Nelson: The Essential Hero (7 page)

In January 1780 an ambitious scheme was evolved by the headquarters staff at Port Royal who, like many planners before and since, could read their maps and estimate the benefits to be obtained by success, but could not in any degree envisage the climate and the territory where what looked so easy on paper would prove almost impossible in practice. The object of the expedition seemed logical in

the extreme : land a force at the mouth of the San Juan river, proceed up it, capture Fort San Juan, and thus obtain control of Lake Nicaragua. Holding Lake Nicaragua, ‘the inland Gibraltar of Spanish America’, they would then have the route open before them all the way to the Pacific. They would seize the cities of Granada and Leon, which were reported to be fabulously wealthy, and, having reached the Pacific, would have succeeded in cutting America in half. The dream which inspired Governor Dalling at Port Royal was as ambitious as anything that was later to beckon Napoleon : none other than the establishment of a new empire in the southern part of America, which would more than equal the one that the British were on the verge of losing in the north.

Unfortunately neither sufficient men nor materiel were available for so ambitious a project; even more serious was the ignorance of the real nature of the terrain through which this task force was to proceed. The Governor of Jamaica could spare little more than 500 men and the expedition arrived on the Mosquito coast in the unhealthy rainy season. The Indians upon whom they had been relying to supply river transport and guides, believing that they had come to take them as slaves to Jamaica, disappeared on their arrival. Nelson, who had been detailed to escort the soldiers in the
Hinchinbrooke
and to provide a naval shore party, volunteered to command the small contingent of sailors and marines. He described how ‘I quitted my ship, carried troops in boats one hundred miles up a river, which none but the Spaniards since the time of the buccaneers had ever ascended . . . boarded (if I may be allowed the expression) an outpost of the Enemy, situated on an Island in the river; that I made batteries, and afterwards fought them, and was a principal cause of our success’.

Nelson was never prone to self-effacement, and all through his life would sound his own trumpet whenever he saw fit to do so. The fact is that the attitude of mock modesty, of ‘not I, but so-and-so deserves the praise’, so often associated with the British, is a comparatively new phenomenon. It originated in the days of the nineteenth-century Empire and later, when ‘good form’ (based perhaps on the muscular Christianity of Dr Arnold, Thring and their counterparts) decreed that a man should be brave, but self-effacing. No such idea prevailed in the eighteenth century, when all sang their own praises, knowing full well that in the hard fight for promotion, influence and power precious few other people would do it for them. Nelson, in fact, here as elsewhere, need hardly have bothered. His words are well confirmed by Major Poison, who was in command of the soldiers: ‘A lighthaired boy came to me in a little frigate,’ he wrote. ‘In two or three days he displayed himself, and afterwards he directed all the operations.’ In the official despatch he recorded that ‘He [Nelson] was the first on every service whether by night or day. I want words to express what I owe to that gentleman.’

Toiling upstream through dense rotting vegetation, the sun obscured by the thick growth over their heads, the soldiers and the small party of sailors and marines were exposed to the deadly ‘Yellow Jack’, yellow fever, which haunted that graveyard coast. It was bad enough to be aboard a ship lying off for, as Nelson later wrote to his friend Dr Benjamin Mosely in a note to the latter’s
Treatise on Tropical Diseases
: ‘In the
Hinchinbrooke
, with a complement of two hundred men, eighty-seven took to their beds in one night.’ In his final estimate, ‘very few, not more than ten survived of that ship's crew’. How much worse then was it for the men ashore, wearing uniforms quite unsuited to the tropics, with few medical skills (though they had a doctor with them), and no real knowledge of what risks they ran. They were to be faced by the back-breaking toil of hauling their boats through shallows - only to be met further upstream by boulder-strewn banks and waterfalls. It is surprising, a tribute to their leaders and to their own resilience, that they ever reached Fort San Juan at all.

