Nelson (47 page)

When the admiral’s new orders came, dispersing the ships about the islands, Nelson had food for thought. He was to reconnoitre the Virgin Islands for useful anchorages and patrol St Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat, but there was nothing about contraband trade. With Collingwood beside him Nelson confronted Sir Richard about the
matter on 10 November. The admiral, an inherently benign old-fashioned gentleman, explained that he had neither orders nor acts of Parliament from England regarding the navigation laws. Nelson, by his own account, said that if such was the case it was ‘very odd’ because he understood that every captain was equipped with copies of the Admiralty statutes as a matter of course. Producing his own, he read the significant passages to the admiral. The next day the two captains were back with a copy of the appropriate Navigation Act itself. Sir Richard wavered, and on 12 November amended his orders. His officers were now instructed to enforce the navigation laws during the course of their other duties. Nelson needed no more encouragement. When Hughes left on the 16th to tour his station, Nelson became the senior officer in Barbados, and several American merchantmen entering Carlisle Bay the following day were summarily ordered out.
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On 21 November the
Boreas
weighed anchor and sailed for the Virgins, reaching St John four days later. Scraping the stern of his frigate over a coral reef, he managed to chart the anchorage on the east coast of the island, sounding the finger-like coves in what is now the Hurricane Hole of Coral Bay. Then he returned to Barbados, where there were more American vessels to be turned away. Throughout these perambulations, the image of Mrs Moutray continued to interrupt the new campaign in Nelson’s mind. He could not free it of her, and used English Harbour both to and from his voyage to the Virgins – on 22–23 November and 3–5 December. ‘You may be certain I never passed English Harbour without a call,’ he confided to his brother.
³³

The close of the year saw Nelson flitting back and forth. First he returned to Carlisle Bay, where he visited the hospital and learned that young Andrews would be ready for duty in about a month. Then he anchored in English Harbour on Christmas Eve to share seasonal cheer with the Moutrays. And on the third day of 1785 he was on the other side of Antigua, in the roadstead at St John’s, where he briefly conferred with Collingwood before setting out to patrol the other islands. What Collingwood told him made Nelson realise that the enforcement of the navigation laws was going to be no simple matter. The two coadjutors had seized a lion by the tail.
³⁴

Both the Collingwood boys had been assiduously searching for foreign interlopers since leaving Barbados. Wilfred, for example, had found
American ships trading at St Kitts with the apparent collusion of the island’s customs officials. It seemed to Nelson that as soon as the navy was out of sight, the illicit traders sneaked back, shielded by many individuals who were charged with suppressing them. Cuthbert Collingwood of the
Mediator
related a whole saga about his experiences at Antigua the previous month.

All sorts of irregularities were afoot, Collingwood said. The
Fair American
was cleared by the customs in St John’s, though it was reported to Collingwood that the ship was owned in Philadelphia. Another vessel, the
Royal Midshipman
, was also fully accredited ashore, yet a naval officer who boarded her said the crew were American sailors, a clear breach of the navigation laws. Collingwood was convinced that customs and other officials, as well as merchants, were shielding the contraband trade once it got to anchor, and his best chance of keeping the foreigners out was by stopping them entering port in the first place.
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But in pursuing this tactic Collingwood had caused a furore in St John’s. He stopped an American sloop, the
Liberty
, entering port. Her master said he needed to repair a mast, but Collingwood supposed him to be merely feigning distress to gain unlawful entry. Once in port, the master would either supply false registration papers to effect British ownership, be furnished with such papers by colluding islanders or contrive a sham trade by selling his cargo to pay for supposed repairs. Collingwood therefore ordered the
Liberty
alongside his
Mediator
, where an inspection seemed to confirm the captain’s suspicions, and the sloop was turned away.

