Nelson: The Essential Hero (18 page)

On the following morning it was seen that the
£a-ira
had now been taken in tow by the 74-gun
Censeur
, and a confused action began in which two British 74s, the
Bedford
and the
Captain
, were badly damaged. The
Qa-ira
, however, was completely dismasted and the
Censeur
lost her mainmast. ‘Our fleet’, Nelson wrote to the Duke of Clarence, ‘closed with
Qa-ira
and
Censeur
, who defended themselves in the most gallant manner; the former lost 400, the later 350 men.’ During the previous day’s engagement the
Agamemnon
had only 7 wounded as compared to 100 lost aboard her superior opponent. The two crippled Frenchmen now struck their colours, at which, to Nelson’s profound disappointment, Admiral Hotham decided that two prizes of such calibre were sufficient to call it a day, and broke off any further pursuit of the fleeing French. ‘We must be contented. We have done very well/ he remarked. Nelson was convinced, as was his friend Goodall in command of the
Princess Royal
, that if the fleet had been energetically led they could have come up with the French and in a general action secured complete victory.

He later confided to Locker that he did not think Hotham was ‘intended by nature for a Commander-in-Chief, which requires a man of more active turn of mind’. It must be said in Hotham’s defence that he had achieved the main object of the engagement. The French fleet had been forced to retreat to Toulon, and Corsica was saved. There was one detached observer on the sidelines, however, who saw matters in exactly the same terms as Nelson. This was Sir William Hamilton, far away in the Palazzo Sessa in Naples, who commented that ‘my old friend Hotham is not quite awake enough for such a command as that of the King’s Fleet in the Mediterranean . . .’. Hotham’s mild success in the capture of the two French ships-of-the-line was also somewhat nullified by the fact that the
Berwick
had already been captured prior to the engagement, and that the 74-gun
Illustrious
was now lost, being driven ashore by a gale between Spezia and Leghorn. Nelson, agitated beyond belief at the prospect that the French might cut off a convoy from England which was eagerly awaited at Leghorn, or that they might sally out again and descend on Corsica, could hardly contain himself.

I am absolutely at this moment in the horrors, fearing from our idling here, that the active Enemy may send out two or three Sail of the Line, and some frigates, to intercept our Convoy, which is momently expected. ... In short, I wish to be an Admiral, and in command of the English Fleet. I should very soon either do much, or be ruined. My disposition cannot bear tame and slow measures. Sure I am, had I commanded our Fleet on the 14th, that either the whole French Fleet would have graced my triumph, or I should have been in a confounded scrape.

His general depression at the state of things in the Mediterranean was later to be further deepened by the news that Lord Hood, who had been expected back aboard
Victory
to resume his command, had fallen foul of the Board of Admiralty. Hood had argued in his fierce and imperious way that the reinforcements their Lordships intended to send out to the Mediterranean were inadequate to deal with the situation. Never a man to temper the wind of his wrath, Hood had not overstated his case, but he had stated it in a manner that was found offensive. He was ordered to strike his flag, and this magnificent old seaman (‘the first officer in our Service’, Nelson reckoned him) was to end his days as Governor of Greenwich Hospital - a post he discharged as honourably and efficiently as all else in his life.

Under Hotham, meanwhile, the fleet continued to be inadequately and somewhat inefficiently employed. On 6 July the
Agamemnon
and four frigates while halfway between Nice and Genoa fell in with the whole French fleet which Hotham, tucked away in San Fiorenza and clearly with very poor information at his command, ought certainly to have known was at sea. Nelson and the ships with him only managed to escape by running with a prevailing northerly back to the security of the British base. The French numbered seventeen ships-of-the-line. By the time that Hotham and his fleet could get to sea - for they had been bottled up in harbour by the same wind that had saved Nelson - the French topsails had retired over the horizon. With a shift of wind the British got to sea and, on 13 July, the
Agamemnon
and half a dozen others came up with the enemy rear, and in the engagement that followed the 74-gun
Alcide
was so badly damaged as to be forced to strike her colours. Unfortunately, before she could be taken in tow as a prize, a fire aboard reached her main magazine and she blew up and sank. A calm then fell leaving the French, who were well inshore, with just sufficient air from the
brise soleil
to make for the Gulf of Frejus. (The
brise soleil
, a solar wind to be remarked in calm summer months when no real winds are blowing, tends to follow the sun’s course throughout the day and towards sundown usually blows westerly on to the Riviera coast.) ‘It was impossible for us to close with them,’ Nelson wrote the Duke of Clarence, ‘and the smoke from their Ships and our own made a perfect calm; whilst they, being to windward, drew in shore.’ He added bitterly: ‘Thus has ended our second meeting with these gentry. In the forenoon we had every prospect of taking every Ship in the Fleet; and at noon, it was almost certain we should have had the six near ships. The French Admiral, I am sure, is not a wise man, nor an Officer: he was undetermined whether to fight or run away : however, I must do him the justice to say, he took the wisest step at last.’

