Nelson (97 page)

More diplomatic than in days gone by, Nelson confined his reservations to private letters and remained on excellent terms with Hotham. After returning to St Fiorenzo he was dispatched once again to the riviera, sailing on 15 July with the
Ariadne
and
Meleager
frigates, the
Tarleton
brig and the
Resolution
cutter under his command. He also had the authority of a new rank, possibly an echo of the promises
made by Lord Hood or maybe an acknowledgement of his part in the battle of 13 and 14 March. Whatever the case, newspapers sent by his father informed him that a general promotion of 6 June had raised him to Colonel of Marines of the Chatham Division with its welcome increment in salary.
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It was belated perhaps, but at least it preserved his chances of remaining on the station, where the French were still at large and there were battles to be fought. It also imparted some sense of progression. Nelson’s health was troubling him and he confessed to Sir Gilbert Elliot that ‘my exertions have been beyond my strength. I have a complaint in my breast which will probably bear me down.’ The ship’s surgeon, Mr Reynolds, prescribed rest, but his promotion and the independent command fed his vanity, and put him back at the forefront of the military struggle in the Mediterranean. He had found the one active theatre left within Hotham’s command.
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Since the Corsican invasion Nelson had felt more frustrated than fulfilled, but his education had benefited. The foundations of his future successes were nearly all in place.

He had been an apt pupil, intelligent, diligent and determined, driven by his own dreams of distinction and honour and a strong personality. His progress also reflected the work of many minds – of Captain Suckling, who had preached the gospel of duty; of Mr Surridge, who had taught him to handle and navigate a ship; and of William Locker, who had given him his first major lessons in command and filled his head with the glorious deeds of Hawke.

Perhaps most of all Nelson’s progress reflected his ultimate role model, Lord Hood, the very epitome of duty, determination and daring. Hood shared Nelson’s energy, aggression and self-confidence, and the two men, one a greying sea dog nearing the end of his active life, the other a zealot who commanded the future, had probably often talked about the complete victory they both wanted, and how it might be won. It is easy to believe that in Nelson’s tactics at the battle of the Nile there were distant echoes of what his old mentor had tried to do at St Kitts and Golfe Jouan. Nelson was outspoken in his admiration for Hood, ‘the best officer, take him altogether, that England has to boast of. Lord Howe certainly is a great officer in the management of a fleet, but that is all. Lord Hood is equally great in all situations
that an admiral can be placed in.’ Nelson’s homage was most obvious in his criticisms of Hotham. Whenever he censured Hotham, he insisted that Hood would have acted differently – in other words, as he himself would have acted. The professional views of Hood and Nelson were therefore interchangeable, distinct from Hotham’s and as one.
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Today it is impossible to endorse Nelson’s exalted opinion of Hood, at least in every respect. Undoubtedly the admiral possessed professional courage and resolution, but we have seen how his refusal to heed advice had contributed to the disaster at Toulon and almost derailed (perhaps we should say shipwrecked) the invasion of Corsica. Even Nelson, something of a Hood protégé, had suffered from his blatant favouritism and failure to appreciate talent. According to Fremantle, one of Hood’s most aggrieved captains, ‘most of us are tired of serving under him’. Surprisingly, Nelson remained unusually blind to his mentor’s failings.
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Nevertheless, Nelson had seen the British fleet reach a state of professional perfection under Hood, and learned essential lessons about the importance of discipline, training and health. Rather than ‘loitering’ in port or at sea, Hood had schooled the ships in manoeuvres and battle procedures. The
Agamemnon
herself was a crack unit. For gales and seas, he said, his men cared nothing. Sometimes waves and winds rolled the ship violently, smashed her stern galleries, sprung masts, ripped sails from their yards, damaged the rudder or streamed her decks with water, but the company handled her beautifully, and she was at the head of every general chase. Her gunnery, seasoned on sea and land, could probably not be bettered. Even ‘worn out’ Nelson doubted there was a two-decker in the world that could have captured the
Agamemnon
. ‘I am sure this ship’s company feel themselves equal to go alongside any seventy-four out of France,’ he said. ‘Every man has seen so many shot fired that they are very superior to those who have not been in action.’
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Health was another legacy of Hood’s command, an important one since sick crews and efficiency did not make good partners. Of course, there would always be sick lists, especially in the Mediterranean where arduous work in feverish climates and disease-ridden ports was inseparable from life. The
Agamemnon
suffered brutally during her Corsican campaigns of 1794. But away from the specific damage of particularly demanding assignments, the fleet had made gains under Hood. Scurvy was practically eliminated from the fleet, partly no doubt through the aegis of the fleet physician, Dr John Harness, who came
to the Mediterranean from Haslar Hospital in Portsmouth. The admiral made little use of salted provisions, and shipped live oxen and other livestock on his ships, while efforts were constantly made to procure lemons, onions and oranges as curatives. ‘No fleet ever was in better order to meet an enemy than I conceive ours to be at this moment,’ Nelson wrote soon after Hood’s departure. ‘We are remarkably healthy.’ Scurvy, he later added, was ‘not known’. In fact, before 1796, when Gilbert Blane persuaded the Admiralty regularly to issue lemon juice to the fleets, Nelson and other Mediterranean captains had been schooled in the maintenance of basic health.
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Much that Nelson brought from his experiences with Hood was allowed greater expression under his successor, Admiral Hotham. Most significantly, it was during Hotham’s command that Nelson had finally come gun to gun with the French fleet and judged its worth. The vast superiority of the Royal Navy’s combat skills, he almost instinctively realised, could best be turned to account in close-quarter engagements, and that meant greater tactical flexibility and a readiness to modify or discard the traditional line of battle.

