by John Sugden
Nevertheless, public opinion still ran against Nelson. ‘The admiral was in Nevis roads the whole time of my persecution,’ Nelson later reported, but neither he nor crown lawyers were able to protect him from insults. When the case went to court on 8 June the judge gave Nelson protection so that he could attend. The merchants had promised to indemnify the local marshal for any losses he suffered in arresting Nelson as he came ashore, but the judge threatened the marshal with imprisonment if he interfered and the captain was able to enter the courtroom unmolested.29
Supported by ‘an honest lawyer’ Nelson won a second victory at Nevis. After a two-day battle all four ships were condemned. Though the masters’ suit for personal damages remained, his conduct with regard to the seizure of ships had been vindicated.30
First St Kitts and now Nevis. Nelson’s successes raised the morale of his brother officers. The rejuvenated Hughes was still in the offing as the Nevis court deliberated, while both the Mediator and the Rattler, commanded by the indefatigable Collingwoods, had arrived to give support.
It was the Collingwoods who took the same battle to Antigua, which immediately followed suit. Early in July Cuthbert Collingwood sent three ships into St John’s, where the collector of customs quickly declared them contraband traders. Two at least had illegal registers. In October another foreign ship was sent into St John’s by the Rattler. 31
From so bleak a beginning, the campaign had gone from success to success, and the relationship between Nelson and his commander-in-chief began to thaw. On 19 June Hughes was able to give the Boreas an assignment to her captain’s liking. A French frigate, L’Iris of thirty-two guns, appeared off Nevis, cruising close enough to draw warning shots from the forts before putting out to sea. France and England were now at peace, but acutely suspicious of one another nonetheless. Hughes asked Nelson to investigate, and the next day he tracked the French frigate to St Eustatius. The governor hosted a dinner ashore, shared by Nelson and the French captain, and Horatio courteously offered to escort L’Iris around the British islands if it was so desired. As he anticipated, the French had no wish to attract such close attention, and protested their ship was bound for Martinique.32
As for Nelson, he was again destined to spend the hurricane season in English Harbour, but this time without the compensation of Mrs Moutray’s company. He arrived on 10 August in a lighter mood than might have been expected. His successes, and those of Collingwood, had fused with Lord Sydney’s voluble support to create a more cooperative environment in Antigua. The officials, at least, were falling over themselves to prove their loyalty to the crown, now that they knew it wholeheartedly supported the enforcement of the navigation laws. Hughes was beginning to portray his deviant captains as heroes, and the doors of Shirley and other public officials graciously opened. Nelson felt a new spirit abroad and cooperated accordingly. In July he had sent a brigantine into Nevis, forwarding her papers to the local customs officers with his observation that he suspected the register to be false. The officials examined the documents and exonerated the ship, and Nelson happily allowed her to proceed.33
There was still far to go, however, as the unfortunate elder Collingwood was even then discovering. While Antigua, Nevis and St Kitts – all in the Leeward Islands within the remit of Shirley’s authority – had been brought into line, the Windward Islands were another matter. Collingwood induced the authorities in Grenada to seize the Speedwell in October, and before the end of the year had sent three more ships for trial there, but the outcomes were as yet unclear. But the hardest nut to crack was undoubtedly Barbados, where the people were blaming the shutting out of American ships for the high cost of grain and the miseries of the poor, especially the blacks. A petition seeking the admission of American maize during times when harvests failed was afoot, and Governor David Parry was unwilling to exert himself against powerful island cliques. Nothing exemplified the growing conflict between the navy and the Barbadian court than the case of the Dolphin. 34
Collingwood seized the ship in July, soon after Nelson’s victory in Nevis, and innocently sent her into Barbados for adjudication. To proceed with the case the king’s advocate in Barbados, Attorney General Charles Brandford, demanded extraordinary advance fees from Collingwood, and when it finally got to court in October it was thrown out. Despite the decisions in the other courts, Judge Nathaniel Weeks ruled against the navy’s right to seize, and the Dolphin was not only released but also given a new register. It was a terrific blow to Cuthbert Collingwood. He was now personally liable for fees, expenses and court costs, and had to tout around to raise a bond to cover them pending an appeal.
