Nelson (28 page)

The process bit yet more time out of their fraying schedule, but Polson could not proceed without the only allies who knew the country and who could supply the shallow-draft canoes they needed to ascend the San Juan. Nelson occupied his men filling water casks and cleaning and repairing the ships, but he disembarked the soldiers. There was no point in leaving them on the packed transports. So far their health had held up. About thirty men were sick, but the only two who had died on the passage had been feverish before the voyage had started. Eagerly, the troops now climbed into the boats to be ferried ashore, and scrambled through grass and mangroves to reach a low-level but marshy area known as Wank’s Savannah. It was damp and mosquito-ridden and one day a fierce northwesterly blew down most of the tents, but the weather was generally kind and, though a precautionary ‘hospital’ was established, the soldiers remained in reasonable health and spirits.
¹²

Polson and Nelson were also talking to their pilot, Hanna. He assured them that the San Juan was navigable to vessels of up to four feet in draft. They therefore unloaded the pieces of the shallow-draft vessel Dalling had provided for Lake Nicaragua, and had the carpenters put it together. Named the
Lord Germain
, it was taken in tow by the
Hinchinbroke
.

In the meantime Indians and blacks began to arrive. From 22 February they dribbled in, many of them ready for war. The recruits included Admiral Dick Richards and General Tempest, who said that he was too old to campaign himself but was contributing his brother and followers to the campaign. Using interpreters, Polson tried to dispel a rumour that the British only wanted to enslave them in Jamaica, and oiled his blandishments with presents and a promise of shares in the plunder. Fresh misunderstandings were already developing. The Indians later insisted that Polson had said they could keep any black slaves they captured from the Spaniards, something the colonel steadfastly denied. Nevertheless, for the time being, Polson’s diplomacy had secured a few native allies.

On 22 February Lawrie himself arrived. Nelson and Polson must have shaken their heads in frustration, for the forces he brought were scant. He said he had two hundred or so men, including the missing detachment of the 79th, and thirteen Black River craft, but even these modest reinforcements had been scattered in the recent gale. In fact, four of the boats had been wrecked and some of the regulars lost with them. Those regulars who did arrive were in ‘a most deplorable
condition’, according to the expedition’s surgeon general, Dr Thomas Dancer, and riddled with dropsy, fevers and dysentery.
¹³

Disappointed at the turnout, Polson saw no point in lingering any longer, and hoped to pick up additional Indians and boats on his journey southwards towards the San Juan. Five or six days were consumed re-embarking the troops, and at one-thirty in the afternoon of 7 March Nelson fired a gun to signal the squadron to sail. The following day they passed Sandy Bay, and Lawrie was landed with presents to rally the blacks there while Polson continued along the coast to Tebuppy to speak to a prestigious Indian leader known as the Governor. After a few difficulties caused by incompetent pilots, the expedition reached its destination late at night, and on 9 March yet another round of negotiations with the natives began.

A white man named Cairns, who lived with the Indians, came aboard the ships to explain that it was absolutely necessary for Polson to speak to them directly. By this time the commander-in-chief was becoming increasingly dependent on Nelson, and flattering him by using his name as a camp password. Ever willing to share the burdens of command, Nelson offered to accompany Polson, and that afternoon the two officers went ashore to meet the Governor and some of his headmen at Cairns’s house. The Indians wanted presents before committing warriors to the expedition, but as Polson had given Lawrie his remaining store of gifts, he had to wait at Tebuppy for the superintendent-general to come up. Two more days elapsed, but on 12 March Lawrie arrived and the Governor informed. Once the gifts had been distributed the following day, however, the Indians scattered for provisions, and it was not until 16 March that they reassembled for departure. Nelson and Polson were fuming, sure that Lawrie had entirely misled Dalling about the readiness of the Indians to join the campaign.

