The Dangerous Book of Heroes (32 page)

The Gurkha Museum, Winchester, U.K.

A
ll Saints' Church, Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk, is today much as it was in 1758 when a son of the rector and his wife was baptized and christened. The most notable additions to this quiet Anglican church since that christening are the wooden lectern and rood, carved from the original oak of HMS
Victory.
For the boy born that autumn was Horatio Nelson, destined to become the most famous naval commander in the world—with his and
Victory
's name forever joined.

Beneath the flat skies of East Anglia, Horatio lived an ordinary boyhood. Although the family was educated, they were not wealthy. He attended local schools, went hunting for birds' nests, and pilfered apples and pears from orchards with his friends. His mother died when he was nine years old, and it was through her family that there was a connection with the sea—Captain Maurice Suckling, an uncle serving in the Royal Navy. Horatio asked his father for permission to join his uncle in a ship being commissioned for possible war with Spain over the Falkland Islands. It was agreed. In January 1771, aged twelve years and three months, Horatio Nelson joined his first ship, the sixty-four-gun
Raisonnable,
at Chatham Naval Dockyard, Kent.

Across the dock from the
Raisonnable
was the new first-rate
Victory,
a one-hundred-gun ship of the line launched in 1765 but held in reserve. There's no doubt that Midshipman Nelson noticed her. It's likely he boarded and looked her over, for she was a most impressive ship: two thousand English oak trees had been used to build her.

Five months later, Spain withdrew her claim to the Falklands and Captain Suckling and Nelson transferred to the seventy-four-gun
Triumph.
Suckling arranged for his nephew to ship for a year to the West Indies in a merchant vessel. Most seamen in the Royal Navy of that era spent time in the merchant service; it was the best training in seamanship available. One such officer, James Cook, had returned from a voyage around the world that July, and all Britain was talking about him.

A year after his return, Nelson joined an Arctic expedition seeking the Northeast Passage through the ice around the top of Russia to the Pacific. At fourteen, he wangled a berth in the bomb ketch
Carcass
as coxswain, a petty officer in charge of one of the small boats. Icebound one polar night, Nelson left the ship on foot to hunt polar bear across the sea ice. He wanted to send his father a white bearskin for his hearth, but the bear escaped when Nelson's musket misfired. Nelson himself escaped the enraged bear only after
Carcass
fired a cannon to frighten it off. Heavy ice turned the expedition back north of Norway.

At the end of 1773, Midshipman Nelson joined HMS
Seahorse,
a twenty-gun frigate in a squadron sailing to the East. He served on the
Seahorse
for two years, visiting Africa, India, and the Spice Islands before he contracted malaria and almost died. Semi-paralyzed, Nelson was invalided home but was to suffer from the aftereffects for the rest of his life. Yet only a few days after his return, five days before his eighteenth birthday in 1776, Nelson was appointed acting lieutenant to the sixty-four-gun
Worcester,
escorting convoys to Gibraltar and elsewhere. The following year, having served the required minimum six years aboard ship, he passed his lieutenant's examination.

The bitter American War of Independence was then being fought, and Nelson was posted to the West Indies station in the frigate
Lowestoffe.
In her he obtained his first command, the captured American schooner
Little Lucy.
A year later he was promoted to first lieutenant on the flagship HMS
Bristol.
In December 1778 he was promoted again, to be master and commander of the brig
Badger,
his
second command. Only six months later, of just twenty years of age, Horatio Nelson was posted captain. That same year, in the far Pacific, Captain Cook was killed.

Although Nelson was “known” at the Admiralty through his uncle, promotion on the West Indies station was due to the fact he was keen, imaginative, and good at almost everything he did. Most superior officers appreciated his talents, most contemporaries enjoyed his company, and most seamen liked him and worked willingly for him because he looked after them—their health, their conditions, and their few comforts.

On being appointed to the twenty-gun frigate
Hinchinbrooke,
replacing a captain killed in action, Nelson wrote: “I got my rank by a shot killing a Post-Captain, and I most sincerely hope I shall, when I go, go out of the World the same way.”

He contracted yellow fever during a combined naval and army assault up the shallows and swamps of the San Juan River on the Spanish Main. His efforts were the main reason the expedition finally succeeded in capturing Fort San Juan, but in 1780 he had to be invalided home. By the spring of 1781 he'd recovered, to be appointed captain of the frigate
Albemarle
for convoy work into the Baltic and to Canada. In 1783 a treaty with the colonial Britons was signed by which the independent United States of America was created. The
Albemarle
and many other vessels returned home and were paid off, and Nelson took leave to visit France.

Before he himself was paid off the active list, Nelson served once more on the West Indies station, from 1784 to 1787. He incurred the displeasure of British planters and traders for enforcing the new trading laws with America, and the displeasure of his king, George III, for associating with his womanizing sailor son, Prince William.

On the Isle of Nevis in March 1787, Nelson married “Fanny” Nisbet, a widow with one son. Prince William gave away the bride.

In his career to that point, Nelson had accumulated some very talented friends and admirers, both senior and junior to him—Admirals Parker, Hood, and Jervis; Captains Cornwallis and Ball; Lieutenants Collingwood, Troubridge, Saumarez, Berry, and Hardy.
During the twenty-two years of French wars, these men became household names in the long fight for freedom from tyranny.

Yet in 1787, Horatio Nelson was “on the beach,” a captain without a ship, living on half pay in the Burnham Thorpe parsonage with his wife, stepson, and father. He was twenty-nine years old. He was also beginning to go blind, from a then untreatable disease of the conjunctiva spreading slowly across each eye.

