FOOTNOTES:
[39] Josiah Nisbet, her son.
[40] Nelson's eldest brother. There appear to have been two copies of this letter in Nelson's hand. One, of which the latter half only remains, is in the British Museum. It bears the endorsement of Lady Nelson, as given. The other copy, entire, is in the Alfred Morrison collection—Number 536. Nelson probably sent a copy to Lady Hamilton to satisfy her exigencies that the breach was final. The two correspond, word for word,—as far, that is, as the former remains. Maurice Nelson died in April, 1801.
[41] Nelson several times spoke of Nisbet's early promise. The author is indebted to Mrs. F.H.B. Eccles, Nisbet's granddaughter, for a copy of the following letter from St. Vincent to his sister Mrs. Ricketts:—
LONDON, January 22, 1807.
My dear sister,—Upon reflexion it appears best to send you the only letters I can find relative to Captain Nisbet, and to authorize you to assert in my name that Lord Nelson assured me that he owed his life to the resolution and admirable conduct of his stepson, when wounded at Teneriffe, and that he had witnessed many instances of his courage and enterprise. Yours most affectionately,
ST. VINCENT.
This letter explains how St. Vincent, feeling the value of Nelson's life to the country, granted, in the still warm memories of Teneriffe, a promotion which must have been sorely against his judgment.
[42] Nicolas, vol. vii. Addenda, p. ccix. In a letter to Lady Hamilton of the same date, Nelson says: "Read the enclosed, and send it if you approve. Who should I consult but my friends?" (Morrison, vol. ii. p. 142.) Whether the enclosed was this letter to Davison cannot be said; but it is likely. Compare foot-note, preceding page.
[43] Nelson.
[44] Lady Nelson.
[45] Morrison, vol. ii. p. 137.
[46] On the 21st of September, 1802, six months before Hamilton's death, he was still £1,200 in Nelson's debt. (Morrison, vol. ii. p. 404.)
[47] Morrison, No. 684.
[48] Ante, p. 43.
[49] From Mr. G. Lathora Browne's "Nelson: His Public and Private Life," London, 1891, p. 412.
[50] Naval Chronicle, vol. xxxvii. p. 445.
[51] Life of Rev. A.J. Scott, D.D., p. 191.
[52] Nicolas, vol. iv. p. 533.
[53] Ibid., vol. vii. p. ccx. Author's italics.
[54] Ibid., vol. v. p. 60.
[55] It is possible that Nelson here used the word "reflect" in the primary sense of reflecting honor; but in the secondary sense of being a reflection upon those who had denied a just claim, the phrase, ambiguous as it stands, represented accurately his feelings. "I own, my dear Sir," he said again to the Premier, with reference to this decoration, "great as this honour will be, it will have its alloy, if I cannot at the same time wear the medal for the Battle of Copenhagen, the greatest and most honourable reward in the power of our Sovereign to bestow, as it marks my personal services."
[56] See Pettigrew, vol. ii. p. 225; Morrison, vol. ii. p. 176.
[57] This habit is mentioned by Captain James Hillyar, for extracts from whose journals the author is indebted to Admiral Sir W.R. Mends, G.C.B.
[58] Morrison Collection, No. 632, October 8, 1801.
CHAPTER XIX.
COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF IN THE MEDITERRANEAN.—THE LONG WATCH OFF TOULON.—OCCUPATIONS OF A COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF.
MAY, 1803—JANUARY, 1805. AGE, 45-46.
When Nelson, after a three years' absence, returned to the Mediterranean in 1803, he found the conditions, upon which the military balance of power there depended, greatly altered from those he had known during the period of his previous service. He had been present, indeed, almost an eye-witness, at the tremendous reverse associated with the name of Marengo, for that battle, it will be remembered, was fought while he was at Leghorn on his return to England; but Marengo, and the conventions following it, were at the moment only the beginning of an end which then could not be foreseen.
H.M. Ships "Agamemnon," "Captain," "Vanguard," "Elephant," and "Victory"
The most significant token of the entire change of conditions—of the predominant, far-reaching, and firmly fastened grip of France on the land—was the presence of an army corps of fifteen thousand men in the extreme southeast of Italy, occupying the Kingdom of Naples from the river Ofanto, on the Adriatic coast, round to the Bradano on the Gulf of Taranto, and including the useful ports of Brindisi and Taranto. This distant and ex-centric extension of the arms of the Republic bespoke Bonaparte's confidence in the solidity of his situation in the South of Europe; for under previous circumstances, even after his victorious campaign of 1796, he had always deprecated an occupation of Naples, and relied upon threats and a display of force to insure the quiescence of that state. That one of his first steps, upon the renewal of war with Great Britain, should have been to place a large body of troops in a position he once considered so exposed, shows the fulness of his conviction that upon the Continent he had, for the moment, nothing to fear from the other Great Powers. Strongly stirred as they had been by his highhanded aggressions, none as yet ventured to call him directly to account. Great Britain, the least immediately affected, had stepped into the lists, and demanded not only that aggression should cease, but that the state of the Continent should be restored as it existed when she signed the treaty of Amiens. With this requirement she maintained the war, single-handed, from May, 1803, to the autumn of 1805.
It was not without reason that Bonaparte reckoned upon the inaction of the Continent. Austria, although profoundly discontented by much he had done since the peace of Lunéville, in 1801, was too thoroughly disheartened and exhausted by the unsuccessful and protracted struggle which preceded it, to be ready to renew the strife. Limited as she now was, by the treaty, to the eastern bank of the Adige, there was in Northern Italy no force to threaten the French communications, between their divisions in the valley of the Po and the one at the heel of the peninsula. Prussia, playing a double part for years back, seeking from day to day the favor of the most powerful, was wholly committed for the time to the First Consul; while Russia, although her youthful sovereign had abandoned the anti-British policy of his predecessor, remained undecided as to the general course she should pursue amid the ever-shifting perplexities of the day. Less fantastic in imagination than his insane father, Alexander I. inherited a visionary tendency, which hindered practical action, and showed itself in plans too vast and complicated for realization, even when two rulers of the overwhelming power of himself and Napoleon, at a later date, set their hands to the task. Swayed, alternately, by sympathy with the ancient order of things, which Great Britain for the moment represented, and by prospects of Russian aggrandizement, which Bonaparte dangled before his eyes, the Czar halted between two opinions, pleasing himself, meanwhile, in weaving, with associates of his own age, schemes for a general reorganization of Europe. In these the interests of Russia naturally, and quite properly, had a leading part, and not least in those seas and regions that fell within the limits of Nelson's command.
The power of the great states which lay to the northward and eastward of him being thus neutralized, Bonaparte found upon the land nothing to oppose his will, or to contest his influence, in the smaller and weaker nations to the southward and westward, close to his own doors, but isolated from the rest of Europe, except by sea—a weighty exception. Spain, reduced to virtual vassalage in the previous war, no longer even pretended to dispute his orders. She was not engaged in the present hostilities, simply because it suited him better to take a money tribute from her, and to enjoy for French ships the benevolent neutrality of Spanish ports, more necessary to them than to the British. Moreover, if Spain joined in the war, Minorca, restored to her at the peace, would be at the mercy of Great Britain, and Port Mahon, the fine haven of that island, was always a menace to Toulon. The harbors of remote Portugal, where Lisbon formerly had given powerful support to the British fleet, were now closed to it for offensive operations; and Nelson, within whose command its seaboard lay, was strictly enjoined to refrain from any such use of them, even from sending in prizes, except under stress of weather. In Italy, Piedmont had been incorporated with France, while the Italian and Ligurian (Genoa) Republics in the North were so identified with her in action, and so submissive to her, that the capture of the latter's ships was at once ordered by Nelson; and he recommended to his Government that a formal blockade should be proclaimed of her ports, as well as of Leghorn, where the French flag was flown on the same staff as the Tuscan. The States of the Pope, intermediate between these tributaries of Bonaparte in the North and his garrisoned province in Naples, enjoyed only such precarious independence as he from day to day allowed. But, mighty as was the growth of French ascendency, as shown by these changes, the very advantages accruing to France from her advanced maritime positions laid her further open to the Sea Power of Great Britain. The neutrality of Genoa and Tuscany could no longer embarrass the British admiral, as it had Nelson in 1795 and 1796. Offensive operations against them were now merely a question of adequate force, and the South of France depended greatly upon free access to their ports. Taking Piedmont from the King of Sardinia, too, relieved any scruples the British might have concerning their use of the island of Sardinia injuring a friendly monarch, a consideration which kept them away from Sicily.
Nelson, instructed by the experience and observation of the recent past, and by a certain prescient sagacity which was at once native and cultivated in him, recognized that the Mediterranean, with its immense indented coast line, its positions of critical importance,—such as the Straits of Gibraltar and the Bosphorus, Egypt and Malta,—and its comparatively short water distances, was the field of operations to which the maritime ambitions of Bonaparte, debarred a wider flight by the sea-power of Great Britain, must inevitably incline. To this contributed also its remoteness from England, as well as its nearness to France and to the ports subject to her influence in Italy and Spain; while the traditional ambitions of French rulers, for three centuries back, had aspired to control in the Levant, and had regarded Turkey for that reason as a natural ally. It was, therefore, not merely as magnifying his own office, nor yet as the outcome of natural bias, resulting from long service in its waters, that Nelson saw in the Mediterranean the region at once for defence and offence against Bonaparte; where he might be most fatally checked, and where also he might be induced most surely to steps exhaustive to his strength. This conviction was, indeed, rather an instance of accurate intuition than of formulated reasoning. Clear, ample, and repeated, as are his demonstrations of the importance of the various positions at stake, and of the measures necessary to be taken, they rather apply to the necessities of the moment than indicate a wide scheme of policy, which should divert the energies of the enemy to the South of Europe, and so provide the best of defences against his projected invasion of England. Yet even of such broader view tokens are not wanting. "To say the truth," he writes to the Queen of Naples, "I do not believe we had in the last war, and, according to all appearance, we shall not have in the present one either, plans of a sufficiently grand scale to force France to keep within her proper limits. Small measures produce only small results. The intelligent mind of your Majesty will readily comprehend the great things which might be effected in the Mediterranean. On this side Buonaparte is the most vulnerable. It is from here that it would be the most easy to mortify his pride, and so far humble him, as to make him accept reasonable conditions of peace."
It cannot be claimed, however, that there entered into Nelson's thoughts, for Italy, any such diversion as that by which the Spanish Peninsular War some years later drained the life blood of France. The time, indeed, was not yet ripe, nor would the scene have been in any way as favorable to Great Britain; and, moreover, so far from being ready to threaten, her energies were effectually constrained to her own defence, by the superior audacity and direct threats of Bonaparte. Even the limited suggestions for the employment of troops in the Mediterranean, made by Nelson from time to time, failed to receive attention, and he himself was left to struggle on as best he might, with inadequate means and upon a bare defensive, even in naval matters. Great Britain, in short, had stripped herself, incautiously, so bare, and was so alarmed by the French demonstrations of invasion, that she for the moment could think only of the safety of her territory and of her home waters, and her offensive operations were confined to the sea.
Bonaparte understood as fully as Nelson the importance of the Mediterranean to him. His mind was set upon the extension of France's dominion therein,—in its islands, upon its northern and southern shores, and in the East; nor was he troubled with scruples as to the means by which that object might be attained. During the short peace of Amiens, Lord Keith had felt it necessary to take precautions against the re-occupation of Corfu by the French troops; and again at a later date had stationed a ship for the same purpose at the Madalena Islands, belonging to Sardinia, which Nelson afterwards made a rendezvous for his fleet. Algiers, too, had attracted the First Consul's attention. "Algiers will be French in one year after a peace," wrote Nelson in August, 1804. "You see it, and a man may run and read; that is the plan of Buonaparte." "The Ministers of the Dey must know, that an armament at Toulon, and a large army, after the peace with Great Britain, was intended to land and plunder Algiers, which they doubtless would have effected, had not a British fleet been placed in Oristan Bay [Sardinia] to watch their motions." These and similar reasons had led the British Government to maintain the Mediterranean Squadron nearly upon a war footing during the peace. But, if Bonaparte's purpose was fixed to control the Mediterranean some day, it now was set also upon the invasion of England; and although he looked and plotted in many directions, taking long views, and neglecting no opportunity to secure advanced footholds for future uses, he had not yet reached the stage in his development when he would divide his energies between two gigantic undertakings. One at a time, and with an accumulation of force abundantly adequate to the end in view, was his policy all the days of Nelson. The Mediterranean with its varied interests was to him at this time one of several means, by which he hoped to distract British counsels and to dissever British strength; but it was no part of his design to provoke Great Britain to measures which would convert her alarm for the Mediterranean peninsulas into open war with them, or in them, compelling France either to recede from thence, or to divert thither a force that might weaken his main effort. His aim was to keep anxiety keenly alive, and to cut short the resources of his enemy, by diplomatic pressure upon neutral states, up to the last extreme that could be borne without war against them being declared, as the lesser evil; and the nearer he could approach this delicate boundary line, without crossing it, the greater his success. "I do not think a Spanish war [that is, a declaration by Spain] so near," wrote Nelson in November, 1803. "We are more likely to go to war with Spain for her complaisance to the French; but the French can gain nothing, but be great losers, by forcing Spain to go to war with us; therefore, I never expect that the Spaniards will begin, unless Buonaparte is absolutely mad, as many say he is. I never can believe that he or his counsellors are such fools as to force Spain to begin."
The course instinctively advocated by Nelson, transpiring through occasional utterances, was directly contrary to Bonaparte's aims and would have marred his game. "We never wanted ten thousand troops more than at this moment," Nelson wrote shortly after he had reached the station and become acquainted with the state of affairs. "They might save Naples, Sicily, the Morea and Egypt, by assisting and giving confidence to the inhabitants." "It has been my plan to have 10,000 disposable troops in the Mediterranean," he wrote to Acton; and he regretted to the Ministry that they should have withdrawn all the fine army which had regained Egypt in 1801. "The sending them home," he remarked to an occasional correspondent, "was a very inconsiderate measure, to say nothing further of it." His idea was to garrison Gaeta and Naples on the coast of the mainland, and Messina in Sicily; and to throw a force into the mountains of Calabria, which should sustain and give cohesion to the insurrection that he confidently expected would follow. With the British fleet covering the approaches by water, and sustaining and reinforcing garrisons in the ports, there would be imposed upon the enemy, unless he chose to abandon Southern Italy, a scene of operations in a distant, difficult country, with a long and narrow line of communications, flanked throughout by the sea, and particularly by the two fortified harbors which he proposed to occupy. "The peasantry would, I believe, defend their mountains, and at least it would give a check to the movements of the French, and give us time to get a fleet into the Mediterranean." That the attempt would have been ultimately successful, against such power as Napoleon then wielded, cannot be affirmed; but, until put down, it necessarily would have engaged a force very disproportionate to its own numbers, drawing off in great part the army destined against England, as it was diverted two years later by Austria, and giving opportunity for changes in the political conditions, even to the formation of a new Coalition.
Nelson, therefore, was not far from right in reasoning that the Mediterranean should, and therefore would, be the chief scene of operations. In Bonaparte's eyes, to invade Britain was, justly, the greatest of all ends, the compassing of which would cause all the rest to fall. Nelson, weighing the difficulties of that enterprise more accurately than could be done by one unaccustomed to the sea, doubted the reality of the intention, and thought it more consonant to the true policy of France to seize control of the Mediterranean, by a sudden concentration of her fleets, and then to transport her troops by water to the heel of Italy, to the Ionian Islands, to the Morea, to Egypt. So stationed, with fortified stepping-stones rising at short intervals from the deep, future movements of troops and supplies from point to point would be but an affair of coasters, slipping from battery to battery, such as he had experienced to his cost in the Riviera. In this project he thought it likely that France could secure the co-operation of Russia, by allowing the latter her share of the spoils of Turkey, especially in Constantinople. He saw, indeed, that the partition would involve some difficulty between the two partners, and in his correspondence he attributes the Morea and the islands, now to one, now to the other; but the prediction, elicited piece-meal from his letters, received a close fulfilment four years later in the general tenor of the agreements of Tilsit, nor was it less accurate in its dim prophecy of a disagreement.
Such, in broad outline, were the prepossessions and views Nelson took with him from England in 1803, as modified by the information he received upon reaching the station; and such the counter-projects of Bonaparte, to whom belonged, as the privilege of the offensive, the choice of direction for his attack. The essential difference between the two was, that one believed the invasion of England, however difficult, to be possible, and therefore to be the true and first object of his efforts; while the other, without pronouncing that attempt impossible, saw its difficulties so clearly, that he conceived his enemy must be aiming for the Mediterranean from the beginning. It is permissible to remark that Bonaparte, after the failure of the invasion, first busied himself in reducing Austria, Prussia, and Russia, successively, to the state of inaction in which they were in 1803; next came to an understanding with the latter, such as Nelson had foreseen; and then turned to the Mediterranean, where he established his own rule in Naples, in the Ionian Islands, on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, and finally in the Spanish peninsula. Beyond that his advance was stayed by the Sea Power of Great Britain, which at last wrought his ruin. Thus in the event the predictions of the British admiral were postponed, but not falsified.
