Nelson (26 page)

Nelson was flattered with a key command in the defences. Admiral Parker had all his ships except the
Hinchinbroke
and four sloops, and disposed them to command the approaches to Kingston. A boom was placed between Gun and Pekin Keys to divert attackers into the channel between Gun Key and Fort Charles, situated at Port Royal on a spit of land that curled around the harbour. A redoubtable seventeenth-century fortress dominating the harbour mouth with a hundred guns in double tiers, Fort Charles would be the focus of any battle for Kingston. Despite his youth, Nelson was put in charge of it with five hundred soldiers. Supporting him were the
Salisbury
,
Charon
,
Lion
and
Janus
, anchored about a cable’s length apart in a line across the harbour entrance, from the point at Port Royal to what was called the western middle ground. If the French overwhelmed them, the ships had instructions to fall back to the
Bristol
and
Ruby
in the narrows off Fort Augusta, which was also defended by a boom. Five more men-of-war, including the
Lowestoffe
, were stationed at various points of danger and four fire ships had been prepared.
¹⁹

Yet, for all this, Nelson could see the defences were flawed. There were simply not enough men. Jamaica had only two regiments of regulars, the 60th (Royal American) Regiment and the 79th (Liverpool Blues), of which only the first was acclimatised to the tropics. For the rest reliance had to be placed in a discontented militia consisting of a few whites, many blacks and a large number of mere conscripts. Furthermore, the entire 6,800 troops available were widely scattered to cover different points. Five thousand were ‘between the ferry and Kingston’, another thousand at Fort Augusta, five hundred at Fort Charles and three hundred at the Apostles Battery. The guns at Forts Charles and Augusta were principally served by privateersmen, who were to be summoned by an alarm system, but the other batteries were largely manned by untrained blacks drummed up from the plantations by Hercules Ross. It did not inspire Nelson with confidence. ‘I think you must not be surprised to hear of my learning to speak French,’ he told Locker dryly on 12 August.
²⁰

Seventeen days after Nelson’s pessimistic prediction, the
Punch
tender arrived with new intelligence. She had spoke a vessel that had been at Cape François only hours before, and learned that d’Estaing had sailed on 17 August with a hundred and twenty warships and transports and thousands of soldiers. The master of the
Punch
reconnoitred Cape François and St Nicolas Mole himself, and confirmed that the French fleet had gone, leaving nothing larger than a frigate behind. Wherever d’Estaing was heading it was obviously not Jamaica, and the imminence of the hurricane season seemed to preclude any later descent upon the island being made. Everyone breathed easily again, martial law was lifted and ships were allowed to come and go as before.
²¹

Nelson was proud of the confidence that had been placed in him and would boast that his was ‘the most important post in the whole island’, but the appearance of the
Hinchinbroke
soon restored him to his proper element. The first of September was a clear day. Captain Nelson went on board the frigate and solemnly listened while his commission was read to the assembled ship’s company. Then he prepared his new command for sea.

Again Nelson inherited the men, but this time he had a small band of followers – the first in his career – to accompany him. Among them
were the four captain’s servants (if we include the absent William Locker), Forster the surgeon, Frank Lepee and petty officers such as Cruger, Tyson and Thomas Gore.

The books of the
Hinchinbroke
also suggest that Nelson was not going to be above the minor financial abuses so commonly practised by captains of the day. His new frigate had a complement of two hundred men, twice that of the tiny
Badger
, and entitled him to another four captain’s servants, although he was in no better position to exploit the privilege. He filled three of the vacancies with seamen – William Fry, James Hatton and John Notes – and invented the fourth incumbent. ‘Horace Nelson’ never existed and was presumably borne on the books purely to earn the captain the full allowance paid for servants.
²²

