Nelson (107 page)

Given these problems, Nelson relied upon First Lieutenant Andrews for what stability there was on his quarterdeck between August 1794 and November the following year. Indeed, though Nelson fought for Andrews’s promotion selflessly he anticipated that it would precipitate a crisis on the
Agamemnon
. For if Andrews left the ship, it would more than create a gap in the commissioned ranks; it would open a path for the next officer in line to become the senior lieutenant, and Nelson doubted that he could work with him. Wenman Allison was a good-hearted young man when sober, but he was descending into alcoholism, and became ‘mad’ when drunk. Worse, he was infecting a junior officer, Lieutenant Suckling, who had come back to his old ship to replace Lucas. Normally ‘a very attentive, good officer’, Suckling became ‘rather troublesome’ under the influence of Allison. Nelson remembered his days on the
Seahorse
and hated inebriation in officers. He should have disciplined Allison, but was sorry for him, and allowed matters to reach an alarming pass. So bad, in fact, that by May 1795 Nelson had decided that if Andrews left he would rather quit the ship himself than suffer Allison as its second officer. In this mood he wrote an unusually bleak and revealing letter to Fanny:

I am tired of
Agamemnon
. Allison is so much given to liquor and then behaves so ill that I have enough to do to refrain from bringing him to a court martial. I have ever heartily repented taking him. I ought to have known enough of him before. He only, with one other [Suckling], will be the cause of my leaving the ship . . . I think Andrews will go into the
Victory
, and sooner than have Allison first lieutenant I would quit the ship and go home by land. However, he does not know my intentions, or anyone else. He will soon be broke [dismissed the service] when left to himself.
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The crisis was solved providentially. Allison went down sick, and a ‘survey’ of his health, conducted at St Fiorenzo on 1 July, pronounced the climate injurious to a recovery. Three days later he was sent home ‘much impaired’. As soon as he reached London the ravaged officer was confined to his bed at 1 King Street in St James’s Square, from where he tried to secure half-pay and leave of absence covering his period of incapacity. But there would be no return to duty. Allison made his way to Bedford, and died there on 17 October 1795, mourned by a surviving sister, Phylis.
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On the
Agamemnon
, the departure of Lieutenant Allison cleared the shadows from the promotion of the much abler Andrews. To Nelson’s delight Andrews was posted commander in November, an acknowledgement of his meritorious services, particularly against the
Ça Ira
. However, he too found the upward ladder a slippery one, and it was not the beginning of the bright career Nelson had wanted. Poor Andrews remained dogged by ill health and bad luck. Too sick to take up his new command, he failed to recuperate in Pisa and was forced to leave, enfeebled, for England at the end of 1795. A year passed and he was still recovering in Bath, but Nelson had attested to his services in writing and got him to post-captain in April 1796. That was the summit of Andrews’s career; beyond lay a long, degrading slide downhill. There was no ship, and the new captain began drinking heavily on half-pay, amid bouts of illness and disability. In 1801 Andrews visited the Admiralty, then headed by Jervis himself, and was offered the choice of commanding a hulk or waiting for a frigate, but he got neither. A few years later he was to be seen in a restless retirement in Tiverton in Devon, using a cane to support a knee crippled with rheumatism, and looking for light duties. Captain Andrews was put in charge of the impress service in Dublin in 1806, but another injury the following year damaged his left leg and sent him home for good. The closing years were sad and final. Penury . . . appeals for outstanding prize money, which agent McArthur charitably paid charge-free . . . a humiliating but unsuccessful petition for relief . . . an early death at the age of forty-three in July 1810 . . . a wife, Anne, in search of a naval pension . . . and an only son dying of consumption at thirty-one. Andrews was yet another light, tended into flame by an unusual commander, only to be extinguished by neglect and misfortune.
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In 1795 the promotion of Andrews was the last of four quarterdeck losses suffered by the
Agamemnon
that year. In April, Edmonds, another of the original lieutenants, had been discharged sick. Allison and Cheetham had followed in July, and Andrews was promoted in November. But after a stormy passage, Nelson suddenly hit clear water as an exceptionally able set of recruits plugged the gaps. The newcomers were Peter Spicer, James Summers, James Noble, Henry Compton and Edward Berry – the veritable quintet that followed Nelson into the
Captain
.

