Nelson (117 page)

It was a testing mission now that Franco-Spanish fleets controlled the Mediterranean, for it involved penetrating deep into an enemy sea and plucking an isolated garrison from a place of danger. Transports and about a dozen small warships would have to be shepherded back to Gibraltar without any help from the main British fleet, and no ships of the line could be spared for the expedition, which must depend upon fast and elusive frigates. Weighing these and other considerations, Jervis did not take long to decide who would command. On 10 December, Commodore Nelson was ordered to transfer his broad pendant to
La Minerve
and sail for Elba.

He left five days later on the voyage interrupted by the seesaw battle off the coast of Spain, when he defeated three enemy frigates in the dead of night, only to lose his prizes and a prize crew to Spanish reinforcements the following day.
⁸⁶

Otherwise his return to Elba went smoothly, and he captured a French privateer off Sardinia as he went, the
Maria
ketch of six guns and sixty-eight men. Nelson and Cockburn reached Porto Ferraio the day after Christmas, just in time to join Fremantle in escorting the pretty Wynne sisters to a theatre which Lieutenant General De Burgh had done out for a grand seasonal ball. The commodore’s entrance was greeted with strains of ‘Rule Britannia!’ and ‘See the Conquering Hero’. Here Nelson was a star and he loved it. In the heady atmosphere three hundred people danced until three in the morning.

The Wynne girls were engaging company, and Nelson, Cockburn and Fremantle were with them again the next evening. Eugenia invariably found the sailors ‘kind and good humoured’, though Betsy thought Nelson ‘very civil and good natured’ but too quiet for her taste. As for the commodore, it was Elliot more than anyone else he wanted to see. ‘I long to see you,’ Nelson once wrote to him, ‘for your advice is a treasure.’ But Sir Gilbert was in Naples. Nelson contemplated following him there, and renewing his acquaintance with the Hamiltons, to whom he had written of his latest exploits the day after the ball, but finally settled for sending Fremantle of the
Inconstant
to collect the ex-viceroy.
⁸⁷

In Elliot’s absence Nelson called in ships and stores for removal but suddenly ran into unexpected resistance in the person of Lieutenant General De Burgh. The general protested that he simply had no orders to evacuate his five thousand-man garrison. His last instructions from the Duke of York, the army commander-in-chief, were admittedly obsolete but required him to remain in Corsica or its dependencies as long as possible, and to refer to the viceroy for further authority. These orders had been overtaken by the relinquishment of Corsica, but De Burgh believed that he was still acting within their spirit at Porto Ferraio. Those orders had never been superseded in writing, and he was uncomfortable tearing them up.

Nelson tried in vain to move him. He convinced De Burgh that there was no point in holding Elba. Now that Naples had made peace with the French, the priority was to defend Portugal, Britain’s most vulnerable remaining ally, and to cover the approaches to England from the Franco-Spanish fleet. Nelson also pointed out that whatever
orders the army did or did not have, his own were perfectly clear, and the naval stores and ordnance would be returned to Gibraltar. If the general refused to leave, Nelson would have to put a few ships at his service, but no more than a couple of frigates and a few sloops. To evacuate Elba now would be dangerous, but to wait longer and risk the enemy fleet putting to sea would be to invite disaster.

Everyone knew General De Burgh to be a gallant gentleman, but he was notoriously ‘diffident and doubtful’, and procrastinated accordingly. Sometimes he edged towards withdrawing the garrison and urging the French to reciprocate by releasing Leghorn; at other times he fussed about the lack of written orders and hesitated to move at all. Nelson had few documents to ease his plight, and none from the army. Jervis’s letter merely referred him to Nelson for details of his ‘plan of carrying into execution the last orders I have received touching the troops under your command’, and contained no enclosures. Nelson showed the general copies of Jervis’s orders from the Admiralty and the secretary for war’s instructions for the redistribution of the troops at Gibraltar, but failed to satisfy him. De Burgh asked Nelson to write a letter that might justify evacuation, but finally opted to wait for Sir Gilbert to come from Italy to tell him what to do. Nelson was frustrated by De Burgh’s weakness, and suspected that on this issue Elliot would be of little help. On New Year’s Day the former viceroy had written from Rome, urging Nelson not to evacuate Porto Ferraio without unequivocal orders to do so. He still dreamed that the Italian states might stand against the French, and was rattling off letters to his old superior, the Duke of Portland, advising him to keep a toehold on Elba.
⁸⁸

