Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey

Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey Richard Holmes Robert Southey LIVES THAT NEVER GROW OLDA radical new series – edited by Richard Holmes – that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Every book is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to read and vividly alive.This short, brilliant, action-packed biography appeared only eight years after Nelson’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar (a scene unforgettably described). It helped transform Nelson into the most popular wartime hero that Britain has ever placed on top of a column.It first gave currency to the proverbial stories of his courage and exhibitionism, from the ‘blind eye’ at Copenhagen, to ‘Kiss me, Hardy’ and the scandal of ‘Beloved Emma’ at Naples. It was written by the romantic poet and historian Robert Southey, a one-time radical who was converted to patriotism by Nelson’s shining (though not ‘untarnished’) example. Southey on Nelson The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY Richard Holmes Table of Contents Cover Page (#uf54506ed-4bdf-5ebb-990c-8523f2a1a284) Title Page (#uc42cea6d-24c5-57e2-8007-2ca89bd93bc4) INTRODUCTION (#uf4e41a29-a055-58d5-b236-883d72127acf) SELECT CHRONOLOGY (#ue80782b7-7432-5af5-8094-d32fcace179b) AUTHOR’S PREFACE (#ucf463152-e4ad-5ce1-bebe-d1f9e124a777) THE LIFE OF NELSON (#u23529fe7-e266-5d72-be05-8a91f0cbb49c) ONE (#ud5fa2a84-f673-5577-9c58-e3c57705dbe3) TWO (#u6040366b-e99d-5b29-8a6c-a4f41927b164) THREE (#ue2c2486b-2404-5271-9ef4-5931919af981) FOUR (#litres_trial_promo) FIVE (#litres_trial_promo) SIX (#litres_trial_promo) SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo) EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo) NINE (#litres_trial_promo) FURTHER READING (#litres_trial_promo) INDEX (#litres_trial_promo) Classic Biographies Edited by Richard Holmes (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) INTRODUCTION (#ulink_eff510f0-e74d-5112-bf08-fa6e29927047) 1 Once he became a fleet-commander, Nelson always liked to lead his ships into battle flying naval signal number sixteen from his topgallant mast-head. Signal number sixteen consisted of two flags, one above the other: the uppermost white with a blue cross, the one below a patriotic red, white and blue. Even at the battle of Trafalgar, after he had issued the immortal message ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’, Nelson hoisted signal number sixteen as his last general command to his battle fleet. Its meaning was a dare as much as an order, and it was particularly relished by his officers, his ‘band of brothers’, who considered it typical of Nelson’s attitude to life in general. Signal number sixteen, applicable in all conceivable circumstances, meant: ‘Engage the enemy more closely’. It was flying at 1pm on 21 October, 1805, when Nelson was hit by a musket ball on the quarter deck of the Victory; and it was still flying when he died three hours later, in the surgeon’s cockpit, asking Captain Hardy to kiss him farewell, and to tell him how many enemy ships had surrendered. 2 Even before his heroic death at Trafalgar aged forty-seven, Nelson had become a national legend in a way that was virtually without precedent. His personal bravery, his astonishing aggression in battle, his loyalty to his fellow officers and his kindness towards his able seamen (especially his young midshipmen), were famous throughout the Royal Navy. But his gallantry, his self-sacrifice, and his fervent patriotism had made him a celebrity, in a quite modern sense, throughout the whole of England. Nelson was a new breed of war hero, a profoundly Romantic figure, who had caught the popular imagination and become the embodiment of a new kind of English nationalism. There were, of course, historical reasons for this. The patriotic war against revolutionary France, which began in earnest in 1793, brought growing fears of invasion and subversion. By 1800, the military successes of Bonaparte had personalised this threat, and even brought fears of defeat and dictatorship. This slowly transformed the mood of radical discontent, and popular disaffection, that had gripped England (and especially its writers and intellectuals) for over a decade. Nelson became the personal focus of a deep, stirring movement of national unity and recovered common purpose. It was no coincidence that he led the most glamorous and successful of the British armed services of the period, and that there were very few families of the landed and middle classes–the families of Jane Austen’s novels–who did not have a father, brother, son, grandson, or uncle in the navy. The Royal Navy was also a powerful and modern force. An English warship or ‘ship of the line’, carrying upward of seventy-four, eighty-six, or a hundred guns and a crew and armed personnel of 500 was the most sophisticated, complex and expensive military machine of its time. The English fleets were small compared to those of France or Spain, but they were better equipped and disciplined, with fierce loyalties among the crews, and strong family affections (and rivalries) between the officers. English navigation and gunnery could not be matched, and when Nelson boasted that ‘one Englishman was worth three Frenchmen’, he meant that his crews could sail across the Atlantic twice as fast, and his gunners fire three broadsides to their one. English fleets might appear virtually anywhere in the world–off the coasts of America, India, Egypt, the Baltic states, or throughout the Mediterranean–and until the successes of Wellington’s armies after 1811, they represented the one check to Bonaparte’s global ambitions. In this sense the Royal Navy, and its figurehead in Nelson, represented not only England, but a certain kind of European freedom. 3 But Nelson had become a legend, above all, because of his charismatic personality. For the English public, his whole life was seen as one unbroken act of heroism, starting as a fifteen-year-old midshipman fighting a polar bear on an artic ice flow, and continuing without check until Trafalgar some thirty years later. Yet in fact neither recognition nor success came quickly to Nelson. After mixed service in the West Indies, South America, the Baltic, Canada and the Caribbean, Nelson was a seasoned officer and a post-captain at the age of thirty. But he had never yet commanded a ship larger than a small frigate, the twenty-eight-gun Boreas; he suffered from sea-sickness, recurrent malaria, and severe bouts of depression; and he frequently considered resigning from the Service. For five years between 1788 and 1792, he was simply an unemployed navy officer, quietly married but without children, and living on half-pay at his father’s rectory, in the remote Norfolk village of Burnham Thorpe. On Saturdays he would ride three miles to the little tidal harbour of Overy Staithe, to sit on the sea wall, read the Navy Chronicle and watch the fishing boats. It was not until the outbreak of war with revolutionary France, that he was given command of the sixty-four gun frigate the Agamemnon, in January, 1793. He served quite successfully in the Mediterranean, notably on the Corsica station in 1794, but he lost the sight of his right eye at the siege of Calvi, and his general health continued bad. It was only three years later that Nelson first really made his distinctive mark at the battle of Cape St Vincent in February, 1797, when he disobeyed his commander Sir John Jervis (later Lord Vincent) by breaking the battle line–‘without a moment’s hesitation’—to sail directly and alone into the huge Spanish fleet. He was promoted Rear Admiral, and appointed a Knight of the Bath. However later that year, while leading a bloody sea-borne landing at Santa Cruz in July, he lost his right arm. The following year, 1798, he was at last given his first major command aboard his flagship the seventy-four gun Vanguard. He pursued the French fleet relentlessly back and forth across the Mediterranean. He finally trapped it outside Alexandria, anchored in Aboukir Bay. In a dazzling display of seamanship he annihilated what had been Napoleon’s Egyptian invasion fleet, at the Battle of the Nile in August 1798. This was the first great strategic British victory against revolutionary France. Gillray cartooned Nelson sweeping the enemy from the seas with a crocodile for a cudgel, and from now on his reputation spread like wild-fire among the general public. His exploits were for the first time widely reported in the daily papers, including the newly founded The Times, which ran gossip items about him as well as battle reports. Nelson found that, unlike most other naval commanders who cultivated bluffness and understatement (like his great friend the taciturn Cuthbert Collingwood), he had a natural gift for extravagant publicity. He was a master of the peremptory official dispatch to his superiors, and the vivid post-action narrative rapidly and skilfully composed, for the benefit of the Admiralty. His account of ‘Nelson’s Patent Bridge’ for boarding enemy ships at Cape St Vincent, was celebrated in the fleet for its cheek, and quickly appeared in The Times. His description (not unbiased) of his tactics at Aboukir Bay, and the explosion of the huge French flagship L’Orient at night, was so famous that Turner painted a picture of it. Nelson understood the essentially dramatic nature of naval command, and the natural theatre of the quarterdeck. Here a captain not only commanded an entire ship’s company for months on end, but also performed for its benefit. Time and again, in the heat and roar of action (when few men could even think clearly), Nelson not only demonstrated his extraordinary coolness, but proved he had a genius for producing the symbolic gesture and the memorable phrase: ‘A laurel or a cypress for my head’; ‘Westminster Abbey or victory’. His words and gestures before and during his last two great battles, Copenhagen (April 1801) and Trafalgar (October, 1805), became so widely known, almost proverbial, that later historians have sometimes treated them as folklore. Yet Nelson was something of an historian himself. He kept very full diaries, and wrote brilliant descriptive and often highly emotional letters about his battles. These were not only sent to his friends and family, but also to his fellow officers and superiors, and were frequently leaked to newspapers. In fact diary-keeping and letter-writing (often later extended to memoirs) became characteristic of British naval officers of this period, just as a century later they would become characteristic of military officers on the Western Front. English naval writing during the Napoleonic War forms a literature of its own, and has subsequently inspired an entire maritime sub-genre of the modern historical novel, from C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series to Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey saga. For Nelson, writing and deliberate phrase-making became an important expression of his turbulent personality and, increasingly, his sense of mission. It was he, and not a fellow officer, who invented ‘the Nelson touch’ in 1805, with its deliberate echo of Shakespeare’s ‘little touch of Harry in the night’ from Henry V; and it was he who adopted Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘we band of brothers’. It is significant that he kept his diary in duplicate so that it should not be lost and that in the last ninety minutes before action was joined at Trafalgar he wrote out his final diary entries, his testament, and his long battle prayer, in his own clear racing longhand, twice in full without a single alteration. 4 From the time of his return to England in 1800, now aged forty-two and the hero of the Nile, Nelson found he had become a universal celebrity, cheered by crowds, dined by City corporations, and painted by leading artists. His small, tanned, hawklike figure; his glazed right eye and his one arm, and above all the mass of decorations he always wore on his dark blue naval greatcoat (he was wearing four stars at the battle of Trafalgar), made him instantly recognisable. He was mobbed wherever he went, whether boarding a cutter in Portsmouth harbour, dining with the mayor of Norwich, or simply shopping in Piccadilly. After his death at Trafalgar a full-blown Nelson cult developed. It produced pictures, poems, songs, medals, statues, marble busts, waxworks, china mugs, and commemorative dinners. Pubs, streets and babies, were named after him; and Haydn composed a Mass in his honour. His fellow officers introduced the after-dinner toast, ‘To the Immortal Memory’, which is drunk in Royal Navy ward-rooms around the world to this day. In 1842 Nelson’s Column with its seventeen-foot high statue on top, was erected in Trafalgar Square. This startling phenomenon has sometimes been compared to the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1999. But it was far more deeply-rooted, in a sense of national pride, renewed identity and wartime achievement. Trafalgar was always understood as a defensive victory, not a conquest. It was the saving of Britain from foreign invasion, and hence an assertion of freedom, not of empire. It has perhaps more revealing analogies with the Battle of Britain of 1940. The memory of Nelson compelled huge and lasting personal loyalty among all seamen, and tales of his exploits became legendary. For many men, contact with Nelson became in retrospect the defining moment of their lives. In a tiny Kentish churchyard, on the banks of the River Rother (which flows into the Thames estuary), I once stumbled upon a tombstone whose inscription read simply: “William Burke, Purser aboard his Majesty’s ship Victory, and in whose arms the immortal Nelson died.’ The witnesses of Nelson’s death are well-known to have been Dr Beatty, his surgeon, Dr Scott his chaplain, and Thomas Hardy, his ship’s captain. Yet the small, balding middle-aged William Burke did in fact support Nelson’s head during the three agonising hours it took him to die, kneeling down between him and the bulkhead, holding his shoulders in the dark, barely speaking a word. William Burke chose to record this moment in a perfect, but surely unconscious, iambic pentameter. The memory of Nelson had inspired the retired naval purser with a another fragment of English poetry, as a noble as an unwritten line from Shakespeare’s Henry V. ‘And in his arms the immortal Nelson died.’ 5 Yet many of those contemporaries who knew Nelson best recognised profound contradictions in his character. When Wellington first met him, he thought Nelson ‘a charlatan’. Lord Minto described him as ‘a great man who was in some respects a baby’. His old commander in Chief Sir John Jervis, later Lord St Vincent, one of the greatest naval leaders of his day, gave it as his deliberate opinion, nine years after Nelson’s death, that: ‘Animal courage was the sole merit of Lord Nelson, his private character most disgraceful in every sense of the word.’ Many of his superior officers thought he was arrogant and absurdly flamboyant. His high-handed actions as a young officer in the West Indies led him to be pursued for years for ?20,000’s worth of civil damages. Sir Hyde Parker, whose signal to withdraw he famously ignored at Copenhagen in 1801, always considered him dangerously impetuous in action and a grave diplomatic liability. Lord Keith was regularly infuriated by his refractory attitude to strategic commands in the Mediterranean. He was frequently accused of vanity and self-importance. His separation from his wife, Frances Nisbet, in 1800 was thought shameful by many, including most of his relatives. His increasingly public liaison with the young and extravagant Lady Emma Hamilton, was considered scandalous, then vulgar, and finally humiliating. His stepson, Josiah Nisbet, came to hate him and frequently expressed the hope that with his one eye and one arm Nelson might one day conveniently fall over the side of his flag ship. His old friend and one time subordinate, Sir Thomas Troubridge, viewing things from the cool high chambers of the Admiralty, thought that popular fame (and Emma Hamilton) had gone to his head, and to other parts of his body too. Many, like Gillray and Cruikshank, thought that there was something irresistibly ludicrous about the small strutting figure, weighed down by his huge medals and his plump mistress. Perhaps most damagingly, while on the Mediterranean station between June, 1799 and July, 1800, it was said that Nelson had become too personally involved with defending the corrupt Sicilian government at Naples, where Sir William Hamilton was Ambassador to the royal court. Here Nelson was thought to have been drawn (or perhaps seduced) into the gravest acts of political double-dealing and injustice. He was accused of disobeying orders to withdraw from Naples by Admiral Keith, of reneging on a truce signed by one of his own officers, Captain Foote, and conniving at the unjust court martial and execution of a Neapolitan patriot and naval officer Commodore Caracciolo. Worst of all, he was accused of allowing more than ninety civilian prisoners, including many women, who were officially under his protection in evacuation ships, to be returned to shore and executed in the cruellest manner by the Neapolitan authorities. Indeed some accused Nelson of war crimes in the Mediterranean. In this glaring combination of light and shade, Nelson’s meteoric career and extraordinary seductive character offered all the moral contradictions of a peculiarly Romantic hero. But the triumph and tragedy of Trafalgar in October, 1805 meant that initially his whole reputation took on the aspect of a simple martyrdom. It was produced a period of unrestrained national mourning; a state funereal at St Paul’s attended by thirty-six admirals; and a great outpouring of Nelson tributes, reminiscences, and memorabilia. Yet even in death Nelson provoked extreme reactions. Benjamin West, the President of the Royal Academy, painted a huge mythological tribute, with a mournful shadowy Neptune handing up the shrouded and distinctly Christ-like figure of Nelson (supported by an angel and surrounded by winged cherubs) into the arms of a resplendent and trident wielding Britannia. It was a deliberate and solemn apotheosis, perilously close to a religious Pieta. In an altogether different spirit James Gillray executed a witty coloured cartoon, showing Nelson lying comfortably back upon the bosom of a buxom Britannia (Lady Hamilton of course, in an operatic flood of tears), while attended by a kneeling sea-captain (a grim George III) and a hysterical flag-waving midshipman (the Duke of Clarence). A sea-sprite circled overhead blowing Nelson’s own trumpet. It spouted a single word: not the expected ‘Victory’, but the self-vaunting ‘Immortality’. 