Nelson (126 page)

Jervis was also fretting about the Elba convoy. By blockading Cadiz he could keep the Spanish fleet off Fremantle’s back, but that still left the field open to the French in Toulon. On 12 April, only two days after entrusting Nelson with the inshore squadron, he therefore accepted his offer to re-enter the Mediterranean. Nelson was given the
Captain
,
Colossus
and
Leander
ships of the line and told to pick up the
Seahorse
,
Caroline
,
Southampton
and
Bonne Citoyenne
during his passage. Both admirals were genuinely concerned for the safety of the Elba convoy, but Nelson at least may also have seen its safe return as a necessary step towards Tenerife. His only reservation about making the trip was the possibility of missing a battle if the Spaniards in Cadiz tried to break the British blockade, but colleagues were sure that if there was going to be a fight Nelson would smell it. As Sutton of the
Egmont
wrote, Nelson had gone to Elba but if there was going to be an action ‘he will, according to his custom, cut in just as the Cadiz fleet is coming out!’
¹⁹

Leaving the commander-in-chief to reflect upon his proposal, Nelson made his second foray into a Mediterranean dominated by the enemy. A powerful French squadron was supposed to be lurking off the southern end of Minorca, and Nelson cleared his ships for action upon approaching the area on the 18th, but the sea was empty of hostile sails. The same wind that had swept Nelson eastwards had driven the
French off their station. The next day Sir Horatio’s squadron took a Spanish prize, and on the morning of 21 April they ran into Fremantle’s convoy near Corsica. Efficiency exemplified, Fremantle had brought everyone from Elba five days before, moving his seventy transports resolutely forward under the watching guns of the
Inconstant
and four or five other small warships. The captain and De Burgh were tremendously relieved to meet Nelson’s squadron. As for the admiral, he decided the convoy could not be in ‘better hands’ and left its management to Fremantle. Nelson dispatched news of the junction to Hamilton and Jervis, and concentrated on providing a shield for the transports.
²⁰

Betsy Fremantle thought Nelson ‘better now than ever I saw him’, but behind the tentative but winning smile that lightened his natural reserve the admiral was far from well. He hurt inside, apparently the result of his inflamed hernia, and was contemplating the possibility of going home sick. But he caught up with the Mediterranean news, concluded dolefully from the progress of Bonaparte that ‘there seems no prospect of stopping these extraordinary people’, and found time to praise where praise was due. This time his cause was the agent of transports, Lieutenant William Day, to whom he paid spontaneous and unsolicited tribute:

I . . . beg leave
again
to recommend Lieut. Day, agent for transports, to your notice [he told Jervis]. I placed my reliance on his judgement (not to leave a ship [at Elba in 1796] more than was necessary) and I am not deceived. A more zealous active officer, as agent for transports, I never met with. General De Burgh also speak[s] of him in the highest terms, and I hope the Transport Board will keep their promise of recommending those officers in their service [for promotion] who eminently distinguish themselves, which I take upon me to say Lieut. Day has not only done at Bastia but [also] at Porto Ferraio. For his conduct at the former place you was so good on my stating his services to recommend him to the Admiralty, [and] I should not do justice to His Majesty’s service was I not to urge it again.

The appeal was not made in vain, and through the instrumentality of Jervis, Day became a commander on 27 June following and ultimately a post-captain.
²¹

There was one Mediterranean acquaintance Nelson might have been expecting to meet at Porto Ferraio, but who now left his life forever: Signora Adelaide Correglia. A few months later Cockburn wrote to
express some regret that Sir Horatio had not, after all, reached Elba, ‘though not solely on account of Blue Skin, for [but] I should wish to have heard some news of your little Adelaide and all other Italian friends’. Adelaide, it is true, quit Nelson’s story almost as mysteriously as she had entered it.
²²

The previous October, Nelson had sent her a letter and a message via Brame in Genoa, leading her to believe that he would see her again. He was at Porto Ferraio in December and January, though as far as is known he had no contact with his mistress. Probably his payments to her had also finished, and the relationship had run its course. At least as far as Nelson was concerned, but Adelaide may have felt otherwise. In the spring she travelled to Porto Ferraio, where the British still held sway and some of Nelson’s agents had temporary homes, apparently looking for him. Nelson had gone, but she contacted Udny, who wrote to the admiral on 11 April: ‘Pray write me what you mean to do about your friend, whom I find has been here some time in distress,’ he said. ‘I return directly tonight to Florence, but have desired Mr John Udny junior to contrive [to] send her to her mother to Genoa, or to Leghorn, as I am setting out directly for Florence and cannot see her.’
²³

