Nelson (39 page)

A dozen line of battleships with the
Albemarle
and two other frigates sailing pluckily on their flanks left New York on 22 November. Hood made the West Indies early the following month, and was reassured by news that the French from Boston had not slipped by him and joined their Spanish allies in Havana. He had an opportunity to intercept Vaudreuil’s ships as they came south, but where should he wait for them?

People who had served on the Jamaica station told Hood that the French usually approached the West Indies from the north by way of the east end of Hispaniola, rather than by the Caicos and Windward Passages further west. Nelson, for one, informed the admiral that he
‘does not remember to have seen a ship of any burthen coming to Hispaniola by that [Caicos] passage’. Hood believed him, partly because navigating the western passages from the north needed exceptional skill in the calculation of longitude. Consequently, he scattered some of his smaller vessels about in case the French did something surprising, but stationed the English battle fleet further east, near Cape Samana on the northeastern shore of Hispaniola, a little windward of Monte Christi.
⁵¹

Nelson was with the main force, acting as Hood’s ‘repeater’, watching for signals from the flagship and repeating them to one ship or another. Usually the orders concerned chasing unfamiliar sails, but occasionally the
Albemarle
investigated herself and stopped Danes, Russians, Flemings and Prussians. Captain Nelson filled his log with such entries as ‘Admiral made our signal to chase’, ‘out cutter’, ‘fired a shot and brought her to’, and ‘found her to be a neutral’. There were two prizes, however. The first was the
Atlantic
, an American lumber brig from Salem, taken on 7 January 1783 off Monte Christi. Nelson put a six-man prize crew aboard to take her to Jamaica, and brought her own complement, eleven men under Samuel Grant the master, on to his frigate.

The second prize was more important, but effectively sailed into the British fleet and offered itself to Nelson’s frigate. She was the
Queen of France
, manned by Auguste Paris and fifty-four men, and carrying up to three hundred French soldiers and a large quantity of masts and naval stores. What was more, she was from Vaudreuil’s fleet. The mast ship had parted company with the rest of the French fleet during gales and snowstorms up north, and consummated her misfortune by losing her main topmast in a squall off Hispaniola. Running pretty helplessly before the wind, she had finally mistaken Hood’s fleet for Vaudreuil’s, and at one o’clock in the morning of 25 January unwarily passed through the British ships to come under the stern of the
Albemarle
. Nelson happily snapped her up.

He mused with mortification that though the ship would fetch a lot of money in Jamaica, where masts were in short supply, the proceeds would have to be shared with the fleet, according to custom. The most significant yield, however, was information. Hood’s surmise that Vaudreuil would steer for the eastern, rather than the western, passages was right, but he was missing him all the same. Six days before, a report had placed the French off Puerto Rico, even further east, and Hood had begun beating in that direction against wind and current.
Now the prisoners of the mast ship confirmed that the enemy fleet was bound for the Mona Passage between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, and, realising that he had ‘a small chance indeed of meeting the enemy’, Hood crowded on all sail.
⁵²

But the battle was not to be; Vaudreuil reached the passage first, slipped through towards the Spanish havens on the Venezuelan coast and sat out the rest of the war in Puerto Cabello. Hood had screened the British islands from the hostile force but muffed the chance to destroy it.

In lieu of a battle, Captain Nelson had to content himself with scouting and prize taking. On the morning of 29 January 1783 he drove a sloop ashore under an enemy battery near Cape Donna Maria, but six days later the British fleet put back into Port Royal. Nelson renewed old friendships about the town, but was eager to get back to sea. One delay occurred on 6 February when he ran his frigate aground in the harbour and lost more than a day getting her afloat, disembarking and re-embarking iron ballast and ten of his guns in the process. He eventually cleared Port Royal on the 16th, accompanied by the fourteen-gun brig sloop
Drake
, under Captain Charles Dixon.

