by John Sugden
Nelson, too, a man of highs and lows, was sinking beneath the weight of the tragedy. On the 27th he had struggled with an unfamiliar pen, scratching his first full letter with the left hand. The strokes which had once confidently sloped to the right, with the occasional flourish, were gone now, replaced by a tortured scrawl, in which letters of all sizes struggled for shape and fell unevenly upright or to one side or the other. His thoughts also ran haphazardly, juxtaposing self-pity and his concern for a stepson left without a protector:
I am become a burthen to my friends and useless to my country [Nelson wrote to his admiral], but by my letter wrote the 24th you will perceive my anxiety for the promotion of my son-in-law, Josiah Nisbet. When I leave your command, I become dead to the world. I go hence, and am no more seen. If, from poor Bowen’s loss, you think it proper to oblige me, I rest confident you will do it. The boy is under obligations to me, but he repaid me by bringing me from the mole of Santa Cruz. I hope you will be able to give me a frigate to convey the remains of my carcass to England. God bless you, my dear sir, and believe me, your most obliged and faithful, Horatio Nelson.45
Twenty days later, as he approached the fleet, he felt no better. ‘A left-handed admiral will never again be considered useful,’ he wrote to Sir John. ‘Therefore the sooner I get to a very humble cottage the better, and make room for a better man to serve the state.’46
XXVII
USELESS TO MY COUNTRY
Yet, yet awhile, the natural tear may flow
Nor cold reflection chide the threatening woe;
Awhile, unchecked, the tide of sorrow swell;
Thou bravest, gentlest spirit! Fare thee well!
George Canning, Ulm and Trafalgar
1
THE Seahorse, in which Nelson raised his flag to go home, made a wretched voyage. It was a passage of broken men, latterly attended by clouds, squalls and drizzling rain. The main topmast cracked, and one of the fore topmast studding sail booms was wrenched away. Down below the injured and sick being sent home felt every lurch. Betsy Fremantle, who accompanied her maimed husband, may have seemed immature and ‘boarding schoolmissish’ to some, but she had coped well with the vicissitudes of naval life. That journey home on the Seahorse was one of her low points, and recalled a ship filled with the groans of the sick day and night.1
The admiral himself was a bad patient. Pain, guilt, professional frustration and fears for the future conspired against him.
The first originated in the remains of his right arm, and was intermittently violent, though Eshelby travelled with him to dress the damaged stump with dry lint and calamine and administer a nightly dose of opium. The ligatures closing his arteries should have come away in about ten days, and one had parted on the last day of July, but the other stubbornly defended its post, remaining a foreign body within the stump and preventing the end from closing. The open wound was still the size of a shilling. The patient complained of ‘twitching pains’, particularly at night, experienced ‘phantom’ sensations where his missing hand had been, and suffered bouts of fever. At times his pain was so great that Eshelby was denied access to the ligature. In himself Nelson was regaining colour, but the empty right sleeve, cut and tied with ribbons for the convenience of the surgeon, proclaimed his impairment. ‘I find it looks shocking to be without one arm,’ Betsy confessed to her diary.2
Jervis, now calling himself the Earl of St Vincent, had been a tower of strength. ‘Mortals cannot command success,’ he had written to a disconsolate rear admiral returning to the fleet. ‘You and your companions have certainly deserved it by the greatest degree of heroism and perseverance that ever was exhibited. I grieve for the loss of your arm, the fate of poor Bowen and Gibson, with the other brave men who fell so gallantly.’ He would be proud to ‘bow to your stump’ when Nelson finally got aboard the flagship.3
The reunion had taken place on 17 August and had gone well. Summoning what strength he had left, Nelson projected an optimism he did not feel, and Collingwood thought he would overexert himself. In return, the commander-in-chief did everything the wounded hero asked. The Seahorse was put at his disposal so that he, Fremantle and a few other seriously sick men could return to England. Some of Nelson’s followers were transferred to her, including Eshelby the surgeon, Compton the flag lieutenant, a servant, Tom Allen, and William Sparks, a boy. All but the first were Agamemnons, the last of a proud company that was now broken forever. Talking strong, Jervis declared that both Nelson and Fremantle would recover to serve their country, and praised their defeated officers and men in letters to the Admiralty. It was not in the new earl’s nature to be swayed by rebuffs.4
The gouty old commander-in-chief often showed his human side to Horatio Nelson, and never more so than after the repulse at Santa Cruz. He wrote to Fanny, assuring her that her husband would live and was on his way home, and he attended to Nelson’s concerns for Josiah and Hoste. On 16 August, Nisbet was promoted commander of the Dolphin hospital ship, and was soon conducting a convoy to Gibraltar. It was his first independent command, and at seventeen he had enjoyed a steeper rise in the profession than Nelson himself. As for Hoste, Jervis promised to watch over the boy. ‘I grieved to have left him . . . I pray God to bless my dear William,’ Sir Horatio wrote, but the commander-in-chief kept his promise to the letter. A year later he summoned the youth into his cabin, just before William was due to face his examination for lieutenant. The boy was astonished that the old admiral, whose stern face softened with amusement, knew so much about him and welcomed him so kindly. Jervis said that he had heard that Hoste had broken both legs with the Agamemnon – words that echoed conversations he had had with Nelson, and inspired Hoste tremendously on the eve of his ordeal. ‘I could not help laughing when he laid hold of me and turned me round three or four times, saying I was a smart young fellow,’ Hoste wrote home. ‘I assure you my heart was so full with gratitude to a person whom I have never seen more than once that I could hardly speak.’5
