Nelson And His Captains: Sketches Of Famous Seamen [Illustrated Edition]

William Henry Fitchett

• Publisher: Wagram Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781786253736
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Includes 11 portraits
NELSON is the only figure amongst the great sea-captains of the Napoleonic war of which the human memory keeps any vivid image. The iron face of Jervis looks out on us for a moment from the smoke of St. Vincent, gloomy, stern, and cynical, and then vanishes! Collingwood, who led down on the Franco-Spanish line at Trafalgar in a fashion so stately, and in advance even of Nelson, and who lies in the great crypt of St. Paul's beside his famous chief, is, for the general reader, little more than a name. Cornwallis, the hero of the tireless and memorable blockade of Brest, is scarcely even a name. Who remembers aught of Barham, the white-haired veteran—sea-dog, as well as sea-lord—who devised, almost off-hand, the counter-stroke that shattered Napoleon's sea strategy and made Trafalgar possible?
Nelson is the one sea-captain of the Great War who has stamped his image imperishably on the imagination of the English-speaking race.
Whether, indeed, Nelson was in a technical sense "the greatest sailor since the world began, " need not be discussed. In the art of taking care of ship and canvas in rough weather some of his own captains probably surpassed him. In the genius that wielded fleets he was supreme! And in the great drama of Napoleonic wars there are —for the man in the street—only three supreme names, that of Napoleon himself, of Wellington, and of Nelson, and Nelson was as great on sea as his two rivals in fame were great on land.
This work is an account, not so much of Nelson as of his captains—the men of the Nile and of Trafalgar. "They, " said Nelson, of a group of his captains, "are my children; they serve in my school, and I glory in them." And we cannot understand the "school" without some clear mental image of the master who stamped his impress so deeply on it.

NELSON AND HIS CAPTAINS

CHAPTER I — NELSON: A CHARACTER STUDY

“Thine island loves thee well, thou famous man,

The greatest sailor since the world began!”

—TENNYSON.

NELSON is the only figure amongst the great sea-captains of the Napoleonic war of which the human memory keeps any vivid image. The iron face of Jervis looks out on us for a moment from the smoke of St. Vincent, gloomy, stern, and cynical, and then vanishes! Collingwood, who led down on the Franco-Spanish line at Trafalgar in a fashion so stately, and in advance even of Nelson, and who lies in the great crypt of St. Paul’s beside his famous chief, is, for the general reader, little more than a name. Cornwallis, the hero of the tireless and memorable blockade of Brest, is scarcely even a name. Who remembers aught of Barham, the white-haired veteran—sea-dog, as well as sea-lord—who devised, almost off-hand, the counter-stroke that shattered Napoleon’s sea strategy and made Trafalgar possible?

Cochrane, no doubt, is remembered after a fashion; but it is as a sort of marine Don Quixote; and he owes his fame almost as much to his long-enduring and loudly proclaimed wrongs as to his marvellous exploits. Sidney Smith flits as a sort of sea-ghost through the cells of human recollection, but it is for what he did—not on sea, but—on land. He is remembered, not as a sailor, but as the defender of Acre.

Nelson is the one sea-captain of the Great War who has stamped his image imperishably on the imagination of the English-speaking race.

Whether, indeed, Nelson was in a technical sense “the greatest sailor since the world began,” need not be discussed. In the art of taking care of ship and canvas in rough weather some of his own captains probably surpassed him. In the genius that wielded fleets he was supreme! And in the great drama of Napoleonic wars there are —for the man in the street—only three supreme names, that of Napoleon himself, of Wellington, and of Nelson, and Nelson was as great on sea as his two rivals in fame were great on land.

This work is an account, not so much of Nelson as of his captains—the men of the Nile and of Trafalgar. “They,” said Nelson, of a group of his captains, “are my children; they serve in my school, and I glory in them.” And we cannot understand the “school” without some clear mental image of the master who stamped his impress so deeply on it.