Despite the
Agamemnon's
proven efficiency as a fighting ship, it was a frustrating time in his life, though somewhat compensated for by learning in July that he had been appointed a colonel of the Marines. This was an honorary command, a reward for his distinguished services ashore, carrying a remuneration but no duties, and Nelson wrote to Earl Spencer, who was now First Lord of the Admiralty, to express his thanks. At the same time he did not forget to remind his Lordship that he had as yet received no compensation for the loss of sight of his right eye at Calvi. He had the satisfaction, though, of being appointed by Hotham to an independent command of a small squadron of frigates, designed to assist the Austrian General de Vins at Vado Bay near Genoa. Baron de Vins had hopes of advancing on Nice, sweeping all opposition before him, and causing the whole of Provence to rise. His optimism, as Nelson soon discovered, was quite ill-founded, and the only success during these long-drawn-out operations was achieved by Nelson’s blockading squadron which, to quote Napoleon,
^c
has suspended our commerce, stopped the arrival of provisions, and obliged us to supply Toulon from the interior of the Republic’. For Nelson this was a very worrying period in his life, for he was now in a position far more taxing and much more complicated than he had been in even in the West Indies. If he, or those under his command, were to make a mistake in the detention of neutral shipping he personally could be sued for damages by the vessel’s owners. The Genoese authorities were even more furious with him than had been the planters and merchants of Nevis all those years ago, while his detention of vessels from Algiers caused such a furore that it looked as if those long-time pirates of the Mediterranean sea-lanes would declare war on all English shipping. Nelson wrote to Fanny, ‘Political courage in an Officer abroad is as highly necessary as military courage’, and to Sir Gilbert Elliot in Corsica,
^c
. . . is England to give up the almost certainty of finishing this war with honour, to the fear of offence of such beings?’ The same strict sense of moral obligation, which in the West Indies had seemed to many merely the presumptuous officiousness of a young captain ‘on the make’, served him in good stead in war. ‘I am acting not only without the orders of my commander-in-chief, but in some measure contrary to them. However, I have not only the support of his Majesty’s Ministers, both at Turin and Genoa, but a consciousness that I am doing right and proper for the service of our King and Country.’

Quite apart from the normal responsibilities of command, he was constantly oppressed by anxiety about his conduct of the blockade and, even worse, his good, left eye was troubling him. The glare of the sea and sky endured day after day in the white heat of August left him for a brief period almost totally blind. Later he was also to complain of a tautness in his chest ‘as if a girth were buckled taut over my breast’. This was uncomfortably reminiscent of pains in his chest and lungs which he had had in
Boreas
in 1784, which, a surgeon has commented, were somewhat suggestive of tuberculosis. In addition to all this, he was to find out that General de Vins, whom he had at first believed to be reliable, was no more than a broken reed : a professional, true, but without any of the fire and aggression that could possibly cope with those very two qualities which the revolutionary French possessed in abundance.

Nelson had some small successes, however, to compensate for his general feeling of frustration about the land campaign. On 26 August, for instance, he and six of his squadron made a raid on the small port of Alassio, and captured a large gunboat, a corvette, two galleys and several other smaller vessels. Since Alassio was occupied by the French, and the ammunition and provisions aboard the ships were all destined for their army, the raid was a good illustration of the proper use of sea-power. It made Nelson ‘feel better in every way’. But he could not feel the same about the overall conduct of the operations: ‘We are doing nothing here,’ he told Fanny. ‘The Austrians cannot get over the mountains and I cannot get the Admiral to come here to give us his assistance in carrying a part of the army a small distance by water, but Hotham will not entangle himself with any co-operation.’ Hearing that his old friend Collingwood was on his way out to join the station, he wrote to put him in the picture. ‘You are so old a Mediterranean man, that I can tell you nothing new about the country. My command here is so far pleasant as it relieves me from the inactivity of our Fleet, which is great indeed, as you will soon see. . . . Our Admiral,
entre nous
, has no political courage whatever, and is alarmed at the mention of any strong measure. . . .’

