Nelson: The Essential Hero (51 page)

Situated as this fleet has been, without a friendly port, where we could get all the things so necessary to us, yet I have, by changing the cruising ground, not allowed the sameness of prospect to satiate the mind - sometimes by looking at Toulon, Ville Franche, Barcelona, and Rosas; then running round Minorca, Majorca, Sardinia and Corsica; and two or three times anchoring for a few days, and sending a ship to the last place for
onions
, which I find the best thing that can be given to seamen; having always good mutton for the sick, cattle when we can get them, and plenty of fresh water. In the winter it is the best plan to give half the allowance of grog, instead of all wine.

Later, in December 1804, he wrote in a letter to the Admiralty: ‘The Fleet is in perfect good health and good humour, unequalled by anything which has ever come within my knowledge, and equal to the most active service which the times may call for.’ He had the perfect instrument to his hand, and now all that was required was the opportunity to use it.

The quarters from which his correspondence was conducted -innumerable private letters, quite apart from the dictated letters to the Prime Minister, the Admiralty, the Fleet, and British consuls and representatives around the Mediterranean - were comfortable enough for a man who had grown up in a simple Norfolk parsonage and known the rigours of a midshipman’s berth. They lay immediately beneath those of Captain Hardy, which in their turn were immediately below the poop deck. There were three rooms in all: the stateroom at the stem with its nine windows, where he worked with his secretaries and attended to formal business; the dining-room from which a staircase led to the upper deck; and his sleeping-cabin - the latter twelve foot by twenty, whereas the dining-room was thirty-five foot wide. Personal attendants, including Chevalier, his Italian steward, occupied adjacent cabins. Mahogany furniture of provincial Georgian design, handsome but without especial elegance, stood out against a canvas-covered floor painted in black and white chequers. Emma’s portrait, caught sometimes by flashing sun or illuminated by candlelight at night, watched over the prematurely ageing, seasick man who directed from these ever-moving quarters the innumerable affairs of the whole Mediterranean command. William Beatty, a doctor who was later to record Nelson’s dying hours and to perform the autopsy on his body, recorded how Nelson generally walked on deck for six or seven hours of the day :

He ate very sparingly, the liver and wing of a fowl and small plate of macaroni in general composing his meal, during which he occasionally took a glass of champagne. . . . He possessed such a wonderful activity of wind, as even prevented him from taking ordinary repose, seldom enjoying two hours of uninterrupted sleep; and on several occasions he did not quit the deck the whole night. At these times he took no pains to protect himself from the wet, or the night air; wearing only a thin coat; and he has frequently, after having his clothes wet through with rain, refused to have them changed, saying that the leather waistcoat which he wore over his flannel one would secure him from complaint. He seldom wore boots, and was consequently very liable to have his feet wet. When this occurred he has often been known to go down to his cabin, throw off his clothes, and walk on the carpet in his stockings for the purpose of drying the feet on them. He chose to adopt this uncomfortable expedient, rather than to give his servants the trouble of assisting him to put on fresh stockings, which, from his having only one hand, he could not himself conveniently effect.

Frigates, or rather the lack of them, were his constant source of concern. Without enough of these eyes of the fleet it was almost impossible to keep an adequate watch on the French coastline, while at the same time permitting his ships-of-the-line to patrol out of sight below the horizon, or be withdrawn for necessary victualling, repairs, and watering. ‘From Cape St Vincent to the Adriatic, I have only eight . . .’ and, ‘I want ten more than I have in order to watch that the French do not escape me.’ His problems were considerably heightened by the fact that the Spaniards had once again indicated that their interests were linked with France, and subsequent to a treaty of friendship signed in October 1803 were allowing a French 74,
Aigle
, to operate out of Cadiz. Nelson had no equivalent ship to spare out of his small force in Gibraltar, and was compelled to order his frigate commander in the area not to attempt to attack her. He was convinced that no two or even three frigates were a match for a 74, and he could in no way afford to have his small force of fast lookouts sunk, or put out of commission. While he dealt with all these affairs he never for a moment forgot Emma, Horatia, and Merton.