Nelson's characteristic impatience and energy hurried him on from the moment he took up his command. "I cannot sail before to-morrow," he said repeatedly in Portsmouth, "and that's an age." "If the Devil stands at the door," he tells St. Vincent, "we shall sail to-morrow forenoon." The Admiralty, in its primary anxiety about Brest, imposed upon him a delay under which he chafed angrily. He was directed to meet off that port the squadron of Admiral Cornwallis, in order that, if the latter wanted the "Victory," she might be left there, and an intimation was even given that he was "on no account to pass Admiral Cornwallis, so as to run any chance of his being deprived of the services of the Victory, if he should judge it necessary to detain her." Nelson resented the implication that he was capable of evading an order, like a frigate-captain parting company to better his chance of prize-money. "I beg to assure you that I hold it impossible for any officer, under such orders as their Lordships' to me, to designedly miss Admiral Cornwallis off Brest."
On the 22d of May he was off Ushant, between which and Cornwallis's rendezvous he passed twenty-four hours, fuming and fretting over a delay that was losing him a fresh, fair, northerly wind; the more so, that he was satisfied Cornwallis neither needed nor wanted the ship. "From his conduct,"—not being on his rendezvous,—"I am clear there can be nothing in Brest to demand his attention." On the 23d, however, he could stand it no longer. "What a wind we are losing!" "If the wisdom of my superiors had not prevented me," he growled, "at this moment I should have been off the coast of Portugal. I am aware of the importance of my getting to the Mediterranean, and think I might safely have been allowed to proceed in the Victory." At 6 P.M. of that day, Cornwallis not turning up, he tumbled himself and his suite on board the frigate "Amphion," which was in company, and continued his voyage, going out in all the discomfort of "a convict," to use St. Vincent's expression; "seven or eight sleeping in one cabin," as Nelson himself described it. "It is against my own judgment but in obedience to orders," he told the Earl; while to the Prime Minister, with whom he was in personal correspondence, he lamented the loss, "for I well know the weight of the Victory in the Mediterranean." As he anticipated, Cornwallis did not want the ship, and she joined Nelson two months afterwards off Toulon.
Late in the evening of June 3d, the "Amphion" anchored at Gibraltar, whither she brought the first certain news of the war, though it had been declared nearly three weeks before. The next day was actively employed in giving necessary instructions to the yard officials, and detailing cruisers to guard the entrance to the Straits, and to maintain the communications with the Barbary coast, upon which the Rock depended for supplies of fresh provisions. At 4 P.M. the ship again sailed for Malta, accompanied by the frigate "Maidstone," to which, on the 11th of June, was transferred, for direct passage to Naples by the north of Sicily, the new British minister to the Two Sicilies, Mr. Elliot, who had embarked with Nelson on board the "Victory," and afterwards gone with him to the "Amphion." Throughout the following two years an active correspondence, personal and diplomatic, was maintained with this gentleman, who, like his brother, Lord Minto, placed the utmost dependence upon the political sagacity and tact of the admiral. When the latter, a year later, spoke of leaving the station on account of his health, Elliot wrote to him: "Where such great interests are concerned, I shall not presume to dwell upon my own feelings, although I cannot but recall to your Lordship that I only consented to depart as abruptly as I did from England, to undertake this arduous and ruinous mission, from the expectation that my efforts to direct the councils of this Kingdom would have been seconded by your pre-eminent talents and judgment." After the two frigates parted, the "Amphion" kept on to Malta, where she arrived on the 15th of June.
With the separation of the "Maidstone" Nelson began the extensive diplomatic correspondence, which employed so much of his time during this command, and through which we are made familiar with the workings of his mind on the general political conditions of the Mediterranean. She carried from him letters to the King and Queen of the Sicilies, to their Prime Minister, Acton, and to the British minister to the Court of Sardinia. To these succeeded, upon his arrival in Malta,—as a better point of departure for the farther East, now that the French held the west coast of the Adriatic,—despatches to the British minister to the Porte, to the Grand Vizier and the Capitan Pacha, to the Republic of the Seven Islands, as the group of Corfu and its sisters was now styled, and to the British representative to their government.
All these communications were, of course, tentative, based upon a yet imperfect knowledge of conditions. For the most part they conveyed, besides the notification of his having taken the command, chiefly general assurances of the good-will of the writer's government, and an undefined intimation that all had best be on their guard against French scheming and aggressions. To Naples he spoke more definitely, and indicated at once the considerations that would dictate his course, and, he intimated, should control theirs also. He had been instructed, he said, to consider the welfare of the Two Sicilies as one of the first of British objects, and his Government was convinced of the advantages that would accrue both to Sicily and Naples, if their neutrality could be maintained. They had to do, however, with an enemy that was not only powerful, but wily and unscrupulous; one whose action would be governed wholly by considerations of interest and expediency, not by those of right. Great Britain could not, probably, keep the French out of Naples, but she could out of Sicily, provided, and only provided, Messina was adequately garrisoned and held. If, however, there was any hasty overt action taken, looking to the security of Sicily, it might merely precipitate the seizure of Naples and the entire conquest of the King's continental dominions; or, "ten times more humiliating," leave him "an odious commissary to raise contributions from his unhappy subjects for the French." On the other hand, if, to avert suspicion, there was too much slackness in the measures to guard Sicily, Messina might be suddenly seized, the gates of the island thus thrown open, and, Sicily once lost, "Naples falls of course." "It is a most important point," he wrote to Elliot soon after, "to decide when Sicily ought to be placed in a state of security. For the present, I am content to say that Messina need not be taken possession of; but the strictest watch must be kept by Sir John Acton that we are not lulled into a fatal security, and thus lose both Kingdoms. To save for the moment Naples, we risk the two Kingdoms, and General Acton must join me in this heavy responsibility." "My whole opinion rests in these few words—that we must not risk Sicily too far in trying to save Naples; therefore, General Acton, yourself and myself must keep a good lookout."
This summed up the conditions for Naples during the long two years of watching and waiting, while Bonaparte, concentrating his purposes upon his invasion scheme, was content to leave things quiet in the South. To check, as far as might be, the designs of the French towards Morea or towards Sicily, on either side of the central position they held at the heel of Italy, Nelson employed a proportionately large number of cruisers—five—between Messina and the mouth of the Adriatic; while, to provide for the safety of the royal family, he kept always a ship-of-the-line in the Bay of Naples, the British minister holding orders for her captain to embark them at a moment's notice, and take them to Sicily. "I have kept everything here to save Italy, if in my power," he wrote Elliot two months later, "and you know I was ordered to send a squadron outside the Straits. Fourteen days ago, a French seventy-four got into Cadiz from Santo Domingo, and two French frigates, with some merchant ships. What will they say at home? However, I feel I have done right, and care not." "I must place a squadron between Elba and Genoa," he says again, "to prevent that expedition from moving, and also send some ships to the Straits' mouth, and keep enough to watch the ships in Toulon. These are all important objects, but nothing when compared to the security of the Sicilies."
Nelson's anxiety for Sicily threw him again into contact with an instance of that rigid and blind conformity to orders which always exasperated him. He had brought out directions to the general commanding in Malta, to hold a detachment of two thousand British troops in readiness to go at once to Messina, on the appearance of danger, and to garrison the works there, if he thought they could be spared from the defence of Malta. Nelson told the Prime Minister that discretion, as to such a step, was a responsibility greater than the average officer could bear, and would certainly defeat the object in view; for he would never feel his charge secure enough to permit such a diminution. There was at this time in Malta a body of Neapolitan soldiers, which had been sent there during the peace of Amiens, in accordance with a stipulation of the treaty. The general received an order to send them to Messina. Nelson had pointed out to him that if he did so, in the divided state of feeling in the Neapolitan dominions, and with the general character of Neapolitan officers, for both efficiency and fidelity, the citadel would not be safe from betrayal at their hands. "I have requested him to keep the orders secret, and not to send them; for if they got into Messina, they would certainly not keep the French out one moment, and it would give a good excuse for not asking us to secure Messina." "If General Acton sends for them we must submit; but at present we need not find means of sending them away." The British general, however, sent them over, and then the Neapolitan governor, as Nelson foretold, said it was quite unnecessary for any British to come. "I must apprise you," wrote Nelson to Addington, "that General Villettes, although a most excellent officer, will do nothing but what he receives, 'You are hereby required and directed;' for to obey, is with him the very acme of discipline. With respect to Sicily, I have no doubt but that the French will have it. My former reasons for inducing General Villettes to keep the Neapolitan troops in Malta, was to prevent what has happened; but, in a month after my back was turned, Villettes obeyed his orders, and now the Governor of Messina says, 'We can defend it, and want no assistance.' His whole conduct, I am bold to say, is either that of a traitor or a fool."[59]
Upon his own subordinates Nelson laid a distinct charge, that he should expect them to use their judgment and act upon it with independence, sure of his generous construction and support of their action. "We must all in our several stations," he tells one of them, "exert ourselves to the utmost, and not be nonsensical in saying, 'I have an order for this, that, and the other,' if the King's service clearly marks what ought to be done. I am well convinced of your zeal." In accordance with this, he was emphatic in his expressions of commendation for action rightly taken; a bare, cold approval was not adequate reward for deeds which he expected to reproduce his own spirit and temper, vivifying the whole of his command, and making his presence virtually co-extensive with its utmost limits. No severer condemnation, perhaps, was ever implied by him, than when he wrote to Sidney Smith, unqualifiedly, "I strictly charge and command you never to give any French ship or man leave to quit Egypt." To deny an officer discretion was as scathing an expression of dissatisfaction as Nelson could utter; and as he sowed, so he reaped, in a devotion and vigor of service few have elicited equally.
In Malta Nelson remained but thirty-six hours. Arriving at 4 P.M. on the evening of June 15th, he sailed again at 4 A.M. of the 17th. He had expected partly to find the fleet there; but by an odd coincidence, on the same day that he hoisted his flag in Portsmouth, it had sailed, although in ignorance of the war, to cruise between Sicily and Naples; whence, on the day he left Gibraltar, the commanding officer, Sir Richard Bickerton, had started for Toulon,—"very judiciously," said Nelson,—the instant he heard of the renewal of hostilities.
The "Amphion" passed through the Straits of Messina, and within sight of Naples, carrying Nelson once more over well-known seas, and in sight of fondly remembered places. "I am looking at dear Naples, if it is what it was," he wrote to Elliot from off Capri. "Close to Capri," he tells Lady Hamilton, "the view of Vesuvius calls so many circumstances to my mind, that it almost overpowers my feelings." "I am using force upon myself to keep away," he had already said to Acton; "for I think it likely, was I to fly to Naples, which I am much inclined to do, that the French might turn it to some plea against those good sovereigns." In his anxiety to join the fleet, and get in touch of the French, the length of the passage, three weeks, caused him great vexation, and deepened his convictions of the uselessness of the island to his squadron off Toulon. "My opinion of Malta, as a naval station for watching the French in Toulon, is well known; and my present experience of what will be a three weeks' passage, most fully confirms me in it. The fleet can never go there, if I can find any other corner to put them in; but having said this, I now declare, that I consider Malta as a most important outwork to India, that it will ever give us great influence in the Levant, and indeed all the southern parts of Italy. In this view, I hope we shall never give it up." "Malta and Toulon are entirely different services. It takes upon an average seven weeks to get an answer to a letter. When I am forced to send a ship there, I never see her under two months."
With Gibraltar, however, Malta gave the British two impregnable and secure bases of operations, within reasonable distance of one another, and each in close proximity to points most essential to control. During Nelson's entire command, the three chief centres of interest and of danger were the Straits of Gibraltar, the heel of Italy, and Toulon. The narrowing of the trade routes near the two former rendered them points of particular exposure for merchant shipping. Around them, therefore, and in dependence upon them, gathered the largest bodies of the cruisers which kept down privateering, and convoyed the merchant ships, whose protection was not the least exacting of the many cares that fell upon Nelson. Upon the Malta division depended also the watch over the mouth of the Adriatic and the Straits of Messina, by which Nelson hoped to prevent the passage of the French, in small bodies, to either Sicily, the Morea, or the Ionian Islands. Malta in truth, even in Nelson's time, was the base for operations only less important than the destruction of the Toulon fleet. The latter he rightly considered his principal mission, success in which would solve most other maritime difficulties. "My first object must ever be to keep the French fleet in check; and, if they put to sea, to have force enough with me to annihilate them. That would keep the Two Sicilies free from any attack from sea."
On the 8th of July the "Amphion" joined the fleet off Toulon. It numbered then nine ships-of-the-line, with three smaller cruisers. "As far as outside show goes," he reported to St. Vincent, "the ships look very well; but they complain of their bottoms, and are very short of men." The fact was, as he afterwards explained, that before the war came they had been expecting every day to go to England, and consequently had been allowed to run down gradually, a result which doubtless had been hastened by St. Vincent's stringent economies. Gibraltar and Malta were both bare, Nelson wrote six months later, and it was not the fault of the naval storekeepers. The ships, everywhere, were "distressed for almost every article. They have entirely eat up their stores, and their real wants not half complied with. I have applications from the different line-of-battle-ships for surveys on most of their sails and running rigging, which cannot be complied with, as there is neither cordage nor sails to replace the unserviceable stores, and, therefore, the evil must be combated in the best manner possible." As the whole Navy had suffered from the same cause, there was no reserve of ships at home to replace those in the Mediterranean, which, besides lacking everything, were between eight and nine hundred men short of their complement, or about one hundred for each ship-of-the-line. "We can send you neither ships nor men," wrote St. Vincent as winter drew on; and even a year later, the administration which followed his found it impossible to replace the "crazy" vessels, of which Nelson said only four were fit for winter cruising. "It is not a storeship a week," he declared, "that would keep them in repair." The trouble was greater because, when leaving Malta, they had anticipated only a cruise of three weeks, which for many of them became two years.
Despite the difficulties, he determined that the fleet as a body should not go into port; nor should the individual ships-of-the-line, except when absolutely necessary, and then to Gibraltar, not Malta. "I have made up my mind never to go into port till after the battle, if they make me wait a year, provided the Admiralty change the ships who cannot keep the sea in winter;" nor did the failure of the Admiralty to meet this proviso alter his resolution. It was the carrying out of this decision, with ships in such condition, in a region where winds and seas were of exceptional violence, and supplies of food and water most difficult to be obtained, because surrounded in all directions by countries either directly hostile, or under the overmastering influence of Bonaparte, that made the exercise of Nelson's command during this period a triumph of naval administration and prevision. It does not necessarily follow that an officer of distinguished ability for handling a force in the face of an enemy, will possess also the faculty which foresees and provides for the many contingencies, upon which depend the constant efficiency and readiness of a great organized body; though both qualities are doubtless essential to constitute a great general officer. For twenty-two months Nelson's fleet never went into a port, other than an open roadstead on a neutral coast, destitute of supplies; at the end of that time, when the need arose to pursue an enemy for four thousand miles, it was found massed, and in all respects perfectly prepared for so distant and sudden a call. To quote his own words, written a year before this summons in reply to an intimation from the Admiralty to be on his guard against Spain, "I have the pleasure to acquaint you that the squadron under my command is all collected, except the Gibraltar,[60] complete in their provisions and stores to near five months, and in a perfect state of readiness to act as the exigency of the moment may determine." "With the resources of your mind," wrote St. Vincent, when unable to reinforce him, "you will do very well;" and Nelson, when he put off his harness, might have boasted himself that the prediction was more than fulfilled.
Provisions, water, and supplies of all sorts were brought to the ships on their station, either at sea, or in unfrequented roadsteads within the limits of the cruising ground. "I never could have spared the ships to go to Gibraltar for them," he wrote to St. Vincent, to whom he expressed his satisfaction with the way the plan worked. He soon abandoned, in fact, the method of sending individual ships for water, because of the long absence thus entailed. When water could not be brought in transports, or rather could not easily be transhipped owing to the badness of the season, he thought it better to take the whole fleet to the nearest watering-place than to divide its strength. Fresh provisions, absolutely indispensable to the health of the ships' companies, constituted the greatest of difficulties. Opposition to furnishing them must be expected wherever French influence could be felt. "The great distance from Malta or Gibraltar renders the getting such refreshments from those places, in a regular manner, absolutely impossible;" and from the Spanish ports, Barcelona or Rosas, which were near his cruising ground, they could be had only "clandestinely." Government Bills would not be taken there, nor in Barbary or Sardinia, where bullocks might be got. Hard money must be paid, and about this there was some routine bureau difficulty. "I certainly hate to have anything to do with the management of money," he wrote, "but I submit the propriety of lodging public money on board the fleet, for the purpose of paying for fresh beef and vegetables, provided, but on no account otherwise, that the simple receipt from the captain of the ship may be a sufficient voucher for the disbursement of such money." Absolutely disposed as he was to assume political or military responsibilities, he was not willing, even for the health of the fleet, to incur the risk of pecuniary imputations for himself or his captains.
