Harold Wheeler - The Boys' Nelson

The career of the little one-eyed, one-armed man who frustrated Napoleon’s ambitious maritime plans for the subjugation of England, who is to sailors what Napoleon is to soldiers, who represented in his person all that sea power meant when the very existence of our forefathers was threatened in the latter days of the eighteenth century and the first half-decade of its successor, must ever appeal to those for whom Great Britain means something more than a splash of red on a coloured map.

I do not wish to suggest that his fame is insular. On the contrary, it is universal. Other lands and other peoples share in our admiration of him. We must not forget that it was an American naval officer, Admiral Mahan, who first gave us a really great book about this truly great man. In his “Life of Nelson,” we have the hero’s career reviewed by an expert whose knowledge of tactics has not blinded him to the more romantic aspects of Nelson’s forty-seven years of life. Before its appearance readers were dependent upon the facts and fancies of the biography by Clarke and McArthur, the “Memoirs” of Pettigrew, or the stirring but often inaccurate pictures of Southey. The seven substantial tomes of “Nelson’s Letters and Despatches,” edited with indefatigable industry by Sir Harris Nicolas, were not compiled for the general public, although they have furnished much material for later historians and must necessarily be the foundation of every modern book on Nelson.

On our own side of the Atlantic there is no more eminent authority than Sir J. Knox Laughton, Litt.D., Professor of Modern History at King’s College, London. He has not only epitomised Nicolas’s work, but added to our knowledge by his excellent “Nelson” (English Men of Action Series), “Nelson and his Companions in Arms,” and “From Howard to Nelson.” His numerous miscellaneous contributions to the subject are also of great interest to the serious student.

Although there is no Nelson cult like that which is associated with the memory of Napoleon, England’s great sailor has inspired a considerable literature, as even the shelves of my own library bear witness. There are works on his career as a whole, the campaigns associated with his name, his relations with Lady Hamilton, and so on. The only excuse I can offer for adding to the list is, I hope, a valid one. It seems to me that Nelson’s life, told in his own words as much as possible, would specially appeal to the young, and there is, so far as I am aware, no book which does this in the simple manner which I deem to be necessary. For help in carrying out my plan of writing a volume of the kind indicated I am particularly indebted to Nicolas’s “Letters” and Prof. Sir J. Knox Laughton’s edition of them.

For good or evil the name of Emma, Lady Hamilton, is inextricably associated with that of Nelson. Many and varied have been the attempts to whitewash the character of her whom he regarded as “one of the very best women in the world.” While it is difficult to associate the possessor of the beauty which appealed with such irresistible force to such painters as Romney, Reynolds, Lawrence, and Madame Vigée Le Brun, with “a most inherent baseness,” it is an indisputable fact that she exercised an adverse influence on Nelson’s career. Her humble origin, her loveliness, her poses, her attempts at statecraft, above all, her connection with the great sailor, have made her the subject of almost innumerable volumes. For those who wish to read an impartial study I would recommend Mr Walter Sichel’s “Emma, Lady Hamilton.”

Nelson’s written communications are not studied literary efforts, but spontaneous expressions of his inmost thoughts. For these reasons they are of inestimable value in an attempt to sum up his life and aims. The kindest of men, he sometimes chose to mix vitriol with his ink. He wrote what he meant, and it was always very much to the point. Less eminent folk have sometimes disguised what they thought and written what they imagined would please. Such was never Nelson’s way.

“This high man with a great thing to pursue,” 1 1 Robert Browning. was never a trifler. He recognised the importance of a supreme navy and the supreme importance of its personnel . He watched the health of his men as a loving mother watches that of her children. Proof of this is furnished in a Report of the Physician to the Fleet, dated the 14th August 1805. 2 2 The Report is given in full in Laughton’s edition of “Nelson’s Letters and Despatches,” pp. 409–11. The editor discovered it in the Record Office, Admiral’s Despatches, Mediterranean, xxxi. 272. In it Dr Leonard Gillespie says that “the high state of health” was “unexampled perhaps in any fleet or squadron heretofore employed on a foreign station.” He attributes this to such causes as the attention paid to the victualling and purveying for the ships; a sane system of heating and ventilation; lack of idleness and intemperance, due to “the constant activity and motion in which the fleet was preserved”; the promotion of cheerfulness by means of music, dancing, and theatrical amusements; comfortable accommodation of the sick; and by the serving of Peruvian bark, mixed in wines or spirits, to men “employed on the service of wooding and watering,” which obviated any ill effects.

Nelson was quite able to “stand on his dignity,” to use a colloquial and comprehensive phrase, and several instances will be discovered by the reader as he peruses the following pages, but it is quite wrong to think that he was in the least a martinet. For instance, during the trying period when he was hungering for the French fleet to leave Toulon, he wrote to an officer: “We must all in our several stations exert ourselves to the utmost, and not be nonsensical in saying, ‘I have an order for this, that, or the other,’ if the king’s service clearly marks what ought to be done.” Everyone has heard how Nelson referred to his captains and himself as “a band of brothers.” You have only to turn to the memoirs of these gallant officers to learn the truthfulness of this remark. They loved him: that is the only term that exactly meets the case.

What of the humbler men who worked the ships? Read the following, which was sent home by a rough but large-hearted sailor of the Royal Sovereign , Collingwood’s flagship at Trafalgar, when he heard that the Master Mariner lay cold in the gloomy cockpit of the Victory : “Our dear Admiral is killed, so we have paid pretty sharply for licking ’em. I never set eyes on him, for which I am both sorry and glad; for to be sure I should like to have seen him—but then, all the men in our ship who have seen him are such soft toads, they have done nothing but blast their eyes and cry ever since he was killed. God bless you! Chaps that fought like the Devil sit down and cry like a wench.”

This spontaneous and perhaps unconscious tribute is worth more than the encomiums of all modern historians and biographers put together.

In studying the life of one who has played a leading rôle on the stage of history there are always a number of subsidiary authorities which will repay perusal. The memoirs of the men who were associated with him, of those of his contemporaries who occupied official or high social positions, even of much humbler folk who have transferred their opinions to paper or had it done for them, are oftentimes extremely important. To print a bibliography of the works of this kind which I have consulted would be inadvisable in such a volume as this, necessarily limited as it is to a certain number of pages. I need only say that the nooks and crannies have been explored besides the main thoroughfare.