Nelson: The Essential Hero (10 page)

In all of this, Nelson was quite correct, but how explain it to the authorities thousands of miles away at home, let alone to those who had sleeping or vested interests in the trade of the West Indies?

He was lucky that he had Collingwood to stand by him, for few wanted to know him during those difficult days. It has been said of him very accurately that ‘a prudent man, with an eye only to his own interests, would have avoided conflict with his superior officer: only a man absolutely fearless, and capable of setting duty above all other considerations, would have risked a quarrel which might ruin him for life’. It is true that in later life we hear much of Nelson’s physical courage, but his moral courage as displayed in the West Indies, when he had no one behind him to back him up and he was in conflict with his senior officer, shows him in a dazzling light - unlit by cannon or thundering sails, or the inexorable approach of one wind-blown fleet upon another.

The
storm clouds gathered. Sir Richard Hughes, after having his attention drawn to the Navigation Laws by Nelson and Collingwood, was finally forced to take some action. But, in accordance with his character, having first instructed all the ships under his command to enforce the Laws and regard Americans as foreigners, he yielded to circumstances, and to the friends by whom he was surrounded. On 11 January 1785 he modified his original instructions, ordering Nelson to do no more than cause foreign merchantmen to anchor near his vessel and report their arrival to the governor of the colony where he then was. Sir Richard added the rider that ‘if, after such report shall have been made and received, the governor or his representative shall think proper to admit the said foreigner into the port or harbour of the island where you may be, you are
on no account to hinder or prevent such foreign vessel from going in accordingly, or to interfere any further in her subsequent proceedings
[my italics]’. This laid the way wide open for whatever governor might be concerned to interpret the Navigation Act as he thought fit. It removed the onus of enforcing it from the Navy, where it belonged.

Nelson immediately remonstrated with his commander-in-chief. He pointed out that in times of peace, such as those, the function of His Majesty’s ships-of-war was to protect the commerce of the nation, which in its turn meant ensuring that foreigners did not trade in areas where they were forbidden. He pointed out that landsmen might easily be taken in by a merchant captain’s saying that his ship was in distress or in need of repair but, ‘in judging of their distress, no person can know better than the sea officers. The governors may be imposed upon by false declarations; we, who are on the spot, cannot.’ Nelson refused to obey the amended orders for, as he wrote to Locker whose experience he valued almost as much as his friendship, ‘Sir Richard Hughes was a delicate business. I must either disobey my orders, or disobey Acts of Parliament, which the admiral was disobeying. I determined upon the former, trusting to the uprightness of my intention. In short, I wrote the Admiral that I should decline obeying his orders, till I had an opportunity of seeing and talking to him, at the same time making him an apology.’

Nelson was also soon embroiled with General Shirley, the Governor of the Leeward Islands, who was as inclined to turn a blind eye to the traffic with America as was Sir Richard. In reply to Nelson’s remonstrations he said sharply that ‘old respectable officers of high rank, long service and of a certain life are very jealous of being dictated to in their duty by young gentlemen whose service and experience do not entitle them to it’. Nelson, according to Lieutenant Wallis of the
Boreas
, said in reply that he had the honour of being as old as the Prime Minister of England (Pitt) and ‘think myself as capable of commanding one of His Majesty’s ships as that Minister is of governing the State’.

Nelson’s troubles increased. The islanders of Nevis, infuriated by the fact that he had seized four American vessels off their shores, raised a large sum to enable the ships’ owners to sue Nelson, who could not go ashore or he would have been arrested. Significantly, Mr John Richardson Herbert, the President of the Council of Nevis, offered to become his bail if need be to the sum of ten thousand pounds - significantly because he was the uncle of a young woman in whom Nelson was to show no little interest. The conclusion of the long-drawn-out affair of the Navigation Act came from England with the news that Nelson’s costs in the case would be met by the Treasury. At the same time there came, with the cruellest irony, a commendation of both the governor and the admiral for their diligence in protecting British trade in the West Indies. Nelson would scarcely have been able to savour the humour of that. . . . But he was, despite all the troubles by which he was still surrounded, now given the official seal of approval and came under the protection of the authorities at home. He remained, of course, unpopular. He was compensated by fate in his acquaintanceship with a niece of President Herbert. Herbert was a widower with one daughter, and was visited from time to time by various nieces from England who came out to find themselves husbands - and usually did. One of them, Frances Herbert Nisbet, was a young widow with a boy of five named Josiah. She was staying with friends on the island of St Kitts at the time that Nelson dined with Mr Herbert in his large house, Montpelier, on Nevis, and she first heard of Nelson - a name generally scorned and detested in the islands - in a letter from one of her cousins:

