Nelson: The Essential Hero (5 page)

A frigate like the
Seahorse
fulfilled much the same functions as a destroyer in twentieth-century navies. She acted as the eyes of the fleet and was built for swift sailing and easy manoeuvrability, being, as a contemporary writer described her, ‘a light nimble ship’. Originally the term ‘frigate’ had been applied to fast, undecked vessels - propelled by oars as well as sails - and used throughout the Mediterranean. It was the French, however, who had first applied the word to full-rigged, three-masted vessels, carrying between 20 and 40 guns, used for cruising and scouting purposes. They had come into their own during the Seven Years War (1756-1763) and were to play an immensely important part in the Napoleonic Wars, when on more than one occasion Nelson was to regret their scarcity or, indeed, their absence. When communications were entirely visual, and the sighting of an enemy fleet depended on these fast outriders of fleet or convoy, the frigate enjoyed a position of importance out of all proportion to its actual firepower. For a young officer, to serve in a frigate was to learn all the niceties of sailing and to enjoy in the ease of her handling and the speed of her advance the greatest delights of sail.

After calling at Funchal in Madeira, where there was already a British community established, mostly engaged in the wine trade, the
Seahorse
sailed down via the remote islands of Amsterdam and St Paul. They were in the Tropic of Capricorn, the ship scudding before the steady wind and the long swell, in rough but exhilarating sailor’s weather. Nelson’s health must have improved during his few years in the Navy for Mr Surridge, the master, who had taken a fancy to his keen and intelligent pupil, later recalled that he was ‘a boy with a rather florid countenance, rather stout and athletic’. The colouring was undoubtedly due to the long days of wind and sun, for Nelson had a fair skin, but his physical build can only be attributed to the healthy life and exercise of recent years. Rated midshipman on the master’s recommending him to Captain Farmer, Nelson for the first time knew the exhilaration of being allowed to tack the ship in fair weather under the keen eyes of the officer of the watch. The memory of that first moment of being in authority, of seeing the sheets hauled, the great sails fly, thunder and then come to rest, as the
Seahorse
drew away on her new tack, will have stayed with him for ever.

After altering course northward for India, with Madras the first port of call, they made for the Hoogly River, then Madras again, and from there on to Bombay. Nelson was now in the world from which England drew so much of her wealth, and it was ships like the one in which he sailed which made the transport of that wealth secure and possible. One could but wish that a Conrad had been aboard to depict the Bombay scene as it was then, or at Bushire which they reached on 25 May. For nearly two years he was in the East, learning the sailor’s trade, becoming familiar with the pattern of a world that was the far side of the moon to quiet Burnham, and indulging no doubt like any young man on ‘runs ashore’ into hot foreign ports, where the very unfamiliarity of everything bred an indifference to conventional rules of behaviour. Many years later in Naples he confided to a lady that he had once sat down for an evening of cards with a cheerful party in the East Indies, and had come away £300 better off. Reflecting next morning, probably with a headache, that if matters had gone differently he might have been ruined, he resolved never to play again. It was a resolve from which even Emma Hamilton in that far distant future could hardly break him.

He saw many places; among them the thriving town and naval station of Trincomalee, where the pearls from Tambalagam were beyond a midshipman’s pocket, but not the observation that it was ‘the finest harbour in the world’. He did not escape from the East unscathed, and in the December of 1775 he was struck down by a ‘malignant disorder’. He was for a time semi-paralysed and very nearly died, indeed would most probably have done so if the surgeon of the
Salisbury
had not advised an immediate return home on the first available ship. In March 1776 a cadaverous, fair-haired midshipman climbed haltingly up the gangway of the frigate
Dolphin.
He was taken under the care of her captain, James Pigot, who showed him such attention that Nelson was convinced that, but for him, he would long since have been dead. The illness was almost certainly malaria, at that time one of the greatest scourges of the East India station, from the after-effects of which he was to suffer nearly all his life. From now on, whether from this or other and later fevers, from wounds and manifold injuries, he would nearly always live with pain.

