Nelson (16 page)

He was still young when he fashioned Nelson into a fully-fledged seaman. Born about 1747, Thomas Surridge was an Irishman from Passage, near Waterford. He had joined the navy in December 1769, enlisting as able seaman and yeoman of the powder room on the
Tweed
frigate at Spithead. Richard Surridge, a sixty-two-year-old clerk aboard the
Tweed
, and said to have been from ‘Donmore’ in Galway, was probably his father or uncle. No doubt it was to reward the elder Surridge’s loyalty that Captain George Collier advanced the boy to midshipman and master’s mate. James Irving was master of the
Tweed
,
and it was from him that Thomas learned the basics of navigation, but Collier himself may have been an influence, for he was an exceptional naval officer, skilled in languages and interested in astronomy, surveying and writing. Young Surridge followed Collier to the
Levant
and
Rainbow
, and also sailed under Captains Samuel Thompson, Richard Collins and Richard Onslow. His appointment to the
Seahorse
followed ten months as master of the
Achilles
.
⁹

Surridge taught Nelson navigation and seamanship, and there were few better able to do so. The lessons stuck. Fifteen years later the pupil advised Commodore William Cornwallis, who had been appointed to the East Indies, that Mr Surridge ‘was a very clever man, and we constantly took the lunar observations’. Nelson suggested Cornwallis consult Surridge’s log, and had ‘no doubt’ that it would be found the ‘best of any in the Navy Office’. Obviously Surridge impressed the pliable young man, but the respect was mutual. Years later Surridge remembered Nelson as ‘a boy with a florid countenance, rather stout [strong] and athletic’, and fired by ‘ardent ambition’. He was a good scholar and during his spell on the
Seahorse
got a thorough grounding in all necessary nautical skills and arts.
¹⁰

With Surridge at his elbow Horace and the other juniors learned how to make lunar observations against a fixed star, using a quadrant or sextant, and then to turn them into Greenwich time through a process of spherical trigonometry. A comparison of the result with local time, ascertained from routine observations, gave an estimate of the ship’s longitude. Each day the readings were carefully entered into the logs, often in Surridge’s own sloping hand, with illuminating remarks that testified to the pride he took in the work. ‘The observation this day,’ he wrote on 17 January 1774, ‘is seventeen miles to the southward of the reckoning, and as we have not had an opportunity of trying the current, I suppose it must set strong to the southward.’ The master also had his students testing Foxon’s hydrometer, a new navigational device the Admiralty wanted to evaluate, but they found it gave very different results from those produced by orthodox practices. It measured sixteen miles short over a trial of 193 miles towards the Cape.
¹¹

It was as the ship forged southwards from Madeira with young Nelson garnering wisdom from Mr Surridge that the first difficulties occurred.

Some one hundred and thirty men and boys made their homes on the
Seahorse
, less than half the number manning the
Salisbury
, but
necessarily shoulder to shoulder all the same. Many of the men slung their hammocks in cramped, uncomfortable spaces only big enough to accommodate them when one watch was up and about, and they messed eight to twelve at a table. There was little or no privacy. Yet these men lived with each other month after month, and sometimes year upon year, working as a team. Indeed, their lives depended upon it, for neither the sea nor the enemy forgave easily. Every man depended upon the others, and a failing in one became a failing in all. Whether one of the top men out on a yard to reef a sail in ferocious conditions, with nothing but a foot rope between him and eternity; a member of a gun crew with an allotted part in the complicated manhandling and firing of huge pieces of artillery amidst the carnage of battle; or one of a gang laboriously extricating the heavy and obdurate anchor cable from the bitts, each had to synchronise movement and work with precision. There were no facilities for rehabilitating slackers or malcontents, or for providing them with time out on a working man-of-war. If the efficiency and safety of the ship, and all aboard her, were to be preserved it was necessary for men and boys to shape up fast.

Those who threatened the equilibrium of a crew, impairing its efficiency or damaging its cohesion, were far from popular. Antisocial activities such as quarrelling or theft damaged fragile relationships, and a man too drunk, lazy or inattentive to do his duty merely increased the heavy burdens on his fellows, who had to make good the deficiency. Most men accepted that a degree of disciplinary violence was necessary to the wellbeing of the crew as a whole and expected a good captain to provide it. As long as it was justly administered and measured in its severity, they regarded it as an inevitable if bloody deterrent to undesirable and dangerous behaviour.

