Nelson (53 page)

The case incriminated the customs officers in Antigua, especially since Seth Warner excused his deception by claiming that he had actually been persuaded to apply for a British register. Nelson suspected that the officials were registering foreign vessels purely to coin in the registration fees.

In Antigua attempts to clean up the customs had already begun to
bite. Even before Nelson got involved, the home secretary had been complaining about registration scandals, and on 2 June 1785 repeated his calls for an investigation, telling Shirley that the business was ‘carried to a pitch’ and culprits had to be named and punished. Spurred on, Shirley was making progress, and revealed that registers were being hawked from one trader to another in the West Indies. He promised that any official involved in fraud would be ‘immediately’ dismissed. Under the inquisitorial glare of government, the courts in Antigua strove to show integrity and efficiency. Captain John Holloway, who dealt with them the next year, was ‘fully persuaded’ that the law officers of Antigua, unlike those on some other islands, were ‘zealously attached to His Majesty’s government’.
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Nelson’s new evidence, therefore, hurt a bureaucracy struggling to clean up its image. In its defence the collector of customs asserted that Seth Warner had originally represented himself to be a Loyalist who wanted to move to Dominica where he had once lived. A clerk in the customs department had claimed to be acquainted with Warner, and supported his story. However, the customs office admitted that after the
Sally
got her register suspicions had grown and the clerk was dismissed for ‘nefarious practices’, but there was never enough information to prosecute Warner. Notwithstanding this, he was prohibited from trading in Antigua again.
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Nelson refused to be appeased, and forwarded the register to Lord Sydney together with a further diatribe against the frauds of customs officials. He accused them of granting registers to whomsoever they pleased, fattening themselves on registration fees, and of obstructing his efforts to bring interlopers to account. So rife was the corruption that he advised ‘exemplary punishments’, and the recall of all existing ships’ registers for replacement with a new form of certification.

In some respects Nelson derived enormous satisfaction from leading the charge against illicit trade. In these dull times it was a substitute for naval glory, and a means of satiating his need for attention. Even without a war he could be the sword of the people, cutting a swath through corruption and selfishness. ‘I shall stand acquitted before your Lordship and my country of any interested [partisan] views in thus representing these malpractices,’ he informed Sydney with pride, ‘for I have no interest to obtain any place, nor do I ever expect any but what rises from a faithful discharge of my duty.’
⁴³

Paradoxically, in the drawn-out struggle over the navigation laws the praise Nelson craved so desperately sometimes fell upon those who had been less than enthusiastic about his activities. There were few rewards to be had from this squalid slugging match, but Sir Thomas Shirley and Sir Richard Hughes, the ‘old officers’ once affronted by a young gentleman, were in for their shares.

Sir Thomas was quick to realise that Whitehall was more interested in enforcing the navigation laws and purifying their administration than listening to a parade of their shortcomings. Sydney had supported Collingwood and Nelson, and demanded reform. Under the shadow of the home secretary, Shirley put his quarrel with the captain of the
Boreas
behind him. Now that the little fellow and his allies were being praised by government, Shirley supported them to the hilt. He assured Sydney that he often met Collingwood and was at one with him, while he would certainly enquire closely into Nelson’s allegations of corruption. What was more, he took credit for their captures, proudly telling the minister on 23 July 1785 that ‘there have been lately several seizures at the different islands under my government!’ Nelson bore no grudges. In August 1786 he even took Shirley’s son William as a protégé aboard his frigate.
⁴⁴

Sir Richard Hughes earned even more from Nelson’s achievements. As commander-in-chief of the station he was due a share of the prize money his wayward captains were earning. He got £97 for the
Fairview
, taken at Nevis, compared with the £388 distributed between Nelson and his ship’s company. The admiral’s professional credit also rose at home. The Treasury, the senior ministry, was pleased with the seizures and impressed by the information Nelson had forwarded about the
Rattler
’s early difficulties with the customs at St Kitts. In August 1785 the Treasury informed the Admiralty that whatever a ship’s register said, proof of a vessel being foreign-built or manned by foreigners was sufficient to warrant condemnation, and revenue officers would be made answerable to the enquiries of naval captains; any corrupt officials would be punished. Furthermore, in a passage the Admiralty sent appreciatively to Hughes, the secretary of the Treasury declared that ‘the commander-in-chief of the Leeward Islands and officers under him have shown a very commendable zeal in endeavouring to put a stop to the illicit practices which were carrying on in the islands’.
⁴⁵