Hood wanted him to find the missing French fleet, which was reportedly about Curaçao, but for some time Nelson searched the islands in vain. ‘Where they are God knows!’ he confessed to Locker. Yet he was far from dispirited and sailed in good heart. More than anything else he felt valued by an admiral he had begun to idolise, with all that that augured for his future. Hood could become a powerful patron, far more so than the genial Locker. He was an admiral, and a good one, but also the confidant of some of the most powerful men in the realm. The king himself relied upon Hood’s counsel and had made him a baronet. The Grenvilles, than whom few were bigger in politics, were family friends, and by the marriage of his brother Hood had secured a connection to the Pitts. In fact the admiral’s rise was due in no small part to his ability to secure and manipulate interest.
⁵³

Nelson was sure he had Hood’s good opinion. He ‘treats me as if I was his son’, he wrote; he seemed to be ready to ‘give me anything I can ask of him’. Prince William Henry, who was often at Hood’s side, told Nelson that he had heard the admiral say that no officer in the fleet knew more about fleet tactics than the captain of the
Albemarle
. This is our first indication that Nelson had given any serious thought to fleet tactics, and Nelson himself was surprised. ‘I cannot make use of expressions strong enough to describe what I felt,’
he told Locker with transparent pride. He had reason to be satisfied, for he had been without a permanent patron in high places for four years, and Hood looked like filling the vacuum.

Eager to vindicate Hood’s regard, Nelson thought he had found his opportunity when some news reached him in the southeastern Bahamas early in March. He had been cruising rather unsuccessfully off Monte Christi. On 4 March he sent the
Drake
to examine the anchorage at Cape François, but nothing more interesting than a corvette was found there. Early on the 6th, however, three sails were seen to the northeast, and the
Albemarle
and
Drake
cleared for action. The newcomers proved to be the
Resistance
, an old fifth-rate warship of forty-four guns under Captain James King, and two prizes, one of them a French twenty-eight-gun frigate named
La Coquette
, now commanded by King’s first lieutenant, James Trevenen, and the other a sloop. When King’s boat bumped alongside the
Albemarle
and he climbed aboard he bore more than interesting news.

A little to the northwest were the Turks Islands. They were relatively insignificant little possessions of the crown, inhabited only by a few fishermen, but they stood sentinel over the approaches to the Windward Passage that led to Jamaica and thus enjoyed a certain strategic importance. Two days earlier the
Resistance
had discovered that the islands had been seized by the French. Two enemy frigates drove the
Resistance
away, but Captain King concluded that the invasion force came from Cape François in Haiti and amounted to about 150 regulars and three warships.

Early in the afternoon Nelson summoned Dixon of the
Drake
aboard to hear King’s story, and within three hours had decided to expel the French. His reasoning was sound. Grand Turk, the principal island, was unfortified, and it was unlikely that the French had had the time to make many improvements. Then, too, Nelson’s force was reinforced at about noon by the arrival of the twenty-eight-gun frigate,
Tartar
, under Captain William George Fairfax. Including their prizes, therefore, the British had a fifth-rate warship, three frigates, a brig sloop and a sloop at their disposal. Nelson decided to chance it, and led his flotilla towards Grand Turk.

At about four to five in the afternoon of Friday 7 March the ships entered the bay at the eastern end of Grand Turk and anchored on a bank within half a cable’s length of the beach. Scanning the shore Nelson picked up the blue-coated soldiers hurrying to their positions, muskets in hand, but tried to avert blooshed. A boat flying a flag of
truce put out from the
Albemarle
with Captain Dixon sitting in the stern with a summons to the French garrison to surrender. The demand was rejected, and Nelson was further mortified to find his scant assault force depleted by the defection of the
Tartar
. The frigate had twice attempted to anchor on the bank and twice found herself swept away, losing an anchor in the process. Finally, Fairfax simply sailed away. Nelson fumed but wrote a restrained report, merely presuming that the ignoble officer must have had ‘good reasons’ for failing to rejoin the squadron and support the attack.

During the night the British amused themselves lobbing shots at the French campfires, but the principal attack began at about five in the morning. The weather was fresh and blustery, with considerable rain, but Nelson judged that it would not hinder his operation. At six he raised the signal for a general cannonade, and the ships trained their broadsides on the landing places and swept away the immediate opposition. All seemed to be going well, and Nelson’s second signal launched his landing parties. A total of 167 marines and seamen from the
Albemarle
,
Drake
and
Resistance
pulled furiously for the beach and landed with little difficulty under the direction of Captain Dixon. To add to Nelson’s optimism, reinforcements fortuitously arrived in the shape of a fourteen-gun brig, the
Admiral Barrington
, under Lieutenant Charles Cunningham.

