by John Sugden
Twenty-two of the seamen who joined Peirson in that transfer had also, in fact, been soldiers by profession. Some of them were Austrian soldiers from De Vins’s army, captured by the French and liberated by the Blanche, one of the commodore’s frigates. Now they happily served as landmen, the rating given to inexperienced sailors, enriching the Captain with linguistic skills and specialist knowledge of use to a squadron still cooperating with the allied armies of Europe.
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Nelson regarded the commissioned officers of the Agamemnon as the best in the fleet, and ‘much in the habit of doing handsome things’. The admiration was mutual, and all but one lieutenant stayed with him when he went to the Captain in June 1796. The exception was Lieutenant Suckling. A family death had left only ‘the lunatic’ between him and the Suckling estate of Woodton, and he intended to return to England, marry, and claim his inheritance. But the decision to leave the fleet would cost him a part in the battle of Cape St Vincent, for which he later said he almost hanged himself, and an almost certain elevation to the post of commander, and it disrupted his professional progress. He eventually returned to active service and commanded the small Neptune in the North Sea until 1801, but never rose above lieutenant.20
The other lieutenants remained with Nelson – Berry, Spicer, Noble, Summers and Compton, acting out of solid self-interest as well as simple affection and admiration for their commander. For no captain in the fleet fought more tenaciously for the promotion of his officers than Nelson. He had gained the goodwill of several commanders-in-chief, from Hood to Jervis, and successfully traded upon it by seeking rewards for fellow officers. ‘I will not forget Capt. Cockburne [Cockburn], nor any other person you are interested in,’ replied Jervis on one occasion. On another he responded, ‘I have written in such strong terms to the Admiralty in praise of your first, second and third lieutenants that I think . . . one [Berry] at least will be made a captain immediately, and I think Spicer and Noble cannot be long without it.’ Additionally, Nelson’s own enterprise created opportunities for his lieutenants to distinguish themselves, and when they did he praised lavishly, pressing their claims to promotion in dispatches and verbal reports. Ultimately several, including Andrews, received ‘hero promotions’ for conduct in the face of the enemy.21
Nelson’s success in creating promotions had one disadvantage: the high turnover of lieutenants on the Agamemnon. As one officer after another was promoted out of the ship, the captain was constantly searching for new talent to replace the old, and having to begin the process of nurturing and training again. When he was with the fleet, Nelson routinely sat on boards examining prospective lieutenants, and got a view of the upcoming crop, but he was still occasionally obliged to sail short-handed.
But he gained satisfaction from helping good officers and benefiting from the loyalty and effort such favours engendered. Five lieutenants had originally sailed with Nelson to the Mediterranean – Martin Hinton, Joseph Bullen, George Andrews, Wenman Allison and Thomas Edmonds. After his success in Naples, Nelson had persuaded Hood to promote the senior lieutenants to the flagship, Bullen in 1793 and Hinton the following year, and from there both stepped briskly to the rank of commander, the first almost immediately. Neither officer fared particularly well beyond Nelson’s ken, however. Invalided home from Corsica, Bullen made the all-important step to post-captain in 1796 and did good service in the Mediterranean and Ireland, but ultimately had to settle for a command in the Sea Fencibles. Nevertheless, he lived until July 1857, long enough to climb the lists of captains and flag officers by seniority and become a full admiral in 1841. By contrast Hinton never even reached the post-captains’ list and died a commander in the Sea Fencibles in October 1814. 22
Nelson was proud of his achievements for Bullen and Hinton, but made heavier work of nudging the career of Andrews forward, despite the lieutenant’s distinguished services aboard the Agamemnon. There was little help at home. Andrews had lost his early patrons, Hugh Pigot and John Nott, and felt adrift in the service. He had met Hood during the ‘Dutch armament’ of 1789, and used the good offices of both Nelson and Sir Gilbert Elliot to renew the connection in 1794, but even that lever was lost when the admiral sailed to England the same year. Hood’s departure also disempowered Nelson, who had less sway with Admiral Hotham, and he resorted to string-pulling in England. While the Andrews family lobbied Earl Spencer, Nelson tried to find Andrews a position in the Channel fleet, but when its commander, Earl Howe, replied with ‘a jumble of nonsense’, he concluded that the ‘great men’ had ‘neither gratitude nor regard’.23