In England ministers assumed that Nelson had acted with the support, rather than the indifference, of the commander-in-chief, and Hughes found himself praised on account of a subordinate he had left to the wolves. When he saw the Treasury paragraph Nelson, who had driven the lauded campaign, felt cheated of credit. ‘The captains Collingwood were the only officers with myself who ever attempted to hinder the illicit trade with America,’ he complained, ‘and I stood singly with respect to seizing, for the other officers were [at first] fearful of being brought into scrapes.’ To Locker he admitted that he felt ‘much hurt that after the loss of health and risk of fortune, another should be thanked for what
I
did
against
his orders’.
⁴⁶

Not surprisingly, the praise from Whitehall and shares in prize money completely reconciled Sir Richard Hughes to his estranged second-in-command. He was ‘highly pleased’ with the captain’s conduct, and to Nelson’s astonishment the two became ‘good friends’. When the
Boreas
put into Barbados, where the admiral occupied rooms, Nelson called for dinner. Horatio always had his doubts about Hughes. The man lacked professional judgement and resolution, as well as a certain social propriety. While his wife, Lady Hughes, and their daughter (now ensnaring Major John Browne of the 67th Regiment into marriage) were residing in Antigua, the admiral was paying rather too obvious attention to a certain Miss Daniels in Barbados. But once the animosity between Hughes and Nelson had melted, the captain discovered his superior a man of much personal charm. His ‘politeness and attention to me is great,’ he wrote in March 1786, grudgingly confessing that he liked Hughes after all. And the next month he was able to report with even greater certainty that, ‘I have been upon the best terms with the admiral, and declare I think could ever remain so . . . He is always remarkably kind and civil to every one.’ It seemed that Nelson’s fortunes, after suffering so many tribulations, were coming full circle.
⁴⁷

In a sense it was a triumph for the junior captains, although one that must be seen in context. The strict enforcement of the navigation laws was hardly the noble cause Collingwood and Nelson supposed, and their victories were of very doubtful utility. Even in St Kitts and Nevis, where the courts had supported the navy, the ‘rigid execution’ of the laws was blamed for inflation ‘at a time when our situation could ill bear any additional burthens, and when we had cause rather to expect the fostering assistance of the parent state’.

Then again, in 1786 the complaints of Nelson and the Collingwoods
prompted the Admiralty to declare unequivocally that American ships built during the rebellion and found engaging in trade were as liable to seizure as those launched after the peace of 1783. They were equally deemed to be foreign vessels. At home the government thought it was protecting native shipbuilding by insisting that trade moved in ‘British bottoms’, but merchants in St Kitts knew that their coastal trade went in American ‘droghers’ built since 1776 and subsequently purchased by islanders. Wood decayed quickly in the West Indies, vessels had to be replaced regularly and the closest supply of ‘droghers’ remained the United States. The Admiralty’s new regulations outlawed the ‘droghers’ at a stroke. Sugar piled up in creeks and bays, unable to be moved to the ports, and British merchantmen sat idle, waiting to ship it to England. In the spring of 1786 the islanders asked Governor Shirley to suspend the new regulations, at least until the harvest was cleared and the matter could be reconsidered.
⁴⁸

