Nelson (22 page)

Many years later, after Nelson’s victory at the Nile had turned him into an international hero, he wrote to his old captain recalling that story. ‘You, my old friend,’ he said, ‘after twenty-seven years’ acquaintance know that nothing can alter my attachment and gratitude to you. I have been your scholar. It is you who taught me to board a Frenchman, by your conduct when in the
Experiment
. It is you who always told [me] “Lay a Frenchman close, and you will beat him”, and my only merit in my profession is being a good scholar. Our friendship will never end but with my life.’ Imagine the feelings of the ageing officer, reading that tribute from the greatest admiral
of the time. But then Locker would have remembered that Nelson had rarely hidden his emotions. If he loved people, be they men or women, he had always said so. It was part of the magic that bound them to him.
²³

Whether Locker gave Nelson some of his first lessons in naval tactics must remain a matter of conjecture. In time Nelson unquestionably learned that ship for ship the Royal Navy had its Spanish and French adversaries beaten; the close-quarter tactics of his great battles reflected his confidence in the superiority of British seamanship and gunnery as well as his own fiery temperament. Although his marked prejudices against the French in particular sometimes led him to attribute the navy’s success to a fancied superiority of the Anglo-Saxon stock, his more thoughtful utterances betrayed greater understanding. Our knowledge of that process of education in Nelson is far from complete, but it seems to have started with William Locker.

Locker’s stories, for example, extended to Hawke’s great victory in Quiberon Bay in 1759, in which he had served aboard the
Sapphire
. Locker had later been a flag lieutenant to Hawke in the
Royal George
, and it is likely that some of the famous admiral’s precepts passed vicariously to Nelson through Locker. Hawke, whose coat of arms enshrined the motto ‘Strike’, had a genuine taste for battle Nelson would have appreciated. His emphasis on close-range action and readiness to depart from the written fighting instructions to achieve a result presaged Nelson’s career. As a captain, for instance, Hawke left the hallowed ‘line of battle’ formation to capture a Spanish capital ship in 1744. Later, raised to flag rank, he tried to marry the strength of the ‘line’ to the ‘general chase’, which allowed ships to break formation in order to pursue a flying enemy, a feature of his most famous victory over the French at Quiberon Bay.
²⁴

At the time Locker knew Nelson he probably talked even more about his young wife, Lucy (nineteen years the captain’s junior and the daughter of Admiral William Parry), and of the three sons and two daughters she had borne him. A William Parry among the captain’s servants on the
Lowestoffe
was probably a brother or nephew of Lucy Locker. The captain’s concern for his family increased soon after the ship’s arrival in Jamaica, because he suddenly fell ill and had to retire to rooms ashore. After his ship’s hull had been sheathed in copper in the dockyard she was ready to sail, but the captain remained incapacitated and it was Sandys who took the
Lowestoffe
for her first cruise on 8 August. Back in his bed Locker feared the worst
during black, lonely reveries, and worried about what would become of Lucy and her children. Searching for a colleague to handle his affairs and do his best for the family, he wrote to the eighteen-year-old stripling who was second lieutenant of his frigate. The reply, when it came, was full of the spontaneous but sincere generosity for which Nelson would become known:

Lowestoffe
, at sea, August 12th, 1777.

My most worthy friend,

I am exceedingly obliged to you for the good opinion you entertain of me, and will do my utmost that you may have no occasion to change it. I hope God Almighty will be pleased to spare your life, for your own sake, and that of your family, but should any thing happen to you (which I sincerely pray God may not) you may be assured that nothing shall be wanting on my part for the taking care of your effects, and delivering safe to Mrs Locker such of them as may be thought proper not to be disposed of. You mentioned the word ‘consolation’ in your letter. I shall have a very great one, when I think I have served faithfully the best of friends, and the most amiable of women.