Great dexterity of management was required to obtain these supplies, without drawing, upon those who gave them, such tokens of displeasure from Bonaparte as might result in their discontinuance. Towards Spain, although he felt for her perplexities, Nelson took a firm tone. She was nominally neutral, and enjoyed privileges as such; he insisted therefore that she should deal equal measure to both belligerents. "I am ready to make large allowances for the miserable situation Spain has placed herself in; but there is a certain line beyond which I cannot submit to be treated with disrespect." That line of forbearance was dictated, of course, less by indulgence towards Spain than by the necessities of Great Britain, which Nelson, however indignant, was too good a diplomatist to drop out of sight; but he kept up a pressure which secured very substantial assistance, though grudgingly given. "Refreshments we have a right to as long as we remain at peace, and if this goes on"—the refusal, that is, to allow provisions to be bought in quantities—"you may acquaint them that I will anchor in Rosas with the squadron, and receive our daily supplies, which will offend the French much more than our staying at sea."
Towards Naples, as secretly friendly to Great Britain, he was of course far more tender; and, while he rejected no suggestion without consideration, he regarded the distance as too great to render such a means of subsistence certain. The numerous privateers that haunted every port would intercept the transports and render convoys necessary; it was not worth while, for so small an advantage, to involve Naples, in its already critical state, in a dispute with France. An occasional purchase, however, seems to have been made there; and even France herself was at times brought to contribute, indirectly, to the support of the squadron which was watching one of her principal ports. "Latterly our cattle and onions have been procured from France," wrote Nelson; "but from the apparent incivilities of the Spaniards, I suppose we are on the eve of being shut out." To escape the notice of the French agents, it was obviously desirable to distribute as widely as possible the sources of supply, so as not to concentrate observation upon any one, or upon the general fact.
It was, however, upon Sardinia that Nelson in the end chiefly depended. The importance of this island, both in fact and in his estimation, was so great, that it may be said to have constituted the chief object of his thought and anxiety, after his own squadron and the French, which also he at times prophetically spoke of as his own. "I do not mean to use the shells you have sent me at sea," he writes to General Villettes, "for that I hope to consider burning our own ships; but in case they run ashore, then a few put into their sides will do their business." In addition to its extremely favorable central position, Sardinia, as compared to Sicily, did not entail the perplexity that its use by the British might cause a friendly sovereign the loss of his continental dominions. Those of the King of Sardinia had passed already nearly, if not wholly, out of his hands. The island itself was so wild, poor, and neglected, that, even if seized by the enemy, the King would lose little. The net revenue derived from it was only £5,000.
Map of Sardinia
During the previous war Nelson's attention had not been called much to Sardinia. Up to the withdrawal from the Mediterranean in 1796, Corsica had been a sufficient, and more suitable, base for the operations of the fleet, which until then had been upon the Riviera and the northern coast of Italy. When he returned in 1798, even after the Battle of the Nile and the disasters of the French in 1799, the unsettled condition of Naples, the blockade of Malta, and the affairs of Egypt, had combined to keep him in the South; while the tenure of the Allies in Northern Italy, up to the Battle of Marengo, was apparently so secure as to require no great support from the fleet. Irrespective of any personal influences that may have swayed him, Sicily was better suited then to be the centre from which to superintend the varied duties of his wide command.
When he returned in 1803, the old prepossessions naturally remained. In a survey of the political conditions written for the Prime Minister when on the passage to Toulon, much is said of Malta, Sicily, and Naples, but Sardinia is dismissed with a passing hope that the French would not seize it. After joining the fleet off Toulon, however, he had to realize that, if it was to remain at sea, as he purposed and effected, and yet be kept fully provisioned and watered, it must at times make an anchorage, which should be so far convenient as to keep it, practically, as much on its station as when under way. In this dilemma his attention was called to the Madalena Islands, a group off the northeast end of Sardinia, where wood and water could be obtained. Between them and the main island there was a good harbor, having the decisive advantage of two entrances, by one or other of which it could be left in winds from any quarter. A survey had been made a year before, during the peace, by a Captain Ryves, now commanding a ship in the fleet. As winter approached, Nelson decided to examine the spot himself, which he did in the last days of October, taking advantage of a moonlight week when the enemy would be less likely to leave port. He found it admirably adapted for his purposes, and that fresh provisions, though not of the best quality, could be had. "It is certainly one of the best anchorages I have met with for a fleet," he wrote, "but I suppose the French will take it now we have used it." This they did not attempt, and the British fleet continued to resort to it from time to time, obtaining water and bullocks.
Such a roadstead as an occasional rendezvous, where transports could discharge their stores to the vessels, and ships be refitted and supplied, would make the fleet as secure of holding its position as were the cruisers that depended upon Malta and Gibraltar. Its being two hundred miles from Toulon was not a serious drawback, for it was no part of Nelson's plan to keep the fleet close to Toulon. When he took command, he found it so stationed, but he soon removed to a position thirty to forty miles west of the harbor's mouth, which seems to have been his general summer rendezvous. "Lord Nelson," wrote a young officer of the fleet,[61] "pursues a very different plan from Sir Richard Bickerton. The latter kept close to the harbour, but Lord Nelson is scarce ever in sight of the land, and there is but one frigate inshore." "I chose this position," Nelson said, "to answer two important purposes: one to prevent the junction of a Spanish fleet from the westward; and the other, to be to windward, so as to enable me, if the northerly gale came on to the N.N.W., to take shelter in a few hours under the Hières Islands, or if N.N.E., under Cape San Sebastian." "It is not my intention to close-watch Toulon, even with frigates," he wrote, and his dispositions were taken rather with a view to encourage the enemy to come out; although, of course, he took every precaution that they should not get far without being observed, and assured himself by frequent reconnoitring that they had not left port. "My system is the very contrary of blockading," he told Admiral Pole. "Every opportunity has been offered the enemy to put to sea," he says again, "for it is there we hope to realize the hopes and expectations of our Country." There was also the obvious advantage that, if habitually out of sight, the enemy could not know his movements, nor profit by his occasional absences in any direction.
From Madalena he extended his observations over the whole island of Sardinia, upon the holding of which he thenceforth laid the greatest stress, and entertained most anxious fears lest the French should snatch it out of his hands. "If we could possess Sardinia, we should want neither Malta nor any other. It is the most important island, as a naval and military station, in the Mediterranean. It possesses at the northern end the finest harbour in the world [Madalena]. It is twenty-four hours' sail from Toulon; it covers Italy; it is a position that the wind which carries the French to the westward is fair for you to follow. In passing to the southward they go close to you. In short, it covers Egypt, Italy, and Turkey." He was anxious that the British Government should buy it. "If we, from delicacy, or commiseration of the unfortunate king of Sardinia, do not get possession of that island, the French will. If I lose Sardinia, I lose the French fleet."
His apprehensions were not verified; as also they were not during his command, either in the Morea, in Naples, or in Sicily. Napoleon took no active steps against Sardinia, although the proceedings there did not escape the sharp eyes of the French agents, but elicited from them vivacious remonstrances. "The government of the Republic," wrote one, "has a right to complain of this excessive complaisance. To give regular support to a squadron blockading a port, to revictual it, in one word, periodically, is to tread under foot the neutrality which is professed. I shall notify my government of a fact which demands all its attention, and in which it is painful to me to see a cause of misunderstanding between France and his Sardinian Majesty." It is singularly confirmatory of the reality of Bonaparte's intention to attempt the invasion of England, that he confined his efforts in the South—in the Mediterranean—to feints and demonstrations. What he did there looked to the future, not to the present; although, doubtless, he stood always so ready that no opportunity offering advantage would have passed neglected. The active mind of Nelson, condemned to the uncertainties of the defensive and to military idleness, however it may have been burdened with administrative routine and official correspondence, found ample time to speculate on the designs of Bonaparte, and the latter took care that he should have matter enough to occupy him—and if possible mislead him—in rumor and in movements. "At Marseilles they are fitting, as reports say, eighty or ninety gunboats, and intend sending them, by the canal of Languedoc to Bordeaux; but I am sure this is not true. They are to go alongshore to the Heel of Italy, and to embark and protect their army either to Sicily or the Morea, or to both; and the Navy of Europe can hardly prevent these alongshore voyages." In this will be noticed the recurrence of ideas familiar to him in the Riviera eight years before; the expectation of ex-centric operations into which Bonaparte was rarely betrayed.
Frequent stories also reach him of projects to invade and seize Sardinia. Vessels are fitting for that purpose, now at Marseilles, now at Villefranche; now the expedition is to come from Corsica only. "A light linen jacket, trowsers, red cap, and a pair of shoes, is the whole expense of Government; the plunder of the Sardinian Anglo-Sardes is held out as the reward." To prevent it he seeks the authority of his Government and of the King of Sardinia to garrison Madalena. The straits of Bonifacio are but ten miles wide; it is impossible therefore for a cruiser to prevent boats passing. If the attempt is made, no scruples about the neutrality of Sardinia shall tie his hands. "I have directed the frigates to pursue them, even should they chase into Sardinia, and to take or destroy them, and also the Corsican troops; for if I wait till the island is taken I should feel deserving of reprobation. Of course, they will say we have broken the neutrality, if we attack them in the ports of Sardinia before their conquest, and if we do not I shall be laughed at for a fool. Prevention is better than cure." With his usual long-headed circumspection, however, even when most bent on an extreme step, he warns the Prime Minister, to whom he is writing, to mention his purpose to the Russian ambassador—that the latter may understand the apparent breach of neutrality; for Russia has constituted herself a champion of the Sardinian monarch. "I mention my intention that idle reports may not be attended to."
As the winter of 1803-4 approached, and it became evident that Spain was to persevere in her neutrality, Nelson removed his fleet to a rendezvous about thirty miles south of Cape San Sebastian, on the Spanish coast—the Number 97 continually mentioned in his official letters to captains. There the highlands of Spain afford some shelter from the furious northerly gales, which, sweeping over France from the Atlantic, are compressed as in a funnel between the Pyrenees and the Alps, to fall with redoubled violence on the Gulf of Lyons. Only the utmost care and the most skilful seamanship could preserve the rickety ships, upon whose efficiency so much depended, and which, if damaged, there was none to replace. I "bear up for every gale," wrote Nelson. "I must not in our present state quarrel with the northwesters—with crazy masts and no port or spars near us." Even in September, he writes, there are "three days' gale of severe blowing weather out of the seven, which frequently comes on suddenly, and thereby exposes the topmasts, topsail yards and sails, to great hazard, under every care and attention; and there are no topmasts or topsail yards in store, either at Gibraltar or Malta." "The French fleet keep us waiting; and such a place as all the Gulf of Lyons, for gales of wind from the N.W. to N.E., I never saw; but by always going away large, we generally lose much of their force and the heavy sea. By the great care and attention of every captain, we have suffered much less than could have been expected. I do not believe Lord St. Vincent would have kept the sea with such ships. However, with nursing our ships, we have roughed it out better than could have been expected. We either run to the southward, or furl all the sails and make the ships as easy as possible." Under such circumstances, it was no small nor unworthy boast he made near the close of the cruise, when the first ineffectual attempt of the French to leave Toulon ended in numerous accidents. "These gentlemen are not accustomed to a Gulf of Lyons gale, which we have buffeted for twenty-one months, and not carried away a spar." Nelson himself, though reckless to desperation when an adequate object was at stake, in the moments of repose husbanded his means, and looked to the efficiency of his instruments, with the diligence of a miser. With his own hand he noted the weather indications, including the barometer, at least three times every twenty-four hours, and occasionally even more often.
A rendezvous, however advantageous, was not permitted by Nelson to become a permanent station, or a long-continued resting-place for the fleet. In the inevitable monotony of a watch protracted so far beyond his original expectations, his sleepless solicitude for the health and contentment of the ships' companies warned him that lack of mental interest saps the spirit, and wears away the strength, beyond the power of mere bodily comfort to prevent. On Number 97 was kept always a ship—frigate or smaller cruiser—with word where the admiral was to be found at any time; and thither resorted the vessels returning from their missions to all parts of the station, or coming out from England. "Rejoin me at Number 97," their instructions ran, "where you will find me, or orders for your further proceedings." Other rendezvous there were, of course, each with its own number, and with a cruiser if at sea; but in the anchorages occasionally resorted to, as Madalena, or the Gulf of Palmas in the south of Sardinia, communications were left on shore. With the threads thus reaching from these centres to the different parts of his command, Nelson's habit was to keep his fleet in motion from point to point, in the stretch of sea bounded on the one side by the coast of Spain, as far south as the Balearics, and on the east by the islands of Sardinia and Corsica. Through this hunting-ground, from end to end of which he roamed in unceasing restlessness, like a lion roaring for his prey, the Toulon fleet must pass, wherever bound; and by the judicious distribution of the cruisers—all too few—allowed him by St. Vincent's economies, he hoped to get timely and sufficient information of its leaving port.
"The great thing in all military service is health," he wrote to his old friend, Dr. Moseley, who had been with him in the far-back Central American expedition in 1780; "and you will agree with me, that it is easier for an officer to keep men healthy, than for a physician to cure them. Situated as this fleet has been, without a friendly port, where we could get all the things so necessary for us, yet I have, by changing the cruizing ground, not allowed the sameness of prospect to satiate the mind—sometimes by looking at Toulon, Ville Franche, Barcelona, and Rosas; then running round Minorca, Majorca; Sardinia and Corsica; and two or three times anchoring for a few days, and sending a ship to the last place for onions, which I find the best thing that can be given to seamen; having always good mutton for the sick, cattle when we can get them, and plenty of fresh water. In the winter it is the best plan to give half the allowance of grog, instead of all wine. These things are for the commander-in-chief to look to; but shut very nearly out from Spain, and only getting refreshments by stealth from other places, my command has been an arduous one." "Our men's minds," he added, "are always kept up with the daily hopes of meeting the enemy." An order indicating one of the squadron movements, of which he here speaks, may be worth quoting. "Whereas it is my intention," he writes at Number 97 to the captain there stationed, "to proceed with the squadron, the first westerly wind, off Toulon, for the purpose of reconnoitring the enemy at that port, and from thence pass through Rendezvous No. 102, to secure any information the ships there may have obtained of them, you are hereby required and directed to keep on your station and inform any of his Majesty's ships arriving on said rendezvous," etc.
The health of the crews, thus carefully watched, remained excellent throughout, and is mentioned by him continually with evident pride as well as satisfaction. Occasional slight outbursts of scurvy are noted, despite his efforts for fresh food, and he mentions hectic complaints—"of the few men we have lost, nine in ten are dead of consumption "—but upon the whole, the general condition is unparalleled in his experience. "We are healthy beyond example, and in great good humour with ourselves," he writes in October, 1803, "and so sharp-set, that I would not be a French Admiral in the way of any of our ships for something." It would be tedious to quote the numerous assertions to the same effect scattered up and down his correspondence at this time; but in December, 1804, when near the end of this long period of suspense, and after eighteen months at sea, he writes to the Admiralty: "The Fleet is in perfect good health and good humour, unequalled by anything which has ever come within my knowledge, and equal to the most active service which the times may call for." Dr. Gillespie, who joined the "Victory" as physician to the fleet in January, 1805, wrote immediately afterwards that out of her eight hundred and forty men, but one was confined to his bed by sickness, and that the other ships, though upwards of twenty months off Toulon, were in a like condition of health.
The same could not then, nor for long before, be said of Nelson himself. The first flush of excitement in leaving England and taking command, the expectation and change of scene in going out, affected him favorably. "As to my health," he says, immediately after joining the fleet, "thank God, I have not had a finger ache since I left England;" but this, unfortunately, did not endure. It was his first experience of the weightier anxieties of a commander-in-chief; for when he had succeeded to that position, temporarily, in the Mediterranean and the Baltic, he had found either a squadron in good running order, or at the least no serious hitch about necessary maintenance. Now all this was different. The difficulties about supplies and the condition of his ships have been mentioned, as have also his fears for Naples, Sicily, and the Morea,—all of which, in his belief, might possibly be conquered, even without the interposition of the Toulon fleet. The latter, however, kept him most uneasy; for he could get no certain knowledge as to its destination, or the probable time of its moving; and the wide field for injury open to it, if his vigilance were eluded, kept his eager, unquiet mind continually on the strain of speculation and anticipation. "I hope they will come out and let us settle the matter. You know I hate being kept in suspense." The nervous excitability—irritability—that often overlay the usually cordial kindliness and gracious bearing of the man, was an easy prey to such harassment. It breaks out at times in his letters, but was only occasionally visible to those around him. By the first of December he already foresees that he cannot last long. "Next Christmas, please God, I shall be at Merton; for, by that time, with all the anxiety attendant on such a command as this, I shall be done up. The mind and body both wear out."
As autumn drew towards winter, the bitter cold went through his feeble frame, and in the wild weather he was "always tossed about, and always sea-sick." "We have had a most terrible winter," he writes, even before the New Year. "It has almost knocked me up. I have been very ill, and am now far from recovered; but I hope to hold out till the battle is over, when I must recruit." "My heart, my Lord, is warm," he tells Lord Hobart, the Secretary of State for War, "my head is firm, but my body is unequal to my wishes. I am visibly shook; but as long as I can hold out, I shall never abandon my truly honourable post." He feared also blindness. "My eyesight fails me most dreadfully," he writes to his old friend Davison. "I firmly believe that, in a very few years, I shall be stone-blind. It is this only, of all my maladies, that makes me unhappy; but God's will be done." The first winter was unusually severe, and during it was added, to his official cares and personal suffering, an extreme anxiety about Lady Hamilton, for he was expecting the birth of a second child in January. This child, a girl, lived but a short time; he never saw her. The effect of these various causes upon his health was so great, that the physicians, as early as January, 1804, were advising his return. "The medical gentlemen are wanting to survey me, and to send me to Bristol for the re-establishment of my health," he tells Minto; but he adds, "do not mention it (it is my concern) I beg of you." Reports were then unusually persistent that the enemy was about to put to sea. "Imust not be sick until after the French fleet is taken."