The
Dolphin
was six months on the return voyage, six months during which he slowly began to rebuild his health, watching the light move across the deckhead in the cabin where he lay, sunrise and sunset, and the dark of night broken only by a lamp’s pale glow if a visitor looked in on him. He heard the pound and scuffle of bare feet on the upper deck, the shouts and orders, the cries of blocks and tackles, and then felt the change of angle as his body sagged from one side to the other when the frigate came about and headed off on her new tack. Often he had fevers and the clinging sweat that went with them, delirium even, and on one occasion a vision which he was later convinced proved the turning point in his life. He had been in a deep trough of depression, a dark night of the soul where everything seemed against him - his illness, his lack of real influence, and the insurmountable obstacles that seemed to lie in his way. ‘I could discover no means of reaching the object of my ambition. After a long and gloomy reverie, in which I almost wished myself overboard, a sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me, and presented my king and country as my patron. My mind exulted in the idea. “Well then,” I exclaimed, “I will be a hero, and confiding in Providence, I will brave every danger.” ’ As he was often to tell Captain Hardy in later years, he saw suspended before him a ‘radiant orb’ ever urging him onwards. He was not quite eighteen.

The
midshipman who had lain so sick and despondent in his bunk during the long voyage home was to find that his star was indeed with him. During his absence, Captain Suckling had been appointed Comptroller of the Navy. Since this office entailed control of all naval shipbuilding, repairs, and manning of the fleet, it was in many respects a position almost comparable to that of the First Lord of the Admiralty. Despite much that has been said to the contrary, Nelson’s advancement - at least in his early days - can be largely ascribed to influence. True, if he had not shown himself competent and zealous not even influence would have prevailed, but he had much to thank his dead mother for having come from the Sucklings (with the shadow of the Walpoles at their backs).

Two days after the
Dolphin
paid off at Woolwich, on 24 September 1776, the convalescent midshipman was ordered by Admiral Sir James Douglas, who was in command at Portsmouth, to report aboard the 64-gun
Worcester
as acting lieutenant. Captain Mark Robinson, who was in command, received his new officer with enthusiasm and was pleased to find out on their first voyage down to Gibraltar that young Nelson was competent to take the deck and be in charge of the watch. There can be no doubt that those two years in the East Indies had taught him a great deal.

The
Worcester
was employed on convoy duties, the War of American Independence having broken out the year before and, although France had not yet declared herself ranged with the revolutionary colonists, there could be no doubt in anybody’s mind that she would do so in the very near future - in which case every British merchantman at sea would be at hazard. As Admiral Lord Charles Beresford commented: ‘A weapon was being silently and steadily forged to strike the British Empire down. The French dockyards were reorganised till Brest had 3,000 shipwrights against our insignificant 800 at Portsmouth. Line-of-battle ships were built with astounding celerity, till the
Pegase
was laid down, launched, and actually at sea within eighty days.’ France, recovered from the disasters of the Seven Years War, was determined to attack her old antagonist as soon as opportunity offered. And the revolt of the colonists provided it. It was not only in the rapid construction of new ships that the French excelled, but in the training of their officers and men. Furthermore, they produced the most beautifully proportioned, fastest and best-armed ships in the world. It is significant that so many of the most famous ‘British’ men-of-war were, in fact, ships captured from the French.

While Nelson was at sea on convoy-duty, bound for Gibraltar, the shipyards of Spain were almost as busy as those of France. Mindful of old wars and unavenged defeats, the Spaniards were fighting to close the gap of sea-power. They succeeded to such an extent that by 1779 they could muster 62 line-of-battle ships. Unlike the French, however, they did not understand that, however well-built, strong and well-armed a vessel, all is to no avail unless the officers and men are of the same calibre. As Nelson was to note in later years, ‘the Don’ could build fine ships, but he did not know how to handle them. The officers were chosen from the nobility and the men from peasant servitude. Neither were suitable for the sea. Nelson was never to hate the Spaniards as he hated the French. One suspects that he felt some sympathy with them : they were monarchists, something which he respected; their officers knew how to die like gentlemen; and, in the final analysis, they were to become little more than the dupes of Napoleon's imperial ambitions. (The position of Spain relative to that of France in the Napoleonic Wars was somewhat akin to that of Italy and Germany in the Second World War.)