If Nelson received Udny’s letter, perhaps on his voyage through the Mediterranean, he may have anticipated settling the matter when he reached Porto Ferraio, but he never got there. He intercepted the displaced British community under Fremantle at sea. Thereafter the record of Adelaide’s affair with Nelson fell silent, and even friends such as Cockburn were left wondering what had happened to her. Probably Nelson never saw her again.

Did he send her money? Again, no one can say. James Ogle, Udny’s prize agent partner who planned visiting Leghorn later in the year, had written to Sir Horatio on 22 March, ‘Be so good as to inform me how much money you wish me to pay for you at Leghorn.’ On 21 July, Nelson also paid Udny for a bill due to one L. Fenzi. It is possible that either or both remarks may have related to Adelaide, but more probably they alluded to outstanding matters of prize or supply.
²⁴

More pressing concerns drew Nelson out of the Mediterranean. The Elba convoy, crowded with soldiers, civilians and stores, had to be taken to safety, and from the master of a Danish ship Nelson encountered on 27 April it appeared that the Spanish fleet had orders to quit Cadiz and fight the British. With another battle in the wind, Nelson
knew that Jervis needed every capital ship. Hurrying westward, he reached Gibraltar on 19 May. Only one ship in the convoy, loaded with two hundred men of Dillon’s regiment, went astray, and it later transpired that it had run upon a neutral shore, where it could be reclaimed. As for the others, some disembarked their passengers and cargoes at Gibraltar while others proceeded to Jervis’s fleet. Nelson ordered the
Andromache
to Malaga to rescue some American vessels trapped by French privateers – a gesture of goodwill to the United States – and was himself back off Cadiz on 24 May.
²⁵

Jervis was ready to meet the thirty-three Spanish ships of the line in Cadiz with only twenty-two, but the last battle had been so demoralising to the ‘Dons’ that even this advantage did not encourage their new commander-in-chief, the able and popular Teniente General Jose de Mazzaredo, to stir. In fact, though Nelson sailed into the fleet expecting action, an ambition no doubt amplified by his receipt of the gold medal for the previous victory, he found that enemies of a different kind were the talk of every table. These enemies came from within.
²⁶

For at home the Royal Navy was in turmoil. That April, with invasion forces still massing across the channel in the Texel, news began to spread across the country that chilled hearts everywhere. The Channel fleet, Albion’s shield against her greatest enemy, had mutinied.

At Spithead the men refused to put to sea. Instead, they manned the shrouds and cheered. Red flags were run up aboard the striking ships, and delegates were elected to represent the grievances of the seamen. There, and at Plymouth, the protest was both disciplined and restrained, though in due course the mutineers turned unpopular officers out of the ships. The seamen called attention to their beggarly pay, the inequitable division of prize money, poor victuals and deficiencies in the treatment of the sick and wounded. The government acceded to some of the men’s demands, and granted a general pardon, but disaffection, once sown, was difficult to contain. A more brutal and unfocused outbreak occurred at the Nore in May, and it spread to the fleet in the North Sea, where most of the ships refused to serve and put back to England.

Nelson had lost none of his notions of mutual obligation on the part of ruled and rulers, and readily understood the distinctions between the men at Spithead and the Nore. The former were fundamentally
loyal seamen protesting the failure of government to discharge its duties to them; the latter, in his view, were Jacobin poltroons. As he dared to enlighten an outraged Duke of Clarence, the Spithead ‘mutiny’ was, in his view, ‘the most manly thing I ever heard of, and does the British sailor infinite honour. It is extraordinary that there never was a regulation by authority in short weights and measures, and it reflects on all of us.’ Others received similar homilies. To Jervis’s flag captain Nelson deplored the way common seamen were sometimes issued inferior rations. ‘I take care as far as my power goes that no difference in the issue of provisions is made between the officers and men, which must ever breed discontent,’ he said. More pointedly Dixon Hoste learned, ‘I am entirely with the [Spithead] seamen in their first complaint. We are a neglected set, and when peace comes are shamefully treated. But for the Nore scoundrels, I should be happy to command a ship against them.’ He believed that troublemakers who drew simpler men into difficulties deserved to be hanged.
²⁷