***

Nelson’s figure when set against a background of mighty battles, seems unheroic in an almost absurd degree. Haliburton makes his Sam Slick describe “Nelson as that cripple-gaited, one-eyed, one-armed little naval critter.” In these days when the foot-rule and the stethoscope and the examination paper are the tests by which our embryo Nelsons and Wellingtons are chosen, the future hero of the Nile and of Trafalgar would infallibly have been rejected. The test of the foot-rule alone would have been fatal. Nelson was mean in stature. “A little man with no dignity and a shock-head,” is the description by a lady who saw Nelson—no doubt with unfriendly eyes—after the Nile. “The merest boy of a captain I have ever beheld,” says Prince William Henry of him when he met him in New York in 1782, when Nelson was twenty-four years old, and already in command of a frigate. “A little man, and far from handsome,” is Sir William Hamilton’s description when Nelson made his appearance in Naples in 1793. Nelson at that date was, no doubt, curiously fragile in appearance, and with the empty sleeve which Santa Cruz gave him, and the half-blindness he owed to Corsica. His face, even in after years, when bronzed with the sea winds and scarred with battle, was hardly—with its pouting lips, half-melancholy, half-boyish eyes, and careless hair —the face of a war leader. Only rarely, indeed, amongst his many portraits and lusts do we catch a gleam of the expression his sailors must have seen on Nelson’s face when the gums were beginning to speak. Thaller’s bust of Nelson, with its masterful profile, its eager fighting look, and the deep line from the base of the nostril to the chin, gives, it is true, a curious impression of power. Even more in Flaxman’s fine bust the resolved line of the lips, the challenging eyes, give us a hint of what may be called Nelson’s battle face.

But in most of his portraits the sensitive mouth, the curving lips, the set of his eyebrows, all tell of the emotional side of Nelson’s character. He was vehement, moody, swinging to opposite poles of emotion with strange readiness; now drooping, now exultant, and intense alike in his hates and his loves. There was a strain of the woman in him; of womanly vehemence, of womanly sensitiveness, of womanly—not to say half-shrewish—temper. It was the woman in him which explains that pathetic “Kiss me, Hardy,” in the last scene of all. His hate of the French has in it a strain of feminine shrewishness. His belief in his friends, in his comrades, in his ship, had in it more than a touch of feminine exaggeration. The half-feminine side of Nelson’s character is seen in his simple and unashamed delight in flattery. Lady Hamilton’s emotions and superlatives, her tears, her apostrophes, her swoons would have turned the stomach of most men.

It is said sometimes that Nelson had no sense of humour; and that is not quite true. There was humour, though of a somewhat grim sort, in his description of himself in Corsica: “I have all the diseases there are,” he wrote, “but there is not enough in my frame for them to fasten on.” There was humour again in his letter to the Duke of Clarence, explaining the loss of his arm at Santa Cruz: “I assure your Royal Highness,” he says, “that not a scrap of that ardour with which I served our King has been shot away”! Was there not humour, again—of what may be called the iron sort — in the incident at Copenhagen, when Nelson lifted his telescope to his blind eye, and declared he really could not see his admiral’s ignoble signal of recall? But it needed, perhaps, the thunder of a great battle to kindle Nelson’s sense of the humorous. Under ordinary conditions it emerged too seldom and too scantily. A pinch of the genuine salt of humour our would certainly have made vain the flatteries and the fascinations of that somewhat passée and decidedly over-plump charmer, Lady Hamilton.

