Nelson (24 page)

Who, if he rise to station of command,
Rises by open means; and there will stand
On honourable terms, or else retire,
And in himself possess his own desire.

William Wordsworth,
The Character of the Happy Warrior

THE
Badger
was not much of a craft, it was true. A captured American merchantman, she had needed extensive renovation after being purchased by the navy in 1776, and even when Horatio Nelson was piped aboard at Port Royal on the first day of 1779 her condition suggested imminent condemnation. Sir Peter Parker reckoned she had a few months left, enough to provide Nelson with a command until something better turned up. The
Badger
was a puny vessel, a brig with two square-rigged masts and a feeble armament of a dozen four-pounder cannons and a couple of half-pound calibre swivels. That being the case, she had no business taking on serious warships, but could run errands and root out small enemy privateers.
¹

Nelson’s commission named him master and commander. The rank of commander entitled its holder to captain a brig or a sloop, vessels deemed too small to justify the appointment of both a post-captain and a master or navigating officer. The functions of these dignitaries were therefore combined in the rank of commander, which was considered equivalent to that of a major in the army.

Ninety men formed the complement of the
Badger
, with one
lieutenant, Osborne Edwards. Nelson inherited the crew from her previous commander, Michael John Everitt, but he brought Francis Forster, a surgeon’s mate, from the
Bristol
and promoted him to surgeon, and looked around for more petty officers. In March Locker sent two from the
Lowestoffe
. Of these George Cruger made a respectable midshipman but Edward Capper turned into a drunkard. ‘I wish I could give [him] a good character,’ Nelson said, regretting that he would have to press a better master’s mate from some unfortunate merchantman.
²

The command of a ship, even one as inconsiderable as the
Badger
, conferred elements of patronage. Nelson had the right to take four captain’s servants on board, but so far from home he had no relatives to slot into the vacant positions. Nelson picked out four likely ratings for the honour – William Sylvan, Frank Lepee, William Orswood and John Smith. Lepee, an eighteen-year-old Londoner, had joined the
Lowestoffe
as a boatswain’s servant in 1777, and would follow Nelson for sixteen years.
³

Nelson was troubled with deserters during the six months he commanded the
Badger
. Whenever the ship was moored in a port, malcontents seized opportunities to run. Twenty-one in all did so, two-thirds of them members of the
Badger
’s crew, and the rest ‘supernumeraries’ being given passage or awaiting distribution to other ships. The defectors even included a midshipman, Henry Lee, who fled at Rattan (Roatan) Island in March. It was not a good record, especially for a brig looking for prizes, and suggests the inexperience of her captain. On the other hand, Nelson apparently preserved reasonable order. A few men followed him to other commands, including the purser John Tyson and the assistant master John Wilson. Only one was punished – Thomas Rochester, a pressed man from Brentwood in Essex, earning the dubious distinction of being the first man ever flogged on Nelson’s orders when he received two dozen lashes for drunkenness and disobedience.
⁴

Sometimes men were disturbed by any change of captain, as the history of that excellent ship the
Ruby
demonstrated. After the death of her popular commander Joseph Deane in 1780 there was widespread disaffection. As Nelson wrote, ‘Of that noble ship’s crew, three hundred took boats and are gone off. Every method has been used to bring them back, which I hope will prove successful.’
⁵

Possibly the departure of the
Badger
’s previous captain unsettled some of her men and increased the difficulties of the young successor.
Nelson hardly cut an imposing figure. He was surprisingly adolescent, barely months beyond the age of majority and had something of a schoolboy about him. A mop of sandy brown hair fell about a thin, sensitive, almost effeminate face with alert blue eyes, a wandering nose and sensuous mouth, until drawn into a ribbon or queue behind. His height was no more than average for the time, perhaps five feet six inches, and he was slim with a waist about thirty-two inches and no more than thirty-eight across the chest. Clothes sometimes hung on him casually. Contemporaries later spoke of Nelson as ‘small’ and ‘slight’, ‘not a tall man’, or ‘about the middle height, thin, and somewhat inelegantly formed’ with ‘few words and plain manners’. It is easy to excuse sun-burnished tars aboard the
Badger
looking incredulously at each another as this apparently insignificant and whimsical little creature with a Norfolk drawl hopped aboard. As yet his lust for distinction and genius only flickered freely within, out of sight.
⁶

