Nelson
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The exceptions were the Collingwood boys. Wilfred, slightly the younger man, had only been promoted commander the year before and was not dissimilar to Nelson, for his flimsy constitution belied a sharp and strong mind. Cuthbert was ten years Nelson’s senior, and in some ways a contrast. Where Nelson hungered for attention, Collingwood regarded fame as a transitory and futile possession. Its ‘trumpet makes a good noise,’ he once said, ‘but the notes do not dwell long on the ear’. Where Nelson was impatient and opportunist, Collingwood was steady and solid as a rock. And where Nelson was quiet but endearing, Collingwood suffered from a somewhat dour and dull disposition. Yet overriding such discrepancies were common attributes. Both were men of the modest middle classes and had gone to sea at twelve; both enjoyed reading and wrote reasonable letters; both were conservative politically; and, more than anything else, both were basically decent men sharing a powerful sense of public duty. Horatio felt a deepening friendship for ‘my dear Coll’, and grieved that the hurricane months had shut him in Grenada, rather than Antigua. ‘What an amiable good man he is!’ he told Captain Locker. ‘All the rest are geese!’17
If Nelson had few good words for his colleagues, he had even fewer for the islanders themselves. ‘I detest this country,’ he wrote; English Harbour was an ‘infernal hole’, and the island a ‘vile place’. Its people, he came to believe, were disaffected and selfish, and in blacker moments he thought them ‘trash’. Perhaps he was thinking about the plantation managers who cheated their absentee landlords, drank the newly fashionable claret and dallied with mulatto mistresses, discarding any inconvenient offspring. This was far from a measured opinion, however. A midshipman who arrived at English Harbour a couple of years later told a very different story. The island ‘society’ was ‘excellent’, he recalled, ‘particularly’ in Antigua, where ‘I . . . experienced all that hospitality could give. They were men of education, and had seen a good deal of life.’ At about the same time another observer thought the British women possessed ‘refined sense’ and made ‘good wives, excellent parents, worthy friends, free from affectation, and blessed [with] every amiable quality’.18
Sometimes Nelson rode the twelve miles to St John’s, on the north coast, where balls and dances occasionally enlivened the impressive stone-built courthouse, whist, cribbage and all-fours were played at Smith’s tavern, and ladies protected their complexions by walking masked along the streets. At English Harbour he rarely dined ashore, but received a few invitations, some to the home of Samuel Eliot, both of whose eligible daughters were being pursued by naval officers. But there was one house to which he found himself returning with an increasing frequency, and where his troubles, real or imaginary, diminished. It was Windsor, high up on the hill above the dockyard, where breezes kept the heat at bay. There lived John Moutray, the elderly naval commissioner of Barbados and the Leeward Islands, and his fascinating young wife.
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They were hospitable from the first. When the Boreas was being repainted in the latter half of October Nelson even stayed a week there. As he informed Cornwallis, Windsor was always ‘open to me, with a bedchamber, during my broil at this place’. A road skirting the harbour linked Windsor to the dockyard, but Nelson used a boat to cross the narrows between the two.19
John Moutray was the seventh laird of Roxobie, Fifeshire, and was sixty-two. He had become a lieutenant in 1744, commander of the Thetis thirteen years later, and post-captain of a forty-gun hospital ship three months after Nelson was born. His career had not only been long, it had also been undistinguished. Periods of unemployment punctuated his service record, and though the American war had provided a succession of commands – including the Warwick, Britannia and Ramilles – he had blighted his prospects taking a convoy to Madeira in August 1780. There had been a Franco-Spanish attack, and though Moutray saved his warships he lost all but ten or eleven of the sixty-six or so merchantmen under his care. Moutray was lucky to have survived the ensuing clamour. Still, he got his career back on track, took the Vengeance to relieve Gibraltar in 1782 and made a voyage to Ireland.