But his moods came and went with bewildering rapidity. Nothing eau well be more tragical than Nelson’s gloom when the dark hour is upon him. Thus, after his failure at Santa Cruz, he writes to Jervis: “I am become a burden to my friends, and useless to my country.” His career was ended On the other hand, nothing could be gayer or more audacious than Nelson’s self-confidence during his moments of exaltation. He was still an almost unknown post-captain when he wrote to his wife: “One day or other I will have a long Gazette to myself. I cannot, if I am in the field of glory, be kept out of sight....Not a kingdom or state where my name will be forgotten.” There was a touch of unreasoning extravagance in his occasional outbursts of discontent at the supposed slowness of his promotion. It is customary to say that Nelson, the sixth child—one out of the eleven children—of a country parson, had no official influence to help him in his career. But his uncle, Suckling, was Comptroller of the Navy and Nelson, by some charm of manner, as well as by his fine gifts, won one powerful patron after another, from Parker to Jervis. The mere dates of his commissions show how swiftly he rose. He was only twelve when, without the formality of an examination, he became a midshipman. At fourteen he was captain’s coxswain in the Carcass, and on his way to the North Pole. When nineteen years old he was second lieutenant of the Lowestoft, and in command of her tender, a schooner named the Little Lacy.

At twenty he flew his flag in command of the Badger, a brig; he was only twenty-one when put in command of the Hinchinbroke, a small frigate, and scarcely twenty-two when, as senior naval officer, he led in the San Juan expedition. His service was broken by much sickness; yet, in August 1781, he was in command of the Albemarle, a 28-gun frigate.

There, it is true, came a gap of wasted time. Nelson went on half-pay, and occupied himself in falling in, and out of, love, and with trying in vain to learn French; but in 1784 he was in command of the Boreal, and was senior captain in the West Indies. Then followed more than four years of married life, half-pay and general unrest and grumbling. Nelson was on half-pay from December 1787 to January 1793—five long, wasted, fretful, unhappy years, when he contemplated giving up the sea altogether. But in January 1793, when yet not thirty-five years old, he walked, as its captain, the quarterdeck of the Agamemnon, “without exception,” as Nelson himself wrote, “the finest 64 in the service.” Nelson, by the way, had as many fond illusions about his ships as a youth for the first time in love has about his mistress. The same year he was commodore under Hood, and in command of the naval forces in the siege of Calvi. In August 1796 he hoisted his broad pennant as commodore of a squadron of frigates. At Cape St. Vincent, where he won imperishable fame, he was only thirty-nine. He fought the battle of the Nile when he was not yet forty.

The mere chronology of Nelson’s career thus proves that he suffered from no official neglect. The sense of discontent which burned in his blood, and so often stains his correspondence, was due, in part, to the hypersensitive, not to say feminine, side of his nature. In part, again, it may be traced to that almost constant experience of ill-health he was doomed to suffer. Through some of the most crowded years of his career, Nelson was little better than a semi-invalid. He had a frail constitution to begin with. “What has poor little Horatio done, who is so weak,” asked Suckling, his uncle, when asked to take Nelson as midshipman, “that, above all the rest, he should be sent to rough it at sea? “ And a body frail by original make was inhabited by a restless, fiery, and vehement spirit, all too strong for its fragile case. Goethe’s description of Hamlet, “an oak tree planted in a vase,” might be applied to Nelson. During his early years his slender body and pain-sharpened face made every kind-hearted woman who came in contact with him eager to nurse him. Mrs. Locker, the wife of his first captain after Suckling, was his nurse; so was Lady Parker, the wife of his admiral; so was Lady Hughes in turn. His tireless energy, with its relapses when the fierce stress for a moment was over, tore his frail body almost to pieces. He could take care of everybody’s health but his own. He might have been a pillule-absorbing hypochondriac but for the fiery indomitable spirit that burned within his dyspeptic and overstrained body, and forbade the shaken nerves to yield, and the tired muscles to rest.

