The Years of Endurance (37 page)

Down in the dark of the gun decks and in the " slaughter houses " near the mainmasts, the men waited with the precision born of long practice. As each enemy drew alongside and all was ready—the ports open, matches lighted, the guns run out—they broke into three tremendous cheers more daunting to their foes even than the thunder of the broadsides. " We gave them their Valentines in style," wrote one of the gunners of the
Goliath
; " not that we loved fighting, but we all wished to be free to return to our homes and follow our own pursuits. We knew there was no other way of obtaining this than by defeating the enemy. * The hotter war, the sooner peace,' was a saying with us."
¹

The climax of the battle came at about one o'clock.

¹
Long,
193.

At that
moment the head of the Spanish line was nearing the tail of the British. Nelson, flying his flag in the thirteenth ship in the British line, saw with the instinct of genius that only one thing could
p
revent the main Spanish division, which had suddenly turned to
l
eeward, from rejoining its isolated ships and so confronting Jervis with a reunited fleet before he could alter course. The Spaniards were battered but they were still intact: another few minutes and the chance of the decisive victory that England needed woul
d
have passed.

Without hesitation, disregarding the letter of the orders he had received and anticipating those there was no time to transmit,. Nelson bore out of the line and placed the
Captain
—the smallest two-decker in the British fleet—straight in the course of the giant
Santissima Trinidad
and four other ships. For ten minutes it looked as though the
Captain,
her foremast shot away and her wheelpost broken in a tornado of fire, would be blown out of the water. But when the smoke cleared she was still there, and the
Excellent
under Captain Collingwood was coming to her aid. The Spaniards' line was in inextricable confusion, all hope of a junction between their sundered divisions at an end and Jervis beating back into the fight with the remainder of his fleet.

But before the victory was complete, Nelson had done a very remarkable thing. Crippled though she was from her duel with the
Santissima Trinidad,
he placed the
Captain
alongside the 8o-gun
San Nicolas
and prepared to board. Helped by a soldier of the 69th, the one-eyed Commodore climbed through the quarter-gallery window in her stern and led his board
ers in person th
rough the officers' cabins to the quarter-deck. Here he found Captain Berry, who had jumped into the enemy's mizen chains, already in possession of the poop and hauling down the Spanish Ensign. At that moment fire was opened on the boarding party from the stern-gallery of the three-decker,
San Josef,
which in the confusion of the fight had drifted against the
San Nicolas.
Placing sentries at the tops of the ladders of his still scarcely vanquished prize, Nelson directed his boarding party up the side of the
San Josef
There, as his friend Collingwood described it, on the quarter-deck of a Spanish first-rate he received the swords of the officers of the two ships, " while one of his sailors bundled
them
up with as much composure as he would have made a faggot, though twenty-two of their line were still within gunshot."
¹
Presently the
Victory,
now in the thick of the fight again, passed that triumphant group on the
San Josef's
quarter-deck, saluting with three cheers. The cool daring of the thing tickled the imagination of the Fleet: " Nelson's patent bridge for boarding first-rates " was for long the admiring joke of the lower-deck. In the English mode, it rivalled Bonap
arte's feat at the Bridge of Arc
ola.

Four battleships, two of them first-rates, remained in the victors' hands. The Spanish fleet, still superior in numbers, withdrew under cover of night to Cadiz, bearing wounds
that
freed Britain from serious danger in that quarter for many months. Imperial Spain had been proved the insubstantial wraith the Navy had always believed it to be: the dreaded junction between the French and Spanish fleets a dream. The nation when it heard the news felt a quickening of its pulse: it was reminded what British courage and resolution could do. The Government, saved at the eleventh hour, showered rewards on the principal commanders: Jervis became Earl St. Vincent w
ith a parliamentary pension of £
3000 a year, the Vice- and Rear-Admirals were made Baronets, and another subordinate Admiral soon afterwards became an Irish peer. But
the
real hero of the day was the till then unknown Commodore who was created a Knight of the Bath: his sudden exploit caught England's imagination. Fretful in inaction and querulous under neglect, Nelson was happier than he had ever been, " rich in the praises of every man from the highest to
the
lowest in the fleet."
²
For all men knew him now for what he was. That knowledge was the measure of his opportunity. The years of testing and obscurity were over, the sunrise gates of fulfilment opening before him.

¹
Collingwood,
39.

²
Nicolas,
II,
359.

CHAPTER
NINE

The Fleet in Mutiny
1797

" The able seamen of the fleet
...
are the bnly description of men now serving his Majesty whose situation by common' exercise of their trade could be bettered fourfold
if
they were released from the service of their country."
Captain
Pac
kenha
m
to
Ear
l Spencer 11
th
Dec,
1796.

" If there is,
indeed
; a rot in the Wooden walls of old England, our decay cannot be very'distant
..."

