by John Sugden
CAPTAIN OF THE AGAMEMNON
When Peace disturb’d recalls him to his post
He issues forth, like Mars, himself an host,
Undaunted braves the peril of the seas,
Preferring Glory to his private ease.
S.H., Of the Late Lord Nelson, 1805
1
NO one knew how long the war would last, but as one power after another entered the lists against France there were reasons for believing they would make short work of it. Pitt himself was complacent. He did not want to involve Britain in the Austro-Prussian campaign to restore the French monarchy, and contented himself with limited war aims. His country’s security was paramount, so a few battalions of soldiers were sent to Holland to clear the French from the Austrian Netherlands. Beyond that the fighting in Europe could be left to the allies, fortified by British subsidies, while the country searched overseas for juicy French colonies to purloin. Little was prepared. The army was under strength and poorly led, and a year of conflict had to pass before the home secretary, Henry Dundas, was turned into a war minister.
The navy at least was in respectable shape, and as the mainstay of the realm was fully mobilised. Ships were put into commission, and the dockyards buzzed with noise and industry. The streets of Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth were choked with cartloads of provisions, horny-handed artificers and excited seamen. Across the country sea chests were packed and tearful farewells made as officers and men returned to service. Some were bound for the Caribbean with Rear Admiral Alan Gardner, more for the Mediterranean under Lord Hood, and others would man the crucial Channel fleet with ‘Black Dick’ Howe. There were too few seamen. Bounties never attracted enough volunteers, and incoming merchantmen had to be embargoed and stripped of suitable hands, while the impress service worked at full stretch. On 10 February 1793 a warrant authorising Captain Horatio Nelson of His Majesty’s ship Agamemnon to press seamen into service was signed at the Admiralty.1
The Agamemnon was special to Nelson, the most favoured of all his ships. Because she brought long, barren years to an end and took him through many and distinguished services, he identified with her. So did her men, who proudly called themselves Agamemnons for the rest of their lives.
As a sixty-four-gunner, armed with a dozen nine-pounders and fifty-two eighteen- and twenty-four-pounders, the Agamemnon was actually one of the weakest ships of the line. In fact sixty-fours were gradually being dropped from the line of battle altogether. Yet though she pitched against head seas and her helm responded indifferently, the ship handled easily and could make ten knots before the wind. Captain Nelson found her at Prince’s Bridge, Chatham, on 7 February and formally took command in the presence of his first lieutenant and master. He thought she was magnificent. Launched at Buckler’s Hard in Hampshire almost a dozen years earlier, the Agamemnon was built of solid English oak, and measured one hundred and sixty feet in length by forty-four and a half in breadth. Her figurehead depicted the King of Mycenae for whom she had been named, and gazed grimly ahead, armoured, helmeted and brandishing a sword.2
Manning her was Nelson’s first objective. For the first time Horatio had to raise a crew from scratch. He distributed posters, directed recruiting officers to forward men to ports between Newcastle and Great Yarmouth, and circulated friends in East Anglia. Many locals answered the call, including Joseph Levrington, John Chadd, J. G. Anniss and Christopher Cook from Wells and the Burnhams, and eventually almost a quarter of the ship’s company hailed from Norfolk and Suffolk. Other men were recruited in Kent and Essex while the Agamemnon was at Chatham, and Nelson was fortunate that the trusty Captain Locker commanded a ship in the Thames, the Sandwich. Locker used it to house London recruits for the Agamemnon, and even helped prepare Nelson’s ship for sea during her captain’s absences. Every month saw a steady increase in the ship’s company. With late entrants picked up at Spithead, she eventually came to within about sixty men of her official complement of five hundred before she was ready to sail in May. The majority appear to have been volunteers, in receipt of the king’s bounty, though numbers of pressed men were also aboard.
