Chapter 12

He was driven frantic by the demands made for convoys by captains and merchants, and his appeals to the Admiralty for more cruisers were unheeded. He expresses himself strongly averse from allowing even fast sailing vessels to make a passage unprotected. Perhaps no human mind that has been given grave responsibilities to safeguard was ever lacerated as was Nelson's in seeing that our commercial interest did not suffer, and that on the seas he guarded a free and safe passage should be assured to our shipping carrying food and other merchandise to the mother-country. The responsibility of carrying out even this special work in a satisfactory way was an amazing task, and no evidence is on record that he left anything to chance. Results are an eloquent answer to any doubts on that subject. In addition to policing the seas, he had the anxiety of watching the tricky manoeuvres of the French fleet, and planning for their interception and defeat should they weaken in their elusive methods. Of course, they were playing their own game, and had a right to, and it was for their opponents, whom Nelson so well represented, to outwit and trap them into fighting; but as for having any grounds for complaint, it was not only silly, but inopportune, to give expression to having a grievance against the French admirals because they cutely slipped out of his deadly grasp from time to time and made him weary of life! His grievances were easier to establish against the Board of Admiralty, who were alternately paying him compliments or insulting him. Instructions were given that could not be obeyed without involving the country in certain loss and complication. Officers, his junior in rank, were given appointments that had the appearance of placing them independent of his authority. Seniors of inferior capacity were given control over him which, but for his whimsical magnanimity, might have cost us the loss of the fleet, their crews, and our high honour and superb fighting reputation. Take for example Sir Hyde Parker's command of the Baltic fleet, or Sir John Orde's clumsy appointment to a squadron in the Mediterranean. Nothing could be so harassing to the nerves of a man sure of his own superiority as to be burdened, not only with Orde's arrogance, but his mediocrity. He was obliged to resort to subterfuge in order to get his dispatches sent home, and here again the action of the Admiralty compelled him to break naval discipline by ordering a nephew of Lord St. Vincent, a clever young captain of a frigate, to whom he was devoted, to take the dispatches to Lisbon. He told the young captain that Sir John Orde took his frigates from him, and sent them away in a direction contrary to his wishes. "I cannot get my dispatches even sent home," he said; adding, "You must try to avoid his ships." Nelson had not signed his orders, because Sir John Orde was his superior officer, but should it come to a court-martial, Hardy could swear to his handwriting, and he gave him the assurance that he would not be broken. "Take your orders, and goodbye," said he, "and remember, Parker, if you cannot weather that fellow, I shall think you have not a drop of your uncle's blood in your veins." Other Nelsonian instructions were given, and the gallant captain carried them out with a skill worthy of his ingenious, defiant chief and of his distinguished uncle.

It was not only a slap in the face to Sir John Orde, but to those whose patronage had placed in a senior position a man who was not qualified to stand on the same quarterdeck with Nelson. He smarted under the treatment, but unhappily could not keep his chagrin under cover. He was always pouring his soul out to some one or other. His health is always falling to pieces after each affront, and for this reason he asks to be relieved. Here is an example of his moods. "I am much obliged to your Lordships' compliance with my requests," he says, "which is absolutely necessary from the present state of my health," and almost immediately after he tells a friend he "will never quit his post when the French fleet are at sea as a commander-in-chief once did." "I would sooner die at my post than have such a stigma upon my memory." This is a nasty dig at Lord St. Vincent, presumably for having a hand in the appointment of Sir John Orde. Then he writes to Elliot that nothing has kept him at his post but the fear of the French fleet escaping and getting to Naples or Sicily. "Nothing but gratitude for the good sovereigns would have induced him to stay a moment after Sir John Orde's extraordinary command, for his general conduct towards them is not such as he had a right to expect." I have heard that snobbishness prevails in the service now only in a less triumphant degree to what it did in Nelson's time. If that be the case, it ought to be wrestled with until every vestige of the ugly thing is strangled. The letters of Nelson to personal friends, to the Admiralty, and in his reported conversations, are all full of resentment at the viciousness of it, though he obviously struggles to curb the vehemence of his feelings. No one felt the dagger of the reticent stabber more quickly and sensitively than he. Invisible though the libeller might be, Nelson knew he was there. He could not hear the voice, but he felt the sinister action.

