Nelson (21 page)

Whatever domestic considerations may have engaged Lieutenant Horatio Nelson in 1777, he was increasingly independent and self-assured, willing to express and act upon his opinions. Those qualities,
and a desire to commemorate his achievement, induced him to sit for his first portrait. He chose the artist John Francis Rigaud, a native of Turin of about thirty-five who had worked in Italy before coming to England in 1771. An associate of the Royal Academy, Rigaud was reputed to be a competent portrait painter though he also depicted historical scenes and tackled wall, staircase and ceiling work. Nelson probably sat to him in his studio in Great Titchfield Street. William Locker, his new captain, commissioned Rigaud to paint a group portrait of his family about this time, and may have recommended the artist to Nelson.

Because Captain William Locker later acquired the Rigaud portrait, biographers have assumed that it was he who actually commissioned it. There seems to have been no reason why Locker should have paid for a portrait of a lieutenant he hardly knew at the time, and the truth seems to have been that Nelson commissioned the likeness himself, through his prize agent and banker, William Paynter. Locker, who returned to England earlier than Nelson and spent more time in London, supervised its completion, and ultimately received it as a present from his young friend.

The portrait was still unfinished when Nelson left for sea. Upon his return four years later, damaged by fresh onslaughts of disease, he admitted that it would no longer ‘be the least like’ him. He authorised Locker to tell the artist to ‘add beauty’ to it, and even managed a fresh sitting. As it has come down to us, then, Rigaud’s portrait reflects the twenty-two-year-old captain of 1781 rather than the fresh lieutenant of 1777. But an X-ray of the painting, made a few years ago, peers into the original we have lost – a chubby-faced Nelson in a pigtail and lieutenant’s uniform, a hat under his arm, standing proudly at the beginning of his career as a commissioned officer of the king.
¹⁷

Nelson joined the
Lowestoffe
at Sheerness. She was a thirty-two-gun frigate, launched in 1761, and ideal for prize-taking out of Jamaica. The possibility of action seemed good. Ever since the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 the quarrel between Britain and her American colonies had been growing. As far as the crown was concerned it was a matter of suppressing a treasonable trade that had developed between the colonies and the French West Indies during the war, a trade that
contravened the navigation laws; of compelling the colonies to make a contribution to the cost of their own defence; and of enforcing what the king regarded as his prerogative to impose colonial taxes and duties.

But many Americans thought differently. They said the navigation laws, which regulated trade between the mother country and its possessions, were restrictive, and the standing army the British had stationed on the western frontier a potential threat to the liberties of the people. More particularly, they insisted that the colonial assemblies had the right to confirm or veto all taxes, a privilege that enabled the people to arrest any tyrannical tendencies of government. As the quarrel intensified both sides lost the will to compromise, and fighting broke out in 1775. The bloodiest battle of the revolutionary war was fought at Bunker Hill outside Boston, and on 2 July 1776 the Continental Congress approved a resolution that the ‘United Colonies’ ought to be ‘free and independent’. Two days later the birth of the United States of America was officially proclaimed.

Everywhere in Britain and America people were divided about the war. In America many stood neutral, and rather fewer remained loyal to the crown, although perhaps half supported independence. In Britain there were Whigs who saw the colonial struggle as a reflection of their own concern for the traditional rights of the people – those much-vaunted liberties Englishmen professed to enjoy as subjects of a monarchy whose powers were checked by the rights of Parliament. Others complained about the expense of yet another conflict so soon after the last, and groaned under an oppressive tax burden. And for some, including Horatio Nelson, this battle between English-speaking peoples seemed a little unnatural. Peace might have settled uncomfortably upon Europe for the time being, but for most Englishmen France was the traditional enemy.

Still, the war had begun and action was certain. The American navy was small, and Britain commanded the coasts as well as the cities of New York and Philadelphia. As Lieutenant Nelson prepared to cross the Atlantic, he expected no large naval battles to greet him, but there would be prizes for the taking. American merchantmen were fair game, and the West Indian waters teemed with enemy privateers. In those days the value of such captures, once condemned as legitimate seizures in the vice-admiralty courts, was distributed among the captors as incentives to duty, and Nelson, no less than every other naval officer, looked forward to supplementing his modest salary through prize money.