We have at last seen the Captain of the
Boreas,
of whom so much has been said. He came up, just before dinner, much heated, and was very silent; yet seemed, according to the old adage, to think the more. He declined drinking any wine; but, after dinner, when the President, as usual, gave the following toasts, ‘the King’, ‘the Queen and Royal Family’, and ‘Lord Hood’, this strange man regularly filled his glass, and observed that those were always bumper toasts with him; which having drank, he uniformly passed the bottle, and relapsed into his former taciturnity, it was impossible, during this visit, for any of us to make out his real character; there was such a reserve and sternness in his behaviour, with occasional sallies, though very transient, of a superior mind. Being placed by him, I endeavoured to rouse his attention by showing him all the civilities in my power; but I drew out little more than ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, If you, Fanny, had been there, we think you would have made something of him; for you have been in the habit of attending to these odd sort of people.

‘Odd sort of people’ most sea captains were, for the loneliness of command turned them in upon themselves and although, like Nelson, many were friendly and even gregarious by nature, there remained always with them a kind of aloofness, difficult to define but somewhat akin to the indifference of the sea that they served. A young captain like Nelson, particularly in view of his relationship with most of the civilians whom he met — or did not meet - in the islands, was likely to be: more taciturn than most.

A side of his nature which was in evidence all his life, stemming no doubt from having grown up in a large, happy family, was brought to the somewhat astonished attention of the President of Nevis a few months later. Nelson had not yet met Mrs Nisbet but, calling on Mr Herbert early one morning on his return to Nevis, he found her five-year-old son in the room into which he was shown. A short time later Mr Herbert came down to meet his visitor. . . . ‘Good God !’ as he later exclaimed to his household at breakfast, ‘Good God ! If I did not find that great little man of whom everybody is afraid, playing in the next room, under the dining-table, with Mrs Nisbet’s child.’ If a suitor had intended a sure way to a mother’s heart he could not have been more aptly engaged. Indeed, when the two first met at dinner a few days afterwards, the young widow was at once to thank Nelson for ‘the great partiality he had shown to her little boy’.

Frances Nisbet had been born a Miss Wool ward, daughter of William Woolward, Senior Judge of Nevis, and her mother, who had died when Frances was young, had been President Herbert’s sister. Shortly after her father’s death she had married the doctor who had attended him, Josiah Nisbet, and had returned to England with her husband where he too died a year and a half later. She was left with her infant son, Josiah, little money and no property. Her uncle had provided the solution by asking her back to Nevis to help him in running his large household. She was a few months older than Nelson, born in the same year, and had been four years a widow when first they met. All the circumstances were ripe for the romance that followed; the lonely widow, the even lonelier bachelor, and the congenial atmosphere of her uncle’s house, where all was elegance and comfort. Frances Nisbet, as her portraits show, was slim, with delicate features, fine dark-grey eyes and dark hair. Irresistibly she reminded Nelson of the paragon Mrs Moutray, but with the advantage in her favour that she was younger, and unmarried. She had, furthermore, all the hallmarks of well-bred distinction which appealed to him, being fluent in the tongue that had mocked him - French - and a fine needlewoman, as well as having an air of somewhat porcelain grace that could hardly fail to appeal to a sea-officer whose daily life was marked by a complete absence of femininity. His was a world of hard-case sailors and equally tough officers, nearly all of whom were fond of the bottle or of the local women, or of both. As late as the 1840s a frigate captain in the West Indies sent ashore for 300 black women, so that every man aboard might have a mistress while in port. The women were supplied from one of the plantations. Rum and venereal disease took a high toll of sailors, whether officers or men, and a naval surgeon writing in 1826 could report a number of deaths which he had recorded due to ‘debauched habits’. The syphilis, which had almost certainly been endemic in the West Indies at the time of Columbus’s navigations, had subsequently been reinforced by venereal diseases of European origin. A sailor’s life in the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century was as beset with disease as it had been since the days of the buccaneers. The world of Montpelier was a far remove from all this. Mrs Nisbet was, in the phrase, genteel - and so was Nelson.