Moutray shared Nelson’s distaste for his present posting. Indeed, he had asked the Admiralty to excuse him tropical appointments. His health, he said, had been ruined by scurvy, gout, and ‘a bilious complaint’ picked up in the West Indies, and any ‘return’ to a ‘warm climate’ was ‘hazardous’. Unfortunately, someone at the Admiralty had a wicked sense of humour. The captain was retired from active service, given a civil appointment with the Navy Board in July 1783 and shipped out to supervise the sleepy dockyard in Antigua.20
Moutray’s misfortunes may have made Nelson better able to bear his own, though the commissioner was compensated with an annual salary of £500. It was the wife, rather than the husband, who attracted Nelson to Windsor, however. Mary Moutray was thirty-three or thirty-four years old and hailed from the Scottish Border. Only months before meeting Nelson she had lost her father, Thomas Pemble, a naval officer of some education. Pemble had entered the service as surgeon’s servant of the Lowestoffe, and taken seven years to pass for lieutenant in February 1744. He joined the Tryal sloop, but spent Christmas Eve of 1745 marrying eighteen-year-old Catherine Selby at Belford in Northumberland. Two daughters, Catherine and Mary, grew to maturity. In June 1765 Pemble became commander of the Hazard sloop, but there his active career ended and he was never promoted post-captain. Two years before Horatio first puffed up the hill above English Harbour, Commander Pemble had asked to be transferred from Whitehaven to a vacancy in the Newcastle impress service, nearer his roots. Perhaps he sensed his life was closing. The switch was made, but Pemble died on 17 May 1784, and his wife, though only fifty-seven or so, also died within the year.21
Doubtless because of their father, both the Pemble girls married naval officers. Catherine took a relative, Lieutenant Gerard Selby, and was widowed in 1779. On 2 September 1771, when Mary was about twenty-one, she stood before members of her family in Berwick-on-Tweed to marry John Moutray, a man nearly thirty years her senior. They moved to London, where the intelligent and immensely personable young woman mixed easily in genteel society. Relatives of the Marquess of Lothian and the Duke of Richmond would one day speak for her, and in 1773 Admiral Hood acted as godfather to her son James. To the end of her life Mary attracted. The novelist Maria Edgeworth, who lived close by during Mary’s later years in Ireland, was impressed by her positive attitude and ‘usual amiable temper and good sense’, and so charmed by her wit and spontaneity that she described her as ‘our Irish Madame de Sévigné’. Looking at her in 1784, Nelson beheld the mother of engaging eleven-year-old twins, James and Kate, and a woman of considerable personality and beauty. Mrs Moutray was slender, with a high, open forehead, straight nose, delicate face and light hair and eyes. Before long she had captivated both Collingwood and Nelson, the one a fellow Northumbrian two or three years her senior and the other seven or eight years her junior.22
Collingwood weakened first, for it was he who had brought out the Moutrays with their servants and baggage in the Mediator the previous year. In the course of the long passage between Portsmouth and Antigua, Mary had penetrated the captain’s natural northern reserve and dissipated his annoyance at the inconvenience of carrying passengers. Thereafter, especially in May 1784 when the Mediator was being overhauled in English Harbour, Collingwood became what Mary called ‘a beloved brother in our house’ and enjoyed rare moments of domesticity. He would correspond with Mary until his death, remembering how she had allowed him ‘to frizzle your head for a ball dress at Antigua’.23
The Nelsons too, Horatio and William, soon attended her, though she must have marvelled at the contrasts between the thin and taciturn naval officer and his garrulous, robust and grasping brother. Mary chided the parson about his friendship for an heiress he knew, Dorothea Scrivener, and soothed the distraught Horatio. As early as 24 September she had the captain writing that ‘was it not for Mrs Moutray, who is very very good to me, I should almost hang myself at this infer
nal hole’. Later he movingly spoke of the times he had shared with ‘a treasure of a woman’ on the hill, where the close leaves and profuse branches of a beloved tamarind tree had screened them from the burning sun as they surveyed the magnificent blue harbour below. It was a place, he said, ‘where I spent more happy days than in any one spot in the world.’24
Nelson was probably motivated by psychological dependency more than lust. Throughout his life he needed attention, and to feel valued and important. He resented indifference or neglect, but soared mightily upon recognition and praise, a drive that influenced both his professional and private relations. It drove him to become a public hero, made him susceptible to the grossest flatteries and deepened his vulnerability to women. Their interest and attentions, however innocent, encouraged his sense of self-importance, and assuaged his insecurities. At any time he would have been vulnerable to Mary, but at this time, in friendless Antigua, his isolation made her devastating. Mary became a lifeline. Where several others learned to avoid him, burned by his fiery interpretation of duty, she liked him, talked to him about his life and opinions, and proved that he mattered. In an ocean of indifference and some hostility she was an island of consideration, and he was drawn irresistibly back to her.
