Nelson (77 page)

Back on board the
Agamemnon
Nelson entertained the Hamiltons and other English expatriates to a ten o’clock breakfast, an event one suspects that was largely of Emma’s making. The captain duly found himself shaking hands and bowing to the Bishop of Winchester, Mrs Henrietta North, Lord and Lady Plymouth, Lord Grandison and Lady Gertrude Villiers. But the pleasure of the king’s company was again and finally foregone. At noon, just before the breakfast guests were departing in readiness for His Majesty, a message from Sir John Acton arrived. A French frigate with an English prize and two French merchantmen had been seen off the southern tip of Sardinia on the 12th. They had been repairing topmasts at the time, and there was a chance that Nelson might catch them if he hurried. With seven Neapolitan ships and a Spanish frigate in the harbour, he did not hesitate. Though Nelson’s ship had not finished provisioning and some of her casks were still ashore, he felt on trial. ‘I considered that the city of Naples looked what an English man of war would do, [and] I ordered my barge to be manned, sent the ladies on shore, and in two hours my ship was under sail . . .’
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There was something special about Naples. Goethe had spoken of it as a ‘paradise’ in which ‘everyone lives in a state of intoxicated self-forgetfulness’. As the city faded behind the wake of the
Agamemnon
, Nelson too tasted that heady draught. It is not difficult to understand why. Naples had given Nelson everything he craved in abundance. Here he had met exciting new friends, who had thrown their house open to him and attended his every need. Here he had met a prime minister and king who had feted and flattered him, and granted his every wish. Here, too, he had been treated with immense reverence, and placed above all others. Thousands of men had been instantly mobilised at his command. Within hours of Nelson’s departure from Naples two thousand soldiers, two seventy-fours, four frigates and corvettes and a transport were on their way to Toulon. Nelson lapped up his new status like a thirsty dog. Never had he been treated like this before, and as Naples receded he was in a state of warm euphoria.
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In a journal clearly written with posterity in mind, Nelson confided, ‘I believe we carry with us the good wishes of Naples, and of Sir William and Lady Hamilton in particular, which I esteem more than all the rest. Farewell Naples! May those who were kind to me be repaid ten-fold. If I am successful, I return. If otherwise, [I] go to Toulon.’
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Nelson’s plan to return to Naples went awry, however, and the French frigate eluded him. He was left with a mysterious incident that took place in the night of 18 September. Nelson was summoned from his cot with the news that two ships seemed to be converging upon the
Agamemnon
from different directions. It was dark, but Nelson suspected the sinister shapes materialising from the gloom might be Algerian pirates mistaking the British warship for a fat merchantman. Two days before he had heard that two such raiders had plundered a ship in the area, and receiving no replies to his signals he fired a fusillade of round and grape and closed in. By the time the British were able to board the two vessels, which turned out to be a ship and a galley, they had been abandoned. Both were armed with ten guns and swivels, and many small arms were found aboard, but the prize court in Leghorn later considered them harmless Genoese traders. Nelson rued that he did not even get salvage money.
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Soon he was at Leghorn himself, collecting the various prize crews he had sent there and replenishing his ship’s supplies. His men were worn out by the relentless service, and three died in a week. ‘I am going into Leghorn absolutely to save my poor fellows,’ Nelson wrote.
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Leghorn belonged to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, one of the small neutral powers that complicated war and displomacy in the Mediterranean. When the
Agamemnon
arrived on 25 September, John Udny, the British consul, came aboard to inform Captain Nelson about local sensibilities. Things could be better, Udny said. Apart from the disappointments in the prize courts, the British had annoyed the governor by trying to ship oxen to Hood’s fleet in Toulon. A fortygun French frigate,
L’Imperieuse
, was also in the harbour, full of diehard republicans. Like many of the French ships at that time it was in a state of turmoil, and the captain was being deposed by his men. Looking at her through his telescope Nelson judged the frigate easy prey, but his hands were tied. This was a neutral port, open to belligerents of both sides so long as they observed a truce. Nelson kept the Frenchman under constant surveillance, ready to follow her the moment she ran for the open sea, but days passed without the frigate stirring. Finally Nelson blinked first. He was needed in Toulon and had to sail at the end of the month.
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Along the way he took two more prizes, both carrying supplies to
the French garrisons in Corsica. One was a Genoese bark with hides and fruit and the other a Frenchman laden with wine. Nelson also saw the Neapolitan reinforcements at sea. When he reached Toulon on 5 October the first two contingents from Naples had already arrived, and the last, with provisions and thirty-two pieces of artillery, was due to sail. As the
Agamemnon
slipped among the other British ships in the outer roads Nelson realised how badly those reinforcements were needed, for affairs at Toulon had taken a turn for the worse.

