Nelson: The Essential Hero (3 page)

Of whatever size the gun, the process of firing remained the same. First of all the powder had to be brought up from the main magazines, sited deep in the ship (a first-rate like the
Victory
, for instance, carried 35 tons of powder in her magazine) where it was taken to a ready-use magazine, measured into flannel bags and then transported to the guns. A gun which had just been fired would be cleaned out with a corkscrew-like instrument, known as the worm, which would then be followed by the sponge. The bag of powder was next inserted, followed by the shot itself, each of which was driven down the muzzle by the rammer. Sometimes two rounds of shot were put in the gun (double-shotting), and in all cases a wad was tamped down to keep everything in place. While this operation was going on, the gunner cleaned out (rimed) the vent, piercing the cartridge bag after doing so, and then inserted a quill filled with fine powder into the vent itself. The gun, having been run out by means of tackles, was then trimmed right or left by handspikes, a rough-and-ready method that had not changed over the centuries. Since, in the gunnery of that period, everything depended upon the ship’s heading - which was where the handling of the ship was so important - there was very little that the gunner could do in the way of laying his weapons. He had, in any case, no more than a very simple sight on the muzzle, the dispart, which was brought into line with a notch on the breech, much in the style of a sporting gun. Apart from being able to manoeuvre the muzzle left or right through the gun-port, he could also elevate or depress it slightly by the same primitive means of handspikes, and a wooden wedge known as a quoin which was tamped in under the breech. When the order was given to fire - and this depended very largely upon the roll of the ship - the gunner ignited the fine powder in the quill either by a slow match or by a flint-lock. The latter, indeed, was one of the very few innovations in gunnery since Elizabethan times, and had been introduced into the Navy in 1755.

An intelligent youth could have made himself familiar with the basic theory and practice of gunnery in a few weeks, but only a real action could have taught him exactly what gunfire achieved. (And Nelson was not to see this for many years.) First of all, ship-to-ship engagements then were quite unlike those since the invention of explosive shot: the solid round-shot was almost incapable of holing the opposing vessel and thus sinking her. The damage was done by the gradual weakening of her structure (as round after round was poured into her sides), and above all by dismasting her. Whereas a naval action in the Second World War - long before the introduction of rockets and nuclear devices - could be over in a matter of minutes, in the eighteenth and indeed nineteenth centuries the engagement could last for many hours. No comparison comes more quickly to mind than the spectacle of a boxing-match, particularly of the old bare-knuckle breed (which was one of the favourite sports of Nelson’s England), where one heavyweight stands up against another and both slug it out until one of them falls unconscious to the ground, or even on some occasions both of them together. At Trafalgar, for instance, only one vessel was sunk by gunfire, all the rest being disabled and reduced to such a condition that they could neither sail nor fight. Although the upper-deck personnel were quite often cut down (as Nelson himself was to be) by marksmen sent aloft into the rigging, as well as by cannonballs, chain-shot or other anti-personnel shot such as grape, the major part of the injuries received by the crew were due to wood splinters. These, screaming out of the ship’s sides, or whining across the deck, inflicted ghastly jagged wounds which, more often than not, could only be coped with by amputation of leg or arm. Stomach or other internal wounds were almost invariably fatal.

Sailing yachtsmen, who can appreciate the difficulties of bringing even a small boat in or out of harbour under sail alone (which few enough do in these days of auxiliary engines), will have some small idea of what it meant to handle a line-of-battle ship under nothing but canvas. To tack a ship, for instance, required an immense amount of manpower, coupled with a feeling for wind, weather and sea that few modern seamen can ever comprehend. William Falconer in his masterly
Marine Dictionary
(1780) devotes two pages to this operation. One extract will show what all sailors and embryo officers like young Nelson had to acquire by practice rather than theory - and then to embody in their frames like the instinctive knowledge of a bird :