6 In a newspaper article of 1811, discussing the new Romantic interest in celebrity and biography, Coleridge described these years of the English Regency as ‘emphatically, the Age of Personality’. So it was not surprising that a figure like Nelson, who seemed so much larger-than-life, was bound to exercise a fascination on people by the very vividness of his character as much as by the heroism of his actions. He had been asked to write his own autobiography as early as October, 1799, and did indeed dash off a Sketch of his life for John M’Arthur, a naval journalist working as joint-editor of The Naval Chronicle. The result was a curious mixture of modesty and melodrama. Nelson mentions in passing the loss of eye and arm, his childless marriage, his failure to achieve spectacular prize-money (from captured ships), and his strictly local success in ‘placing the King of Naples back on his throne’. But his conclusion is like one of his battle signals hoist to the topgallant mast-head. ‘Without having any inheritance, or having been fortunate in prize money, I have received all the honours of my profession, been created a peer of Great Britain, and I may say to the reader: GO THOU AND DO LIKEWISE.’ After his death, a mass of brief memoirs were hastily published, especially dealing with disputed events at the battles of Aboukir Bay and Copenhagen, and the controversy over Nelson’s actions–and inactions–at Naples. Encouraged by Lady Hamilton, an inaccurate and highly partisan study was published by James Harrison in 1806. The following year 1807 William Beatty published his Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson. Then the journalist John M’Arthur joined forces with a navy chaplain and historian James Clarke, to produce a massive semiofficial assemblage of papers, The Life and Services of Horatio Viscount Nelson from his Lordships own Mss published in two enormous volumes in 1809. It drew widely on Nelson’s letters and despatches, and commissioned or republished eyewitness accounts. These volumes had the support of Lady Nelson, and were notable for the fact that they did not mention Lady Hamilton at all. They also carried, as their frontispiece to set the tone, an engraving of Benjamin West’s heroic painting. In the following year 1810, the newly founded Quarterly Review asked one of its fiercest reviewers to make a general assessment of the state of Nelson biography. It was five years after Trafalgar, the Napoleonic war was still at its height, and a patriotic encomium might have been expected. But the reviewer chosen was unusual: the poet and one-time pro-Jacobin rebel, Robert Southey. He was given the Harrison volume, the Clarke and M’Arthur, the Beatty memoir, and several lesser studies. In a forty-two page essay published in Quarterly Review No. 5, February, 1810, Southey was highly critical of all the volumes except Beatty’s precise and moving eye-witness account. He observed that Harrison was totally unreliable, and that Clarke and M’Arthur were almost literally unreadable, as their volumes ran to thousands of pages, were five inches thick, and weighed in at almost twenty-seven pounds. The Life lacked all narrative skill and selection, did not give a convincing picture of Nelson’s character, and did not address the question of Lady Hamilton, about whom Southey appended a long and waspish footnote. Southey concluded by making an elegant pr?cis of Nelson’s career, and observing that none of the writers before him understood the art of biography. True biography required above all three things: ‘industry, judgement, and genius: the patience to investigate, the determination to select, the power to infer and enliven.’ Southey’s shrewd publisher John Murray (already Byron’s publisher) immediately challenged Southey to write such a biography himself. Could not Southey easily turn the 10,000-word review into short and popular portrait of Nelson, to suit the taste of wartime readers, and to inspire young sailors? If he pitched it right, Murray could print ‘a large impression’ and also count on it ‘going off as a midshipman’s manual’. He had paid a hundred guineas for the review, and he now offered a further hundred guineas for the biography, which he reckoned Southey could complete within six months. Southey enthusiastically accepted; but almost the moment he began serious research, was assailed by doubts. What could a literary man, living in deep rural retirement with his family in the Lake District, know of naval warfare, sailing terminology, the drama of the high seas and the intricacies of maritime diplomacy? Moreover, what could a poet understand of a warrior’s temperament like Nelson’s? He wrote to his brother Tom Southey, who was the sailor in his family: ‘I am such a sad lubber that I feel half ashamed of myself for being persuaded even to review the Life of Nelson, much more to write one…I walk among sea terms as a cat does in a china pantry, in bodily fear of doing myself mischief, and betraying myself.’ It was a properly domestic and unseamanlike analogy, and one that Southey would often repeat in self-deprecation. In fact Southey was rather better qualified than he pretended. As a young man he had indeed made his name as a Jacobin writer, and a poet of long, lurid verse romances, like Thalaba, the Destroyer (1801), and The Curse of Kehema (1810). Their length and their absurd titles suggest why Lord Byron–among others – made fun of them. The verse was execrable, and yet the story-telling was strangely compelling. Southey realised that this suggested that his prose–which his private letters already show as crisp, vivid, and wonderfully engaging–might be a stronger suit than his poetry. So now, a family man in his mid-thirties, he had deliberately set out to re-establish himself as an historian, and had done so with great success. Murray had just published the first volume of his massive History of Brazil, which was very well-received and Southey would dedicate a further nine years to completing it in three volumes (1810-1819). It was on the basis of this work, not his poetry, that he had originally been sent the Nelson books for review and why Murray now had such confidence in him. In fact Southey had a natural genius for shaping narrative and bold story-telling. (His children’s tale of ‘The Three Bears’ is still a favourite, partly because of its perfect construction, a masterly accumulation of comic suspense.) He also revealed an outstanding ability to research and organize complex sources, and yet still retain a poet’s feel for the vivid turn of phrase or memorable image. In this unusual combination of the scholarly and the imaginative, Southey had all the makings of a fine biographer, whatever his subject might be. He had not renounced poetry, and would continue to publish works, now increasingly patriotic, like The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (1816). But he saw history and biography as the new direction to his mature career, even though he pretended to lament it. In 1810 he wrote to his friend Walter Savage Landor: ‘I have an ominous feeling that there are poets enough in the world without me, and my best chance of being remembered will be as an historian.’ Later he would add simply: ‘by nature I am a poet, by deliberate choice an historian.’ Like all good biographers, Southey was soon drawn deeply into his subject, finding Nelson’s life both more inspiring and more enigmatic than he had at first expected. In the event the six month project took over two years to complete, and Southey was still writing in spring 1813. He combed minutely through Clarke and M’Arthur, carefully re-assembling the narrative of Nelson’s career, but boldly reconstructing it in a series of superbly visualised scenes. From the original chaos of these materials, an overwhelming sense of Nelson’s destiny emerged with almost hypnotic power, a destiny that had seized him even in childhood. Southey sticks remarkably close to the original sources in official despatches and eyewitness accounts. There is not a single quoted phrase of Nelson’s, or exchange of dialogue, that does not have an authentic written source, and often several. Unlike modern scholars’ convention, Southey only occasionally chooses to acknowledge these–notably in the case of Beatty–but prefers to present unbroken historical narrative. Yet such is the crisp, factual style of the narration, that the reader never feels he is straying into fiction. Instead Southey selects and dramatises–or ‘infers and enlivens’-with enormous success, achieving a genuine sense of modern epic, especially in his four great battle set-pieces–Cape St Vincent, Aboukir Bay, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar. Besides Clarke and M’Arthur, Southey also characteristically undertook a wide sweep of research and enquiry, especially in controversial areas. He read with exacting attention the independently published accounts of Boswell on Corsica; Captain Edward Berry at Aboukir Bay; of Captain Edward Foote at Naples (together with a civilian eyewitness to the atrocities, Helen Maria Williams); of Colonel William Stewart, a military liaison officer at Copenhagen; of Dr Beatty and Nelson’s chaplain, Alexander Scott, at Trafalgar. He gave full consideration to the materials that Lady Hamilton had supplied to Harrison and others, even when he did not approve of them, or even fully trust them. He made contact with John Wilson Croker, a formidable Tory figure then Secretary to the Admiralty, who after initial suspicions, whole-heartedly backed the book and provided Southey with charts, maps, strategic plans, and the full co-operation of the Admiralty’s cartographic department. The biography was eventually dedicated, with nice diplomacy, to Croker. 7 Southey also knew that much would stand or fall on the authenticity he could bring to his accounts of naval actions. He was not in fact a complete landlubber. He had himself twice sailed across the Bay of Biscay to Lisbon, both rough voyages of over a fortnight each way. His friend Coleridge had sailed in a wartime convoy to Malta in 1804, and become intimate friends with one of Nelson’s ‘band of brothers’, Alexander Ball, then civilian Governor of Malta, but in 1799 Captain of the ship that took on the French flagship L’Orient in Aboukir Bay. Coleridge had made notes about Nelson from Ball’s conversation, which he supplied to Southey, and had also been in Naples at the time of Trafalgar and witnessed the reaction to the news of Nelson’s death. Coleridge’s materials, both published and unpublished, were skilfully incorporated into Southey’s biography. But Southey’s most confidential source was his own much-admired naval brother Tom, who had actually been a lieutenant at the Battle of Copenhagen, though serving in Sir John Hyde’s squadron rather than directly under Nelson himself. Though later Tom was court marshalled for insubordination, he remained a lively source of combat details and atmosphere, as well as offering to check all Southey’s dreaded ‘naval terms’ in proof. What Southey wanted above all from Tom was the feel of an actual battle at sea, and the way ordinary men behaved under the extreme stress of battle conditions and physical violence. Only then could he make a true judgement of what made Nelson extraordinary. In December, 1812, while still trying to pull the battle sections of the biography together, he wrote to Tom: ‘You used to speak of the dead lying in the shoal water at Copenhagen; there was the boatswain’s mate, or somebody, asked for–when he was lying face upwards under the stern, or somewhere. Tell me the right particulars of this, which is too striking a circumstance to be lost.’ He also asked about the behaviour of the gun crews, the fear that some of the canons were ‘honeycombed’ and would blow up, the things that men did and said in the heat of battle, and the English gunner’s savage cry, ‘here goes the death of six!’ whenever the canons were fired. ‘This is a thing which would be felt.’ Several of these incidents found their way into the account of Copenhagen, which is one of the triumphs of Southey’s battle narratives. It opens with a superbly orchestrated description of the perilous approach of the British fleet through the Danish Sound–conjuring up the names of Prince Hamlet at Elsinore, the astronomer Tycho Brahe on the Isle of Huen, and Queen Matilda escaping from Cronenburg Castle. The battle itself reaches its climax in the legendary incident of Nelson putting his telescope to his blind eye. This Southey had carefully compiled from two different eyewitness accounts—by the ship’s surgeon, Mr Ferguson (1806), and by the liaison officer Colonel Stewart (1809)–together with Clarke and M’Arthur’s commentary, and Tom Southey’s memories of later gossip in the fleet. Skilfully fitting together these varied and sometimes contradictory records of Nelson’s precise words and gestures on the quarter deck of the Elephant, Southey produced the dramatic composite version which has become, as it were, scriptural. ‘I have only one eye–I have a right to be blind sometimes’–and then, putting the glass to his blind eye, in that mood of mind which sports with bitterness, he exclaimed, ‘I really do not see the signal!’ Presently he exclaimed , ‘Damn the signal! Keep mine for closer battle flying. That’s the way I answer such signals! Nail mine [No. 16]. to the mast!’. But Southey produces far more than the heroics of battle. His account of the aftermath of Copenhagen, for example, and Nelson’s sense of absolute exhaustion and growing anxiety, is wonderfully captured. The sky had suddenly become overcast; white flags were waving from the mastheads of so many shattered ships; the slaughter had ceased, but the grief was to come, for the account of the dead was not yet made up, and no man could tell for what friends he might have to mourn. The very silence which follows upon the cessation of such a battle becomes a weight upon the heart at first, rather than a relief…[Nelson] had won the day by disobeying his orders, and, in so far as he had been successful, had convicted the Commander-in-Chief of an error in judgement. ‘Well’, said he, as he left the Elephant, ‘I have fought contrary to orders, and I shall, perhaps, be hanged. Never mind: let them!’ Some of the small, discordant, surreal moments of the battle are particularly memorable. When a cannon shot shattered a large ‘kettle’ of bacon and beans on the gun deck of the Monarch, at a time when she was taking terrible punishment from the Danish guns, ‘amid the tremendous carnage’ the English sailors with ‘singular coolness’ carefully scooped up the spilled food from the deck, and nonchalantly ate as they continued to fire their cannons. This vivid incident, which says a number of things about Nelson’s navy, almost certainly came from Tom Southey. All the battles are narrated with superb, panoramic sweep and then stunning immediacy. Southey manages to retain an almost balletic sense of the great fleet manoeuvrings. Yet he continually plunges the reader into close-up moments of chaos and violence. The massive explosion of L’Orient, which brought the entire battle to a halt for several minutes, is one such; Nelson’s own death aboard the Victory is another. One of his most effective biographical techniques is to set the scene of a coming battle, and then ignite it with a few words from Nelson. He carefully describes the tactics, the plans and risks, bringing them to a climax of suspense, and then–as if he had prepared a well-laid a fire–he sets light to the whole with a single phrase by Nelson. The evening before Aboukir Bay is one such a masterly passage, which ends with the following characteristic exchange. ‘Captain Berry, when he comprehended the scope of the design, exclaimed with transport, “If we succeed, what will the world say?”–“There is no if ‘in the case,” replied the Admiral; “that we shall succeed is certain, who may live to tell the story is a very different question.”’ 8 In the light of modern research, Southey’s biography does have many technical shortcomings. He is too close to the war against Napoleon to set it in any larger European context. He has nothing like the modern scholar’s access to the Nelson and Admiralty archives. He frequently over-simplifies the manoeuvrings and chaos of a large naval battle and, despite his conversations with Tom Southey, he often underestimates the stunning, brutal violence of naval warfare for officers and seamen alike. Clipped phrases like ‘he was almost cut in half, lose all meaning. Alexander Scott, the chaplain aboard the Victory at Trafalgar, described it as finding himself suddenly plunged into ‘a butcher’s shambles’ of human body parts. He refused to write any detailed memoirs, and was traumatised for years afterwards. But the portrait of Nelson is admirable in its depth, and contrasting lights. What is most striking is its mixture of flamboyant patriotism and grim psychological realism. It is not a flat portrait, or hagiographic study. It presents an immensely powerful and seductive figure, who is also restless, self-deluding and vain. There are many penetrating glimpses of Nelson’s inner doubts and turmoil. Southey emphasises his weakness as a child, the disastrous loss of his mother at the age nine, and writes a moving passage about Nelson’s boyhood homesickness, which in a sense continues until he meets Emma Hamilton. He isolates the episode of young Nelson’s despair, on the voyage back from India, and suggests a moment of intensely Romantic selfdedication to the idea of ‘heroism’ itself. He describes the depressions, professional frustrations and bitterness of Nelson’s middle period; his anger with the Admiralty; his disillusion with many superior officers; and hints at the physical disappointments of his marriage with Frances Nisbet, later Lady Nelson. 