It was only after seventeen days of nightmare, in the course of which Nelson, sword in hand, led a frontal assault on a small fortified island which lay in their way, that the bedraggled, exhausted and, in many cases, dying troops finally reached their objective. Nelson, his spirit unquenched even though the seeds of disease must already have been active in his body, was all for an immediate assault. In this his instinct was correct, for the Spanish garrison, demoralised by their station and no doubt many of them as ill as the attackers, would hardly have put up much of a fight. Such, however, was not the way of the eighteenth-century military. They had been instructed and trained in the formal and ‘scientific’ methods of the age: the formal siege which, though usually suitable in the terrain of Europe, was quite out of place in South America.

Napoleon would undoubtedly have acted as Nelson would have done, but lesser minds must always abide by the book of rules. While perceiving the folly of the method, Nelson nevertheless acted properly in his subordinate position and followed the instructions of the military. He was ever first in the batteries as the slow zig-zag of trenches crept nearer to the fort, and, as Major Poison reported, ‘there was scarce a gun but what was pointed by him or Lieutenant Despard’. The fort finally fell on 24 April, but Nelson was not present to witness its capture, for he had been recalled to Jamaica to take command of the 44-gun
Janus.
In his first experience of field action he had shown his usual enthusiasm and initiative; he had learned something about co-operating with the Army which would serve him in good stead years later in Corsica. He had also learned that, whether ashore or afloat, the book of rules should be thrown away whenever it was considered necessary by the man on the spot. By carrying out, under unsuitable conditions, the slow formal siege tactics that they had been taught, the expeditionary force had run into the rainy season, when the torrential downpour prevented any further activity and disease flourished even faster than before. The San Juan expedition was a failure, very few returned, and those who did were ravaged by yellow fever.

One of the sufferers was Nelson, who was carried ashore in Jamaica and was never well enough to take command of the
Janus.
In the
Lowestoffe
he had endured a recurrence of his malaria as well as suffering from manchineel poisoning. The latter was one of the minor hazards of the West Indies, but unpleasant enough in itself, as Columbus's sailors had found all those years ago. The corrosive poison of the leaves, or the fruit, acted upon the central nervous system -something which the Carib Indians had long known, since they tipped their arrows with its juicy sap. Now he was suffering from yellow fever, which was transmitted by several types of forest mosquitoes. A modern clinical diagnosis describes many of the symptoms from which Nelson was to suffer during his recuperation, ‘headache, backache, fever, prostration, vomiting, and jaundice’, and goes on to say, ‘there is no specific treatment for yellow fever. Provision should be made for good nursing, quiet surroundings, alkaline water and fruit juices to drink . .

All these Nelson was to find ashore in Jamaica, and there can be no doubt that, if he had stayed longer at San Juan and had not been recalled, he would almost certainly have died. On 30 August 1780, he formally applied to Admiral Parker: ‘Having been in a very bad state of health for these several months, so bad as to be unable to attend my duties on board the
Janus
, and the faculty having informed me that I cannot recover in this climate, I am therefore to request that you will be pleased to permit me to go to England for the re-establishment of my health.’ Lady Parker (who had spent long hours nursing the young officer) and her husband Sir Peter were as sad to see him go as if they were indeed losing a son. They would not forget him. It says something for the medical care he received that neither then nor on later occasions did Nelson succumb to his illnesses or his wounds. Somewhat ungenerously he was to write to the Duke of Clarence in 1794: ‘One plan I pursue, never to employ a doctor, nature does all for me and Providence will protect me.’ Perhaps . . . But Haslar Naval Hospital in Portsmouth had opened its doors some four and a half years before he was born, and records show that he was looked after at various times during his life by some twenty-five doctors.

Returned to England aboard the
Lion
, whose Captain ‘Billy Blue’ Cornwallis looked after him with as much care as had Captain Pigot in the
Dolphin
, Nelson paid a brief visit to Captain Locker and other friends in London, and then made his way to Bath in the autumn of 1780. Unlike most of the other visitors he was not in search of high play, romance, or even specifically those curative waters which had made the city a spa since Roman times. He was in search of a climate that would not be too intolerable for a sick man just returned from the West Indies. From Bath, recuperating slowly and having to be ‘carried to and from bed with the most excruciating tortures’, he wrote to Captain Locker describing how he had almost lost the use of his left arm, while at a later date, returned to London, he wrote to his brother William : ‘I have entirely lost the use of my left arm, and very nearly of my left leg and thigh, and am at present under the care of a Mr Adair, an eminent surgeon in London.’ The interesting point about these two letters is that, whereas the one to Locker is dated 15 February 1781, that to his brother is dated 7 May. Either Nelson had had a relapse, or had been putting a good face on his condition for Locker’s benefit, just in case there was any chance of a new command in the offing.