The journey to the San Juan resumed on 17 March. It was a bizarre sight, and History has seldom spoken of the strange composition of the first fleet commanded by its greatest admiral. Nelson led the way south in a dilapidated frigate, followed by seven transports and tenders, some shallow Black River craft and a flotilla of dugout pangas, pitpans, dories and canoes manned by Indian and black warriors. The Mosquito Indians were a ferocious sight. Almost naked, some of their lithe, bronzed bodies were tattooed or painted, their ears, noses and lips pierced for ornaments, and the arms they had received from the British supplemented by bows and arrows, spears and perhaps blowguns. Some of their weapons may well have been tipped with poison.

As the ships passed along the low, flat coastline Nelson was also being taxed by his local pilots, whose inefficiency reached a nadir at seven in the morning of the 18th when the ships ran upon ‘a hidden reef’. Horatio signalled them to anchor and successfully refloated every vessel, but part of the
Hinchinbroke
’s false keel and copper sheathing had been ripped off. Complicating matters, one of Nelson’s carpenters had fallen out of a boat and drowned at Tebuppy, and repairs had to proceed short-handed. But, undeterred, Nelson brought the force to Pearl Key Lagoon, where several small islets guarded a large lagoon rich in shellfish and turtles, and Admiral Dick Richards and the last Indian contingent were to meet them.

For Nelson every step of the wretched voyage had brought its own frustrations and Pearl Key Lagoon ran to form. On the 20th, while Lawrie was mustering the Admiral’s men, the masters of the transports brought Nelson the unwelcome news that they had only two days’ worth of fresh water left. There was no water at Pearl Key, so the next day Nelson left Lawrie to complete his business ashore while he sailed on to Monkey Point. Again he found himself misled. Despite assurances that the ships could water at Monkey Point, the landing parties returned empty handed, and Nelson had to ration his remaining supplies. He crowded on all sail for the mouth of the San Juan on 22 March, and the ships, with some of the Black River and Indian craft, finally reached their destination in two days. Here there was water, here the troops and military stores were to be put ashore and here Nelson’s greatest responsibilities came to an end.

The vexations of the Mosquito coast were over but they had cost the expedition dear. It had left Jamaica late in the first place, and now a whole month had been wasted waiting for people and boats and negotiating with Indians and blacks, work that was supposed to have been done already. The results themselves were also disappointing, for nothing like Lawrie’s paper army of auxiliaries ever appeared. According to Robert Hodgson, admittedly a prejudiced opponent of Lawrie, only 12 whites, 60 black slaves and 220 ‘Mosquito Men’ eventually joined the campaign. Nelson himself complained that the few men General Tempest supplied soon defected. Weeks of effort had eventually given Polson a number of black and Indian allies, who would prove themselves adept scouts and boatmen, but they were far too few for the job in hand.

The rains, which everyone had thought it essential to avoid, were looming ominously, and the time left for the British to ascend the San
Juan, capture its fort and reach the healthier climes of Lake Nicaragua was very short indeed.

Apart from sitting at anchor in the mouth of the San Juan, guarding the supply line, Captain Nelson’s job was done. The men had reached the river in reasonable shape and the rest was now up to Polson.

The difficulties of the army soon became obvious, however. The San Juan estuary was uninviting. Its harbour, where Nelson drew up the ships, seemed ‘very fine’, but it was graced by no more than a shabby collection of deserted wooden shanties collectively known as Greytown, and accessed a drab low-lying shoreline covered in grass, scrub and mangrove swamp. Beyond, through a strong current of shallow, muddy water spilling into the sea, the river had to be entered by tricky channels threading between sandy islands and shoals. Polson sent his chief engineer to erect a battery and rough defences at a suitable place for a base. Lieutenant Edward Marcus Despard of the 79th was one of the strengths of the expedition. A delicately featured, slim Irishman in his late twenties, he discharged this and all other duties with exceptional ability and determination.
¹⁴

On 26 March, Polson began the onerous job of landing men, provisions and stores. For two days the
Chichito
, supplied by Lawrie, the
Royal George
and
Lord Germain
, and the Black River and Indian boats ploughed back and forth to one of the islands in the mouth of the river. They were too few for the work and inevitably made their trips overloaded. Some capsized, stores were lost or damaged and one man drowned.

