Nelson (44 page)

Thither shall youthful heroes climb,
The Nelsons of an aftertime,
And round that sacred altar swear
Such glory and such graves to share.

John Wilson Croker,
Songs of Trafalgar

A
NTIGUA
, the largest of the British Leeward Islands, sweltered in latitude seventeen degrees. A mere 108 square miles, it was set in bright blue Caribbean seas that swept over coral reefs onto pale sandy beaches, penetrated secluded coves or lashed themselves into a milky foam against craggy promontories. The island’s central valleys were dotted with sugar plantations maintained by thirty-five thousand black and mulatto slaves, a system of which Nelson was largely ignorant and wholly uncritical. The countryside was sprinkled with cane-producing windmills, but the only significant extended settlement was St John’s in the northwest, a town of eighteen hundred houses and huts with spacious but unpaved streets sprouting scrub and prickly pear.

In August 1784, however, His Majesty’s frigate
Boreas
lay in English Harbour on the south coast, a couple of interlocking anchorages hidden from the sea and sheltered by green, lofty hills. There, in a broiling sun trap, even the winters were warm. In the summers, secured from the northeast trades that gave relief elsewhere, the air became uncomfortably hot and the water itself stagnant and fetid. There was only one spring and storage tanks were needed to conserve fresh water.
English Harbour was nevertheless naturally strong. Ships entered through a thin strait flanked by Fort Berkeley and the Horse-shoe battery and steered a few points to larboard to pass northwards through the outer anchorage and into a second channel, graced by a small sixty-year-old dockyard on the left. Once inside the inner anchorage, another turn to larboard enabled them to be warped into a secure berth. More than a haven difficult for enemies to breach, English Harbour was also a bolt hole safe from the cyclones that stormed over these seas between August and October. That, more than anything else, was why Captain Nelson was shut in the place, waiting for the hurricanes to blow themselves out.

A peacetime commission was a dull blessing at any time, but English Harbour had few attractions. The dockyard consisted of little more than a few wooden warehouses and workshops, with a ‘neat’ house for the naval commander of the station made from a storehouse near the wharf. At the head of the three-quarter-mile harbour, situated furthest north in the inner anchorage, was a hospital and powder magazine, while across the narrows from the dockyard rose Mount Prospect with a house flying a flag upon its summit. Positioned to escape the worst of the dockyard clamour and to gain the cooler air above, the residence was named ‘Windsor’ and housed John Moutray, the resident dockyard commissioner, and his wife Mary.
¹

Nelson spent much of his time on board the
Boreas
. His cabin occupied the full width of the aftermost part of the upper deck, with gun ports at the sides, and a row of stern windows through which the brilliant tropical light could relieve the gloom. The quarters were divided into a day cabin, a dining area to which Nelson’s servants brought food from the ship’s galley and a place where his cot was slung from the beams. A gallery at the stern supplied a convenience. On the voyage out chivalry had probably banished Captain Nelson to one of the officers’ cabins in the gun room below, while Lady Hughes and her daughter used his own quarters, but now the suite was again at his disposal. Frugally furnished and dimly lit, it provided sanctuary, with a red-coated marine standing guard outside his door with a musket and bayonet. Thus protected, Nelson read, reflected and wrote between his duties on deck and the occasional business ashore.

The outward passage had not been as bad as Nelson had feared.

True, his quarterdeck had been crowded, but although Lady Hughes was ‘an eternal clack’ time had shown her a ‘very pleasant good’ person, while the many young gentlemen darting here and there had become ‘my dear good children’. Captain Nelson loved young people, and saw himself in their thirst for adventure. He fussed over them like a proud father, daily haunting the schoolroom to monitor their progress, and ensuring they learned every kind of task. ‘All the youngsters, I hope, learnt and did the[ir] duty, from rigging the topgallant mast to stowing the ballast; they never were confined to any particular part of the service,’ he recalled. ‘The trouble of breeding up officers properly I need not state, and it is only by their turning out good men that a captain is repaid.’
²