. . . the first effort to turn the ship in tacking is communicated by the helm, which is then put to the lee-side. This circumstance being announced by the pilot, or commanding officer, who then calls out
Helm’s a-lee
, the head-sails are immediately made to shiver in the wind, by casting loose their
sheets
or
bowlines.
The pilot then calls out,
Up tacks and sheets
, which is executed by loosening all the ropes which confine the corners of the lower sails, in order that they may be more readily shifted to the other side. When the ship has turned her head directly to windward . . . the pilot gives the order to turn about the sails on the main and mizen masts, by the exclamation,
Haul mainsail, haul!
The bowlines and braces are then instantly cast off on one side, and as expeditiously drawn in on the other side, so as to wheel the yards about their masts: the lower corner of the mainsail is, by means of it’s tack, pulled down to it’s station at the chestree [crosstree] and all the after-sails are, at the same time, adjusted to stand upon the other board. Finally, when the ship has fallen off five or six points [one point equals 11° 15' in a circle] the pilot cries,
Haul of all!
or,
Let go, and haul!
Then the sails on the fore-mast are wheeled about by their braces: and as the ship has then a tendency to fall-off, she is checked by the effort of the helm, which for that purpose is put
hard-a-lee.
The fore-tack, or the lower corner of the fore-sail, being fixed in it’s place, the bowlines are hauled; and the other sails, which have been neglected in the hurry of tacking, are properly arranged to the wind; which exercise is called trimming the sails.

It neither sounds, nor was, simple and to do it efficiently required great skill and expertise.

As for the men who formed the human machinery that drove these ships - so beautiful to the eye and yet so harsh to the bodies that served them - they will have numbered about five hundred aboard a vessel like the
Raisonable
. The well-known saying of Dr Johnson must be quoted once again: ‘No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get him in jail; for being in a ship is being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.’ This was true enough in its way, but it must always be borne in mind that the condition of the farm labourer or the town dweller in the late eighteenth century was one of almost unimaginable squalor and brutality. Nelson was later to grow familiar with the conditions of the countryman, and was to do all that he could to alleviate the poverty of the labourers in his own area. But, even as the boy that he then was, he would have seen that the sailors aboard fared better than a great many landsmen. One of the most illuminating books to be written during this period was
Nautical Economy; or Forecastle Recollections of Events during the last War. Dedicated to the Tars of Old England by a Sailor politely called by the officers of the Navy Jack Nasty-Face.
Now ‘Jack’, as his title suggests and indeed as the contents of the book reveal, was no lover of the Navy, but his description of the food aboard compares very favourably with the practically starvation diet of a Norfolk farm labourer of the same period. ‘Breakfast usually consists of burgoo, made of coarse oatmeal and water; others will have Scotch coffee, which is burnt bread boiled in some water, and sweetened with sugar.’ At noon, ‘the pleasantest part of the day . . . every man and boy is allowed a pint, that is, one gill of rum and water, to which is added lemon acid, sweetened with sugar’. Salt beef, or pork with pease pudding, provided the main dish. The evening meal consisted of ‘half a pint of wine, or a pint of grog (rum diluted with water), to each man, with biscuit, and cheese or butter’.

Between decks the conditions of life were primitive and rough, but when it is remembered that even large cities at that time had no effective form of sewage disposal, and that most families lived in homes with but a single room, the necessities of discipline and some form of essential cleanliness in a ship meant that the sailor was often better off than the working man ashore. Much has been made of the harshness of naval discipline, and indeed no one could possibly defend it with a clear conscience. At the same time it must always be remembered that the general conditions of life everywhere were such that pain was a constant feature of existence: there was no recourse to anaesthetic when it came to an operation; most people had rotten teeth; a high percentage suffered from venereal disease and tuberculosis; and childbirth in itself always entailed a great degree of risk. Life was indeed ‘nasty, brutish and short’, and to say of the Navy that it consisted solely of ‘rum, sodomy and the lash’ is about as true as to judge the activities of human beings today solely by the gossip columns of the popular press. Even ‘Jack’, while rightly condemning most of the disciplinary practices of the Navy, had to admit that some humanitarian captains did exist:

Out of a fleet of nine sail of the line I was with, there were only two Captains thus distinguished [for their humanity]. They kept order on board without resorting to the frequent and unnecessary call upon the Boatswain and his cat, adopted by the other seven; and what was the consequence ? Those two ships beat us in reefing and furling; for they were not in fear and dread, well knowing that they would not be punished without a real and just cause. . . .

