Nelson (93 page)

Fanny perked up most when officers from the Mediterranean brought news of her missing men. Josiah, Hood told her, was ‘one of the finest colts he ever saw’, but she continued to mother him, and reminded Horatio that the boy had to clean his teeth up and down, and not across. John Harness, formerly the fleet’s physician, brought her stories of Nelson in Corsica. He ‘spoke so handsomely of you, and did tell me many little things which to bystanders might be thought trifling, but to me highly gratifying. I have heard of your breakfast on the fig tree. My son – they all say I shall not know him.’
⁴¹

Of the many services Fanny did Nelson in the years he was away, the most essential was the care of his father, but she proved a valuable aid in other ways. She was affable and able enough to converse with the useful, including Sir Andrew Hamond, the comptroller of the Navy Board, and the Hoods, and gently to fight her husband’s corner. She also handled everyday naval and family business on his behalf, drawing upon Nelson’s London agent, Marsh and Creed of 23 Norfolk Street in the Strand, for money. She wrote letters for her husband, and saw to the gifts he was forever sending to friends and relations. The captain remained as generous as ever, even when far from home. It was Fanny who sent sugar, tea and wine to Nelson’s aged Aunt Mary at Hilborough, and the rector who distributed his son’s largesse in Burnham Thorpe. Like the good patron he was, Nelson felt an obligation to the poor of his parish, and customarily sent £200 each Christmas to provide warm clothing for the needy. ‘Accept our best new year’s gift [in return],’ Edmund replied at the beginning of 1795, ‘good wishes, the poor man’s all!’
⁴²

In many respects Fanny made a good wife, and she shared some of her husband’s characteristics. She was a regular churchgoer, and no respecter of those who would subvert the hallowed British constitution. Believing the treasonable stories in the newspapers, she was sure that the reformer John Horne Tooke and the leaders of the London
Corresponding Society then being tried for their lives by an alarmed government were ‘a wickeder set’ of men than ever existed. And like Horatio, Fanny was never a slave to money (‘the love of wealth ruins many’), could mix with the grand without envying them, and if she was less self-righteous than her husband she was no less dutiful. To the end Fanny played the loyal daughter-in-law, mother and wife. She never failed her ‘father’, the ailing rector. She never failed Josiah. And as far as she was able, she never failed Nelson. Fanny delighted in pleasing her husband. When he cautioned her against travelling by coach she replied, ‘No stage coach, I give you my honour, do I travel in, [nor] do anything in your absence that I thought would give you an opportunity to say that you wished it had been otherwise. No, not for the world.’
⁴³

The one thing she could not share with Horatio was his passion for fame. Fanny would have been content to live in her cottage, married to a retired rear admiral, and building a sedate social world around them, but she never felt his fierce need to achieve. Nor in the early years did it seem to matter.

For a naval officer the alignment of time, place and circumstance that made the ‘happy moment’ was always elusive. At the beginning of 1795 Nelson had been in the navy for twenty-four years without seeing a fleet action, but now that was about to change.

The first cruises of 1795 portended nothing so remarkable. Still more than a hundred men short of a full complement, the
Agamemnon
sailed with Hotham’s fleet on 21 December, but the voyage was a thumping ‘series of storms and heavy seas’ and deposited Nelson in St Fiorenzo on 9 January. The weariness of Leghorn was renewed in what Nelson declared a ‘damned place . . . where nothing is to be had for love or money’, and relieved only on the 15th when the seventy-four-gun
Berwick
rolled over and lost her masts. For eight days Nelson sat in the great cabin of the
St George
as part of a court trying her officers. He felt sorry for the ‘poor young man’ who commanded her, but Captain William Smith and two of his officers were held accountable for the disaster and dismissed.
⁴⁴

The fleet sailed on 7 February and forged through ‘a perfect hurricane’ to reach Leghorn on the 24th. It was ‘a very bad cruise’, Nelson concluded. Many of the ships were damaged and sickness was
returning. ‘
Agamemnon
wants almost a new ship’s company,’ he said. ‘I have just sent 40 to the hospital and I have 100 on board without strength or spirits. Indeed, we are equal to an English 50-gun ship, nor is myself [free] from complaints. I have been so low by a flux and fever this last cruise that I sometimes thought I should hardly get over it. I am now on shore by leave from the admiral to see if I can get up again.’
⁴⁵

Then, on 8 March, came the news the British were waiting for. The French were at sea with fifteen sail of the line and several smaller warships. Hotham’s look-out sloop, the
Moselle
, hovering off Leghorn, also saw the fleet in the northwest, steering south. It seemed as if the French were heading for Corsica.

