by John Sugden
Beneath flickering candles Nelson worked through his papers, sifting out anything that might offend Fanny if his possessions were sent home. All that concerned Adelaide must have gone up in flames that night. Josiah, now a lieutenant of the Theseus, was on watch, but at some stage interrupted his stepfather’s work, and helped destroy the papers, hardly knowing what most of them were about. Nelson explained that once he had left with his storming party, which included most of the officers, Josiah must ‘take care of the ship’.
‘The ship, sir, must take care of herself,’ said the boy with unusual stubbornness. He wanted to go with his admiral.
‘You must not go,’ Nelson insisted. ‘Supposing your poor mother was to lose us both. What will she do?’
Josiah had not always been a satisfying charge, but this was to be his night and perhaps he sensed it. ‘I will go [with you] this night if I never go again,’ he said grimly.19
Miller saw them as their boat pulled away towards the Seahorse, where they were to join Fremantle and the German pilot in the captain’s barge. Elsewhere the Theseus filled with difficult, last-minute wishes and anxious farewells. William Hoste remained aboard, but his closest friend, John Weatherhead, who had boarded Spanish ships at Cape St Vincent, been in the thick of the Cadiz boat fights and toiled up the Jurada height, was going to Santa Cruz at the head of twenty men in the ship’s yawl. Miller paraded the men of the Theseus at nine, distributing their last pieces of equipment, ‘and said a few words of encouragement to them, caution[ing] against straggling, plundering or injuring any person not found in arms’. Then he allowed them one and a half hours of sleep, and snatched a little himself in his clothes.20
Outside, Nelson found the conditions satisfactory. The stars were just visible, but it was not a clear night and the darkness made an ideal cloak for the boats as they pulled for the mole. The vessels rose and fell on a substantial swell and the breeze was stiffening as the ship’s bell of the Theseus finally signalled the general embarkation at about ten-thirty. The boats of the squadron, filled with seven hundred men, silently assembled about Hood’s Zealous in six divisions. Nelson and Bowen led the first, Nelson in the Seahorse’s barge and Bowen in his gig. The other five divisions were commanded by Troubridge, Hood, Thompson, Miller and Waller, and again, each division roped its boats together to prevent separation and propelled themselves through the water with muffled oars. The men were to preserve complete silence, and show no lights, and in the wake of the ships’ boats would come the reserves. They consisted of one hundred and eighty men with Gibson in the Fox cutter, seventy or eighty in a small Spanish prize taken the day before, and a handful in the jolly boat of the Theseus.
The mole, the focus of the defences of Santa Cruz, lay three miles to the southwest but the boats would have to make a longer journey. They had to pass three or four shore batteries to starboard before even reaching the town, and on Miller’s suggestion were ordered to swing wide before making their final swift advance. At eleven they set off, and their comrades on the ships saw them swallowed by the darkness, one by one. For more than two hours the boats pressed on to the rhythmic action of the oars and the sound of wood against water. They were heavily laden and a current increased their travail, but on they went. Behind them the occasional thud and flash marked where the mortar launch continued to hurl shells towards a black, unseen shore, while to the right every spasmodic response from the enemy batteries raised fears that the boats had been seen. Nelson led his men forward, each silent and wrapped in his own world.21
5
Their immediate objective was well defended and easily recognisable in a fair light, jutting eighty yards into the sea from the front of the town, and close to the citadel and square. By focusing upon the mole, Nelson no doubt hoped to reduce the chances of his men blundering about in a dark, strange town and becoming dispersed. His plan was to hit the heart of the opposition with the best part of a thousand men. A shock column, reinforcing itself as one division came in behind another, would pile into key defences, overcoming opposition before the Spaniards could pull in the units they had inevitably scattered across a wide front. While his forces were concentrated, theirs would be scattered. Nelson believed that once the mole, citadel and square were taken resistance would crumble, and bargained that the opposition had relatively few first-class defenders.
