffe, but now stood nearly four years his junior on the captains’ list. Nelson recognised the good in him, and liked him as a man, but Sandys failed wretchedly as an officer and went through ‘a regular course of claret every day’. As for the other captains of the squadron, they were – bar two – mere ‘ignoramuses’.16
