Nelson: The Essential Hero (9 page)

At St Omer he once again fell in love, this time with one of two daughters of a visiting English clergyman. The eldest daughter captivated the impressionable tow-headed captain, who seems to have spent much of his time with the family - ‘French goes on but slowly’ -and who was finally to declare that she was ‘the most accomplished young woman my eyes ever beheld’. He even went so far as to write to his uncle William Suckling asking him if, in the event of his marriage, he would make an allowance of ‘a hundred a year, until my income is increased to that sum either by employment or any other way’. His total income at that time was less than £130 per annum.

Uncle William was certainly prepared to help him - as indeed he did at the time of Nelson’s marriage in 1787 - but before he could signal his readiness to do so Nelson arrived back in London. Various reasons have been suggested to account for this, among them the fact that his twenty-three-year-old sister Anne had just died at Bath. But Nelson’s letters to his correspondents all differ, and to such an extent that one sees him at something of a loss to explain his sudden change of plans. It would seem most probable that the captivating Miss Andrews had rejected him : after all, a postcaptain with no private fortune, on half-pay in a time of peace, was no great catch. The very fact that Nelson does not refer to her again suggests the chagrin of a rebuffed suitor. One cannot help wondering whether in later days she did not regret her decision. As for Nelson, a woman whom he found so attractive - with ‘such accomplishments that, had I a million of money, I am sure I should at this moment make her an offer of them’ and coming from the same background as himself - might well have made an ideal wife. It is noticeable that he never displayed such evidence of passion towards the lady who ultimately did become his wife. Meanwhile, his general air of uncertainty about his future seems reflected in his letters. He wrote to his brother William that ‘London has so many charms that a man’s whole time is taken up’, suggesting that, as far as his pocket permitted, he was living the life of a man about town. A letter written on 31 January, however, is more revealing. The general election of 1784 had taken place, and it is clear that Nelson had for a time considered himself as a potential candidate for Parliament. In disillusionment as to the Walpole connection, he wrote to the Reverend William : ‘As to your having enlisted under the banners of the Walpoles, you might as well have enlisted under those of my grandmother.’ That Fox had got in instead of his hero Pitt was a bitter blow but ‘Mr Pitt, depend upon it, will stand against all opposition : an honest man must always in time get the better of a
villain
; but I have done with politics; let who will get in, I shall be left out.’ Nelson was lucky that the sea soon reclaimed him. A man so honest and ingenuous, so incapable of the backbiting and devious intrigue that constitutes politics, would have proved nothing but an unwitting tool or a sad disaster.

On 18 March he was appointed yet again to a 28-gun frigate, this time the
Boreas.
Miss Andrews’ younger brother George went with him, so at any rate he was still on good terms with the family, even if matrimony was no longer on the cards. He hoped this time for the East Indies, but was to be disappointed. It was to be the West Indies once again, and this time not only with a lot of young midshipmen to train but, worst of all, with the wife of the Admiral commanding the Leeward Islands as a guest aboard. Lady Hughes and her daughter Rosy were to prove a sore affliction, the former eternally talkative and the latter clearly despatched as part of ‘the fishing fleet’ to catch herself a husband on her father’s station - if she could not find one before. Nelson was in a bad temper from almost the moment they set out, and he was rightly worried at the cost (which fell on him) of looking after Lady Hughes and her daughter in the manner that their station warranted. A small ship was hardly the place for women, and to add to his general irritability he had also to take his brother, the Reverend William, who had suddenly decided that he liked the idea of a sea life.