Nelson remained on half pay for five years, concerning himself with the conditions of farm laborers and campaigning for improvements. He thought he might never go to sea again, but in 1792 revolutionary France declared war on Austria, Sardinia, and Prussia and invaded the Austrian Netherlands. Despite Britain's neutrality in continental politics, the die was cast in early 1793, when French batteries fired upon HMS
Childers
without warning or provocation. Nelson was appointed captain of HMS
Agamemnon.

The British government still refused to respond, but on February 1 France declared war on Britain and Holland. Thus began a world war that was fought from Ireland to Russia, from Norway to South Africa, in North and South America, in India and in Southeast Asia, and across almost every sea in the world. France further inflicted on the world a gunnery corporal named Napoléon Bonaparte, the man responsible for the greatest destruction in Europe until the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. During the war against French oppression Nelson grew to despise Bonaparte.

Ship of the line
Agamemnon
was a sixty-four-gun vessel from Hampshire, strongly built yet fast, maneuverable, and with a crew mostly of volunteers. She was Nelson's favorite command. Soon after joining, he was offered the command of a seventy-four-gun ship. He declined. In a fleet under the command of Admiral Hood in HMS
Victory,
Nelson sailed for Gibraltar and the Mediterranean.

Nelson and the
Agamemnon
were deployed continuously for three years throughout the western Mediterranean. During the capture of Corsica, Nelson received a severe wound to his right eye from a stone chip, leaving it virtually useless. However, he never wore an eye patch; it was over his weakening left eye that he occasionally wore
an eyeshade to protect it from glare. At sea he usually wore a green shade beneath his cocked hat to protect both eyes. The Trafalgar Square statue depicts him accurately with no eye patch.

In the
Agamemnon
Nelson hoisted his commodore's pennant, fought a series of successful actions against the French and the Spanish, and wrote a brief autobiography,
Sketch of My Life.
A weather-beaten
Agamemnon
was sent home for a refit in 1796, and Nelson transferred his commodore's flag to HMS
Captain.
In February 1797 came the first great sea battle of the war—and of Nelson's career. It was named the battle of Cape Saint Vincent, fought in the waters off southwest Portugal.

On the morning of Valentine's Day, a Spanish fleet of twenty-seven ships of the line—the 130-gun four-deck
Santissima Trinidad,
six 112-gun ships, two 80s, and eighteen 74s—was intercepted on its passage to the English Channel by Admiral Sir John Jervis. Jervis's fleet comprised only fifteen ships of the line, including the 100-gun
Victory
and
Britannia,
three 98s, one 90, eight 74s, and one 64. As the enemy vessels gradually emerged from a bank of fog, Captain Calder in the
Victory
counted them for his admiral: “There are eight sail of the line, Sir John.” “There are twenty sail of the line, Sir John.” “There are twenty-five sail of the line, Sir John.” “There are twenty-seven sail of the line, Sir John.”

“Enough, sir. No more of that!” Jervis thundered. “If there are fifty sail, I will go through them!”

Go through them he did. The
Culloden
led the British fleet and opened fire at 11:30
A.M
., splitting the Spanish line in two. The majority of Spanish vessels on the right altered course to the north, engaging the British sailing on the opposite course. Jervis ordered his captains to tack in succession to pursue the main body and to prevent the gap being closed by the eight Spanish ships on the left. Broadside after broadside drove those ships out of the battle.

Close to the rear of the British line in the north, Nelson saw that the majority of Spanish ships were attempting to escape. Disobeying orders, he hauled the 74-gun
Captain
out of the line and engaged the 130-gun
Santissima Trinidad,
the largest warship in the world.
Collingwood followed Nelson in the
Excellent.
With Troubridge in the
Culloden,
Frederick in the
Blenheim,
and Rear Admiral William Parker in the
Prince George
arriving from the south, a fierce battle within a battle took place as those five British ships attempted to stop the Spanish fleet from escaping.

All the vessels suffered heavy damage. At one stage the
Captain
was fighting five ships at once, and Nelson was wounded in the stomach by a flying splinter of wood. Then the Spanish first-rates
San Jose
and
San Nicolas
ran onto each other and were locked together. Nelson saw his chance. He steered the
Captain
onto the the
San Nicolas.
“Calling for the boarders, I ordered them to board,” he wrote later.

From the
Captain
, Nelson led the British marines and seamen onto the 80-gun
San Nicolas
and captured her. Seeing no reason to stop, he then led them onto the 112-gun
San Jose
and captured her, too. On the quarterdeck of the
San Jose
he received the sword of the dying Spanish admiral and handed it to bargeman William Fearney, who “placed it, with the greatest sang-froid, under his arm.” Pursuing the Spanish fleet, the
Victory
passed by and her crew lined the rails and cheered the amazing sight of the three ships all now flying Royal Navy ensigns. This unique action of boarding one enemy ship via another was referred to as “Nelson's patent bridge for boarding first-rates.”

Although his understanding of tactics was supreme, he had taken an enormous risk, disobeying both Jervis's order of battle and Admiralty Fighting Instructions. Jervis had told him to use his initiative, but it might have been a court-martial offense. Instead, after the battle, Jervis welcomed him to the deck of the
Victory
with open arms. The last shots were fired at 5
P.M
., and the Spanish retreated into Cadiz. They had lost four ships and three thousand men killed, wounded, or captured; the British lost no ships but seventy-three killed and four hundred wounded. Jervis was created Earl Saint Vincent, Nelson made a Knight of the Bath and, unknown to the fleet, was already promoted to rear admiral, though the news didn't arrive until April. He was just thirty-eight years old.

Elsewhere, there was mutiny in the Channel Fleet. The cause was
partly due to ill treatment by a few captains but primarily to the government not paying the seamen. One of those vessels, the
Theseus,
was ordered to Jervis's fleet. Jervis transferred Rear Admiral Nelson, Captain Miller, and a handful of former
Agamemnon
seamen to her.