Nelson was driven back from the East by sickness while yet a lieutenant. He brought the seeds of a deadly fever with him in his blood from the San Juan expedition. His health broke down again after a period of service in the West Indies. He knew months of pain and completest weakness after his wound at Santa Cruz. He fretted himself into a fever in his great sea chase after Brueys, and believed himself to be in serious peril of dying from a broken heart. His health failed again after the Nile. “I never expect,” he wrote to Jervis, “to see your face again.” He drooped like a chronic and hopeless invalid in the sunshine of Naples, and when breathing the atmosphere of Lady Hamilton’s adoration. He was threatened with blindness; he was “worn out and left-handed,” as he described himself. “I am almost finished,” he wrote to Admiral Goodall. The cold and exposure of the Copenhagen operations were all but fatal to him. When on Channel service off Boulogne he was racked with a perpetual cough, driven almost mad with toothache, and—most ignoble distress of all—was perpetually seasick! His cough-shaken, pain-racked body, when he kept guard during the stormy months of 1803 off Toulon, moved the perpetual wonder and pity of his own officers. He was rheumatic, he had incessant pains of the heart, he was tormented with “the constant sense of the blood gushing up the left side of my head.” “Dreadfully seasick,” he wrote; “ always tossed about, and always seasick.” And this was the year before Trafalgar! “Nothing,” he wrote to Lady Hamilton, “can be more miserable and unhappy than your poor Nelson. My heart is almost broken.”

And yet the keen, clear, heroic spirit burnt like a flame within the shattered, fragile, pain-tormented body. Macaulay describing the rival leaders who confronted each other at Neerwinden in 1693, says that, “amongst the 120,000 soldiers who were marshalled round Neerwinden under all the standards of Western Europe, the two feeblest in body were the hunchbacked dwarf who urged forward the fiery onset of France, and the asthmatic skeleton who covered the slow retreat of England.” And, as far as physical appearance is concerned, Nelson ‘would have been a good companion figure to either Luxemburg or William III. It is difficult indeed to recall any other great figure in history who carried such a burden of physical disabilities as did Nelson, and grumbled over them so loudly, yet triumphed over them so completely.

And it moves one’s wonder still to remember that this fragile, undersized, half-womanly figure, if not “the greatest sailor since the world began,” was the greatest sea-warrior the world has ever seen. He was even more—he was almost, if not quite, the most terrible fighter, whether on sea or land, war has known. Admiral Colomb dwells with wondering emphasis on “that tremendous desire for personal distinction, that delight in confronting danger, that awful singleness of destructive purpose” which built Nelson’s monument in English history.

Courage is of many sorts, from the hot-blooded temper that danger exhilarates, to what is sometimes called “two o’clock in the morning” courage—the cool, unshrinking valour, which is independent of all physical conditions, and which Wellington held to be the rarest kind of courage. Nelson, it may be claimed, had both kinds of courage, and had each in perfect measure.

Battle intoxicated him, and yet left him cool. It was like a fierce wine poured into his blood; but it steadied while it exalted every sense. There is something humorous in the pity he expends on Troubridge when the Culloden went ashore at the Nile, and its unfortunate captain was compelled to watch his comrades, to use Nelson’s phrase, “in the full tide of happiness,” smashing up the French fleet, while he himself could take no part in the peril and glory of that process. To be in the passion and perils of a great battle was, for Nelson, to be “in the full tide of happiness.” At Copenhagen, when the Danish bullets were covering the quarterdeck of the Elephant with splinters, Nelson turned to Colonel Stewart, with the remark, “This is warm work, and this day may be the last to any of us at any moment.” Then he added, with emphasis, “But, mark you, I would not be elsewhere for thousands.” Collingwood knew his admiral well, and, as the Royal Sovereign led into the tempest of fire at Trafalgar, he said to his captain, “Rotherham, what would Nelson give to be here.” Nelson, on his part, gazing at the far-stretched and menacing line of Villeneuve, was just then saying to Hardy, “What would poor Sir Robert Calder give to be with us now.”