His temper was far from improved by the fact that ‘The d—d pilot, it makes me swear to think of it - ran the Ship aground, where she lay with so little water that the people could walk round her till next high water.’ A dispute with a Dutch Indiaman in the Downs, who was illegally holding sixteen British seamen on board against their will, had to be settled by sending over an armed guard. The Dutch captain reported his behaviour to the Admiralty who, fortunately for Nelson, approved his side of the argument, ‘a thing they are not very guilty of when there is a likelihood of a scrape’. But once at sea, Madeira-bound, the quiet routines and ordered discipline of the ship - even if his quarter-deck was cluttered up with unwanted passengers - exercised their usual calming influence. Crossed in love, disappointed in political ambition, he was happy in that element which seemed to have chosen him quite as much as he had chosen it. His enthusiasm and his pleasure in the details of command, even down to the training of the midshipmen, were recalled many years later by Lady Hughes in a letter to George Matcham, who had married Nelson’s favourite sister Catherine :

As a woman, I can only be a judge of those things that I could comprehend - such as his attention to the young gentlemen who had the happiness of being on his quarter-deck. It may reasonably be supposed that among the number of thirty, there must be timid as well as bold; the timid he never rebuked, but always wished to show them that he desired nothing of them that he would not instantly do himself: and I have known him say: ‘Well, Sir, I am going a race to the masthead, and beg I may meet you there.’ . . . His Lordship never took the least notice with what alacrity it was done, but when he met in the top, instantly began speaking in the most cheerful manner, and saying how much a person was to be pitied that could fancy there was any danger, or even anything disagreeable in the attempt. After this excellent example, I have seen the timid youth lead another, and rehearse his captain’s words. In like manner, he every day went into the school-room, and saw them do their nautical business, and at twelve o’clock he was first upon deck with his quadrant.

She also recollected how on another occasion, when the
Boreas
was at Barbados, she and Nelson were due to call on the Governor and Nelson asked permission to bring one of the midshipmen with them, excusing himself by saying, ‘I make it a rule to introduce them to all the good company I can, as they have few to look up to besides myself during the time they are at sea.’ It is hardly surprising that ‘This kindness and attention made the young people adore him. . . .’

If Nelson at the time, and certainly in recollection, pleased Lady Hughes, the same could not be said of the effect made upon him by her and her husband. Sir Richard Hughes was an amiable but insignificant man who had lost the sight of one eye - something which might have inspired respect if it had been a war wound, but not when it was known that it was due to an accident in youth while chasing a cockroach with a table fork. Nelson was later to dismiss him with the comment, ‘tolerable, but I do not like him, he bows and scrapes too much for me’, adding on closer acquaintance, ‘the admiral and all about him are great ninnies’. There can be no doubt that from the very beginning he was unhappy on this station and, had it not been for the presence of Cuthbert Collingwood and his brother Wilfred, there would have been few with whom he could share his thoughts and feelings, let alone the serious problems that were so
c ~
to confront him. His own brother, William, was soon to leave, though not to any great regret on Nelson’s part: he was unfitted for the life of a chaplain afloat and found, as did so many, that the languorous climate of the West Indies did not agree with him. The eternal afternoon of the tropics, the susurrus of the wind through the palm trees, the monotony of the breakers on the windward side of the islands, and the dreamy slip-slop of the Caribbean on the lee, were often to prove the undoing of men raised in colder and more stimulating climates. Nelson recorded of one of his brother officers, Charles Sandys: ‘I am sorry to say he goes through a regular course of claret every day.’

Antigua, crowned by a line of forts around the crater of its vast ancient volcano, and with the English Harbour - now restored as a haven for those last voyagers under sail, the private yachtsmen -provided the West Indies squadron with a fine base for refitting and maintenance work. The dockyard saw much of Nelson, as did the Commissioner and his wife. Captain John Moutray was a retired naval captain, considerably senior to Nelson, who had been appointed as Commissioner of the Navy in a civil capacity connected with the running of the Antigua dockyard. For Mrs Moutray Nelson conceived one of those sentimental and romantic passions which, while perfectly harmless in itself and recognised as such by both parties, seemed to give him a purpose for living. While the
Boreas
was repainting he was entertained at the Moutrays’ house and his admiration for the lady steadily increased. Knowing that she was unattainable, and being himself on awkward terms - professionally at any rate - with Commissioner Moutray, and well aware that both she and her husband were due to return to England within a year, Nelson permitted himself a Werther-like dream of romance. As he was later to write to brother William : ‘You may be certain I never passed English Harbour without a call, but alas! 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.’