Commissioner Moutray was by no means ignorant of the goingson between his wife and the two naval officers, and like many an elderly man thus placed sensed his own insecurity. Compared with Collingwood and Nelson, Moutray lacked talent, prospect and youth. He must have understood the attractions they possessed for someone of his wife’s age, attractions that he had lost long before. After all, all three belonged to the same generation and he could have been their father. But whatever flirting that went on remained within bounds, and Commissioner Moutray seems to have kept his suspicions to himself.
Perhaps the most attractive story of the strange situation at Windsor tells how Collingwood and Nelson painted each other’s portraits under Mary’s approving eye. Nelson was suffering from one his fevers and had lost much of his hair. Turning to the less than expert services of the local perruquier, he secured an ill-fitting wig that occasioned much merriment among associates. ‘I must draw you, Nelson – in that wig!’ Collingwood declared one day, and with evident heavy-handedness eventually produced a miniature profile. It was a primitive composition, but at least preserved some of its subject’s obvious physical characteristics. Surveying the unflattering result with good-humoured dissatisfaction, Nelson replied, ‘And now, Collingwood, in revenge I will draw you in that queue of yours!’ Taking watercolours and a small piece of paper the captain of the Boreas proved himself a rather more proficient amateur, and supplied a pleasing monochrome portrait – his only known sortie into art, but one that suggested undeveloped skills. Mary kept both pictures, but at the end of her life searched for a safe haven and gave them to Sarah Collingwood, the admiral’s daughter. These remarkable mementos of English Harbour may still be seen in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich.25
When the hurricane season of 1784 was finally spent the ships prepared for sea. Sir Richard planned to take the squadron to Barbados, where bread might be had, and then to direct the captains to their different stations. Before leaving Antigua he hosted a ‘grand dinner’ on the last day of October, though Nelson thought it a great nuisance. The Moutrays made it bearable, but Nelson’s hunger for activity probably raised his spirits when he sailed with the squadron the following day.26
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Out at sea Hughes exercised his ships in ‘different manoeuvres and evolutions’ before reaching Barbados on 6 November and reuniting with the Mediator and Rattler. The admiral lodged at Constitution Hill, and amidst preparations for a personal inspection of his station issued orders for the men-of-war under his command. Nelson was to patrol the northern islands with Wilfred Collingwood’s Rattler, and to call at the island of St John in the Virgins to see whether it offered wood, water and shelter.27
While the Boreas was being fitted out an altercation between two of Nelson’s young officers resulted in a pistol ball cutting through the stomach of George Andrews and lodging in his back. Nelson was distressed by the tragic dispute between two of his ‘children’. Andrews had joined the ship late, arriving from England in the Unicorn in July, but he had been making good progress. Perhaps he created tensions among youths who had already bonded or formed some kind of pecking order. Whatever the case, without telling any superiors four of them went ashore and Andrews and Thomas Stansbury exchanged shots. Close to death, Andrews was confined to a hospital bed in Barbados while Stansbury and his second, William Oliver, were confined in the Boreas, dismally reflecting on how their own lives now also hung by a thread. Fortunately Andrews returned to duty in April, and Stansbury and Oliver were transferred to other ships to preserve harmony.28
It was while he was in Barbados that Nelson also first turned his mind to one of the most vexing questions of the day, the navigation laws. They had been the props of the mercantilist system since the seventeenth century, and endeavoured to create economic self-sufficiency within the empire by regulating trade between Britain and its overseas dependencies and shutting out rivals. Foreign trade was excluded from the colonies, and the empire bound into an interdependent network, with each territory producing only specifically enumerated goods to be purchased by the others. In that way competition could be reduced and markets ensured. Moreover, the navigation laws recognised the mutual dependence of trade and naval power. The navy protected Britain, her colonies and their trade, but equally relied upon that trade for the prosperity to maintain itself. The navigation laws went further, decreeing that all trade commodities be carried in ships built in Britain or her dependencies (in ‘British bottoms’ rather than ‘foreign bottoms’), and predominantly manned by their citizens. Thus the acts encouraged two of the crucial foundations of naval power, a thriving shipbuilding industry and the maintenance of a pool of experienced seamen. Given the fundamental way in which the acts linked trade and the wellbeing of the navy, it was perhaps natural that patriotic sea officers would be fiercely protective of them.