The power of the line-ahead formation, which protected vulnerable bows and sterns and presented discouraging broadside batteries right and left, was obvious. To approach such a line head-on, or even at an angle, offering the weakly defended bow or quarter to those formidable rows of guns, invited terrific risks. The safety of the line, and the potential disaster courting any who departed from it, was written into the printed Admiralty fighting instructions, but a consequence had been the distant sterile exchanges between fleets facing one another in roughly parallel lines, each afraid of abandoning the standard defensive formation.

Nelson understood the importance of the line, but appeared to have relatively little reverence for it in his early years, placing more emphasis upon the need for individual captains to use their initiative to get to close quarters. He was by no means alone in his desire for greater tactical flexibility, but rather part of a tradition that had been growing for half a century.

Some admirals had long elaborated the standing Admiralty instructions to erode the tyranny of the line. Hawke used a ‘general chase’ to release ships to pursue flying enemies in the preliminaries to his defeat of the French at Quiberon Bay in 1759, a victory immortalised in the patriotic song ‘Hearts of Oak’, which Nelson had known since childhood. In 1780 Admiral Sir Charles Henry Knowles opined that
while the line was useful as a way to approach an enemy fleet, it was advisable for ships to pursue their opponents as they saw fit once engaged. Two years later the battle of the Saintes appeared to demonstrate the potential of aggressive tactics when an accidental rupture of the French line enabled some of Rodney’s captains to slip through, double the enemy’s ships and catch them in a destructive crossfire. A Scottish laird, John Clerk of Eldin, advocated exactly such manoeuvres in his
Essay on Naval Tactics
, published in 1790.

Perhaps the most inventive assault upon an enemy fleet, however, was that made by Lord Howe in 1794. He planned to attack from windward, pierce the French line and finish the engagement in the lee of the enemy fleet. Theoretically, this would have given him the advantage of the wind in the opening phase of the battle, and enabled him to attack when he chose. Passing through the enemy line, the British ships would also have been able to rake the French sterns and bows with their broadsides, and once under their opponents’ lee they would have been well positioned to cut off the retreat of any disabled enemies. A badly crippled ship unable to work to windward had to fall to leeward before the wind. Howe’s plan was complicated, but at ‘The Glorious First of June’ some of his ships managed to cut the enemy line and produce a modest victory. Howe had also contributed to more sophisticated tactics by issuing an improved signal book in 1790.
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In his willingness to shed the line, therefore, Nelson was in keeping with the changing perceptions of enterprising forebears. There were a growing number of precedents for new and aggressive tactics. But those battles under Hotham had arguably been even more formative, for they confirmed Nelson in his opinion that a tremendous gulf was opening up between the French and British fleets. Its implications were not lost upon him. The defence offered by the line was no longer imperative, and captains were justified in taking risks to get to close quarters.