On 21 January 1797 Elliot arrived at Porto Ferraio and brought matters to a head. In an earnest conference he declined to authorise the evacuation himself, rightly explaining that his position as viceroy had terminated with the withdrawal from Corsica. However, he told De Burgh that if the army commander-in-chief had wanted him to leave Elba, he would surely have said so. What little confidence Nelson had put in the general now evaporated. Though he agreed that the Elba garrison no longer served a purpose, he wrote to Portland that without ‘discretionary powers, I can only act from such orders as I have received’. He would wait for further instructions. Elliot happily pronounced the decision ‘prudent and proper’.
⁸⁹

This ‘unfortunate want of unison and punctuality’, as Jervis called it, was a farce, but Nelson was powerless to do more. Frustrated
though he was, he continued to laud De Burgh in his reports to the Admiralty, and quietly got on with the rest of his job. Conferring with the agent of transports, Lieutenant William Day, he worked out how many ships and stores he would have to leave behind to provide De Burgh with basic services and protection. Fremantle, who had finally married Miss Betsy in Naples, agreed to remain in charge of a skeleton naval force, despite the dangers of being ‘caught in a net’. Everyone and everything else would be evacuated as planned.
⁹⁰

The work was not entirely onerous, for interspersed with the aggravations were days to remember in the sunset of British rule: convivial evenings, on board
La Minerve
or ashore at the house taken by the Fremantles, with Betsy singing to her own accompaniment on the harpsichord; public dinners organised by the amiable if recalcitrant general. ‘If you and Captain Cockburne [sic] come on shore at dinner time tomorrow,’ De Burgh wrote to Nelson, ‘you will meet some of the emigrant demoiselles at dinner, and some of the prettiest of them.’ Wine, women and sun warmed Nelson’s last days in Elba.
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One of Nelson’s regular duties as senior sea officer at Porto Ferraio reminded him of long-gone days in the West Indies. He presided over courts martial. He was used to being sucked into courts martial every time he joined the fleet, of course, and during the summer and autumn had been involved in several in or about St Fiorenzo. One, for example, concerned John Clark, boatswain of the
Tartar
, who was tried on the
Princess Royal
for contempt of authority. Linzee presided, but it was Nelson who was delegated to oversee the one hundred and fifty lashes Clark received through the fleet on 24 June. The following December, Nelson sat on another series of trials at Gibraltar, including those of a master’s mate and a surgeon’s mate charged with theft and drunkenness, and of a seaman hauled up for assault. Saddest of all, from Nelson’s point of view, was the case of Edward Tyrrell, the commander of
L’Eclair
. His record already marred by illness and incompetence, he was now dismissed his ship for selling the king’s stores.
⁹²

On those occasions Nelson had been a junior member of courts controlled by Waldegrave, Thompson or Linzee, but at Porto Ferraio it was different. He commanded, sitting by the authority of Sir John Jervis as the chief justice on a bench. Four or more captains would form his court, and his secretary, Mr Castang, supported him as deputy
judge advocate, but it was Nelson more than any other who held the fates of the unhappy men paraded before him in his hands.
⁹³

He had headed courts martial before in Antigua, and now, as then, he tried to be fair within the conventions of the service. In the case of Lieutenant Robert Pigot of
L’Utile
, heard on board the
Romulus
on 23 January, Nelson used the inexperience of the accused to reduce his sentence. Pigot had foolishly cast off a hawser thrown him from the
Southampton
and made flippant remarks to her captain, and he was dismissed from his ship but not the service. Three days later, when three deserters from the
Inconstant
were sentenced on the
Romulus
to be flogged around the fleet, Nelson gave one of the defendants, Richard Wright, fifty strokes’ remission on account of his former good behaviour.