By the end of 1795 Nelson's gloomy prognostications about the fate of the war ashore were confirmed. Massena, who was to become the greatest of Napoleon’s marshals, had given proof of his abilities by routing the Austrians and their allies at Loano. ‘General de Vins, from ill-health, as he says,’ Nelson wrote bitterly, ‘gave up the command in the middle of the battle, and from that moment not a soldier stayed at his post. . . . The Austrians ran eighteen miles without stopping.’ Perhaps if Hotham had supported Nelson’s offshore squadron, and had given the full assistance of the British fleet to the land operations, things might have turned out differently. But one doubts it: ‘The French, half-naked, were determined to conquer or die.’ They now had possession of the whole coastline from Savona to Voltri; the Austrians were cut off from their British allies at sea; and the path to the subsequent French invasion of Italy was laid open. No one emerged with any credit from the whole of this operation except Nelson - and, of course, the other captains of his inshore squadron. The
Agamemnon
, so worn out by her year off the Riviera coast that she had had to be frapped with cables (three or four huge hemp hawsers being passed round the hull amidships to keep her weakened frame together), returned to Leghorn. She was in need of a refit beyond the capacity of any dockyard available to the fleet outside England.

Nelson
was at Leghorn when he learned that he now came under the command of Admiral Sir John Jervis, who had been appointed to take over the Mediterranean station in succession to Admiral Hotham. No greater contrast between two commanders-in-chief could have been found. Hotham had been unsure in his judgement, and was always prone to take the middle way both in the discipline of the fleet and in the conduct of operations. Sir John Jervis, on the other hand, was a fire-eater, a martinet indeed, and a man whose record in the Seven Years War, the War of American Independence, and as Commander-in-Chief in the West Indies, had established him as one of the foremost officers in the Service. He arrived at San Fiorenza on 27 November, and it became evident within days of his arrival that everything was to change. This was ‘to the great joy of some, and sorrow of others’, but it was to prove in Nelson’s case the formation of a friendship that was to last his lifetime. Indeed, Jervis’s influence on Nelson was such that he, above all other admirals, must be regarded as the man who added the stamp of authority to a nature that had already shown itself zealous and brave. Jervis put the steel in his soul, and some of Nelson’s subsequent actions - particularly when it came to disciplinary matters - can only be judged in the light of the fact that he was an ardent pupil of this iron-bound sixty-year-old admiral.

Since Jervis was to have so great an influence upon Nelson, and indeed upon all the captains who served under him, it is worth quoting the viewpoint of another, later admiral, Lord Charles Beresford, who was also known as a disciplinarian and a man who could always be relied upon to act with firmness and efficiency:

In character he [Jervis] was the typical, grim, cold, reserved Englishman of his day - a Duke of Wellington at sea. To the incapable he was terrible; the lazy captain and the mutinous sailor found in him the harshest of judges. Zeal and courage he favoured and distinguished. Of character he was a consummate judge; the captains whom he ‘made and formed’ in the Mediterranean were the ‘band of brothers’ rendered glorious by the victory of the Nile. His merciless severity was untempered by the milk of human kindness; he had no hesitation in ordering men to be flogged or hung; he never attempted to govern by love. But to repair defects in discipline, to keep a fleet in thorough order, to train it for battle, he was the very man we needed. . . . The energy of Jervis was as furious as that of Nelson himself, though he had attained the ripe age of sixty years [on taking over the Mediterranean station]. He had not, however, Nelson’s genius for war, or Nelson’s power of winning his officers’ and men’s affection. His tastes were cultivated, his conversation charming, his table well-appointed - and yet he was not liked. ‘Where I should take a penknife,’ said Nelson, ‘he takes a hatchet.’