Back in the summer of 1797, Nelson needed such a patron as Jervis, for he felt that his own chances of being re-employed were thin. The first of his new spidery left-handed letters to reach Fanny was dated 5 August. The writer tried to make light of his misfortune as usual. ‘I beg neither you or my father will think much of this mishap,’ he said. ‘My mind has long been made up to such an event.’ But unpleasant facts had to be faced. His career was over. ‘I shall no longer be considered as useful,’ he said. The cottage retreat was ‘more necessary than ever’.6
2
As the Seahorse coursed home, the ruins of the Tenerife disaster went with it. Apart from Nelson, the ship contained a number of its victims. Fremantle kept to his cot, exhausted and depressed, haunted by the thought that his painful right arm, which refused to heal, would turn gangrenous, and that he would have to resign his commission. Among other invalids were Thomas Ramsay, in better health since the left arm injured at Cadiz had been amputated, and John Clarke and John Cooper of the Theseus, who had been wounded at Santa Cruz. Ramsay would recover, pass for gunner and appeal for a renewal of Nelson’s patronage in 1802. 7
The dead would remain in the Canaries, however. Nelson was particularly troubled by the fate of Lieutenant Weatherhead, for whom he had developed a great respect and affection. The father would learn of his son’s death from the newspapers, and it was a cruel blow, since he had already lost one son in the West Indies three years earlier. Despite all, the old man hurriedly assured the admiral that he would never forget ‘the many and great favours [you] conferred on my poor boy . . . from the moment he entered with you on board the Agamemnon to the hour of his fall’. Nelson’s reply revealed how the loss of that ‘most excellent young man’ was affecting him. Whenever he thought of ‘that fatal night, I cannot but bring sorrow and his fall before my eyes’, he said. ‘Dear friend, he fought as he had always done, by my side, and for more than one hundred times with success, but for wise reasons (we are taught to believe) a separation was to take place.’8
Of heroics there had been plenty: at Cadiz, where Nelson had failed to achieve his strategic objectives, and at the bloody repulse in Tenerife. But unkind critics could still point to a lack of recent results. The king, for one, a man who had disliked Nelson ever since the captain had chummed up to Prince William Henry in the Leeward Islands. ‘I do not wish for empty displays of valour when attended with the loss of many brave men,’ was His Royal Highness’s considered response to the affair at Santa Cruz. In his gloomier moments, Nelson worried that the swelling, magnificent wave on which he had risen for so long seemed at last to have broken.10
Nevertheless, taking a longer view of his career, the admiral being carried home on the Seahorse had much of which to speak. By the count he had kept during the present war he had been in action one hundred and twenty times, assisted in the capture of seven ships of the line, six frigates, four corvettes, eleven privateers and taken or destroyed near fifty sail of merchantmen. He might have added the capture of four strongly fortified towns and innumerable small actions. On the strength of these claims, which he enshrined in a memorial of October 1797, he would receive a pension of £1,000 a year.11
Nor, the king notwithstanding, did most Britons blame Nelson for what was seen as a gallant defeat in the Canaries. They, and eventually he, would acclaim his successes and courage.
It was the battle off Cape St Vincent, not the hiding at Tenerife, which was remembered. His brothers were preparing a coat of arms to accompany his knighthood, based on an old bookplate used by their father and his motto, ‘Faith and Works’. The crest showed the San Josef, the shield was supported by a common sailor holding the broad pendant of a commodore and a British lion, both trampling upon the colours of Spain, and the design was elaborated with Spanish doubloons. Soon after getting home the admiral also sat for another commemorative portrait. Just as Rigaud had displayed the victor of the siege on the San Juan many years before, so Henry Edridge would show Nelson as he wanted the world to remember him in 1797 – erect and proud in the undress coat of a rear admiral, his Bath riband and St Vincent medal on his chest, and the famous action against the Spanish fleet raging in the background.12
But the first of Lemuel Abbott’s portraits of Nelson, which followed soon after, hinted at something less triumphant. There were still the remains of the boy in the sitter, but the mop of untidy hair that had once been sandy brown, though long at the sides and tied with the customary ribbon, was turning to grey. And a severe, almost pained expression had replaced the restrained smile that Rigaud had captured in the younger man.
On the Seahorse it was that darker mood that predominated. If recalled, the past seemed to hold more than the future. Nelson had lived to achieve, and in so doing became alive and fulfilled, but in August of 1797 the glory days appeared to be over. For one thing the war seemed to be finishing. Sir John Jervis was betting £100 that peace was only weeks away, and had already drawn up a plan for a peace-time navy. For another, Nelson was returning to his loved ones a physical ruin, wasted in war, with a sightless right eye, a permanently damaged stomach and a missing right arm. As the admiral struggled to pull on stockings or fasten the buttons of his breeches, as he fumbled with shirts and coats and the stocks about his throat, failed to carve food unaided, or swore at the quill pen that had been cut for a right hand, it was a new war that exercised his spirit. A fight against demons only the sick and disabled know, the fight for dignity and self-respect, and against dependence and disability.