Perhaps the most perilous hour in Nelson’s stormy life was that of the boat combat by night in the Bay of Cadiz. He himself described it as “the greatest peril he had ever known.” His boat, with twelve officers and men, stumbled, in the blackness, on a Spanish gunboat with a crew of thirty officers and men. How desperate was the fighting which followed may be judged from the circumstance that of the Spaniards eighteen were killed and all the rest wounded. Nelson’s own life, in the furious hand-to-hand struggle, was twice saved by the devotion of his coxswain, Sykes. And yet, in all Nelson’s references to that incident, it is plain he regarded it as one of the most ecstatically delightful moments of his whole career.

Nelson’s fighting qualities—the speed of his stroke, the swiftness of his onfall, his audacious daring, and the bloodhound-like tenacity of his spirit—are perhaps most strikingly illustrated in the two signal failures of his career—the San Juan expedition, and the attack on the treasure ships at Santa Cruz.

Nelson, when he commanded the naval detachment in the San Juan business, was only a lad of twenty-one. The climate was deadly, the rain incessant, the country almost impassable. It took seventeen days of desperate toil to force the boats of the Hinchinbroke up stream till the fort of San Juan was reached.

Nelson was for leaping, without a moment’s delay, on the fort, and that instinct was as wise as it was daring. But the soldiers were pedants. They insisted on beginning their approaches with tedious formality. Nelson found his advice rejected, yet he toiled in the trenches and batteries with furious energy, while men died fast on all sides with sickness, and out of his zoo sailors, 145 were dead. Nelson, too, would probably have died but that his fiery spirit gave him no time to be sick. He was “ the first in every service, whether by day or night,” wrote the very soldier who had rejected his advice for an instant attack. “There was not a gun fired but was pointed by him or by the chief engineer.” Nelson brought a shattered frame and fever-poisoned blood back from San Juan, but he had given a proof of supreme fighting qualities.

In the blackness of the failure at Santa Cruz, again, Nelson’s figure as a leader of men stands out in lines at once luminous and noble. He was forbidden by his orders to land in person; and to that circumstance is, perhaps, due the failure of the whole expedition. Troubridge commanded the first party that landed, and hesitated to attack the heights which overlooked the town, where Nelson certainly would not have hesitated for an instant. But Troubridge’s failure, according to Nelson’s keen sense of honour and duty, created a new obligation for him. He must attack again, “for the honour of our kingdom and country...and that our enemies may be convinced there is nothing an Englishman is not equal to.” And Nelson decided he must command in person. “I felt the second attack,” he wrote, “a forlorn hope; I never expected to return.” But, as Nelson read his duty, the obligation to attack was peremptory.

So, in the blackness of the night, he led his tiny squadron of boats, carrying 1000 seamen, and swung hither and thither by the vast seas, in an attack on an unknown and rocky shore, hedged with a roaring surf, guarded by great batteries manned by not less than 8000 Spaniards. The mole and the shore gleamed with hostile fires, and were swept with bullets as the boats struggled up. The Fox, a cutter carrying 180 men, was sunk by a single shot. Nelson, in the act of landing,...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• CHAPTER I - NELSON: A CHARACTER STUDY
• CHAPTER II - THE MEN OF NELSON’S SCHOOL
• CHAPTER III - SIR EDWARD BERRY (1768-1831)
• CHAPTER IV - CAPTAIN EDWARD RIOU (1758-1801)
• CHAPTER V - SIR HENRY BLACKWOOD (1770-1832)
• CHAPTER VI - SIR THOMAS TROUBRIDGE (1758-1807)
• CHAPTER VII - SIR BENJAMIN HALLOWELL (CAREW) (1760-1834)
• CHAPTER VIII - SIR ALEXANDER BALL (1757-1809)
• CHAPTER IX - SIR JAMES SAUMAREZ (1757-1836)
• CHAPTER X - SIR WILLIAM PARKER (1781-1866)
• CHAPTER XI - SIR EDWARD PELLEW (LORD EXMOUTH) (1757-1833).
• CHAPTER XII - SIR THOMAS FOLEY (1757-1833)
• CHAPTER XIII - SIR THOMAS MASTERMAN HARDY (1769-1839).