Their courtship was conducted in a setting that would have been familiar to Jane Austen - indeed the two main characters might well have emerged from one of her novels. Only the exotic background of Nevis presented an unfamiliar touch. Nevis, which Columbus called after the Mountain of Nieves in Spain because its summit was nearly always snow-like with grazing clouds lodged there by the trade wind, was the peak of an extinct volcano, and the brilliant green of its lower slopes shone out against the turning blue and the raked-white waves of the Caribbean. In unusual but charming contrast to this world of natural beauty was the small ‘court’, for such it almost seemed, of the President’s house, where the attachment of the shy naval officer to the quiet young widow proceeded as if according to a well-ordered plan. Nelson’s letters reflect the courtesies and conventions of the time but, though they display an eager desire to be married, they are lacking in the fire and spontaneity of his reflections upon Mrs Moutray or even upon the clergyman’s daughter at St Omer. One suspects that loneliness was very largely responsible for driving him to marriage, as well as a feeling that he had reached the time of life when marriage was somehow the suitable, and settling, answer to his personal problems. As for Mrs Nisbet, a young widow with a small child, and dependent upon her uncle, she viewed Nelson’s advances with careful, but thankful, appraisal, observing of him that he was of ‘a superior mind’. The trouble was that her suitor, as has been seen, had nothing other than his naval pay.

Nelson proposed in August, having made up his mind to do so in June, and having first met his future bride in March. But everything depended on the reactions of uncle William Suckling to his nephew’s request for financial help and, above all, to the reaction of President Herbert, who would naturally be unwilling to lose a housekeeper. His view on the financial side of things was expressed as follows : ‘Nelson, I am proud, and I must live like myself, therefore I can’t do much in my lifetime; when I die she shall have twenty thousand pounds; and if my daughter dies before me, she shall possess the major part of my property. I intend going to England in 1787 and remaining there my life; therefore, if you two can live happily together till that event takes place, you have my consent.’ Pending a definite reply from William Suckling, and something a little more concrete from the President, Nelson and ‘Fanny’ - for such she had now become in his letters - had to settle down and wait for eighteen months, during much of which time Nelson was inevitably away from his fiancee as his duties called him backwards and forwards between the islands. For a time during November 1786 he even found himself temporarily in command of the whole station, his former adversary Sir Richard Hughes having been appointed home, and his relief, Sir Richard Bicker ton, not having arrived.

One expects illusions from a man in love, but Nelson’s letters -whether to his fiancee, his brother William, or his uncle - are all eminently practical, and the most evidence of passion that can be found is couched in the copper-plate conventions of the time. Thus, at sea off the island of Desirade on 3 March 1786, he writes: ‘Separated from my dearest what pleasure can I feel? None! Be assured all my happiness is centred with thee and where thou art not there I am not happy. ... I daily thank God who ordained that I should be attached to you. He has I firmly believe intended it as a blessing to me, and I am well convinced you will not disappoint His beneficent intentions.’ And so on. To his brother he writes : ‘The dear object you must like. Her sense, polite manners, and to you I may say, beauty, you will much admire’, while to uncle Suckling, ‘Her mental accomplishments are superior to most persons of either sex. . . . My affection for her is fixed upon that solid basis of esteem and regard that I trust can only increase by a longer knowledge of her.’ The sentiments were always impeccable, if uninspired, and all would seem to have augured well for a quiet conventional marriage, reinforced in due course by a household of healthy children.