Ultimately the navigation laws, serving neither Britain nor the West Indian islands, could not be defended. For a while the government persisted, passing an act to tighten the registration of ships in 1786, and renewing orders to naval and civil officers to stamp out illegal trade. But the islands needed the foreign trade, and hopes that the Canadian colonies would supply their wants proved delusive. As late as 1790 Nova Scotia was importing large amounts of American grain, foodstuffs and timber, the very products it was supposed to be supplying the British West Indies. Nor were the contrary arguments of Shirley and others entirely ignored. When the Navigation Act was renewed it contained a clause allowing governors the discretion to permit imports from foreign ‘islands’ in cases of acute public distress. They jumped upon it. In the Leeward Islands, Sir Thomas was besieged with applications for a relaxation of the navigation laws, and by July 1787 was having to grant general indulgences permitting merchants to import goods from America and foreign islands in the West Indies. The same year the British governments declared partially free ports throughout their possessions in the Caribbean.
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However, if Nelson’s cause was doomed to eventual retreat, he had triumphed in the short term, and his campaign had encapsulated the man’s weaknesses and strengths. It showed him hasty, myopic, arrogant, disobedient and contentious, but it also betokened leadership and tremendous moral and physical courage. He had refused to be overawed, intimidated or swerved from a matter of principle; his willingness to lead where others hesitated in the face of danger had
seized the initiative from superiors, and inspired followers; and he had persevered, making light of difficulties, until a victory had been won. He had engaged propertied merchants, artful lawyers and shifty officials in the strange ill-lit labyrinthine world of imperial and prize law, and emerged victorious into the sunlight. It is not surprising that the reputation that spread through the islands was that of a young man worthy of weighing in any reckoning.

Among the few who had admired Nelson in the darker days was the president of the council of Nevis, Mr John Richardson Herbert. Herbert was an unlikely benefactor. He was one of the richest merchants in the colony and related by marriage to the governor of Barbados. It was a niece Herbert shared with Governor Parry – Miss Parry Herbert – who may, in fact, have been the means of bringing Nelson and the president together. In the spring of 1785 Nelson transported Miss Parry from Barbados to Nevis, and probably for the first time walked between the globe-topped stone pillars that welcomed visitors to the Herbert mansion, Montpelier. Soon, it seems, Nelson found himself being observed rather closely at the dinner table, and shortly afterwards an intrigued female guest at Montpelier was penning her impressions to a friend:

We have at last seen the little captain of the
Boreas
, of whom so much has been said. He came up just before dinner, much heated, and was very silent, yet seemed according to the old adage to think the more. He declined drinking any wine, but after dinner, when the president as usual gave the three following toasts, the king, the queen and royal family, and Lord Hood, this strange man regularly filled his glass, and observed that those were always bumper toasts with him, which having drank, he uniformly passed the bottle and relapsed into his former taciturnity. It was impossible during this visit for any of us to make out his real character. There was such a reserve and sternness in his behaviour, with occasional sallies, though very transient, of a superior mind. Being placed by him, I endeavoured to rouse his attention by showing him all the civilities in my power, but I drew out little more than ‘yes’ and ‘no’. If you, Fanny, had been there, we think you would have made something of him, for you have been in the habit of attending to these odd sort of people.
⁵⁰

The recipient was yet another of Herbert’s nieces, a twenty-four-year-old widow named Mrs Frances Nisbet. A little later, early in May, she met Nelson herself, apparently for the first time, and they talked of a mutual acquaintance who had been in Nevis some years before. Writing to his brother William on the 12th of the month, almost as an afterthought, Nelson recounted how he had ‘just come from Nevis, where I have been visiting Miss Parry Herbert and a young widow [Frances Nisbet], the two latter known to Charles Boyles [who commanded the
Barbados
on the station in 1784]. Great inquiries after him by the damsels in that island.’
⁵¹

That ‘young widow’ would become Nelson’s wife.

Nelson for ever – any time
Am I his to command in prose or rhyme!
Give me of Nelson only a touch,
And I save it, be it little or much:
Here’s one our Captain gives, and so
Down at the word, by George, shall it go!

Robert Browning,
Nationality in Drinks

N
ELSON
saw much of Nevis in the months after he met Fanny. The capture of the American ships in May, the trial in June and the contingent controversy kept him on the island for much of the spring and summer of 1785. After Nelson’s victory in the local vice-admiralty court he spent some time as a guest in Herbert’s house, Montpelier. The trips away were brief and increasingly to be regretted. Sometimes the
Boreas
crossed the shallow two-mile strip to St Kitts to search for more foreign traders, but Nevis kept drawing him back with intensifying power.