Making full allowance for what might be put down to imagination, there is still an abundance of material to justify the belief that the first naval authority of his time was the target of snobs, and that, but for his strong personality and the fact that he was always ready to fight them in the open, he would have been superseded, and a gallant duffer might have taken his place, to the detriment of our imperial interests. It is a dangerous experiment to put a man into high office if he has not the instinct of judging the calibre of other men. This applies to every department of life nowadays. Take the Army, the Navy, departments of State, commercial or banking offices, manufacturing firms, and the making of political appointments. The latter is more carelessly dealt with than any other department of life. The public are not sufficiently vigilant in distinguishing between a mere entertaining rhetorician and a wholesome-minded, natural-born statesman. What terrible calamities have come to the State through putting men into responsible positions they have neither training, wit, nor wisdom to fill efficiently! Providence has been most indulgent and forbearing when we have got ourselves into a mess by wrong-headedness. She generally comes to our aid with an undiscovered man or a few men with the necessary gifts required for getting us out of the difficulty in which the Yellow Press gang and their accomplices may have involved the country. We know something of how the knowledge of these anomalies in public life chafed the eager spirit of Nelson, but we can never know the extent of the suffering it caused except during the Neapolitan and Sicilian days. This lonely soul lived the life of a recluse for months at a time. The monotony of the weird song of the sea winds, the nerve-tearing, lazy creak of the wooden timbers, the sinuous crawling, rolling, or plunging over the most wondrous of God's works, invariably produces a sepulchral impression even on the most phlegmatic mind, but to the mystically constituted brain of Nelson, under all the varied thoughts that came into his brain during the days and nights of watching and searching for those people he termed "the pests of the human race," it must have been one long heartache. No wonder that he lets fly at the Admiralty in some of his most passionate love-messages to the seductive Emma. His dreary life, without any exciting incident except the carrying away of sails or spars, and the irritation of not being able to get what he regarded as life or death requests carried into effect owing to the slothfulness or incompetent indifference of the Admiralty was continual agony to him. He writes in one of his dispatches to the Admiralty: "Were I to die this moment, _want of frigates_ would be found stamped on my heart. No words of mine," he continues, "can express what I have suffered and am suffering for want of them."

No person could write such an unconsciously comic lament to a department supposed to be administered with proficiency unless he were borne down by a deep sense of its appalling incompetency. It is quite likely that the recipients of the burning phrases regarded them in the light of a joke, but they were very real to the wearied soul of the man who wrote them. I do not find any instances of conscious humour in any of Nelson's letters or utterances. It is really their lack of humour that is humorous. He always appears to be in sombre earnest about affairs that matter, and whimsically affected by those that don't. The following lines, which are not my own, may be regarded as something akin to Nelson's conception of himself. If he had come across them, I think he would have said to himself, "Ah! yes, these verses describe my mission and me."

"Like a warrior angel sped On a mighty mission, Light and life about him shed-- A transcendent vision.

"Mailed in gold and fire he stands, And, with splendours shaken, Bids the slumbering seas and lands Quicken and awaken."

Nelson never attempted to carry out a mere reckless and palpably useless feat for the purpose of show. His well-balanced genius of caution and accurate judgment was the guiding instinct in his terrific thrusts which mauled the enemy out of action at the Nile, St. Vincent, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar, and enthralled the world with new conceptions of naval warfare. He met with bitter disappointments in his search for the illusive French fleet, which wore him, as he says, to a skeleton, but never once was he shaken in his vigorous belief that he would catch and annihilate them in the end. They cleverly crept out of Toulon, with the intention, it is said, of going to Egypt. Villeneuve was no fool at evasive tactics. His plan was practically unerring, and threw Nelson completely off the scent and kept him scouring the seas in search of the bird that had flown weeks before. Once the scent is lost, it takes a long time to pick it up. Villeneuve no doubt argued that it was not his purpose to give the British Admiral an opportunity of fighting just then. He had other fish to fry, and if he wished to get away clear from Toulon and evade Nelson's ships, he must first of all delude him by sending a few ships out to mislead the enemy's watchdogs or drive them off; if that succeeded (which it did not), he would then wait for a strong fair wind that would assure him of a speed that would outdistance and take him out of sight of the British squadron, and make sure that no clue to his destination was left. The wind was strong NNW.; the French fleet were carrying a heavy press of canvas and steering SSW. The British ships that were following concluded that they were out for important mischief, and returned to convey the news to Nelson, who quickly got under weigh and followed them. Meanwhile, Villeneuve's squadron, after getting from under the shelter of the land into the open sea, lost some of their spars and sails, and one vessel, it is recorded, was dismasted, which means, in seafaring interpretation, that all her masts were carried away; as she succeeded, however, in getting into Ajaccio, she can only have lost her royal topgallant, and possibly a topmast or two. If her lower masts had been carried away, she could not have got into refuge without assistance, and the rest of the fleet apparently had enough to do in looking after themselves, as they lost spars and sails too, and became somewhat scattered, but all appear to have got safely into Toulon again to refit and repair the damage done by the heavy gale they encountered.

