Nelson (48 page)

The admiral’s revised order about the navigation laws was not the only unwelcome news that had overtaken Nelson at St Kitts.

Included in the very same package was another order of Sir Richard’s, dated 29 December. It informed the captains that Commissioner Moutray had an ‘especial commission’ from the Admiralty authorising him ‘to superintend and carry on the business’ of English Harbour ‘in the absence of a flag or senior officer’, and to fly the broad distinguishing pendant of an active commodore proclaiming his authority over the other captains. In accordance with the practice established by his predecessors, Rodney and Pigot, Hughes required all officers to accept Moutray’s orders when he himself was not in the port.
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The pendant cut Nelson to the quick. As far as he was concerned he – not Moutray – was second to the admiral. He was the senior serving captain ‘in commission’, and presided over courts martial, the accepted privilege of a second-in-command. Moutray’s appointment as dockyard commissioner, on the other hand, was merely a civil one, made by the Navy Board rather than the Admiralty, and conferred no authority over active officers. In Nelson’s view Hughes had blundered again. By elevating Moutray he confused civil with active appointments, and effectively demoted Nelson whenever he entered English Harbour.

Hughes was thoughtless, not malevolent: he had intended to serve Moutray rather than slight Nelson. In fact, previous admirals on the station had empowered naval commissioners without provoking complaints, and Hughes remembered that when he had himself been a naval commissioner at Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1778, his instructions had explicity authorised him to act as commander-in-chief when no ‘flag’ or ‘senior’ officers were present. Hughes, therefore, assumed that he was acting entirely within naval custom. He never asked to see Moutray’s supposed ‘especial commission’, nor stopped to ponder the technicalities. For example, in Halifax Hughes had been both an active sea officer ‘in commission’ and a dockyard commissioner. Moutray, on the other hand, liked to wear his old naval uniform, but offered no proof that he held a commission as an active officer from the Admiralty.
⁴⁴

Sir Richard’s misfortune was to command two bright young officers whose grasp of naval procedure and maritime law far exceeded his own. Nelson and Collingwood responded to the admiral’s announcement about Moutray in the same breath as they protested his injunctions on the navigation laws. Their letters were double-barrelled blasts at Hughes’s authority. Collingwood’s protest was the most conciliatory. Though admitting Moutray’s pendant ‘quite an affliction’, he assured the commander-in-chief that he had no wish ‘to appear petulant and contentious’ and suggested a way out of the difficulty. Moutray could not act as a commodore because he was not a serving officer; very well, then Collingwood would temporarily make him one by entering him as a supernumerary on the books of the
Mediator
every time the ship entered English Harbour. In that way, Collingwood felt he could obey the commissioner’s orders without creating an irregularity.
⁴⁵

Nelson, however, rejected Moutray’s authority outright. ‘I beg leave to say that whenever he [Moutray] is in commission as commodore or captain I must obey him,’ he wrote to Hughes on 9 January. ‘It is my duty, and I shall have great pleasure in serving under him. Till then, as a [dockyard] commissioner, I never will obey any order of his. I should lower the rank of the service, and be unworthy to have a command in it.’ Notwithstanding Hughes’s order, he would continue to regard himself as the station’s second-in-command: ‘all officers . . . who are junior to me must obey my orders.’ His letter was deeply offensive to Hughes, for it did more than decline to obey. First, it dismissed and clearly disbelieved the commander-in-chief’s statement
that Moutray had a special commission from the Admiralty; and second, by declaring that he could only comply with Hughes’s orders by acting unworthily he was accusing the admiral himself of being unworthy.
⁴⁶

Perhaps Sir Richard hoped the problem would go away, but it didn’t. No one did anything about the pendant dispute, in written word or deed . . . until the
Boreas
put back into English Harbour on 5 February 1785.

Sure enough, there was Moutray’s pendant, flying from the
Latona
as if the commissioner was a commodore with authority over the squadron. Nelson was in a quandary, partly because he saw a show-down coming and partly because of his friendship for the Moutrays, man and wife. He must have worried about Mary, and what would happen if an open quarrel developed between himself and her husband?

