Nelson (31 page)

Few survived, though the precise toll has never been ascertained.
In November, Robert Hodgson, Lawrie’s predecessor as superintendent general of the Mosquito settlements, estimated that only some 130 men of the 1,500 to 1,800 whites sent to Nicaragua as soldiers, volunteers and auxiliaries then remained. This may not have been much of an exaggeration, for one of the officers testified that 176 of 290 men of the Loyal Irish Corps were dead by 21 September. More than a thousand sailors were also dead, most of disease, but a few drowned when two store ships foundered in a hurricane in October. Even most of the wretched Spanish prisoners perished before they could be returned to their people in Cuba. Such losses, amounting to more than two thousand five hundred men, made the San Juan expedition the costliest British disaster of the entire war.
⁴¹

And ultimately it was for nothing. Kemble had not the stomach to press on to Lake Nicaragua, only thirty miles above the fort, and as the force at San Juan reeled under the terrific mortality the plan to hold it was abandoned. The British evacuated the fort before the end of the year and it was reoccupied by the Spaniards.

Recriminations flew – against Lawrie for the delays on the Mosquito coast, against Polson for not storming the fort at the first onset as Nelson had suggested, and perhaps most of all against Dalling. The planters of Jamaica petitioned for his recall, complaining that he had bled the island’s defences dry and damaged its economy. Almost as if he had not supported the venture, Lord George Germain upbraided the governor, telling him that he could only:

lament exceedingly the dreadful havoc Death has made among the troops . . . especially as from the entire failure of the expedition no public benefit has been derived from the loss of so many brave men. Indeed, from the moment I heard no considerable body of the Mosquito Indians had been collected to go with the troops, or employed in making eruptions into the country, and that the few which had accompanied them were disgruntled, and suffered to depart, I ceased to flatter myself that any thing important would be effected, for you must remember the commencement of this undertaking was directed to be by desultory enterprises of adventurers, joining themselves to the natives, and stirring them up to make incursions into the Spanish settlements, and when by these means an opening was made . . . then to throw in a body of troops to overturn the Spanish government and support the inhabitants and adventurers in forming a new state in the centre of the country. The first object therefore certainly was to secure the hearty and general concurrence of the Mosquito Men, and
it was unfortunate that more pains were not taken to effect it before any troops were sent down.
⁴²

Dalling survived an investigation by the council and assembly of Jamaica, but the government called him home, where stories of the terrible losses in the isthmus had shocked the public. Of all the officers engaged in the service, only two seem to have emerged with public credit – Nelson and Despard. Coincidentally, ironies are attached to both cases.

The publication of Polson’s dispatches brought Nelson to the attention of British readers for the first time, and his undeniably spirited performance raised his stock among naval officers, merchants and public officials in the West Indian islands. It gave Horatio some of the recognition and attention he craved. That, for him, was the principal gain. Proud of his part in the expedition, in England Nelson had Rigaud complete his portrait by painting Fort San Juan into the background to commemorate his one public achievement. And in 1799, when he was a much bigger hero, he dwelt upon the enterprise in a bragging review of his services. ‘Major Polson, who commanded,’ he said, ‘will tell you of my exertions: how I quitted my ship, carried troops in boats one hundred miles up a river, which none but Spaniards since the time of the buccaneers had ever ascended. It will then be told how I boarded, if I may be allowed the expression, an outpost of the enemy, situated on an island in the river; that I made batteries, and afterwards fought them, and was a principal cause of our success.’
⁴³

Dalling had wanted to deliver a serious blow to the Spanish empire, but lost two thousand five hundred men achieving nothing. It seems ironic that a quarter of a century later it was the most talented of his officers who irreparably damaged Spain’s ability to defend that empire by destroying her navy off Cape Trafalgar, and for only a fraction of the loss suffered in Nicaragua.