Although he was always a strict disciplinarian, it was to be to the distinction of Nelson and many of the generation of officers who grew up with him that they were largely of the new persuasion. The French Revolution, against which they were to fight so hard, and which Nelson as a conservatively-minded man detested, nevertheless laid its impress even upon the men who were so largely to contribute to the downfall of French imperialistic dreams. It was hard for the old breed to comprehend, but gradually it was realised that even sailors had rights - and that an efficient ship was a happy one where recourse to the cat-o’-nine-tails was minimal.

The
opening of Nelson’s career was inconspicuous. The war between England and Spain, centring around a dispute over the Falkland Islands, was averted, and the
Raisonable
was paid off. Nelson had served aboard her five months and a day. It was little enough, but sufficient to give him a close acquaintanceship with the life of a midshipman in the Royal Navy. Being under the age of fifteen he came in the category of the ‘youngsters’, those who slung their hammocks in the gun-room, coming under the supervision and jurisdiction of the gunner. The latter ranked with the boatswain and purser as a warrant officer, and was usually appointed after having spent at least twelve months’ service as a petty officer. In his charge were the provisioning, supply, and maintenance in a constant state of readiness of all the ordnance of the ship. He was, then, in a position of considerable authority and it was men such as he who, providing the link between the officers and the men, were the backbone of the Royal Navy. From a man who had ‘come up through the hawse-pipe’ the youths could learn more about the total operation of a ship, from sailing her to handling her in action, than they could have done in any system of special instruction ashore. From the moment that Horatio Nelson stepped into the gun-room he was part and parcel of the vessel in a way which few modern seamen in their highly complex and specialised skills can ever be.

The midshipmen were instructed every forenoon by a certificated schoolmaster in coastal and celestial navigation and in trigonometry. The ‘schooly’ also kept a strict eye on their behaviour and morals, reporting regularly to the captain on the character and potentialities of his charges. More often than not the schoolmaster was also the ship’s chaplain. When at sea, the boys were assembled on the upper deck to take the sun’s meridian altitude at noon with their quadrants. The quadrant, used for taking sun, moon and star altitudes, had been known in simple form since the thirteenth century, when it had been used by the Portuguese navigators during their epic voyages of discovery. By Nelson’s time it had become a highly reliable precision instrument and was generally, but wrongly, believed to be a British invention. (Edmund Stone in an appendix to his book on navigational instruments published in 1758 categorically stated that ‘The first of these instruments . . . was invented long ago by Sir Isaac Newton’.) They were then sent below to work out the latitude, combining this with a dead-reckoning of the ship’s position. Nelson would soon have found out that, whether at sea or in port, there was little rest. If they were at sea they were employed on the watches to learn an officer’s duties, while at the same time they were expected to mix with the men in all operations of sail-changing, either on deck at the braces, or aloft furling canvas. In the mornings one of their duties was to see that the sailors’ hammocks were properly lashed and stowed and, in general, to supervise all the operations of the ship. In harbour, as well as at sea, they were kept permanently busy as messengers by the First Lieutenant and one of their primary duties was boat service. If it was a hard life, it was a healthy one, and Nelson undoubtedly benefited from it.

It is unlikely, since he was a ‘youngster’ and aboard a ship commanded by his uncle, that Nelson saw much of the seamier or more squalid side of life as it was lived in the ‘olders’ ’ mess, where those who had reached the age of fifteen and had been rated as midshipmen lived under conditions that have often been described, though by few better than Frederick Chamier in his
Life of a Sailor
(1833):