Nelson (69 page)

If all this happened, it was due in no small measure to Nelson. William Henry, to whom Wilkinson and Higgins had originally directed their proposals, had done nothing to investigate the charges of abuse, and it had been left to Nelson to spearhead the attack. He had done so creditably, carefully sifting the documentation, directing the allegations to the appropriate boards, and arguing Wilkinson and Higgins’s
cause in letter and person. Despite his own reduced circumstances, he had stood behind the two merchants in moments of despair, and spent his own money in postage, travel and lodgings. Indeed, he neither asked nor expected any material reward for his efforts, and as far as we know was only reimbursed for the one trip he made to London for the Victualling Board in the summer of 1789. Though Nelson’s biographers have shown little interest in this sortie against Old Corruption, it testified to his tenacity in pursuit of a principle and adds to his stature.
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Sadly, whistle-blowers court reprisals, and Wilkinson ruined what was left of his life. Though released from prison in Antigua by the Insolvency Act of 1790, he was pursued by a single creditor and suffered another eighteen months’ incarceration in Virginia. Soon afterwards he showed up in London, where he was committed to the King’s Bench, a debtors’ prison for gentlemen. He was still there in 1798, counting nearly nine years in one jail or another. At that time he made another appeal to Nelson, then something of a national hero. ‘It is with sorrow I inform you that I have not the smallest power of being useful to you,’ Nelson replied, reflecting upon an episode that now belonged to his past. ‘I was probably in a great measure the cause of your exertions to detect bad men who were cheating our country, and I hope the desire of preventing bad men from fattening on the plunder of my country is still uppermost in my mind.’ But he believed his interest minimal, and could only refer the unhappy supplicant to Sir Andrew Hamond, the current comptroller of the Navy Board as well as ‘a good man’. It did no good, and the
Gentleman’s Magazine
recorded the miserable finale for 24 August 1798. ‘[Died] at his apartments in the King’s Bench prison, William Wilkinson, esq., of Antigua. He was one of those whose debt exceeded the limitations of the late insolvent act.’ Even though he had outlived his greatest adversary, Whitehead, who had died in England seven years before, Wilkinson’s end illustrated the crippling penalties of eighteenth-century debt.
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It was a fate that could so easily have plucked Nelson from his rural retreat and lodged him behind a powerful prison door. In 1790 he had to seek Admiralty protection as the last rumbling aftershocks of his other West Indian campaign against the contraband traders again threatened him with ruinous lawsuits. Nelson had heard the distant thunder. There had been stories of an impending pamphlet that would accuse him of branding the planters disaffected smugglers, but it was not until 20 March that the counterattack came to the door.

On that day the captain received a letter from solicitors acting for James and William Sheafe of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, owners of the
Jane and Elizabeth
, the American brig Nelson had seized in Barbados four years before. Nelson was invited to admit he had been ‘hasty’ and to negotiate damages; otherwise the solicitors demanded to know the attorney to whom he wanted their writ delivered. Whatever amount Nelson was being sued for, it was beyond his means. Into his third year of unemployment, his resources were evaporating, and he had just returned from a trip to London in which he had even begged the Admiralty to pay him for the time he had commanded a garrison in Port Royal more than ten years earlier. Now thoroughly alarmed, Horatio sent the letter to the Admiralty, seeking an assurance that he would not be left to the wolves. It was with relief that he learned that his case had been referred to the Treasury with a recommendation that he be defended from prosecution.
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But he did not breathe easily for long. About a month later, on 26 April, Nelson returned to the parsonage after a trip to a nearby fair, pleased with a small horse that he had purchased. Fanny greeted him with an anxious face. A man from London had called during his absence and served the aforementioned writ. Nelson examined the document. It was dated that very day, and gave notice that an action for damages would commence against him in a month’s time. The
Jane and Elizabeth
and its cargo of timber and fish were valued at £5,000, but Nelson was also held liable for inconveniences and such expenses as the wages of the crew and the cost of returning them to their homes. Although no overall sum was mentioned, Nelson stood to be arrested and imprisoned for debt.