The next day aggrieved messages flew back and forth. Nelson drafted one to Sandys of the
Latona
, upbraiding him for not paying the respects due to the senior captain arriving in port. In other words, poor Sandys must repudiate the pretended authority of Moutray and publicly acknowledge Nelson’s supremacy.

Another of the messages Nelson received from the commissioner himself, upset at the
Boreas
’s failure to salute his pendant. Moutray was obviously still ignorant of Nelson’s opinions. Styling himself a ‘commander-in-chief’ he referred to Hughes’s instructions and required Nelson to place himself under orders. Nelson was ready with his answer. Enclosing a copy of his vitriolic letter to Hughes, he assured Moutray of his ‘personal esteem’ but stated unequivocally that he could accept no orders from him until he was placed in commission.
⁴⁷

Like Hughes, the wounded commissioner suffered with dignity. He shammed amicability, inviting Captain Nelson to dinner as usual, and allowing Mary to steer the conversation to safe ground with her exceptional dexterity. We must suppose that Nelson tried to explain, but he certainly held his ground and on the morning of the 7th called the captain of the
Latona
to account. Sandys had continued to act as Moutray’s flag captain, and flew signals on his behalf. When he called for the naval commanders to send details of their ships to the commissioner, Nelson peremptorily ordered him to the
Boreas
.
⁴⁸

It was an uncomfortable moment for the junior captain. He was several years older than Nelson and had been his superior on the
Lowestoffe
, but ever since he had been falling behind and winning little respect from colleagues. Then in hot pursuit of one of the Eliot
sisters, he was often ashore and even more often drunk and incapable. Nelson liked but pitied him. ‘Little Sandys, poor fellow, between Bacchus and Venus, is scarcely ever thoroughly in his senses,’ he said. ‘I am very sorry for him, for his heart is good, but he is not fit to command a man-of-war . . . such men hurt the service more than it is in the power of ten good ones to bring back.’ Sandys was no stranger to Nelson’s forgiving nature, but knew he was in trouble as he warily climbed aboard the
Boreas
to the customary shrill of pipes.
⁴⁹

Inside the captain’s cabin Nelson came directly to the point. ‘Have you any order from Sir Richard Hughes to wear a broad pendant?’ he asked.

‘No,’ replied the embarrassed Sandys.

‘For what reason do you then wear it in the presence of a senior officer?’ Nelson continued sternly.

‘I hoisted it by order of Commissioner Moutray,’ Sandys blurted out.

‘Have you seen by what authority Commissioner Moutray was empowered to give you orders?’ Nelson asked.

‘No,’ admitted the other miserably.

‘Sir,’ said Nelson grimly, ‘you have acted wrong to obey any man who you do not know is authorised to command you.’

Sandys had no retreat. ‘I feel I have acted wrong,’ he confessed, ‘but being a young [junior] captain did not think it proper to interfere in this matter, as there were you and other older [senior] officers upon this station.’

Nelson did not order the wretched fellow to haul the pendant down and Sandys sailed the next day. The
Boreas
followed shortly afterwards, heading for Barbados to collect Andrews from hospital. In reporting to Hughes Nelson referred to Moutray’s pendant but simply declared ‘he did not think [it] proper to pay the least attention’ to it.
⁵⁰