Nelson encountered a few problems acquiring a stable team of officers for the
Hinchinbroke
. John Walker was master and Robert Huggins the purser, but during the eight months of his command Nelson had no fewer than three first lieutenants, one succeeding another. Notably, all three – Arthur St Leger, Charles Cunningham and George Harrison – were merely acting lieutenants still waiting to take their examinations. Of them Cunningham, whose scant, two-month stint began in November, may have been the ablest. Hailing from Eye in Suffolk, he was actually two years older than his captain and had experience of both the naval and merchant services. Harrison, who followed him, had been the second lieutenant of the
Hinchinbroke
, and Joseph Bullen, a former protégé of Captain Cornwallis, joined the ship to replace him as the junior commissioned officer on board. Bullen became one of the most steadfast of all Nelson’s followers. Born in April 1761, the son of the rector of Kennett in Cambridgeshire, he had gone to sea as a thirteen-year-old midshipman in Cornwallis’s
Pallas
, and followed his captain to four more ships before transferring to the
Hinchinbroke
.
²³

Bullen was the only one of Nelson’s lieutenants to hold a full commission, dated two years earlier. The use of so many unqualified officers reflected the shortages on the Jamaica station and the necessity for constant promotions, but hardly helped maintain good order aboard the ships. Nevertheless, Nelson did rather better on the
Hinchingbroke
than the
Badger
. He felt it necessary to flog nine of his men, but there were only ten desertions, one from the hospital in Port Royal.
²⁴

Nelson enjoyed reading his new orders, which dispatched him to join the
Niger
(Captain Robert Lambert) and the
Penelope
(Captain
James Jones) in patrolling the Lesser Antilles to the southeast. Here, close to the fabled main, there were opportunities to profit from the new war with Spain. Spanish wars had always been popular in the Royal Navy, because treasure was still shipped from the rich American mines to Spain and fortunes in prize money had occasionally fallen to fortunate officers. Nelson was by no means a slave to lucre, but he was a man of sorely measurable means with a career ahead, and far from blind to the advantages of money. The potentially rich pickings were probably at the forefront of his mind when he sailed from Port Royal on 5 October 1779.
²⁵

Improving the efficiency of his crew on the way, he reached the
Niger
and
Penelope
off the Dutch island of Curaçao on the 28th, and two days later experienced his first contested action as a commander. At about midnight of 30 October the squadron spotted four sails to the northeast and gave chase. One quickly surrendered, but the
Niger
and
Hitchinbroke
had difficulty with the second. About three-thirty, after exchanging broadsides with the
Niger
and resisting for an hour, she hauled down her colours. By daylight the other two fugitives had also been taken by the
Penelope
. They were American vessels, two fourteen-gun ships, the
Conference
and the
Rachel and Betsy
, and a brig and a snow, the
Penelope
and
Adrianne
, both unarmed, all four owned by Daniel Ross and Company, manned by a total of sixty-eight men, and bound for Curaçao with sugar and coffee. The Americans had been hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered, but they had fought gamely. Nelson’s frigate received several shot, her pinnace was broken and some of her rigging cut. But her captain was richer in more than experience. His promotion to post-captain had increased his share of prize money, and he estimated that the captures would net him £800.
²⁶

On 6 November the
Hinchinbroke
and the
Niger
also seized a sloop, but somewhere east of Jamaica Nelson separated from his consort. The end of the month found his frigate being punished by a powerful head sea. Her fore-topgallant yard, main topmast and main top were sheared away, with much standing and running rigging. The men cleared the wreckage and fashioned repairs, but Nelson put into Port Antonio for help. There he was asked to escort a merchantman to Port Royal, and gathering others along the way reached his destination on 12 December.

Back in harbour, the
Hinchinbroke
was refitted and reprovisioned, ten men were pressed to make good desertions and Horatio punctuated
the seasonal festivities with letters to his much-missed ‘sea-daddy’. Locker learned that his rum, stored on the
Lowestoffe
, was still safe, and that Nelson was sending him some shaddock fruits as a gift; in the meantime he received a chronicle of the ravages of life on the Jamaica station.
²⁷

‘Poor Hill’, the former master of the
Lowestoffe
, had died of a fever at Rattan, and ‘your old coxswain’ had perished in action. Sadder still, Horatio had just attended the funeral of one the most respected of their colleagues. ‘I am now going to tell you what you and many others will be very sorry to hear,’ he wrote. ‘The death of that worthy, good man, Captain Joseph Deane [of the
Ruby
]. He died on the 12th of January, and was buried next day at Green Bay amidst the tears of his officers and ship’s company and his many friends.’ Nelson, most likely, was among those friends overcome by emotion. He never hid affection from close comrades and was usually tearful at meetings and partings. He would always find deathbed scenes unbearable.