On his first visit, sent ashore by the commanding officer with despatches and letters, Nelson admired the great fortress-rock of Gibraltar, symbol of Britain's hold over the sea-lanes of the world. He came to know its story: how Admiral Sir George Rooke, in command of a small Anglo-Dutch fleet, had stormed the Rock and seized it from the Spaniards in 1705. Ever since then, having endured its ‘Great Siege’ by the combined French and Spanish forces which began in 1779 and lasted for three years, seven months and twelve days - the longest continuous siege in history - it had become a cornerstone of Empire. The phrase ‘as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar’ had passed into the language. Over his head, as the young acting lieutenant went ashore, the muzzles of guns protruded everywhere from the galleries cut in the great limestone mass, and the British flag waved over them in the wind. The Spaniards could never forgive, nor forget, that encroachment upon their land. It dominated the straits, facing towards Mount Ceuta on the Moroccan coast, only fourteen miles away. Nelson would most probably have known, however sketchy his knowledge of the classics, that the two of them had represented to the ancients the Pillars of Hercules. This was the end of voyaging for early Mediterranean men who, peering fearfully at the great ocean beyond, had decided that they marked the limits of the world.

Nelson recorded that he ‘was at sea with convoys till April 2nd 1777’, so he knew a hard winter and the kind of weather that the Bay of Biscay can throw at sailors, seas which will founder even the stoutest ships. It was a good training ground, and one to which he would often return, and where he would learn the ominous swell that presages rising winds and storm, and how to handle a ship when they came. Did the hairs on his neck bristle, did a shadow cross his path as he first set foot upon the Rock ? It was to ‘this dark comer of the world’, as he once referred to it in later years, that his body was brought ashore from H.M.S.
Victory
on 28 October 1805. But now as he looked about him, recovered in health and happily conscious of the dignity of his acting rank, he would have seen in the naval, military and marines’ uniforms happy evidence of that far hand of Empire which he himself had represented in the Arctic, and which he had seen in all its formality in the sun-drenched West Indies. As a seaman he would have remarked on one occasion or another when the east wind, or Levanter, was blowing out of the Mediterranean the ashen tail of the Levanter cloud as the humid air spun up off the sheer eastern face of the Rock, lifting to a thousand feet and more, and then condensed into a cloud that trailed away westerly darkening all Gibraltar and the Bay of Algeciras beyond. He stood at the mouth of the Mediterranean and looked inward from the great ocean at the wrinkled, ancient sea. He would have learned from experience, as well as from instruction, of the two-to three-knot current that flows steadily into the Mediterranean as the Atlantic makes good the inland sea’s water-loss due to evaporation. He was at the gateway of the world where he would make his name, and cause the flag of his country to fly above all others.

Early in April 1777, the
Worcester
was paid off at Portsmouth and Nelson found himself facing the first major hurdle in his professional career : his examination for lieutenant. By now he had the necessary qualifications to prove that he had been at sea for more than six years (he had, to be exact, done six years, three months, one week and six days since he had first joined the
Raisonable
in Chatham). His certificates showed him to be over twenty years of age, whereas he was five months under his nineteenth birthday - a fact which must have been well enough known to Comptroller Suckling, who was on the board that examined him. Clarke and M‘Arthur say that the latter purposely concealed his relationship from the other examining captains:

When his nephew had recovered from his first confusion [at finding his uncle present at the Navy Board interview], his answers were prompt and satisfactory, and indicated the talents he so eminently possessed. The examination ended in a manner very honourable to him; upon which his uncle threw off his reserve, and rising from his seat, introduced his nephew. The examining Captains expressed their surprise at his not having informed them of this before. ‘No,’ replied the independent Comptroller, ‘I did not wish the younker to be favoured, I felt convinced that he would pass a good examination; and you see, gentlemen, I have not been disappointed.’