However, as Dixon’s men trudged towards the French defences, it became clear that they had bitten off more than could be comfortably chewed. Dixon rattled off a request for a diversion. Accordingly, at about eleven Cunningham and Lieutenant Hinton of the
Albemarle
took the
Admiral Barrington
and
Drake
a little northward to anchor as close to the town as they could. They had orders to bombard the French until Dixon raised a blue-and-white flag to signify his men were in position. In an hour or so the two ships were firing, but the French gunners replied from a hastily constructed three-gun battery that included at least one big eighteen-pounder. Nor were they mean marksmen. During an hour’s exchange their shots smashed into the ships’ hulls, cut up rigging and disabled the
Drake
’s gaff. The master and several men of the
Drake
were wounded, as were seven aboard the
Admiral Barrington
. Both ships had their cables cut by the French fire and were obliged to retire.

Ashore the British fared no better. Dixon’s heroes found the French solidly entrenched behind seveal field pieces and a couple of naval cannons, and judged the attack too dangerous. Nelson called it off
and re-embarked the men. He summoned King aboard the
Albemarle
for a further consultation, but they agreed that nothing more was to be done.

Nelson was criticised for the affair, then and later. Lieutenant Trevenen complained that the ‘ridiculous expedition’ had been ‘undertaken by a young man merely from the hope of seeing his name in the papers, ill depicted at first, carried on without a plan afterwards, attempted to be carried into execution rashly, because without intelligence, and hastily abandoned at last for the same reason that it ought not have been undertaken at all’. It is possible to sympathise with this to some extent, but it has been uncritically reproduced. It owed much to hindsight. Unfortunately, military operations are not precise sciences, and failures are as often the result of unforeseen circumstances or mere misfortune as of incompetence. Risks can be minimised, but seldom eliminated. Nelson may have failed to gauge obvious strengths in his opponents, but even if this was true Trevenen’s was a harsh judgement. After all, Nelson barely committed his forces. He learned about the French occupation, tested its defences, found them stronger than expected and withdrew his men before they suffered serious casualties. In short, he did his duty.

The truth was that Trevenen’s complaint was motivated less by professional dissent than pecuniary loss. What really grieved the lieutenant about the Turks’ Island affair was that it delayed his return to Jamaica with two prizes. That delay allowed the impending news of peace to interfere with the legal proceedings and cost the captors several thousands in prize money. But that was simple bad luck. Hood made no public criticism of Nelson. He forwarded the captain’s dispatch to the Admiralty without comment, and the relationship between the two men was unimpaired. This last raises a doubt about Prince William Henry’s subsequent claim that Hood verbally reprimanded Nelson. Nelson was a man who brooded over criticism, but he remained steadfastly loyal to Hood, cheerful and positive. In fact a month later he was urging his admiral to retain the services of the
Albemarle
during the peace. ‘If you remain in this country it will be truly grievous to me to be sent to England,’ he said.
⁵⁴

A few days after leaving Grand Turk, Nelson overhauled a French ship sailing under a flag of truce, and learned that she carried a copy of the preliminary articles of peace agreed in Europe. Nonetheless, until there was an official ceasefire he had to maintain a war footing. At last, on 29 March, he tracked the missing French fleet to Puerto
Cabello on the luxuriant Venezuelan coast, and counted eleven sail of the line, two frigates, an armed auxiliary and several merchantmen at anchor. Then he enjoyed a late supper, making some of the last captures of the war about the Lesser Antilles and the Main.

An eight-man Spanish schooner was taken on 25 March, and two days later another, which six of Nelson’s men crewed to Jamaica. The 28th was a busier day. Nelson chased one vessel aground beneath Cape Blanco, and took two more near Puerto Cabello. One was a schooner, which Nelson used to receive his prisoners, but the other was altogether stranger: a royal launch crowded with French and Spanish dignitaries and scientists on a pleasure cruise. The master, who went by the remarkable name of Waken Lanatera, had mistaken the French-built
Albemarle
for a friend and obligingly come alongside, just as the mast ship had done two months before.