The Admiral: A Romance of Nelson in the Year of the Nile

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

I do not know if at the moment she was enhancing her beauty in the manner I have described,—she had the gift at will of intensifying it,—but certainly it seemed as if no human countenance could have before held so much serene loveliness, yearning sympathy, tender pity, and blithe courage. She was the angel of all and the servant of all. She was never in her bed through all the three days of the storm. The moment at which she was lovelier than ever I saw her in her life, was when poor little Prince Albert, who had eaten the good breakfast that she bade him and been in violent pain and sickness ever since, at seven o’clock of the evening threw his little arms convulsively round her neck and vomited out his life, his mother the while being prostrated with the sea-sickness, as she was after to be with his death.

The approach of the child’s death roused the Admiral from his own sickness. The approach of battle or death was always like a trumpet-blast to that commanding spirit, and he was present when the little child died, calmly but convulsively, in the arms of the good woman. For in moments like this My Lady was a woman as good as ever breathed. The Admiral was completely overcome. When we were taking up our station at the Nile, the broadside of the Aquilon crashing into our bows laid a hundred of our men on the deck wounded and dying, but his cheek never turned, as it turned at the passing of this seven-year-old slip of exiled Royalty. All through the 24th from the hour after midnight, and all through the 25th, and all through the long dark hours of the early morning of the 26th, till we were under the lee of the port of Palermo, this tempest raged. It seemed, as Sir William, who palmed himself on his mots, observed, as if the fiends of the lightning and tempest were stretching out their hands for those snatched from battle, murder, and sudden death. And the cruelty of it was that for a full four hours before the child died we were in sight of Palermo, lying between Zaffarano and Monte Pellegrino on our larboard hand. But the storm was such that there was no hope of our making the port, which lies as it were in the arm of Pellegrino. There were we, with the King’s own child dying of sea-sickness in sight of his island-capital, and the greatest Admiral in all the world powerless to take the ship into the harbour. But in the night the wind changed again, and at 2 a.m. we were safe at anchor within a stone’s throw of the Villa of the Marquess de Gregorio, where it was the custom of the old Viceroys to repair on landing.

What a contrast to My Lady’s heroic energy, mingled with the utmost womanly tenderness, was the behaviour of Sir William in these awful days and nights!—though, indeed, he showed in a high degree the philosophical temperament which had won for him the title of Pliny, much used by My Lady before their marriage.

Whilst she was animating with her exertions and sympathy the miserable flock of refugees huddled in the Admiral’s state-room, Sir William sat in his wife’s cabin, with a loaded pistol in each hand. When she first came upon him in this extraordinary attitude, she gave such a wild shriek of alarm as the fiercest of the storm could not draw from her. But Sir William, in a cold voice and with an impassioned face, bade her not be alarmed. He had no designs upon any other life than his own, and not even on that until it should be certain that they were going down without hope of rescue. He was merely resolved not to die with the guggle-guggle-guggle of such an unpleasant fluid as sea-water in his throat, and was therefore prepared to shoot himself as soon as he felt the ship to be sinking. It is not certain whether he sat on like a statue, in the same position for the whole two days; but in the laughing time after the retaking of Naples, when all the dreadful memories of the storm were lost in one long festa, My Lady used to vow that, often as she went into the cabin, she never found him to have moved a muscle from the original position.

I should mention that, from the moment we were in sight of Palermo, His Sicilian Majesty’s royal standard was hoisted at the maintop-gallant masthead of the Vanguard, and was kept flying from that until His Majesty got into the Vanguard’s barge, when it was struck in the ship and hoisted in the barge, and every proper honour paid to it by the ship. As soon as His Majesty set foot on the shore it was struck from the barge. The King did not leave the ship till 9 a.m., thinking a proper reception of importance.

It is not often that men whose trade is war are impressed with the beauties of peace, as I was on that December morning, the 26th, of 1798. The day before had been a tempest so awful, that not only had the little Prince died of sea-sickness, but among all those hundreds of people, for the most part without ceasing praying or shrieking out their religion, not one that I heard recalled that it was the day on which the little Christ was born to be the Saviour of the world. Agonised appeals to His Virgin Mother I heard in plenty; but so frightened were all these shriekers, that they did not remember to invoke her aid for the sake of the man-child, which it was the hope of every Jewish woman to bring into the world, in case he should be the prophesied Messiah, whose advent was the comfort of the long captivity by the waters of Babylon.

When daylight dawned on the 26th all traces of the storm had passed within the harbour; and indeed there was very little sign outside, for as the storm had been from the south-west, the sea had dropped when the wind veered. With the iron discipline which prevails on a man-of-war, all traces of disorder on the deck had been removed in the two or three hours which intervened between the dropping of the anchor and dawn, and Palermo itself was just rising from the mists of sleep. Of the main part of the city we could see but little from the port, which is on the outskirts. We could only see the tops of palaces, each with its moresco-looking loggia in some part or other of it, for taking the air in the heat of summer. The Palermitans do not leave their city in summer, deeming it proof against the mal’ aria, but rather in spring and autumn.

Right and left, too, we saw the two fortress-like mountains which terminate the horns of the Bay—Pellegrino to the north-west, and Zaffarano to the east.

In front of the de Gregorio Villa there is a broad paved quay, and the silence of the city was accentuated by the faint prolonged bleat of flocks of white goats, led by one with a bell, which stalked along this quay, and turned up at the street which leads into the upper city. There were often no herds or dogs with them. These goats will go of their own instinct to where they are milked. The impressions I gathered as I stood on the deck, in charge of the men who were making the preparations for the Queen to leave, was one of white palaces and green lattices and decaying moresco ornament. As the mists rose I could see that the city was in an amphitheatre of mountains. In Palermo, I noticed afterwards, there is a mountain at the end of every street.

At five o’clock the Queen, in the profoundest grief—heightened by the fact that she had no black to wear, as she accompanied the body of her child—and with the pride and grace at last shrunk from her tall figure, was rowed ashore in the plainest manner in the Admiral’s barge, the Admiral himself escorting her, and none but Sir William and My Lady and body servants being permitted to accompany. Plain coaches lumbered round the corner, summoned in some mysterious way at the moment they were wanted, as the chariot of Pluto rose from the plains of Enna. So, I am told, Sir William observed, in his cold classical manner.