9 One of Southey’s main challenges as a biographer was how to write about Nelson and Emma Hamilton. Here he was faced with subtle problems of libel, scandal and biographical convention. Although Nelson had separated from his wife in 1800, he had never divorced Lady Nelson, never publically acknowledged his liaison with Emma Hamilton (though he lived openly with her on their estate at Merton from 1801), nor officially recognised his daughter by her, Horatia ‘Thompson’, born in February 1801. Clarke and M’Arthur had simply refused to write about Lady Hamilton. Yet the affair was common knowledge throughout the Navy, and probably across most of England, since it was depicted so often and with such relish in Cruickshank’s and Gillray’s openly erotic and mocking cartoons. At the time of writing in 1810-13, both women were alive, although living in characteristically different styles. Lady Nelson was established frugally and respectably on her large Suffolk estate, influential at Court, and receiving a fine state pension of ?3,500. She would live into her seventies. Emma, on the other hand, was recklessly besporting herself, drinking heavily, gambling, mortgaging the Merton estate, and talking hypnotically to a stream of visitors about her ever-beloved Nel. But by 1812 she had become obese, confused and virtually bed bound; and was rumoured to be selling off Nelson’s letters to pay her debts. In 1815 she was to die in Calais, tragically exiled, penniless and alcoholic, aged only forty-nine. Accordingly, Southey decided to adopt a double strategy. Only the most discreet and gracious mention would be made of Lady Nelson, and certainly very little of her shortcomings as a wife. As a result, ironically, she is reduced to something of a cipher in his biography. But the story of Nelson and Emma, however scandalous, was too emotionally revealing for Southey not to use it as fully as he dared. Emma in fact gave him unique opportunity to write about the private life of a public figure. She gave him access to Nelson’s turbulent inner world, and thereby allowed him to give Nelson’s character a truly Romantic dimension. His tactic was to state formally and solemnly at the outset that there was absolutely no ‘criminal connection’ (viz. sexual relationship) between them, and that it was simply ‘an excessively romantic’ friendship which brought Nelson much trouble. He then proceeded to write about it in such a way that it was clear to any adult reader that here was the grand passion of Nelson’s life, an ‘infatuated attachment’ of a supremely sexual nature. It was a love-affair that kept Nelson alive to fight the battle of Trafalgar, but also in some matters–political as well as moral–severely and permanently damaged his reputation. Southey describes how Nelson and Emma first met fleetingly in 1793 at Naples, a strategic key to the Western Mediterranean, and at that time the largest city and port in Italy. Here Emma was established as the picturesque young wife of the charming and eccentric Ambassador to the Court of King Ferdinand and Queen Marie-Carolina (sworn enemies of Napoleon), Sir William Hamilton. Nelson immediately took to them both, and innocently described Emma (in a letter home to his wife), as ‘a young woman of amiable manners’ who did honour to her diplomatic station. Southey adds, choosing his words carefully: ‘thus that acquaintance began which ended in the destruction of Nelson’s domestic happiness’. Southey prudently avoids more than a sketch of the exotic Ambassadorial couple. Sir William was a career diplomat and a dilettante, whose main passion in life (like his friend Lord Elgin of the Marbles), was collecting Greek and Roman sculptures and pottery. He also studied volcanoes. Sir William was sixty-two, rich, ugly, aristocratic, easy-going and sophisticated. Lady Emma was twenty-eight, a blacksmith’s daughter from Cheshire, exuberant, loud, large and stunningly beautiful. Before being recuperated by Sir William she had worked as an artists’ model and as an attendant in a Turkish Bath in the Adelphi as plain Emma Hart. Accordingly, she was said by visiting naval officers to be the most valuable and curvaceous amphora in Sir William’s collection. ‘Her figure is colossal, but well-shaped,’ wrote one admirer; ‘she resembles the bust of Ariadne’. ‘She’s a whopper’, added another, simply–Regency slang for a smasher. She was frequently painted by Romney: her thick black hair parted in the centre above large wide dark eyes, upper arms strong and bare, bosom full. She had that curious combination attractive to many men: a child’s face upon a large, voluptuous body. But Emma was not a child: quick, generous, highly intelligent and expressive, she had blossomed in the Mediterranean, learnt to speak fluent French and Italian (better than most British diplomats), host diplomatic dinners and entertainments (usually with rather too much champagne), and write vivid letters and confidential reports. She had also become the closest female confidante to Queen Marie-Carolina, who as the executed Marie-Antoinette’s sister, was a key figure in the dangerous, shifting Continental alliances against the French republicans. Emma also had an exaggerated, operatic, Italian enthusiasm which Nelson came to adore. This was most famously expressed in her ‘Attitudes’, a form of after-dinner entertainment she had invented. Dressed in a series of thin flowing veils and shawls, she would dance across the room and strike a series of rapid, classical poses, which she would then hold in complete stillness, like living statuary. Some were based on Greek or Roman themes, others more Turkish or Egyptian. Goethe witnessed one of the more classical performances, which he pronounced truly artistic and astonishing. Sir Nathanial Wraxall witnessed another, more reminiscent of a Bacchante, which involved ‘screams, starts and embraces’, and he thought only appropriate for select, adult company. Depending on the evening, the guests, and Emma’s mood, her ‘Attitudes’ seemed to have ranged between classical ballet, theatrical mime and nightclub striptease. She always retained her native humour, as well as her Northern accent. Once, while draped as a buxom half-naked Naiad over one of Hamilton’s larger and more expensive Greek urns, she was heard to say in a stage-whisper: ‘Don’t be afeared Sir Willum: I’ll not break your joog.’ At first Southey hints at little of this. But when Nelson met Emma again in 1798, now returning to Naples as the glorious but wounded and exhausted hero of Aboukir Bay, Southey feels free to expand. He describes the hero’s welcome in a scene strongly reminiscent of Plutarch’s account of Antony meeting the seductive Cleopatra, together with triumphal barges, feasts and music. The operatic emotion is now openly expressed: When [the Hamilton’s] barge came alongside the Vanguard, at the sight of Nelson Lady Hamilton sprang up the ship’s side, and exclaiming, ‘O God! Is it possible?’ fell into his arms–more, he says, like one dead than alive.’ This must have impressed the crew; it certainly impressed Nelson, who gallantly described it as ‘terribly affecting’. The sexual feeling is also strongly implied, with Southey’s acute intuition that what partly attracted the battle-hardened Nelson was Emma’s promise of generous, almost maternal comforts. This was still, after all, the boy who had lost his beloved mother at the age of nine. He nicely quotes Sir William’s witty and knowing invitation to Nelson: ‘A pleasant apartment is ready for you in my house, and Emma is looking out for the softest pillows to repose those few limbs you have left.’ Later Southey describes her as having ‘totally weaned’ Nelson’s affections from Lady Nelson; and during the King and Queen’s escape from a pro-Republican mob in Naples, which Nelson engineered, he says that Emma impressed Nelson by acting with extraordinary courage and decision, ‘like a heroine of modern romance’. Yet Southey suggests deep moral conflict in Nelson, and produces a weirdly effective passage at the start of the affair, when Nelson dines with his coffin behind his chair, antagonizes his officers, and seems close to exhaustion and mental breakdown. Southey–in another Antony and Cleopatra passage–blames Emma’s sexual magnetism for distorting Nelson’s political and moral judgement at Naples. He implicates her (though indirectly) in the execution of the patriot Caracciolo in June 1799, which he describes as ‘a deplorable transaction! A stain upon the memory of Nelson and the honour of England.’ But worse, he holds Nelson’s ‘baneful passion’ for Emma as almost wholly responsible for the failure of his natural sense of justice and generosity (so characteristic of him as a commander at sea), thus allowing the terrible massacre of the civilian prisoners that followed in July 1799. This failure ‘stained ineffaceably his public character’. Southey’s biography here rises to one of its fiercest, most outspoken and impressive rhetorical heights. If Nelson’s eyes had not been, as it were, spellbound by that unhappy attachment, which had now completely mastered him, he would have seen things as they were; and might perhaps have awakened the Sicilian court to a sense of their interest, if not their duty. The court employed itself in a miserable round of folly and festivity, while the prisons of Naples were filled with groans, and the scaffold streamed with blood. At such moments it might seem as if Southey was simply casting Emma as Nelson’s sexual nemesis, and the biography has often been interpreted in this way. But Southey is far more subtle than this. He goes on to show how well Emma understood-and matched–Nelson’s own extravagant temperament, how she saved him from recurrent periods of near suicidal depression, and how she genuinely made a new home for him at Merton. While his marriage with Lady Nelson had been childless, the birth of Horatia ‘Thompson’ brought him a wholly new kind of domestic happiness. It also brought him a new sense of a future, and Southey implies that this in turn inspired him to go on to fight Trafalgar. He is brave enough to quote not only Nelson’s last naval signal and diary entry before battle, but also the whole of the open letter ‘bequeathing’ Lady Hamilton to the nation. A bequest which, Southey dryly points out, had not yet been fulfilled by 1813. Southey was surely right in this complex, nuanced and Romantic reading of their love-affair. Much of its deep and genuine emotion appears in the passionate, unguarded letters that Nelson wrote to Emma in 1802. Although Southey had the materials Emma had supplied to Harrison in 1806 to draw on, he could not have read these particular letters. But they retrospectively confirm much of what he had been able, with some reservations, to suggest of their mutual infatuation. “You know, my dearest Emma, that there is nothing in this world that I would not do for us to live together and have our little child with us…You, my beloved Emma, and my Country are the two dearest objects of my fond heart…My longing for you, both person and conversation, you may readily imagine. What must be my sensations at the idea of sleeping with you! It sets me on fire, even the thoughts, much more would the reality. I am sure all my love and desires are all to you, and if a woman naked were to come to me, even as I am thinking of you, I hope it might rot off if I would touch her even with my hand.’ Southey accepts Emma’s own authority for one of the most moving passages towards the end of the book. In summer 1805 Nelson is distractedly walking the little lawn in the Merton garden which he called his ‘quarterdeck’. He had not accepted a new command, and claimed to be happy in retirement, surrounded by ‘his family’. Sensing his secret restlessness, Emma ‘knew he was longing to get at the combined fleet’. She destroys her own happiness by encouraging him to ‘do his duty’–to go back and take over the Mediterranean battle station off Toulon. Southey presents this as an act of supreme unselfishness on both their parts, and a final justification of their love. ‘If there were more Emmas, there would be more Nelsons.’ In fact Emma Hamilton comes strangely to dominate the later chapters of the biography, and there is a sense in which Southey had written a great, doomed Romantic love story. Like many biographers, Southey only seems to have become aware of the underlying emotional drive of his own book after it was published. His inhibitions may also have been released by the publication of some of Nelson’s love letters to Emma in 1814, and her own death in the following year. Certainly the main additions he made to the biography, long after in 1827, consisted of expanded passages about Emma and extracts from her own letters to Nelson. 10 Finally the process of writing lead Southey to revise many of his erstwhile political opinions, and his views of British Government policy in the Mediterranean, particularly where Nelson had been involved in Corsica, Sardinia, and Naples. He also came to reflect on the whole notion of patriotic ‘duty’, which is not merely the subject of Nelson’s famous Trafalgar signal, but is a powerful theme running through the whole biography, affecting not only Nelson’s career but also his love affair. Here, paradoxically, the poet Southey, driven all his life by his own demons of duty and principle, discovered a profound sympathy for the patriot Nelson and his compulsive loyalties. It also forced the one-time disaffected radical to reconsider the meaning of English patriotism itself. In his final chapters Southey produced some of the finest, and most unexpected passages of Romantic English nationalism ever written. They were perhaps consciously intended to echo and even rival Shakespeare’s Henry V. The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than a public calamity; men started at the intelligence, and turned pale, as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend. An object of our admiration and affection, of our pride and of our hopes, was suddenly taken from us; and it seemed as if we had never until then known how deeply we loved and revered him…He has left us, not indeed his mantle of inspiration, but a name and example which are at this hour inspiring hundreds of the youth of England–a name which is our pride, and an example which will continue to be our shield and our strength. Shortly before publication in spring 1813, Southey began to feel more confident about the book. In January he wrote to his old friend Walter Scott, a rival poet of verse romances, who was also turning to prose in the shape of historical novels. He described his biography with a touch of pride as ‘a subject not self-chosen, and out of my way, but executed con amore.’ To his uncle and literary patron, Herbert Hill, he wrote in February, repeating the cautionary image of the cat walking among crockery. But now he added: ‘if I have succeeded in making the narrative continuous and clear–the very reverse of what it is in the Lives before me–the materials are, in themselves, so full of character, so picturesque, and so sublime, that it cannot fail of being a good book.’ The reviewers agreed with him. They found the book timely, well-written and surprisingly free from hagiography. They praised the ‘vigorous, plain narrative’ (The British Critic), and the intensely gripping battle scenes, ‘minute in detail, admirable in execution’ (The Eclectic Review). They also approved of the measured handling of Nelson’s character. ‘The author is not so dazzled by the glory of Lord Nelson as to be blind to his defects’, wrote The Critical Review. ‘Mr Southey has an eagle’s–or rather perhaps he would wish us to say–a poet’s eye: and he has ventured to look fully and fixedly upon the sunny radiance of Nelson’s fame, and hath both seen and marked the blots of infirmity, by which it was partially obscured.’ They all agreed that Southey had correctly identified the two great controversies of Nelson’s career–Naples and Lady Hamilton—and had thereby set the pattern for all subsequent biography. Young Lord Byron, whose taste reflected the sharpest fashion of the day, made a point of reading Nelson as soon as it appeared, and meeting its author on one of his rare visits to London for its publication. Having mocked Southey’s verses, he was surprised by what he found in the flesh. ‘The best-looking bard I have seen for some time. His appearance is Epic; he is the only existing entire Man of Letters…His prose is perfect…His Nelson is beautiful.’ Another potentially hostile critic, William Hazlitt, who detested Southey’s shift in political beliefs, also made an exception for Nelson, and the way it was written. ‘His prose style is plain, clear, pointed, familiar, perfectly modern in texture, but with a grave and sparkling admixture of archaisms in its ornaments and occasional phraseology. He is the best and most natural prose-writer of any poet of the day: we mean that he is far better than Lord Byron, Mr Wordsworth, and Mr Coleridge for instance.’ (The Spirit of the Age) By 1813 the immediate cult of Nelson was fading, and Wellington’s star was rising. So at first the book found its general readers slowly, but steadily enough. It was published in the same year as Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Austen herself said she was bored with books about Nelson unless they mentioned her brother. The first edition of 3,000 copies (quite large for its day) was reprinted later that summer. A third edition appeared in 1814, and after a long gap, a fourth edition in 1827, largely to incorporate the new Lady Hamilton materials. This was the last that Southey seriously revised. However the fortunes of the biography, and the perceptions of the kind of book it was, changed radically in 1830. This followed a full-scale retrospective of all Southey’s work by Thomas Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1830. Macaulay singled out Nelson as the finest thing Southey had ever written, destined to endure longer than any of his poetry, and to be read more widely than any of his multi-volume histories. But in doing this, he overlooked all the controversial themes Southey had so carefully explored, and ignored the complex Romantic portrait he had achieved of Nelson. Instead Macaulay relaunched the biography as a gripping adventure story of a Boy’s Own hero: the literary equivalent of a patriotic Victorian pub sign. Given all Southey’s initial doubts, and his subsequent meticulous researches, his anxieties about Nelson and Lady Hamilton, and his concerns about Naples, it was a supremely ironic outcome. ‘No writer, perhaps, ever lived, whose talents so precisely qualified him to write the history of the great naval warrior,’ boomed Macaulay. There were no fine riddles of the human heart to read–no theories to found–no hidden causes to develop–no remote consequences to predict. The character of the hero lay on the surface. The exploits were brilliant and picturesque…it was an exact hit between wind and water.’ After this brassy endorsement, the book quickly became a bestseller, and then a Victorian classic. The young Queen herself was reported to have adored the Nelson story–as a girl. New editions appeared in 1830,1831, and in 1840, the year of Southey’s own death. There were more than a hundred editions by the end of the century. In America it was issued as a standard manual to all naval cadets, rather as John Murray had originally foreseen. At the same time Victorian naval scholars, starting with the great Sir Harris Nicolas and his mighty edition of Nelson’s Dispatches (1844-6), began firmly to set Southey aside as a children’s book, no longer relevant to serious readers. This marginalising work was completed by Professor Geoffrey Callender’s highly critical annotated edition of 1922, which page by page, and footnote by footnote, picked minute holes in Southey’s understanding of everything from flags and knots, to navigation and international diplomacy. Yet strangely enough, even Cal-lender ended by observing that ‘the Nelson whom we know today is almost as truly Southey’s as Henry the V and Richard the III are Shakespeare’s’. 11 To his great surprise, the biography immediately made Southey’s own career. Its patriotism caught a public mood, and he was offered the Poet Laureateship that autumn (on the generous recommendation of Walter Scott). His position with his publishers and the Quarterly Review was assured, and Murray later urged him to write Lives of two other notable warriors, first the Duke of Wellington, and then the Duke of Marlborough. He wrote extended essays on both for the Quarterly, as he had with Nelson; but finally–and perhaps wisely–he turned down both ideas—in Wellington’s case with the pointed comment that biographies of living persons were impertinent. He did however write an enormous, erudite and worthy three volume History of the Peninsular War (1823—1832), which has sunk without trace. To the end of his career, Southey remained intrigued by the more introspective aspects of the form, and what biography could tell us about an inner life. He later wrote long and thoughtful Lives of John Wesley (1820), John Bunyan (1830), and the poet William Cowper (1835). They have striking passages, such as the moment when the boy Wesley is dramatically–and symbolically–saved from a house fire, ‘a brand plucked from the burning’. Yet none of them have the narrative flair and the instinctive passion of his portrait of Nelson, whom he once described in an inspired moment truly worthy of a Poet Laureate, as ‘the hero, the darling hero of England’. SELECT CHRONOLOGY (#ulink_0fe664c2-473f-5dde-9ab0-effa0a008d7e) 1758 (29 September) Horatio Nelson born at Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk 1774 Robert Southey born in Bristol 1771 Nelson joins the Royal Navy as a midshipman at Chatham 1773 Nelson sails to the Arctic 1777 Nelson sails to the West Indies 1787 Nelson marries Mrs Fanny Nisbet on Nevis, in the British Caribbean 1788 Nelson retires to Norfolk on half-pay 1792 Southey goes to Oxford University 1793 (January) Nelson given command of HMS Agamemnon (September) Nelson first meets Emma Hamilton at Naples 1794 (July) Nelson loses sight of right eye while besieging Calvi, Corsica 1795 Southey lectures with Coleridge in Bristol 1796 Southey sails to Spain 1797 (February) Nelson ‘breaks the line’ at the Battle of Cape St Vincent (July) Nelson loses right arm at Santa Cruz 1798 (August) Nelson wins the Battle of the Nile (Aboukir Bay) Southey publishes his ballads, ‘The Inchscape Rock’ and ‘The Battle of Blenheim’ 1799 Nelson in Naples with Emma Hamilton Execution of Caraccioli, and Neapolitan ‘rebels’ 1800 Nelson separates from Lady Nelson 1801 (April) Nelson disobeys orders at the Battle of Copenhagen Nelson’s illegitimate daughter, Horatia, born Southey publishes Thalaba, the Destroyer 1803 (June) Nelson takes command of the Mediterranean fleet Southey moves to the Lake District 1805 (August) Nelson’s last summer in England with Emma and Horatia (15 October) Nelson dies at the Battle of Trafalgar 1810 Southey begins publishing his History of Brazil Southey reviews several Nelson biographies for The Quarterly 1813 Southey publishes The Life of Nelson Southey appointed Poet Laureate 1815 Emma Hamilton dies in Calais 1820 Southey publishes The Life of John Wesley 1833 Southey publishes his Lives of the British Admirals 1843 Southey dies in Keswick, Cumberland AUTHOR’S PREFACE (#ulink_e0f1c873-7a45-529c-870c-b4a7066aa64a) Many lives of Nelson have been written: one is yet wanting, clear and concise enough to become a manual for the young sailor, which he may carry about with him till he has treasured up the example in his memory and in his heart. In attempting such a work I shall write the eulogy of our great Naval Hero; for the best eulogy of NELSON is the faithful history of his actions; the best history, that which shall relate them most perspicuously. ROBERT SOUTHEY THE LIFE OF NELSON (#ulink_4cc88154-0567-53f3-9270-6aa42502bdef) ONE (#ulink_3deec048-1c8f-5fbf-ba65-7b311fe0f03a) Nelson’s birth and boyhood–He is entered on board the Raisonnable – Goes to the West Indies in a merchant-ship; then serves in the Triumph – He sails in Captain Phipps’s voyage of discovery–Goes to the East Indies in the Seahorse, and returns in ill-health–Serves as acting lieutenant in the Worcester, and is made lieutenant into the Lowestoffe, commander into the Badger brig, and post into the Hinchin-brook – Expedition against the Spanish Main–Sent to the North Seas in the Albemarle – Services during the American war. HORATIO, son of Edmund and Catherine Nelson, was born September 29, 1758, in the parsonage house of Burnham Thorpe, a village in the county of Norfolk, of which his father was rector. The maiden name of his mother was Suckling, her grandmother was an elder sister of Sir Robert Walpole, and this child was named after his godfather the first Lord Walpole. Mrs Nelson died in 1767, leaving eight, out of eleven, children. Her brother, Captain Maurice Suckling, of the navy, visited the widower upon this event, and promised to take care of one of the boys. Three years afterwards, when Horatio was only twelve years of age, being at home during the Christmas holidays, he read in the county newspaper that his uncle was appointed to the Raisonnable of 64 guns. ‘Do, William,’ said he to a brother who was a year and a half older than himself, ‘write to my father and tell him that I should like to go to sea with Uncle Maurice.’ Mr Nelson was then at Bath, whither he had gone for the recovery of his health: his circumstances were straitened, and he had no prospect of ever seeing them bettered: he knew that it was the wish of providing for himself by which Horatio was chiefly actuated, and did not oppose his resolution; he understood also the boy’s character, and had always said, that in whatever station he might be placed, he would climb, if possible, to the very top of the tree. Accordingly Captain Suckling was written to. What,’ said he in his answer, ‘has poor Horatio done, who is so weak, that he, above all the rest, should be sent to rough it out at sea? But let him come, and the first time we go into action a cannon-ball may knock off his head, and provide for him at once.’ It is manifest from these words, that Horatio was not the boy whom his uncle would have chosen to bring up in his own profession. He was never of a strong body; and the ague, which at that time was one of the most common diseases in England, had greatly reduced his strength; yet he had already given proofs of that resolute heart and nobleness of mind, which, during his whole career of labour and of glory, so eminently distinguished him. When a mere child, he strayed birds-nesting from his mother’s house in company with a cow-boy; the dinner-hour elapsed; he was absent, and could not be found; and the alarm of the family became very great, for they apprehended that he might have been carried off by the gipsies. At length, after search had been made for him in various directions, he was discovered alone, sitting composedly by the side of a brook, which he could not get over. ‘I wonder, child,’ said the old lady when she saw him, ‘that hunger and fear did not drive you home.’ ‘Fear! grandmamma,’ replied the future hero, ‘I never saw fear: what is it?’ Once, after the winter holidays, when he and his brother William had set off on horseback to return to school, they came back because there had been a fall of snow; and William, who did not much like the journey, said it was too deep for them to venture on. ‘If that be the case,’ said the father, ‘you certainly shall not go; but make another attempt, and I will leave it to your honour. If the road is dangerous, you may return: but remember, boys, I leave it to your honour.’ The snow was deep enough to have afforded them a reasonable excuse; but Horatio was not to be prevailed upon to turn back. ‘We must go on,’ said he; ‘remember, brother, it was left to our honour!’ There were some fine pears growing in the schoolmaster’s garden, which the boys regarded as lawful booty, and in the highest degree tempting; but the boldest among them were afraid to venture for the prize. Horatio volunteered upon this service: he was lowered down at night from the bed-room window by some sheets, plundered the tree, was drawn up with the pears, and then distributed them among his schoolfellows, without reserving any for himself. ‘He only took them,’ he said, ‘because every other boy was afraid.’ Early on a cold and dark spring morning Mr Nelson’s servant arrived at this school at North Walsham with the expected summons for Horatio to join his ship. The parting from his brother William, who had been for so many years his playmate and bed-fellow, was a painful effort, and was the beginning of those privations which are the sailor’s lot through life. He accompanied his father to London. The Raisonnable was lying in the Medway. He was put into the Chatham stage, and on its arrival was set down with the rest of the passengers, and left to find his way on board as he could. After wandering about in the cold, without being able to reach the ship, an officer observed the forlorn appearance of the boy, questioned him, and happening to be acquainted with his uncle, took him home and gave him some refreshments. When he got on board Captain Suckling was not in the ship, nor had any person been apprised of the boy’s coming. He paced the deck the whole remainder of the day, without being noticed by any one; and it was not till the second day that somebody, as he expressed it, ‘took compassion on him.’ The pain which is felt when we are first transplanted from our native soil–when the living branch is cut from the parent tree–is one of the most poignant which we have to endure through life. There are after-griefs which wound more deeply, which leave behind them scars never to be effaced, which bruise the spirit, and sometimes break the heart: but never, never do we feel so keenly the want of love, the necessity of being loved, and the sense of utter desertion, as when we first leave the haven of home, and are, as it were, pushed off upon the stream of life. Added to these feelings, the sea-boy has to endure physical hardships, and the privation of every comfort, even of sleep. Nelson had a feeble body, and an affectionate heart, and he remembered through life his first days of wretchedness in the service. The Raisonnable having been commissioned on account of the dispute respecting the Falkland Islands, was paid off as soon as the difference with the Court of Spain was accommodated, and Captain Suckling was removed to the Triumph, 74, then stationed as a guardship in the Thames. This was considered as too inactive a life for a boy, and Nelson was therefore sent a voyage to the West Indies in a merchant-ship, commanded by Mr John Rathbone, an excellent seaman, who had served as master’s-mate under Captain Suckling in the Dreadnought. He returned a practical seaman, but with a hatred of the king’s service, and a saying then common among the sailors—‘Aft, the most honour; forward, the better man.’ Rathbone had probably been disappointed and disgusted in the navy; and, with no unfriendly intentions, warned Nelson against a profession which he himself had found hopeless. His uncle received him on board the Triumph on his return, and discovering his dislike to the navy, took the best means of reconciling him to it. He held it out as a reward, that if he attended well to his navigation, he should go in the cutter and decked longboat, which was attached to the commanding officer’s ship at Chatham. Thus he became a good pilot for vessels of that description from Chatham to the Tower, and down the Swin Channel to the North Foreland, and acquired a confidence among rocks and sands of which he often felt the value. Nelson had not been many months on board the Triumph, when his love of enterprise was excited by hearing that two ships were fitting out for a voyage of discovery towards the North Pole. In consequence of the difficulties which were expected on such a service, these vessels were to take out effective men, instead of the usual number of boys. This, however, did not deter him from soliciting to be received, and by his uncle’s interest he was admitted as coxswain under Captain Lutwidge, second in command. The voyage was undertaken in compliance with an application from the Royal Society. The Hon. Captain Constantine John Phipps, eldest son of Lord Mulgrave, volunteered his services. The Racehorse and Carcass bombs were selected, as the strongest ships, and therefore best adapted for such a voyage; and they were taken into dock and strengthened, to render them as secure as possible against the ice. Two masters of Greenlandmen were employed as pilots for each ship. No expedition was ever more carefully fitted out; and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, with a laudable solicitude, went on board himself, before their departure, to see that everything had been completed to the wish of the officers. The ships were provided with a simple and excellent apparatus for distilling fresh from salt water, the invention of Dr Irving, who accompanied the expedition. It consisted merely in fitting a tube to the ship’s kettle, and applying a wet mop to the surface as the vapour was passing. By these means, from thirty-four to forty gallons were produced every day. They sailed from the Nore on the 4th of June; on the 6th of the following month they were in lat. 79° 56’ 39”; long. 9° 43’ 30” E. The next day, about the place where most of the old discoverers had been stopped, the Racehorse was beset with ice; but they heaved her through with ice-anchors. Captain Phipps continued ranging along the ice northward and westward till the 24th; he then tried to the eastward. On the 30th he was in lat. 8o° 13’; long. 18° 48’ E., among the islands and in the ice, with no appearance of an opening for the ships. The weather was exceedingly fine, mild, and unusually clear. Here they were becalmed in a large bay, with three apparent openings between the islands which formed it; but everywhere, as far as they could see, surrounded with ice. There was not a breath of air; the water perfectly smooth; the ice covered with snow, low and even except a few broken pieces near the edge; and the pools of water in the middle of the ice-fields just crusted over with young ice. On the next day the ice closed upon them, and no opening was to be seen anywhere, except a hole, or lake as it might be called, of about a mile and a half in circumference, where the ships lay fast to the ice with their ice-anchors. They filled their casks with water from these ice-fields, which was very pure and soft. The men were playing on the ice all day, but the Greenland pilots, who were farther than they had ever been before, and considered that the season was advancing, were alarmed at being thus beset. The next day there was not the smallest opening, the ships were within less than two lengths of each other, separated by ice, and neither having room to turn. The ice, which yesterday had been all flat, and almost level with the water’s edge, was now in many places forced higher than the mainyard, by the pieces squeezing together. A day of thick fog followed; it was succeeded by clear weather; but the passage by which the ships had entered from the westward was closed, and no open water was in sight either in that or any other quarter. By the pilots’ advice the men were set to work to cut a passage and warp through the small openings to the westward. They sawed through pieces twelve feet thick; and this labour continued the whole day, during which their utmost efforts did not move the ship above three hundred yards, while they were driven, together with the ice, far to the N.E. and E. by the current. Sometimes a field of several acres square would be lifted up between two larger islands, and incorporated with them; and thus these larger pieces continued to grow by aggregation. Another day passed, and there seemed no probability of getting the ships out, without a strong E. or N.E. wind. The season was far advanced, and every hour lessened the chance of extricating themselves. Young as he was, Nelson was appointed to command one of the boats which were sent out to explore a passage into the open water. It was the means of saving a boat belonging to the Racehorse from a singular but imminent danger. Some of the officers had fired at and wounded a walrus. As no other animal has so human-like an expression in its countenance, so also is there none that seems to possess more of the passions of humanity. The wounded one dived immediately, and brought up a number of its companions; and they all joined in an attack upon the boat. They wrested an oar from one of the men; and it was with the utmost difficulty that the crew could prevent them from staving or upsetting her, till the Carcass’s boat came up; and the walruses, finding their enemies thus reinforced, dispersed. Young Nelson exposed himself in a more daring manner. One night, during the mid-watch, he stole from the ship with one of his comrades, taking advantage of a rising fog, and set out over the ice in pursuit of a bear. It was not long before they were missed. The fog thickened, and Captain Lutwidge and his officers became exceedingly alarmed for their safety. Between three and four in the morning the weather cleared, and the two adventurers were seen, at a considerable distance from the ship, attacking a huge bear. The signal for them to return was immediately made; Nelson’s comrade called upon him to obey it, but in vain; his musket had flashed in the pan; their ammunition was expended; and a chasm in the ice, which divided him from the bear, probably preserved his life. ‘Never mind,’ he cried; ‘do but let me get a blow at this devil with the butt-end of my musket, and we shall have him.’ Captain Lutwidge, however, seeing his danger, fired a gun, which had the desired effect of frightening the beast; and the boy then returned, somewhat afraid of the consequences of his trespass. The captain reprimanded him sternly for conduct so unworthy of the office which he filled, and desired to know what motive he could have for hunting a bear. ‘Sir,’ said he, pouting his lip, as he was wont to do when agitated, ‘I wished to kill the bear, that I might carry the skin to my father.’ A party were now sent to an island, about twelve miles off (named Walden’s Island in the charts, from the midshipman who was intrusted with this service), to see where the open water lay. They came back on the 6th, with information that the ice, though close all about them, was open to the westward, round the point by which they came in. They said also, that upon the island they had had a fresh east wind. This intelligence considerably abated the hopes of the crew, for where they lay it had been almost calm, and their main dependence had been upon the effect of an easterly wind in clearing the bay. There was but one alternative; either to wait the event of the weather upon the ships, or to betake themselves to the boats. The likelihood that it might be necessary to sacrifice the ships had been foreseen; the boats accordingly were adapted, both in number and size, to transport, in case of emergency, the whole crew; and there were Dutch whalers upon the coast in which they could all be conveyed to Europe. As for wintering where they were, that dreadful experiment had been already tried too often. No time was to be lost; the ships had driven into shoal water, having but fourteen fathoms. Should they, or the ice to which they were fast, take the ground, they must inevitably be lost; and at this time they were driving fast towards some rocks on the N.E. Captain Phipps sent for the officers of both ships, and told them his intention of preparing the boats for going away. They were immediately hoisted out, and the fitting began. Canvas bread-bags were made, in case it should be necessary suddenly to desert the vessels; and men were sent with the lead and line to the northward and eastward, to sound wherever they found cracks in the ice, that they might have notice before the ice took the ground; for in that case, the ships must instantly have been crushed, or overset. On the 7th they began to haul the boats over the ice, Nelson having command of the four-oared cutter. The men behaved excellently well, like true British seamen; they seemed reconciled to the thought of leaving the ships, and had full confidence in their officers. About noon the ice appeared rather more open near the vessels; and as the wind was easterly, though there was but little of it, the sails were set, and they got about a mile to the westward. They moved very slowly, and were not now nearly so far to the westward as when they were first beset. However, all sail was kept upon them, to force them through whenever the ice slacked the least. Whatever exertions were made it could not be possible to get the boats to the water-edge before the 14th; and if the situation of the ships should not alter by that time, it would not be justifiable to stay longer by them. The commander therefore resolved to carry on both attempts together, moving the boats constantly, and taking every opportunity of getting the ships through. A party was sent out next day to the westward, to examine the state of the ice; they returned with tidings that it was very heavy and close, consisting chiefly of large fields. The ships, however, moved something, and the ice itself was drifting westward. There was a thick fog, so that it was impossible to ascertain what advantage had been gained. It continued on the 9th; but the ships were moved a little through some very small openings; the mist cleared off in the afternoon; and it was then perceived that they had driven much more than could have been expected to the westward, and that the ice itself had driven still farther. In the course of the day they got past the boats, and took them on board again. On the morrow the wind sprang up to the N.N.E. All sail was set, and the ships forced their way through a great deal of very heavy ice. They frequently struck, and with such force, that one stroke broke the shank of the Racehorses best bower-anchor; but the vessels made way, and by noon they had cleared the ice, and were out at sea. The next day they anchored in Smeerenberg Harbour, close to that island of which the westernmost point is called Hakluyt’s Headland, in honour of the great promoter and compiler of our English voyages of discovery. Here they remained a few days, that the men might rest after their fatigue. No insect was to be seen in this dreary country, nor any species of reptile, not even the common earthworm. Large bodies of ice, called icebergs, filled up the valleys between high mountains, so dark as, when contrasted with the snow, to appear black. The colour of the ice was a lively light green. Opposite to the place where they fixed their observatory was one of these icebergs, above three hundred feet high: its side towards the sea was nearly perpendicular, and a stream of water issued from it. Large pieces frequently broke off, and thundered down into the sea. There was no thunder nor lightning during the whole time they were in these latitudes. The sky was generally loaded with hard white clouds, from which it was never entirely free even in the clearest weather. They always knew when they were approaching the ice, long before they saw it, by a bright appearance near the horizon, which the Greenlandmen called the blink of the ice. The season was now so far advanced that nothing more could have been attempted, if indeed anything had been left untried: but the summer had been unusually favourable, and they had carefully surveyed the wall of ice extending for more than twenty degrees between the latitudes of 80° and 81°, without the smallest appearance of any opening. The ships were paid off shortly after their return to England; and Nelson was then placed, by his uncle, with Captain Farmer, in the Seahorse, of 20 guns, then going out to the East Indies in the squadron under Sir Edward Hughes. He was stationed in the foretop at watch and watch. His good conduct attracted the attention of the master (afterwards Captain Surridge), in whose watch he was and, upon his recommendation, the captain rated him as midshipman. At this time his countenance was florid, and his appearance rather stout and athletic, but when he had been about eighteen months in India he felt the effects of that climate, so perilous to European constitutions. The disease baffled all power of medicine; he was reduced almost to a skeleton; the use of his limbs was for some time entirely lost; and the only hope that remained was from a voyage home. Accordingly, he was brought home by Captain Pigot, in the Dolphin; and had it not been for the attentive and careful kindness of that officer on the way, Nelson would never have lived to reach his native shores. He had formed acquaintance with Sir Charles Pole, Sir Thomas Trowbridge, and other distinguished officers, then, like himself, beginning their career: he had left them pursuing that career in full enjoyment of health and hope, and was returning from a country in which all things were to him new and interesting, with a body broken down by sickness, and spirits which had sunk with his strength. Long afterwards, when the name of Nelson was known as widely as that of England itself, he spoke of the feelings which he at this time endured. ‘I felt impressed,’ said he, ‘with a feeling that I should never rise in my profession. My mind was staggered with a view of the difficulties I had to surmount, and the little interest I possessed. 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. “Well, then,” I exclaimed, “I will be a hero! and, confiding in Providence, I will brave every danger!”‘ Long afterwards Nelson loved to speak of the feeling of that moment: and from that time, he often said, a radiant orb was suspended in his mind’s eye, which urged him onward to renown. The state of mind in which these feelings began is what the mystics mean by their season of darkness, of aridity, and of desertion. If the animal spirits of coarser enthusiasts fail, they represent it as an actual temptation, a snare of Satan. The enthusiasm of Nelson’s nature had taken a different direction, but in its essence it was the same. He knew to what the previous state of dejection was to be attributed; that an enfeebled body, and a mind depressed, had cast this shade over his soul, but he always seemed willing to believe that the sunshine which succeeded bore with it a prophetic glory, and that the light which led him on was ‘light from heaven.’ His interest, however, was far better than he imagined. During his absence, Captain Suckling had been made Comptroller of the Navy; his health had materially improved upon the voyage; and, as soon as the Dolphin was paid off, he was appointed acting lieutenant in the Worcester, 64, Captain Mark Robinson, then going out with convoy to Gibraltar. Soon after his return, on the 8th of April, 1777, he passed his examination for a lieutenancy. Captain Suckling sat at the head of the board, and when the examination had ended, in a manner highly honourable to Nelson, rose from his seat, and introduced him to the examining captains as his nephew. They expressed their wonder that he had not informed them of this relationship before; he replied that he did not wish the younker to be favoured; he knew his nephew would pass a good examination, and he had not been deceived. The next day Nelson received his commission as second lieutenant of the Lowestoffe frigate, Captain William Locker, then fitting out for Jamaica. American and French privateers, under American colours, were at that time harassing our trade in the West Indies: even a frigate was not sufficiently active for Nelson, and he repeatedly got appointed to the command of one of the Lowestoffe’s tenders. During one of their cruises the Lowestoffe captured an American letter-of-marque: it was blowing a gale, and a heavy sea running. The first lieutenant being ordered to board the prize, went below to put on his hanger. It happened to be mislaid; and, while he was seeking it, Captain Locker came on deck. Perceiving the boat still alongside, and in danger every moment of being swamped, and being extremely anxious that the privateer should be instantly taken in charge, because he feared that it would otherwise founder, he exclaimed, ‘Have I no officer in the ship who can board the prize?’ Nelson did not offer himself immediately, waiting, with his usual sense of propriety, for the first lieutenant’s return; but hearing the master volunteer, he jumped into the boat, saying, ‘It is my turn now; and if I come back, it is yours.’ The American, who had carried a heavy press of sail in hope of escaping, was so completely water-logged that the Lowestoffe’s boat went in on deck, and out again, with the sea. About this time he lost his uncle. Captain Locker, however, who had perceived the excellent qualities of Nelson, and formed a friendship for him, which continued during his life, recommended him warmly to Sir Peter Parker, then commander-in-chief upon that station. In consequence of this recommendation he was removed into the Bristol flagship, and Lieutenant Cuthbert Collingwood succeeded him in the Lowestoffe. He soon became first lieutenant; and on the 8th of December, 1778, was appointed commander of the Badger brig, Collingwood again succeeding him in the Bristol. While the Badger was lying in Montego Bay, Jamaica, the Glasgow, of 20 guns, came in and anchored there, and in two hours was in flames, the steward having set fire to her while stealing rum out of the after-hold. Her crew were leaping into the water, when Nelson came up in his boats, made them throw their powder overboard, and point their guns upward; and, by his presence of mind and personal exertions, prevented the loss of life which would otherwise have ensued. On the nth of June, 1779, he was made post into the Hinchinbrook, of 28 guns, an enemy’s merchant-man sheathed with wood which had been taken into the service. A short time after he left the Lo?υestoffe, that ship, with a small squadron, stormed the fort of St Fernando de Omoa, on the south side of the bay of Honduras, and captured some register ships which were lying under its guns. Two hundred and fifty quintals of quicksilver, and three millions of piastres, were the reward of this enterprise; and it is characteristic of Nelson that the chance by which he missed a share in such a prize is never mentioned in any of his letters, nor is it likely that it ever excited even a momentary feeling of vexation. Nelson was fortunate in possessing good interest at the time when it could be most serviceable to him; his promotion had been almost as rapid as it could be; and before he had attained the age of twenty-one he had gained that rank which brought all the honours of the service within his reach. No opportunity, indeed, had yet been given him of distinguishing himself; but he was thoroughly master of his profession, and his zeal and ability were acknowledged wherever he was known. Count d’Estaing, with a fleet of 125 sail, men-of-war and transports, and a reputed force of five-and-twenty thousand men, threatened Jamaica from St Domingo. Nelson offered his services to the Admiral and to Governor-General Dalling, and was appointed to command the batteries of Fort Charles, at Port Royal. Not more than seven thousand men could be mustered for the defence of the island–a number wholly inadequate to resist the force which threatened them. Of this Nelson was so well aware, that when he wrote to his friends in England, he told them they must not be surprised to hear of his learning to speak French. D’Estaing, however, was either not aware of his own superiority, or not equal to the command with which he was entrusted; he attempted nothing with this formidable armament; and General Dalling was thus left to execute a project which he had formed against the Spanish colonies. This project was to take Fort San Juan, on the river of that name, which flows from Lake Nicaragua into the Atlantic; make himself master of the lake itself, and of the cities of Granada and Leon; and thus cut off the communication of the Spaniards between their northern and southern possessions in America. Here it is that a canal between the two seas may most easily be formed–a work more important in its consequences than any which has ever yet been effected by human power. Lord George Germaine, at that time Secretary of State for the American department, approved the plan; and as discontents at that time were known to prevail in the Nuevo Reyno, in Popayan, and in Peru, the more sanguine part of the English began to dream of acquiring an empire in one part of America more extensive than that which they were on the point of losing in another. General Dalling’s plans were well formed, but the history and the nature of the country had not been studied as accurately as its geography. The difficulties which occurred in fitting out the expedition delayed it till the season was too far advanced; and the men were thus sent to adventure themselves, not so much against an enemy whom they would have beaten, as against a climate which would do the enemy’s work. Early in the year 1780, five hundred men, destined for this service, were convoyed by Nelson from Port Royal to Cape Gracias a Dios, in Honduras. Not a native was to be seen when they landed, they had been taught that the English came with no other intent than that of enslaving them, and sending them to Jamaica. After a while, however, one of them ventured down, confiding in his knowledge of one of the party; and by his means the neighbouring tribes were conciliated with presents, and brought in. The troops were encamped on a swampy and unwholesome plain, where they were joined by a party of the 79th regiment, from Black River, who were already in a deplorable state of sickness. Having remained here a month, they proceeded, anchoring frequently, along the Mosquito shore, to collect their Indian allies, who were to furnish proper boats for the river, and to accompany them. They reached the river San Juan March 24th; and here, according to his orders, Nelson’s services were to terminate; but not a man in the expedition had ever been up the river, or knew the distances of any fortification from its mouth, and he, not being one who would turn back when so much was to be done, resolved to carry the soldiers up. About