The British were right. The enemy ships under Rear Admiral Pierre Martin included the hundred and twenty-gun
Sans-Culotte
and three eighty-gunners and carried seven thousand French troops and a siege train for the invasion of Corsica. So sanguine were some of success that the mayor and municipality of Bastia were carried as passengers, ready to resume their civic duties as soon as the French regained control. The French had heard that Hotham’s fleet had been incapacitated by the storms and reduced to ten or so fit capital ships. Hastily they filled their ships with troops, and prepared another eighteen thousand men to follow in one hundred and thirty transports as soon as Admiral Martin had cleared the British away and established a bridgehead on Corsica. At sea, Martin soon had a crumb of success. He intercepted and captured the rehabilitated British ship of the line
Berwick
, as it struggled towards Hotham from St Fiorenzo. Despite this and his apparent superiority, Martin was not eager to meet the British fleet and probably hoped to sneak to Corsica while Hotham was refitting in Leghorn. If so, that hope was quickly crushed. After a furious bustle, the British got to sea at daylight on the 9th, steering for Corsica with fourteen ships of the line.
⁴⁶

The fate of Corsica hung in the balance as the British fleet forged ahead. Admiral Hotham flew his flag from the
Britannia
of one hundred and ten guns, with John Holloway, Nelson’s old associate, as his captain. One of Hotham’s ships was the Neapolitan seventy-four
Tancredi
, which had joined on 1 March under Captain Francesco Caraccioli. Sir William Hamilton regarded Caraccioli as ‘surely the best officer in the Neapolitan navy’, a man who had ‘distinguished himself as a gallant officer and a good seaman’ on ‘many occasions’, but scattered also through the fleet were many who would one day
become Nelson’s ‘band of brothers’, among them Thomas Foley, flag captain of the
St George
, Fremantle and Hallowell in the
Inconstant
and
Lowestoffe
frigates, and Ralph Miller on the little
Paulette
. This, the first fleet action in the Mediterranean, was to be a lesson to more than one captain of the Nelson ‘school’.
⁴⁷

Throughout the first day the hostile French fleet remained beyond the horizon, visible only to Hotham’s lookouts, but towards noon of the 10th the
Moselle
signalled. The French were in the northwest, standing back towards Toulon. It appeared that far from seeking battle they were scurrying home at the first sign of trouble. On board the
Agamemnon
, Nelson saw Hotham’s signal for a general chase climb the mast of the flagship at noon, releasing his ships to pursue the enemy as best they could. The wind was light, and notoriously fickle in these parts, but the
Agamemnon
was swift and Nelson fully expected to engage the enemy. It was the chance he had been waiting for, and after giving the necessary orders he retired to his cabin to scratch a note to Fanny. It prepared her for the worst and oozed with his determination to fight, but was written in a clear, composed, well-formed hand as if death was a million miles away:

The lives of all are in the hands of Him who knows best whether to preserve it or no, and to His will do I resign myself. My character and good name is in my own keeping. Life with disgrace is dreadful. A glorious death is to be envied, and if anything happens to me, recollect death is a debt we must all pay, and whether now or in a few years hence can be but of little conesquence.
⁴⁸

Back on deck, he discovered it was not to be that day. The French had caught a wind, leaving the British behind, and the chase was called off after five and a half hours. Nor could they get close to the enemy the next day, though the French appeared to have continued westwards throughout the night. But there was almost an engagement on the 12th, when daylight revealed the British becalmed some ten miles east of the enemy fleet and dangerously dispersed. The French had the advantage of a southerly breeze, and Hotham’s ships were divided into two groups, the one nearest the enemy consisting of only six ships, including the
Agamemnon
, all wide open to attack. Nelson’s ship was still undermanned, but he wrote to Vice Admiral Samuel Cranston Goodall on the
Princess Royal
, the senior officer with the smaller British division, congratulating him on being ‘so near’ the
enemy and promising support, but soliciting a reinforcement of fifty or more men if they could be supplied.
⁴⁹