Yet an even stranger fate awaited Lieutenant Despard, the other hero of the San Juan debacle. Unlike Nelson he remained in the West Indies, and added to his laurels by defeating a Spanish force that invaded the Black River settlement in 1782. He became Superintendent of British Affairs in Honduras two years later, after Britain negotiated the acquisition of Belize in return for surrendering the Mosquito settlements to Spain. Unfortunately, Despard’s career was then stymied. Intrigues led to his recall, but although cleared of misconduct he was not reappointed. The embittered Irishman slipped into London’s tavern
world, finding other friends and other causes. He associated with Irish patriots and English radicals, and familiarised himself with the inequalities and injustices of British society. In the 1790s he joined the London Corresponding Society, a largely working-class organisation seeking, among other things, universal manhood suffrage, but his sentiments were actually closer to the revolutionary republicanism of Tom Paine and his adherents. In 1802 Despard was involved in a desperate plot to assassinate the king, seize the Tower of London, the Bank of England and the Houses of Parliament, and to inaugurate a new political order. He was taken and arraigned for high treason.

It was embarrassing for a man who was then the foremost national hero to be asked to speak for a traitor, but Nelson did it. He had not seen Despard since the day he left San Juan castle, and it seemed strange to behold him now, a shabbily dressed, ageing revolutionary in the dock of the Newington Sessions House, fighting hopelessly for his life before the Grand Jury of Surrey and a judge notorious for his severity. Under cross-examination Nelson tried to save him:

We went on the Spanish Main together. We slept many nights together in our clothes upon the ground. We have measured the height of the enemy’s wall together. In all that period of time no man could have shown more zealous attachment to his sovereign and his country than Colonel Despard did. I formed the highest opinion of him at that time, as a man and an officer, seeing him so willing in the service of his sovereign. Having lost sight of him for the last twenty years, if I had been asked my opinion of him, I should certainly have said, ‘If he is alive, he is certainly one of the brightest ornaments of the British army.’
⁴⁴

But it was useless, and Nelson could do no more than try to secure a pension for the wife of a condemned man. Despard died on the scaffold, accepting his fate as bravely and as defiantly as he had once honoured a different flag in the green hell of Nicaragua.

You need not be sorrowful. Have I not often told you who
was almost as little, as pale, as suffering as you, and yet
potent as a giant and brave as a lion?

Charlotte Brontë,
Shirley

I
T
was not often that Horatio Nelson was less than passionate about active service, but the late spring and early summer of 1780 found him exhausted and thinking about home. Even the careful ministrations of Cuba Cornwallis and the powerful frigate waiting for him in the harbour at Port Royal could not rekindle the fire the sickness had drained out of him. It was not until 25 May that he visited the
Janus
and had the commission authorising him to take command read to the crew. Even then he was too ill to give it serious attention.
¹

It was part of the business of every good captain to build up a reliable following, which he might take from ship to ship. A kind of unwritten contract bonded officer and followers. The latter provided a bedrock of support and facilitated the captain’s purposes; on his part, he looked after their welfare and intervened when necessary to secure their pay or other entitlements. The captain, in effect, represented his men in circles from which they were socially excluded. Hitherto, Nelson had not been able to recruit a ship’s company from scratch, and inherited reasonably full complements with his ships, but in a short while he too, even as he lay sick, had the makings of a following growing around him.

We can see it in his transfer to the
Victor
on 1 May, when he quit
the
Hinchinbroke
to return to Jamaica. Seventeen men from his frigate went with him, all hoping to find a place aboard the
Janus
, their captain’s new ship. The seventeen were Nelson’s six personal servants (seven if we include the absent Locker), several petty officers (Tyson, a servant, Gore, a boatswain’s mate, Boyet, a thirty-four-year-old Norwegian coxswain, Cruger, a master’s mate, and Hayward, a midshipman), and six able seamen, Lepee, McAfee, Wilson, Bradley, Bamfield and Irwin. At least nine of these had been on the
Badger
, but by no means all found berths aboard the
Janus
.