To the last moment the destination of the French and the purposes of Bonaparte remained unknown to him, a fruitful source of guessing and worry. "It is at best but a guess," he wrote to Ball, after a year's pondering, "and the world attaches wisdom to him that guesses right." Yet his conclusions, however reached, though subject to temporary variations, were in the main correct. Strongly impressed though he was with the importance and exposure of Egypt, he inclined upon the whole to the belief that the French were bound to the westward, out of the Straits and into the Atlantic. This confirmed him in taking his general summer rendezvous to the westward, where he was to windward of such a movement, as well as interposed between Toulon and any Spanish fleet attempting to go there. "My station to the westward of Toulon, an unusual one," he writes to Addington in August, 1803, "has been taken upon an idea that the French fleet is bound out of the Straits and probably to Ireland. I shall follow them to the Antipodes." Two months later he says: "Plausible reasons may certainly be given for every one of the plans" suggested by his various correspondents; but he thinks that either Alexandria or outside the Mediterranean is the most probable. "To those two points my whole attention is turned." "Their destination, is it Ireland or the Levant? That is what I want to know;" but in December he still holds to his first impression: "My opinion is, certainly, out of the Mediterranean."
In this perplexity Elliot suggested to him to receive on board the fleet some good Frenchmen, who could land from time to time and get information in Toulon,—a proposition which drew from Nelson a characteristic and amusing explosion. "Mr. Elliot wanted to send me some good Frenchmen, to go ashore and get me information. My answer to all these offers is 'No.' I can be told nothing of any consequence to me; but a copy of the French admiral's orders, when he is to put to sea, and where he is destined to, is the only useful information I can care about. I can see the number and force at Toulon any day I please, and as for the names of the Captains or Admirals I care not what they are called; therefore, as you may suppose, I have none of these 'good Frenchmen' about me." "I put no confidence in them," he tells Elliot. "You think yours good: the Queen thinks hers the same: I believe they are all alike. Whatever information you can get me, I shall be very thankful for; but not a Frenchman comes here. Forgive me, but my mother hated the French." "I never trust a Corsican or a Frenchman. I would give the devil ALL the good ones to take the remainder."
As winter advanced, his perplexities increased, for each correspondent, by long dwelling on his particular concern, saw its danger and importance growing in his own eyes, and dwelt upon them with greater emphasis in his letters. "Ball is sure they are going to Egypt; the Turks are sure they are going to the Morea; Mr. Elliot at Naples, to Sicily; and the King of Sardinia, to his only spot. Every power thinks they are destined against them; but whatever the French may intend to do," he concludes, with a quaint humor occasional with him, "I trust, and with confidence, they are destined for Spithead." He recognized, too, that Bonaparte himself was not wholly master of his own projects when contending with such uncertain elements; and the great master of War, in this instance as in many others, had placed his force so centrally, in the heel of Italy, that he threatened with equal facility in two opposite directions, to his own advantage and his enemies' perplexity. "Circumstances may even make it necessary to alter its destination by Buonaparte; Egypt or Ireland, and I rather lean to the latter destination." Anything, indeed, is possible; for, as winter approaches, "we can be sure of nothing in so short a run,"—as to Sardinia or Sicily.
For a little while during February, 1804, he was further stirred up by reports that the French were about to concentrate their naval forces, from Brest and Ferrol, in the Mediterranean; and this he was inclined to believe, unfavorable as the season would be for maritime operations in that stormy sea, with the inexperienced crews of the enemy. In the summer his conviction of the importance of the Mediterranean had fully prepared him for such an attempt. "Naples, the Morea, and ultimately Egypt, are in Buonaparte's view," he had then written. "With this idea, I fully expect that the French fleet from Brest will assuredly come into the Mediterranean, to protect this army across the water. I shall try and fight one party or the other, before they form a junction." "Much may be done before British reinforcements arrive," he reminded St. Vincent. "Your Lordship knows what Admiral Bruix might have done, had he done his duty, and they may buy their experience." Now he says to Ball, "The Admiralty tells me nothing, they know nothing; but my private letters say, that the Brest squadron, as well as Ferrol,[62] is bound here—if so, we shall have work enough upon our hands." Thirty thousand troops, also, were ready to embark in Marseilles and Nice. The conclusion, in view of so great a force assembling, was natural: "Egypt, I have no doubt is the favourite and ultimate object of the Corsican tyrant." Nelson's spirit rises with the occasion. "I shall try to intercept them, but I cannot go so far to the westward as is necessary; for I will not lose sight of the Toulon fleet. What a most zealous man can do to meet all points of difficulty, shall be done. My squadron is the finest for its numbers in the world, and much may be expected of it. Should superior numbers join, we must look it in the face. Nil desperandum! God is good, and our cause is just."
This alarm passed away like others. Bonaparte had no idea of pushing ships into the Mediterranean, or embarking his naval forces on any doubtful experiments, until he had first tested the possibility of that supreme adventure, the invasion of England. When that mighty imagination passed away like a dream that leaves no trace, he ordered his fleets into the Mediterranean, as Nelson had expected, and the result was Trafalgar.
As the spring of 1804 opened, the French admiral at Toulon began to exercise his ships outside the harbor, singly or in small groups, like half-fledged birds learning to fly; or, to use Nelson's expression, "My friend Monsieur La Touche sometimes plays bo-peep in and out of Toulon, like a mouse at the edge of her hole." The only drill-ground for fleets, the open sea, being closed to him, he could do no better than these furtive excursions, to prepare for the eagle's flight Napoleon had prescribed to him. "Last week, at different times, two sail of the line put their heads out of Toulon, and on Thursday, the 5th [April], in the afternoon, they all came out." "Yesterday [the 9th] a rear-admiral and seven sail, including frigates, put their nose outside the harbour. If they go on playing this game, some day we shall lay salt upon their tails, and so end the campaign."
These outings—"capers," Nelson called them—naturally became more venturesome by little and little, as the British suffered them to proceed without serious attempt at molestation, or near approach on their part. Nelson veiled the keenness of his watch, as he crouched for a spring, with a drowsy appearance of caution and indifference. The French admiral, Latouche Tréville, was he who had commanded at Boulogne when Nelson's boats were repelled with slaughter; and it was also he who in 1792 had sent a grenadier to the King of Naples, with a peremptory summons to diplomatic apology in one hand, and a threat of bombardment in the other. For both these affairs Nelson considered he had a personal score to settle. "I rather believe my antagonist at Toulon begins to be angry with me: at least, I am trying to make him so; and then, he may come out, and beat me, as he says he did off Boulogne. He is the Admiral that went to Naples in December, 1792, who landed the grenadier. I owe him something for that."
The French having eight sail-of-the-line certainly ready for sea, and two or three more nearly so—how nearly Nelson was not sure—he now endeavored to lure them out. "I have taken a method of making Mr. La Touche Tréville angry. I have left Sir Richard Bickerton, with part of the fleet, twenty leagues from hence, and, with five of the line, am preventing his cutting capers, which he has done for some time past, off Cape Sicie." "He seems inclined to try his hand with us," he writes a week later, "and by my keeping so great an inferiority close to him, perhaps he may some day be tempted." Nelson had near Toulon at the time nine ships-of-the-line. Had he succeeded in bringing Latouche Tréville to attack his five, he would have hoped, even with such odds, for a decisive victory; but, failing that, he was assured that the Toulon fleet would be out of the game for that summer. It was important to bring matters to an issue, for, as he wrote Elliot, his force was diminishing daily through the deterioration of ships never from the first fit for their work. Measured by the standard of the ships in the Channel, "I have but four sail fit to keep the sea. I absolutely keep them out by management." Except the four, all needed docking, and there was not a dock open to the British west of Constantinople.
But, while thus keenly anxious to force an action, he was wary to obtain tactical conditions that should insure a success, adequate both to the risk he ran, and to the object at which he aimed. "I think their fleet will be ordered out to fight close to Toulon, that they may get their crippled ships in again, and that we must then quit the coast to repair our damages, and thus leave the coast clear; but my mind is fixed not to fight them, unless with a westerly wind, outside the Hières, and with an easterly wind, to the westward of Sicie." Crippled there, to leeward of their port, the other British division coming up fresh, as a reserve, from the southward, where it lay concealed, would both cut them off, and rescue any of their own fleet that might have been overpowered. Bickerton's orders were to remain due south from Port Cros, one of the Hyères, at a distance such that, with the upper canvas furled, his ships could not be seen from the islands, but could keep the main division in sight from their mastheads. In all cases of anticipated battle, Nelson not only took his measures thus thoughtfully, but was careful to put his subordinates in possession both of his general plans, and, as far as possible, of the underlying ideas. Thus, in a memorandum issued about this time to the captains, he says: "As it is my determination to attack the French fleet in any place where there is a reasonable prospect of getting fairly alongside of them, I recommend that every captain will make himself, by inquiries, as fully acquainted as possible with the following places, viz., Hières Bay, [with its three entrances], Gourjean Bay, (of which I send a chart from the latest surveys made,) Port Especia, and, in particular the northern Passage into Leghorn Roads, from which side it is only, in my opinion, possible to attack an enemy's fleet to advantage; and with the Gulf of Ajaccio." To these instructions he adds some details of practical preparation for anchoring under fire, and the reasons therefor. In the same spirit, when expecting the Brest fleet in the Mediterranean, he says: "I am perfectly prepared how to act with either a superior or an inferior force. My mind is firm as a rock, and my plans for every event fixed in my mind." No man ever was served better than Nelson by the inspiration of the moment; no man ever counted on it less.
In communicating his ideas to his subordinates Nelson did not confine himself to official intercourse; on the contrary, his natural disposition impelled him rather to familiar conversation with them on service subjects. "Even for debating the most important naval business," we learn through his confidential secretary at this period, "he preferred a turn on the quarter-deck with his captains, whom he led by his own frankness to express themselves freely, to all the stiffness and formality of a council of war."[63] An interesting instance of these occasional counsels has been transmitted to us by one of his captains, then little more than a youth, but the last to survive of those who commanded ships under him. "Throughout the month of October, 1804, Toulon was frequently reconnoitred, and the Phoebe and Amazon were ordered to cruize together. Previous to their going away Lord Nelson gave to Captains Capel and Parker several injunctions, in case they should get an opportunity of attacking two of the French frigates, which now got under weigh more frequently. The principal one was, that they should not each single out and attack an opponent, but 'that both should endeavour together to take one frigate; if successful, chase the other: but if you do not take the second, still you have won a victory, and your country will gain a frigate.' Then, half laughing, and half snappishly, said kindly to them as he wished them good-bye, 'I daresay you consider yourselves a couple of fine fellows, and when you get away from me you will do nothing of the sort, but think yourselves wiser than I am!'"[64]
The game of cat and mouse, off Toulon, occasioned one incident which greatly upset Nelson's composure, and led to a somewhat amusing display of ire, excited by a statement of the French admiral, published throughout Europe, that his renowned antagonist had run away from him. On the 13th of June, two French frigates and a brig were seen under the Hyères Islands, where they had been sent by Latouche Tréville, upon the report that some enemy's cruisers were in the neighborhood. Nelson despatched two frigates after them, which, owing to light winds, did not get near until the next day. The French vessels being then seen from the "Victory" to be close in with the batteries, the "Excellent," 74, was sent to support the frigates, and some time afterwards the other four ships also bore up for the main entrance to the islands. Upon this, Latouche Tréville got under way, and at about 5 P.M. came out of the harbor with his eight sail-of-the-line. Nelson's division reduced their canvas, hauling to the wind in line of battle, on the starboard tack, which, with the then wind, was with their heads off shore, and the "Excellent" was recalled, although she could not rejoin till midnight. In this order they hove-to (stopped), with two reefs in the topsails and the main yards square, at 7.30 P.M., which at that time of the year was broad daylight, and in this general position remained till next morning.
As the distance between the hostile bodies was apparently from twelve to fifteen miles, the French admiral's observations may have failed to recognize that the enemy, by backing his topsails, had offered a fair challenge; else, in his report of this very commonplace occurrence, he could scarcely have used, concerning the movement of heading south, the expression, prit chasse, which, whether rendered "retired," or "retreated," or, as Nelson did, "ran away," was a misrepresentation of the facts, and heightened by the assertion that he pursued till nightfall, and next morning could not see the enemy. Writing to Elliot four days after the affair happened, Nelson mentioned casually his view of the matter. "Monsieur La Touche came out with eight sail of the line and six frigates, cut a caper off Sepet, and went in again. I brought-to for his attack, although I did not believe anything was meant serious, but merely a gasconade." "On the morning of the 15th," he tells Acton on the same day, "I believe I may call it, we chased him into Toulon." His purpose evidently was, as has been shown, to fight, if the enemy meant business, to leeward of the port, and far enough off to give Bickerton a chance to come up. Great was his wrath, two months later, when Latouche's statement reached him, and he found that not only no mention was made of the relative numbers, but that the offensive expression quoted had been used. "I do assure you," he wrote to the Admiralty, enclosing a copy of the day's log, "I know not what to say, except by a flat contradiction; for if my character is not established by this time for not being apt to run away, it is not worth my time to attempt to put the world right." He might well have rested there,—an imputation that might have injured an untried man could provoke only a smile when levelled at his impregnable renown; but his ruffled mind would not let him keep quiet, and in private correspondence he vented his rage in terms similar to those used of the Danish commodore after Copenhagen. "You will have seen Monsieur La Touche's letter of how he chased me and how I ran. I keep it; and, by G—d, if I take him, he shall eat it." He is a "poltroon," a "liar," and a "miscreant." It may be added that no admiral, whether a Nelson or not, could have abandoned the "Excellent" under the conditions.
Immediately after this abortive affair, Nelson, convinced by it that something more than a taunt was needed to bring his enemy under his guns, stationed frigates at the Hyères, and to cruise thence to the eastward as far as Cape Taillat, to intercept the commerce between Italy and Toulon and Marseilles. For this purpose he had recommended, and the Government had ordered, a blockade of all Genoese ports including Spezia; Genoa, now the Ligurian Republic, being considered as much France as Toulon. Nothing, he said, could distress France more. This blockade had been but feebly enforced, owing to the lack of small cruisers; but he hoped to attain the same end by the frigates off the Hyères. "I really am of opinion," he told their commander, "that it will force La Touche out." In the latter, however, he had to do with an opponent of skill as well as of resolution. Firmly imbued with the French tradition, and with Bonaparte's instructions, which subordinated his local action entirely to the great scheme in which the Toulon fleet had its appointed part, Latouche Tréville was neither to be provoked nor betrayed into an action, by which, however tempting the promise, his fleet might be made unfit for their intended service. Nelson did him no more than justice, when he said, "I am confident, when he is ordered for any service, that he will risk falling in with us, and the event of a battle, to try and accomplish his orders;" but, short of the appointed time, nothing else could entice him. In vain did the British admiral bait his trap by exposing frigates, without visible support, to draw him to leeward, while the hostile fleet hovered out of sight to windward. The shrewd Frenchman doubtless felt the temptation, but he distrusted the gifts too plausibly tendered.
Besides the interest of the public service, Nelson had the strongest personal motives for bringing matters to an issue. The prolonged suspense and the anxiety were exhausting him, the steady tension even of the normal conditions fretted him beyond endurance; but when a crisis became accentuated by an appearance that the enemy had eluded him, his feelings of distress, acting upon an enfeebled organization, and a nervous temperament so sensitive that he started at the mere dropping of a rope beside him, drove him almost to distraction. On such an occasion he wrote: "I am absolutely beginning this letter in a fever of the mind. It is thick as butter-milk, and blowing a Levanter; and the Narcissus has just spoke me to say, 'she boarded a vessel, and they understood that the men had seen, a few days before, twelve sail of ships of war off Minorca. It was in the dusk, and he did not know which way they were steering.' This is the whole story, and a lame one. You will imagine my feelings, although I cannot bring my mind to believe. To miss them, God forbid.... If I should miss these fellows, my heart will break: I am actually only now recovering the shock of missing them in 1798. God knows I only serve to fight those scoundrels; and if I cannot do that, I should be better on shore." When the weather cleared, and a reconnoissance showed the news was false, his intense relief found expression in the words: "I believe this is the only time in my life, that I was glad to hear the French were in port." "The French ships," he says at another time, "have either altered their anchorage, or some of them have got to sea in the late gales: the idea has given me half a fever. If that admiral were to cheat me out of my hopes of meeting him, it would kill me much easier than one of his balls. Since we sat down to dinner Captain Moubray has made the signal, but I am very far from being easy."
On the 12th of May, 1804, there was a change of administration in England. Earl St. Vincent left the Admiralty, as First Lord, and was succeeded by Lord Melville. A few days before this Nelson, by a general promotion, had become Vice-Admiral of the White, the rank in which he died eighteen months later.