Nelson was now a credible patron, and the gentry wanted positions as trainee officers for their sons. The class of the Agamemnon included relatives of Nelson and protégés of Norfolk notables. Maurice William Suckling, who had been to the East Indies since quitting the Boreas, was rated master’s mate, while the captain’s servants included Nelson’s thirteen-year-old stepson, Josiah, urged to sea by Fanny, and sixteen-year-old William Bolton, a son of the Reverend William Bolton of Hollesley in Suffolk, brother of Thomas. The Walpoles proffered a twenty-one-year-old volunteer, Midshipman Samuel Gamble from King’s Lynn, while Coke of Holkham rewarded two friends by getting places for their boys. Both sons of Norfolk parsons, they made the finest material. John Weatherhead was about twenty and the son of Thomas Weatherhead of Sedgeford, while thirteen-year-old William Hoste was the son of Dixon Hoste of Tittleshall.3
So many eligible young men competed for places among the petty officers that Suckling, Gamble and Weatherhead had to be rated able seamen until they could be raised to midshipmen. Another aspirant, Thomas Bourdon Fellows, possibly a relation of the ship’s purser, was twenty-two years old and claimed to have served on seven ships in the past thirteen years, but also had to enter as able seaman before he could be more suitably rated master’s mate. Less experienced protégés took refuge among the score of captain’s servants to which Nelson was entitled. Bolton, Nisbet and Hoste began as captain’s servants, but elbowroom remained, and Nelson filled his allocation with charity boys from the Marine Society. At least twenty joined him on 19 and 20 February, aged between thirteen and nineteen years, many of them undersized for their age but each thoroughly scrubbed and equipped with a sea outfit.4
Good officers were needed to train the recruits into an efficient team and Nelson turned to tried and tested followers from his past. Martin Hinton, formerly of the Albermarle and known to be ‘a good sailor’, became first lieutenant, and Joseph Bullen of the Hinchinbroke his second. Since his previous spell under Nelson, Bullen had returned to his old patron, Captain Cornwallis, and commanded half a gun deck on the Prince George during the battle of the Saintes, but the Agamemnon rescued him from half-pay. Nelson got George Andrews of the Boreas for his third lieutenant, though the fourth and fifth commissions went to Wenman Allison and Thomas Edmonds, men he knew but with whom he had never worked. Allison had gone to sea as a captain’s servant on the Suffolk in May 1778, a protégé of Captain Adam Duncan, the future hero of Camperdown. Duncan had just been promoted vice admiral of the blue squadron in 1793, and either he, or Captain John Vashon, another of Allison’s patrons, may have pressed Nelson to take the young man. Allison came to the Agamemnon from half-pay, but there was no reason to expect a novice because he had been a lieutenant for three years. Nelson’s new master was John Wilson, possibly the same man who had served him on the old Badger. 5
Further down other familiar faces came to rejoin their old commander. They included Frank Lepee, now rated coxswain; Richard Pryke, a thirty-five-year-old Colchester man rated master’s mate; and the boatswain and sailmaker of the Boreas, Joseph King. King had spent twenty-one of his thirty-five years in the service, and with the help of the Duke of Clarence got a special discharge from the Valiant to return to his old captain. When the existing boatswain, Alexander Moffat, fell ill in Gibraltar later that year, Nelson was able to restore King to his old office.6
After the spiritless years ashore everything Nelson saw magnified his excitement. The Agamemnon was ‘the finest 64 in the service’ and a ‘remarkably’ good sailer, and her officers appeared to know their duties. He spoke with most of them, including the purser Thomas Fellows. Pursers had a bad name on warships. They made up their salaries by conserving the stores entrusted to them, for which they had paid a bond in advance, and were notorious for their stringency in meeting the men’s needs. Nelson assured Fellows that supplies would be used carefully,
but he would not ‘suffer any poor fellow to be lessened of his due’.7
In March Nelson learned that he was to sail to the Mediterranean with his old patron, Lord Hood, but first he must hurry to Spithead for a preliminary cruise in the Channel. He hopped happily between London and Chatham, setting interminable arrangements in train. Charts, teacups, wineglasses, shirts, towels and a fine new quadrant made by Richard Hornby made their way to his cabin at the rear of the quarterdeck. Nelson spent £50 on as many dozen bottles of port, sherry and claret, a third of them for consumption in the officers’ wardroom, and purchased bread, butter, beef, pork, mutton, tea, coffee and rum for his table. In Spain he would top up with ninety-six chickens and twelve turkeys. Various delicacies, along with personal belongings from the parsonage, were shipped through Wells by his father, taking months to dribble in for sorting. The hams and bacon had chafed while rocking in a wagon and Nelson’s bureau arrived without its key. Nevertheless, he contrived a degree of comfort in his new quarters, with a cheery coal-fired brazier to drive away the cold and damp.8
