Nelson (5 page)

The traditional tactics of battle, which saw belligerent fleets in more or less parallel lines banging away at each other over distance, were defensive in character and keyed to a time when the competing navies had been more equally matched. But now Britain’s superiority in battle was making the old safe and sure line-ahead formations increasingly
obsolete. Risks might be taken to achieve decisive results, and the ‘line’ abandoned. When Nelson advised an admirer, the young Lord Cochrane (later the model for the fictional heroes of Marryat, Forester and O’Brian) to ‘never mind manoeuvres, always go at them’, he was not expressing a mindless and reckless enthusiasm for combat. As much as anyone he believed in rigorous training and careful planning. Rather he was acknowledging the massive battle superiority of the Royal Navy, and suggesting that its advantages were maximised in close-quarter actions with the enemy.
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That night off the Spanish coast he was set to prove it in a straight stand-up fight.

It was ten-forty before
La Minerve
slipped under the impressive stern of the
Santa Sabina
, the Spaniard’s burning poop light and greater size marking it as the senior of the two enemy ships. The odds were roughly equal on the face of it, though Nelson had a slight superiority in the number of guns and weight of metal fired.
La Minerve
was a captured French prize. She carried forty-two guns, two of them carronades designed for close-range action, while the Spanish ship mounted forty: twenty-eight eighteen-pounder and twelve eight-pounder cannons. The manpower conferred few advantages either way. On the
Santa Sabina
Don Jacobo Stuart commanded some 286 men, whereas Nelson had 216 seamen and 25 marines, giving a total of 241, besides perhaps a score of ‘supernumeraries’.
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But as Nelson knew full well it was teamwork and the skill with ships and guns that mattered. From the beginning he outmanoeuvred his opponent by running alongside the Spaniard’s vulnerable stern, where the timbers were flimsier and there were few enemy guns to face. From that position he could ‘rake’ the
Santa Sabina
with his full broadside, hitting her end-on and smashing wood, dismounting guns and killing and maiming men along the entire length of her decks.

‘This is an English frigate,’ Nelson called, with his usual submersion of the other British nationalities. There was no answer, and
La Minerve
opened fire, the guns along her side spitting fire into the night as they bore upon their targets. Three minutes later the
Blanche
brought the other Spanish frigate, the forty-gun
Ceres
, to action, and all four ships were wreathed in the powder smoke of murderous point-blank volleys. The horror of a sea fight was like no other. Large round shot could smash through ship timbers more than two feet thick, and there was nowhere for men to run. Caged in a wooden hell, amidst the roar, smoke and stench of guns, and air filled with lethal flying
debris, they knew that only inches of plank and sheathing divided them from the deep below. Men slaved silently at their pieces, and fell and suffered and died.
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Nelson’s opponent, Don Jacobo Stuart, was not one to run away from a challenge. A descendant of the expelled James II of England, he was as proud as any Castillian
caudillo
and fought bravely, but he was simply outgunned and outsailed. Cockburn, who as captain of
La Minerve
was responsible for her management, handled his frigate beautifully. She wore this way and that to prevent her opponent escaping to leeward, and unleashed one broadside after another into her with mechanical precision. According to the Spaniards, the fire from Nelson’s ship ‘was a perfect hell’.
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While
La Minerve
and
Santa Sabina
manoeuvred and fought, as if partners in a macabre midnight dance, the
Blanche
vindicated the commodore’s confidence by defeating the
Ceres
with little trouble. Preston, like Nelson, fired into the Spaniard’s bow and stern when he could, raking her fore and aft. As usual the enemy fire was misdirected, largely flying up towards masts, spars, sails and empty air rather than into the British hull; it was also sluggish and poorly aimed. ‘When they did fire their guns they were in such haste that their shot all went over us,’ recalled an American seaman aboard the
Blanche
. After taking eight or nine broadsides in half an hour and suffering forty-five casualties the
Ceres
ceased firing. Her colours were hauled down and she called for quarter.
⁹