At noon, when the boys assembled on deck to calculate the ship’s position with the master, they also found Nelson there with his quadrant; and when the
Boreas
‘crossed the line’ in June, by which phase our informant must have meant the Tropic of Cancer rather than the Equator, they were bled and given ‘purgative medicines’ on the orders of a captain mindful of the health of those who had never seen the tropics before. In the opinion of First Lieutenant James Wallis the youngsters benefited from these ministrations to a ‘wonderful’ degree.
³

Lady Hughes was also impressed by Nelson’s ‘attention’ to the boys and his patience with those still learning their trade. He ‘never rebuked’ those intimidated by the fearful climbs aloft, she noticed. ‘Well, sir,’ he told one reluctant apprentice, ‘I am going a race to the mast-head, and beg I may meet you there.’ As she recalled it, ‘No denial could be given to such a wish, and the poor little fellow instantly began his march. His lordship [Nelson] never took the least notice with what alacrity it was done, but when he met [the boy] in the top instantly began speaking in the most cheerful manner, and saying how much a person was to be pitied that could fancy there was any danger, or even any thing disagreeable in the attempt. After this excellent example, I have seen the timid youth lead another, and rehearse his captain’s words.’ According to Lady Hughes, the boys responded to their captain with adulation and vied with each other for his approval.
⁴

On 2 June, the day after the
Boreas
reached Funchal in Madeira, Lady Hughes and her daughter accompanied Nelson, his brother and
senior officers ashore to visit the Portuguese governor. As the boat pulled from the ship it fired a salute for her ladyship but it was not this she remembered but the entourage of ten young gentlemen in the captain’s train. It resembled a school outing, with excited juveniles outnumbering their supervisors. ‘I make it a rule to introduce them to all the good company I can,’ Nelson explained, ‘as they have few to look up to besides myself during the time they are at sea.’ He understood that though the boys were receiving lessons in mathematics, navigation and seamanship from the master, their formal education contained little about fighting and commanding a ship. For that they had to rely upon role models, and Nelson was determined to be the best he could. At Funchal his budding Nelsons not only learned something about international niceties, but also the fraternity of all seafarers, because Nelson supplied emergency rations to a Danish frigate.
⁵

Yet even on this first voyage there were indications that Nelson’s partnership with the
Boreas
might frustrate more than excite. The captain did not enthuse about the ship in his usual fashion, and a few hard cases were beginning to emerge among the crew. In Plymouth one of the seamen, Thomas Johnston, had grumbled when his wife and the other women on board were ordered off the ship just before sailing. Standing between decks near the fore hatchway, where he could be heard by men loading water and beer into the hold, Johnston declared that ‘if his wife was not permitted to go out in the ship, that no woman should go out in her’. Ordinary ratings were not allowed to take wives and sweethearts to sea, although officers sometimes did, and female passengers were not uncommon. Evidently Johnston took exception to the Hughes women and the wife of Daniel Letsome Peers, the purser, being given passage. His words sounded subversive and Bromwich reported them to Lieutenant Wallis. Nelson called Johnston onto the quarterdeck to warn him ‘what the consequences would be if he continued to make use of improper expressions’, but left it at that. Unfortunately, Johnston did not improve. Indeed, he took pride in his incorrigibility. ‘I am reckoned one of the worst men in the ship,’ he later bragged, claiming that if his fellows had been ‘as bad’ the
Boreas
‘would never have got . . . to Barbados or Antigua’.
⁶

A truculent marine named John Nairns was also becoming troublesome. Though generally attentive to duty he was ‘frequently drunk’ and threatening to hit one officer or another. Off Madeira, Nairns earned one of the three floggings seen on the outward voyage by receiving a dozen strokes for abusing his sergeant, John Cochran, but
he remained unreformed. At Barbados he struck a petty officer and was lucky that the victim chose not to make an issue of it.
⁷

Nelson, too, was unusually contentious throughout his spell in the Leeward Islands. As a rising officer he had generally endeared himself to superiors and peers, and had few bad words for any of them. But during this command he was forever standing upon his dignity, and reacting powerfully and sometimes tactlessly to fancied affronts or anything that smacked of slackness of duty. Although many have admired his conduct and seen courage and principle in it, a few historians have admitted the strain of arrogant intemperance and self-righteous pedantry that developed. Out in these islands Nelson tended to be irritable, uncompromising and severe with his men. He was, of course, still in his twenties, and might be excused the confidence and follies of youth, but professional frustration, sexual tension and indifferent health may also have influenced his behaviour.