All the services I can render to your family, you may be assured shall be done, and shall never end but with my life, and may God Almighty of his great goodness keep, bless, and preserve you and your family, is the most fervent prayer

Of your faithful servant,
Horatio Nelson

P.S. Though this letter is not couched in the best manner be assured it comes from one entirely devoted to your service. H.N.
²⁵

This letter, the outspoken testimony of a young man willing to accept the grimmer burdens of his friendship for an ageing captain looking into the abyss, illustrates the characteristics that had and would continue to endear him to a succession of superiors. Reading it we can understand why William Locker would fight for him through years of obscurity, and take pride in living to know that he had nurtured the country’s greatest national hero.

While Locker recovered in Jamaica, the
Lowestoffe
was out at the beginning of the hurricane season, looking for prizes. They chased
numerous sails but had no luck until eleven in the morning of 21 August when a strange vessel was seen in the northwest quarter. Sandys ordered a tender, the
Gayton
, commanded by a midshipman, to give chase and in four hours it returned with a Charleston sloop laden with rice. A crew of nine was put aboard the capture to sail it to Port Royal, where Locker’s prize agent, the Kingston merchant Hercules Ross, began the process of condemnation in the vice-admiralty court. Two more prizes were taken towards the middle of September. Between Cape Maisi in Cuba and Cape à Foux in French Haiti a ship they had pursued to windward turned out to be the Charleston sloop
Mary Angelic
, bound for St Nicolas Mole in Haiti with rice and timber. Two days later Sandys took the
Burford
, a North Carolinian schooner with a cargo of pitch, tar and other stores. It was with some self-congratulation, therefore, that the
Lowestoffe
returned to Port Royal on 30 September to report to her recuperating captain.
²⁶

Locker himself commanded when the frigate returned to her patrol on Guy Fawkes day. One of the prizes taken on the previous cruise had been fitted as a new tender, christened the
Little Lucy
in honour of Locker’s infant daughter, and sailed fifteen days earlier. Locker soon came up with her to discover that she had engaged an American privateer and lost three men killed and wounded. It was not long before the
Lowestoffe
herself was in action, perhaps with the same privateer. In 1799 Nelson boasted that the incident ‘presaged my character’ by demonstrating ‘that difficulties and dangers do but increase my desire of attempting them’. Accepting his account the public agreed, and the episode became another of Nelson’s canonical feats of courage, inspiring one of the stirring paintings by Richard Westall which were engraved and published after the admiral’s death.

At six in the morning of 20 November, when the
Lowestoffe
was haunting the Windward Passage off Cape Maisi, lookouts reported two sails to the northward. The frigate gave chase and after four hours brought one of the strangers to by firing a cannon and ten double-shotted swivel guns at her. She was the
Resolution
brig, an American privateer on her way from St Nicolas Mole to North Carolina, but she carried a mere eight guns, ten swivels and twenty men and made little resistance. Her consort, a schooner laden with powder for the American colonies, escaped, and it is possible that Master John Meredith of the
Resolution
diverted the British ship to allow her to get clear.

In the afternoon, as the prize was brought close by, a fierce storm
engulfed both ships, punishing them with rain, bruising gales and heavy seas. Locker ordered Sandys to board and secure the prize, but the first lieutenant flunked the job. Our sources conflict. Nelson’s own, written in 1799, said that the first lieutenant tried to reach the prize but was driven back by the furious waves, but Bromwich, who gave an account even later, maintained that Sandys never left the frigate, but merely went below to rummage for his hanger. Whatever the case, Captain Locker is said to have appeared on deck in consternation. ‘Have I no officer in the ship who can board the prize?’ he called.

The ship’s boat was being jostled alongside, but as the master stepped forward to board it young Nelson stopped him. ‘It is my turn now,’ he said according to his own story, ‘and if I [too] come back it is yours.’ In the meantime the privateer was shipping a great deal of water, and Bromwich said that after Nelson’s boat had ploughed through huge waves it was swept onto the deck of the prize and carried ‘out again with the scud’. Nevertheless, he got on board. The log of the
Lowestoffe
recorded that at seven in the evening Locker fired a swivel to signal the prize to come under his stern, but made no reference to Nelson’s exploit.