The return of summer had improved his health from the low condition into which it had fallen during the winter, but he did not flatter himself as to the future. The combination of colorless monotony with constant racking anxiety slackened the springs of moral energy, which, and which alone, responding joyously to a call to action, afforded the stimulus capable of triumphing over his bodily weakness, and causing it for the moment to disappear. "This is an odd war," he said, "not a battle!" Tying himself to the ship, in profound sympathy with the crews, he never went ashore from the time he left Malta in June, 1803, until he reached Gibraltar in July, 1805; nor was he ever outside of the "Victory" from July 30, 1803, the day he went on board her from the "Amphion." "Always shut up in the Victory's cabin," as he himself wrote, "cannot be very good for the constitution. I think you will find me grown thin, but never mind." Other officers, especially of the frigates, got their occasional runs ashore; but his slight figure was continually in view, walking the front of the poop, to the unconscious contentment of the men, thus reminded ever that their admiral shared their deprivations. This profound seclusion to the narrow circle of the flagship, although often broken by the presence of officers from the other vessels, who, whether cruising in company with the fleet, or arriving with tidings from different ports, were daily partakers of the admiral's hospitable table, could not but depress him; and there was with him the constant sense of loss, by absence from those he held most dear. "I have not a thought except on you and the French fleet," he tells Lady Hamilton; "all my thoughts, plans, and toils tend to those two objects. Don't laugh at my putting you and the French fleet together, but you cannot be separated."
Yet even towards her his mind is fixed as of old, that she must take a place second to duty. She had, it appears, insisted upon her wish to come out to the station to be near him. Malta and Italy were both, he said, out of the question. His place was off Toulon, as long as the French fleet was there; therefore he could not go into harbor; nay, "I might absolutely miss you, by leaving the Mediterranean without warning. The other day we had a report the French were out, and seen steering to the westward. We were as far as Minorca when the alarm proved false." As for coming on board the "Victory" to live, which she seems to have suggested, "Imagine what a cruize off Toulon is; even in summer time we have a hard gale every week, and two days' heavy swell. It would kill you; and myself to see you. Much less possible to have Charlotte, Horatia, &c., on board ship! And I, that have given orders to carry no women to sea in the Victory, to be the first to break them! I know, my own dear Emma, if she will let her reason have fair play, will say I am right; but she is like Horatia, very angry if she cannot have her own way." "Horatia is like her mother; will have her own way, or kick up a devil of a dust,"—an observation both Greville and Hamilton had had to make. "Your Nelson," he concludes, "is called upon, in the most honourable manner, to defend his country. Absence to us is equally painful: but, if I had either stayed at home, or neglected my duty abroad, would not my Emma have blushed for me? She could never have heard my praises, and how the country looks up." "The call of our country," he says again, "makes it indispensable for both our honours—the country looks up to the services of the poorest individual, much more to me, and are you not a sharer of my glory?"
Of his daily life on board, and intercourse with others, we have intimations, fragmentary yet sufficient. "Our days," he himself says, "pass so much alike that, having described one, you have them all. We now [October] breakfast by candle light; and all retire, at eight o'clock, to bed." "We cruise, cruise, and one day so like another that they are hardly distinguishable, but hopes, blessed hopes, keeps us up, that some happy day the French may come out, then I shall consider my duty to my country fulfilled." Of one of these monotonous days we have received a description from an officer,[65] a member of the admiral's mess, who had then too lately entered upon them to feel the full weight of their deadly sameness.
"At 6 o'clock my servant brings a light and informs me of the hour, wind, weather, and course of the ship, when I immediately dress and generally repair to the deck, the dawn of day at this season and latitude being apparent at about half or three-quarters of an hour past six. Breakfast is announced in the Admiral's cabin, where Lord Nelson, Rear Admiral Murray, (the Captain of the Fleet,) Captain Hardy, commander of the Victory, the chaplain, secretary, one or two officers of the ship, and your humble servant assemble and breakfast on tea, hot rolls, toast, cold tongue, &c., which when finished we repair upon deck to enjoy the majestic sight of the rising sun (scarcely ever obscured by clouds in this fine climate) surmounting the smooth and placid waves of the Mediterranean, which supports the lofty and tremendous bulwarks of Britain, following in regular train their admiral in the Victory. Between the hours of 7 and 2 there is plenty of time for business, study, writing, and exercise, which different occupations I endeavour to vary in such a manner as to afford me sufficient employment. At 2 o'clock a band of music plays till within a quarter of 3, when the drum beats the tune called, 'The Roast Beef of Old England' to announce the Admiral's dinner, which is served up exactly at 3 o'clock, and which generally consists of three courses and a dessert of the choicest fruit [66] and the well earned laurels which he has acquired. Coffee and liqueurs close the dinner about half-past 4 or 5 o'clock, after which the company generally walk the deck, where the band of music plays for nearly an hour.[67] A 6 o'clock tea is announced, when the company again assemble in the Admiral's cabin, where tea is served up before 7 o'clock, and, as we are inclined, the party continue to converse with his lordship, who at this time generally unbends himself, though he is at all times as free from stiffness and pomp as a regard to proper dignity will admit, and is very communicative. At 8 o'clock a rummer of punch with cake or biscuit is served up, soon after which we wish the Admiral a good night (who is generally in bed before 9 o'clock). Such is the journal of a day at sea in fine or at least moderate weather, in which this floating castle goes through the water with the greatest imaginable steadiness."
Another medical officer, who served on board the "Victory" soon after the writer of the lines just quoted, has transmitted some other interesting particulars of Nelson's personal habits and health, which relate to the general period now under narration.
"An opinion has been very generally entertained, that Lord Nelson's state of health, and supposed infirmities arising from his former wounds and hard services, precluded the probability of his long surviving the battle of Trafalgar, had he fortunately escaped the Enemy's shot: but the writer of this can assert that his Lordship's health was uniformly good, with the exception of some slight attacks of indisposition arising from accidental causes; and which never continued above two or three days, nor confined him in any degree with respect to either exercise or regimen: and during the last twelve months of his life, he complained only three times in this way. It is true, that his Lordship, about the meridian of life, had been subject to frequent fits of the gout; which disease, however, as well as his constitutional tendency to it, he totally overcame by abstaining for the space of nearly two years from animal food, and wine, and all other fermented drink; confining his diet to vegetables, and commonly milk and water. And it is also a fact, that early in life, when he first went to sea, he left off the use of salt, which he then believed to be the sole cause of scurvy, and never took it afterwards with his food.
"His Lordship used a great deal of exercise, generally walking on deck six or seven hours in the day. He always rose early, for the most part shortly after daybreak. He breakfasted in summer about six, and at seven in winter: and if not occupied in reading or writing despatches, or examining into the details of the Fleet, he walked on the quarter-deck the greater part of the forenoon; going down to his cabin occasionally to commit to paper such incidents or reflections as occurred to him during that time, and as might be hereafter useful to the service of his country. He dined generally about half-past two o'clock. At his table there were seldom less than eight or nine persons, consisting of the different Officers of the Ship: and when the weather and the service permitted, he very often had several of the Admirals and Captains in the Fleet to dine with him; who were mostly invited by signal, the rotation of seniority being commonly observed by his Lordship in these invitations. At dinner he was alike affable and attentive to every one: he ate very sparingly himself; the liver and wing of a fowl, and a small plate of macaroni, in general composing his meal, during which he occasionally took a glass of champagne. He never exceeded four glasses of wine after dinner, and seldom drank three; and even those were diluted with either Bristol or common water.
"Few men subject to the vicissitudes of a Naval life, equalled his Lordship in an habitual systematic mode of living. He possessed such a wonderful activity of mind, as even prevented him from taking ordinary repose, seldom enjoying two hours of uninterrupted sleep; and on several occasions he did not quit the deck during the whole night. At these times he took no pains to protect himself from the effects of wet, or the night air; wearing only a thin great coat: and he has frequently, after having his clothes wet through with rain, refused to have them changed, saying that the leather waistcoat which he wore over his flannel one would secure him from complaint. He seldom wore boots, and was consequently very liable to have his feet wet. When this occurred he has often been known to go down to his cabin, throw off his shoes, and walk on the carpet in his stockings for the purpose of drying the feet of them. He chose rather to adopt this uncomfortable expedient, than to give his servants the trouble of assisting him to put on fresh stockings; which, from his having only one hand, he could not himself conveniently effect.
"From these circumstances it may be inferred, that though Lord Nelson's constitution was not of that kind which is generally denominated strong, yet it was not very susceptible of complaint from the common occasional causes of disease necessarily attending a Naval life. The only bodily pain which his Lordship felt in consequence of his many wounds, was a slight rheumatic affection of the stump of his amputated arm on any sudden variation in the state of the weather; which is generally experienced by those who have the misfortune to lose a limb after the middle age. His Lordship usually predicted an alteration in the weather with as much certainty from feeling transient pains in his stump, as he could by his marine barometer; from the indications of which latter he kept a diary of the atmospheric changes, which was written with his own hand.
"His Lordship had lost his right eye by a contusion which he received at the siege of Calvi, in the island of Corsica. The vision of the other was likewise considerably impaired: he always therefore wore a green shade over his forehead, to defend this eye from the effect of strong light; but as he was in the habit of looking much through a glass while on deck, there is little doubt that had he lived a few years longer, and continued at sea, he would have lost his sight totally."[68]
The business hours of the day from seven to two were spent by Nelson largely with his secretaries. We know from Colonel Stewart that in the Baltic, where his command was more numerous than in the Mediterranean, his habit was to get through the ordinary business of the squadron before eight o'clock; for the rest, the greater part of the detail work would fall upon the Captain of the Fleet, then Rear-Admiral George Murray, who would require only general instructions and little interference for carrying on the laborious internal administration of the fleet. The admiral's energies were sufficiently taxed in considering and meeting, so far as his resources would permit, the numerous and complicated demands for external services in the different quarters of his wide command—the ingenious effort to induce two and two to make five, in which so much of the puzzle of life consists. His position necessarily involved extensive diplomatic relations. Each British Minister around the shores of the Mediterranean had his own particular care; the British admiral was in confidential communication with all, and in every movement had to consider the consequences, both of what he did and of what he left undone. It was a day when force ruled, and all the nations of Europe, whether they wished or not, had to put their chief trust in the sword, and in those who bore it. Not the least of Nelson's qualifications for his post was that he possessed intimate knowledge and experience of political conditions in the Mediterranean, knew the peoples and the rulers well, and to great sagacity and sound judgment added a temper at once firm and conciliatory. "He had in a great degree," said a contemporary who knew him well,[69] "the valuable but rare quality of conciliating the most opposite tempers, and forwarding the public service with unanimity amongst men not of themselves disposed to accord;" and although the remark referred primarily to his conduct in the naval service, it will readily be seen that this aptitude is nowhere more useful than in the tangled maze of conflicting national interests. "My line of conduct," he wrote to Hobart, a year after taking his command, "in obedience to the spirit of his Majesty's instructions communicated through your Lordship, has been simply this,—to conciliate all, to protect all from French rapacity. I have been honoured with your letter of January 7th, and it has given me most sincere pleasure that my whole conduct in my command here has been such as to meet his Majesty's approbation." The new Ministry, upon assuming office, requested him in the most flattering terms to continue his direct correspondence on political subjects with them, as with their predecessors.
Yet, while conciliatory, he could at times be curt and arbitrary enough. Fault was found with the blockade of Genoa on the ground that it did not comply with the requirements of international law; the complaint resting, apparently, on the statement that the blockaders could not be seen from Genoa. Nelson replied that the proof of evident danger to vessels seeking to enter or leave, rested on the fact that captures were made; and it is, on the face of it, absurd to say that there can be no danger to a vessel seeking to enter a blockaded port, because the blockading vessels are not visible from the latter. Much more depends upon their number, disposition, and speed. "From my knowledge of Genoa and its Gulf," said Nelson, "I assert without fear of contradiction, that the nearer ships cruise to Genoa, the more certain is the escape of vessels from that port, or their entrance into it insured. I am blockading Genoa, according to the orders of the Admiralty, and in the way I think most proper. Whether modern law or ancient law makes my mode right, I cannot judge; and surely of the mode of disposing of a fleet, I must, if I am fit for my post, be a better judge than any landsman, however learned he may appear. It would be the act of a fool to tell Europe where I intend to place the ships, for the purpose of effectually obeying my orders; not a captain can know it, and their positions will vary, according to the information I may receive.... I endeavour, as well as I am able, to obey my orders, without entering into the nice distinctions of lawyers. I will not further take up your time on a subject which, without being a lawyer, merely as a man, could have admitted of no dispute." Along with much truth, there was in this a certain amount of special pleading, as appeared when he took the further position that, to intercept ships from Genoa, bound to the Atlantic, there was no better place than the Gut of Gibraltar. When a definition of international law is stretched as far as that, it will have little elastic force left.
A petty, yet harassing, diplomatic difficulty, curiously illustrative of maritime conditions at that day, ran unsettled through almost the whole of his command. Malta, under the Knights, had been always at war with the Barbary Powers; and there was trouble in impressing upon the rulers of the latter that, when it passed into British hands, its people and ships were under British protection. Several Maltese vessels had been taken by Algerine cruisers, and their crews enslaved. When Nelson came out in 1803, he found pending these cases, and also the question of compelling, or inducing, the Dey to receive back the British consul, whom he had expelled with insult. In the absence of a British representative, the negotiations were intrusted wholly to the admiral.
Nelson's feelings were strongly excited. He was tenacious of everything he conceived to touch his country's honor, and long service in the Mediterranean had made him familiar with the outrages on its defenceless coasts practised by these barbarians, under the pretence of war with the weaker states. Even in the remote and impoverished north of Sardinia, the shepherds near the beaches watched their flocks with arms beside them, day and night, to repel the attacks of marauders from the sea. Not only were trading-vessels seized, but descents were made upon the shore, and the inhabitants swept off into slavery. Speaking of one such case in 1799, he had said: "My blood boils that I cannot chastise these pirates. They could not show themselves in the Mediterranean did not our Country permit. Never let us talk of the cruelty of the African slave trade, while we permit such a horrid war." But he knew, both then and afterwards, that Great Britain, with the great contest on her hands, could not spare the ships which might be crippled in knocking the barbarians' strongholds about their ears, and that no British admiral would be sustained in a course that provoked these pirates to cast aside the fears that restrained them, and to declare war on British commerce, which, as it was, he had difficulty to protect. He estimated ten ships-of-the-line as the force necessary, in case the batteries at Algiers were to be attacked. Exmouth, twelve years later, with fuller information, thought and found five to be sufficient.
Nelson's conduct and self-control were sorely tested by the necessity of temporizing with this petty foe, who reckoned securely on the embarrassments of Great Britain. He acted with great judgment, however, holding a high tone, and implying much in the way of menace, without at any time involving himself in a definite threat, from which he could not recede without humiliation; careful and precise in his demands, but never receding from them, or allowing them to be evaded, when once made; sensible of the difficulties in his way, as well those raised by his own Government as those dependent upon his opponent, but equally aware that he held in his hands, if authorized to use it, the power to suppress the career of depredation, upon which the Dey relied to support his revenue, and to content his officers. Personally, he favored a short and summary proceeding, accordant to his own decided character. The Dey proving immovable when first summoned, he proposed to the British Government "that on the 28th of April next, when, if he means to send his cruisers to sea, they will be out, that, on that day, every ship under my command should have strict orders (to open on that day) to take, sink, burn, and destroy every Algerine, and that on that day the port of Algiers should be declared in a state of blockade. Thus the Dey could get neither commerce, presents, or plunder; and, although the other Powers may rejoice at the war with us, yet I am firmly persuaded that it will be most advantageous to us for the next hundred years." At the same time, with his usual circumspection, he issued a general direction to all commanders of convoys to carry their charges well clear of the Algerine coast, until matters were settled. In the end, the British Ministry yielded much more than Nelson approved, but, however sorely against the grain, he carried out all his instructions with scrupulous subordination. It was only three days before the active campaign began with the sortie of the French fleet, that he was rejoined by the ship to whose captain were intrusted the final arrangements with Algiers.