The navy was furious. Even Hughes, a traditional English gentleman, pronounced the decision ‘shameful’ and the judge ‘a good-for-nothing dirty fellow’. He urged the Admiralty to support Collingwood. Nelson too was appalled, and wrote to Uncle William Suckling, a lifelong employee of the Customs House in London, asking him to secure the opinion of their solicitor.35
Barbados was a shock but failed to check growing optimism. While sheltering in English Harbour Nelson received an exhilarating piece of news. Back in June, when a lawsuit for personal damages had been filed against Nelson in Nevis, the crown lawyers had suggested he petition the king for assistance through Lord Sydney, the home secretary. As the suit remained, even after the condemnation of the ships in question, Nelson had done so, and on 4 August Sydney replied. ‘His Majesty has been pleased to direct that the Law Officers of the Crown should defend the suit upon this occasion,’ Nelson eventually read. If his defence still failed, Sydney indicated that an appeal against the judgement would be favourably considered. The same day the home secretary fired off a brief letter to Governor Shirley. Nelson’s reports had been received by government, and ‘from the character’ he bore there was no reason to doubt their accuracy; consequently, the law officers of the crown should defend him at public expense. There could no longer be any doubt that Nelson enjoyed the government’s full confidence, and that it was the duty of the king’s servants to support him. Equally, there was little likelihood of the suit for personal damages now being pressed against him with any success.36
Captain Nelson, the scourge of the islands, had been vindicated – by some of the courts and now by the king. Notwithstanding the setback in Barbados, the navy hungered to return to its hunt for contraband traders, its predatory instincts fully aroused. ‘My dear boy,’ Nelson wrote to Collingwood, ‘I want some prize money!’ Nor would the Mediator miss out on the excitement, for in October Hughes authorised Collingwood to cruise entirely for the purpose of enforcing the navigation laws.37
The Boreas herself got to sea on 17 October. There was another reason why Nelson was pleased to see the hurricanes blow themselves out. At Nevis he had met an interesting young lady and he longed to return.
5
He steered straight for St Kitts and Nevis, where the ship ran aground on the point and had to be hauled off by her stern. It was the fourth time the Boreas had been ashore since leaving England, so Nelson or the master, Jameson, might have been less than attentive to the business of navigation. However, the damage was repaired and for several months Nelson patrolled the northern islands in search of suspicious merchantmen, occasionally retreating to Antigua or Barbados for supplies and maintenance.38
On 21 October he arrested the Active brig off Nevis. Her colours were British but she was illegally manned and American built. This new seizure, heralding the return of the most feared of the naval captains to these waters, threw the islands into what Nelson termed ‘a violent ferment’. The merchants and their coadjutors had used the respite given them by the hurricane season to arm themselves with a formidable new weapon from London: the opinion of Judge William Scott, later Lord Stowell. An advocate for the Admiralty, Scott was already well into a career as the foremost authority on English prize law.
It says much for the disturbance Nelson had caused that interested islanders had written to England for the advice of Scott. Nevertheless
, they found his views largely satisfactory, for they raised serious doubts about the right of the navy to seize in support of the navigation laws. Scott maintained that acts of 1662 had reserved such powers to customs officers and those authorised by either a warrant from the Treasury or by a special commission from the king under Great or Privy Seal.