There was an upside to the delay in Andrews’s progress, however. It had only been with considerable difficulty that the vacancies left by Bullen and Hinton had been filled. Andrews, Allison and Edmonds had moved up to fill the senior positions on the Agamemnon, but juniors proved stubbornly hard to find. After using three temporary stand-ins from the Victory, Nelson had eventually replaced Bullen in October 1793 by the newly commissioned William Lucas, and the following August Hinton’s place was taken by another raw lieutenant, nineteen-year-old Edward Cheetham. The son of a Derbyshire squire and a favourite of Hood, Cheetham had joined the service at eleven and served aboard the admiral’s ship, the Duke. Unfortunately, neither of these replacements remained with Nelson as long as a year. Lucas was transferred to another ship after only five months, while Cheetham was wounded in the battle off Hyères in July 1795 and invalided home. The young man fortunately recovered and his career rebounded; he would be buried an admiral in 1862, having fought in the spectacular victory over Algiers in 1816. 24
Given these problems, Nelson relied upon First Lieutenant Andrews for what stability there was on his quarterdeck between August 1794 and November the following year. Indeed, though Nelson fought for Andrews’s promotion selflessly he anticipated that it would precipitate a crisis on the Agamemnon. For if Andrews left the ship, it would more than create a gap in the commissioned ranks; it would open a path for the next officer in line to become the senior lieutenant, and Nelson doubted that he could work with him. Wenman Allison was a good-hearted young man when sober, but he was descending into alcoholism, and became ‘mad’ when drunk. Worse, he was infecting a junior officer, Lieutenant Suckling, who had come back to his old ship to replace Lucas. Normally ‘a very attentive, good officer’, Suckling became ‘rather troublesome’ under the influence of Allison. Nelson remembered his days on the Seahorse and hated inebriation in officers. He should have disciplined Allison, but was sorry for him, and allowed matters to reach an alarming pass. So bad, in fact, that by May 1795 Nelson had decided that if Andrews left he would rather quit the ship himself than suffer Allison as its second officer. In this mood he wrote an unusually bleak and revealing letter to Fanny:
I am tired of Agamemnon. Allison is so much given to liquor and then behaves so ill that I have enough to do to refrain from bringing him to a court martial. I have ever heartily repented taking him. I ought to have known enough of him before. He only, with one other [Suckling], will be the cause of my leaving the ship . . . I think Andrews will go into the Victory, and sooner than have Allison first lieutenant I would quit the ship and go home by land. However, he does not know my intentions, or anyone else. He will soon be broke [dismissed the service] when left to himself.25
The crisis was solved providentially. Allison went down sick, and a ‘survey’ of his health, conducted at St Fiorenzo on 1 July, pronounced the climate injurious to a recovery. Three days later he was sent home ‘much impaired’. As soon as he reached London the ravaged officer was confined to his bed at 1 King Street in St James’s Square, from where he tried to secure half-pay and leave of absence covering his period of incapacity. But there would be no return to duty. Allison made his way to Bedford, and died there on 17 October 1795, mourned by a surviving sister, Phylis.26
On the Agamemnon, the departure of Lieutenant Allison cleared the shadows from the promotion of the much abler Andrews. To Nelson’s delight Andrews was posted command
er in November, an acknowledgement of his meritorious services, particularly against the Ça Ira. However, he too found the upward ladder a slippery one, and it was not the beginning of the bright career Nelson had wanted. Poor Andrews remained dogged by ill health and bad luck. Too sick to take up his new command, he failed to recuperate in Pisa and was forced to leave, enfeebled, for England at the end of 1795. A year passed and he was still recovering in Bath, but Nelson had attested to his services in writing and got him to post-captain in April 1796. That was the summit of Andrews’s career; beyond lay a long, degrading slide downhill. There was no ship, and the new captain began drinking heavily on half-pay, amid bouts of illness and disability. In 1801 Andrews visited the Admiralty, then headed by Jervis himself, and was offered the choice of commanding a hulk or waiting for a frigate, but he got neither. A few years later he was to be seen in a restless retirement in Tiverton in Devon, using a cane to support a knee crippled with rheumatism, and looking for light duties. Captain Andrews was put in charge of the impress service in Dublin in 1806, but another injury the following year damaged his left leg and sent him home for good. The closing years were sad and final. Penury . . . appeals for outstanding prize money, which agent McArthur charitably paid charge-free . . . a humiliating but unsuccessful petition for relief . . . an early death at the age of forty-three in July 1810 . . . a wife, Anne, in search of a naval pension . . . and an only son dying of consumption at thirty-one. Andrews was yet another light, tended into flame by an unusual commander, only to be extinguished by neglect and misfortune.27
In 1795 the promotion of Andrews was the last of four quarterdeck losses suffered by the Agamemnon that year. In April, Edmonds, another of the original lieutenants, had been discharged sick. Allison and Cheetham had followed in July, and Andrews was promoted in November. But after a stormy passage, Nelson suddenly hit clear water as an exceptionally able set of recruits plugged the gaps. The newcomers were Peter Spicer, James Summers, James Noble, Henry Compton and Edward Berry – the veritable quintet that followed Nelson into the Captain.
