Nelson (122 page)

However, Nelson’s own cup was already overflowing. He had been lucky, especially in those dramatic boarding actions. Both the commodore’s prizes had suffered heavily in the preceding bombardment, but they still had more than a thousand fit men between them when the battle ended. More than three hundred were found killed and wounded. The casualties on the
San Nicolas
appear to have been particularly high, perhaps as many as two hundred and forty, but the
San Josef
surrendered with less than a hundred of its large crew down. The speed and impetuosity of Nelson’s attack, which enabled him to seize strategic points on the enemy ships before they could be reinforced from below, also contributed to his success. Nevertheless, it had been a huge gamble. It was little surprising that Collingwood was beginning to think his friend guided by ‘a most angelic spirit’ that made him ‘equal to all circumstances’.
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The British fleet had unquestionably distinguished itself. ‘We dashed at them like Griffins spouting fire,’ wrote Collingwood. But the greatest honours have to be shared between Jervis and Nelson. Despite the odds, Jervis believed in his team, and committed it to a major battle. To some extent he had also divided his enemy, although both the windward and leeward divisions of the Spanish fleet continued to command the attention of British ships. However, if the engagement off Cape St Vincent was memorable, it was Nelson who made it so. Without him one or two ships of the line might have been captured, and the action, gallant as it was, would have been forgotten. By contrast, those who watched the
Captain
wear out of the British line, take on five or six superior ships in protracted gun duels, and finish by boarding one enemy over another, knew they had witnessed a unique naval spectacle. As a combination of insight, decision and heroism it was unsurpassed in the history of combat at sea.
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Nelson’s seizure of the two Spanish prizes was seen from the
Victory
, and Jervis recognised the
Captain
’s achievement as much as any man. After the guns ceased, and the British ships formed to protect their prizes, the
Victory
passed the mangled
Captain
and gave her three cheers. Every ship in the fleet followed suit. Horatio Nelson had searched for that applause all his life.
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Unable to use his wrecked seventy-four, Nelson got into a boat from
La Minerve
and transferred to his old frigate, receiving the cheers of her company as he came over the side, cheers so loud that they were heard aboard the other frigates. He stayed to see his pendant run up, and at about four-thirty left for the
Victory
without troubling to change his uniform. The commander-in-chief met him on the quarterdeck. Still suffering from his wound, Nelson was ‘dirtied and disfigured’ and a ‘great part of his hat [had been] shot away’. But the admiral embraced him, and instantly gave him leave to hoist his pendant on the
Irresistible
, an undamaged seventy-four captained by George Martin. There was still a possibility of further action, and Nelson was aboard his new ship with Lieutenant Noble by five-fifteen.
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Jervis reacted exactly as Nelson expected. An unverified story that may be true tells how Robert Calder, the commander-in-chief’s flag captain, complained to Sir John that Nelson’s manoeuvre had been a breach of orders. ‘It certainly was so,’ replied the crusty old veteran, ‘and if ever you commit such a breach of orders, I will forgive you also.’
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There was no more fighting. The Spanish fleet ran for a port with the consolation that, while their men-of-war had taken a thrashing, at least their mercury convoy had escaped. Jervis withdrew to Lagos for repairs and supplies.

The close of conflict had left the
Captain
laying on the water like an exhausted and bloodied whale, with
La Minerve
taking her in tow. The intensity of her struggle can be measured in the munitions she consumed in those brief four hours. One hundred and forty-six barrels, containing between six and seven tons of powder, had been expended. The
Captain
fired 2,531 round shot, 232 anti-personnel grape and case shot, and 151 double-headed hammered shot designed to tear down rigging. Twenty hand grenades had been thrown to clear enemy decks before boarding, and 1,940 musket and pistol balls fired.
³⁸