Adjoining the mole to the north was a small beach upon which the boats might be drawn. Nelson almost got there without being seen. But within about half a gunshot of his destination a form of Hell broke loose. Alarm bells rang, and a furious blast of fire tore at the invaders ‘from one end of the town to the other’.22
Nelson instantly ordered his division to cast off their towropes and storm the mole, and with outrageous gallantry the men raised a cheer and hurtled forward. They charged into a wall of shot, grape and musketry. The fearful discharge was heard three miles away on the quarterdeck of the Theseus, where at about one o’clock in the morning Hoste noted ‘one of the heaviest cannonading[s] I ever was witness to . . . likewise a very regular fire of musketry, which continued without intermission for the space of four hours.’ He must have shuddered to think that both his best friend and greatest protector were at the epicentre of that thunder stroke.23
Perhaps thirty pieces of artillery swept the narrow area through which Nelson made his attack. Seven or eight twenty-four-pounders occupied the sea end of the mole, and at its other extremity a hastily constructed battery guarded the gateway that led to the square. Up to ten guns could be trained from the huge citadel looming at the mole head, and to the northeast were the Rosario and San Pedro batteries, which could rake the beach beside the mole or slash into attacking boats making their final approach. Squatting in buildings or behind every available cover thereabouts were musketeers, ready to deliver a fierce small-arms fire.
Even as Nelson’s division dashed into that storm of metal the attack was misfiring. In the darkness most of the other divisions missed the mole completely or were swept past by wind and current towards the rocky, surf-lashed shores beyond. Only one of the five supporting divisions – Thompson’s – actually joined Nelson’s in the attack on the mole.
Under strength and cut down in swaths, they fought their way forward with extreme courage, marking their progress with dead and wounded. Beaching their boats, some flung themselves upon the battery at the end of the mole, and expelling several hundred defenders, spiked all but one or two of the guns. Then the remains of the British force charged the mole head and almost cut their way through. Some of the defenders broke before the fury of the attack and fled to the citadel, but others valiantly held their ground, and Nelson’s men simply lacked the reserves to overwhelm them. Now, in these crucial moments, Nelson’s failure to secure the thousand or more redcoats he had originally wanted, told. As one Spaniard later admitted, ‘if the Nelsons, Bowens or other commanders had united their forces there [at the mole], the result [for us] would have been a disaster’.24
In that brave assault nearly all of Nelson’s men seemed to be killed or wounded. Fremantle had gone down early, two musket bullets ripping through the flesh of his right arm, near one of the joints. John Weatherhead lay on the guardhouse steps near the beach, his life’s blood oozing from a bullet wound in his stomach. Bowen of the Terpsichore fell, and young Lieutenant Thorp – he who had written to his family – both dead side by side, surrounded by the bodies of half a dozen of their closest followers cut down by a single blast of canister. Thompson was also hit in the arms, and his lieutenant of marines went down beside him mortally wounded.
Josiah Nisbet had eschewed the safety of the ship to stand with his stepfather that night. They were in the stern of their boat, and when it ran upon the beach beside the mole the men bounded from the front with ferocious war cries. Nelson made his way forward as space cleared, drawing the sword he had inherited from his uncle, Captain Suckling. He reached the middle of the boat and prepared to put one foot over the side. Josiah remembered him suddenly turning hi
s head towards him and away from the flashing of the guns. ‘I am shot through the elbow,’ he said.25
His right arm was now useless, though he had the presence of mind to retrieve his fallen sword with his left hand. With the noise of violence around him, Josiah helped the injured admiral down into the boat and felt his arm. It was a serious wound. A musket ball had shattered the bones above the elbow, and severed the brachial artery. Nelson grew faint at the sight of the blood pumping from his arm, and Josiah covered it with his hat.26
6
Among those who blundered past the mole in the darkness were the divisions of Troubridge and Waller. Searching for a landing place through thunderous surf, many of their boats were filled with water ‘in an instant’ and sunk while the others were staved against the rocks of the Aduana beach, a notoriously difficult place strewn with the broken timbers of earlier misfortunes. The men lost most of their equipment, including the scaling ladders they needed to storm the citadel. They waded ashore in an abrasive wind, soaked to the skin. The muskets carried by the marines could not be fired because all the cartridges in their pouches were wet and useless.