Spicer, who replaced Edmonds at St Fiorenzo on 18 April 1795, came particularly well recommended. A native of Saltash in Cornwall, and the son of one of Jervis’s former lieutenants, he had officially joined the navy as an able seaman in March 1777, though in truth he was only eleven years old and a protégé of his captain, John Robinson of the Queen. Despite this early act of patronage and a life at sea – he remained unmarried – Peter moved forward slowly, rising by merit rather than influence. Seven ships later he got his commission in 1794, and served under Nelson’s closest friends and allies. At one time or other he was with Jervis on the Foudroyant, Locker on the Cambridge at Plymouth, Pole on the Colossus, and in Hood’s Victory. Nelson also remembered that Spicer had commanded a gunboat during the Corsican campaign, a perfect training for inshore work.28
James Summers also climbed aboard at St Fiorenzo, but not until the following July. Nelson knew less about Summers, and his commission was only a provisional one, but he came with the blessing of Captain Locker. For many worrying months the Admiralty dithered about confirming the boy’s commission, but Nelson lobbied for him and eventually got it ratified in September 1796.
Perhaps an even happier discovery was the excellent James Noble. This son of an American Loyalist had been forced to flee to England as a boy, and enlisted in the navy in 1788. He had been on board the Bedford when it had taken its historic beating from the Ça Ira and Censeur in the battle off Genoa in 1795. The following October, Noble was transferred to the Agamemnon from Hotham’s Britannia, initially as an acting lieutenant. William Hoste for one recognised Noble and was glad to see him, for it had been he (then a midshipman) who had first shown the Hostes the sights of Portsmouth back in 1793. Soon Hoste was describing Noble as ‘a very good young man’ who had ‘behaved very well to me the short time he was on board’, and Nelson was no less pleased, admiring the new lieutenant’s irrepressible
enthusiasm to be among the first in every service. Noble, we have seen, was captured in 1795 but exchanged, and it was Nelson who paid for his board and lodging in Genoa during the period he waited, beached, for the ship to collect him. Long afterwards Noble remembered many acts of kindness Nelson had done him, and like King the boatswain named one of his children for the commodore. He wrote of his gratitude in a letter, expressing ‘the honour I have been so fortunate as to have had of having served under the immediate command of your lordship, and the obligations I am under to your lordship for the rank I now hold in the service’.29
The next year, in 1796, the Agamemnon added two more solid lieutenants to its complement, Henry Compton, one of Noble’s old shipmates from the Britannia, and Edward Berry, who came from England on the Comet to join Nelson as first lieutenant in May. Compton had been seven years in the service, beginning his naval career as an able seaman on the Cumberland in 1789. Attracting the attention of Sir John Jervis, he passed from the flagship Victory to the Agamemnon in March as a newly commissioned lieutenant, and followed Nelson devotedly for three years.30
Of all the lieutenants of the Agamemnon one was destined to achieve a legendary status: Edward Berry, later one of Nelson’s greatest fighting captains. The twenty-eight-year-old Berry was of merchant stock, but his family knew Lord Mulgrave, at one time first lord of the Admiralty, and it was through him that the boy had entered the king’s service. In 1779 he volunteered for the Burford, bound for the East Indies, but it took him fifteen years to get a commission. He came to Nelson from England, where he had met Fanny, who was duly impressed. He certainly looked a hero. Slim, fair-haired, blue-eyed and dashing, he was as nervy as a cat preparing to pounce. ‘He seems a gentleman and an officer from appearances,’ Nelson told his wife within days of meeting his new first lieutenant. ‘I have no doubt but I shall like him.’ From the beginning the commodore treated his new subordinate with marked generosity. When Berry helped capture a prize in September, Nelson begged Jervis to make him an acting flag captain of the Captain to give him a greater share of the spoils. If Jervis declined the request, he wrote, ‘I must endeavour to show my sense of his gallantry and good conduct in other ways.’31
