Nelson (18 page)

Horace probably didn’t like Henery. He was a foolish, blustering fellow, always threatening to have people flogged around the fleet for trivial offences that no court martial would ever have taken seriously. In particular he enjoyed baiting the ‘young gentlemen’. Some or all of the midshipmen were quartered in the gun room in the bowels of the ship, and shared Gunner Middleton’s distaste for the lieutenant. Apparently Henery suspected that both were plotting his downfall, and declared the midshipmen ‘a parcel of puppies, and he would send one half of them [to be flogged] round the fleet, and not two Captain Farmers should save them’.

But with Henery suspended, and Surridge and Abson again sharing watches, life on the
Seahorse
improved for the midshipmen. The ship itself, enduring the longest voyage Nelson had made so far, was no less in need of attention. The tropics were hard on wooden sailing ships, and encrusted worm-ravaged hulls, rotting masts, frayed weathered ropes, rat-gnawed casks and canvas, stinking beer, vermin-ridden bread and men drained by debilitating climes were all too evident to Commodore Hughes. Now, in his second year on the station, he also knew the great monsoon was on its way and ships and crews needed to be in shape. After taking a detachment of East India Company soldiers to Pandarty road, Farmer accordingly found himself under the command of Captain Benjamin Marlow of the
Coventry
. On 14 October the two ships were ordered to Trincomalee on the eastern coast of Ceylon for wood, water and supplies. They were then to rejoin Hughes on the
Malabar coast, preparatory to wintering in Bombay and going into dry dock.

Nelson got his first sight of Trincomalee as the
Seahorse
was towed into harbour on 22 October. Farmer welcomed the Dutch governor aboard, and amidst compliments and clinking wineglasses secured permission for a wood detail to camp ashore and cut timber. Two petty officers led the shore party and threw up a tent as a base. The job was done, but four of the detail deserted and a marine was drowned during the boat journeys to and from the ship.

On some of the nine days the two ships stayed at Trincomalee, Horatio Nelson also went ashore, enjoying a brief period of leisure with his friends. At the behest of the ever mindful Surridge, Farmer restored the youth to his former rank of midshipman on 31 October and he was again freely fraternising with other petty officers of the quarterdeck. In later life Nelson recalled that at the age of seventeen he was induced to play at a gaming table and actually won £300, which in those days was a large sum of money for a naval petty officer. However, he suddenly realised that, had he lost rather than won such an amount, he could never have paid the debt. It was a sobering thought. Horace had been brought up to pay his way and vowed he would never gamble again. The story may have grown in the telling but probably referred to some incident that occurred in Madras, Trincomalee or Bombay.
²⁰

Reprovisioning complete, Marlow led the two ships to the Malabar coast in November and found Commodore Hughes at Anjenga. The
Seahorse
was then sent north, taking one convoy from Tellicherry to Goa and picking up another there for Bombay, where Hughes was concentrating his squadron for the winter. The finer days of these final voyages of the year may have given Midshipman Nelson his first opportunity to tack a ship, as if he was a master or lieutenant. Surridge had found the boy obedient and conscientious, ever eager to learn and serve, and no doubt prevailed upon the senior officers occasionally to allow him to tack the
Seahorse
. Tacking was a particularly tricky method of changing a ship’s direction by turning its bow through the wind, but Horace performed the task with efficiency and authority, while Surridge stood by approvingly, knowing he had turned this boy into a capable sea officer.
²¹

The
Seahorse
eventually arrived at Bombay on 19 December and remained for several months. On 19 February Nelson witnessed a formidable ritual aboard the ship. The captains of the squadron were
piped aboard and swallowed by Farmer’s cabin. While red-coated marines stood sentinel outside the door, inside Commodore Hughes presided over a court consisting of Marlow of the
Coventry
, Walters of the
Salisbury
, John Clerke of the
Dolphin
and James Pigott of the
Swallow
. Lieutenant Henery was marched in, surrendered his sword and seated himself to listen to a succession of witnesses to charges of drunkenness, disobedience, profaning the sabbath and tyrannical conduct. There was enough to show that the accused had neither judgement nor popularity, but the court did not feel he merited a conviction. Surridge and Abson both cleared Henery of malpractice.