There was no retreat, weapons or not, but Troubridge was still Troubridge. He knew that Nelson was expecting to meet him in the square, and therefore what he had to do. Sword in hand, he and Waller collected the bedraggled band and got them into order. They still had pikes, cutlasses and bayonets, and they were soon clambering over the line wall and plunging along the dark Calle de la Caleta towards the northern end of the plaza. The accounts of Troubridge’s march are confused and contradictory, but there appears to have been some stiff fighting. If one of the Spanish reports is to be believed the steady nerve of the British got them through, as they scattered the opposition with fierce bayonet charges, killing and wounding several antagonists and taking prisoners. The captives were ‘well treated’, and provided Troubridge with something he badly needed – a small but valuable supply of ammunition.27
Perhaps he also got information about where he was; at any rate, he made the rendezvous with few losses. But Nelson was not there. Driving his opponents into adjoining streets and alleys, Troubridge occupied the square and arranged his men in battle formation to wait. He even sent a sergeant of marines and two Spanish civilians to the citadel with a summons to surrender, but they never returned. An anxious hour or so passed in the dark, but still no Nelson. Then Troubridge somehow got word that another British party had got into the town, and were holed up in the convent of Santo Domingo a little to the west. Wearily the men fell in, and Troubridge marched them from the square, through the black streets and across a narrow bridge spanning a stream to reach the convent. Muskets occasionally spat at them from the dark as emboldened Spaniards gathered in the surrounding streets, and field pieces were being wheeled up to hem them in. But sometime after four in the morning, perhaps, they reached the convent. Nelson was not there, but inside Troubridge found the sodden survivors of two of the other British divisions with their commanders, Miller and Hood.
Miller had also overshot the mole, even more than Troubridge. His men had come under fire as they tried to land through the surf and seven had been hit before the leading boat had beached and filled with water thirty yards out. Their guns wet and useless, and equipment such as scaling ladders lost, the British had to wade ashore with water up to their chests. Miller and Oldfield gathered as many as possible and relying on pikes and bayonets drove away a picket of sixty Spanish volunteers and stormed the six-gun Concepción battery above them. Then, joined by Hood’s men as they came ashore, they fought their way into the town, heading for the citadel. But as they advanced, guns flashed at them through the gloom, ahead and behind, from corners, alleys and windows. With men going down, discipline and morale wavering, and the opposition growing, Miller and Hood turned from the citadel to the main square. They seized a Spanish prisoner and demanded he guide them, but either he dissembled or misunderstood, because he led the bedraggled invaders to the convent of Santo Domingo instead. Still, the British found the place defensible. The ground floor of the convent was secure because it had no windows, and defenders could command the adjacent streets from the upper storey and tower, while directly before the building was ‘a sort of broad platform, about ten feet higher than the common street’, and useful for forming ranks. Confiscating the arms of about thirty prisoners they had taken, there the British remained, wet, mud-caked and miserable, until sometime before dawn when Troubridge arrived with his men from the plaza and took overall command.28
No one knew what had happened to Nelson and Thompson, but as the heavy firing at the waterfront had finished long before, it could only be assumed that they were not coming. The depressing thought that their comrades had been killed began to sink in. Miller, ever the gentleman, worried about Fremantle’s young wife. ‘Of Mrs Freemantle’s situation it was terrible to think,’ he wrote. At least seven hundred men should have been at the rendezvous in the square. Some were dead and drowned, others had been driven back by the enemy or the surf, and yet more were scattered about the shoreline with nothing to do but surrender and search for relief. Now Troubridge’s survivors, a mere three hundred and forty seamen, marines and pikemen, were isolated in the half-light, far from their ships, and ringed by enemies.29
7
Gripping his stepfather’s arm above the gushing wound, and then using two silk neckties, one his own, as a tourniquet, seventeen-year-old Josiah Nisbet managed to stay the greater flow of blood. ‘The revolting of the blood was so great that Sir H. said he never could forget it,’ remembered Fanny in later years. Five seamen rallied round to help, one the powerful thirty-year-old Londoner John Lovell, one of the admiral’s faithful Agamemnons. They pushed the boat out on a receding tide, and started the long haul back to the ships in increasingly rough weather.
