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

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

I think every Italian in the ship expected him to be struck dead, or a thunderbolt to fall from the clear sky, and not a few of our chaps felt a bit queer over it; but up went the anchors and aloft went the men, and we shook out our sails and bent them, and very soon we were bounding along towards the apparition.

How great a man I felt the Admiral to be at that moment! as great as I felt him when we were running into the Nile and Trafalgar, with the French blazing away at us, and us reserving our guns double-shotted until we were near enough for them to tear the whole length of the ships we raked. To head the ship for it, our great Foudroyant, of which we were so proud, made every man feel his courage; while if the Admiral had ordered a boat to be lowered it would have taken some stiff-backed men to go in her—though he would, I have not the least doubt, have gone himself. When we did get up to it, and backed our topsails, no Englishman in the ship need have been put out by it, for it was plain to every one that the body had risen because it was so distended with gases, bred by some horrible internal disease. And then we read the Sicilians a lesson of British courage and discipline. For when the Admiral gave his orders, without the smallest unusual bustle or excitement a boat was lowered, and the men took the evil-looking and horrible-smelling thing on board—still, as it proved, with those double-headed thirty-two pound shot fastened to the feet—and rowed it a couple of miles, it might have been, to a point on the shore, where they buried it at their leisure.

And I do think that this should have laid the ghost of Caracciolo as effectively among the Admiral’s enemies in England as it did among the superstitious Neapolitans, who were veritably more impressed with this than by any of his victories over the French.

Hardly had the Foudroyant returned to her moorings, when we beheld the standards of England and the Sicilies run up on the lofty Citadel of St. Elmo, and had it saluted by one-and-twenty guns repeated from every vessel in the fleet, as they noted the proud signal. And as soon as might be after that, a barge dashed out from the Arsenal with Captain Troubridge on board, to announce the surrender of the Citadel, the last point in Naples to hold out against the Sovereign, at a loss to us of only two killed and five wounded, though the Swiss and Russians and Albanians and Calabrians suffered somewhat more severely, owing to a sortie which they had successfully countered.

So interested was every one in the new hero of the hour—the splendid British seaman who had no equal, but the Admiral, where tough fighting was to be done—that nobody noticed a second barge which pulled alongside shortly after the other, starting from the Castel dell’ Uovo, and which, as it proved, contained, besides Will and its crew, a lady and a lame old gentleman. But that was the first time that Katherine saw the Admiral, to whom her gracious presence was to be the one bright star during the wearisome weeks that he had to be at Deal, to watch some new move of the flotilla which Napoleon had assembled at Boulogne for the invasion of England; and the first time that my Lord Eastry, the greatest of all the frigate captains before Cochrane, and the great Lord Nelson were face to face.

This brings me back to the Admiral—the Admiral about whom I sat down to write this chronicle, but whom I had almost forgotten for the moment, for Will is so much the nearer to me.

Well, the Admiral lived for more than six years after this. And though his friends made moan over his ill-health and ill-spirits, and that great love of his for which alone he had the wish and the spirit to live, whatever the sin or the shame of it might have been; and, though his enemies at home found him neglectful, and insubordinate, and whatnot, he went from strength to strength, and as the necessity became the greater, he put forth fresh powers of his genius. It was his very name which preserved England from invasion during the long months that Napoleon lay at Boulogne. He had the Danish Navy at Copenhagen, and would have had the Russian into the bargain if his blockheads of superiors had let him. And, as all the world knows, at the sad and glorious day of Trafalgar he swept the seas.

And so to rest, in the heart of the Cathedral, which is the heart of the City, which is the heart of the Empire, which was the creation of him, who made all the seas the highways of the King of England.

Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.