Henery was more of a fool than a rogue. He damned and threatened freely. Lodington was menaced with four hours at the masthead, a common punishment for erring midshipmen, and young Troubridge was driven from the carpenter’s store room with the threat that he would be flogged around the fleet for leaving the deck without permission. The carpenter’s servant, though innocent of any wrongdoing, also endured a tirade, in which Henery threatened to flog him because his master had planned to take him ashore without asking the permission of an officer. Henery particularly picked on Midshipman William Sullivan, subjecting him not only to the usual threats about flogging through the fleet, but to habitual name-calling, such as ‘Coolie’ and ‘Puppy’.

Henery’s inability to sympathise with the ‘young gentlemen’ was recollected by one of them, Master’s Mate Joseph Keeling, then about twenty-one years old:

I was going on board the
Salisbury
once to answer a signal, and one of the boat’s crew was very insolent to me and refused to row. On my coming on board I acquainted the lieutenant of it, and he told me I certainly must have made too free with the men or else they never would have used you so, and told me to go away. I recollect another time between decks two men were fighting. I went to part them, and one of them struck me. I immediately went aft and made a complaint to the lieutenant, who gave me no satisfaction at all.
²²

It was this acerbic, unhelpful personality, rather than serious misconduct, that seemed to have rebounded upon Henery. George Middleton, the gunner, brooded over what he considered to be an unjustified rebuke during the firing of a salute. The lieutenant complained that the powder was being brought up from the magazine too slowly. ‘God
bless me, sir,’ puffed the hapless gunner. ‘I make what haste ever I can.’ ‘God damn me, sir,’ replied Henery, ‘make more haste, or else I’ll haste you elsewhere!’

Whether the lieutenant’s bluster turned into actual physical abuse was another matter. It was said that Henery had ordered excessive floggings in November 1774, when the ship was at Kedgeree and the captain absent in nearby Calcutta. One marine was reported to have been flogged, and his regimental clothes, fiddle and sea chest thrown overboard. And the lieutenant was supposed to have regularly employed a rattan ‘to forward the people to their duty’. But neither this, nor some testimony relating to intoxication, weighed sufficiently with the court, hence his acquittal.

A sensible man would have treasured the reprieve, internalised its lessons and set about rehabilitating his reputation, but Henery was consumed with resentment. He racked his brains to find mud to fling at Farmer, furious that the captain had allowed the complaint to go forward. Thus, two days after Henery’s court martial, Hughes and his officers reassembled on the
Seahorse
to consider charges the first lieutenant had proffered against his own captain.

They were flimsy indeed, but Henery hit the bull’s-eye when he accused Farmer of keeping his son and a slave boy on the books when neither was present. This sin was of a type so widely practised in the navy that most officers turned a blind eye towards it. Many, if not most, had committed such frauds themselves, or at least benefited from them. The purser, Alexander Ligerwood, and Surridge were placed in the embarrassing position of owning that they had authenticated false books, but the captain’s guilt was felt worthy of no more than a mild reprimand.

Henery’s other attack drew attention to indigo, piece-goods and bales of cloth that Farmer had taken aboard at Surat and Anjenga. The implication was that the captain was making money out of illicit freight, but it collapsed when Commodore Hughes revealed that the goods had been embarked upon his, not Farmer’s, orders. Without too much trouble the court dismissed the charges as ‘dictated by a spirit of malice and litigiousness’ and honourably acquitted the defendant.
²³

The sight of a captain and first lieutenant exchanging courts martial was an uncommon one, and Horace may have pondered its lessons in leadership. In some mysterious way the captain had failed to meld his senior officers into a team and suffered the consequences. Though his record had been exonerated, the bad blood aboard the
Seahorse
raised questions about his powers of command. As for Henery, he can only have been an object of derision among the ‘young gentlemen’. He had acted badly and compounded his errors by a misguided prosecution of his captain. Juniors who turned upon superiors without good cause seldom did themselves a favour. In this case Thomas Henery survived to become a commander the following year – probably because in the East Indies there were few alternatives to fill available posts – but it is doubtful that his early death deprived the navy of an outstanding officer.