Two ships gave Nelson particular problems, the
Speedy
sloop and the
Dromedary
store ship. John Hoyles, a boatswain of Captain Elphinstone’s
Speedy
, had been drunk and refused to go below when ordered. In the process he had struck a petty officer, declared he would be ‘ruled by no bugger of a master’s mate’, and disobeyed a lieutenant. Nelson wanted to be sure that Hoyles had been in a fit condition to recognise the officers concerned, and although the defendant was convicted of contempt a charge of mutiny was dropped. The sailor was demoted to foretopman.

John Hall and John Maloney of the
Speedy
also appeared before the court. Maloney, tried with Hoyles on board
La Minerve
on 30 December, was the least fortunate. A recidivist deserter, he had offended on three previous occasions, once or twice by stealing a launch. The latest flight had taken place in Naples in November, when he had also made off with a boat, but the court explored every conceivable innocent explanation of Maloney’s behaviour. To satisfy himself that the prisoner had truly intended to desert, for example, Nelson enquired whether he had run off with spare clothes. But there was no way out, and Maloney was sentenced to hang from the foreyard arm.

By far the most exhausting proceedings involved the store ship
Dromedary
, a ‘rotten’ ship rife with insubordination, incompetence and corruption. It took four separate hearings between 28 December and 6 January to put the vessel to rights, and no fewer than five officers were convicted – a boatswain, midshipman, the master George Casey, Lieutenant Nicholas Meager and the captain himself, Thomas Harrison. Harrison’s case came first. It became obvious that his ship was a mess and the stores entrusted to his care kept in a poor state.
Requests for them to be issued were sometimes ignored or evaded, the officers inattentive and the captain apt to crawl drunk into his cot. Nelson had few sympathies for inebriated officers, and listened impatiently to Harrison blathering about rheumatism and pains in the head and eyes, probably alcohol-induced migraines. The captain was dismissed the service.

On 3 January it was the turn of the master, Casey, arraigned on charges of insubordination lodged by Lieutenant Meager. Nelson may have had difficulty keeping a straight face during a hearing that verged on the comical. Casey and Meager were at odds, and one night the master had refused to extinguish the light in his cabin while the lieutenant’s own remained lit. There was a childish tussle at the master’s door, with Meager trying to shove it open to get in to douse the offending light, and Casey as fiercely trying to keep it closed. The court judged that the allegations had been proven ‘in part’, and passed what it deemed to be a light sentence, dismissing Casey from the king’s service. But there was a ridiculous sequel. In retaliation, the dishonoured master immediately indicted Lieutenant Meager for assault, resurrecting an older scuffle of the previous June. Nelson and his captains heard of a scene on the quarterdeck of the
Dromedary
in which the lieutenant had spat in the face of Casey’s wife, supposedly because she had been giving him bad language. When the master intervened on his wife’s behalf, Meager seized him ‘by the nose and pulled it with all his strength’. Even the discredited Captain Harrison appeared before the court to testify that his lieutenant could be ‘obstinate and ill tempered’, but the prosecution was judged to have been a spiteful one, motivated by revenge, and Meager got away with a reprimand.

If Nelson thought the business of the
Dromedary
had finally been discharged with the case against Meager he was mistaken. When a new acting captain, Bartholomew James, took charge of the ship he discovered that casks of pitch and tar and coils of rope had been smuggled into boats during the dark and windy nights before Christmas, and carried to the
Zephyr
transport. A midshipman and boatswain of the store ship were convicted of embezzlement. The former lost sea time and forfeited pay, and the latter was reduced to the ranks. The master of the
Zephyr
admitted receiving stolen goods, but pleaded for clemency. He was a young man, he said, afraid to incriminate other officers, and besides, he had a large family . . . In all it had been a sad reminder that slack and dishonest leadership on a ship was infectious and undermined its authority, structure and rhythm.
⁹⁴

The ‘trials’ of Nelson, as a pioneer researcher has recently called them, again reveal him in a respectable light for his time and place. He probed intention, investigated alternative explanations, weighed mitigating circumstances and considered the previous records of defendants. Yet he, like other naval officers, believed strongly in punishing established transgressions and drawing clear boundaries between what was and was not acceptable behaviour. There were times when the lives and safety of a ship’s company depended upon every man discharging his duty without equivocation.