The Agamemnon slowly readied for sea. Hoys bumped alongside with iron and shingle to furnish ballast for the hold. Sacks of bread, flour, raisins and biscuit were hauled aboard, along with casks of beef, pork, peas, oatmeal, sugar, cheese, butter, water, beer, wine and spirits. The masts, yards and rigging were set up, and men scrubbed the timbers and applied fresh paint. Nor were the educational and spiritual needs of the company ignored. In March Nelson’s appeal to the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge produced 150 psalters and 125 copies of The Christian Soldier, or The Seaman’s Monitor. It took Nelson longer to get a satisfactory schoolmaster for the boys, for twenty-four-year-old Thomas Withers of the Victory did not join him until May. Withers, it transpired, was one of the most remarkable men on board. The son of a yeoman of North Walsham, where Nelson had gone to school, he was trusting and transparent but intelligent. The nephew of a naval purser, Withers had been a nautical scholar of Christ’s Hospital and a merchant seaman in the Indian Ocean. Nelson was so impressed that he re-rated him midshipman within five months and was repaid by unflinchingly loyal service.9
March brought Fanny and Josiah to London, where they lodged with the Sucklings in Kentish Town. The new year had brought much joy to Horatio, but not to his wife. Her uncle John Richardson Herbert had died in Nevis on 18 January, increasing her isolation on a wintry, wet island far from the place of her birth, and his will, upon which the Nelsons had placed hopes, was a disappointment. Herbert’s property was entailed on his daughter, Martha Hamilton, with the right of reversion upon her death to Fanny’s cousin, the younger Magnus Morton. The £20,000 once promised Fanny had shrunk to £4,000, and that could be withheld for up to six years on the payment of 5 per cent interest. Josiah would receive a further £500 on his twenty-first birthday, and in the meantime receive the interest for his maintenance and education. The annual yield from the whole package barely made up for the loss of the one or two hundred pounds the couple had previously been receiving from their uncles’ annuities.10
The Nelsons had expected Herbert’s will to secure their immediate future and erase the humiliating spectre of a propertyless gentleman and his lady utterly incapable of returning the hospitality of the likes of Coke, Walpole and Martin. It had done neither, and one can only assume that Fanny sold a £100 investment in 3 per cent consols for £76 because of their shortage of ready cash. If the war was going to be merely the brief spat many predicted, Horatio could anticipate more needy years on half-pay. Only the possibility of quick prize money suggested a long-term solution.11
Fanny worried more about bidding farewell to her husband and son, and confronting a lonely, quiet and cold existence in Norfolk than anything else. On 4 April Nelson took Josiah on board the Agamemnon at Sheerness, where she had a new berth. The boy had missed the guns being hoisted aboard, but he was in time to see the powder hoy come alongside and the most dangerous part of the ship’s cargo being loaded. Josiah’s ‘high glee’ at getting under sail would soon disintegrate into seasickness when the ship weighed anchor for the Great Nore, but his stepfather was in good spirits after the brief trip down the Medway. ‘We appear to sail very fast,’ he marvelled. ‘We went, coming out, nearly as fast without any sail as the Robust [of seventy-four guns] did under her topsails.’ Recruits were coming in handsomely and officers and men were forming a productive partnership, ‘the greatest comfort a captain can have’.12
Fanny wanted to see her husband before sailing. Their own partnership had not been blessed with children, and she was sterile, but her husband had been affectionate and kind and she loved him deeply. She always would. Nelson supposed the Agamemnon would stop for a while at Portsmouth, and Fanny arranged to stay with the Matchams, who had just taken Shepherd Spring, a house at Ringwood, Hampshire, not far from Portsmouth. Horatio’s letters to her were dutiful, but lacked the impassioned urgency of those he would later write to Lady Hamilton, and his sentiments expressed almost indifference as to whether he saw Fanny or not. Rather, he was absorbed by his command. He talked about escaping to Ringwood if he could, or of Fanny renewing her acquaintanceship with the Palmers at the George inn at Portsmouth. On 28 April, Nelson brought a convoy to Spithead, just outside the town. ‘If you and my sister [Kitty] wish to come [to Portsmouth], [I] shall be glad to see you,’ he wrote to Fanny, ‘but do as you like.’13