The end of Deane seems to have broken up the captains’ ‘mess’. Horatio, who shared lodgings with Cornwallis, was sure that he would soon be returning to England himself. He was ill again and his doctors were advising him to leave Jamaica. He even applied to the captain and first mate of the
Rover
, an American ship brought in as a prize, for a particular bottle of medicine. His ‘
old
complaint in my breast’ was to blame, he informed Locker. ‘It is turned out to be the gout there,’ and he had been twice ‘given over’ to ‘that cursed disorder’ in the past eight months. Gout was a diagnosis eighteenth-century physicians conveniently ascribed to almost any unidentifiable pain, but Nelson was probably actually experiencing recurrent attacks of the malaria he had contracted in the East Indies.
²⁸

Before going home, however, he anticipated performing one more service and Sir Peter was trying to find him a better ship. The admiral offered Nelson a Spanish prize he was converting into a thirty-six-gun frigate, but the captain opted to wait for a purpose-built warship to become available.

Just what that final service would be was rapidly becoming clear and providing the gossip for the island. Excitement and speculation were rife, but few, perhaps none, realised that what began as an adventure of dazzling imperial vision was to disintegrate into a hideous nightmare of broken dreams and death.

To him, as to the burning levin,
Short, bright, resistless course was given.
Where’er his Country’s foes were found
Was heard the fated thunder’s sound.
Till burst the bolt on yonder shore,
Rolled, blazed, destroy’d – and was no more.

Sir Walter Scott,
Marmion

M
AJOR
General John Dalling was almost fifty and had been a soldier for most of his life. He regaled listeners with colourful memories of the Jacobite rebellion and service in North America under Amherst and Wolfe, but he had also spent many years in Jamaica, where he rose from the humble command of Fort Charles to become governor and commander-in-chief of the island in 1777. Dalling was a man it was possible to underestimate. He suffered from an old war wound, cursed a stubborn gout and looked homely, plump and amiable. Entertaining in some style at the King’s House in Spanish Town, a few miles northwest of Kingston, he looked suitably tailored to a life of sedentary administration. But the truth was that Dalling had a vestigial thirst for military glory and was thoroughly fed up with Jamaica. He constantly feuded with the assembly, which was not only corrupt but eager to appropriate powers claimed by the royal governor. Now that Spain had entered the war, joining France and the American colonies, Dalling saw a way out – a means of winning that coveted military reputation with plunder and an honourable retirement to boot.

The immediate threat to Jamaica had passed, and in Dalling’s opinion it was time to go on the offensive. At home the colonial secretary, Lord George Germain, agreed. Spain was now a hostile power, a potential threat not only to Britain’s West Indian possessions but also to her forces struggling to subdue the rebellious colonies in North America. In fact, Spaniards were soon proving a nuisance on the Mississippi and in Honduras, where they fell upon the British settlement of St George’s Key. But if Britain launched her own attacks, the Spanish would be employed defending their own colonies and prevented from interfering elsewhere.

Dalling’s ideas raced forward after a small force he sent to the Bay of Honduras in October 1779 successfully stormed Omoa, defeating a superior Spanish garrison and harvesting plunder reckoned at several million dollars. Although Jamaica was soon torn by an unseemly squabble over the spoils, the raid whetted appetites for further adventures. Treasure, patriotism, security, glory . . . Soon Dalling was turning an expectant eye towards Nicaragua, a Spanish province in Central America, and fashioning a plan to recruit volunteers and Indians on the Mosquito coast for a foray up the San Juan River to Lake Nicaragua, where they could seize the town of Granada and blaze an outlet to the Pacific.