For his diplomatic and naval correspondence, Nelson had two principal secretaries, public and private, both, awkwardly enough, named Scott; but the latter, being a clergyman and chaplain of the ship, was colloquially brevetted Doctor, a distinction which, for convenience, will be observed when it is necessary to mention him. He had become known to Nelson while serving in the same capacity with Sir Hyde Parker, and had been found very useful in the negotiations at Copenhagen. An accomplished linguist and an omnivorous reader, Dr. Scott was doubly useful. Upon him devolved the translating of all despatches and letters, not only from, but to, foreign courts and officials; for Nelson made a point of sending with all such papers a copy in the language of the person addressed, and an apology for failing to do so sometimes appears, on account of his secretary's absence. The latter was also a man of wide information, acquired, not as his superior's chiefly was, by mingling among men and dealing with affairs, but from books; and the admiral, while rightly valuing the teachings of experience above all, was duly sensible that one's own experience is susceptible of further extension through that of others, imparted either by word or pen. Nelson entertained a persuasion, so Scott has told us, that no man ever put his hand to paper without having some information or theory to deliver, which he fancied was not generally known, and that this was worth looking after through all the encumbering rubbish. For the same reason, besides being naturally sociable, he liked to draw others into conversation, and to start subjects for discussion, from which, when fairly under way, he would withdraw himself into silence and allow the company to do the talking, both in order to gather ideas that might be useful to himself, and also to observe character transpiring in conversation. Bourrienne has told us that Bonaparte took pleasure in provoking similar debates. Scott himself, a man essentially unpractical, afforded Nelson amusement as well as interest, and was the object of a good deal of innocent chaffing. He would, in those after-dinner gatherings which Gillespie mentions, lead the doctor into arguments on literature, politics, Spanish and even naval affairs, and would occasionally provoke from him a lecture on navigation itself, to the great entertainment of Murray, Hardy, and the other officers present.[70] "Ah, my dear Doctor!" he would say chaffingly, "give me knowledge practically acquired—experience! experience! experience! and practical men!"
Nelson, however, was too big and too broad a man not to know that, while by doing the same thing, or bearing the same thing, many times,—by experience, that is,—one acquires a facility not otherwise communicable, in a novel situation a man is abler to act, the more he has availed himself of the knowledge and the suggestions of others. Absorbed with the duties of his station, it was of the first importance that he should possess every information, and ponder every idea, small and great, bearing upon its conditions, as well as upon the general political state of Europe in that period of ominous waiting, wherein great events were evidently coming to birth. Day after day, Dr. Scott's biographer tells us, was passed by the two together, sitting in two black leathern arm-chairs with roomy pockets, stuffed with papers, written and printed, journals and pamphlets, gathered from every source—from prizes, from passing neutral vessels, from cruisers returning from neutral or friendly ports, or picked up by the doctor himself in the not infrequent trips on which he was sent, ostensibly for pleasure, but with a keen eye also to the collection of intelligence. Marked externally by the abstraction of a book-worm, entirely unpractical and heedless in the common affairs of life, and subject to an occasional flightiness of action, the result in part of an injury to his head while in the service, Scott gave those who saw him going about an impression of guilelessness, which covered him from the suspicion of having a mission. He had, says his biographer, "in union with a capacity for very difficult services, a simplicity that often put him at disadvantage in worldly matters, and it became a common joke with the Admiral, that 'the doctor would always want somebody to take care of him.'"
Nelson had everything read to him; first of all, newspapers, which were sent regularly to the fleet by British agents in various quarters. Upon them chiefly, and not upon England, he depended for knowledge of what was happening; in Great Britain itself, as well as on the Continent. From ten to twelve weeks was no uncommon length of time for him to be without word from home. "I never hear from England," he wrote to Elliot in the summer of 1804, "but as we manage to get the Paris papers regularly through Spain. From ten days to a fortnight we get them from their date at Paris: therefore we know the very great events which are passing in Europe—at least as much as the French people;" a shrewd limitation. These, therefore, together with Spanish, Italian, and other sheets, it was Scott's daily task to read aloud to his chief, who found therein not only information but amusement. He insisted also upon hearing the numerous ephemeral pamphlets, of which the age was prolific, and which found their way to him. His quickness in detecting the drift of an author was marvellous. Two or three pages of a pamphlet were generally sufficient to put him in complete possession of the writer's object, while nothing was too trivial for his attention where there existed a possibility of its contributing a clue to the problems of his command. Not the least onerous of the doctor's duties was the deciphering of private letters found in prizes, a channel by which important public interests are often betrayed. Nelson's quickness to see the bearing and value of an apparently trifling mention, dropped by the way by a careless pen, rendered such an exercise of his ingenuity at once a pleasure and a profit. The public secretary, Mr. Scott, was equally struck with the alertness and sagacity of his employer's mind. "I have heard much of Lord Nelson's abilities as an officer and statesman, but the account of the latter is infinitely short. In my travels through the service I have met with no character in any degree equal to his Lordship; his penetration is quick, judgment clear, wisdom great, and his decisions correct and decided: nor does he in company appear to bear any weight on his mind." It was with difficulty, after a prolonged session, that the doctor could at times beg off, and leave, stuffed in the arm-chair pockets, for another day's work, a dozen or two of such letters, sealed to Nelson by his imperfect eyesight and inadequate mastery of other tongues. The arm-chairs, lashed together, formed at times a couch upon which the admiral "slept those brief slumbers for which he was remarkable;" in those moments, doubtless, when anxiety about the enemy's movements did not permit him to go regularly to bed.
In common with all those closely associated with Nelson, Dr. Scott was particularly struck with the kindliness and cordiality of his bearing and actions; which is the more to be noted, because no one, probably, had more occasion to see the movements of irritability, of impatience, which lay very near the surface, than did his secretaries, through whom his most vexatious work must be done. That he was vehement to express annoyance has appeared frequently in these pages. The first Lord Radstock, who was senior to him in the service, and knew him well, writing to his son, then a midshipman in the "Victory," is constant and extreme in his admiration of Nelson; but he gives the caution to be careful of impressions made upon a chief upon whom advancement depends. Quick in all his ways, a moment's heedlessness, possibly misunderstood or misrepresented, may produce lasting injury. "Lord Nelson is of so hasty a temper, that in spite of all his natural goodness, I should fear that he would too readily give ear to those in whom he had placed his confidence. He is a man of strong passions, and his prejudices are proportionate." "On many occasions," says another writer, "Lord Nelson evinced an impatience that has been considered as irreconcileable with magnanimity; but the secret workings of his soul have not been received into the account or analysis of character, for we find the same individual, while employed in watching the French fleet off Toulon, display the most unexampled patience and forbearance, and never betray the smallest symptom of inquietude or disappointment."[71] Murray, the Captain of the Fleet, when first offered his appointment, had hesitated to accept. Upon Nelson urging him, he gave as his reason that the nature of the duties often led to disagreements between the admiral and his chief of staff, and that he was unwilling to risk any diminution of the regard existing between him and his Lordship; a remark true enough in the general, but clearly of somewhat special application. Nelson assured him that, should anything go contrary to his wishes, he would waive his rank and explain or expostulate with him as his friend, and when, after two years' service, Murray had to leave the ship, he refused to replace him,—he would have Murray or none. In truth, such readiness to flare up must needs be the defect of that quality of promptness, that instant succession of deed to thought, which was a distinguishing feature of Nelson's genius and actions. Captain Hillyar more than once alludes to this trait as characteristic of the fleet, to which its chief had transmitted his own spirit. "I have had to-day to lament," he says, speaking of some trifling disappointment, "the extreme promptitude with which we all move when near his lordship."
But, while traces of this failing may be detected here and there by the watchful reader, as Nelson himself gleaned useful indications amid the rubbishy mass of captured correspondence, there survives, among the remains left by those in daily contact with him, only the record of a frank, open bearing, and unfailing active kindness. "Setting aside his heroism," wrote Dr. Scott after Trafalgar, "when I think what an affectionate, fascinating little fellow he was, how dignified and pure his mind, how kind and condescending his manners, I become stupid with grief for what I have lost." "He is so cheerful and pleasant," wrote the public secretary, Mr. Scott, "that it is a happiness to be about his hand." Dr. Gillespie notes "his noble frankness of manners, freedom from vain formality and pomp (so necessary to the decoration of empty little great men), which can only be equalled by the unexampled glory of his naval career, and the watchful and persevering diligence with which he commands this fleet." "Nelson was the man to love" said Captain Pulteney Malcolm, who knew intimately both him and Wellington. "I received Captain Leake," Nelson himself says, speaking of an army officer on a special mission to the Mediterranean, "with that openness which was necessary to make myself as well acquainted with him in three days, as others might do in as many years. I have given him all the knowledge of the men, their views, &c. &c., as far as I have been able to form a judgment." The remark is valuable, for it shows that frankness and cordiality were recognized by him as the wisest and most politic method of dealing with men. "Our friend, Sir Alexander," he says testily, "is a very great diplomatic character, and even an admiral must not know what he is negotiating about. You shall judge, viz., 'The Tunisian envoy is still here, negotiating. He is a moderate man; and, apparently, the best disposed of any I ever did business with.' Could even the oldest diplomatic character be drier? I hate such parade and nonsense."
Captain Hillyar, who commanded one of the frigates that were ever coming and going, writes in his journal: "If extreme kindness and attention could render me happy, I have this day experienced both from our revered and good commander-in-chief. How can I repay his kindness? By obeying his injunctions 'not to be in a hurry to get married,'[72] or by a continued perseverance in discharging those duties with alacrity and honour, which he is more immediately concerned in?" "Lord Nelson talked a great deal against matrimony yesterday, and I feel will not trust me at Malta, while we are capable of remaining at sea. It was all, however, in a good natured way. He is going to charge me with two of his boys [midshipmen], I am pleased that an opportunity is offered for showing my gratitude in a small degree for his almost fatherly kindness. I wish you knew him; if he has failings, reflections on his virtues cause them to be forgotten, and the mind dwells with pleasure on a character where bravery, generosity, and good nature, are joined to a heart that can feel for the woes of others, and delights in endeavouring to alleviate them." Hillyar was experiencing what Radstock had remarked: "Gain his esteem, and there is nothing he will not dash through to put you forward." "Gain his esteem, and you will have nothing to fear, for I know not a more honourable man existing, or one who would more readily do you justice in all respects." "I am well aware," wrote another young captain to Nelson himself, "of the good construction which your Lordship has ever been in the habit of putting on circumstances, although wearing the most unfavourable appearances.... Your Lordship's good opinion constitutes the summit of my ambition, and the most effective spur to my endeavours."
Nelson loved to bestow promotion, when deserved, on the spot, to give a man his spurs, if it might be, on the field of battle; but vacancies would not always offer at the happy moment. A brother of Hillyar's was a midshipman in one of two boats, sent to visit a suspicious vessel. A sudden and staggering fire killed the lieutenant in command, besides disabling a number of the boats' crews. The men hesitated; but the lad, left in charge, cheered them on and carried the vessel by boarding. Although he was but a couple of months over fifteen, Nelson gave him at once his commission into the vacancy made by the lieutenant. One very dark night, the "Victory" being under way, a midshipman, at the imminent risk of his life, leaped into the sea to save a seaman who had fallen overboard, and otherwise would have been drowned. Nelson gave him, too, his commission the following morning; but, seeing the jubilation among the young man's messmates, and thinking the act might be a dangerous precedent, he leaned over the poop and said, smiling good-naturedly, "Stop, young gentlemen! Mr. Flin has done a gallant thing today, and he has done many gallant things before, for which he has now got his reward. But mind, I'll have no more making lieutenants for men falling overboard."
The power thus to reward at discretion, and speedily, though liable to abuse, was, he claimed, essential to the due influence of a commander-in-chief; his subordinates must feel that it was in his power to make their future, to distinguish them, and that they were in so far dependent upon him. Nevertheless, with him as with others, personal interest had a weight which qualified his argument. The premature[73] and disastrous promotion of his stepson, at his request, by St. Vincent, was a practical abuse which in most minds would outweigh theoretical advantages. Writing to Sir Peter Parker about this time, he said, "You may be assured I will lose no time in making your grandson a postcaptain. It is the only opportunity ever offered me, of showing that my feelings of gratitude to you are as warm and alive as when you first took me by the hand: I owe all my honours to you, and I am proud to acknowledge it to all the world." Such enduring gratitude is charming to see, and tends to show that Nelson recognized some other reason for Parker's favor to himself than deference to Suckling's position; but it is scarcely a good working principle for the distribution of official patronage, although the younger Parker was a good and gallant officer.
Among the military duties that weighed upon Nelson, not the least was the protection of British trade. The narrow waters of the Mediterranean favored the operations of privateers, which did not have to go far from their ports, and found shelter everywhere; for the littoral states, in their weakness and insecurity, could but feebly enforce neutrality either in their continental or insular territories. In fact, both parties to the war, Great Britain and France, derived from the infringement of neutrality advantages which checked their remonstrances, and gave the feebler nations an apt retort, when taken to task in their painful efforts to preserve an attitude that was rather double-faced than neutral. If France, on the one hand, was deriving a considerable revenue from Spanish subsidies, and subsisting an army corps upon Neapolitan territory, Great Britain, on the other, could scarcely have maintained her fleet in the Gulf of Lyons, if unable to get fresh provisions and water from neutral ports; for, save Gibraltar and Malta, she had none that was her own or allied. Under these conditions, small privateers, often mere rowboats, but under the colors of France or the Italian Republic, swarmed in every port and inlet; in the Adriatic,—a deep, secluded pocket, particularly favorable to marauding,—in the Ionian Islands, along the Barbary coast, upon the shores of Spain, and especially in Sicily, whose central position and extensive seaboard commanded every trade-route east of the Balearics.
Nelson's correspondence is full of remonstrances addressed to the various neutral states—including even Austria, whose shore-line on the Adriatic was extensive—for their toleration of these abuses, which rested ultimately upon the fear of Bonaparte. He has, also, constant explanations to make to his own Government, or to British ministers at the different Courts, of the acts of his cruisers in destroying the depredators within neutral limits, when found red-handed. He makes no apologies, but stands firmly by his officers, who, when right, could always count upon his support in trouble. He never left a man in the lurch, or damned him with faint approval. "The protection afforded the enemy's privateers and rowboats in the different neutral ports of these seas, so contrary to every known law of neutrality, is extremely destructive of our commerce.... Although their conduct is infamous, yet their doing wrong is no rule why we should. There is a general principle which I have laid down for the regulation of the officers' conduct under my command—which is never to break the neutrality of any port or place; but never to consider as neutral any place from whence an attack is allowed to be made. It is certainly justifiable to attack any vessel in a place from whence she makes an attack." "I very fully approve every part of Captain ——'s conduct on the above occasion," he writes to the Admiralty in such a case.
The supplying of convoys, therefore, was ceaseless, for the depredations of the marauders were unending. "I am pulled to pieces by the demands of merchants for convoys," Nelson said; and he recognized that it must be so, for he entirely disapproved of even a fast-sailing vessel attempting to make a passage unprotected. "I wrote to the Admiralty for more cruisers until I was tired," he told Ball, "and they left off answering those parts of my letters. The late Admiralty thought I kept too many to the eastward of Sicily; the Smyrna folks complain of me, so do the Adriatic, so they do between Cape de Gatte and Gibraltar. If I had the vessels, I do assure you not one of them should go prize-hunting: that I never have done, I am a poorer man than the day I was ordered to the Mediterranean command, by upwards of £1,000; but money I despise except as it is useful, and I expect my prize money is embarked in the Toulon fleet." "I am distressed for frigates," was his continual cry. "From Cape St. Vincent to the head of the Adriatic I have only eight; which, with the service of watching Toulon, and the necessary frigates with the fleet, are absolutely not one half enough." For military duties, "frigates are the eyes of a fleet. I want ten more than I have in order to watch that the French should not escape me, and ten sloops besides, to do all duties." For nine stations which ought to be filled, "I have but two frigates; therefore, my dear Ball, have a little mercy, and do not think I have neglected the protection of the trade of Malta." This was written soon after joining the station, and he represents the number as diminishing as time passed. "It is shameful!" he cries in a moment of intense anxiety.
In this fewness of cruisers he was forced to keep his vessels constantly on the go,—to the Levant, to the Adriatic, to Sicily, to Italy,—scouring the coasts for privateers, gathering merchant ships by driblets, picking up information, and at the end of the round returning to Malta with their fractions of the large convoy. When this was assembled, a frigate or a ship-of-the-line, with one or two smaller ships of war, sailed with it for Gibraltar at a date fixed, approximately, months before. Meanwhile, at the latter place a similar process of collection had been going on from the ports of the western Mediterranean, and, after the Malta convoy arrived, the whole started together in charge of a division, composed usually of vessels of war that had to return to England for repairs.
To arrange and maintain this complicated process, and to dovetail it with the other necessary cruising duties, having in consideration which ships should first go home, required careful study and long foresight—infinite management, in fact. "The going on in the routine of a station," he tells Ball, who seems to have trod on his toes, "if interrupted, is like stopping a watch—the whole machine gets wrong. If the Maidstone takes the convoy, and, when Agincourt arrives, there is none for her or Thisbe, it puzzles me to know what orders to give them. If they chace the convoy to Gibraltar, the Maidstone may have gone on with it to England, and in that case, two ships, unless I begin to give a new arrangement, will either go home without convoy, or they must return [to Malta] in contradiction to the Admiralty's orders to send them home; I am sure you see it in its true point of view." "I dare not send a frigate home without a convoy," he says later. "Not an officer in the service bows with more respect to the orders of the Admiralty than myself," he writes St. Vincent; "but I am sure you will agree with me, that if I form plans for the sending home our convoys, and the clearing the different parts of the station from privateers, and the other services requisite, and that the Admiralty in some respects makes their arrangements, we must clash." Then he points out how the Admiralty diverting a ship, unknown to him, has tumbled over a whole train of services, like a child's row of blocks.