Captains enjoined loyalty at all times. They regularly had the Articles of War read to the ship’s company, reminding them of the penalties of disaffection, as well as a portion of an act of parliament for the encouragement of seamen in the Royal Navy. The endless gun salutes commemorating the king’s birthday, his accession and coronation, and such notable events in royal history as the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot, the restoration of Charles II and the landing of William of Orange, also emphasised the connection between obedience, duty and patriotism. Equally, all captains flogged substantial offenders.

During his twenty-nine months with the
Seahorse
Horace saw eighty-eight floggings on board, but most of them (87.5 per cent)
consisted of the token twelve lashes. On one occasion a mere six lashes were administered, which suggests that mitigating circumstances were weighed, and rather more often severe offences earned twenty-four lashes. The majority of floggings concerned a minority of difficult men. Forty-eight (54.5 per cent) were inflicted on just ten individuals, such men as the marine Thomas Harrington, an incorrigible thief and shirker, who received 204 lashes in twelve floggings, and a seaman named John Clark, who ran up a total of seventy-two lashes covering drunkenness, theft and neglect of duty. Among other offences punished by flogging were disobedience, fighting, and being absent without leave.
¹²

There is no evidence that the official violence on board the
Seahorse
raised any eyebrows, but unfortunately an undercurrent of bullying was developing. The trouble was Lieutenant Drummond. His commission was two years old but he had a weak grasp of the responsibilities of command. Drink betrayed him first. One day he came to relieve Surridge on watch, ‘reeling about the deck’ in an inebriated condition. When the master refused to surrender the watch, Drummond tottered back to his cot and could not be roused hours later. Nelson, who would never be a heavy drinker and was rarely intoxicated, may have learned that duty and drink made poor shipmates on this voyage in the
Seahorse
. Even when Drummond took his watches, he was sometimes semiconscious, and slumped on the arms chest swaddled in his boat cloak, oblivious of whatever danger might threaten the ship. At other times he was livelier, but to no advantage. On one occasion he sent his servant to bring a bottle to the quarterdeck, and distributed drink to the inferior officers, including the ‘young gentlemen’ unfortunate enough to be assigned to his watch. Then, calling for a fiddler to strike up a tune, he commanded his company to dance. A mate, John Murray, seized the lieutenant by the coat to warn him that the commodore might hear the ruckus from the
Salisbury
, and eventually dismissed the servant to avoid further damage.
¹³

No less disturbing were rumours of gratuitous brutality. Farmer himself may have set the pattern, for according to Murray the captain once urged him to ‘beat the scoundrels all round’ in order to get the topsails hoisted faster. If so, it was an appalling example to set before the likes of Drummond. One day a seaman reported to the sick bay complaining of bleeding in an ear. Though the surgeon, John Bullen, could find nothing amiss upon examination, he was perturbed to hear
that Drummond had beaten the sailor about the head with the end of a rope.

The lieutenant’s litany of misdemeanours expanded to include insubordination. Somehow he had an entirely mistaken view that when officer of the watch he had the right to issue every order given on board. The captain directly ordered a ladder to be ‘shipped up’ during Drummond’s watch one day, but the lieutenant had it brought down again because the order had not been given through him. Shortly thereafter Farmer tramped up from his cabin and ascertained what had happened. He exchanged words with Drummond but failed to impose authority.

Almost inevitably the breach widened. The ships reached Table Bay at Cape Town on 3 March 1774. They had survived some punishing weather, and the
Seahorse
needed a new mizzen mast as well as supplies. Working into the bay to join five Dutch and French East Indiamen sheltering there, Farmer lost his longboat, which was swept under the
Seahorse
’s stern as she was turning her bow into the teeth of a strong gale. Capsizing with the loss of two men, the boat’s fate reaffirmed the old lesson that at sea, even entering a haven, danger and death were never far away. But instead of reinforcing the importance of cooperation, the stay at the Cape merely drove the captain and his first lieutenant further apart.

