Nelson (134 page)

That day and the next the blood-stained survivors of the attack
returned, each with his own story. Some were unhurt. Lieutenant Hawkins brought back his squad of small-arms men, and the only physical discomfort suffered by Summers was a recurrence of a ‘gout’ in his foot. But many – very many – were not so lucky. Seventy-one men from the
Theseus
were killed or wounded: William Harrison, thirty, his left arm fractured by a musket ball; James Harrison, thirty-two, shot through the gluteus muscles of the buttock and hip and injured in the thigh; John Cowper, twenty-one, his leg broken by a musket ball; Patrick McKinna, twenty-seven, shot in the loins; James McKinna, twenty-nine, hit in both legs; John Clarke, twenty-three, shot three times in the right leg . . .
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It would take time for the British to assess the cost of the disaster. Final returns recorded that 158 were killed and missing and 110 wounded, a total of 268. It was not a severe loss for the time, not when the country was in the midst of squandering eighty thousand men in the West Indies. But it was high for the navy, exceeding anything Nelson had suffered before and approaching the three hundred casualties incurred at the battle of Cape St Vincent. The one-sided nature of the conflict was also demonstrated by the losses of the Spanish and French, which amounted to no more than twenty-five killed and up to thirty-eight wounded.
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Some have portrayed Nelson’s thrust at Tenerife as wild and reckless, and others as a well-planned operation that misfired. It was both and neither. In some respects it illustrated forethought and preparation, but in others it exemplified the underlying weaknesses in Nelson’s notions of fighting ashore. His intelligence had been bad, and his men remained vague about local conditions, terrain, and the state of the opposition as well as a prey to rumours. At one time his captains allowed themselves to minimise the likely resistance; at another they believed grossly inflated Spanish statements of the forces gathering around them. The expedition was also undermanned. The thousand extra redcoats Nelson had asked for would very probably have tilted the balance against the Spaniards and given him Santa Cruz. Then there had been tactical errors, particularly the costly loss of surprise. After that a direct assault upon prepared defences was always going to be a difficult gamble – one that perhaps would only have been vindicated by success.

Having said that, hindsight apart, eighteenth-century war was not formulaic, and too often rested capriciously upon changing circumstances and imponderables. Its history is full of gambles that succeeded,
and Nelson might have taken the town that night. If the weather had been kinder, or the assault force concentrated instead of scattered, or the Spaniards been less resolute than they were . . . But Fortune was a fickle mistress. She had supported Nelson so often in the past, sometimes in situations of equal or greater difficulty. And now she had deserted him.

The next day Nelson was a little better, though still in severe pain. Watched over by Remonier, who would stay up with him for many a night, and sedated with opium he had slept and strengthened himself with tea, soup, sago, lemonade and a tamarind drink. Eshelby gave the butchered stump its daily dressing, and although as yet there was no sign of fever, he would prescribe cinchona over the next few days to help with the pain and reduce temperature. The admiral was also constipated – a product, probably, of the opium – and he was given laxatives such as senna and jalap.

He was well enough to respond to well-wishers and to think of others. ‘Our gallant admiral is much obliged for your kind enquiries,’ Miller wrote to Captain Thompson. ‘He is, as the ladies in the straw say, “as well as can be expected” . . . What a comfort it is to reflect that however great our loss has in other respects been, we have suffered none in honour or our character for humanity. No town was ever so possessed, and so little injury suffered by the inhabitants.’ Nelson tried to write a note of his own to Betsy, whose husband was having a miserable time with his injured right arm. In a trembling new hand he could manage five words: ‘God bless you and Fremantle.’
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He confirmed the terms Troubridge had made with Gutierrez, and sent the commandant general some beer and cheese as a present. Compton went ashore with a carpenter to inspect their surviving boats and found the
Theseus
’s cutter dashed to pieces on a rock and the launch lost to the west of the mole. Troubridge and Hood also went back to Santa Cruz to collect twenty-five of their wounded from the hospital and deliver a note to accompany Nelson’s gifts. It offered Don Antonio the admiral’s ‘sincerest thanks for your kind attention to myself and your humanity to those of our wounded who were in your possession or under your care, as well as your generosity to all that were landed’.
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None of these niceties could erase the sorrow and disappointment that gnawed at the British squadron. Troubridge and Hood dined with
Don Antonio that day, but ‘at table they hardly raised their eyes’, a Spanish observer said. ‘One could see that their faces were very sad.’ At sunset the flags and pendants on Nelson’s ships were at half-mast, and salutes were fired as the bodies of Bowen and Thorp were committed to the deep. Bowen’s body had been stripped by some of the islanders, and the sailors had had to dress it in their own clothes to return it to the ship.
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On the morning of 27 July, Nelson’s squadron finally weighed anchor to leave the scene of its humbling. The admiral faced the job of dictating a brief report to his commander-in-chief. Unlike modern politicians, he sought no scapegoats nor offered excuses. There was no attempt to blame Troubridge for the mistakes of the 22nd, nor criticism of Miller and Fremantle for their plan to storm Santa Cruz. The responsibility had been his, and the gallantry theirs. ‘I am under the painful necessity of acquainting you that we have not been able to succeed in our attack,’ he said, ‘yet it is my duty to state that I believe more daring intrepidity was never shown than by the captains, officers and men you did me the honour to place under my command.’ The flawless secretarial hand and the unsteady, pain-laden signature told an even fuller story.
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As the ships sailed sadly back to Cadiz, the casualties continued to mount. They told heavily on the small communities that had lived and worked aboard each ship, communities that had bonded in danger and now suffered as families do when losses are close and personal. The muster of the
Theseus
contained almost fifty entries annotated with such words as ‘drowned in storming Santa Cruz’ or ‘killed at Santa Cruz’. There were meagre possessions to sort and distribute. A few of the dead had left wills. Twenty-two-year-old William Marsh, an able seaman from Kent, had bequeathed his goods to a Sarah Cole of Sittingbourne, perhaps a sweetheart. Others had no one waiting for them at home, and their belongings were sold to shipmates, some as mementos of lost comrades.

On 29 July, as they skirted west of Gomera, Lieutenant Weatherhead slipped away, ‘seemingly without pain’. He had appeared to improve, sleeping less fitfully and taking some sago, mutton and broth, but the vomiting had returned and he was constipated, his motions few and black. As his stomach swelled with the fatal bullet still inside it the wound turned gangrenous, and anodyne barely relieved the pain. During his last night Weatherhead’s pulse faded and his extremities grew cold. He died at about one o’clock in the afternoon. The following
day was a Sunday, a fitting day for a final farewell to a parson’s boy far from home. At nine in the morning the blue waters nine leagues west of La Palma closed around the body to three volleys of musket fire. A religious service followed, but the burial intensified the gloom about the ship. Nelson promoted Hoste, now seventeen, to act as lieutenant in the place of the dead man, but the boy took no pleasure from it. Weatherhead had been his closest friend from the beginning, and the one with whom he had shared their remarkable adventure over the last four years. When Hoste had been sick or injured it had been Weatherhead, more than anyone else, who had helped him through. Now their partnership was over. ‘In losing him I lost a good companion, and a true friend,’ wrote Hoste, ‘and I believe . . . the nation lost as brave an officer as ever stepped on board a ship. He was the darling of the ship’s company, and universally beloved by every person who had the pleasure of his acquaintance.’
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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.
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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.’
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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

T
HE
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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