An early example of this punctilio had occurred at Funchal. Nelson’s time there had been pleasant enough. He embarked some wine to soften up the governor of Dominica, with whom he intended to broach the matter of lands Captain Locker had inherited there, saluted the king’s birthday, fraternised with the captain of the
Resource
and sent his brother ashore to preach in an English trade factory. But he took umbrage when Charles Murray, the English consul, neglected to return a visit Nelson had made, and grumpily declined to have further dealings with the man. The quarrel, he admitted to Locker, was rooted in nothing more than ‘a little etiquette about visiting’, but there would be similar occasions in the next few years. Salutes were another raw spot. Any failure to fire the correct number of guns to acknowledge his flag he deemed a national insult. There must have been diplomatic ways of correcting such oversights but Horatio was not always good at finding them. The governor of the Dutch island of St Eustatius received one protest, and in December 1784 Nelson even fired two nine-pounders at the British fort at Barbados for neglecting to salute a national French schooner leaving port.
⁸

However, leaving Funchal on 8 June the
Boreas
had reached Carlisle Bay, Barbados, in the Windward Islands eighteen days later. Here things had looked up. Rear Admiral Sir Richard Hughes, commander-in-chief in the Leeward Islands, was there in the
Adamant
, along with a number of other captains. It was with ‘no small degree of satisfaction’ that Nelson discovered he stood next to Hughes in seniority, and was consequently second-in-command of the station. As such he had
the privilege of presiding over the courts martial in Carlisle Bay. Moreover, the admiral seemed to bear him no grudges for their previous difficulty. Hughes came aboard the
Boreas
the day she arrived, reclaiming his family and the dispatches Nelson had brought from the Admiralty. Lady Hughes gave Horatio an excellent ‘character’, and Sir Richard was relentlessly amiable, regretting only that Nelson did not have the opportunity to ‘partake of family fare’ at his table more often. On his perambulations ashore the admiral dutifully introduced Horatio to all the eminent islanders.
⁹

Nelson had left Barbados on 20 July with orders to ‘lay up’ for the hurricane season in English Harbour. He sailed northwards by way of Martinique and Dominica. Dominica was merely a wood and water stop, but at the French island of Martinique Horatio was at his most insistent. He berated the governor for not greeting His Britannic Majesty’s ship with colours above the citadel, and only when national dishonour had been expunged by an exchange of fifteen-gun salutes between frigate and fort did fraternisation commence. The governor visited the
Boreas
, and Captain Nelson went ashore, each greeted by salutes of eleven guns. Nelson arrived accompanied by as many young gentlemen as could tumble into his boat, and enquired after some British seamen in the town jail. He also discovered that the French officer who had been inattentive to his ship’s colours when he arrived had likewise been incarcerated, and upon reflection allowed his inherent generosity to prevail. Horatio gallantly pleaded for the offender’s release. All things put to rights, the
Boreas
eventually sailed into English Harbour on 28 July.
¹⁰

The Leeward Islands squadron divided for the hurricane season. At the island of Grenada was stationed Nelson’s old friend Cuthbert Collingwood, with his forty-four-gun frigate the
Mediator
and two sloops, the
Rattler
and the
Experiment
, the first under the younger Collingwood brother, Wilfred. The rest of the ships were with the
Boreas
at English Harbour – the
Adamant
(Captain William Kelly), flying the flag of Sir Richard Hughes; the
Latona
frigate under Captain Charles Sandys; the
Unicorn
,
Zebra
,
Fury
and
Falcon
, all sloops and brigs, respectively commanded by Charles Stirling, Edward Pakenham, William Smith and Velters Cornelius Berkeley; and the
Berbice
tender of William Lucas. It was a contemptible flotilla compared to some of the fleets Nelson had known, but he had authority within it and organised both the captains’ mess and any necessary courts martial. Briefly, before the tedium wore him down, there was a little satisfaction.