If anyone thought that such legal jargon would silence Nelson, they were mistaken. Scott’s interpretation denied the navy the right to intervene and turned them into powerless observers of flagrant illegalities. Horatio pored over his copies of the various acts in his cabin, sometimes beneath a flickering light in the quieter hours after dark, and steadily picked holes in his opponents’ case. As he told his Uncle William to whom he turned for an opinion of his own:
I am clearly of opinion that we [naval officers] do hold our commissions eventually under the Great Seal, for the Admiralty is only a Patent place during pleasure; and that the act seems to think so. Read the next clause, ‘an indemnification for all officers of the customs, or any officer or officers, person or persons authorised to put in execution the act for increasing shipping and navigation, their deputies,’ &c. What occasion could there be to indemnify the officers enjoined to put the navigation act in force if the power had been taken away by the preceding clause? It appears to me that the parliament was afraid it might be wrong construed, [and] therefore included them by name in a subsequent clause. Well done, Lawyer Nelson!39
He was soon framing complicated arguments about the circumstances in which naval officers could or could not seize transgressors, but in November appealed again to Lord Sydney. ‘A doubt is now started (and I may probably be persecuted in this country upon it),’ he explained, ‘that if the Custom House give leave to a foreigner to trade, I have no right to hinder him, but must look on as an idle spectator.’40
Nelson’s points went home and the Active was condemned.
Next came the forty-ton sloop Sally, owned and navigated by Seth Warner of Connecticut and stopped at Nevis on 23 January 1786. Here, Nelson discovered, was outright deception. The original Sally had been an older vessel, registered by Governor Shirley in 1784 after she entered St John’s in an unseaworthy condition. At that time it was sworn that the ship was a former American prize eligible for registration. The owner himself claimed to be a subject of the British island of Dominica, and although no proof supported any of these protestations, the ship got her register permitting her to trade. But then something strange happened. The ship returned to the United States, where a new vessel was built to the specifications of the old and took her name. Being foreign-built, the new vessel had no right to trade with the British islands, but she did so, claiming to be the old Sally and flaunting her register and documentation.
The case incriminated the customs officers in Antigua, especially since Seth Warner excused his deception by claiming that he had actually been persuaded to apply for a British register. Nelson suspected that the officials were registering foreign vessels purely to coin in the registration fees.
In Antigua attempts to clean up the customs had already begun to bite. Even before Nelson got involved, the home secretary had been complaining about registration scandals, and on 2 June 1785 repeated his calls for an investigation, telling Shirley that the business was ‘carried to a pitch’ and culprits had to be named and punished. Spurred on, Shirley was making progress, and revealed that registers were being hawked from one trader to another in the West Indies. He promised that any official involved in fraud would be ‘immediately’ dismissed. Under the inquisitorial glare of government, the courts in Antigua strove to show integrity and efficiency. Captain John Holloway, who dealt with them the next year, was ‘fully persuaded’ that the law officers of Antigua, unlike those on some other islands, were ‘zealously attached to His Majesty’s government’.41
Nelson’s new evidence, therefore, hurt a bureaucracy struggling to clean up its image. In its defence the collector of customs asserted that Seth Warner had originally represented himself to be a Loyalist who wanted to move to Dominica where he had once lived. A clerk in the customs department had claimed to be acquainted with Warner, and supported his story. However, the customs office admitted that after the Sally got her register suspicions had grown and the clerk was dismissed for ‘nefarious practices’, but there was never enough information to prosecute Warner. Notwithstanding this, he was prohibited from trading in Antigua again.42
Nelson refused to be appeased, and forwarded the register to Lord Sydney together with a further diatribe against the frauds of customs officials. He accused them of granting registers to whomsoever they pleased, fattening themselves on registration fees, and of obstructing his efforts to bring interlopers to account. So rife was the corruption that he advised ‘exemplary punishments’, and the recall of all existing ships’ registers for replacement with a new form of certification.