Meanwhile, Nelson’s battle with the
Santa Sabina
raged for two and a half hours, ending at about one-twenty in the morning when Don Jacobo hauled down his colours and declared he could fight no more. The masts of the Spanish frigate had all been damaged close to the decks, her mizzen was down, her hull riddled and her sails and rigging slashed to pieces. Many of her men were killed and wounded – probably many more than the fifty-six later admitted in Cartagena and fewer than the 164 claimed by Nelson. But she had not been crushed with impunity.
La Minerve
had suffered most aloft, due to the inefficient continental practice of trying to bring down masts and sails, but she had also sustained forty-six human casualties, including a midshipman and seven others killed. Lieutenant Noble had been showered in splinters and injured in six or seven places.

Jonathan Culverhouse, the first lieutenant of
La Minerve
, went aboard the prize and sent the Spanish captain on the opposite journey. Once on the quarterdeck of the British ship, Don Jacobo explained
that he had lost all his senior officers and offered his sword, but Nelson generously declined to take it. While they talked Thomas Masterman Hardy, second lieutenant of the victorious ship, took a prize crew of twenty-four to the
Santa Sabina
to help Culverhouse secure the prisoners, clear wreckage and fix the ship for sailing as best they could. Speedy repairs were begun on both ships as they got underway towards the southeast,
La Minerve
towing her prize behind.

Elated by his victory, Nelson returned to his cabin to pen a candlelit report to Sir John Jervis. This was a dispatch obviously destined for the
London Gazette
and he was determined to do his men justice. No one fought more tenaciously for his followers than Commodore Nelson and he jumped at this new opportunity to advance Cockburn and his officers.

You are, sir, so thoroughly acquainted with the merits of Captain Cockburn [he wrote] that it is needless for me to express them, but the discipline of the
Minerve
does the highest credit to her captain and lieutenants, and I wish fully to express the sense I entertain of their judgement and gallantry. Lieutenant Culverhouse, the first lieutenant, is an old officer of very distinguished merit. Lieutenants Hardy, [William Hall] Gage, and Noble deserve every praise which gallantry and zeal justly entitle them to, as do every other officer and man in the ship. You will observe, sir, I am sure with regret, amongst the wounded, Lieutenant James Noble, who quitted the
Captain
to serve with me, and whose merits and repeated wounds received in fighting the enemies of our country entitle him to every reward which a grateful nation can bestow.

If the engagement had ended there, Nelson would have taken two Spanish frigates and scored a minor but striking and morale-lifting success. Unfortunately, it did not, and the fortunes of war had more in store for him.

At three-thirty in the morning another frigate materialised through the gloom. Nelson and Cockburn thought it was the
Blanche
, which had separated in her battle with the
Ceres
, but at four-fifteen they heard the newcomer hailing the
Santa Sabina
in Spanish. Then it flung a broadside into the crippled prize. Instantly,
La Minerve
cast off the tow line to allow Culverhouse and Hardy to shift for them-selves, and turned upon their fresh adversary. Once again the weary men, their rest already stolen by the previous encounter, rushed to their stations. Once again the fire power and seamanship on Nelson’s frigate told. After a mere thirty minutes the newcomer, the
Perla
,
had had enough. The Spaniards simply wore their ship to turn and ‘run off’.

But now, victorious in three night combats, the British were dogged with bad luck. The
Blanche
, further seaward, had long realised that what they had taken to be isolated enemy warships were in fact lookouts for a much larger enemy force. In fact they belonged to the principal Spanish fleet under Don Juan de Langara y Huarte, bound for Cartagena. At the beginning of his fight with the
Ceres
, Captain Preston had noticed two more frigates to leeward, and by the time he had defeated his opponent another ship was also visible. Fumbling to take possession of his prize in squally weather, he eventually gave up as enemy ships gathered right and left. With dawn filtering over the water on the 20th, Preston counted six Spanish ships in the offing, apart from the original pair, and two of them were ships of the line, far too formidable for any frigate to engage. Some of the Spaniards were already turning upon
La Minerve
, but a dozen miles lay between the two British vessels and Preston was powerless to help. His duty now was to save his ship and run.