Spicer, who replaced Edmonds at St Fiorenzo on 18 April 1795, came particularly well recommended. A native of Saltash in Cornwall, and the son of one of Jervis’s former lieutenants, he had officially joined the navy as an able seaman in March 1777, though in truth he was only eleven years old and a protégé of his captain, John Robinson of the
Queen
. Despite this early act of patronage and a life at sea – he remained unmarried – Peter moved forward slowly, rising by merit rather than influence. Seven ships later he got his commission in 1794, and served under Nelson’s closest friends and allies. At one time or other he was with Jervis on the
Foudroyant
, Locker on the
Cambridge
at Plymouth, Pole on the
Colossus
, and in Hood’s
Victory
. Nelson also remembered that Spicer had commanded a gunboat during the Corsican campaign, a perfect training for inshore work.
²⁸

James Summers also climbed aboard at St Fiorenzo, but not until the following July. Nelson knew less about Summers, and his commission was only a provisional one, but he came with the blessing of Captain Locker. For many worrying months the Admiralty dithered about confirming the boy’s commission, but Nelson lobbied for him and eventually got it ratified in September 1796.

Perhaps an even happier discovery was the excellent James Noble. This son of an American Loyalist had been forced to flee to England as a boy, and enlisted in the navy in 1788. He had been on board the
Bedford
when it had taken its historic beating from the
Ça Ira
and
Censeur
in the battle off Genoa in 1795. The following October, Noble was transferred to the
Agamemnon
from Hotham’s
Britannia
, initially as an acting lieutenant. William Hoste for one recognised Noble and was glad to see him, for it had been he (then a midshipman) who had first shown the Hostes the sights of Portsmouth back in 1793. Soon Hoste was describing Noble as ‘a very good young man’ who had ‘behaved very well to me the short time he was on board’, and Nelson was no less pleased, admiring the new lieutenant’s irrepressible

enthusiasm to be among the first in every service. Noble, we have seen, was captured in 1795 but exchanged, and it was Nelson who paid for his board and lodging in Genoa during the period he waited, beached, for the ship to collect him. Long afterwards Noble remembered many acts of kindness Nelson had done him, and like King the boatswain named one of his children for the commodore. He wrote of his gratitude in a letter, expressing ‘the honour I have been so fortunate as to have had of having served under the immediate command of your lordship, and the obligations I am under to your lordship for the rank I now hold in the service’.
²⁹

The next year, in 1796, the
Agamemnon
added two more solid lieutenants to its complement, Henry Compton, one of Noble’s old shipmates from the
Britannia
, and Edward Berry, who came from England on the
Comet
to join Nelson as first lieutenant in May. Compton had been seven years in the service, beginning his naval career as an able seaman on the
Cumberland
in 1789. Attracting the attention of Sir John Jervis, he passed from the flagship
Victory
to the
Agamemnon
in March as a newly commissioned lieutenant, and followed Nelson devotedly for three years.
³⁰

Of all the lieutenants of the
Agamemnon
one was destined to achieve a legendary status: Edward Berry, later one of Nelson’s greatest fighting captains. The twenty-eight-year-old Berry was of merchant stock, but his family knew Lord Mulgrave, at one time first lord of the Admiralty, and it was through him that the boy had entered the king’s service. In 1779 he volunteered for the
Burford
, bound for the East Indies, but it took him fifteen years to get a commission. He came to Nelson from England, where he had met Fanny, who was duly impressed. He certainly looked a hero. Slim, fair-haired, blue-eyed and dashing, he was as nervy as a cat preparing to pounce. ‘He seems a gentleman and an officer from appearances,’ Nelson told his wife within days of meeting his new first lieutenant. ‘I have no doubt but I shall like him.’ From the beginning the commodore treated his new subordinate with marked generosity. When Berry helped capture a prize in September, Nelson begged Jervis to make him an acting flag captain of the
Captain
to give him a greater share of the spoils. If Jervis declined the request, he wrote, ‘I must endeavour to show my sense of his gallantry and good conduct in other ways.’
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Most of Nelson’s lieutenants also liked their captain. Of the thirteen principal commissioned officers who served him on the
Agamemnon
, at least nine owed him crucial promotions. Berry would make the
most use of his advantages, however. He had sailed with Jervis on the
Boyne
, and the admiral vouched for his ‘talents, great courage, and laudable ambition’. And so it turned out. In years ahead, after Nelson had seen him to post-captain, Berry’s nose for action became proverbial in the fleet. If there was going to be a battle, people said, there you were sure to find Berry. His very presence seemed to promise powder smoke. True to form, he arrived just in time for the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, commanding – of all ships – the old
Agamemnon
herself. ‘Here comes Berry!’ Nelson is said to have exclaimed at his approach. ‘
Now
we shall have a fight!’
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Berry, Spicer, Noble, Compton and Summers all flourished under Nelson’s leadership and played key roles in refashioning the new ship’s company.