Professionally, Nelson had grown in his year with Hotham and become an admiral in the making, but a commander-in-chief needed more than a grasp of the naval tactics. A grasp of the broader strategical situation and the elements of interstate diplomacy were essential. Nelson had seldom been required to think through the ramifications of policy, and sometimes gushed intemperate opinions about what should or should not be done, with little regard for their political consequences. However, when Nelson returned to his duties off the riviera in the summer of 1795, he entered a vortex where the ambitions
of enemies, allies and neutrals crunched head-on. The captain not only acted as a commodore, developing his leadership skills at the head of a squadron, but he also entered the murky waters of Mediterranean diplomacy, filling the one obvious vacuum in his professional education.

As Nelson’s calm eternal face went by,
Gazing beyond all perishable fears
To some imperial end above the waste of years.

Alfred Noyes,
The Phantom Fleet

W
RITING
to the Honourable John Trevor, the British minister plenipotentiary in the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont at Turin, Horatio Nelson admitted wearily that ‘We English have to regret that we cannot always decide the fate of empires on the sea.’
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Never did he feel the truth of that assertion more than during his operations off the riviera coast in 1795 and 1796. Despite all his customary energy and will he watched Britain’s position in the Mediterranean disintegrate, her allies humbled and the triumphal
tour de force
of her foes gather spectacular pace. Try as he might, Nelson found himself largely a tool of damage limitation. It was a dispiriting, disempowering business, akin to being the commander of a crippled ship driven to inexorable destruction by wind and tide. During the eighteen months Nelson cruised off the riviera the old fleet phrase ‘drifting to leeward’ reasonably described his country’s position east of Gibraltar.

There were many reasons for the deterioration. While the British wasted tens of thousands of redcoats in largely fruitless West Indian forays they had no significant military force for the Mediterranean. They relied on allies – allies who proved to be ropes of sand.

Prussia made peace with France in 1795, then Holland, and then
Spain. Even before the Franco-Spanish alliance of August 1796, diminishing tension between the two countries allowed the French to transfer soldiers from their western frontier to Italy. Off the riviera, where the war continued, Nelson found the remnants of the once mighty allied coalition frail and fractious. The Austrians were afraid the Sardinian king would strike a separate bargain with the French, and try to regain his lost possessions of Nice and Savoy at the expense of Austria. On their part the Sardinians resented the overall command of the allied armies being given to a sixty-three-year-old Austrian general, Joseph Nikolaus, Baron De Vins, an officer notoriously unpopular with the Piedmontese. Further east the score of Italian states were incapable of uniting against French invaders. The republic of Genoa, supposedly a neutral buffer between the French and Italy, was economically bound to its powerful western neighbour as well as afraid of her, and it was rife with Jacobin sentiment. The other Italian states were enfeebled by mutual suspicions, internal revolt and irresolute leadership, and to Nelson it seemed that only the Neapolitan Kingdom of the Two Sicilies showed any spirit whatsoever.

With little support from home, and irresolute and fragmented allies at his elbow, Nelson felt a crumbling breakwater against the eastward tide of French imperialism. These new soldiers of the French republic were the fodder of mass conscription, many of them mere ill-provisioned boys, but they fought with a new spirit and in a new style. The time-honoured lines of the traditional armies that faced them were repeatedly weakened by musket fire or artillery before being pulverised by loose but powerful columns of infantry. Rediscovering the military secrets of the ancient Mongols, the French often moved swiftly and flexibly, without the encumbrance of ponderous baggage and supply trains. If they had no artillery, they did without, and food was pillaged from the ground they marched over. What they lacked in discipline they requited by numbers, a reckless courage and the experience of battle after battle. Even ‘half-naked’ they ‘determined to conquer or die’. Reluctantly, Nelson acknowledged the new vibrancy of the French armies. When it came to war they were as unorthodox as he was, and as enthused by revolutionary fervour as he was by a growing hatred of it. On land these alien warriors were ‘like our seamen; they never stop, and know not the word halt’. The contrast with the Austrian whitecoats opposing them became inescapable. As a British army officer with the Austrians wrote, the emperor’s forces were paralysed by ‘indecision, indifference and indolence’.
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