Had Horace remained in the East Indies it is likely that promotion would have been a speedy prospect for him too, for he had acquired all the basic skills of handling and navigating ships, and boasted a good mind and a thorough devotion to his profession. On paper at least he was near qualifying for lieutenant. He was approaching his eighteenth birthday, but the ship’s books had advanced his years by three and now had him over twenty, the official minimum age for a lieutenant’s commission. Moreover, he was close to completing the six years of sea service that were also needed, and there was little doubt about his ability to pass the obligatory oral examination. The tantalising prize of a first commission from the king seemed to be just around the corner.

But then, about the time Henery and Farmer were locked in combat by court martial, he was struck down by a stealthier foe. It was almost certainly malaria.

In the autobiography Nelson wrote twenty-three years later he simply described it as a life-threatening illness, and Surridge remembered it as a disorder ‘which nearly baffled the power of medicine’. The midshipman was wasted, his frame reduced almost to the skeleton and for a while he lost the use of his limbs. For years after his eventual recovery he suffered recurrent febrile attacks. Little was known about malaria in Nelson’s day, except of course for its devastating onset. The work of Ross, Manson and Bignami, establishing the role of the female mosquito in human malaria, was still a hundred or more years away and the prevailing eighteenth-century opinion attributed the disease to insanitation and fetid air.
²⁴

Nelson’s enemy was most probably
Plasmodium vivax
, the commonest form of malaria in India. Though a ‘benign’ form and rarely deadly, if untreated it is prone to recur for several years and the acute attack can be extremely debilitating. The weakness of Nelson’s limbs may simply have reflected his emaciated condition, or been an indication of additional complications.

He was seen by the surgeon of the
Seahorse
, David Dalzell, and probably by others too. Captain Clerke of the
Dolphin
, Lieutenant Mather Fortescue of the
Coventry
and Marine Lieutenant Evan Evans of the
Seahorse
were also sick, and we know they were all examined by the surgeons of the naval hospital in Bombay as well as by doctors employed by the East India Company. Given the severity of Midshipman Nelson’s illness, it is to be presumed that he received no less attention.
²⁵

Commodore Hughes certainly gave the youth every consideration. On 14 March 1776 he discharged Nelson from the
Seahorse
. The
Dolphin
was bound for England. Though about the same age, armament and dimensions as the
Seahorse
, she was worn out by her eastern service. Even though she had been dry docked in Bombay and the bottom rendered more or less watertight, many of her timbers were much decayed. Captain James Pigott, who was switched to the
Dolphin
and ordered to take her home, subsequently reported that ‘in bad weather [the ship] complains much in her upper works, her sides and decks being very leaky, notwithstanding she has been twice caulked since she came out of Bombay Dock’. With the ship went some fourteen serious invalids, including Clerke, Fortescue, Evans and Nelson. A return to England was considered essential to their recovery.

Nevertheless, Nelson would lose neither sea time nor pay, for Hughes had him rated midshipman on the
Dolphin
from 15 March and thereby protected his employment until the ship was paid off in England. Horace always spoke of Hughes with gratitude, and no less affectionately did he remember Pigott, the newly promoted postcaptain who took him home. Pigott’s ‘kindness at that time saved my life’, he said.
²⁶

The
Dolphin
slipped from Bombay on 23 March, victualled for a six-month voyage. Her lieutenant was John Jervis, her master Richard Ogilvie and the surgeon and surgeon’s mate, who tended Horace in his sickness, were respectively Joseph Davis and Bernard Penrose. Of the three other midshipmen – Peter Templeman, Frederick Ross and William Scott – the last, a lad from Ashford, was officially of Nelson’s age. That Horace’s duties aboard the
Dolphin
were negligible or light is obvious, but over the six-month voyage his health improved, and when he got home he was fit enough to take an immediate position with another ship.

He must have missed the companions with whom he had shared the past two and a half years. He would meet Troubridge again and
the two would stand together in brilliant victories and a humiliating defeat.