In some respects Nelson derived enormous satisfaction from leading the charge against illicit trade. In these dull times it was a substitute for naval glory, and a means of satiating his need for attention. Even without a war he could be the sword of the people, cutting a swath through corruption and selfishness. ‘I shall stand acquitted before your Lordship and my country of any interested [partisan] views in thus representing these malpractices,’ he informed Sydney with pride, ‘for I have no interest to obtain any place, nor do I ever expect any but what rises from a faithful discharge of my duty.’43
6
Paradoxically, in the drawn-out struggle over the navigation laws the praise Nelson craved so desperately sometimes fell upon those who had been less than enthusiastic about his activities. There were few rewards to be had from this squalid slugging match, but Sir Thomas Shirley and Sir Richard Hughes, the ‘old officers’ once affronted by a young gentleman, were in for their shares.
Sir Thomas was quick to realise that Whitehall was more interested in enforcing the navigation laws and purifying their administration than listening to a parade of their shortcomings. Sydney had supported Collingwood and Nelson, and demanded reform. Under the shadow of the home secretary, Shirley put his quarrel with the captain of the Boreas behind him. Now that the little fellow and his allies were being praised by government, Shirley supported them to the hilt. He assured Sydney that he often met Collingwood and was at one with him, while he would certainly enquire closely into Nelson’s allegations of corruption. What was more, he took credit for their captures, proudly telling the minister on 23 July 1785 that ‘there have been lately several seizures at the different islands under my government!’ Nelson bore no grudges. In August 1786 he even took Shirley’s son William as a protégé aboard his frigate.44
Sir Richard Hughes earned even more from Nelson’s achievements. As commander-in-chief of the station he was due a share of the prize money his wayward captains were earning. He got £97 for the Fairview, taken at Nevis, compared with the £388 distributed between Nelson and his ship’s company. The admiral’s professional credit also rose at home. The Treasury, the senior ministry, was pleased with the seizures and impressed by the information Nelson had forwarded about the Rattler’s early difficulties with the customs at St Kitts. In August 1785 the Treasury informed the Admiralty that whatever a ship’s register said, proof of a vessel being foreign-built or manned by foreigners was sufficient to warrant condemnation, and revenue officers would be made answerable to the enquiries of naval captains; any corrupt officials would be punished. Furthermore, in a passage the Admiralty sent appreciatively to Hughes, the secretary of the Treasury declared that ‘the commander-in-chief of the Leeward Islands and officers under him have shown a very commendable zeal in endeavouring to put a stop to the illicit practices which were carrying on in the islands’.45
In England ministers assumed that Nelson had acted with the support, rather than the indifference, of the commander-in-chief, and Hughes found himself praised on account of a subordinate he had left to the wolves. When he saw the Treasury paragraph Nelson, who had driven the
lauded campaign, felt cheated of credit. ‘The captains Collingwood were the only officers with myself who ever attempted to hinder the illicit trade with America,’ he complained, ‘and I stood singly with respect to seizing, for the other officers were [at first] fearful of being brought into scrapes.’ To Locker he admitted that he felt ‘much hurt that after the loss of health and risk of fortune, another should be thanked for what I did against his orders’.46
Not surprisingly, the praise from Whitehall and shares in prize money completely reconciled Sir Richard Hughes to his estranged second-in-command. He was ‘highly pleased’ with the captain’s conduct, and to Nelson’s astonishment the two became ‘good friends’. When the Boreas put into Barbados, where the admiral occupied rooms, Nelson called for dinner. Horatio always had his doubts about Hughes. The man lacked professional judgement and resolution, as well as a certain social propriety. While his wife, Lady Hughes, and their daughter (now ensnaring Major John Browne of the 67th Regiment into marriage) were residing in Antigua, the admiral was paying rather too obvious attention to a certain Miss Daniels in Barbados. But once the animosity between Hughes and Nelson had melted, the captain discovered his superior a man of much personal charm. His ‘politeness and attention to me is great,’ he wrote in March 1786, grudgingly confessing that he liked Hughes after all. And the next month he was able to report with even greater certainty that, ‘I have been upon the best terms with the admiral, and declare I think could ever remain so . . . He is always remarkably kind and civil to every one.’ It seemed that Nelson’s fortunes, after suffering so many tribulations, were coming full circle.47