Locker was under orders to bring his company up to 220 men before proceeding to the Nore, but manning remained a problem, partly because thirty men went down sick before sailing. As his first lieutenant was on leave Captain Locker ordered Nelson to lead a party to a ‘rendezvous’ near the Tower of London to get more men. A rendezvous was a recruiting station, usually a tavern, where volunteers were enlisted and press gangs were based under the supervision of a regulating captain. From this particular rendezvous, gangs sallied out to round up sailors about Tower Hill.

With Nelson went another officer, a young Londoner named Joseph Bromwich. Born in about 1754, Bromwich was older than Nelson but little if any ‘interest’ smoothed his path. He had volunteered to join the
Lowestoffe
as an able seaman in March 1777, but Captain Locker had been impressed and re-rated him midshipman on 8 May. Though inferior in rank to Nelson, Bromwich’s extra years were reassuring to Nelson on what was perhaps his first outing at the head of an impress party. It was fortunate that Bromwich was there. Nelson was still suffering from the after-effects of the illness that had brought him from the East Indies, and was troubled by severe pains in the chest and occasional febrile onslaughts that left him weak and drained. One cold night, while searching for recruits about the Tower, his legs gave way and Bromwich carried him back to the rendezvous on his back.
¹⁸

Nelson’s health, in fact, was now seriously fractured, and a major impediment to someone with his prodigious capacity for work. In that sense Jamaica was not, perhaps, the place to go. The most important of Britain’s possessions in the West Indies, and for more than a century the command centre of her imperial ambitions in that region, Jamaica was aesthetically impressive. Kingston, on the south shore of the island, flourished as a focus for commerce, its large, sheltered harbour hidden from outsiders by a firm spit of land that stretched several miles westwards and terminated in the fortified town of Port Royal, once the haunt of legendary privateers and buccaneers. Yet despite the undeniable beauty of the island, where shining strips of white sand separated green forests from turquoise seas, there was an uncomfortable chill to the sunlight. Within, the prosperous sugar plantations were maintained by slave labour, and forever threatened by rebellion; and without, beyond the blue horizons bastions of Britain’s imperial rivals, Spain and France, could be found in all directions. Every European war made Jamaica a target. More lethal still, and apposite to Nelson’s
physical condition, the area was pestilential. Diseases such as yellow fever and malaria could sweep the unacclimatised with fierce, uncontrollable power.

Nelson knew Jamaica and knew what it could do. Sobering the natural optimism of youth and his hunger for adventure and action were dark fears for what it held in store for his weakened body. His chest pained him on the outward voyage, surviving the attentions of John Cunningham, the ship’s surgeon, and Joshua Doberry, the servant to which his new rank entitled him. There was a naval cemetery near Port Royal named Green Bay, and during his years on the island Horace would come to regard it as a ravenous beast, waiting with open jaws to devour him.

The
Lowestoffe
got into Spithead with no greater loss than a yawl, submerged in a heavy squall outside Margate as it was being towed behind. Accompanied by the
Grasshopper
sloop under William Truscott, she sailed again on 16 May 1777, heading into the setting sun with a bevy of merchantmen. Locker was ordered to load wine and other necessities at Madeira, before continuing to Barbados and the Leeward Islands.
¹⁹

The Atlantic crossing was mundane. Occasionally the escorts had to lay to or fire guns to keep the merchant ships together, and Lieutenant Nelson carefully entered these and other daily aggravations in his log. ‘At 4 PM [26 June] committed the body of the deceased [Edward Clark, a seaman] to the deep,’ he wrote. ‘At 1/2 past 5 the
Betsey
hailed us and informed us of some of her people being mutinous. Immediately hove to, hoist[ed] the boat out and sent her on board. At 7 the boat returned with 2 men, having left one [of our own] in their room.’ A seaman and a marine of the
Lowestoffe
were also lost overboard during the voyage. Surprisingly, in those days few sailors could swim, and by the time a frigate could be brought to and a boat lowered the chances of rescue were slim. Other than that, the seizure of a schooner on 1 July was the only relief from routine. She seemed to be American property, so Locker brought her into Carlisle Bay, Barbados, two days later, but she established her innocence and had to be released. From Barbados the
Grasshopper
proceeded with part of the convoy to St Vincent, while the
Lowestoffe
pressed on with the rest to Port Royal by way of Antigua. Though the seas were ‘
infested by rebel privateers’ Captain Locker brought all his charges safely to their destination on 19 July.
²⁰