Two days later the Agamemnon sailed on a short prize hunt. With the swell beneath his feet and the old enemy before him Nelson was alive again. The second day out he found four French merchantmen in La Hague roads, and at seven in the evening almost ran them ‘on shore’ beneath two forts that guarded a harbour near Pointe de Barfleur. Shallows and threatening rocks on one side of the anchorage deterred him from pressing the attack, and after counting four small warships in Cherbourg he reluctantly returned to Spithead on the fifth. During the cruise he had shared his cabin with his brother Maurice, who had been trapped aboard by the bad weather while visiting at Spithead, and apparently also young, wide-eyed William Hoste. While Josiah was conquering his seasickness, Hoste – watched protectively by Weatherhead, the older of the two – felt ‘very well and very comfortable’ and found Nelson the perfect hero. ‘I like my situation very much,’ he told his father in one of his entertaining letters. ‘Captain Nelson treats me as he said he would, and as a proof I have lived with him ever since I have been on board.’14
In May the Agamemnon was ready for her voyage to the Mediterranean, and there were final moments ashore and partings to manage. Suckling passed his examination for lieutenant, while Hoste spent an interesting day about the quayside at Spithead with Weatherhead and his brother, the latter attached to the Edgar. They watched some treasure being unloaded and carted to Portsmouth, accompanied by a band and a regiment of horse.15
After surviving rather more perils, including the overturning of her coach, Fanny reached Ringwood. It was apparently on the ‘fine’ morning of 10 May that she bade farewell to her husband at Portsmouth. Neither of them expected the separation to be a long one, but they would not meet again for four years; when he returned to her he would be rich in honour but ruined in body and spirit, a half-sighted, one-armed creature with a stomach hernia. Fanny never really understood the fires burning within her husband, but she knew every bit as much about duty as he, and steadfastly took his place as the supporter and comforter of his old father.16
Her letters, whether written from Ringwood, Hilborough or new lodgings at Swaffham, did not always reach him in the Mediterranean, and sometimes he missed her. Horatio wrote a few times most months, and even managed the occasional sentimentality. ‘How I long to have a letter from you’ was the message of 4 August. ‘Next to being with you, it is the greatest pleasure I can receive. I shall rejoice to be with you again. Indeed, I look back as to the happiest period of my life the being united to such a good woman, and as I cannot show here my affection to you, I do it doubly to Josiah, who deserves it as well on his own acco
unt as on yours, for he is a real good boy, and most affectionately loves me. He tells me he intends to write you all the news.’17
2
On 11 May the Agamemnon sailed from St Helen’s as part of a division commanded by Vice Admiral William Hotham from the Britannia. Three seventy-fours – the Colossus (Captain Charles Pole), the Courageux (Captain William Waldegrave) and the Fortitude (Captain William Young) – and two frigates (one of them the old Lowestoffe) made up the rest of the squadron, but Nelson felt that it was wasted cruising west of Guernsey where no enemies were to be found. ‘Indeed,’ he complained, ‘I believe we are sent out for no other purpose than to amuse the people of England by having a fleet to sea.’ They remained doing ‘worse than nothing’ until Lord Hood joined them off the Lizard on 25 May.18
For two weeks the combined squadrons stood off the Scillies in fog, rain and cold trying what remained of Nelson’s patience. ‘What the fleet is doing here, I can’t guess,’ he grumbled from his place in the rear of the force, ‘not having seen a single Frenchman.’ Regular ‘naval evolutions’ barely relieved the frustration, but on the 7th they fell in with a large convoy of British merchantmen plodding home from the West Indies. This, Nelson thankfully concluded, must have been the reason for Admiral Hood’s interest in such a ‘very barren’ spot, and he looked forward to greater activity. Sure enough, once the merchantmen had passed, the fleet sailed for Gibraltar, eleven ships of the line and attendant frigates bowling elegantly into the Atlantic.19
Nelson’s thirst for action remained unquenched, though Pole captured ‘a poor miserable National brig’, but at least the captain of the Agamemnon renewed his friendship with Lord Hood. It was the first time they had met since Hood had crushed Nelson’s hopes for employment three years before, but now the tension was brushed aside. The admiral was ‘very civil’, Fanny learned, and ‘I dare say we shall be good friends again’.20