In the lash of gales, as the mistral roared down into the Gulf of Lions, or in hot sultry days of autumn when the sirocco pushed up a swell from the south and the ships sweated with humidity - he dreamed of his home. ‘For the winter, the carriage can be put in the barn. The new building, the chamber over the dining-room, you must consider. The stair window, we settled, was not to be stopped up.’ Mail was very irregular, brought only by the arrival of a new ship in the Mediterranean, and it was not until March 1804 that he received the painful letter that told him that Emma had borne him a second daughter who had died within a few weeks. There were to be no sons, then; the name and title would in any case go elsewhere, his ‘wife’ could not be acknowledged, and his only daughter would grow up as ‘Miss Horatia Nelson Thomson’. None of his intimates, none of his captains, suspected that the Admiral had any personal concerns or worries. His life was devoted to the fleet. On St George’s Day, 1804, he was gazetted Vice-Admiral of the White (the rank in which he died).

Early in 1804 Latouche-Treville began to exercise his ships out of the harbour of Toulon. He had need to, for, however well his fleet might be equipped and prepared, he knew well enough that the men could not be exercised in harbour — and that the enemy whose topsails fringed the horizon was as familiar as a fish with the environment upon which the issue must one day be decided. ‘My friend Monsieur La Touche, wrote Nelson, ‘sometimes plays bo-peep in and out of Toulon, like a mouse at the edge of a hole. On 9 April, ‘a rear admiral and seven sail, including frigates, put their nose outside the harbour. If they go on playing this game, some day we shall lay salt upon their tails, and so end the campaign.’ He was far less amused when, later that summer, a sortie made by Latouche-Treville in person - to which Nelson responded by standing towards him - was interpreted by the latter as a refusal by the British fleet to give battle. ‘You will have seen Monsieur La Touche’s letter,’ he wrote in fury to his brother William, ‘of how he chased me, and how I
ran.
I keep it; and, by God, if I take him, he shall
eat
it! There is no doubt he meant what he said, but the encounter was never to take place. In August 1804 Latouche-Treville died, his place being taken by Vice Admiral Villeneuve. ‘He has given me the slip,’ wrote Nelson. ‘The French papers say he died of walking so often up to the signal-post to watch us: I always pronounced that would be his death.’ His new adversary, Villeneuve, had also given Nelson the slip once before - at Aboukir Bay. He was destined to do so again, and to cause Nelson the greatest anguish of his professional life, only to be brought to bay in the scarred waters off Cape Trafalgar.

By the
midsummer of 1804 Nelson’s health was so bad that he had applied to be sent home. It was not only his failing eyesight that plagued him, but also a flare-up of that internal injury which he had suffered during the Battle of St Vincent. He had a bad cough, and he found that his coughing bouts triggered off the pain in his stomach. There is no doubt that on this occasion his desire to return home was very genuinely on health grounds, for he went on to say : ‘No officer could be placed in a more agreeable Command, and no Command ever produced so much happiness to a Commander-in-Chief.’ In one sense, however, he was not happy with what had happened to his Command, for a part of it - and the most lucrative - had been taken away from him and given to Sir John Orde. It was Orde who had quarrelled with St Vincent about the latter’s appointment of Nelson to lead the squadron which had broken into the Mediterranean in the spring of 1798. Now, so ill with gout that he could not leave his cabin, he had been given the section of the Mediterranean command which lay to the west of Gibraltar and extended to Cape Finisterre. This was the very area in which most prize-money was to be made and Nelson, permanently worried about money, could hardly help complaining that: ‘He is sent off Cadiz to reap the golden harvest. .. . But never mind : I am superior to those who could treat me so. I believe I attach more to the French fleet than making captures.’