Nelson’s brush with Commissioner Moutray was caused by the fact that Sir Richard Hughes had given the latter a memorandum authorising him to act as Commander-in-Chief during the absence of a senior officer, and to hoist the broad pendant of a commodore. Nelson justifiably, though perhaps somewhat punctiliously, saw this as quite incorrect, for the Commissioner, though formerly a senior postcaptain, was now working in a civilian capacity. Correspondence ensued between Nelson and Sir Richard, and between Nelson and the Secretaire to the Admiralty. In the end the issue was resolved when the Moutrays sailed for England, while for the future the Admiralty decided that all Commissioners of the Navy should be on full pay, and appointed to the nominal command of a ship, or ‘stone frigate’ as such shore-bases came to be called. But the incident in itself should have warned the indolent Sir Richard that he had a gad-fly on the station, one who was determined to see that rules and regulations should be obeyed to the letter.

It is difficult not to see in this and Nelson’s subsequent actions something of an officiousness unattractive in so junior a captain. That, certainly, was how his behaviour was judged by most of the civilians and even many of the Navy in the West Indies. In the major dispute that followed over the implementation of the Navigation Act, however, one finds an officer who is so dedicated to the Service that he is prepared to sacrifice his whole career and prospects to what he judges to be the rights of the laws that he has been appointed to defend. Briefly, only British-built and British-owned ships were allowed to trade with her colonies; this meant that the Americans, who until recently had been British colonists, were now excluded, by the very fact of their independence, from the rights possessed by British citizens. No one could possibly dispute this, but the fact was that not only the inhabitants of the West Indian islands but the Americans themselves did not see things in this light. The former colonists had enjoyed a very prosperous trade with the West Indies and they could not see why they should now be disbarred just because they were now citizens of what, in effect, had become a foreign power; neither could the majority of the merchants in the islands who had long traded with their American friends and had well-established connections with them.

Nelson, long since removed from the scene of his youthful indignation and therefore no longer pressing his own case, could be quite dispassionate in the account that he gave in the ‘Sketch of My Life’. Investigation has shown that his statement of the case is accurate and, though at this distance in time it seems but a storm in a teacup, the issue was very real to a junior captain who hazarded his future on the true and just interpretation of the laws. Of the West Indies, he wrote:

The Station opened a new scene to the Officers of the British Navy. The Americans, when colonists, possessed all the trade from America to our West India Islands; and, on the return of Peace, they forgot, on this occasion, they became foreigners, and of course had no right to trade in the British Colonies. Our Governors and Custom-house officials pretended, that by the Navigation Act they had a right to trade; and all the West Indians wished what was so much for their own interest.

Nelson acted according to what he saw as right, and seized many of the American trading ships, incurring so much displeasure and downright hatred in so doing that ‘I was persecuted from one Island to another, that I could not leave my ship’. Admiral Hughes, when called upon for judgement, was unable or, rather, unwilling to make up his mind on the subject. He had hoped for a quiet and easy time in this station, and had little counted on having such a general commotion about his ears - and all caused by a junior postcaptain. Nelson equally had his views about the Admiral:

Our Commander has not that opinion of his own sense that he ought to have. He is led by the advice of the Islanders to admit the Yankees to a Trade; at least to wink at it. He does not give himself the weight that I think an English Admiral ought to do. I, for one, am determined not to suffer the Yankees to come where my ship is; for I am sure, if once the Americans are admitted to any kind of intercourse with these Islands, the views of the Loyalists in settling Nova Scotia are entirely done away. They will become first the Carriers, and next have possession of our Islands, are we ever again embroiled in a French war. The residents of these Islands are Americans by connexion and by interest, and are inimical to Great Britain.