Jervis was determined to take a strong line and stamped ferociously upon any sign of insubordination. Among the first threats to the equanimity of his fleet were the reinforcements from England, some contaminated with the spirit of revolt. One was the seventy-four-gun
Theseus
from Spithead. Her captain, John Aylmer, was frightened the crew would mutiny and take her into Cadiz, and only days before Nelson rejoined the fleet one of her lieutenants had been tried and acquitted of contempt to a superior. Jervis was not easily assured. As far as he was concerned the ship was ‘in a most deplorable state of licentiousness and disorder’, and good men were needed to put her to rights. Betsy Fremantle, who agreed, thought the crew of the
Theseus
‘the most tiresome, noisy, mutinous people in the world’.
²⁸

On 24 May, when Nelson reported to Jervis aboard the
Ville de Paris
, he was invited to exchange the
Captain
for the
Theseus
. In addition to resuming his command of the inshore squadron he would be expected to turn around a rotten ship, and he could take his own team with him to do it. Writing to Miller from the flagship, he requested his ‘store room’ to be transferred, along with ‘such officers as wish to go with me . . . mids Hoste and Bolton . . . and such men as come from
Agamemnon
if they like it.’ Even now he thought the old
Agamemnons
his best men.
²⁹

Forty-seven men, including Captain Miller and the six lieutenants of the
Captain
, shifted with their admiral. The lieutenants included two newly promoted acting officers, Weatherhead and Nisbet. They
found five midshipmen on the
Theseus
, all in their forties and incapable of passing the lieutenants’ examination. From the
Captain
Nelson was therefore lucky to bring seven midshipmen or master’s mates, as well as two surgical staff (Thomas Eshelby and Louis Remonier), a secretary (Castang), a clerk and a schoolmaster. In addition twenty-nine forecastle ratings followed Nelson, some of whom – Cook, Shillingford and William Fearney – were promoted to midshipman, and Sykes to coxswain. The
Theseus
had a complement of six hundred men but all her key posts were put in the hands of proven followers. Furthermore, twenty-eight of the men who transferred were ex-
Agamemnons
, and Nelson’s young guard was almost intact.
³⁰

With a cadre of reliable men about him, Nelson began reforming the wayward ship. Soon after taking charge an inspection revealed that despite her reputation the
Theseus
was in respectable shape. The company was fairly healthy, and used to breakfasting on gruel sweetened with molasses and Monday dinners enriched with peas. No one complained about the food. The ship itself also appeared in a reasonable condition, though Sir Horatio found ropes worn and the shot lockers deficient. But there were lingering signs of discontent. Captain Thomas Oldfield’s marines were ‘a most excellent’ body of men, but among the sailors Nelson noticed some ‘very indifferent boys and Dublin men’.
³¹

Hoste also believed that the ship was what Sir Horatio might have called reclaimable. In his opinion nothing more than a battle was needed to give ‘our brave admiral . . . an opportunity of initiating the
Theseus
crew into his fighting rules, so strictly observed by him in the
Agamemnon
and
Captain
. They are a fine set of men, but have not been in action since they have been in commission.’ In the event, the officers rehabilitated the ship without action. On 17 June, Miller read the crew a new act of Parliament promising improved pay and provisions, and to appeasement he added a new regime. Aylmer’s stewardship had been harsh, and Miller reduced the number of floggings while maintaining a firm control.
³²

One night a crudely written note was dropped on the quarterdeck of the
Theseus
. ‘Long live Sir Robert Calder,’ it read. ‘Success attend Admiral Nelson. God bless Captain Miller. We thank the admiral for the officers he has placed over us. We are happy and comfortable, and will shed every drop of our blood in fighting the enemies of our country and in supporting the admiral. The Ship’s Company.’ Once again, with the powerful aid of Captain Miller, Nelson was weaving his magic.
³³