Acts of 1660 and 1696 enjoined naval officers to enforce the navigation acts, but the job was difficult and the American War of Independence introduced a new problem. Before the war the American colonies had enjoyed a profitable trade with the British West Indian islands, a legal trade protected by the navigation laws. The islands particularly relied upon the mainland colonies for inexpensive lumber and food, and in their turn supplied sugar and rum. But the rebellion threatened to end that traffic, for it made the Americans foreigners and liable to exclusion. In London the matter became clear. The navigation laws now excluded American merchants from the British islands, which now needed to turn for their timber and grain to the developing colonies of Nova Scotia and the Canadas. It was the duty of the navy to expel or seize any American vessels engaging in contraband trade.
But the West Indian communities saw it differently. Recovering from the disruption and expense of the American war, and plagued by a succession of appalling harvests, they were only interested in restoring prosperity. The essential goods supplied by the Americans were not readily available elsewhere, since the Canadian colonies, even fortified by an influx of American Loyalists, were sparsely populated and economically underdeveloped. Moreover, the established bonds between former trade partners could not be easily broken. Not all of the American traders who continued to fraternise with the British West Indian islands after the war were the out-and-out ‘rebels’ described by Nelson and his associates. Some, whose livelihoods depended upon maintaining commercial links with the British possessions, had sympathised with the crown during the revolution, or at least broken away with less than wholehearted enthusiasm. When the war ended they wanted to resume a relationship of patently mutual benefit. Some resented the way politics had intruded upon, and threatened, their economic security and peace.
The British government was not entirely unaware of these sentiments or the difficulties of a strict enforcem
ent of the navigation laws. In 1784 a commission considered restoring relationships between the former American colonies and the islands, but the hard line was reaffirmed. That intransigence did nothing to endear the mandarins of Whitehall to the islanders. In fact, it stimulated disaffection, and in 1789 the Jamaican assembly denied that Parliament was ‘competent to destroy’ or ‘partially to mutilate private properties’. Ultimately, it also failed. Jamaica unilaterally authorised a free trade with the United States, and in 1787 Britain had to declare Jamaica, Dominica, Grenada and New Providence to be free ports open to necessities from Spanish vessels, although even then there was no relaxation of the laws in respect to American commerce.29
Nelson and the Collingwoods saw few complications. Wise leaders understand that those who would rule effectively need to protect the interests of the governed in order to gain their consent, and are aware of the considerations and compromises that are needed to secure loyalty and affection. But junior naval officers were not required to be statesmen; theirs was simply to obey political masters. Nelson imposed the navigation laws without distinction, as if a square peg could always be sledge-hammered into a round hole, and without understanding. As far as he and the Collingwoods were concerned, any trade with the Americans was treasonable and beyond contempt. The Americans were rebels, guilty of an ungrateful uprising against the British crown, and had disqualified themselves from the benefits of the intercolonial trade. In fact, lacking abler direction, Nelson and the Collingwoods exhibited the same dogmatism, inflexibility and aggression that had contributed to their country’s loss of the American colonies, and their language often reflected the strength of their ill-considered opinions. When Wilfred Collingwood of the Rattler came upon an American ship at the British island of St Kitts in the spring of 1784 he reportedly called the master ‘a damned Yankee rascal’, and swore, ‘by God, you shall not lie in this bay!’30