Meanwhile, Nelson, in dismay at losing touch with them, searched every nook and cranny in the Tyrrhenian Sea, and making sure that none of them were in hiding and that the sea was clear, he proceeded to act on his fixed opinion that their objective must be Egypt. So to Egypt he went, and the bitter disappointment at not finding them stunned his imagination, so sure had he been that his well-considered judgment was a thing to which he might pin his faith, and that his lust for conflict with the "pests of the human race" could not escape being realized in the vicinity of his great victory at the battle of the Nile. His grievance against Villeneuve for cheating him out of what he believed would result in the annihilation of the French Power for mischief on the seas brought forth expressions of deadly contempt for such astute, sneaking habits! But the Emperor was as much dissatisfied with the performances of his admirals as Nelson was, though in a different way. Napoleon, on the authority of the French historian, M. Thiers, was imperially displeased. He asks "what is to be done with admirals who allow their spirits to sink _into their boots_ (italics are the author's) and fly for refuge as soon as they receive damage. All the captains ought to have had sealed orders to meet at the Canary Islands. The damages should have been repaired _en route_. A few topmasts carried away and other casualties in a gale of wind are everyday occurrences. The great evil of our Navy is that the men who command it are unused to all the risks of command." This indictment is to a large extent deserved, and had his fleet been out in the Atlantic or outside the limits of the vigilance of Nelson's ships, the putting back to Toulon or anywhere to refit the topmasts, sails, or rigging would have been highly reprehensible. But in any case, I question whether the British would have shown the white feather or lack of resource under any circumstances. On a man-of-war they were supposed to have refits of everything, and men, properly qualified, in large numbers to carry out any prodigious feat. On the other hand, the British have always excelled in their nautical ability to guard against deficiency in outfit, which was not overtested unless there were sufficient cause to demand such a risk. This applies especially to the sailing war vessels in Nelson's time. I think there can be no question that the French vessels were both badly officered and manned with incapable sailors and that the damage which led them back to Toulon was caused by bad judgment in seamanship. What they called a severe gale would have been regarded by an Australian clipper or Western Ocean packet-ship in the writer's early days as a hard whole-sail breeze, perhaps with the kites taken in. It was rare that these dashing commanders ever carried away a spar, and it was not because they did not carry on, but because they knew every trick of the vessel, the wind, and the sea. It was a common saying in those days when vessels were being overpowered with canvas, "The old lady was talking to us now," i.e. the vessel was asking to have some of the burden of sail taken off her. I have known topmasts to be carried away, but it generally occurred through some flaw in a bolt or unseen defect in the rigging. So much depends on the security of little things. But when a catastrophe of this kind occurred on board a British merchantman or war vessel the men had both the courage, skill, training, and, above all, the matchless instinct to clear away the wreck and carry out the refitting in amazingly short time. That was because we were then, and are now under new conditions, an essentially seafaring race. And it was this superiority that gave Nelson such great advantages over the French commanders and their officers and seamen, though it must be admitted they were fast drilled by the force of circumstances into foes that were not to be looked upon too lightly.

The elusive tactics of the French admirals then were in a lesser degree similar to those practised by the Germans now, if it be proper to speak or think of the two services at the same time without libelling them. The French were always clean fighters, however much they may have been despised by Nelson. They were never guilty of cowardly revenge. They would not then, or now, send hospital ships to the bottom with their crews and their human cargoes of wounded soldiers and nurses. Nor would they indiscriminately sink merchant vessels loaded with civilian passengers composed of men, women, and children, and leave them to drown, as is the inhuman practice of the German submarine crews of to-day.

The French in other days were our bitterest enemies, and we were theirs. We charged each other with abominations only different from what we and our Allies the French are saying about Germany to-day, who was then our ally. We regarded Germany in the light of a downtrodden nation who was being crushed and mutilated under the relentless heel of the "Corsican Usurper." "Such is the rancorous hatred of the French towards us," says Collingwood in January 1798, "that I do not think they would make peace on any terms, until they have tried this experiment (i.e. the invasion of England) on our country; and never was a country assailed by so formidable a force"; and he goes on to say, "Men of property must come forward both with purse and sword, for the contest must decide whether they shall have anything, even a country which they can call their own." This is precisely what we are saying about Germany with greater reason every day at the present time (1918).