There is no evidence that Nelson himself had misgivings. His instructions directed him westwards to the British settlements clinging like limpets to the Mosquito coast of Spanish Honduras and Nicaragua, scratching a living from logging, farming and fishing for green turtles. There were several of them – St George’s Key near Belize and Black River, Rattan Island and Omoa in the Gulf of Honduras – all of them surviving at the sufferance of Spain and in fear of the depredations of American privateers and French naval forces. They were even more afraid that Spain would also pitch into the war against Britain. Now that France had allied herself with the American colonies, Britain was fighting on both sides of the Atlantic and was dangerously stretched. There was a reasonable chance that Spain would also attack her, and try to regain control of Gibraltar, which Britain had acquired in 1704. If Spain declared war, the British settlements in Honduras and Nicaragua would become easy targets, and as they struggled to improve their defences they cultivated good relations with the local Mosquito Indians. Nelson was charged with communicating with the British settlements and bringing an Indian leader named King George to Jamaica for talks with the governor, Major General John Dalling.

The
Badger
sailed on 25 January 1779, and five days later made the mouth of the Black River in Honduras. Nelson had a letter from Dalling for the settlers, but there was a reef across the estuary and he fired a gun for a pilot. Unfortunately, the weather was blustery and the water broke so menacingly across the reef that no one dared risk coming out to him. The next day he slipped a few miles further
east towards Cape Camaron, anchored off what he called ‘Prinaw Creek’, and dispatched a boat upstream to reach the Black River settlement that way. Then, continuing along the coast as far as Cape Gracias a Dios, he sent more of the governor’s messages ashore before returning to Black River and finally getting the
Badger
to its moorings. King George and two of his attendants duly arrived on board. George was the leader of the Sandy Bay ‘samboes’, a mixed Indian–black community descended from the survivors of a slaver shipwrecked upon the coast a hundred or so years before. These blacks, as well as Indian warriors throughout the region, were being courted by the British as potential military auxiliaries in case a war broke out with Spain.

Nelson visited Rattan Island, where the guns were hoisted out and the ship careened, and St George’s Key before setting sail for Jamaica in March. By his own story the trip was a success. He ‘gained so much the affections of the [Mosquito coast] settlers that they unanimously voted me their thanks, and expressed their regret on my leaving them, entrusting to me to describe to Sir Peter Parker and Sir John Dalling their situation should a war with Spain break out’.
⁷

On 2 April the
Badger
reached Port Royal, where ten of His Majesty’s ships, including the old
Lowestoffe
, were gathered. Although desertions increased in port, he had reasons to believe the efficiency of his crew had benefited from the cruise. No prizes had been taken, but the men had sharpened their skills in exercises with the guns and the pursuit of half a dozen suspicious sails. Nelson’s first mission in command of a ship of war might have lacked incident, but it was nothing of which to be ashamed.

On reaching Port Royal, he was sorry to find Captain Locker ill and talking about returning home. The thought of losing another close friend worried Nelson, though he believed Locker would recover in England. As a favour to his old captain, on 21 April Nelson entered his eldest son, William Locker junior, on the books of the
Badger
as a captain’s servant, re-rating Frank Lepee as an able seaman to make room. A pay book lists Locker’s son as ‘prest’, but both that and his very presence were fictitious. In fact the boy was not on the ship at all. He was not even in the West Indies. Nor had he reached his eleventh birthday, the minimum age at which a son of a naval officer
might enter the service. Less than ten years old, William Locker was too young to serve legitimately on any warship. He was still at home with his mother, but if he ever chose a naval career the bogus sea time he had accumulated on the
Badger
would ease his promotion.
⁸

The next day Nelson sailed again, submerging his sadness about Captain Locker in a hunt for privateers.