Nelson’s new frigate had a paper complement of two hundred and eighty, entitling the captain to twelve servants, roughly four to every hundred men. Unfortunately, the death of the previous captain left his protégés bereft of a protector, and Horatio evidently lacked the heart to disrate them. He was able to rate Locker, Sylvan, Lepee and Irwin as captain’s servants on the
Janus
, but renewed the postings of four of the existing servants and added three or four newcomers to make up his quota. It seems that some of his old captain’s servants either became incapacitated or found more promising openings on other ships. But Gore, Boyet, Hayward, McAfee, Wilson and Bamfield all got places on the
Janus
, and two other veterans of the
Hinchinbroke
, able seaman Bartholomew Lyas and Thomas Lawson, also caught up with their old captain and joined up.
²

During his three months in command the
Janus
remained in harbour, where the temptations to seamen to desert and misbehave were constant. Forty-eight men ‘ran’ (in the vernacular of the navy) and six were flogged. The usual punishment was twelve lashes, but a man convicted of mutiny and drunkenness received three dozen. Two men guilty of insolence received different sentences, one man getting twelve strokes, twice as many as his partner. This suggests that Nelson was concerned with degrees of guilt, and believed that one offender had misled the other. How far Horatio supervised these events it is difficult to say, however. Much, if not most, of the day-to-day work on the
Janus
must have fallen upon the lieutenants (George Hope Stephens, James Crosby Haswell and Charles Pusick Codrington) and the master (James Fenwick). Given his condition, the officer Nelson probably saw most often was Thomas Jameson the surgeon.

However brief Horatio’s conversations with the officers of the
Janus
may have been, they cannot have failed to provide news of one of his mentors. Thomas Surridge, the old master of the
Seahorse
, had been lieutenant on the
Janus
as late as January, but had fallen ill and gone home.
Nelson would have missed the reunion. He was sick himself, and, after an attempt at his duties on the
Janus
, relapsed in June. This time the Parkers took him to their own house, ‘Admiral Penn’, near Kingston, to convalesce. Horatio was not happy there, the dreary drumming of the rain upon the windows and the lack of attention combining with the infuriating feebleness of his body and lack of spirits. ‘Oh, Mr Ross,’ he wrote to his agent the day after his arrival, ‘what would I give to be at Port Royal. Lady P[arker] not here, and the servants letting me lay as if a log, and take no notice.’
³

Some days he managed to rise to a quaky normality, his malarial fever appearing to recede, only to return and resume its regular pattern of attacks every other or every third day. At times he lay with his head throbbing and his stomach retching, feeling cold enough to shiver, while on other occasions it seemed as if he was burning up and his body sweated profusely. One of his physicians was probably Moseley, the surgeon general, whose
Treatise on Tropical Diseases
Nelson would one day enlarge with observations of the San Juan expedition. But he was not a good patient. Sir Peter and Lady Parker often sat by his bedside, a tribute to their regard, and Mrs Yates the housekeeper administered to his needs, but Horatio often did not take his medication. The Parkers discovered their most powerful weapon in getting Captain Nelson to do so was their youngest daughter, a mere child who invariably got her way with the guest.
⁴

Despite the persuasive little girl, by 15 August it was obvious that Horatio would not be taking the
Janus
to sea. He was officially discharged to the sick quarters and Lieutenant Manley Dixon assumed acting command. Fifteen days later Nelson was no better and applied to Sir Peter for permission to sail for England. His health had deteriorated, with the attacks now occurring daily, and the hospital at Port Royal certified that he was also suffering from ‘bilious vomitings, nervous headaches, visceral obstructions, and many other bodily infirmities’. He was ‘being reduced quite to a skeleton’.
⁵

Sir Peter feared for his life. He granted Nelson permission to leave Jamaica ‘with my very sincere wishes for your speedy recovery’, but privately confided to the Admiralty that the patient was ‘so emaciated, and in so bad a state of health that I doubt whether he will live to get home’. ‘I wish much for his recovery,’ he added. ‘His abilities in his profession would be a loss to the service.’
⁶

Privately Nelson had often shared Sir Peter’s pessimism and felt himself destined for nothing better than a place in Green Bay, the sad little naval cemetery near Port Royal where his friend Captain Deane and so many other men, good and bad, had been laid to rest. His predicament was not a new one, however. He remembered being shipped home from India, and surviving. The thought of leaving these pestilential climes and going home put new life into him.