Hood’s position was serious. A superior French army investing the town had gained command of the surrounding heights. Its artillery, including pieces served by an ambitious young officer named Napoleon Bonaparte, were throwing shot and shells at the allied forts and across the harbour. Hood had fifteen miles of vulnerable defences to man, and was putting together a polyglot force of 12,500 Britons, Spaniards, Neapolitans, Sardinians and Piedmontese, but the redcoats were few and many of the others proved almost useless. The Spaniards, who were holding important positions, appeared to confuse their right and left shoulders in drill, and were apt to ‘run away, officers and men together’. Yet Hood’s ships sat as oblivious to the descending shells as if they were anchored in Spithead, and the admiral remained optimistic. He still hoped for major reinforcements, his men were conducting brilliant sorties against the encircling forces and there were hopes that the besiegers would quarrel among themselves. When Nelson went on board the
Victory
on 6 October it was difficult not to catch some of the old admiral’s enthusiasm. ‘He is so good an officer that every body must respect him,’ Nelson told his wife.
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He was a hard taskmaster though, with steely words for those such as the captain of the
Iris
who tried to excuse failure. Nelson’s performance at Naples pleased Hood, however, and he asked the captain what he could do for him. Typically, Nelson’s thoughts were for his followers and Hood promised to serve the
Agamemnon
’s officers. Bullen and Suckling were taken aboard the flagship and promised promotion. Bullen became a commander before the end of November, while Suckling received his commission as a lieutenant the following March, and got the command of the small
St Croix
to boot. In August 1794, Hood took Fellows, another of Nelson’s young gentlemen, into the
Victory
.

Hood also had further orders for Nelson, and the
Agamemnon
left the fleet on the evening of 9 October. He was bound for Cagliari in
Sardinia, where he was to join the squadron of Commodore Robert Linzee of the
Alcide
. Linzee’s squadron had just failed to uproot the French garrisons in Corsica, and the island remained a good hunting ground for prizes as numerous small ships slipped back and forth with enemy supplies. Skirting the eastern coast of Corsica on the 16th the
Agamemnon
intercepted a French tartan,
L’Aimable
, on its way from Bastia to Toulon with sixty-five sick soldiers. He entrusted the prize to the British
Colossus
, which was making for Leghorn, and spent the next day trying to flush a French privateer from the nearby island of Capraia, a possession of neutral Genoa. Landing one of his officers, Nelson got the permission of the local governor to move against the elusive Frenchman, and sent Hinton in with two rowing boats loaded with armed men. The privateer was nowhere to be seen, but on the 18th Hinton brought out a Genoese vessel from Bastia, laden with French wheat.
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Then, having sent the prize to Cagliari with a skeleton crew, Nelson sailed into his first real sea fight.

Two o’clock in the morning, 22 October 1793, off Monte Santo on the east coast of Sardinia. The
Agamemnon
was steering south on its passage to Cagliari when five sails were seen ahead, standing across their path to the northwest. No one could make them out, either from the quarterdeck or the fighting tops, but Nelson supposed the ships to be Neapolitan or Sardinian. But they were certainly large ships, possibly even sail of the line . . . in the darkness it was possible to take one of them for the
Duquesne
, an eighty-gun French ship known to be at large.