In every respect his life to date might have been paralleled by that of many another naval officer, except perhaps for his quick rise to post-captain. Many were taken ill with fevers - many recovered - but few, though, so readily impressed the senior officers with whom they came in contact that there was lurking within them some especial spark which one day, given luck or opportunity, would set them apart from other men. His life continued humdrum, although he did get his new appointment: this time to a 28-gun frigate, the
Albemarle
, in which he spent the winter of ’81 on convoy duty to the Baltic and back. It was a far call from his last station, but the cold of the North Sea and the Baltic - about which he complained - most probably did his health a great deal more good than if he had been returned to the West Indies or sent out to the East. Ordered once more on convoy duty, this time to Quebec, he wrote bitterly : 'I want so much to get off this d—d voyage. Mr Adair has told me that if I was sent to a cold damp climate it would make me worse than ever.’

Nelson’s illnesses were real enough, and no less than fourteen different occasions have been recorded on which he suffered among other things from malaria, pains in his chest and lungs, ‘rheumatic fever’ and severe physical breakdown accompanied by mental depression. All this was quite apart from the later wounds, and the seasickness which he mentioned on numerous occasions (‘Heavy sea, sick to death - this seasickness I shall never get over’ - as late as August 1801). He was to undergo more operations than any other flag-officer. Yet despite all this, his slight frame, driven by the wind of a desire for fame - or rather a passionate search after ‘Honour’ - was to carry him through where many an apparently stronger constitution yielded. The fact is, as his correspondence bears out, that Nelson was something of a hypochondriac. His sickly childhood, his damaged health in youth, were to give him a constant concern about his health that the more robust never possess. As an old Norfolk saying has it: ‘A creaking gate lasts for ever.’

A bad passage across the Atlantic, not so surprising in spring, when the north-westerlies hurl themselves across in what can sometimes seem not a succession of gales but a permanent one, found Nelson with part of his convoy at the unattractive gate of Britain’s senior colony. He thought little of it - ‘this disagreeable place’ he said of St John’s -but had to admit that ‘the voyage agrees better with me than I expected’. The tone of his letters throughout all this period is dull and almost rancorous: not so surprising when one considers that his services in the West Indies, which had nearly cost him his life, would in modern times have earned him something like a year ashore on sick leave. Possibly he should never have been passed fit for the
Albemarle
, but the fact was that he could not afford to be ‘on the beach’ so long as there was a war, a chance of action and of prize money. Promotion he could not of course expect to see for many years, since he had already advanced as far as any sea-officer could do by the age of twenty-three.

It was in Canada, in Quebec, that Nelson first shook off the illnesses that had been plaguing him, and here also that he first fell in love. Everything in his letters to date would suggest that he was not only sexually inexperienced — somewhat rare for that time — but that he had never been in any way emotionally moved. His experiences among the midshipmen with their free-and-easy sex lives, his knowledge of Chatham and Portsmouth, of the sailors and their women (who were quite often carried at sea aboard the larger vessels), had most certainly given the son of the parsonage a distinct distaste not for the opposite sex, but for carnality as such. Nelson’s attitude towards women would seem to have been that simple one which, until recent times, was held by many Englishmen of his type and class. There were two categories of women : superior beings who were placed on a pedestal, of a more sensitive order than men, and destined to be wives and mothers; and whores, strumpets, drabs and doxies, with whom officers and men took their sexual pleasure when ashore. It was not for many years that he was to find out that there was, as it were, a kind of ‘halfway house’, women who could grace an assembly or a dinner party and also be sensual and active lovers. His first love was almost inevitably of the romantic kind. Nelson was indeed a great romantic, although not in the sense that Lord Byron was to show himself - whose outward trappings of romanticism cloaked an inherent cynicism that reflected the attitudes of the eighteenth century rather than those of the nineteenth. Nelson was at no time in his life capable of cynicism.