Nelson’s ship lost eighty killed and wounded, more than a quarter of the three hundred reported for the British fleet as a whole. Among the dead were Midshipman James Francis Goddench, a Portsmouth lad, and two old
Agamemnons
, William Hayward and Midshipman Thomas Lund, who died of his wounds eight days after the battle. Amidst the exultation there was grief for lost comrades and a deepened
sense of the fragility and value of life. ‘I often . . . think how uncertain a man’s life is,’ reflected Oliver Davis, whose right arm was broken on the
Captain
. ‘I compare it to a flower in the field; in the morning growing and in its full bloom, but before night is cut down and never more seen.’
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Nelson’s own wound was more than trivial, though the initial swelling of his stomach receded within ten days. The blow appears to have produced an abdominal hernia that gave him occasional pain thereafter. Sometimes coughing temporarily forced part of his intestines into the hernial cavity, causing painful inflammation as big as a fist and difficulty in passing water. Three days after the battle Nelson was too ill to attend the court martial of Benjamin Hallowell, who was acquitted of losing his ship in the winter gales. He included the injury on the official return, remembering how a failure to report a damaged eye in Corsica had eventually rebounded upon him, but he still dismissed his fresh misfortune with a ‘they who play at bowls must expect rubbers’ and declined to tell Fanny. She learned of it from the casualty list printed in the
London Gazette
, and had to wait until Culverhouse and others returned home from the fleet to get a reassuring account of the wound. More than four years later the Patriotic Fund voted Nelson £500 in compensation for his injury.
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The Spaniards lost four ships with 378 carriage guns at the battle of Cape St Vincent, and suffered damage to many others. On board the prizes there were some two hundred and eighty dead and two thousand four hundred prisoners. It was not, admittedly, a huge victory though it was a spectacular and timely one. Cordoba’s fleet was still more or less intact, but any participation in France’s plans for invading England was indefinitely postponed. The most significant impact of Sir John’s battle was on morale. The Spanish navy was damaged in spirit, struck by the humiliation of a significantly superior fleet, and sure as never before that it could not compete with the British in battle. The gloomy defeatism that dogged continental navies was vindicated. Conversely, in the British fleet confidence soared, and captains talked ever more of their ship-for-ship advantages and the possibilities that lay in close-quarter action. As Nelson remarked, ‘If our ships are but carried close by the officers, I will answer for a British fleet being always successful.’
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At home the news fell upon an anxious public downcast by the poor state of the war and a faltering economy. The government needed a success and reacted with a shower of rewards. Obviously Nelson
would be a recipient. The fleet was ringing with quips about a new method of boarding called ‘Nelson’s Patent Bridge for Boarding First Rates’. His promotion to rear admiral had long been imminent, and now there were rumours that he would be made a baronet as well.

Ordinarily he would have pounced on such honours, but they could never be divorced from economic circumstances. Mindful of his modest fortune, Nelson remembered that even as a captain he had been embarrassed among the Norfolk gentry. A flag and hereditary title, even the meanest, would multiply those discomforts. He would be expected to mix in circles far more affluent than his own, circles dominated by inherited wealth, and to reciprocate hospitality. He would need to meet the accepted standards of a new class, yet his material ambitions had never been extreme, and the proceeds of his prize money were disappointing. His mind was set on a Norfolk cottage. Much as he hungered for status, he was at heart rather a simple man, and did not feel ready to stand among the aristocracy.