An extremely critical point in the homeward voyage was the first hundred miles west of Gibraltar; and it was a greater thorn in Nelson's side, because of a French seventy-four, the "Aigle," which had succeeded in entering Cadiz just after he got off Toulon. For the ordinary policing of that locality he assigned a division of three frigates, under a Captain Gore, who possessed his confidence. "The enemy's privateers and cruisers," he tells him, "are particularly destructive to our trade passing the skirts of the station." Privateering was thus reduced; but when a convoy sailed, he tried always to have it accompanied through that stage by a ship of size sufficient to grapple with the "Aigle." For a while, indeed, he placed there an eighty-gun ship, but the gradual deterioration of his squadron and the increase of Latouche Tréville's obliged him to recall her, and at times his anxiety was great; not the less because Gore, like other frigate captains, entertained the fancy that his three frigates might contend with a ship-of-the-line. "Your intentions of attacking that ship with the small squadron under your command are certainly very laudable; but I do not consider your force by any means equal to it." The question of two or three small ships against one large involves more considerations than number and weight of guns. Unity of direction and thickness of sides—defensive strength, that is—enter into the problem. As Hawke said, "Big ships take a good deal of drubbing." Howe's opinion was the same as Nelson's; and Hardy, Nelson's captain, said, "After what I have seen at Trafalgar, I am satisfied it would be mere folly, and ought never to succeed."[74] What Hardy saw at Trafalgar, however, was not frigates against ships-of-the-line, but vessels of the latter class opposed, smaller against greater.
It seems singular, with such a weak link in the chain of communication from the Mediterranean to England, that the Admiralty, on the outbreak of the war with Spain, in the latter part of 1804, should have divided Nelson's command at this very point, leaving as a somewhat debatable ground, for mutual jealousy, that through which valuable interests must pass, and where they must be transferred. The reason and manner of this division, impolitic and inopportune as it was, and bitterly as Nelson resented it, seem to have been misunderstood. Convinced that he could not endure another winter such as the last, he made a formal application, about the middle of August, 1804, for permission to go home for a while. "I consider the state of my health to be such as to make it absolutely necessary that I should return to England to re-establish it. Another winter such as the last, I feel myself unable to stand against. A few months of quiet may enable me to serve again next spring; and I believe that no officer is more anxious to serve than myself." In accordance with this last intimation, which speaks his whole heart, he wrote privately to the First Lord that he would like to come back in the spring, if his health were restored, as he believed it would be; and he assured him that his second, Bickerton, whose rank did not entitle him to the chief command under ordinary conditions, was perfectly fitted to hold it during his absence—in short, to keep the place warm for his return.
Nelson knew that the Admiralty was besieged with admirals, many senior to himself, seeking for employment, and that it would be very difficult for it to resist the pressure for the vacancy in "my favourite command," to resume which he was impelled by both his sense of duty and his love of glory. He wrote therefore to Elliot, and to the King of the Two Sicilies, in the same sense as he had to Melville, recalling his well-tried devotion to the interests of that Court, which a successor might not equally show, and suggesting that his cause would be strengthened by an application for his return on the part of the King. The latter consequently intimated to the British Government that he hoped Lord Nelson would be sent back. He was, in truth, so much agitated over the prospect of his going, that he offered him a house in either Palermo or Naples, if he wished to remain in the South to recruit; an offer which Elliot, equally uneasy, urged him to accept.
The Government did exactly what was asked. Nelson received permission to go to England, when he felt it necessary, leaving the command in the hands of Bickerton; but at the same time the Admiralty had to meet the rush of claimants for the vacancy, all the more pressing because rumors were afloat of a Spanish war, which would make the Mediterranean not only the most important, but, in prize-money, the most lucrative command. Among the applicants was Sir John Orde, who had been nursing a technical grievance ever since he had been passed over, in Nelson's favor, for the command of the detachment with which the Battle of the Nile was fought. Nelson's leave was issued on the 6th of October, and on the 26th Orde was given a small squadron—five ships-of-the-line—to blockade Cadiz. Being senior to Nelson, and of course to Bickerton, he could only have this position by reducing the latter's station, which had extended to Cape Finisterre. The line between the two commands was drawn at the Straits' mouth, a rather vague phrase, but Gibraltar was left with Nelson. Orde thus got the station for prize-money, and Nelson that for honor, which from youth until now he most valued. "The arrangement," wrote his friend, Lord Radstock, "will be a death-stroke to his hopes of the galleons; but as your chief has ever showed himself to be as great a despiser of riches as he is a lover of glory, I am fully convinced in my own mind that he would sooner defeat the French fleet than capture fifty galleons."
Nevertheless, Nelson was sorely aggrieved, and complained bitterly to his correspondents. "I have learnt not to be surprised at anything; but the sending an officer to such a point, to take, if it is a Spanish war, the whole harvest, after all my trials (God knows unprofitable enough! for I am a much poorer man than when we started in the Amphion,) seems a little hard: but patienza." "He is sent off Cadiz to reap the golden harvest, as Campbell was to reap my sugar harvest. It's very odd, two Admiralties to treat me so: surely I have dreamt that I have 'done the State some service.' But never mind; I am superior to those who could treat me so." His contempt for money, however acquired, except as a secondary consideration, remained unchanged. "I believe I attend more to the French fleet than making captures; but what I have, I can say as old Haddock said, 'it never cost a sailor a tear, nor the nation a farthing.' This thought is far better than prize-money;—not that I despise money—quite the contrary, I wish I had one hundred thousand pounds this moment." "I am keeping as many frigates as possible round me," he wrote to his friend Ball, "for I know the value of them on the day of battle: and compared with that day, what signifies any prizes they might take?"[75] Nor did such utterances stand alone. "I hope war with Spain may be avoided," he wrote. "I want not riches at such a dreadful price. Peace for our Country is all I wish to fight for,—I mean, of course, an honourable one, without which it cannot be a secure one." But his outlays were very heavy. Besides the £1,800 annually paid to Lady Nelson, he gave Lady Hamilton £1,200 a year, exclusive of what was spent on the house and grounds at Merton; and it may be inferred from Dr. Gillespie that the cost of the cabin mess, beyond the table money allowed by the Government, was assumed by him. He himself said, early in the cruise, "Unless we have a Spanish war, I shall live here at a great expense, although Mr. Chevalier [his steward] takes every care." "God knows, in my own person, I spend as little money as any man; but you[76] know I love to give away."
That he was thus sore was most natural; but it was also natural that the Government should expect, in view of his strong representations about his health, that the three weeks between the issuing his leave and Orde's orders would have insured his being on his way home, before the latter reached his station. Had things fallen out so, it would not have been Nelson, the exceptional hero of exceptional services, but Bickerton, a man with no peculiar claims as yet, who would have lost the prize-money; for Nelson himself had just won a suit against St. Vincent, which established that the moment a commander-in-chief left his station, his right lapsed, and that of the next flag-officer commenced. Nor was the division of the station an unprecedented measure. It had been extended from the Straits to Cape Finisterre at the time St. Vincent withdrew from the Mediterranean, in 1796; and in 1802, when Lord Keith asked for additional aids, on account of the enormous administrative work, the Admiralty made of the request a pretext for restricting his field to the Mediterranean, a step which Keith successfully resisted.
Before Nelson received his leave he had begun to change his mind about going home. This was due, partly, to a slight betterment in his health, which he at this time mentions; chiefly, it would seem, to the prospects of a Spanish war. This, by doubling the number of his enemies and the quarters whence they might come, contributed to the pleasurable excitement that was always a tonic to his physical frame, and roused the eager desire for conspicuous action, which was his most prominent passion. Indications also assured him that the expectation of the French coming out, in which appearances had so often deceived him, was now on the point of being realized; that Bonaparte's projects, whatever they were, were approaching maturity. His "guess," founded on the reports before him, was wonderfully penetrative. He did not see all the way through the French mill-stone, but he saw very deep into it; his inference, indeed, was one in which intuition and sagacity bore equal shares. "If the Russians continue increasing their naval force in this country [that is, in the eastern Mediterranean], I do not think the French will venture to the eastward; therefore, I rather expect they will, as the year advances, try to get out of the straits; and should they accomplish it with 7,000 troops on board, I am sure we should lose half our West India Islands, for I think they would go there, and not to Ireland. Whatever may be their destination, I shall certainly follow, be it even to the East Indies." The last allusion is interesting, for it shows the wide flight of his speculations, which had found utterance before in the casual remark that his ships were provisioned for a voyage to Madras; and, even as a guess, it struck perilously near one of Bonaparte's purposes. The splendid decision, formulated so long before the case arose, to follow wherever they went, held in its womb the germ of the great campaign of Trafalgar; while in the surmise that the Toulon fleet was bound to the West Indies, the arrow of conjecture had gone straight to the bull's-eye.
In this same letter, addressed to General Villettes, at Malta, formerly his coadjutor at the siege of Bastia, Nelson, in the intimacy of friendship, reveals what was to him at once the secret of health and the fulfilment of desire; the congenial atmosphere in which his being throve, and expanded to fulfil the limits of his genius. "Such a pursuit would do more, perhaps, towards restoring me to health than all the doctors; but I fear" (his application for leave having gone in) "this is reserved for some happier man. Not that I complain; I have had a good race of glory, but we are never satisfied, although I hope I am duly thankful for the past; but one cannot help, being at sea, longing for a little more." "I hope," he had written a few months earlier to Lord Minto, "some day, very soon, to fulfil the warmest wishes of my Country and expectations of my friends. I hope you may be able, at some debate, to say, as your partiality has said before, 'Nelson has done more than he has done before;' I can assure you it shall be a stimulus to my exertion on the day of battle.... Whatever happens, I have run a glorious race."
On the 12th of October Nelson received a piece of news which elicited instantaneously a flash of action, illustrative at once of the promptness of his decisions and of the briskness of temper that has been noted already. A letter arrived from Captain Gore, commanding the detachment outside of the Straits, that two frigates, sent from the Brest squadron by Admiral Cornwallis, had arrived, with a captain senior to himself, who had taken him under his orders, and carried two of Nelson's frigates off Cadiz to intercept the Spanish treasure-fleet expected there from America. Cornwallis's action had been taken by orders from England, but no communication to that effect, either from him or from the Admiralty, reached Nelson at this moment. Astounded by a measure which could scarcely fail to cause war, and convinced, as he said, that Spain had no wish to go to war with Great Britain, he gave himself a night to pause; but early next day he wrote to the Admiralty, intimating pretty plainly that, if done by its direction, this was not the way the commander of the Mediterranean fleet should receive word of so momentous a step taken in his district, while to Gore he sent emphatic orders to disobey Cornwallis, although the latter was Nelson's senior. Summing up with admirable lucidity the facts before him, and thereby proving that the impression under which Cornwallis's action probably was taken was erroneous, he said: "Unless you have much weightier reasons than the order of Admiral Cornwallis, or that you receive orders from the Admiralty, it is my most positive directions that neither you, or any ship under your orders, do molest or interrupt in any manner the lawful commerce of Spain, with whom we are at perfect peace and amity."
It is permissible, because instructive, to note that in this order, while Nelson amply provides for discretion on the part of his subordinate, he throws the full weight of his authority on the difficult horn of a possible dilemma, the act—so momentous to an officer—of disobedience to a present superior; in this case the captain sent by Cornwallis. Contrast this with the Government's orders to the commander of the troops at Malta, when it wished him to send a garrison to Messina.[77] Instead of saying, "You will send so many men, unless you think you cannot spare them," its orders ran: "You will send, if you think you can spare them." Of course, as Nelson invariably experienced, an officer addressed in the latter style found always a lion in his path. So his orders to Gore were not, "Obey, if" but "Disobey, unless;" and Gore knew, as every man in the Mediterranean knew by long trial, that, if he disobeyed, he would have at his back, through thick and thin, the first sea-officer in Great Britain. But Nelson's orders were always stamped with the positive, daring, lucid character of his genius and its conceptions; and so, except in unworthy hands, they were fulfilled in spirit as well as in letter.
An interesting illustration of this trenchant clearness is to be found in instructions given to the captain of the "Donegal," an eighty-gun ship, sent under very critical circumstances to cruise off Cadiz, in September, 1803. It appears to the author not only characteristic of Nelson, but a perfect example of the kind of directions a junior would wish to have in a difficult case, when desirous to carry out the spirit of his superior's orders. It explains itself.
26th September, 1803.
TO CAPTAIN SIR RICHARD JOHN STRACHAN, BART., H.M. SHIP DONEGAL.
The occurrences which pass every day in Spain forbode, I fancy, a speedy War with England; therefore it becomes proper for me to put you on your guard, and advise you how to act under particular circumstances. By looking at the former line of conduct on the part of Spain, which she followed just before the commencement of the last War, we may naturally expect the same events to happen. The French Admiral Richery was in Cadiz, blocked up by Admiral Man; on August the 22nd, they came to sea, attended by the Spanish Fleet, which saw the French safe beyond St. Vincent, and returned into Cadiz. Admiral Man very properly did not choose to attack Admiral Richery under such an escort. This is a prelude to what I must request your strict attention to; at the same time, I am fully aware that you must be guided, in some measure, by actual circumstances.
I think it very probable, even before Spain breaks with us, that they may send a Ship or two of the Line to see L'Aigle round Cape St. Vincent; and that if you attack her in their presence, they may attack you; and giving them possession of the Donegal, would be more than either you or I should wish, therefore I am certain it must be very comfortable for you to know my sentiments. From what you hear in Cadiz, you will judge how far you may venture yourself in company with a Spanish Squadron; but if you are of opinion that you may trust yourself near them, keeping certainly out of gun-shot, send your Boat with a letter to the Spanish Commodore, and desire to know whether he means to defend the French Ships; and get his answer in writing, and have it as plain as possible. If it be 'yes, that he will fire at you if you attack the French under his protection,' then, if you have force enough, make your attack on the whole body, and take them all if you can; for I should consider such an answer as a perfect Declaration of War. If you are too weak for such an attack, you must desist; but you certainly are fully authorized to take the Ships of Spain whenever you meet them. Should the answer be ambiguous, you must then act as your judgment may direct you, and I am sure that will be very proper. Only recollect, that it would be much better to let the French Ships escape, than to run too great a risk of losing the Donegal, yourself, and the Ship's company.
I am, &c.
NELSON AND BRONTE.
This letter fulfils his own request to the Admiralty: "All I wish and submit to their Lordships is, that if the business is left to me, my orders may be decisive."
Later in the same day that Nelson received Gore's letter, the Admiralty's orders arrived, sent, as despatches too often were, by a vessel so small and slow that it would seem they counted upon her insignificance to elude an enemy's notice. The delay served, as has been said, to give proof of the rapidity of Nelson's action; the receipt of the orders enabled him also to show how much clearer were his conceptions of adequacy than those of ordinary men. To stop treasure-ships, or to embargo merchant-ships, when difficulty was threatening, was no new idea to the British Government. The latter had been done with Baltic merchantmen at the time of the Armed Neutrality. In the case of Spain, it was a measure particularly efficacious, for the financial solvency and belligerent capacity of that country depended upon the galleons, which brought to her the tribute of her colonies; and her relations and dealings with France at this time were so partial and suspicious as to justify precautions. Evidently, however, such a step, being avowedly preventive and not offensive, should be taken in such a way as to avert all chance of possible disaster. Several Spanish frigates being expected, the British Government charged four vessels of the same rate with the task of arresting them. Nelson, the instant he got his orders, detached to the spot an eighty-gun ship, to which he added four other cruisers, thinking, as he said in his orders to the captain selected, that "this is a service of the highest importance, and that an officer of your rank and experience should be employed therein." With such odds against him, the Spanish commander would need no military justification for submission. As it was, he resisted, necessitating a fight, which under the circumstances was barbarous and brutal, and ended in one of the Spanish vessels blowing up with several women on board; a result due wholly to the blundering lack of foresight which sent a corporal's guard to do the work of a sheriff's posse.
This incident, of the order to arrest the treasure-ships, which was made general for all vessels of that class, was probably the determining occasion of Nelson's decision to remain in the Mediterranean. War with Spain, with consequent increased activity on the part of France, though not certain, became probable. There was at that time on board the "Victory" a Dr. Lambton Este, who had gone to the Mediterranean in a civil capacity, and was on his way home. Nelson, hoping to return soon himself, asked Este to remain until he started, and to accompany him in a worn-out seventy-four, the "Superb," which he was holding for that purpose. It seems that, in looking forward to the resumption of his command, he expected it would be the scene of a more wide-spread political activity, especially in the far East where Este had been employed, and that, for this purpose, he wished to attach the latter to his person. "There may be more occupation there for us all, hereafter, than we just now foresee, or may expect."
In confirmation of this general forecast, we are told by Dr. Scott that, when the admiral left England before Trafalgar, arrangements had been made with the Foreign Office for Este with six clerks to be attached to the flagship, to conduct the diplomatic correspondence. The fact is doubly interesting. It shows, on the one hand, the accuracy of Nelson's foresight as to the vast importance the Mediterranean was about to assume, to meet which he thus was making provision in a general way; although neither he nor any other man could have anticipated the extraordinary, complicated snarl of the political threads in Napoleon's later years. The cares from these, it may be said in passing, were by Nelson's death devolved upon Collingwood; who, though a strong man, was killed by them, through general debility resulting from confinement, and through organic injury produced by bending over his desk. On the other hand, it cannot but be grateful to those who admire the hero, to see that Nelson looked forward to no inglorious ease, but to a life of strenuous work, as well as, if it might be so, of military honor. Had he lived, we may hope, the days after Trafalgar would not have been the grave of his renown.
