Nelson (30 page)

Outright incompetence had turned the siege into a farce and already much darker clouds were gathering. On the 19th the shortfall in provisions compelled Polson to cut rations, and the following night the weather finally broke. The rains, dreaded from the beginning, had
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come.

The rain poured down all that night and the next day, and for much of almost every day after that. The river was turned into a raging flood, and the camp of crude shelters was transformed into a sea of misery and mud. At night horrific flashes of lightning stabbed through the black sky. In the words of Benjamin Moseley, the surgeon-general of Jamaica, whose deputy was on the ground, the ‘horrid tempests of lightning and thunder’ constituted ‘a magnificent scene of terror unknown but in the tropic world’.
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And the men – fatigued, tormented night and day by mosquitoes, sodden, and stinted on food and medicine by the slow and uncertain communications on the river – suddenly fell sick. The Indians began to die first, but on the 24th or after the soldiers also started ‘falling down in great numbers’, seized by a crippling distemper.
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Matters were soon serious. According to Dancer, the physician with the expedition, men initially went down with tertian fevers, suffering
‘cold, hot and sweating fits’ every other day. Many patients then slid into ‘quotidian’ fever, daily attacks during which the cold fits diminished but the others became more violent and exhausting. Dancer was soon alert to warning signs. In some the stricken boils about the body or pustules at the lips and nostrils ‘generally indicated a crisis or solution of the fever’, but other patients displayed ‘a universal yellowness’ that generally indicated the end was close. In mature cases a bloody flux and ‘obstructions of the viscera, particularly of the spleen’ developed, and occasionally disorientation and derangement.
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Bogged down in a mosquito-ridden river valley and the marshy estuary at the mouth of the San Juan, the expedition was probably being scourged by malignant tertian malaria and dysentery, and perhaps also typhoid fever caused by the ingestion of food and water contaminated by the human sewage upstream. Horatio Nelson was among the first to be struck down. He had not been well in Jamaica and was arguably weakened by subsequent misfortunes. Years later he told the Duke of Clarence that he had drunk from a spring in which branches of the manchineel tree had been thrown. Manchineel contained toxic substances, and was used by the Indians to tip arrows, but whether Nelson drank enough to occasion the ‘severe and lasting injury’ he claimed may be doubted. More likely the campaign through jungle, marsh and water had taken its toll.
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For a while he struggled on, but release came suddenly. On 28 April, as Polson prepared to summon the Spaniards to surrender, more news and letters came into the camp. For Polson the most material revelation was that Kemble’s reinforcements had arrived at the mouth of the river from Jamaica. Kemble had two hundred regulars and two hundred and fifty volunteers, additional stores and two howitzers, which Dalling pronounced ‘by far the best kind of artillery’ for siege work. He also had instructions to supersede Polson in command, fortify the harbour and river of San Juan, and forward Dalling’s plans to control Lake Nicaragua, and capture Granada, Leon and Realejo. There was also a letter for Captain Nelson from Sir Peter Parker. He was to hand the
Hinchinbroke
to Captain Cuthbert Collingwood and immediately return to Jamaica on the sixteen-gun
Victor
, which had accompanied Kemble’s troops. Captain Bonovier Glover of the forty-four-gun frigate
Janus
had died, and Nelson was to take command. When Sir Peter had promised to find Nelson a better ship he meant it, and Horatio’s new commission was backdated to 22 March 1780.
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At twelve noon on 28 April, Nelson set off downriver, lying pale
and feeble in the bottom of an Indian boat and attended by John Tyson, his former purser from the
Badger
. He left his men to follow in the pinnace, and carried with him a letter from Polson to Kemble. Acknowledging the confusion upriver and the ‘flux’ ravaging the Indians and troops, Polson’s epistle was entirely frank about the crucial role Nelson and his seamen had played in the siege:

Captain Nelson’s going off directly puts it out of my power to be full on any subject, but I shall write you tomorrow by his pinnace, which he leaves for that purpose. I want words to express the praise due to Captain Nelson for the many services he did the army in coming here, and the great assistance he gave me in carrying on the siege. Hardly a gun [was fired] but was laid by him or Lieutenant Despard, and I shall miss him and his good men more than double their number of any others.
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But Polson wrote too early to transmit the really important news. On the afternoon of the day following Nelson’s departure the Spaniards surrendered their fort. Polson searched for a British flag to raise over the keep but found only one. It flew quite fittingly, though its master was gone . . . Nelson’s ‘jack’.
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The British found El Castillo de la Immaculada Concepción in a wretched condition, disease-ridden, fetid and pervaded by an ‘unsupportable’ stench from badly located privies. There were no proper sick quarters and the health of both the British and their Spanish prisoners deteriorated. When Kemble finally reached the fort on 15 May he was shocked. The soldiers were ‘in a most deplorable state’ and ‘everything’ was ‘in the greatest confusion. No part of our works destroyed, nor any preparations for defence.’ It was only ‘with difficulty’ that it was possible to find ‘one subaltern . . . to mount the castle guard’. As men fell sick they lay helplessly, some with legs swollen to ‘an enormous size’ and discharging water. Those who rallied relapsed after the slightest exertions, and the burdens on the dwindling numbers of fit or partly fit men became insuperable. The Indians and blacks, afraid of the sickness, were also disgruntled. They had been restrained from hunting, denied access to the fort and deprived of what they deemed to be legitimate plunder, especially the Spanish slaves. Muttering angrily, they simply defected.
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As Horatio descended the San Juan, he passed supplies and men moving up. Some, noticing the shocking state of the young captain, got their first intimation of what lay ahead. But the river mouth proved
to be no relief. Nelson found a pestilential fort being erected at Greytown, Kemble organising his troops ashore and several transports riding in the harbour with His Majesty’s warships the
Hinchinbroke
,
Victor
,
Resource
and
Ulysses
. The old
Hinchinbroke
was opening at the seams, and a few desertions and a couple of floggings had been logged since Nelson had left. Much worse, disease was appearing in the ship.
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First Lieutenant George Harrison had died first, on 24 April. He was not an old man. Harrison had come to the
Hinchinbroke
from the
Lowestoffe
, and served as a master’s mate and able seaman the previous year before passing for lieutenant. Only three months before, on 14 January, he had moved up to first lieutenant, and during Nelson’s absence the ship had been his to command. So briefly an officer and gentleman, he was now buried ashore, far from home. He had learned the hard way that in the islands promotion – and death – came quick. Harrison’s place was taken by Joseph Bullen, and Peter Burns, an experienced officer, was borrowed from the
Resource
to support him.