two hundred, therefore, were embarked in the Mosquito shore craft, and in two of the Hinchinbrook’s boats, and they began their way. It was the latter end of the dry season, the worst time for such an expedition; the river was consequently low. Indians were sent forward through narrow channels between shoals and sandbanks; and the men were frequently obliged to quit the boats, and exert their utmost strength to drag or thrust them along. This labour continued for several days, then they came into deeper water; but then they had sometimes currents and rapids to contend with, which would have been insurmountable, had it not been for the skill of the Indians in such difficulties. The brunt of the labour was borne by them, and by the sailors–men never accustomed to stand aloof when any exertion of strength or hardihood is required. The soldiers, less accustomed to rely upon themselves, were of little use. But all equally endured the violent heat of the sun, rendered more intense by being reflected from the white shoals, and because the high woods on both sides of the river were frequently so close as to prevent all refreshing circulation of air; and during the night all were equally exposed to the heavy and unwholesome dews. On the 9th of April they reached an island in the river called St Bartolomeo, which the Spaniards had fortified as an outpost, with a small semicircular battery, mounting nine or ten swivels, and manned with sixteen or eighteen men. It commanded the river in a rapid and difficult part of the navigation. Nelson, at the head of a few of his seamen, leaped upon the beach. The ground upon which he sprung was so muddy that he had some difficulty in extricating himself, and lost his shoes; barefooted, however, he advanced, and, in his own phrase, boarded the battery. In this resolute attempt he was bravely supported by Despard, who was at that time a captain in the army, and whose after fate was so disastrous. The Castle of St Juan is situated about sixteen miles higher up; the stores and ammunition, however, were landed a few miles below the castle, and the men had to march through woods almost impassable. One of the men was bitten under the eye by a snake, which darted upon him from the bough of a tree. He was unable to proceed for the violence of the pain; and when, after a short while, some of his comrades were sent back to assist him, he was dead, and the body already putrid. Nelson himself narrowly escaped a similar fate. He had ordered his hammock to be slung under some trees, being excessively fatigued, and was sleeping when a monitory lizard passed across his face. The Indians happily observed the reptile, and knowing what it indicated, awoke him. He started up, and found one of the deadliest serpents of the country coiled up at his feet. He suffered from poison of another kind; for, drinking at a spring in which some boughs of the manchineel had been thrown, the effects were so severe as, in the opinion of some of his friends, to inflict a lasting injury upon his constitution. The Castle of St Juan is thirty-two miles below the Lake of Nicaragua, from which it issues, and sixty-nine from the mouth of the river. Boats reach the sea from thence in a day and a half; but their navigation back, even when unladen, is the labour of nine days. The English appeared before it on the eleventh, two days after they had taken St Bartolomeo. Nelson’s advice was that it should instantly be carried by assault; but Nelson was not the commander, and it was thought proper to observe all the formalities of a siege. Ten days were wasted before this could be commenced: it was a work more of fatigue than of danger; but fatigue was more to be dreaded than the enemy. The rains set in; and could the garrison have held out a little longer, disease would have rid them of their invaders. Even the Indians sunk under it, the victims of unusual exertion and of their own excesses. The place surrendered on the twenty-fourth. But victory procured to the conquerors none of that relief which had been expected; the castle was worse than a prison; and it contained nothing which could contribute to the recovery of the sick, or the preservation of those who were yet unaffected. The huts which served for hospitals were surrounded with filth and with the putrefying hides of slaughtered cattle, almost sufficient of themselves to have engendered pestilence; and when at last orders were given to erect a convenient hospital, the contagion had become so general that there were none who could work at it, for, besides the few who were able to perform garrison duty, there were not orderly men enough to assist the sick. Added to these evils, there was the want of all needful remedies; for though the expedition had been amply provided with hospital stores, river-craft enough had not been procured for transporting the requisite baggage; and when much was to be left behind, provision for sickness was that which of all things men in health would be most ready to leave. Now, when these medicines were required the river was swollen, and so turbulent that its upward navigation was almost impracticable. At length even the task of burying the dead was more than the living could perform, and the bodies were tossed into the stream, or left for beasts of prey, and for the gallinazos–those dreadful carrion-birds, which do not always wait for death before they begin their work. Five months the English persisted in what may be called this war against nature; they then left a few men, who seemed proof against the climate, to retain the castle till the Spaniards should choose, when the fit season arrived, to retake it, and make them prisoners. The rest abandoned their baleful conquest. Eighteen hundred men were sent to different posts upon this wretched expedition; not more than three hundred and eighty ever returned. The Hinchinbrook’s complement consisted of two hundred men; eighty-seven took to their beds in one night, and of the whole crew not more than ten survived. Nelson himself was saved by a timely removal. In a few days after the commencement of the siege he was seized with the prevailing dysentery; meantime Captain Glover (son of the author of ‘Leonidas’) died, and Nelson was appointed to succeed him in the Janus, of 44 guns. He returned to the harbour the day before St Juan surrendered, and immediately sailed from Jamaica in the sloop which brought the news of his appointment. He was, however, so greatly reduced by the disorder, that when they reached Port Royal he was carried ashore in his cot; and finding himself, after a partial amendment, unable to retain the command of his new ship, he was compelled to ask leave to return to England, as the only means of recovery. Captain (afterwards Admiral) Cornwallis took him home in the Lion, and to his care and kindness Nelson believed himself indebted for his life. He went immediately to Bath, in a miserable state; so helpless, that he was carried to and from his bed; and the act of moving him produced the most violent pain. In three months he was recovered, and immediately he hastened to London, and applied for employment. After an interval of about four months he was appointed to the Albemarle, of 28 guns, a French merchantman which had been purchased from the captors for the king’s service. His health was not yet thoroughly re-established; and while he was employed in getting his ship ready he again became so ill as hardly to be able to keep out of bed. Yet in this state, still suffering from the fatal effect of a West Indian climate, as if, it might almost be supposed, he said, to try his constitution, he was sent to the North Seas, and kept there the whole winter. The asperity with which he mentioned this so many years afterwards, evinces how deeply he resented a mode of conduct equally cruel to the individual and detrimental to the service. It was during the armed neutrality, and when they anchored off Elsineur, the Danish admiral sent on board, desiring to be informed what ships had arrived, and to have their force written down. ‘The Albemarle,’ said Nelson to the messenger, ‘is one of His Britannic Majesty’s ships. You are at liberty, sir, to count the guns as you go down the side; and you may assure the Danish admiral that, if necessary, they shall all be well served.’ During this voyage he gained a considerable knowledge of the Danish coast and its soundings, greatly to the advantage of his country in after times. The Albemarle was not a good ship, and was several times nearly overset in consequence of the masts having been made much too long for her. On her return to England they were shortened, and some other improvements made, at Nelson’s suggestion. Still he always insisted that her first owners, the French, had taught her to run away, as she was never a good sailer except when going directly before the wind. On their return to the Downs, while he was ashore visiting the senior officer, there came on so heavy a gale that almost all the vessels drove, and a store-ship came athwart-hawse of the Albemarle. Nelson feared she would drive on the Goodwin Sands; he ran to the beach; but even the Deal boatmen thought it impossible to get on board, such was the violence of the storm. At length some of the most intrepid offered to make the attempt for fifteen guineas; and, to the astonishment and fear of all the beholders, he embarked during the height of the tempest. With great difficulty and imminent danger he succeeded in reaching her. She lost her bowsprit and foremast, but escaped further injury. He was now ordered to Quebec, where his surgeon told him he would certainly be laid up by the climate. Many of his friends urged him to represent this to Admiral Keppel; but, having received his orders from Lord Sandwich, there appeared to him an indelicacy in applying to his successor to have them altered. Accordingly, he sailed for Canada. During her first cruise on that station, the Albemarle captured a fishing schooner, which contained in her cargo nearly all the property that her master possessed, and the poor fellow had a large family at home, anxiously expecting him. Nelson employed him as a pilot in Boston Bay, then restored him the schooner and cargo, and gave him a certificate to secure him against being captured by any other vessel. The man came off afterwards to the Albemarle, at the hazard of his life, with a present of sheep, poultry, and fresh provisions. A most valuable supply it proved, for the scurvy was raging on board; this was in the middle of August, and the ship’s company had not had a fresh meal since the beginning of April. The certificate was preserved at Boston in memory of an act of unusual generosity, and now that the fame of Nelson has given interest to everything connected with his name it is regarded as a relic. The Albemarle had a narrow escape upon this cruise. Four French sail of the line and a frigate, which had come out of Boston harbour, gave chase to her; and Nelson, perceiving that they beat him in sailing, boldly ran among the numerous shoals of St George’s Bank, confiding in his own skill in pilotage. Captain Salter, in the St Margaretta, had escaped the French fleet by a similar manoeuvre not long before. The frigate alone continued warily to pursue him; but as soon as he perceived that this enemy was unsupported, he shortened sail, and hove to, upon which the Frenchman thought it advisable to give over the pursuit, and sail in quest of his consorts. At Quebec Nelson became acquainted with Alexander Davison, by whose interference he was prevented from making what would have been called an imprudent marriage. The Albemarle was about to leave the station, her captain had taken leave of his friends, and was gone down the river to the place of anchorage, when the next morning, as Davison was walking on the beach, to his surprise he saw Nelson coming back in his boat. Upon inquiring the cause of this reappearance, Nelson took his arm to walk towards the town, and told him he found it utterly impossible to leave Quebec without again seeing the woman whose society had contributed so much to his happiness there, and offering her his hand. ‘If you do,’ said his friend, ‘your utter ruin must inevitably follow.’ ‘Then let it follow,’ cried Nelson, ‘for I am resolved to do it.’ ‘And I,’ replied Davison, ‘am resolved you shall not.’ Nelson, however, upon this occasion was less resolute than his friend, and suffered himself to be led back to the boat. The Albemarle was under orders to convoy a fleet of transports to New York. ‘A very pretty job,’ said her captain, ‘at this late season of the year’ (October was far advanced), ‘for our sails are at this moment frozen to the yards.’ On his arrival at Sandy Hook, he waited on the commander-in-chief, Admiral Digby, who told him he was come on a fine station for making prize-money. ‘Yes, sir,’ Nelson made answer; ‘but the West Indies is the station for honour.’ Lord Hood, with a detachment of Rodney’s victorious fleet, was at that time at Sandy Hook. He had been intimate with Captain Suckling; and Nelson, who was desirous of nothing but honour, requested him to ask for the Albemarle, that he might go to that station where it was most likely to be obtained. Admiral Digby reluctantly parted with him. His professional merit was already well known; and Lord Hood, on introducing him to Prince William Henry, as the Duke of Clarence was then called, told the prince, if he wished to ask any questions respecting naval tactics, Captain Nelson could give him as much information as any officer in the fleet. The Duke, who, to his own honour, became from that time the firm friend of Nelson, describes him as appearing the merest boy of a captain he had ever seen, dressed in a full-laced uniform, an old-fashioned waistcoat with long flaps and his lank, unpowdered hair tied in a stiff Hessian tail of extraordinary length; making, altogether, so remarkable a figure, ‘that,’ says the Duke, ‘I had never seen anything like it before, nor could I imagine who he was, nor what he came about. But his address and conversation were irresistibly pleasing; and when he spoke on professional subjects, it was with an enthusiasm that showed he was no common being.’ It was expected that the French would attempt some of the passages between the Bahamas: and Lord Hood, thinking of this, said to Nelson, ‘I suppose, sir, from the length of time you were cruising among the Bahama Keys, you must be a good pilot there.’ He replied, with that constant readiness to render justice to every man, which was so conspicuous in all his conduct through life, that he was well acquainted with them himself, but that in that respect his second lieutenant was far his superior. The French got into Puerto Cabello on the coast of Venezuela. Nelson was cruising between that port and La Guayra, under French colours, for the purpose of obtaining information, when a king’s launch, belonging to the Spaniards, passed near, and being hailed in French, came alongside without suspicion, and answered all questions that were asked concerning the number and force of the enemy’s ships. The crew, however, were not a little surprised when they were taken on board, and found themselves prisoners. One of the party went by the name of the Count de Deux Ponts. He was, however, a prince of the German empire, and brother to the heir of the electorate of Bavaria, his companions were French officers of distinction, and men of science, who had been collecting specimens in the various branches of natural history. Nelson having entertained them with the best his table could afford, told them they were at liberty to depart with their boat and all that it contained. He only required them to promise that they would consider themselves as prisoners, if the commander-in-chief should refuse to acquiesce in their being thus liberated–a circumstance which was not by any means likely to happen. Tidings soon arrived that the preliminaries of peace had been signed; and the Albemarle returned to England, and was paid off. Nelson’s first business after he got to London, even before he went to see his relations, was to attempt to get the wages due to his men for the various ships in which they had served during the war. ‘The disgust of seamen to the navy,’ he said, ‘was all owing to the infernal plan of turning them over from ship to ship, so that men could not be attached to the officers, nor the officers care the least about the men.’ Yet he himself was so beloved by his men, that his whole ship’s company offered, if he could get a ship, to enter for her immediately. He was now, for the first time, presented at court. After going through this ceremony, he dined with his friend Davison at Lincoln’s Inn. As soon as he entered the chambers he threw off what he called his iron-bound coat; and, putting himself at ease in a dressing-gown, passed the remainder of the day in talking over all that had befallen them since they parted on the shore of the River St Lawrence. TWO (#ulink_d2b1dfdd-24a7-57b3-9b9f-992b42c89072) Nelson goes to France during the Peace–Re-appointed to the Boreas and stationed at the Leeward Islands–His firm Conduct concerning the American Interlopers, and the Contractors–Marries and Returns to England–Is on the Point of quitting the Service in Disgust–Manner of Life while Unemployed–Appointed to the Agamemnon on the Breaking-out of the War of the French Revolution. ‘IHAVE closed the war,’ said Nelson, in one of his letters, ‘without a fortune, but there is not a speck in my character. True honour, I hope, predominates in my mind far above riches.’ He did not apply for a ship, because he was not wealthy enough to live on board in the manner which was then become customary. Finding it, therefore, prudent to economise on his half-pay during the peace, he went to France, in company with Captain Macnamara, of the navy, and took lodgings at St Omer’s. The death of his favourite sister, Anne, who died in consequence of going out of the ball-room, at Bath, when heated with dancing, affected his father so much, that it had nearly occasioned him to return in a few weeks. Time, however, and reason and religion, overcame this grief in the old man; and Nelson continued at St Omer’s long enough to fall in love with the daughter of an English clergyman. This second attachment appears to have been less ardent than the first; for, upon weighing the evils of a straitened income to a married man, he thought it better to leave France, assigning to his friends something in his accounts as the cause. This prevented him from accepting an invitation from the Count de Deux Ponts to visit him at Paris, couched in the handsomest terms of acknowledgment for the treatment which he had received on board the Albemarle. The self-constraint which Nelson exerted in subduing this attachment made him naturally desire to be at sea; and when, upon visiting Lord Howe at the Admiralty, he was asked if he wished to be employed, he made answer that he did. Accordingly, in March, he was appointed to the Boreas, 28 guns, going to the Leeward Islands, as a cruiser, on the peace establishment. Lady Hughes and her family went out with him to Admiral Sir Richard Hughes, who commanded on that station. His ship was full of young midshipmen, of whom there were not less than thirty on board; and happy were they whose lot it was to be placed with such a captain. If he perceived that a boy was afraid at first going aloft, he would say to him, in a friendly manner: ‘Well, sir, I am going a race to the masthead, and beg that I may meet you there.’ The poor little fellow instantly began to climb, and got up how he could—Nelson never noticed in what manner; but, when they met in the top, spoke cheerfully to him; and would say, how much any person was to be pitied who fancied that getting up was either dangerous or difficult. Every day he went into the schoolroom, to see that they were pursuing their nautical studies; and at noon he was always the first on deck with his quadrant. Whenever he paid a visit of ceremony, some of these youths accompanied him; and when he went to dine with the Governor at Barbadoes, he took one of them in his hand, and presented him, saying, ‘Your Excellency must excuse me for bringing one of my midshipmen. I make it a rule to introduce them to all the good company I can, as they have few to look up to, besides myself, during the time they are at sea.’ When Nelson arrived in the West Indies he found himself senior captain, and, consequently, second in command on that station. Satisfactory as this was, it soon involved him in a dispute with the admiral, which a man less zealous for the service might have avoided. He found the Latona in English Harbour, Antigua, with a broad pennant hoisted; and upon inquiring the reason, was presented with a written order from Sir R. Hughes, requiring and directing him to obey the orders of Resident Commissioner Moutray, during the time he might have occasion to remain there; the said resident commissioner being in consequence authorised to hoist a broad pennant on board any of His Majesty’s ships in that port that he might think proper. Nelson was never at a loss how to act in any emergency. ‘I know of no superior officers,’ said he, ‘beside the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty and my seniors on the post list.’ Concluding, therefore, that it was not consistent with the service for a resident commissioner, who held only a civil situation, to hoist a broad pennant, the moment that he had anchored he sent an order to the captain of the Latona to strike it, and return it to the dockyard. He then went on shore the same day, dined with the commissioner, to show him that he was actuated by no other motive than a sense of duty, and gave him the first intelligence that his pennant had been struck. Sir Richard sent an account of this to the Admiralty; but the case could admit of no doubt, and Captain Nelson’s conduct was approved. He displayed the same promptitude on another occasion. While the Boreas, after the hurricane months were over, was riding at anchor in Nevis Road, a French frigate passed to leeward, close along shore. Nelson had obtained information that this ship was sent from Martinico, with two general officers and some engineers on board, to make a survey of our sugar islands. This purpose he was determined to prevent them from executing, and therefore he gave orders to follow them. The next day he came up with them at anchor in the roads of St Eustatia, and anchored at about two cables’ lengths on the frigate’s quarter. Being afterwards invited by the Dutch governor to meet the French officers at dinner, he seized that occasion of assuring the French captain that, understanding it was his intention to honour the British possessions with a visit, he had taken the earliest opportunity in his power to accompany him, in His Majesty’s ship the Boreas, in order that such attention might be paid to the officers of his Most Christian Majesty, as every Englishman in the islands would be proud to show. The French, with equal courtesy, protested against giving him this trouble; especially, they said, as they intended merely to cruise round the islands without landing on any. But Nelson, with the utmost politeness, insisted upon paying them this compliment, followed them close, in spite of all their attempts to elude his vigilance, and never lost sight of them, till, finding it impossible either to deceive or escape him they gave up their treacherous purpose in despair, and beat up for Martinico. A business of more serious import soon engaged his attention. The Americans were at this time trading with our islands, taking advantage of the register of their ships, which had been issued while they were British subjects. Nelson knew that, by the Navigation Act, no foreigners, directly or indirectly, are permitted to carry on any trade with these possessions; he knew, also, that the Americans had made themselves foreigners with regard to England; they had broken the ties of blood and language, and acquired the independence which they had been provoked to claim, unhappily for themselves, before they were fit for it; and he was resolved that they should derive no profit from those ties. Foreigners they had made themselves, and as foreigners they were to be treated. ‘If once,’ said he, ‘they are admitted to any kind of intercourse with our islands, the views of the loyalists, in settling at Nova Scotia, are entirely done away; and when we are again embroiled in a French war, the Americans will first become the carriers of these colonies, and then have possession of them. Here they come, sell their cargoes for ready money, go to Martinico, buy molasses, and so round and round. The loyalist cannot do this, and, consequently, must sell a little dearer. The residents here are Americans by connection and by interest, and are inimical to Great Britain. They are as great rebels as ever were in America, had they the power to show it.’ In November, when the squadron, having arrived at Barbadoes, was to separate, with no other orders than those for examining anchorages, and the usual inquiries concerning wood and water, Nelson asked his friend Collingwood, then captain of the Mediator, whose opinions he knew upon the subject, to accompany him to the commander-in-chief, whom he then respectfully asked, Whether they were not to attend to the commerce of the country, and see that the Navigation Act was respected? that appearing to him to be the intent of keeping men-of-war upon this station in time of peace. Sir Richard Hughes replied, he had no particular orders, neither had the Admiralty sent him any Acts of Parliament. But Nelson made answer that the Navigation Act was included in the statutes of the Admiralty, with which every captain was furnished, and that Act was directed to admirals, captains, &c., to see it carried into execution. Sir Richard said he had never seen the book. Upon this Nelson produced the statutes, read the words of the Act, and apparently convinced the commander-in-chief that men-of-war, as he said, ‘were sent abroad for some other purpose than to be made a show of.’ Accordingly, orders were given to enforce the Navigation Act. General Sir Thomas Shirley was at this time Governor of the Leeward Islands; and when Nelson waited on him to inform him how he intended to act, and upon what grounds, he replied, that ‘old generals were not in the habit of taking advice from young gentlemen.’ ‘Sir,’ said the young officer, with that confidence in himself which never carried him too far, and always was equal to the occasion, ‘I am as old as the Prime Minister of England, and think myself as capable of commanding one of His Majesty’s ships as that Minister is of governing the State.’ He was resolved to do his duty, whatever might be the opinion or conduct of others; and when he arrived upon his station at St Kitt’s he sent away all the Americans, not choosing to seize them before they had been well apprised that the Act would be carried into effect, lest it might seem as if a trap had been laid for them. The Americans, though they prudently decamped from St Kitt’s, were emboldened by the support they met with, and resolved to resist his orders, alleging that king’s ships had no legal power to seize them without having deputations from the Customs. The planters were to a man against him; the governors and the presidents of the different islands, with only a single exception, gave him no support; and the admiral, afraid to act on either side yet wishing to oblige the planters, sent him a note advising him to be guided by the wishes of the President of the Council. There was no danger in disregarding this, as it came unofficially, and in the form of advice. But scarcely a month after he had shown Sir Richard Hughes the law, and, as he supposed, satisfied him concerning it, he received an order from him, stating that he had now obtained good advice upon the point, and the Americans were not to be hindered from coming, and having free egress and regress, if the governor chose to permit them. An order to the same purport had been sent round to the different governors and presidents; and General Shirley and others informed him, in an authoritative manner, that they chose to admit American ships, as the commander-in-chief had left the decision to them. These persons, in his own words, he soon ‘trimmed up and silenced;’ but it was a more delicate business to deal with the admiral. ‘I must either,’ said he, ‘disobey my orders or disobey Acts of Parliament. I determined upon the former, trusting to the uprightness of my intentions, and believing that my country would not let me be ruined for protecting her commerce.’ With this determination he wrote to Sir Richard, appealed again to the plain, literal, unequivocal sense of the Navigation Act; and in respectful language told him he felt it his duty to decline obeying these orders till he had an opportunity of seeing and conversing with him. Sir Richard’s first feeling was that of anger, and he was about to supersede Nelson; but having mentioned the affair to his captain, that officer told him he believed all the squadron thought the orders illegal, and therefore did not know how far they were bound to obey them. It was impossible, therefore, to bring Nelson to a court-martial composed of men who agreed with him in opinion upon the point in dispute; and, luckily, though the admiral wanted vigour of mind to decide upon what was right, he was not obstinate in wrong, and had even generosity enough in his nature to thank Nelson afterwards for having shown him his error. Collingwood, in the Mediator, and his brother, Wilfred Collingwood, in the Rattler, actively co-operated with Nelson. The Custom-houses were informed, that after a certain day all foreign vessels found in the ports would be seized; and many were in consequence seized, and condemned in the Admiralty Court. When the Boreas arrived at Nevis, she found four American vessels deeply laden, and with what are called the island colours flying–white, with a red cross. They were ordered to hoist their proper flag, and depart within eight-and-forty hours; but they refused to obey, denying that they were Americans. Some of their crews were then examined in Nelson’s cabin, where the judge of the Admiralty happened to be present. The case was plain; they confessed that they were Americans, and that the ships, hull and cargo, were wholly American property–upon which he seized them. This raised a storm: the planters, the Custom-house, and the governor, were all against him. Subscriptions were opened, and presently filled, for the purpose of carrying on the cause in behalf of the American captains: and the admiral, whose flag was at that time in the roads, stood neutral. But the Americans and their abettors were not content with defensive law. The marines whom he had sent to secure the ships had prevented some of the masters from going ashore; and those persons, by whose depositions it appeared that the vessels and cargoes were American property, declared that they had given their testimony under bodily fear, for that a man with a drawn sword in his hand had stood over them the whole time. A rascally lawyer, whom the party employed, suggested this story; and as the sentry at the cabin-door was a man with a drawn sword, the Americans made no scruple of swearing to this ridiculous falsehood, and commencing prosecutions against him accordingly. They laid their damages at the enormous amount of ?40,000; and Nelson was obliged to keep close on board his own ship, lest he should be arrested for a sum for which it would have been impossible to find bail. The marshal frequently came on board to arrest him, but was always prevented by the address of the first lieutenant, Mr Wallis. Had he been taken, such was the temper of the people, that it was certain he would have been cast for the whole sum. One of his officers, one day, in speaking of the restraint which he was thus compelled to suffer, happened to use the word pity! ‘Pity!’ exclaimed Nelson: ‘Pity! did you say? I shall live, sir, to be envied! and to that point I shall always direct my course.’ Eight weeks he remained under this state of duresse. During that time the trial respecting these detained ships came on in the Court of Admiralty. He went on shore under a protection for the day from the judge; but notwithstanding this, the marshal was called upon to take that opportunity of arresting him, and the merchants promised to indemnify him for so doing. The judge, however, did his duty, and threatened to send the marshal to prison if he attempted to violate the protection of the Court. Mr Herbert, the president of Nevis, behaved with singular generosity upon this occasion. Though no man was a greater sufferer by the measures which Nelson had pursued, he offered in court to become his bail for ?10,000, if he chose to suffer the arrest. The lawyer whom he had chosen proved to be an able as well as an honest man; and, notwithstanding the opinions and pleadings of most of the counsel of the different islands, who maintained that ships of war were not justified in seizing American vessels without a deputation from the Customs, the law was so explicit, the case so clear, and Nelson pleaded his own cause so well, that the four ships were condemned. During the progress of this business he sent a memorial home to the king: in consequence of which, orders were issued that he should be defended at the expense of the Crown. And upon the representations which he made at the sametime to the Secretary of State, and the suggestions with which he accompanied it, the Register Act was framed. The sanction of Government, and the approbation of his conduct which it implied, were highly gratifying to him: but he was offended, and not without just cause, that the Treasury should have transmitted thanks to the commander-in-chief for his activity and zeal in protecting the commerce of Great Britain. ‘Had they known all,’ said he, ‘I do not think they would have bestowed thanks in that quarter, and neglected me. I feel much hurt that, after the loss of health and risk of fortune, another should be thanked for what I did against his orders. I either deserved to be sent out of the service, or at least to have had some little notice taken of what I had done. They have thought it worthy of notice, and yet have neglected me. If this is the reward for a faithful discharge of my duty, I shall be careful, and never stand forward again. But I have done my duty, and have nothing to accuse myself of.’ The anxiety which he had suffered from the harassing uncertainties of law, is apparent from these expressions. He had, however, something to console him, for he was at this time wooing the niece of his friend the president, then in her eigh-teenth year, the widow of Dr Nisbet, a physician. She had one child, a son, by name Josiah, who was three years old. One day Mr Herbert, who had hastened, half-dressed, to receive Nelson, exclaimed, on returning to his dressing-room, ‘Good God! if I did not find that great little man, of whom everybody is so afraid, playing in the next room, under the dining-table, with Mrs Nisbet’s child!’ A few days afterwards Mrs Nisbet herself was first introduced to him, and thanked him for the partiality which he had shown to her little boy. Her manners were mild and winning; and the captain, whose heart was easily susceptible of attachment, found no such imperious necessity for subduing his inclinations as had twice before withheld him from marrying. They were married on March n, 1787; Prince William Henry, who had come out to the West Indies the preceding winter, being present, by his own desire, to give away the bride. Mr Herbert, her uncle, was at this time so much displeased with his only daughter, that he had resolved to disinherit her, and leave his whole fortune, which was very great, to his niece. But Nelson, whose nature was too noble to let him profit by an act of injustice, interfered, and succeeded in reconciling the president to his child. ‘Yesterday,’ said one of his naval friends, the day after the wedding, ‘the navy lost one of its greatest ornaments by Nelson’s marriage. It is a national loss that such an officer should marry: had it not been for this, Nelson would have become the greatest man in the service.’ The man was rightly estimated; but he who delivered this opinion did not understand the effect of domestic love and duty upon a mind of the true heroic stamp. ‘We are often separate,’ said Nelson, in a letter to Mrs Nisbet, a few months before their marriage; ‘but our affections are not by any means on that account diminished. Our country has the first demand for our services; and private convenience or happiness must ever give way to the public good. Duty is the great business of a sea officer: all private considerations must give way to it, however painful.’ ‘Have you not often heard,’ says he, in another letter, ‘that salt water and absence always wash away love? Now I am such a heretic as not to believe that faith; for, behold, every morning I have had six pails of salt water poured upon my head, and instead of finding what seamen say to be true, it goes on so contrary to the prescription, that you must, perhaps, see me before the fixed time.’ More frequently his correspondence breathed a deeper strain. To write letters to you,’ says he, ‘is the next greatest pleasure I feel to receiving them from you. What I experience when I read such as I am sure are the pure sentiments of your heart, my poor pen cannot express; nor, indeed, would I give much for any pen or head which could express feelings of that kind. Absent from you, I feel no pleasure: it is you who are everything to me. Without you, I care not for this world; for I have found, lately, nothing in it but vexation and trouble. These are my present sentiments. God Almighty grant they may never change! Nor do I think they will. Indeed there is, as far as human knowledge can judge, a moral certainty that they cannot, for it must be real affection that brings us together, not interest or compulsion.’ Such were the feelings, and such the sense of duty, with which Nelson became a husband. During his stay upon this station he had ample opportunity of observing the scandalous practices of the contractors, prizeagents, and other persons in the West Indies connected with the naval service. When he was first left with the command, and bills were brought him to sign for money which was owing for goods purchased for the navy, he required the original voucher, that he might examine whether those goods had been really purchased at the market price; but to produce vouchers would not have been convenient, and therefore was not the custom. Upon this Nelson wrote to Sir Charles Middleton, then Comptroller of the Navy, representing the abuses which were likely to be practised in this manner. The answer which he received seemed to imply that the old forms were thought sufficient: and thus having no alternative, he was compelled, with his eyes open, to submit to a practice originating in fraudulent intentions. Soon afterwards two Antigua merchants informed him that they were privy to great frauds which had been committed upon Government in various departments–at Antigua, to the amount of nearly ?500,000; at Lucie, ?300,000; at Barbadoes, ?250,000; at Jamaica, upwards of a million. The informers were both shrewd, sensible men of business: they did not affect to be actuated by a sense of justice, but required a percentage upon so much as Government should actually recover through their means. Nelson examined the books and papers which they produced, and was convinced that Government had been most infamously plundered. Vouchers, he found, in that country were no check whatever: the principle was, that ‘a thing was always worth what it would bring;’ and the merchants were in the habit of signing vouchers for each other, without even the appearance of looking at the articles. These accounts he sent home to the different departments which had been defrauded; but the peculators were too powerful, and they succeeded not merely in impeding inquiry, but even in raising prejudices against Nelson at the Board of Admiralty, which it was many years before he could subdue. Owing, probably, to these prejudices, and the influence of the peculators, he was treated, on his return to England, in a manner which had nearly driven him from the service. During the three years that the Boreas had remained upon a station which is usually so fatal, not a single officer or man of her whole complement had died. This almost unexampled instance of good health, though mostly, no doubt, imputable to a healthy season, must, in some measure, also be ascribed to the wise conduct of the captain. He never suffered the ships to remain more than three or four weeks at a time at any of the islands; and when the hurricane months confined him to English Harbour, he encouraged all kinds of useful amusements: music, dancing, and cudgelling among the men; theatricals among the officers—anything which could employ their attention and keep their spirits cheerful. The Boreas arrived in England in June. Nelson, who had many times been supposed to be consumptive when in the West Indies, and perhaps was saved from consumption by that climate, was still in a precarious state of health; and the raw wet weather of one of our ungenial summers brought on cold and sore throat and fever; yet his vessel was kept at the Nore from the end of June till the end of November, serving as a sloop and receiving ship. This unworthy treatment, which more probably proceeded from intention than from neglect, excited in Nelson the strongest indignation. During the whole five months he seldom or never quitted the ship, but carried on the duty with strict and sullen attention. On the morning when orders were received to prepare the Boreas for being paid off, he expressed his joy to the senior officer in the Medway, saying, ‘It will release me for ever from an ungrateful service, for it is my firm and unalterable determination never again to set my foot on board a king’s ship. Immediately after my arrival in town I shall wait on the First Lord of the Admiralty, and resign my commission.’ The officer to whom he thus communicated his intentions behaved in the wisest and most friendly manner; for, finding it in vain to dissuade him in his present state of feeling, he secretly interfered with the First Lord to save him from a step so injurious to himself, little foreseeing how deeply the welfare and honour of England were at that moment at stake. This interference produced a letter from Lord Howe, the day before the ship was paid off, intimating a wish to see Captain Nelson as soon as he arrived in town; when, being pleased with his conversation, and perfectly convinced, by what was then explained to him, of the propriety of his conduct, he desired that he might present him to the king on the first levee day; and the gracious manner in which Nelson was then received, effectually removed his resentment. Prejudices had been, in like manner, excited against his friend, Prince William Henry. ‘Nothing is wanting, sir,’ said Nelson in one of his letters, ‘to make you the darling of the English nation, but truth. Sorry I am to say, much to the contrary has been dispersed.’ This was not flattery; for Nelson was no flatterer. The letter in which this passage occurs shows in how wise and noble a manner he dealt with the prince. One of his royal highness’s officers had applied for a court-martial upon a point in which he was unquestionably wrong. His royal highness, however, while he supported his own character and authority, prevented the trial, which must have been injurious to a brave and deserving man. ‘Now that you are parted,’ said Nelson, ‘pardon me, my prince, when I presume to recommend that he may stand in your royal favour as if he had never sailed with you, and that at some future day you will serve him. There only wants this to place your conduct in the highest point of view. None of us are without failings; his was being rather too hasty; but that, put in competition with his being a good officer, will not, I am bold to say, be taken in the scale against him. More able friends than myself your royal highness may easily find, and of more consequence in the State; but one more attached and affectionate, is not so easily met with. Princes seldom, very seldom, find a disinterested person to communicate their thoughts to: I do not pretend to be that person: but of this be assured, by a man who, I trust, never did a dishonourable act, that I am interested only that your royal highness should be the greatest and best man this country ever produced.’ Encouraged by the conduct of Lord Howe, and by his reception at court, Nelson renewed his attack upon the peculators with fresh spirit. He had interviews with Mr Rose, Mr Pitt, and Sir Charles Middleton, to all of whom he satisfactorily proved his charges. In consequence, it is said, these very extensive public frauds were at length put in a proper train to be provided against in future: his representations were attended to; and every step which he recommended was adopted; the investigation was put into a proper course, which ended in the detection and punishment of some of the culprits; an immense saving was made to Government, and thus its attention was directed to similar peculation in other parts of the Colonies. But it is said, also, that no mark of commendation seems to have been bestowed upon Nelson for his exertion. And it is justly remarked, (#litres_trial_promo) that the spirit of the navy cannot be preserved so effectually by the liberal honours bestowed on officers when they are worn out in the service, as by an attention to those who, like Nelson at this part of his life, have only their integrity and zeal to bring them into notice. A junior officer, who had been left with the command at Jamaica, received an additional allowance, for which Nelson had applied in vain. Double pay was allowed to every artificer and seaman employed in the naval yard. Nelson had superintended the whole business of that yard with the most rigid exactness, and he complained that he was neglected. ‘It was most true,’ he said, ‘that the trouble which he took to detect the fraudulent practices then carried on, was no more than his duty; but he little thought that the expenses attending his frequent journeys to St John’s, upon that duty (a distance of twelve miles), would have fallen upon his pay as captain of the Boreas.’ Nevertheless, the sense of what he thought this unworthy usage did not diminish his zeal. ‘I,’ said he, ‘must still buffet the waves in search of–What? Alas! that they called honour is now thought of no more. My fortune, God knows, has grown worse for the service: so much for serving my country. But the devil, ever willing to tempt the virtuous, has made me offer, if any ships should be sent to destroy his majesty of Morocco’s ports, to be there; and I have some reason to think that, should any more come of it, my humble services will be accepted. I have invariably laid down, and followed close, a plan of what ought to be uppermost in the breast of an officer–that it is much better to serve an ungrateful country than to give up his own fame. Posterity will do him justice. A uniform course of honour and integrity seldom fails of bringing a man to the goal of fame at last.’ The design against the Barbary pirates, like all other designs against them, was laid aside; and Nelson took his wife to his father’s parsonage, meaning only to pay him a visit before they went to France–a project which he had formed for the sake of acquiring a competent knowledge of the French language. But his father could not bear to lose him thus unnecessarily. Mr Nelson had long been an invalid, suffering under paralytic and asthmatic affections which, for several hours after he rose in the morning, scarcely permitted him to speak. He had been given over by his physicians for this complaint nearly forty years before his death; and was, for many of his last years, obliged to spend all his winters at Bath. The sight of his son, he declared, had given him new life. ‘But, Horace,’ said he, ‘it would have been better that I had not been thus cheered, if I am so soon to be bereaved of you again. Let me, my good son, see you whilst I can. My age and infirmities increase, and I shall not last long.’ To such an appeal there could be no reply. Nelson took up his abode at the parsonage, and amused himself with the sports and the occupations of the country. Sometimes he busied himself with farming the glebe; sometimes spent the greater part of the day in the garden, where he would dig as if for the mere pleasure of wearying himself. Sometimes he went bird-nesting, like a boy; and in these expeditions Mrs Nelson always, by his express desire, accompanied him. Coursing was his favourite amusement. Shooting, as he practised it, was far too dangerous for his companions; for he carried his gun upon the full cock, as if he were going to board an enemy; and the moment a bird rose, he let fly, without ever putting the fowling-piece to his shoulder. It is not, therefore, extraordinary, that his having once shot a partridge should be remembered by his family among the remarkable events of his life. But his time did not pass away thus without some vexatious cares to ruffle it. The affair of the American ships was not yet over, and he was again pestered with threats of prosecution. ‘I have written them word,’ said he, ‘that I will have nothing to do with them, and they must act as they think proper. Government, I suppose, will do what is right, and not leave me in the lurch. We have heard enough lately of the consequence of the Navigation Act to this country. They may take my person; but if sixpence would save me from a prosecution, I would not give it.’ It was his great ambition at this time to possess a pony; and, having resolved to purchase one, he went to a fair for that purpose. During his absence two men abruptly entered the parsonage, and inquired for him: they then asked for Mrs Nelson; and after they had made her repeatedly declare that she was really and truly the captain’s wife, presented her with a writ, or notification on the part of the American captains, who now laid their damages at ?20,000, and they charged her to give it to her husband on his return. Nelson having bought his pony, came home with it in high spirits. He called out his wife to admire the purchase, and listen to all its excellences, nor was it till his glee had in some measure subsided that the paper could be presented to him. His indignation was excessive: and in the apprehension that he should be exposed to the anxieties of the suit, and the ruinous consequences which might ensue, he exclaimed, ‘This affront I did not deserve! But I’ll be trifled with no longer. I will write immediately to the Treasury; and if Government will not support me I am resolved to leave the country.’ Accordingly, he informed the Treasury that if a satisfactory answer were not sent him by return of post he should take refuge in France. To this he expected he should be driven, and for this he arranged everything, with his characteristic rapidity of decision. It was settled that he should depart immediately, and Mrs Nelson follow under the care of his elder brother, Maurice, ten days after him. But the answer which he received from Government quieted his fears: it stated that Captain Nelson was a very good officer, and needed to be under no apprehension, for he would assuredly be supported. Here his disquietude upon this subject seems to have ended. Still, he was not at ease; he wanted employment, and was mortified that his applications for it produced no effect. ‘Not being a man of fortune,’ he said, ‘was a crime which he was unable to get over, and therefore none of the great cared about him.’ Repeatedly he requested the Admiralty that they would not leave him to rust in indolence. During the armament which was made upon occasion of the dispute concerning Nootka Sound, he renewed his application, and his steady friend, Prince William, who had then been created Duke of Clarence, recommended him to Lord Chatham. The failure of this recommendation wounded him so keenly that he again thought of retiring from the service in disgust–a resolution from which nothing but the urgent remonstrances of Lord Hood induced him to desist. Hearing that the Raisonnable, in which he had commenced his career, was to be commissioned, he asked for her. This also was in vain; and a coolness ensued, on his part towards Lord Hood, because that excellent officer did not use his influence with Lord Chatham upon this occasion. Lord Hood, however, had certainly sufficient reasons for not interfering, for he ever continued his steady friend. In the winter of 1792, when we were on the eve of the Anti-Jacobin war, Nelson once more offered his services, earnestly requested a ship, and added that if their lordships should be pleased to appoint him to a cockle-boat, he should feel satisfied. He was answered in the usual official form: ‘Sir, I have received your letter of the 5th instant, expressing your readiness to serve, and have read the same to my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty.’ On the 12th of December he received this dry acknowledgment. The fresh mortification did not, however, affect him long; for, by the joint interest of the Duke and Lord Hood, he was appointed, on the 30th of January following, to the Agamemnon, of 64 guns. THREE (#ulink_11c859af-b94a-5f60-a7aa-b699cb4256de) The Agamemnon sent to the Mediterranean–Commencement of Nelson’s acquaintance with Sir W. Hamilton–He is sent to Corsica to co-operate with Paoli–State of affairs in that island–Nelson undertakes the siege of Bastia, and reduces it–Takes a distinguished part in the siege of Calvi, where he loses an eye–Admiral Hotham’s action–The Agamemnon ordered to Genoa to co-operate with the Austrian and Sardinian forces–Gross misconduct of the Austrian General. ‘THERE are three things, young gentleman,’ said Nelson to one of his midshipmen, ‘which you are constantly to bear in mind:–First, you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own respecting their propriety; secondly, you must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your king; and, thirdly, you must hate a Frenchman as you do the devil.’ With these feelings he engaged in the Anti-Jacobin war. Josiah, his son-in-law, went with him as a midshipman. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/richard-holmes/southey-on-nelson-the-life-of-nelson-by-robert-southey/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.