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Still unsure that a definite decision to defend him had been made, Horatio immediately scribbled another letter to the Admiralty and in the meantime concocted a desperate plan to escape to France. If he was arrested and imprisoned it would be all the harder to organise his defence, so he decided to quit the country first, leaving Fanny to pack essentials and follow in the safe keeping of his brother Maurice. Fortunately, Nelson’s friends were alerted by anxious letters and rallied around. William Henry, now the Duke of Clarence, stood on hand, while Captain Pole appealed to the Prince of Wales, who declared his support for Nelson ‘in the highest terms’. More instrumentally, Captain Pringle marched into the Treasury building to confront secretary Rose. The reply was reassuring and unequivocal: Nelson was reckoned a good officer and could rely upon a publicly-funded defence. The news
reached Horatio on 4 May and the flight to France was duly abandoned.
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The matter never destablised him again, but it left him shaken. Even a public defence could fail, and incarcerate and ruin him. ‘I see a person may do their duty too well,’ he sighed. It was his reputation that most worried him. ‘The character of an officer is his greatest treasure,’ he observed. ‘To lower that is to wound him irreparably.’
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The career of Horatio Nelson was always something of a roller coaster ride, weaving exhilarating heights and depressing lows, and the summer of 1790 ran true to form. No sooner had his morale been mended by the forthright intervention of the government over the issue of the lawsuit than it was crushed by new evidence of Admiralty animosity. His hopes for employment were raised and destroyed within months.

The spark of optimism was struck far away, in an obscure and rocky inlet in the coast of Vancouver Island. The previous year two Spanish ships had arrived in Nootka Sound to claim this corner of the Pacific Northwest for their king. A pair of British trading ships found bartering with the local Indians were seized, their crews carried off to a Mexican jail, and the formal pretensions of the Spanish governments duly presented in London. Pitt was not impressed. He demanded the release of His Britannic Majesty’s subjects and countered with territorial claims of his own. Sabres rattled ominously.

When Nelson read about the affair he scented war, and with it a ship. Leaving Fanny at Swaffham in Norfolk, where she had decided to settle if her husband was employed, he hurried to London, depositing his belongings with his uncle in Kentish Town. At last, after many years a beached whale, he was optimistic. The navy began pressing sailors, and on 8 May Nelson found the Admiralty in a ‘bustle’ and the waiting room thronged with aspiring captains looking for ships. As Chatham was unable to see him, Nelson sat down to declare on paper that he was ‘ready to undertake such employment as their lordships shall judge most proper’. At some stage he was led to believe that though the first ships were already spoken for he would soon be employed, but then Hood delivered a thunderbolt. Gone were the days when Hood had acted the willing patron. When Nelson asked for his recommendation the reply was so crushing that he later admitted it could ‘never be effaced from my memory’. Hood flatly refused support,
and declared that the king had a poor opinion of Nelson. The captain was flattened. The king rarely approved of the friends of his sons, and Nelson could only suppose that his friendship with William Henry had created offence. Deeply wounded, he returned to Norfolk. ‘My not being appointed to a ship is so very mortifying that I cannot find words to express what I feel on the occasion,’ he wrote from the depressing silence of the parsonage.
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Now Nelson was sure there were members of the Admiralty who had it in for him. In July, Hood wrote to explain that his patronage was ‘of no use to anyone’ while so many unemployed captains were lobbying Chatham, but that he would certainly try to get him a ship if war broke out. Yet only a month earlier the board had appointed Collingwood, a junior captain, to the command of the
Mermaid
frigate.
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Back in Kentish Town Uncle William Suckling had a large enough family of his own to protect. William junior was now an army officer, Benjamin a rector and Horace a student, while a daughter, Eliza, and a grandson, William Benjamin, still enlivened the house. But Suckling had a special affection for his naval nephew and sympathised with his predicament. He tried to reach Lord Chatham through Lord Hawkesbury, but with no apparent effect. About the same time Nelson himself was writing to anyone he thought capable of applying pressure. In September he wrote over the head of the Admiralty secretary to the first lord himself. He addressed barren appeals to the Duke of Clarence, now captain of a ship of the line. ‘Dear Nelson . . . by God there is no man I should so soon go out of my way to serve as yourself,’ shouted the prince, but despite the flattering sentiments in his miserably written letters he achieved little for Nelson. The only other straw of encouragement came from Lord Mulgrave, who as Commodore Phipps had led the young Nelson to the Arctic. He was now a commissioner for the affairs of India, and said it would give him the ‘greatest pleasure’ to help Nelson get a ship.