Three days after Harrison’s death William Clark, a mariner of the
Hinchinbroke
, died. Then, on 30 April, the last day of Nelson’s command, two more seamen, William Robertson and John Mockler, also died. Mockler was a boatswain from Waterford. He was twenty-nine years old.

Collingwood was there to take command of Nelson’s frigate but the contagion gathered strength despite all his considerable efforts. Selections from the ship’s log tell their own sad story:

And so it went on: the young and old, brave and weak, efficient and incompetent. Hosier’s expedition had been wiped out in these waters, and Vernon’s, and now it was happening again. By the end of the year one hundred and seventy of the two hundred on Collingwood’s muster had died, and ‘scarcely any of those who had been attacked by the distemper have recovered so as to be able to serve again’. The story was a similar one aboard the other ships at San Juan. On eight or nine transports barely twenty men were fit for duty early in July; the rest were sick or dead.
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Nelson missed the worst. He gave verbal reports to Kemble, Captain Patrick Fothringham, now the senior naval officer at San Juan, and Collingwood, and transferred to the
Victor
(Captain Samuel Hood Walker) for his passage to Jamaica, sailing on 2 May.

But he remained long enough to hear of the capture of the fort from two Indians who arrived at the river mouth grumbling about the sickness and lack of plunder. Horatio’s frail hand managed to write two letters, one to Polson expressing satisfaction that the job had been done before the arrival of Kemble, and the other to Dalling. From the governor he received a most gratifying reply. ‘Thanks to you, my friend, for your kind congratulations. To you, without compliment, do I attribute in a great measure the cause.’
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On 17 May the
Victor
arrived at Port Royal, and an emaciated Nelson was carried ashore in a cot and taken to the lodging house of Cuba Cornwallis, a black woman who had taken her surname from the captain who had given her her freedom. She was popular among people of every colour, and a competent nurse, and it was she, rather than John Tyson the servant, who slowly put Horatio Nelson back on his feet. The
Janus
, his new command, was moored at the wharf preparing for sea, but for some time Nelson fought for life and thought of home. His illness set into a pattern of remission and resurgence, and there were days when he felt able to make shaky excursions out of doors.
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He met Dalling a few times and told him about the expedition,
pointing out Polson’s chronic need of boats, boatmen, provisions, ordnance stores and an artillery officer. He liked the colonel and defended him, but dwelt on Lawrie’s broken promises and explained how the delays had exhausted the campaigning season so that the rains caught them in the swampy river valley rather than the airier uplands. To his English agent he expressed some annoyance that whatever prize money accrued from the capture of the public property in Fort San Juan would probably be shared with Kemble’s detachment as well as the crews of the
Resource
,
Victor
and
Ulysses
, none of which had played any part in the victory.
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But in reality there was no victory. Dalling persevered with his dream for some time, recklessly preparing more men for the pestilential reaches of the San Juan, and planning the annexation of Nicaragua and the establishment of naval squadrons on both sides of the isthmus. Praising Nelson to the colonial secretary, he recommended the captain be given command of the Pacific squadron. The other, he opined, might not suit a constitution that was ‘rather too delicate’.
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Slowly, however, the plan fell apart. The soldiers Dalling got from England were too sick to send to the San Juan, while those already there under Kemble lost all interest in their duty and dropped like flies. Ragged, some without shoes and stockings, living in filth, and savaged by malaria, liver problems and dysentery, they reached new depths of demoralisation and despair. Some died raving. Others, with shivering shrivelled frames, yellowing skins and haunted faces, were too weak to bury their comrades and had to lay them out for scavengers by the riverside, waiting and wondering who would die next.

On the ships so many corpses were seen floating in the sea that men stopped eating fish. As one witness wrote from the harbour, ‘The
Venus
’s complement is very short. The men are almost all sick . . . The
Horatio
has lost several men, and has now only two able to do duty. The
Julia
has one only, and the
Penelope
two . . . I am told the soldiers die here very fast. Poor Gascoigne is dead, as is Mr Fead of the artillery, lately arrived . . . Captain Fothrington [Fothringham] told me . . . he had 70 men sick. Capt. Collingwood only five able to do duty . . . Sickness and dependency prevail here. All is a lifeless disagreeable stillness, and in some of the transports there are hardly men to bury the dead. All the surgeons are sick and neither officers or soldiers get proper attendance.’
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