The day after the battle Nelson visited the frigate
Lively
and spoke to Colonel Drinkwater, who was accompanying Elliot to England. Nelson stated a preference for the Bath, a privileged order of knight-hood with a star and scarlet ribbon, and Drinkwater got the idea that he wanted some visible honour that could be worn and, of course, seen. ‘The attainment of public honours’ and a desire ‘to be distinguished above his fellows were his master passions,’ recalled the colonel. The next day Nelson wrote to Elliot, requesting him to use what influence he had in that direction when he reached London. Nelson was less interested in status
per se
, which commonly rested upon inheritance, financial double-dealing or political sycophancy, than in a desire to be known as a self-made man raised by valour and a dedication to public duty. To him medals and ribands were no trivial baubles, but badges of bravery, earned distinctions unavailable to mere men of birth.
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In the distant past Nelson had innocently assumed that due credit was usually paid to meritorious officers, but experience had taught him otherwise. He still brooded over those dismissive notices of his service in Corsica, and was determined that this – his finest achievement – would not be buried likewise. Back in 1793, flushed with the excitement of his first naval action, Horatio had sent his brother Maurice an account for the newspapers. Without waiting to see what Sir John Jervis was putting in his official dispatch of the battle, Nelson decided to revive the tactic and prepare his own narrative for the press,
though he acknowledged the right of his admiral to send the first account.
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As early as 16 February, when Jervis was writing one of the least informative accounts of a victory ever penned by a commander-in-chief, Nelson and Miller were also at work, using the logs of the
Captain
as their foundation. The original may have been Nelson’s, or perhaps the work of Castang, the secretary who had followed him to the
Irresistible
with Noble, but it was authenticated by Berry and Miller, who interposed their own considerable claims to attention. With the straightforward story of the battle from the
Captain
’s point of view was a touch of egocentric humour, concocted by Nelson or Miller. Entitled ‘Nelson, His Art of Cooking Spaniards’, it was delivered as a recipe for ‘Olla Podrida’ in a style perhaps familiar today. After ‘battering and basting’ the Spaniards till they were ‘well seasoned’ (‘your fire must never slacken for a moment’ till the enemy was ‘well stewed and blended together’), a ‘hop, skip and jump’ was necessary to turn one ship into ‘a stepping stone’ for another. ‘Your Olla Podrida may now be considered as completely dished, and fit to set before His Majesty.’
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Nelson considered ‘the pruning knife’ necessary to fit his account for publication, but copies of ‘Remarks Relative to Myself in the
Captain
’ were sent to family and friends and one accompanied Winthuysen’s sword to the city of Norwich as a gift to his native county. If the commodore had any qualms about self-advertisement he was soon reassured. Jervis’s official account of the battle, addressed to the Admiralty secretary on 16 February, did more than marginalise his exploits. It missed him, and all but one other officer, out altogether.
⁴⁵

‘I would much rather have an action with the enemy than detail one,’ the admiral growled. He was thinking of the furore Lord Howe had caused with his formal dispatch about ‘The Glorious First of June’ in 1794. So much discontent and jealousy had been stirred by Howe’s attempt to apportion credit among his captains on that occasion that Sir John decided he would mention none at all, save his own flag officer, Robert Calder, who would bear the wholly unsatisfactory document home. It reached the Admiralty in Whitehall at seven in the morning of 3 March, and made an extraordinary issue of the
London Gazette
the same day.
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While the public celebrated their second general naval victory of the war, Nelson’s friends were astonished at the way his achievement
had been erased from the record. ‘I don’t like it not being particular enough,’ grumbled his brother Maurice, enclosing the offending
Gazette
to Horatio. Culverhouse, returning home to deal with sickness in his family, was still deeply upset about the neglect when he met Fanny in Bath.
⁴⁷

Sir John was not entirely negligent, for he did name deserving captains in a
private
letter to Earl Spencer, first lord of the Admiralty. On the same day his public dispatch was completed, a confidential epistle explained that he thought it ‘improper to distinguish one [captain] more than another’ before the public, but that stars there had been. Among them, he said, Nelson ‘took the lead on the larboard [tack] and contributed much to the fortune of the day’. And he reinforced the point by observing that the respective contributions of the ships were reflected in the numbers of their casualties, a criterion that placed the
Captain
before all others.
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But none of this would have consoled a man as eager for public praise as Nelson. Reading that beggarly official dispatch, he must have been hugely relieved that his insurance policy was already in full swing. Armed with copies of ‘Remarks Relative’, friends at home were going on the offensive. He sent copies to the Duke of Clarence and the secretary for war, William Windham. Nelson had met Windham on the polar expedition of 1773, though the latter had abandoned the venture in Norway because of seasickness. Now he was the Member of Parliament for Norwich as well as secretary for war, and owed Nelson a favour for finding one of his protégés a place on a ship. Nelson sent Peirson to him with a letter of introduction begging Windham’s patronage, and a copy of the account of the battle. The day Windham received his copy of ‘Remarks Relative’ he personally delivered it to the king at St James’s Palace, and happily forwarded another copy to Earl Spencer. Hood and Locker got their copies through Fanny. The admiral said he would circulate it among useful acquaintances, while Locker took it to the newspapers, assuring ‘Horace’ that the
Sun
was ‘read all over the kingdom’. In fact not only that favourite rag, but also the
True Briton
and the
Star
published the piece on 20 March. ‘Nelson’s New Art of Cookery’ had debuted even earlier, in
The Times
of 13 March.
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