About thirty minutes passed before the distant ships spotted the
Agamemnon
approaching. Nelson watched as signal rockets flew above the strangers, and then they tacked across the wind and stood away to the eastwards, in the direction of the open sea. The ships were some three miles away on the windward bow and Nelson turned to pursue.

The
Agamemnon
may have been a ship of the line, but under sail she sped like a frigate and by four Nelson had come within hailing distance of the nearest of the ships. She was plainly a big frigate, but Nelson was puzzled by her shyness and uncertain of her nationality so he withheld his fire. The men waited anxiously at their stations as
the captain had the stranger hailed in French. There was no answer. Instead the frigate made more sail. Nelson opened his lower gun ports, and fired an eighteen-pound shot ahead of her as a signal to come to, but this merely prompted the frigate to run for it. She fired more rockets to signal her consorts to windward and crammed on all sail.

Nelson now ordered all his sails to be set, and chased the enemy ship, trying to keep her within two compass points on the bow to prevent her from gaining any advantages of the wind. At the same time he kept an eye on the other ships which were coming after him on his windward quarter, and wondered what part they might play if there was a serious battle. The frigate had a start on him, and in a fresh breeze the pace reached six or so knots, but by daylight the
Agamemnon
had got within gunshot again. By five they were at half gun range. The French, who had been signalling to each other all night, now raised their colours in defiance. It was an accepted custom of war that a ship never fired under a false or masked flag, and every officer on Nelson’s quarterdeck knew that there would now be a fight. Puffs of smoke from the frigate’s stern guns opened the exchange.

Now Nelson got a smart, and perhaps surprising, lesson in battle tactics. The enemy ship was the
Melpomene
of forty guns, ‘one of the finest [frigates] ever built in France’, according to Hood, and she was exceptionally well handled by Captain Gay, an officer with a reputation for intrepidity. Gay resorted to ‘yawing’, periodically bringing his ship’s head round to allow her broadside guns to bear instead of relying solely upon her small stern battery. The tactic posed a considerable threat to the
Agamemnon
, because it exposed the pursuing British ship’s vulnerable bows to terrific discharges while Nelson was confined to the use of his few forward bow-chaser guns. As Midshipman Hoste noted, ‘our situation was rather unfavourable, as our shot did not at all times hit her’. The
Agamemnon
was saved from severe damage and casualties by the French custom of firing high to tear away masts, yards, sails and rigging. Her main topmast was ‘shot to pieces’, and her mainmast, mizzenmast and fore yard seriously damaged, but only one man was killed and six wounded, apparently from wreckage crashing down from above.
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Despite the frigate’s attempts to cripple Nelson’s advance, he gradually worked close enough to get in broadsides of his own, and the British gunners fearlessly wreaked their revenge, blasting at the
Melpomene
’s hull, throwing wooden splinters about and cutting men
down. Nelson greatly exaggerated when he claimed to have reduced the frigate to a ‘shattered’ if not a sinking condition, but even young Hoste, who had no superiors to appease, told his father that ‘our last broadside did her infinite damage’.

While firing was continuing Nelson anxiously swept the other enemy ships on his weather quarter with a telescope, and thought he could pick out a ship of the line, two frigates and a brig. Though poor sailers compared with the
Melpomene
, they were coming up fast, and Nelson doubted whether he could finish the frigate off before they entered the fight. At about seven he summoned his officers and asked them whether they agreed that the biggest vessel on the weather quarter was a line of battle ship. They thought so, though erroneously. In fact, she was the forty-gun frigate
La Minerve
(Captain Zacharie Allemand), armed with twenty-six eighteens and fourteen nines, while her consorts were two frigates and a fine corvette, the thirty-six-gun
La Fortunée
,
Le Mignonne
of thirty-two guns and the twenty-gun
La Flêche
. The
Agamemnon
was more than a match for any one of her antagonists, but together they considerably outgunned and outnumbered the British ship, and their manpower was far greater. Nelson’s company had been reduced by the crews he had put on prizes, and only three hundred and fifty men now stood at their quarters. There were probably more on the
Melpomene
alone.
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