He enquired of every ship he ‘spoke’ and chased all doubtful sails in vain, but on the clear afternoon of the 28th his luck seemed to change. The
Badger
pursued a ship for an hour before halting it with a warning shot. She was the
La Prudente
sloop of eighty tons, on her way from Cape François to New Orleans with dry goods, sugar, coffee and other French produce. Though she mounted no artillery, a few muskets, pistols and cutlasses, as well as powder and shot, were taken from her. Her master, Pedro Guinard, protested that the ship was Spanish, but most on board were French and Nelson searched her for two days. The ship’s papers, eventually discovered hidden inside a shoe, were recently dated and suggested that
La Prudente
belonged to three Frenchmen who were naturalised Spaniards residing in New Orleans. Nelson was sure of his prize but her status was ambiguous. Was she French, and therefore fair game, or the property of Spaniards, with whom Britain was not yet at war? In the event, Nelson’s prize agent in Jamaica, Hercules Ross, failed to get her condemned in the vice-admiralty court. More unfortunately, Nelson had to hold the sixteen prisoners, including a master, two of the owners and a black servant, on board the
Badger
for a week before landing them at Port Antonio. In the intervening time some of his crew became infected with what he was told was the plague.
⁹

Nor was there compensation elsewhere. On the afternoon of 30 April Nelson encountered an enemy privateer off the northeast coast of Jamaica and pursued it for the rest of the day, discharging futile rounds of shot and grape. The next morning the wind dropped and the
Badger
lay becalmed under lifeless sails while her target propelled itself to safety under oars. Six days later another promising ‘chase’ escaped in dark, cloudy weather leaving Nelson cursing his lack of a night glass.
¹⁰

Potentially more damaging to a young commander was a disagreement with the master of a British merchantman in Port Antonio in May. Still short of seamen, Nelson sent a boat around the traders anchored in the port, looking for likely men to press into service, and his officer brought five hands from the
Amity Hall
. Reconsidering,
Nelson regretted the action. He had left the merchantman with enough seamen to function, but worried that his conduct might appear highhanded and planned to return the pressed men. But when the master of the
Amity Hall
stormed aboard in ‘a most impertinent manner, and with very abusive language told me he should take [me to] the law’, Nelson saw red. Growing what he modestly termed ‘warm’, he returned two of the five sailors, added one of the less useful of his own men and declared he would keep the rest. The master appeared mollified. At least he apologised to Nelson on his next visit to the
Badger
on 13 May, but a bad account of the affair was already circulating in Kingston.
¹¹

For the first time Nelson felt his public reputation endangered. The captain of a man-of-war was accountable not only to professional superiors but also to the mercantile community and society at large. He wrote to Locker in search of help and reassurance, but it was a sad letter, written after he had learned that his ‘sea-daddy’ had at last been given leave to return to England. For some time Locker had been afflicted with a violent scorbutic disorder that pained his back and loins and he went home in May. Personally impoverished as he felt, Horatio knew that Jamaica was no place for a sick man:

I see you are quite settled about going home [he wrote], which in all probability may happen before you can hear from me again, but I shall always write to you in England. I hope you will have a good passage, and find Mrs Locker and all your family in good health. I hope you will soon recover when you get home. The friendship you have shown me I shall never forget, and though I lose my best friend by your going, I would not have you stay a day in this country. I am very sorry indeed Captain [Joseph] Deane [of the
Ruby
] is ill. I beg you will give [him] my best wishes for his speedy recovery.
¹²

Behind him Captain Locker left his young admirer with a certificate of good behaviour covering service on the
Lowestoffe
, a prayer book signed by the two of them, now in the Royal Naval Museum, a treasure chest of memories and the comforting knowledge that he had a professional ally at home. But the ailing captain did not return home to the happiness he anticipated. He recovered his health, but his young wife, of whom he had never stopped speaking, died in childbirth the following year and was buried in the village of Addington, Kent, where the couple had married ten years before.