Most of Nelson’s lieutenants also liked their captain. Of the thirteen principal commissioned officers who served him on the Agamemnon, at least nine owed him crucial promotions. Berry would make the most use of his advantages, however. He had sailed with Jervis on the Boyne, and the admiral vouched for his ‘talents, great courage, and laudable ambition’. And so it turned out. In years ahead, after Nelson had seen him to post-captain, Berry’s nose for action became proverbial in the fleet. If there was going to be a battle, people said, there you were sure to find Berry. His very presence seemed to promise powder smoke. True to form, he arrived just in time for the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, commanding – of all ships – the old Agamemnon herself. ‘Here comes Berry!’ Nelson is said to have exclaimed at his approach. ‘Now we shall have a fight!’32
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Berry, Spicer, Noble, Compton and Summers all flourished under Nelson’s leadership and played key roles in refashioning the new ship’s company.
Below them the young gentlemen of the Agamemnon quarterdeck had also benefited from his patronage. Nelson always interested himself in them, partly because something of the boy still lingered inside him, and partly, one suspects, because they substituted for the children he had never had.
The ‘class’ of the Agamemnon were a varied lot, in ability, interest and ambition. Some were hell-bent for promotion, impatient to get their commissions before the war ended. Whereas the eyes of the lieutenants were set upon the post of commander and the rank of post-captain, the midshipmen and master’s mates had the lieutenant’s commission in their sights. With the king’s commission in their pockets they became, if they were not already, officers and gentlemen, and their names were entered on lists of the permanent dependants of the crown. The most successful, such as Weatherhead, Hoste or Bolton, carried the hopes of gentrifie
d families with them, but they rubbed shoulders with others Nelson had raised from the common ranks from time to time. One such was poor William D. Williams, who died of his wounds at Vado in 1795. A number were older men, who had few chances of reaching that treasured lieutenancy. When they joined the ship as able seamen in 1793 twenty-seven-year-old David Lindsey was a pressed man from Dunbartonshire, and Ralph Woodman of Morpeth was thirty-two, while Thomas Lund enlisted as able seaman in 1796 at the age of thirty-five. They were all rated midshipmen by Nelson, but none made lieutenant. John Wood of Sunderland was luckier. He enlisted with Nelson as able seaman at the age of thirty-three in 1793, became midshipman and master’s mate, passed his examination, and in July 1796 got an acting position as lieutenant of the Blonde. 33
Nelson fussed over the youngsters like a benign uncle, and praised when they applied themselves. William Bolton, a studious youth who thought nothing of reading late into the night, went beyond his duties to compile a neatly-written manual for junior officers, complete with loving illustrations of knots, ropes and sails and notes on etiquette and propriety. Josiah Nisbet, Nelson’s stepson, had the most obvious claim upon his attention. Josiah benefited from Fanny’s constant concern and sprouted into a strong, healthy boy as tall as his captain. Occasionally something engaged his interest, such as the epaulettes Nelson had to fit to his uniform in 1795, but though he wrote to his mother two ‘Dear Mamma’ letters in 1793, he was not a natural correspondent (‘Josiah begins to threaten you with a letter, and Time may produce it’), and he rarely shone about his general business. ‘You seem to think Josiah is a master of languages,’ Nelson disabused Fanny. ‘I must say he is the same exactly as when an infant, and likes apples and port wine, but it will be difficult to make him speak French, much more Italian. However, I hope his heart is good, and that is the principal.’ ‘Hope’ was the telling word. Josiah’s manners and conversation were boorish, something Nelson never liked even in a man. Although he knew Josiah would ‘never be troubled with the graces’, he tried to convince himself that he was ‘a good officer’ and had ‘many good points about him’.34