Soon angry merchants were complaining to the governor of the Leeward Islands, Thomas Shirley, that the
Mediator
was blockading St John’s. If Collingwood regarded the officials and traders as a nest of rebels conspiring to frustrate the navigation laws, they had as little use for him. When the captain defended his conduct, Shirley submitted his justifications to Messrs Burton and Byam, respectively a king’s counsel and the attorney-general for Grenada, and received an unequivocally hostile response. Rowland Burton was also the speaker of the island assembly and hand in glove with Shirley, who would help him to become chief justice of Antigua in 1786, while Ashton Warner Byam belonged to one of the most influential families in the islands. They agreed that His Majesty’s customs, not naval officers, were responsible for determining the legal standing of vessels in port, and their investigations in the case of the
Royal Midshipman
were to be preferred
to the ‘mere hearsay’ promulgated by Collingwood. Samuel Martin, the collector of customs in St John’s, was ‘zealous’ and ‘vigilant’. Certainly, the navy was charged with apprehending illicit traders outside of the jurisdiction of ports, but the legal wiseacres pointed out that a law of 1764 allowed foreign ships to remain in or about British possessions for forty-eight hours after receiving notice to leave, and that nothing could interfere with the time-honoured right of ships in distress to seek a haven. Collingwood’s actions were ‘repugnant to this established benign usage of nations’.
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Governor Shirley was caught between two fires, with the islanders on one side and the navy apparently on the other. Yet everyone admitted that some irregularities were occurring. Even the collector of customs conceded that the
Liberty
’s register was out of order, her master was an American and that had it not been for her alleged distress she would have been ‘inadmissible’. Consequently, the governor looked for a way of investigating the claims of American ships without alienating either the customs or the navy. He addressed Collingwood, who appeared to be the eye of the storm, ‘hinting . . . in a friendly manner’ that injured ships should always be allowed shelter, and notifying his superior, Admiral Hughes, of the ‘disquiet and dissatisfaction’ among the merchants. Somewhat testily he asked Hughes what instructions the government had sent relating to the navigation laws, and why the admiral had not conferred with him about how they might be implemented without antagonising the people.
³⁷

This kicked the complacent Hughes into action. He decided to revise his order of 12 November, the one Nelson and Collingwood had previously pressed upon him. The superseding instruction was dated 30 December 1784. It said that if foreign ships attempted to enter British ports, naval captains and commanders should intercept them and assess any alleged damage, as Collingwood had done. But the final decision to admit would rest with the governor of Antigua or his representatives in the other islands, the presidents of their local councils. The naval officers were merely required to submit their reports and hold the foreign ship pending a decision by the afore-mentioned civil authorities.
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The revised order reached Nelson at St Kitts, where the locals were growing alarmed. On 7 January the council at Basseterre complained that the actions of the Collingwoods portended ‘great distress’ to the islanders, and resolved to petition Shirley and Hughes for ‘such relief as may be in their power to grant’. The next day the council decided
to petition the home government to allow the import of foodstuffs and the use of small American vessels to export indigenous produce. But Nelson and his allies were in no mood to relent. He had been patrolling the northern islands warning away foreign ships. In January Nelson interrupted the
Fanny
of Connecticut unloading illicit cargo on one of the islands and firmly ordered her out, and at St Kitts he came across the sloop
Rattler
and listened to Commander Wilfred Collingwood’s stories of similar transgressions. When the captain of the
Boreas
read Hughes’s revised order and learned that such cases were to be referred to the civil authorities, he exploded.
³⁹

Hughes, following Shirley’s suggestions, had sought a middle way, but to Nelson it was a simple abrogation of the responsibilities the navigation laws had placed upon the navy. It was worse than that, for Hughes’s orders placed the final decision with those least equipped to take it – the civil authorities Nelson believed to be colluding with the illegal traders. From everything he had learned the customs officials encouraged these misdemeanours, supplementing their own incomes by the fees they charged to supply false registers to interlopers and facilitating their transactions. Nor did he trust the governor of Antigua, who, he recalled had once forwarded a petition of the assembly for a relaxation of the navigation laws to Lord Sydney, the British secretary of state. In Nelson’s eyes Shirley was suspect. He might have been corrupted, or at least deceived and turned into an instrument of the illegal trade lobby.