During the voyage Nelson occupied a frugal larboard (left-hand side) cabin on the lower deck between the surgeon and purser, across from the quarters of the first lieutenant and master on the starboard side. But his warmest relationship was with the men who occupied the grander cabin on the deck above, a friendship unusual in its closeness and durability. It developed between a middle-aged man and a youth twenty-seven years his junior, who was barely a man. Nelson liked most of his captains, but Locker was special: he became his best friend and professional confidant, always there as if he had been close blood kin, and always strong.

Nelson’s biographers have noticed the friendship without ever explaining it. The captain’s increasing reliance on a green eighteen-year-old when a senior lieutenant shipped aboard seems to have struck no one as unusual, nor has any previous attempt been made to identify the officers of the
Lowestoffe
. In fact the first lieutenant was Charles Sandys. Sandys was a commissioned officer of four years’ standing, but he was incompetent nonetheless and worse. He was a drunkard to boot. To a colleague who knew Sandys in later years he was ‘one of those vulgar, drunken dolts who bring discredit on the naval service’. As usual, Nelson was generous, but retrospectively admitted that Sandys had exhibited the same weakness aboard the
Lowestoffe
. ‘The little man, Sandys, is a good-natured laughing creature,’ he wrote to Locker in 1784, ‘but no more of an officer as a captain
than he was as a lieutenant
.’ The next year he added that ‘little Charles Sandys is
as usual – likes a cup of grog as well as ever
. . . What a pity he should have that failing. There is not a better heart in the world.’
²¹

The captain of a man-of-war bore the loneliness of command more keenly than most. Isolated on the ocean, his responsibilities were always heavy and sometimes awesome. It was he who was ultimately responsible for the discharge of the ship’s duty, and for the safe return of his vessel and her people to port. Faced with the exigencies of the service, even a good captain needed colleagues to share that burden. Sandys was Locker’s senior lieutenant, in age, rank and experience, but we can see why the captain considered him to be unreliable. Nelson, by comparison, was responsible, conscientious and eager, and like Locker he loved the profession. It was consequently to him, and the master Arthur Hill, that the captain learned to turn.

Nelson always reacted positively to praise and to those who trusted him. It lifted him, and intensified his effort. He had already acquired the habit of actively cultivating friendships with people he admired, and during the voyage innumerable conversations on the quarterdeck or at the captain’s dining table told Horace that William Locker was another kindred spirit.

Locker was born in February 1731, the second of nine children of John and Elizabeth Locker, parents not unlike Nelson’s own. John Locker, a clerk with the Leathersellers’ Company, was ‘highly esteemed in the literary world for his knowledge in polite literature and remarkable for his skill in the modern Greek language’. His wife was the daughter of a Norfolk parson, the rector of Wood Norton and Swanton. William Locker had been educated at the Merchant Taylors’ school, and joined the navy in 1746, enlisting as a captain’s servant at the age of fifteen under a relative, Captain Charles Wyndham. He served in both the West and the East Indies, and was a favourite of Edward Hawke, arguably the most distinguished admiral of the eighteenth century.
²²

When Nelson met Locker, the captain did not have the obvious appearance of a warrior. He was well read and knowledgeable like his father, and a hearty looking, round-faced man, his receding hair greying at the temples. The limp gave him away though, and often led social conversation to the story that always inspired Nelson the most. Back in 1756, during the Seven Years War, Hawke had appointed the young Locker lieutenant of the twenty-gun
Experiment
under Captain John Strachan. In June 1757 Strachan engaged a French privateer, the
Telemaque
, off Alicante. She had twenty-six guns and three times the men, but after a desperate struggle the British boarded and captured her, and Locker had never fully recovered from the splinter he received in a leg that day.