Below them the young gentlemen of the
Agamemnon
quarterdeck had also benefited from his patronage. Nelson always interested himself in them, partly because something of the boy still lingered inside him, and partly, one suspects, because they substituted for the children he had never had.

The ‘class’ of the
Agamemnon
were a varied lot, in ability, interest and ambition. Some were hell-bent for promotion, impatient to get their commissions before the war ended. Whereas the eyes of the lieutenants were set upon the post of commander and the rank of post-captain, the midshipmen and master’s mates had the lieutenant’s commission in their sights. With the king’s commission in their pockets they became, if they were not already, officers and gentlemen, and their names were entered on lists of the permanent dependants of the crown. The most successful, such as Weatherhead, Hoste or Bolton, carried the hopes of gentrified families with them, but they rubbed shoulders with others Nelson had raised from the common ranks from time to time. One such was poor William D. Williams, who died of his wounds at Vado in 1795. A number were older men, who had few chances of reaching that treasured lieutenancy. When they joined the ship as able seamen in 1793 twenty-seven-year-old David Lindsey was a pressed man from Dunbartonshire, and Ralph Woodman of Morpeth was thirty-two, while Thomas Lund enlisted as able seaman in 1796 at the age of thirty-five. They were all rated midshipmen by Nelson, but none made lieutenant. John Wood of Sunderland was
luckier. He enlisted with Nelson as able seaman at the age of thirty-three in 1793, became midshipman and master’s mate, passed his examination, and in July 1796 got an acting position as lieutenant of the
Blonde
.
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Nelson fussed over the youngsters like a benign uncle, and praised when they applied themselves. William Bolton, a studious youth who thought nothing of reading late into the night, went beyond his duties to compile a neatly-written manual for junior officers, complete with loving illustrations of knots, ropes and sails and notes on etiquette and propriety. Josiah Nisbet, Nelson’s stepson, had the most obvious claim upon his attention. Josiah benefited from Fanny’s constant concern and sprouted into a strong, healthy boy as tall as his captain. Occasionally something engaged his interest, such as the epaulettes Nelson had to fit to his uniform in 1795, but though he wrote to his mother two ‘Dear Mamma’ letters in 1793, he was not a natural correspondent (‘Josiah begins to threaten you with a letter, and Time may produce it’), and he rarely shone about his general business. ‘You seem to think Josiah is a master of languages,’ Nelson disabused Fanny. ‘I must say he is the same exactly as when an infant, and likes apples and port wine, but it will be difficult to make him speak French, much more Italian. However, I hope his heart is good, and that is the principal.’ ‘Hope’ was the telling word. Josiah’s manners and conversation were boorish, something Nelson never liked even in a man. Although he knew Josiah would ‘never be troubled with the graces’, he tried to convince himself that he was ‘a good officer’ and had ‘many good points about him’.
³⁴

Youngest of the aspiring gentlemen of the
Agamemnon
was probably Isaac Charles Smith Collett (the son of Nelson’s gunner), who may have been a tender thirteen years when he joined the ship in November 1794. However, the most universally beloved were Hoste and Weatherhead. Like Josiah, Hoste advanced from captain’s servant to midshipman, and Nelson could not avoid comparing him to Josiah’s disadvantage. Hoste excelled at his work, loved it dearly and was grateful for every favour bestowed. No reverse seemed to crush his love of life, nor sour his inclination to see the best in those around him. ‘In his navigation you will find him equally forward,’ Nelson wrote to the boy’s father. ‘He highly deserves anything I can do to make him happy. Do not spoil him by giving him too much money. He has all that he wishes – sometimes more. I
love
him, therefore shall say no more on that subject.’
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