Nelson seldom saw himself as he appeared to others. Only recently he had written of a fellow captain, ‘I do not like him at all. He is a self-conceited young man.’ That, in truth, was how Hughes was now seeing Nelson: someone stuffed with opinions, constantly questioning or refusing orders, and, most terrifying of all, entirely capable of exposing incompetence in a commander-in-chief. All Hughes wanted to do was to survive his tour of duty with the minimum aggravation. Now Moutray was also complaining to him. He had raised the distinguishing pendant ‘in consequence of your several
orders to me’, wailed the commissioner, but Captain Nelson had refused to recognise it.
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Reluctantly, Sir Richard tackled the firebrand again. On 14 February, when both were in Barbados, the admiral sent Nelson a letter. In it he repeated his claim that Moutray had a ‘special commission’ from the Admiralty, and said his authority to act as commodore was ‘comformable to the example of two late commanders-in-chief, my predecessors of high rank employed upon this station’. Hughes was plainly angry. ‘Why you should . . . judge that it was not your duty to pay any attention to that distinguishing pendant, or to receive any orders from Commodore Moutray, I cannot possibly conceive . . .’
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The water was beginning to boil around Captain Nelson and his reply was more conciliatory. He wrote a vindication of his conduct for the Admiralty, and begged Hughes to do him the justice of forwarding it. Hughes probably had not wanted the issue to reach their lordships back home, but now Nelson left him no choice. In his official report he made light of Nelson’s objections. It was true, for example, that the captain of the
Boreas
had presided over courts martial, but only when Hughes himself was on the station; Moutray’s acting powers became applicable solely when the admiral was away. However, Hughes let slip one interesting admission. Moutray, he said, had told him that he had ‘the same additional powers as had been vested in the hands of his predecessor, Commissioner [John] Laforey, namely with an especial commission from the Board of Admiralty, authorising and requiring him in the absence of a flag or senior officer to superintend and carry on the duty of the port . . . and . . . to take under his command such of His Majesty’s ships or vessels of war as might occasionally arrive’. Thus, it appears, Hughes himself had never actually seen Moutray’s supposed commission, but depended only upon precedent and hearsay.
⁵³

The affair of the pendant had unsettled more people than it was worth. Moutray felt rejected and bleated to Hughes, while Hughes, who had taken Moutray at his word, felt vulnerable and challenged. Nelson and Collingwood rejected the story about the special commission and thought their status was being undermined. And in between was the hapless Sandys, ducking and diving to avoid brickbats from both sides. It had become a tragicomedy and an entirely unnecessary one. For the truth was that Moutray really
did
have a commission from the Admiralty.

It was dated 25 July 1783 and designated Moutray ‘commander-in-chief,
in the absence of a flag officer or senior captain, of such of His Majesty’s ships and vessels as shall, at any time, be at Barbadoes or the Leeward Islands’. He was empowered to expedite the dispatch of ships making use of the dockyard; ‘to oblige their commanders’ to return to their sea-going duties as soon as possible; and to request details of ships using the dockyard, just as Moutray had attempted to do through the luckless Sandys. He was even authorised to keep naval commanders afloat and prevent them dallying ashore if he thought it would restore their ships to service more speedily. If Moutray had produced this commission much, if not all, of the heat about the pendant would have dispersed. The whole storm had been brewed by poor communications in a climate of pride and distrust.
⁵⁴

Nelson was beginning to appreciate the danger of being branded unreliable and insubordinate, but the Admiralty’s view when it came – that he should have submitted his doubts about Moutray’s status to the admiral, rather than taken unilateral action – was not expressed forcefully. To the board, far away and ignorant of the wider difficulties between Nelson and his commander-in-chief, the issue seemed trivial. And in the event it disappeared as quickly as it had blown in, for while Nelson was still in Carlisle Bay in Barbados he received a letter in a small, neat hand that sloped forward in a way he knew well.

What Mary wrote shocked him. The Moutrays were going home.

The commissioner’s health had not, as he expected, borne up well in the West Indian climate, but that was not the reason for his return. Now that the war was over, the lords of the Admiralty had decided to scale down the dockyard at Antigua and withdraw its naval commissioner. Moutray’s post was struck down by the economic benefits of the peace.

Collingwood had been expecting it, dolefully. ‘I shall miss them grievously,’ he told his sister. ‘She [Mrs Moutray] is quite a delight, and makes many an hour cheerful that without her would be dead weight.’
⁵⁵

Nelson was devastated. His behaviour towards the commissioner now seemed irrelevant and churlish, a spiteful act against a sick old man near the end of his career. Worse still, Horatio suddenly contemplated the emptiness that Mary would leave behind. As he told William a few days later,

I am not to have much comfort. My dear, sweet friend is going home. I am really an April day, happy on her account, but truly grieved were I only to consider myself. Her equal I never saw in any country or in any situation. She always talks of you, and hopes (if she comes within your reach) you will not fail visiting her. If my dear Kate goes to Bath next winter, she will be known to her, for my dear friend has promised to make herself known. What an acquisition to any female to be acquainted with. What an example to take pattern from! [Commissioner] Moutray has been very ill. It would have been necessary he should have quitted this country had he not been recalled.