The French had a tremendous opportunity to steer between the two divisions of the British fleet and turn upon the smaller one, and for a while looked intent on doing so. Considering that they had to defeat the British fleet to achieve their objective, the subjugation of Corsica, they were unlikely to be presented with a better opportunity. Nelson saw the French making ‘a very easy sail’ towards them, but his sharp eye noticed something else too. ‘They did not appear to me to act like officers who knew anything of their profession,’ he wrote. ‘At noon they began to form a line on the larboard tack which they never accomplished. At two P.M. they bore down in a line ahead, nearly before the wind, but not more than nine sail formed.’
⁵⁰

In short, Nelson was measuring the French fleet and finding it wanting. He was absolutely right. Despite unsteady government finances, France had invested large sums in her navy since the Seven Years War, and won a significant victory on the Chesapeake in 1781, when the Royal Navy was repulsed and a British army forced to surrender. But stubborn problems remained, including shortages of skilled manpower, uncertain supplies of naval stores and a tendency to adopt defensive and defective tactics. Furthermore, to these long-standing weaknesses the revolution brought new strains. The view that legitimate political sovereignty was vested in the popular will, rather than executive authority, eroded respect for the navy both without and within. Revolutionary governments failed to protect the service from abuse by local communes and Jacobin clubs, and politicised sailors challenged their officers and reduced ships to chaos. By 1792 most of the established officers of the French navy had quit the troubled service in despair, abandoning its upper ranks to swarms of relatively unskilled upstarts. Rear Admiral Martin was forty-three when he sailed to meet Hotham, but two years before he had been a mere lieutenant, and partly owed his elevation to his ardent Jacobinism. The National Convention, which governed France between 1792 and 1795, had tried to restore order in the fleet, but difficulties were compounded by the policy of keeping ships in port. Cooped up, barely putting out before running back again, the French were incapable of developing disciplined, well-knit and practised crews. The professional seamen among them were denied the handson experience they needed to create efficient teamwork, and the amateurs swept in to make up numbers had no means of learning a
new trade. If French fleets sailed, even with a sufficiency of ships, they lacked the basic human resources to fight the British on equal terms. No one doubted that men of the highest calibre could be found in those fleets, but as a whole the personnel lacked skills, experience, discipline and confidence.
⁵¹

Now those problems showed. About three miles from Goodall’s division, the French abandoned the attack; their ships hauled their wind on the larboard tack, threw away their advantage and retired. Though Hotham united his ships in battle order later in the day, the wind continued to abort action, and darkness found both fleets off Genoa, standing to the southward under a fresh breeze.

On 13 March, Nelson’s first ‘happy moment’ finally occurred.

As the first light filtered over the water, the French were seen about four leagues to windward in the southwest, their sails full in a brisk breeze. Again, with the wind in their favour, they might have attacked, but betrayed no such inclination. Their only interest, it seemed, was flight, and once more the British admiral signalled a general chase. Undermanned as she was, the
Agamemnon
was soon nimbly outperforming its larger consorts, and cutting through the squally weather after the retreating fleet. At seven or eight o’clock something happened. Two of the big French eighty-gunners, the
Ça Ira
and
La Victoire
, collided. The main and fore topmasts of the
Ça Ira
cracked, and plunged down, hanging with a trail of wood, rope and canvas over her leeward side, and acting as a drag upon the ship. Though men threw themselves into clearing the wreckage, Captain Louis-Marie Coudé found his ship lagging behind and heeling over so much that most of his lower-deck guns on one side were unable to bear.

The
Ça Ira
was a huge opponent, the biggest two-decker in the world, and ‘large enough to take
Agamemnon
in her hold’. On board her quota of the troops embarked for the reconquest of Corsica had raised her manpower to at least one thousand and sixty men, three times that of the
Agamemnon
, which had only 344 hands at their quarters, including Nelson himself. In terms of fire power the
Ça Ira
was the equal of a three-decker, its eighty-four guns including a formidable lower-deck armament of French thirty-six-pounders. Against that Nelson’s ship could dispose only sixty-four guns, the largest of them mere twenty-four-pounders. Moreover, when the larger French pound is also taken into the balance (a Gallic thirty-six was equal to thirty-nine English pounds), the
Ça Ira
’s advantage in weight of metal fired over the
Agamemnon
was something like two to one. It was a terrific
superiority, and it was compounded by the French ship’s use of red-hot shot and the close proximity of other powerful antagonists, including the gigantic hundred and twenty-gun
Sans-Culotte
and the seventy-four-gun
Jean Bart
.
⁵²