Technically, Nelson was obliged to obey his superior officer. If he doubted the wisdom or legality of the admiral’s orders, he might voice his reservations and if necessary refer them to the Admiralty for a definitive opinion, but it was his duty to abide by the received instructions in the meantime. But he chose confrontation instead. On 9 January he wrote a lecturing and subversive reply to his commander-in-chief, declaring that he would be no party to the revised procedure. American merchants were inventing all sorts of pretexts to enter British ports and swearing their innocence ‘through a nine-inch plank’, and public officials were collaborating with or ignoring the practice. ‘The governor may be imposed on by false declarations,’ raged the young captain. ‘We, who are on the spot, cannot.’ Nelson left Hughes in no doubt that neither Shirley nor his representatives in the islands could be trusted, and that he held their legal advice to be worthless:

Whilst I have the honour to command an English man-of-war, I never shall allow myself to be subservient to the will of any governor, nor cooperate with him in doing illegal acts. Presidents of Council I feel myself superior to. They shall make proper application to
me
for whatever they want to come by water. If I rightly understand your order of 29 [30] December, it is founded upon an opinion of the king’s attorney-general [Byam], viz. ‘That it is legal for governors or their representatives to admit foreigners into the ports of their government if they think fit.’ How the king’s attorney-general conceives he has a right to give an illegal opinion, which I assert the above is, he must answer for. I
know
the Navigation Law.
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This riposte was a bombshell to Hughes, and amounted to an outright refusal to obey his order of 30 December. Professionally Nelson was skating on very thin ice, but Sir Richard’s own position was little less unenviable. For though this immature firebrand was challenging his authority, his legal interpretation of the matter might conceivably be correct. After all, Nelson spoke confidently as well as loudly. If so, the commander-in-chief, rather than the captain, might be called to account.

A stronger admiral would have reduced Nelson to obedience, if necessary by court martial, but Hughes was not only unsure of himself but also a basically genial soul who knew the value of keeping his head down. More than that, he quickly realised that dissatisfaction with the new orders went beyond one man. On 13 January the elder Collingwood joined the protest. In a long letter to Hughes he railed at a confederacy of American merchants, West Indian landowners looking for ways to escape debts, and ‘those in office [who] taste the sweets of exorbitant fees, and forget their trust or betray it’. Unlike Nelson, the captain of the
Mediator
stopped short of refusing to obey the revised instructions, but he forcefully argued that the enforcement of the navigation laws lay solely with the navy, and that captains were responsible to their admirals, not governors. No longer able to dismiss Nelson as a lone voice, Sir Richard stopped stirring the pot.
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Horatio was also sensing his vulnerability, but had no intention of yielding. Pouring his heart out to Locker, he said that Hughes had ‘not that opinion of his own sense that he ought to have’ and had allowed himself to be manipulated by Shirley and vested interests. But Nelson, ‘for one’, would not be intimidated. Groping towards some political justification of the navigation laws, he ventured that if the American trade was allowed, the colony of Nova Scotia would be cut
out and the political complexion of the West Indian islands become treasonable. ‘The residents of these islands are American by connexion and by interest, and are inimical to Great Britain.’ Some tortuous logic allowed him to believe that the loyalty of the islands could be improved by bludgeoning them into accepting trading conditions for the benefit of Nova Scotia rather than themselves. Yet his moral courage was undeniable. ‘I have not had a foot in any house since I have been on the station,’ he said with his usual exaggeration, ‘and all for doing my duty by being true to the interests of Great Britain.’
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By the end of January 1785 Captain Nelson was engaged in recriminatory correspondence with both his commander-in-chief and the governor of the Leeward Islands, and felt his isolation keenly. He leaned upon Collingwood, whose opinions buttressed his own, and the consoling warmth of Mrs Moutray. But black clouds were gathering even in that quarter, and when he returned to English Harbour on 5 February a second storm broke.