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By then time was running out. On 28 October Spain agreed to a humiliating convention recognising Britain’s prior claim to the Pacific Northwest, and the need for ships and captains eased. Nelson’s ambition was dashed again, and he was disappointed in friends he had loved and respected. As an officer he had always responded when worthy subordinates called for his help; others, he reflected bitterly, seemed less constant. ‘I certainly cannot look on Lord Hood as my friend,’ he complained, and as for Cornwallis, who had gone to the
East Indies without him, ‘I may now tell you that if Kingsmill had gone to India, I was to have been his captain, and the senior one sent out.’
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Events the following spring deepened his emptiness. A dispute with Russia had Pitt mobilising the fleet once again, and Hood himself was to command twenty-nine sail of the line. Several of Nelson’s friends were earmarked for ships, and March and April saw Horatio again trudging around London. He left a message at Hood’s door but received no answer. The Duke of Clarence, he was relieved to find, still welcomed him and spoke as loudly as usual, this time about commanding a division in a fleet bound for the Mediterranean. Briefly Nelson fooled himself into believing his luck might change. He did not underestimate the difficulties of campaigning in the Baltic (‘narrow seas and no friendly ports are bad things’), but judged that neither Pitt nor Catherine the Great, whom he compared to England’s own Elizabeth I, would back down. As it happened, it was the British Parliament that blinked and refused to support its first minister. Nelson made another sad journey home.
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There seemed no way forward, and Nelson’s next trip to London more than a year later was to a large extent less self-serving. Again, he was answering calls of distress. In March 1791 we find him writing to the Navy Board in an effort to clear the name of a seaman of the
Albemarle
unjustly listed as a deserter. The next year he received a letter from Donald Trail, the former master of the same ship, asking Nelson to testify to his character. Trail was in a serious mess. He had voluntarily surrendered to answer charges of brutality and murder relating to his command of the convict ship
Neptune
, and was incarcerated in Newgate awaiting trial at the Old Bailey before the High Court of Admiralty. Trips to London always gave Horatio the opportunity of ‘bowing to the high and mighty potentates’, as his father put it, but it was primarily to help Trail that the captain arrived ‘in town’ in June 1792.
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Waiting for Trail’s case, Nelson sat through the trial of Captain John Kimber on 8 and 9 June. Kimber, a Bristol slaver, was indicted for appalling acts of cruelty said to have been committed upon a slave girl during a second leg of the infamous triangular run from Africa to Grenada in the West Indies. Broadcast by the emancipator William Wilberforce, the affair attracted considerable public interest, and Nelson found himself sitting beside such illustrious observers as the Duke of Clarence, Lord Sheffield and Admiral Barrington, most of
them friends of the accused. Kimber was acquitted, but Nelson took exception to one published account that alleged Clarence had tried to influence the result by ‘gestures’ and ‘improper conduct’.
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Trail and his boatswain, William Ellerington, were tried in three hours on Friday 9 June. The
Neptune
had left England in February 1790 with five hundred convicts bound for the penal colony in Australia’s Botany Bay, and returned by way of China. Nelson regarded Trail as an exceptional master, but had never seen him command a ship and listened to some very disturbing charges. One seaman was supposed to have died after being strapped to a longboat and then flogged and kicked. Evidence was given that another who died had suffered beatings involving fists, feet and a rope, and was left in irons on an exposed deck for days and nights in violent winds. A third alleged victim was John Joseph, a Portuguese cook guilty of some minor misdemeanour. According to the prosecution he was punched by the boatswain and hit with a rope and some wood before being bound to the rigging and flogged. After receiving punishment Joseph was reported to have been kicked as he lay unable to walk, and put in irons for several hours. A quartermaster testified that he ‘went to Joseph that night and found him very ill and crying in his cot’, and that though he eventually resumed his duties he was ‘never . . . well afterwards’ but ‘got worse and worse’. A cabin boy who saw him dying in a Macao hospital said the cook ‘thought he was going to a better world’ but asked that his family be told that he had been murdered. The cat Trail used for floggings, said one witness familiar with naval discipline, was ‘too severe for anybody but a sodomite’.
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