Words between the two grew so heated that Farmer threatened to report Drummond to Commodore Hughes. The lieutenant declared ‘he did not care a pin who he complained to’ for ‘he [Drummond] was first lieutenant of the ship and would be so’. Unwisely Farmer faltered and dropped the matter, and when he spoke to Hughes it was only to request the services of a second lieutenant. At the back of Farmer’s mind was Drummond’s inability to perform satisfactorily, but he did not say so, and when the commodore inspected the
Seahorse
the case the captain made for additional help was simply a general one. Hughes was amenable, nonetheless. He promoted an able seaman, Samuel Abson, to the post of second lieutenant of the
Seahorse
on 6 January 1774. Abson seems to have been an adequate officer because he got command of the
Swallow
in February 1776, but his career was cut short when he drowned two years later.
¹⁴

Allowing his threat against Drummond to lapse, Farmer hoped his difficulties would go away, or maybe that Drummond would mature in time. But he merely advertised his own weakness and encouraged waywardness. There was more trouble ahead.

The long passage across the Indian Ocean began on 23 March, when the ships left Table Bay. They took what was known as the ‘outward’ course, proceeding eastwards to the islands of Amsterdam and St Paul before turning north towards India, rather than by way of Madagascar. For a boy the trip had many fascinations. Horace saw the great guns exercised regularly, and men fish for sharks, and on 5 April he was rated able seaman and sent to watch from the foretop. The reason for this is not clear, but the weather had got squally and gusty again, and there was much to be done aloft. Visibility was often poor, and the day before Nelson got his fresh rating the ships had lost sight of each other in gales and had to use signal fires and guns to keep in touch. Conceivably Farmer decided new eyes were needed above.

Horace, it seems, belonged to what was called the larboard watch, kept originally by Mr Surridge and perhaps now also by Lieutenant Abson. If so he was fortunate, for the starboard watch was in the hands of Lieutenant Drummond, and on that steamy leg between the Cape and Madras it sank into greater disrepute.

The bullying climaxed with a disgraceful attack upon a seaman, Thomas Muckle. He was supposed to have been in the tops with the ‘young gentlemen’ but for some reason went missing. A fuming Drummond sent the boatswain’s mates to find the absentee and haul him onto the quarterdeck, where he was evidently beaten with the end of a rope. Exactly what happened depends on the version preferred, but the chastised Muckle hurried up the main shrouds, either fleeing in fear of his life or merely returning to duty. According to one account he was encouraged to climb by blows aimed at his toes. However, before completing his ascent the unhappy miscreant was summoned back down. If we may believe the testimony of Bullen, the surgeon, Muckle was then struck in the face until he fell to the deck, where Drummond kicked him once or twice as he lay helpless. Though sent up to the top again, and told to climb in silence, the sailor reported to the sick bay the next day. His shoulders were bruised, his face swollen, one eye was inflamed and he complained of a pain in his side.

The best relationships between captains and crews were partnerships. In return for the loyalty and industry of the men, the good captain offered protection. As far as he was able, he ensured the crew got fair treatment, and he was prepared to intervene with superiors and naval authorities to secure the payment of wages or prize money
owed, or to assist the injured get necessary compensation. Many captains took these obligations extremely seriously and amassed considerable followings among their men, followings that went with them from ship to ship. But conversely, captains who disappointed their men attracted little support and found their standing and authority undermined.

While crews accepted a measure of corporal punishment, they quickly turned against officers who perpetrated or condoned gratuitous brutality. We cannot say how Farmer stood with his men, but he had failed to protect at least one of them from an incompetent lieutenant. It seems that the captain learned of Drummond’s excesses and summoned him, Surridge and probably Abson into his cabin to declare that he would not suffer an officer to strike the men.

It was not the issue that finally prompted him to act decisively, however. That occurred on the evening of 19 April, some time in Drummond’s dogwatch between the hours of four and six in the afternoon. The quarterdeck was crowded with inferior officers, while others, including Lodington, one of Nelson’s companions, were working on a damaged main mast. Farmer wanted the fore-topgallant sail set to catch more wind and ordered Murray, the mate, to see to it. Drummond, still labouring under the misapprehension that all orders had to pass through himself, protested in public, and the captain and lieutenant went head to head before an astonished audience. Farmer said he would order Drummond below, to which the irate lieutenant replied that the quarterdeck belonged to the king, not Farmer, and as he carried the king’s commission none but His Majesty could tell him to leave it. In effect he was denying the captain’s right to command. Turning to the embarrassed spectators Farmer could only appeal, ‘Gentlemen, is this to be borne?’