The weather remained so foul that the prize separated, and Locker feared her lost. On the 22nd he backed the topsails of his frigate to wait for her, and both vessels eventually made Port Royal on 24 November. Whatever the prize was worth, Locker and Nelson gained some valuable information from her. The Americans reported that the French at St Nicolas Mole were predicting that their country would soon enter the war in aid of the rebellious colonies, and that a fleet and thousands of soldiers would arrive via Cape François on the north coast of Haiti. Indeed, the French forts at St Nicolas Mole were already well garrisoned, and British ships had been ordered out of the harbour.
²⁷

The
Lowestoffe
’s next cruise, which began on 9 December, took her back through the Windward Passage to the northern coasts of Hispaniola and Cuba and the island-studded seas of the Bahamas. She returned to Port Royal on the last day of January 1778 without any prizes, but Lieutenant Nelson had gained in experience. On this occasion Locker had given him command of the
Little Lucy
. In his usual style, Horatio later bragged that ‘even a frigate was not sufficiently active for my mind’ so he pressed for the tender, in which ‘I made myself a complete pilot for all the passages through the islands situated on the north side of Hispaniola.’ This suggests that Locker took
the American intelligence seriously, and was on the watch for the French fleet as well as further prizes.

When the
Lowestoffe
returned to Jamaica, Nelson obtained Locker’s permission to cruise independently, and he made two voyages from Port Royal in the
Little Lucy
. During the first in February he took a prize off the island of West Caicos after a chase of eight hours, apparently the
Abigail
sloop of Boston, laden with molasses and dry goods. The second cruise occupied much of March and April. In the Bahama Straits on 25 March he captured the
Swan
sloop, master Daniel Smith, en route from St Nicolas Mole to Nantucket with molasses, but nothing else came his way before he returned to port on 19 April. If relatively unprofitable, these voyages were significant as the first that Nelson made as an independent commander.
²⁸

But his training with William Locker was reaching its end. They put to sea for their last cruise together on 5 May. For fifty days the
Lowestoffe
and
Little Lucy
searched for prizes, particularly two notorious privateers with the striking names of
Rattlesnake
and
Thunderbolt
. Locker worked industriously but with conspicuous bad luck, pursuing sails here and there only to discover them to be French, Spanish or British. On 10 May Nelson ran the
Little Lucy
alongside a longboat heading for Jamaica. It was filled with the crew of a British ship captured by an American privateer, but of the privateer itself there was nothing to be seen.

Another disappointment occurred near West Caicos. On the afternoon of 24 May two strange vessels were seen and chased in the southeast quarter. Shots were exchanged, but it was not until the next morning that the British came up with the fugitives. One of them was the
Inconstant
, a French frigate, and the other a schooner. Britain and France were at peace, but the French sympathised with the Americans, and Locker decided to examine the schooner in case it belonged to the rebel colonies. Accordingly Lieutenant Nelson advanced in the
Little Lucy
, but he was greeted by small-arms fire from the frigate and Locker signalled him back. Anticipating a fight, no doubt with relish, Nelson sent a boat to the
Lowestoffe
to know whether Locker wanted his men back on board but the captain kept calm. As he expected, the French decided that national honour had been satisfied. Unfortunately, to the chagrin of the British, when Sandys boarded the schooner he found it, too, was French.
²⁹

On 23 June the
Lowestoffe
was back at Port Royal. Nelson never sailed with Locker again but had learned much from him. Overall,
the captain had been an ideal commander, inherently gentle but professional and bold when necessary, and firm and just with his men. Twenty-four had been flogged aboard the frigate during the period Nelson was with her, some several times, but it was not a large number for a ship of its size. More significantly, small-scale as the exploits of the
Lowestoffe
were, they provided Nelson with his first real experience of war and command. His only previous action had been an isolated skirmish off India. It was in the West Indies that Nelson learned to cruise in a combat zone. Though there had been no serious fighting, chasing suspicious ships, taking prizes and gathering intelligence were very much the stock in trade of wartime frigate patrols. In the
Little Lucy
Nelson had also tasted the full responsibility of command, without any superior to guide him.