Nelson decided to intervene. He was already chafing at the thought of remaining on his frigate while the serious action moved upriver, and knew Polson’s problems would only increase. The published atlas said that the river had many ‘cataracts’, but little else was known about it, and even its length was uncertain. A hundred miles of difficult water were thought to connect the estuary to Lake Nicaragua. At the moment it was still the dry season, and the water would be broken into runs or narrow channels, but that would make the transportation of heavy stores and siege guns a hazardous toil. The enemy fortifications were also mysterious. According to Lawrie, San Carlos, the fort at the entrance to Lake Nicaragua, was garrisoned by only a handful of men with about twenty-five pieces of artillery, but then
Lawrie had revealed himself a dismal prophet. Another castle, Fort San Juan, was some thirty miles below the lake. A stone structure erected the previous century to halt privateers and buccaneers, it was likely to be a formidable obstacle. Bearing all this in mind, Nelson concluded that Polson needed all the help he could get. He put the
Hinchinbroke
’s cutter and pinnace at the colonel’s disposal, with thirty-four seamen and thirteen marines, and offered to command them himself. Furthermore, he would conduct the entire convoy upstream. Gratefully, Polson accepted.

Invigorated, but still with insufficient boats to move the whole of his force at once, Polson split the men and stores into two divisions. Nelson would take the first and largest, including Polson and most of the regulars, as the advance, while Major MacDonald would bring the second division upstream as soon as boats became available. Some of Polson’s boats would be sent back at the first opportunity, and Lawrie was expected to arrive with others from Pearl Key Lagoon.

As the first division was poised to begin its journey, Polson received a new inducement. A boat arrived from Jamaica with a letter from Dalling, dated 17 March, eleven days earlier. It informed Polson that reinforcements of three hundred regulars and as many volunteers were being shipped from Kingston under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Kemble of the 60th (Royal American) Regiment. A forty-year-old, Kemble had earlier applied to command the expedition, but only after Polson and Nelson had been appointed. Now he would be assuming overall command, Dalling said. If anything was calculated to galvanise Polson into greater action, it was the knowledge that he had to capture San Juan fort before Kemble appeared and got the credit for the operation.
¹⁵

The morning the letter arrived the first division of Polson’s force headed upriver. A little above its mouth, Nelson found the San Juan perhaps half a mile wide, sliding between low grass-covered banks and around sandy shoals and islands. Caymans basked along some of its muddy margins and manatees browsed peacefully on the plants they found in the adjoining creeks. The water was shallow, and every mile upstream was hard won, with the Indians and blacks proving their worth as boatmen at every twist and turn. Nelson had repeatedly to order the men to stow their oars and plunge into the water to help haul and push the vessels on when they grounded. The heavier boats, such as the
Lord Germain
and the
Chichito
, were constantly beaching in the rear, and Nelson’s solution was to move the cutter,
pinnace and Indian boats forward so that they could be unloaded and sent back to relieve the burdens of the larger craft lagging behind. In three days the men fought the river in heat, humidity and mosquitoes, making barely six miles a day. On 31 March the soldiers were allowed a day of rest in one of their nightly encampments on shore, but for Nelson’s men the battle with the boats continued.

Once Nelson got past the mouth of the Colorado River on 1 April he found deeper water and mended his pace. The jungle closed in on lofty banks, looking black and threatening beneath huge trees that shot up to reach the light and wove their crowns into an unbroken canopy. The persistent heat and humidity gave the forest a high metabolism, and many of its creatures completed their life-cycles quickly, generating a swift turnover and astonishing diversity. Large butterflies, moths and dragonflies flitted in the still moist air, and iridescent hummingbirds hovered busily before brilliant flowers. But for Nelson and his men there were rapids, falls, currents and countercurrents to absorb their attention, and the extremes between the exhausting daytime heat on the river and the falling temperatures that enveloped the makeshift camps at night to endure.

Working arduously side by side, Nelson and the Indians developed a considerable mutual respect. On his part, Horatio was impressed by the durability of the natives, and their skill in weaving the boats around grassy islands and through tumbling rapids. On theirs, the Indians saw a young man of no great strength or size struggling with them in the van without any of the common European arrogance. In this relationship Nelson trod surely in the footsteps of Drake.