Nelson was in deep trouble.
La Minerve
had started the battle several men short of the full complement of three hundred, suffered fifty-seven killed and wounded defeating the two enemy frigates, and sent another twenty-six to her prize. In continuing bad weather the remaining hands were straining every sinew to repair sails, rigging and spars, and support battered lower masts when daylight revealed the fresh antagonists astern. Of two enemy ships of the line visible, one was the massive three-decked
Principe de Asturias
of 112 guns. Like Preston, Nelson had no option but to flee. He fired some defiant but futile shots into the advancing three-decker and turned tail.

It was then that an unusual act of heroism aboard the
Santa Sabina
prize helped save
La Minerve
. Lieutenants Culverhouse and Hardy, who commanded, were no strangers to derring-do. Culverhouse was a West Country man from Glastonbury, with a home in Bideford. About thirty-six years old, he was one of many able officers without the social connections to achieve steady promotion, and had been a lieutenant for nine years. A former shipmate thought him a ‘very active’ and ‘excellent signal lieutenant, a good sailor, an agreeable messmate, and in every respect a very clever fellow’. He was popular too, ‘full of fun and drollery’ and capable of entertaining all and sundry with ‘humorous songs in the most comic style’. Hardy, a big square-shouldered, large-featured man from Dorset, was a practical, business-like
officer. Though under thirty he had been at sea since the age of twelve, like Nelson himself, and knew most there was to know about managing a ship. Both men had followed Cockburn into
La Minerve
from his previous frigate, the
Meleager
, and had been earning Nelson’s approval over the last eighteen months. Commanding the
Meleager
’s boats they had captured the
Belvedere
in July 1795, and both had won additional laurels during Nelson’s attacks on Loano and Oneglia the following spring.
¹⁰

Now in charge of the Spanish prize, they decisively intervened to spare their superior officers and old ship from capture. Rather like a female duck feigning injury to draw a predator from her young, the injured
Santa Sabina
limped away to the northeast, raising the English over the Spanish colours in a provocative gesture of defiance. That insult may have done the trick, for the enemy three-decker and a frigate turned upon the wounded ship. She had no chance, and at about nine-thirty, after her fore and main masts had been brought down, Culverhouse and Hardy surrendered.

But
La Minerve
made good her escape. Still pursued by a ship of the line and a pair of frigates, Nelson fled past Cartagena and eventually shook off his opponents as dusk fell at around six o’clock. He reached Porto Ferraio in Elba on 26 December, two days ahead of the
Blanche
and in time to attend a seasonal ball. It was his initial victory over the frigates, rather than the ignominious retreat, that was remembered, and the commodore was received at the festivities to the vigorous strains of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and ‘See the Conquering Hero’.

Nelson fought the midnight action off Spain on the eve of achieving national fame in the battle of Cape St Vincent and within months of his subsequent promotion to the rank of rear admiral. On the other hand he had been at sea since boyhood, and the engagement followed almost four years of continuous war experience in the Mediterranean. It reveals him to us, therefore, as a budding admiral with his apprenticeship thoroughly completed but with his great years ahead.

Almost all the qualities that would distinguish him were already in place, and some shine fiercely from the brush with the Spanish frigates. His zest for action and fame was certainly apparent. Contrary to normal practice Nelson personally wrote the account of the battle for the captain’s log to ensure that the record was both correct and
appreciative. In his letters he almost crowed with self-magnification. His action would be ‘in the
Gazette
,’ he told his father. ‘Take it altogether, I may venture to say, it is the handsomest done thing this war. It was what I know the English like in a
Gazette
. I feel all the pleasure arising from it which you can conceive.’ No less important, the skirmishes demonstrated that Nelson had already got the measure of his adversaries, and realised that historic opportunities were developing. The disparity between the performances of the Franco-Spanish navies on the one hand and the British on the other was growing and opening a path to decisiveness in battle. Risks that might have been unjustified in the past were becoming viable.
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