He had never meant it to be so, of course. In his mind he had dreamed of even greater success and the enjoyment of repaying those who had supported him in the years of uncertainty. People such as William Suckling, from whom he had not heard for ‘upwards of two years’. He had not reckoned upon returning a broken, pitied supplicant. As he wrote again to his uncle, ‘I have ever been a trouble to you, and am likely so to continue.’ He would strike his flag, hurry to Fanny and find ‘a hut to put my mutilated carcass in’.13
3
In the immediate aftermath of Santa Cruz, Nelson can be forgiven for despair. There was a substantial psychological adjustment for him to make. But from the perspective of today we can see the great admiral in the Nelson of 1797. It is wrong to invoke the term ‘genius’ as Mahan so often did, suffused as it is with a sense of supernatural ability. Nelson’s achievements, like those of most ‘geniuses’, were explicable, and close readers of this book will easily bring relevant facts to mind.
It is not necessary to regard Nelson as faultless or unique to appreciate his abilities. Many of his notable characteristics were widely diffused in the British fleet. The increasing efficiency of the Royal Navy in seamanship, gunnery and teamwork, based partly upon its extended sea keeping, was laying the foundations of a formidable battle supremacy, a supremacy enhanced by the decline and occasional chaos of the navies of France and Spain. A huge gap between the belligerent navies was opening and historic opportunities unfolding. The indecisive line of battle, which had seemed so essential when adversaries were evenly matched, could be compromised, even discarded, by a force vastly superior in combat. More flexible tactics could be employed to bring enemy ships to close quarters, where the best could be gained from that battle superiority. The ultimate prize of total victory began to seem realisable.
Many officers saw it, and Nelson was less a solitary genius than a particularly strong example of a new breed of aggressive naval officers, nurtured in a tradition of victory and increasing professionalism. Both Hood and Jervis cherished and cultivated that tradition, learning to keep their forces at sea in good order and health. Neither doubted the outcome of a battle, even against considerable odds, and both looked for ways of coming to grips with the enemy. Both, for example, explored the idea of concentrating force against part of an enemy line to secure a decisive advantage.14
The concept of total victory, so imperative in Nelson, was not confined to him. We have only to remember the widespread disgust at the inadequacy of Hotham’s victories in 1795 to realise that Nelson was not alone in seeking a new decisiveness. Or we can look at another occasion, when a British captain advocated an energetic pursuit of French ships in the hope of bringing them to battle. ‘Whenever that happens,’ wrote the officer, ‘I have no doubt of the event, but longer days [in which to prepare] would suit us better, for whatever is not perfectly decisive will be against us.’ The words sound as if they are Nelson’s, but they are not. They were written by Cuthbert Collingwood in 1795. 15
Yet there was something special about Nelson, and most admirals who knew him saw it. He was more than a professional sea officer, competent in all that went with the job, or even just a patriotic enthusiast, eager to do his best for his country. Hood, Hotham and Jervis selected him for particularly arduous responsibilities, and he helped win battles and honours for all three. His reputation as the star of a fleet distinguished by good captains grew.
He was, people realised, a driven man, intensely focused on his work. Nelson’s
need for glory and recognition was as strong in 1797 as it had been in his early days. As he told Fanny in August 1796, ‘one day or other I will have a large gazette to myself . . . one day or other such an opportunity will be given me. I cannot, if I am in the field of glory, be kept out of sight . . . Whenever there is anything to do, there Providence is sure to direct my steps, and ever credit must be given me in spite of envy.’16
In Nelson, patriotism, duty and personal glory united to create an almost messianic zeal. He saw himself as an instrument and champion of his country, and was sure that given an opportunity he would win its acclaim. He never lost sight of that wider, far-off audience, as if it was there, cheering its hero from the sidelines and judging his actions. His defeat of the Santa Sabina in 1796, he wrote, was the sort of victory ‘I know the English like in a Gazette’. After Troubridge’s repulse at the Paso Alto in Tenerife he might have thrown up his hands and returned, but the honour of the country had not been upheld; as long as there was a prospect of victory, it had to be redeemed.17
The downside of this urgency was the boastfulness and self-advertisement so often encountered in Nelson, the ease with which he succumbed to flattery and flatterers, and tactically a tendency to run his luck hard and underestimate opposition. These pages provide numerous illustrations of these weaknesses, including the deleterious effect Prince William Henry had had upon the young captain’s leadership.
Its upside, in professional terms, was his tireless energy, his constant enterprise and opportunism, his need to lead and achieve the ultimate goal, and his refusal to be beaten. He was desperate for distinction, and consistently went beyond the normal bounds of duty to reach it. He was so often in the right place at the right time because he saw what was coming and put himself there.