On 11 January 1805 Nelson’s ships anchored in Maddalena roadstead to take on water. Before leaving the patrol line off Toulon he had satisfied himself that it did not look as if Villeneuve was likely to proceed to sea, but he had left behind two frigates to maintain the watch in the event of his doing so. On the nineteenth the frigates H.M.S.
Active
and
Seahorse
came bustling down to the anchorage. Telescopes flashed to read the flags at their yards, and immediately the fleet was suffused with joy and activity. The signal for which the British had waited for so many long months was flying: ‘The Enemy is at sea.’ Within three hours of the news being received the
Victory
led out through the rocky, narrow passage to the east. It was difficult for large vessels at any time, but with the wind that was blowing Nelson could not pass through the Bonifacio Straits. The only news the frigates could give him was that Villeneuve seemed to be headed for the southern end of Sardinia. He concluded from this that their destination was either Naples, Sicily, or the eastern Mediterranean. Unfortunately, no sooner was the British fleet out than it ran into a full southerly gale and for three days could make no headway, or gain any news of the enemy’s course. It was not until the twenty-sixth that Nelson learned that the French
Indomitable
of 80 guns had been dismasted in the gale and had taken refuge in Ajaccio. Nothing was known about the rest of the fleet except that it had not attempted Sardinia, and had not been seen off Cagliari. If they had been bound for Sicily they would certainly have been sighted.

Once again the British fleet drove through the Messina Straits. Unlike that occasion seven years before, they were not in pursuit of Brueys, Napoleon, and the Army of the East, but, as Nelson thought, of Villeneuve and the Toulon squadron. His reasoning was sound, he was indeed anticipating what had been Napoleon’s original plan, but he was not to know that all had been changed again - and that the French fleet was licking its wounds in harbour. On 29 January, off the Faro of Messina, he wrote to the Admiralty explaining the circumstances that had prompted his course; ‘One of two things must have happened, that either the French Fleet must have put back crippled [after the gale] or that they are gone to the Eastward, probably to Egypt. . . .’ Viscount Melville was now First Lord of the Admiralty, and over a fortnight later Nelson was writing to him, as he had once written sadly to St Vincent, that he had been unable to find the French: 'I considered the character of Buonaparte; and that the orders given by him, on the banks of the Seine, would not take into consideration winds and weather. . . .’ He had been to the Morea and then to Alexandria. He returned in anguish of spirits to Malta, where he finally learned the truth.

In the meantime Napoleon had yet again changed his plans. Villeneuve’s delay meant that there was now no time for him to make a rendezvous with Rear-Admiral Missiessy in the West Indies. The latter, who had managed to elude the blockading British off Rochefort, had failed in his attempts against the British-held islands in the Caribbean. Summoned back to Rochefort he had been dismissed his command by Napoleon for failing to capture Diamond Rock, that islet off Martinique which had been seized by the British in 1804 and which menaced Port Royal, capital of the French West Indies. Villeneuve, now that his ships were repaired, was ordered to sail from Toulon to Cadiz. Here he was to collect whatever Spanish ships were ready, and proceed to Martinique where he was to be joined by Ganteaume. The latter was to evade the British blockade of Brest with his twenty-one ships-of-the-line, pick up whatever French and Spanish ships could escape from Rochefort and Ferrol, and sail for his rendezvous with Villeneuve. Having alarmed the British for the safety of their Caribbean possessions - no doubt provoking Nelson to follow them across the Atlantic - the combined French fleet was to avoid major action and return to the Channel. Here they would, it was assumed, defeat Cornwallis’s ships and secure the safe crossing of the invasion army. On paper, all - at least to the military mind of the Emperor - looked relatively simple. But what Napoleon could never understand was that the movements of ships upon seas and oceans were so very different from the movement of armies upon the land. The juncture of fleets could not be easily correlated; frigates sent with despatches failed to find the admiral for whom they were destined; above all, the vagaries of wind and weather could never be calculated.