R.
B
.
Sheridan.

Nelson
had appeared on the horizon at the very moment that the Corporate forc
e; he
embodied was contending with powers which almost seemed too great for it. That force was
the
Navy, which had made its entry on the world stage under
Drake and the great Elizabethans
h
ad sunk in
to imigriificance under the early Stuarts, revived
¹
under Cromwell and the second Charles to wrest the imperial sceptre of commerce from Holland and, given administrative discipline by the life-long labours of Pepys, had remained throughout the eighteenth century the principal arbiter of human affairs at sea. Yet its ascendancy had never been undisputed. For over a hundred years monarchica
l France, with its greater popu
lation and resources, had contended with Britain for the command of the sea a
nd on more than on
e occasion had all but attained it. Britain's danger had been greatest when France and the Atlantic empire of Spain had joined hands against her: then, as during t
he American War and now in 1797
t
heir fleets had been outnumbered arid she had had to fight for her very existence.

But Britain had always triumphed because in
the
last resort the sea was her whole being, whereas with her Continental rivals it was only a secondary consideration. " The thing which lies nearest the heart of this nation," Charles II had written a century before, "

Is
trade and all that belongs to it." Being an island her commerce was maritime and its protection an essential interest of an ever-growing number of her people. They were ready to make sacrifices for the Navy which they would never have done for the Army or any other service of the Crown. For it was on the Navy, as the Articles of War put it, that under the Providence of God the safety, honour, and welfare of the realm depended.

Because of these things the Navy touched mystic chords in the English heart which went deeper than reason. The fair sails of a frigate at sea, the sight of a sailor with tarry breeches and rolling gait in any inland town, and that chief of all the symbolic spectacles of England, the Grand Fleet lying at anchor in one of her white-fringed roadsteads, had for her people the
power of a trumpet call. So littl
e Byam Martin, seeing for the first time the triple-tiered ships of the line lying in Portsmouth harbour, remained " riveted to the spot, perfectly motionless, so absorbed in wonder " that he would have stayed there all day had not his hosts sent a boat's crew to fetch him away. From that hour his mind was " inflamed with the wildest desire to be afloat."
¹
Bobby Shafto going to sea with silver buckles on his knee was an eternal theme of eighteenth-century England: of such stuff were Admirals made.

They had a hard schooling. Flung like Nelson at twelve into an unfamiliar world of kicks and cuffs, crowded hammocks and icy hardships, or after a few months under " Black Pudding," the omnipresent horsewhip of the Naval Academy, Gosport, apprenticed as midshipmen to the cockpit of a man-of-war, they learnt while still children to be Spartans, dined off scrubbed boards on salt beef, sauerkraut and black-strap, and became complete masters before they were men of a wonderful technical skill in all that appertained to the sailing and fighting of ships.

They were as inured to roughness and salt water as gulls to wind. Boys in their teens would spend days afloat in the maintop, ready at any moment to clamber to the masthead when topgallant or studding sail needed setting or taking in. They grew up like bulldogs, delighting to cuff and fight: in some ships it was the practice while the officers were dining in the wardroom for the midshipmen to
engage regularly in pitched battl
es on the quarter-deck, Romans against Trojans, for the possession of the poop, banging away, " all

¹
Martin,
I,
4.

in good part," with broomsticks, handswabs, boarding pikes and even muskets. Midshipman Gardner of the
Edgar,
being pinked in the thigh by a comrade with a fixed bayonet in the course of one of these friendly scraps, retaliated by putting a small quantity of powder into a musket and firing at his assailant, marking " his phiz " for life.
¹
So toughened, they faced the world on their toes ready for anything and everyone. Such were the high-spirited midshipmen who pelted the British Ambassador with plums at the Carnival at Pisa and, as he looked angry, hove another volley at his lady, observing that she seemed better tempered than his Excellency.
²

So also the officers of the wardroom, dining at the best inn in Leghorn and growing somewhat merry, rolled the waiter among the dishes in the tablecloth and pelted the passers-by with loaves and chicken legs.
³

These were the permanent cadre of the Navy; the officers of the Establishment, " born in the surf of the sea," who, unlike the lower deck, coming and going as occasion demanded, lived in the Service and died in it. They were bound together by the closest ties of professional honour, etiquette and experience. Socially they were of all sorts: one high-born captain filled his frigate with so many sprigs of aristocracy that his first lieutenant—no respecter of persons —was wont to call out in mockery to the young noblemen and honourables at the different ropes, " My lords and
gentle
men, shiver the mizen topsail!" The majority were of humbler origin, occasioning Sir Walter Elliot's remark that, though the profession had its utility, he would be sorry to see any friend of his belonging to it. Few had much of this world's goods no
r, unless exceptionally lucky ov
er prize money, could hope for much. Some were scholars —for it was a literary age—and read their Shakespeare or discoursed learnedly on the classical associations of the foreign ports they visited: more often they were simple souls " better acquainted with rope-yarns and bilge water than with Homer or Virgil." But one and all were masters of their profession, proud in their obedience to King and country and ready to give their lives and all they had whenever the Service demanded. " A bloody war and

¹
Gardner,
83.

²
Gardner,
140.

³
Ibid.,
142.