It has been the common practice for German submarine commanders to sink at sight British, neutral cargo, and passenger vessels, and hospital ships loaded with wounded troops and nurses. They have put themselves outside the pale of civilization since they forced the whole world into conflict against them. Nothing has been too hideous for them to do. They have blown poor defenceless fishermen to pieces, and bombarded defenceless villages and towns, killing and maiming the inhabitants.

Nelson's ardent soul must have been wearied with the perversity of the "dead foul winds" (as he described his bitter fate to Ball) that prevented him from piercing the Straits of Gibraltar against the continuous easterly current that runs from the Atlantic and spreads far into the Mediterranean with malicious fluctuations of velocity. Many a gallant sailing-ship commander has been driven to despair in other days by the friendly levanter failing them just as they were wellnigh through the Gut or had reached the foot of the majestic Rock, when the west wind would assert its power over its feebler adversary, and unless he was in a position to fetch an anchorage behind the Rock or in the bay, their fate was sealed for days, and sometimes weeks, in hard beating to prevent as little ground being lost as possible. But ofttimes they were drifted as far back as Cape de Gata in spite of daring feats of seamanship in pressing their vessels with canvas until every spar, sail, and rope was overstrained. A traditional story of sailors of that period was that only a fast clipper schooner engaged in the fruit trade and a line-of-battle ship which fired her lee guns on every tack was ever known to beat through this channel, which mystified the sailors' ideas of God. They could not understand how He could have committed such an error in planning the universe which so tried the spirits of His loyal believers!

We know how catholic Nelson was in his religious views; and his feats of expressive vocabulary, which was the envy of his class at the time, became their heritage after he had accomplished his splendid results and passed into the shadows. Such things as the strength of the adverse sea winds, his experience of the capriciousness of the official mind--a capriciousness which might be reflected in the public imagination were he not to be wholly successful in getting hold of the French fleet, and the indignity of having a man like Sir John Orde put over him, all filled his sensitive nature with resentment against the ordinances of God and man. His complaints were always accompanied with a devotional air and an avowal of supreme indifference to what he regarded as the indecent treatment he received at the hands of the amateurish bureaucrats at the Admiralty. At times they were out of humour with the great chieftain, and perhaps at no time did they make him feel their dissatisfaction more than when adverse winds, a crazy fleet, and deadly current were eating deep into his eager soul at a time when the genius of seamanship was unavailing in the effort to get through into the Atlantic in pursuit of the French fleet, which his instinct told him was speeding towards the West Indies.

Sir John Orde, who was an aversion to him (as well he might be), had seen the French fleet off Cadiz, and failed to procure him the information as to their course. Nelson believed, and properly believed, that an alert mind would have found a way of spying out the enemy's intentions, but Sir John's resource did not extend to anything beyond the fear of being attacked and overpowered. He obviously was devoid of any of the arts of the wily pirate or smuggler. A month after the French had passed through the Gut, Nelson got his chance. A change of wind came within five hours after a southerly slant brought his ships to anchor in Gibraltar bay for water and provisions. He immediately gave the signal to heave the anchors up, and proceeded with a fair wind which lasted only forty-eight hours. He anchored his fleet to the east of Cape St. Vincent, and took on board supplies from the transports. He received from different sources conflicting accounts as to the objective of the French, but the predominating opinion was that they had gone to the West Indies. Nelson was in a state of bewilderment, but decided to follow his own head, and pinned his faith on the instinct that told him to follow westward "to be burnt in effigy if he failed, or Westminster Abbey if he succeeded." The adventure was daring, both in point of destination and the unequal strength of the relative fleets. Nelson had ten ships of the line and three frigates, against Villeneuve's eighteen and two new line-of-battle ships.

But the British Admiral's genius and the superiority of his commanders, officers, and men, should they come to battle, would more than match Villeneuve's superiority in ships. Nelson, always sure of his own powers, could also depend upon the loyalty of men of every rank under him. He knew that the terrible spirit which shattered and scattered Spanish Philip's armada was an inheritance that had grown deep into every fibre of the generations of seamen that followed Hawkins and Drake's invincibles. When Nelson delivered himself of death-or-glory heroics, he did so with the consciousness that _he_ was the spirit that enthused masses of other spirits to carry out his dominating will.