Spanish guns were still firing hard to larboard, beyond the booming surf, and the boat had to pass eight sets of batteries on its homeward run, most if not all of them blazing blindly into the night. The helmsmen doubted they could make it, and even Nelson, who wanted to be propped up, thought it wise to ‘strike out to sea’ as they had coming out. But Josiah firmly disagreed. His stepfather needed urgent medical attention. Eventually, Nelson allowed him to take the tiller, and Josiah took the boat through the turbulent sea, the spray tossed here and there by the shrieking shot.30
Nearby they heard a great cry and the sounds of men drowning. It was the Fox cutter under Commander Gibson, sunk by a single shot below the waterline, and going to the bottom with one hundred and eighty men on board. A few struggling seamen were hauled into Nelson’s boat, and two managed to swim back to the Emerald. A boat returning with the injured Fremantle also picked up survivors, and a few others managed to keep themselves afloat long enough for the remaining boats with the ships to reach them. Four men of the Theseus were in the water so long that they developed pains in their limbs, loins and backs, but they were lucky. Fewer than half the men on the Fox survived. Gibson and ninety-six of his fellows were lost at a single stroke.
The flagship was the furthest out, and it was probably a little after three in the morning when her watch heard a voice hailing them out of the night. Josiah’s boat came alongside with the wounded admiral, and the men began to lower a chair. Nelson would not hear of it. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I have yet my legs and one arm’, and so saying he used a rope and his legs and left arm to struggle up the side unaided. William Hoste was aghast. ‘I leave you to judge of my situation, sir,’ he wrote home, when he saw ‘the man whom I may say has been a second father to me’ climbing on to the deck, ‘his right arm dangling by his side’. Yet he showed ‘a spirit that astonished everyone’ and ‘told the surgeon to get his instruments ready, for that he knew he must lose his arm, and that the sooner it was off the better’.31
He probably went down to the cockpit, a damp, dark place on the orlop deck below the water line, where surgeons normally stationed themselves during an action. There, beneath the shadowy and uncertai
n light of lamps swinging overhead to the roll of the ship, twenty-eight-year-old Thomas Eshelby examined the wound. Eshelby was a Yorkshireman, and a surgeon of some experience. The company of surgeons in London had authorised him to be a surgeon’s mate in 1791 and a surgeon three years later, and he had followed Nelson from the Captain to the Theseus. Betsy Fremantle thought him ‘a sensible young man’, but whatever his professional competence, he was certainly short-handed. One surgeon’s mate had gone to Santa Cruz and would never return. To help him, therefore, Eshelby turned to Louis Remonier, a twenty-four-year-old French royalist who had worked in Toulon Hospital, and served Nelson on the Agamemnon, Captain and Theseus. Also on hand were two or three seamen to act as assistants, one apparently Tom Allen, the admiral’s manservant, and a chaplain gravely preparing for the worst.32
Cutting the clothing from Nelson’s blood-sodden right arm and cleaning it as best he could, Eshelby found a compound fracture with severe tissue damage and a ruptured artery. Amputation was the commonest operation performed on ships but it caused the most fatalities. Eshelby had to work quickly to prevent the patient bleeding to death or traumatising, and he turned to his formidable array of instruments while the admiral was prepared for his horrific ordeal.
The surgeon needed to reduce the flow of blood to see what he was doing and used a tourniquet to depress the brachial artery. A leather strap was accordingly buckled around the admiral’s arm, above the wound, and tightened by means of a screw on the outside that drew its two ends through a compress that closed upon the limb. Ashore this type of amputation was sometimes performed upon patients sitting upright in a chair, but on the Theseus Nelson was probably put on his back, with sea chests serving as an operating table beneath him. There was nothing to arrest his pain. Novelists have written that such patients were given spirits and a leather pad to bite upon, but no surgeon’s journal of the time records either. Nelson endured the entire operation without an anaesthetic of any kind.