On the first of November his decision was taken. He sent for Este and said, "Oh, my good fellow! I have abandoned the idea of going to England, at present. I shall not go yet, and when I may go is quite uncertain—must depend upon events, and upon my own precarious health; at the same time, I am doing you an evident injustice, by detaining you here so long in uncertainty." Este of course expressed his willingness to remain while needed, but Nelson interrupted him, saying, "No, my wish is that you should go,—I am anxious that you should go, and go without further delay. To tell you the truth, I am not entirely disinterested. Go home; get confirmed in your appointment, according to my desire, and return to me as soon afterwards as you can. Should I retain my command in the Mediterranean, with the powers already conceded to me, I shall require your assistance." It seems probable that he was anxious to get some one home as rapidly as possible, to forestall, if time permitted, a final recall, which the appointment of a successor would be. "Long before this time," he had written Lady Hamilton, "I expect, another admiral is far on his way to supersede me. I should for your sake, and for many of our friends, have liked an odd hundred thousand pounds [by a Spanish war]; but, never mind. If they give me the choice of staying a few months longer, it will be very handsome; and, for the sake of others, we would give up very much of our own felicity."
The despatches and routine papers were got ready rapidly, and placed in charge of Este, who sailed for Lisbon, in a sloop-of-war, on the 6th of November, furnished with orders to all officials to expedite him on his way, and particularly to captains not to communicate with the ship, because the plague, then raging in Gibraltar, would involve her, if visited, in the delays of quarantine. On the 18th of November, off Cape St. Vincent, Este met the "Swiftsure," seventy-four, bringing Orde out. It has been charged that the latter discourteously delayed to notify Nelson of his taking over part of the station.[78] It appears, however, from this encounter, that his letter to that effect, dated the 17th,[79] though headed "off Cadiz," was actually prepared before he reached his position there. It was forwarded to Nelson by the "Anson," whose captain was senior officer of the division till then blockading the port, whom Orde relieved and sent on with his despatch. The "Anson" joined Nelson on the 15th of December. The "Swiftsure," which was also destined to his squadron, did not reach him until the 25th. It seems, therefore, fair to acquit Orde of a discourtesy as aimless as it would be reprehensible.
Just before Este's departure Nelson had reconnoitred Toulon. A new vice-admiral had hoisted his flag in place of Latouche Tréville, who had died on the 20th of August. "He has given me the slip," wrote Nelson, who felt himself balked of his vengeance. "The French papers say he died of walking so often up to the signal-post, upon Sepet, to watch us: I always pronounced that would be his death." His successor was Villeneuve, the predestined victim of Trafalgar. "They now amuse themselves with night-signals," Nelson informed the First Lord; "and by the quantity of rockets and blue lights they show with every signal, they plainly mark their position. These gentlemen must soon be so perfect in theory, that they will come to sea to put their knowledge into practice. Could I see that day, it would make me happy." The time was now not far distant. The weariness of waiting was soon to give way to the anxious fever of doubtful and protracted pursuit, of prolonged uncertainty and steadfast endurance, through which he advanced to his final triumph, just as he had to those of the past.
The seizure of the Spanish treasure-ships, with its lamentable catastrophe, took place on the 5th of October. Nelson had the news on the 8th of November, which, extraordinary as it may appear, was before the fact was known in Madrid. On the 10th of November, when the British minister received his passports upon his own demand, no word had reached there. On the 15th, Nelson was informed that a British vessel had been fired upon by the batteries of Barcelona, which was an error; but receiving at the same time a letter from the minister, probably to the effect that he would break off relations on the 10th, he inferred that war existed, and issued orders for a general seizure of Spanish vessels of war and commerce throughout the station. This was done on his own responsibility, but he guarded himself by stringent provisions against any injury beyond detention being inflicted; and he alleged, very reasonably, that a commander-in-chief who never got letters from home less than two months old must act upon his own motion. "I am completely in the dark. It is now more than two months since the John Bull [the last despatch boat] sailed." "I have set the whole Mediterranean to work," he tells Lady Hamilton on the 23d; "and if I had had the spare troops at Malta at my disposal, Minorca would at this moment have had English colours flying." A Swedish ship, carrying a Spanish regiment from Barcelona to the latter island, was among the first captures.
"With respect to my making war upon Spain, and Sir John Orde not having done it," so he wrote to Elliot, "I believe you will think I have acted not precipitately, but consistent with the firmness of John Bull. I can't tell what schemes ministers may have; but when I am without orders, and unexpected occurrences arise, I shall always act as I think the honour and glory of my King and Country demand. Upon the most mature and serious consideration I can give the subject, the present lays within the compass of a nutshell. Our Ministers demand certain points to be conceded to them; they, to give a spur, detain the Spanish treasure. Spain, the moment she hears of it, kicks your minister out of Madrid; a plain proof they had not acceded to our propositions. Indeed, Mr. Frere,[80] you will see by his letter, did not believe it would have a favourable termination, even had not the frigates been detained. I send your Excellency his letters. I feel I have done perfectly right. No desire of wealth could influence my conduct; for I had nothing to take worth two-pence to me. Sir John Orde was sent, if it was a Spanish war, to take the money; but until he saw my orders, he did not act. I suppose he was fearful of that responsibility which I am ever ready to take upon me; and now he is to wallow in wealth, whilst I am left a beggar. But such things are. I receive the kindest letters from Lord Melville and the Secretary of State, but they think the French fleet is prize enough for me." No wonder Nelson found that diplomatists were slow, measured by himself as a standard; but what a wonderful instinct it shows in him, that, with action ever prompt to the verge of precipitancy, he made so few blunders in deed. There are several errors of fact in his summary of reasons, but his action was absolutely well-timed—to the very hour.
Meanwhile, and up to the 15th of December, when Orde's letter was received, no reply had come to his application for leave, and no intimation of a successor. A fresh complication here arose by the entire break-down of one of his two junior admirals—Rear-Admiral Campbell—whose health became so affected that it was necessary to send him immediately home. He quitted the fleet on the 4th of December. Nelson rightly felt that he himself could not go, leaving Bickerton without any assistant. He went further; for, when a rumor came that Orde was to relieve him, he determined that he would offer his services to him, as second, until a successor to Campbell should arrive. As there was friction between himself and Orde, who had, besides, a not very pleasant official reputation, this intention, to take a lower place where he had been chief, was not only self-sacrificing, but extremely magnanimous; it was, however, disfigured by too much self-consciousness. "I have wrote to Lord Melville that I should make such an offer, and that I entreated him to send out a flag-officer as soon as possible, but I dare say Sir John Orde is too great a man to want my poor services, and that he will reject them; be that as it may, you will, I am sure, agree with me, that I shall show my superiority to him by such an offer, and the world will see what a sacrifice I am ready to make for the service of my King and Country, for what greater sacrifice could I make, than serving for a moment under Sir John Orde, and giving up for that moment the society of all I hold most dear in this world?"
Orde's letter reached Nelson in Pula Roads, in the Gulf of Cagliari, at the southern extremity of Sardinia; an out-of-the-way position which probably accounts for much of its delay. He remained there, or in the Gulf of Palmas, a little to the westward, for about a week, and on the 19th of December left for his station off Cape San Sebastian. At the latter place, on Christmas Day, he was joined by the "Swiftsure," which brought him a great batch of official mail that had come out with Orde. He thus received at one and the same time his leave to go home and the Admiralty's order reducing his station. Unluckily, the latter step, though taken much later than the issuing of his leave, had become known to him first, through Orde; and the impression upon his mind remained with that firmness of prejudice which Radstock had noted in him. He does not appear at any time to have made allowance for the fact that his command was cut down under a reasonable impression that he was about to quit it.
Immediately after the "Swiftsure" joined at Rendezvous 97, he took the fleet off Toulon. The enemy was found to be still in port, but the rumors of an approaching movement, and of the embarkation of troops, were becoming more specific. He remained off the harbor for at least a week, and thence went to Madalena, where he anchored on the 11th of January, 1805. This was, though he knew it not, the end of the long watch off Toulon.
Short as the time was, Nelson had already experienced the inconvenience of a senior admiral, lying, like an enemy, on the flank of his communications with Great Britain, and dealing as he pleased with his vessels. One frigate at least had been sent already to England, without his knowledge and consent. "I have in a former letter," he tells the First Lord, "stated my opinion freely upon the stations of Gibraltar and Cadiz being given to the same officer; for without that is done, our convoys can never be considered safe. There is also another consideration, why the Officer at Gibraltar should be under the orders of the Admiral commanding the Mediterranean fleet—which is, that any admiral independent of that station, takes all the stores he chooses, or fancies he wants, for the service of his fleet; thereby placing the fleet in the Gulf of Lyons in great distress for many articles."
Off Toulon, having a large official mail to make up in reply to that brought by the "Swiftsure," he thought it both quicker and safer, under all the conditions of the time, to send it to Lisbon. He therefore called on board the "Victory" a smart young frigate-captain, William Parker, a nephew of Lord St. Vincent, gave him orders to take the despatches to Lisbon, and added, "Sir John Orde takes my frigates from me, and sends them away in some other direction from what I wish. I cannot even get my despatches home. You must contrive to get to the westward and go into Lisbon, and avoid his ships. I have not signed your orders," alluding to memorandum instructions separate from the formal orders, "because Sir John Orde is my senior officer; but, if it should come to a Court Martial, Hardy can swear to my handwriting, and you shall not be broke. Take your orders, and good bye; and remember, Parker, if you cannot weather that fellow, I shall think you have not a drop of your old uncle's blood in your veins." The memorandum directed him to pass Cape Spartel in the night, steering to the southward and westward to avoid Orde, and ended thus: "Bring-to [stop] for nothing, if you can help it. Hoist the signal for quarantine, and that you are charged with dispatches. If you are forced to speak by a superior officer, show him only my order for not interfering with you; and unless he is an admiral, superior to me, you will obey my orders instead of any pretended ones from him, from my superior officer."
Parker executed his commission successfully, but in doing so met with a curious adventure. Leaving Gibraltar with a north wind, favorable for his purpose, he passed Spartel as directed, and, the night being moonlight, saw in the distance Orde's squadron cruising under easy sail. Unluckily, one of the outlying lookout frigates discovered him, gave chase, and overtook him. Her captain himself came on board, and was about to give Parker orders not to proceed to the westward, Orde jealously objecting to any apparent intrusion upon his domain. Parker stopped him hastily from speaking on the quarter-deck, within earshot of others, and took him into the cabin. The stranger had been one of Nelson's old midshipmen and a favorite; had started with him in the "Agamemnon," and by him had been made a commander after the Nile. "Captain Hoste," said Parker, "I believe you owe all your advancement in the service to my uncle, Lord St. Vincent, and to Lord Nelson. I am avoiding Sir John Orde's squadron by desire of Lord Nelson; you know his handwriting; I must go on."[81] (Parker being senior to Hoste, the latter could not detain him by his own authority; and he understood from this avowal that Orde's orders, if produced, would become a matter of record, would be disobeyed, and a court-martial must follow.) "The question of a court-martial would be very mischievous. Do you not think it would be better if you were not to meet the 'Amazon' this night?" Captain Hoste, after a little reflection, left the ship without giving his admiral's orders to Parker.[82]
Having determined not to leave Bickerton alone, Nelson decided to keep secret his own leave to return to England. "I am much obliged by their Lordships' kind compliance with my request, which is absolutely necessary from the present state of my health," he writes on the 30th of December; "and I shall avail myself of their Lordships' permission, the moment another admiral, in the room of Admiral Campbell, joins the fleet, unless the enemy's fleet should be at sea, when I should not think of quitting my command until after the battle." "I shall never quit my post," he tells a friend, "when the French fleet is at sea, as a commander-in-chief of great celebrity once did,"—a not very generous fling at St. Vincent. "I would sooner die at my post, than have such a stigma upon my memory." "Nothing has kept me here," he writes Elliot, "but the fear for the escape of the French fleet, and that they should get to either Naples or Sicily in the short days. Nothing but gratitude to those good Sovereigns could have induced me to stay one moment after Sir John Orde's extraordinary command, for his general conduct towards me is not such as I had a right to expect."
During this last month of monotonous routine, while off Toulon and at Madalena, he had occasion to express opinions on current general topics, which found little room in his mind after the French fleet began to move. There was then a report of a large expedition for foreign service forming in England, and rumor, as usual, had a thousand tongues as to its destination. "A blow struck in Europe," Nelson wrote to Lord Moira, "would do more towards making us respected, and of course facilitate a peace, than the possession of Mexico or Peru,"—a direction towards which the commercial ambitions of Great Britain had a traditional inclination, fostered by some military men and statesmen, who foresaw the break-up of the Spanish colonial system. "Above all, I hope we shall have no buccaneering expeditions. Such services fritter away our troops and ships, when they are so much wanted for more important occasions, and are of no use beyond enriching a few individuals. I know not, if these sentiments coincide with yours; but as glory, and not money, has through life been your pursuit, I should rather think that you will agree with me, that in Europe, and not abroad, is the place for us to strike a blow." "I like the idea of English troops getting into the Kingdom of Naples," he tells Elliot at this same time; whence it may be inferred that that was the quarter he would now, as upon his first arrival, choose for British effort. "If they are well commanded, I am sure they will do well. They will have more wants than us sailors." The expedition, which sailed the following spring, was destined for the Mediterranean, and reinforced the garrisons of Gibraltar and Malta to an extent that made the latter a factor to be considered in the strategy of the inland sea; but when it arrived, Nelson had left the Mediterranean, not to return.
As regards general politics, Nelson, writing to the Queen of Naples, took a gloomy view of the future. The Prime Minister of the Two Sicilies, Sir John Acton, had some time before been forced out of office and had retired to Palermo, an event produced by the pressure of French influence, which Nelson regarded now as absolutely dominant in that kingdom, and menacing to Europe at large. "Never, perhaps, was Europe more critically situated than at this moment, and never was the probability of universal Monarchy more nearly being realized, than in the person of the Corsican. I can see but little difference between the name of Emperor, King, or Prefect, if they perfectly obey his despotic orders. Prussia is trying to be destroyed last—Spain is little better than a province of France—Russia does nothing on the grand scale. Would to God these great Powers reflected, that the boldest measures are the safest! They allow small states to fall, and to serve the enormous power of France, without appearing to reflect that every kingdom which is annexed to France, makes their own existence, as independent states, more precarious." How shrewd a prophecy this was as regards Prussia and Spain, those two countries were to learn by bitter experience; and remote Russia herself, though she escaped the last humiliation, saw in the gigantic hosts whose onset a few years later shook her to her centre, the armed subjects of the many smaller states, in whose subjugation she had acquiesced during the period of the Czar's moral subservience to Napoleon.
Nelson's essentially military genius had in political matters a keenly sensitive intuition of the probable action of his fellow-warrior, Bonaparte. "Russia's going to war in the way I am sure she will, will cause the loss of Naples and Sardinia; for that Court will not send 100,000 men into Italy, and less are useless for any grand purpose." "Your Excellency's summary account of the situation of Naples since the negotiations with Russia," he wrote to Elliot in October, "are perfectly clear; but the times are such that kingdoms must not be played with. So far from Russia assisting Naples, it may involve her, without the greatest care and circumspection, in total ruin. Naples must not be hastily involved in war with France. Sicily must be saved. The Calabrians must be kept from the entrance of French troops. If we are consulted, we must assist Naples in keeping off the blow as long as possible." That Napoleon's action would have been as here surmised, had his purposes then tended towards the Mediterranean instead of the English Channel, we have his own assertion. "At the solicitation of your ambassador at St. Petersburg," wrote he to the Queen of Naples, three months later, referring to the same subject, "ten thousand Russians have been sent to Corfu.... If it had entered into my plans to make war upon the King of Naples, I should have done it on the entrance of the first Russian in Corfu, but I wish for peace with Naples, with Europe entire, with England even." Napoleon's wishes for peace, except on the condition of having his own way, are scarcely to be taken seriously; but his care to keep things quiet in the South corroborates the other indications of his firm purpose to invade England. He was too astute to precipitate troubles elsewhere while that was pending. The appearance of the Russians in Corfu, although unwise in Nelson's view, relieved his fears for the islands and the Morea, and enabled him to reduce a little his detachment about the heel of Italy.
Towards the middle of December Nelson had received information, which was substantially correct, "from various places, and amongst others, from the King of Sardinia [then in Gaeta], that the French were assembling troops near Toulon, and had taken some of the best troops and a corps of cavalry from the Riviera of Genoa. Every seaman was pressed and sent to Toulon. On the 16th the Active spoke a vessel from Marseilles, who reported that seven thousand troops had embarked on board the French fleet."
It was in Madalena Roads that the long-expected summons came at last. In the afternoon of January 19, 1805, blowing a heavy gale of wind from the northwest, the two lookout frigates from off Toulon came in sight, with the signal flying that the French fleet was at sea. At 3 P.M. they anchored near the "Victory." Three hours later Nelson had left Madalena forever.